Great Travel and Food Stuff. Might read it again.

Buttermilk Graffiti:
A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting-Pot Cuisine
Edward Lee

Starting with the title, a contrast of traditional and ghetto, the author takes us on his journey through American cooks and restaurants, like a tasting menu. He hops--and eats--from Louisville to the midwest, from the northern coast to Louisiana. I don't remember his going out west or to extreme south Texas, though. But that's okay--you can't do it all and still write a readable book.

And this is a very readable book. I'm giving it five stars on Goodreads--I didn't want it to end. In fact, I considered not taking it back to the library so I could read selected chapters again.

Because the point of his journey and heart of his narrative is people. Food is peoples' stories, their hearts. Cooking and eating is what a person does to celebrate, to mourn, and to remember their loved ones gone by. Food is what we do to live, but it's also a part of how we celebrate life.

Still on a Maisie Dobbs Binge

Pardonable Lies
by Jacqueline Winspear



Maisie Dobbs travels back to France to seek out explanations for a young man killed in the Great War. But you can get that from the title. How was it?

Great and engrossing as always. Much more about the interior workings of Maisie's mind than any mere mystery, but the mystery(ies) were good too.

 

And also 

Messenger Of Truth

 

Maybe not as wonderfully great as the others, but still great. I can't get enough of Maisie.

Gardening Roots, Autumn Surprise

Today is a tale of the beautiful and the ugly. The ugly is cows. Oh, they're quite scenic when they're grazing in a field, munching their grasses and pooping out big piles of steaming compostable manure. But cows in the garden are evil, disgusting beasts. What turnips they don't eat they destroy by trompling into the ground. The second time they rampaged through the garden, they ate my only head of lettuce.

The beautiful:

Where did all these guys come from? I planted about four slips plus a grocery store specimen that was sprouting in the pantry. On Monday I was pulling up the dead vines--frost got 'em--when I saw a sweet potato poking an end up out of the ground. Weird. I pulled him out, set him aside, and resumed my job.

Then I saw another! Getting the digging fork and turning over the ground revealed all of these.

Here I'd been thinking I'd not try growing sweet potatoes again because they didn't produce for me. How wrong I was.

Adventures in Cooking, Uh Huh

 A few cooking adventures. A couple of weeks ago, I finally made Chrissy Tiegen's Oven Baked Zucchini Fries with Honey Mustard Ranch Dressing. They were remarkably good and exceedingly fattening. For a normal human being who isn't an ultramarathoner, the serving size should be "1/2 a fry with 1/2 tsp dressing". Sigh. Wish I was an ultramarathoner.

Then I tried the experiment from norecipes.com--Japanese Pork Steak. The white things on top are fried garlic chips. And the sauce is a heavy, sweetish barbeque sauce. I though they were too salty--salty to the point on inedibility. But Ed mixed his with rice and was fine with the results. Which is good, since I wasn't going to eat them anyway.

For myself, this marvelous soup! Creamy Thai Carrot Sweet Potato Soup. Yes, I'll admit it looks like a bowl of stewed orange color crayons. But it's yummy.

Leaving Brazos Bend State Park

Thursday 4 Nov 2021
Planned time: 5:13
Actual time: who knows?  We left at 11:20 and didn't get in until very late, maybe 5:30.

Extra long cleanout at dump station. Rest area pee stop 11 minutes. Arrival time unknown, but it was late. The traffic through Dallas was horrid. Oddly enough, they've done something to the connector between I-45 and US-75 so that it's a whole lot easier than it used to be. Used to you had to get left--fast, in heavy traffic, then get left, then get left, etc. Now you still have to get left but it's not the extreme left lane and you have a lot more time to get prepared. Google calls this the "I-235" route but I never saw a single sign that showed it.

It had stopped raining during the night, so we had an easy, though chilly, preparation morning. But we got a really late start--it shouldn't have been, but at the dump station Ed got maniacal about cleaning out the tanks really really well. But the effect of that was going to be Dallas rush our traffic at the end of our drive.

Going around Houston on the tollway loop was a blast -- not the old, 610 loop we remembered, but a new one with "EZTag" toll stations. I guess the trip ended up costing six to ten dollars in tolls alone. Traffic was heavy but there were very few slowdowns. Driving around Houston is not what it used to be. Thank heavens.  Driving up through Dallas at 4pm in the afternoon stunk. Royally.

Mammoth at Brazos Bend and Galveston Day 5

 Wednesday 11/3

Started the day by watching two young racoons climb up and into the dumpster. Why in the world don't they insist on using dumpster whose lids close in the middle?  Anyway, best we could tell the racoons were trapped in there, so Ed put a tree branch in the side door and left the door ajar. They should have been able to exit easily after their meal.

Then I waffled back and forth between options. Stay and visit the the alligators at 40 Acre lake again, or take a road trip to the Lake jackson Birding Center and drive along the sea wall at Galveston? Since rain was in the forecast, driving seemed the better choice, and after a slow breakfast of blueberry pancakes, off we went. To the ocean!

To the Sea, to the Sea! The white gulls are crying,
The wind is blowing, and the white foam is flying.
West, west away, the round sun is falling.
Grey ship, grey ship, do you hear them calling,
The voices of my people that have gone before me?
I will leave, I will leave the woods that bore me;
For our days are ending and our years failing.
I will pass the wide waters lonely sailing.
Long are the waves on the Last Shore falling,
Sweet are the voices in the Lost Isle calling,
In Eressëa, in Elvenhome that no man can discover,
Where the leaves fall not: land of my people for ever!

    --JRR Tolkien

 The birding center was empty of visitors, but we were welcomed with a nest of fire ants and a really nice man doing some weedeating. They'd cleared a lot of lovely little trails in the swampy woods. I saw a warbler, but other than that just a few cardinals, wrens and chickadees. It was late iin the day by then, so no surprise.

From there it was about a 45-minute drive to Surfside. We drove along the beach, admiring the brand-new, softly colored houses on stilts. Gorgeous, but (a) who wants to clutter up the ocean with a bunch of shitty human habitat, and (b) who wants to pay the homeowners insurance and flood insurance on a house in a hurricane zone?

I suspect they bulldozed sand dunes to clear the land there, too. Dunes are habitat for birds and wildlife;; they slow the progression of storm surge waters and stabilize the beach; and they're beautiful. The houses done none of the above.

We tried to stop at the Galveston Island State Park, but the oceanside area was closed and the bayside area just didn't look all that appealing to us. Plus, unlike most state parks, the day use fee was six dollars per person rather than per vehicle, so we would have had to pay. We only have the one State Park Pass--typically you only need it for camping and entrance and engrance is, as I said, typically by vehicle. So why pay $20 for a second one?

 Besides it was getting late by then. We went on to Galveston and drove along the sea wall. Being winter and very few people about, it wasn't at all what I remembered. Plus I suspect they've rebuilt a good bit of it in the twenty-plus years since I've been there.  We drovw back out of the city along Broadway Street, wheere a lot of the old houses are, but I forgot to get any pictures. Oh well.

It's a big place, much bigger than I remembered. 

As we drove back toward the wildlife preserve it started to seriously threaten rain, so we skipped that one for the time being. We'll go another time. And as we neared the park, the skies opened up and deluged us. But it was slacking off as we neared camp and we were able to get inside without getting too awfully wet.

After an hour the rain stopped, so Molly and I got a good enough walk at sundown. It was 5:45 when I looked at the clock, so I determined a one-mile walk would be plenty. I didn't have the flashlight.

 

           

 

We went over toward the Big Creek Bridge and decided that the trail around ?? Lake was too muddy, so we continued on the road. In a short bit, a trail marked "Bluestem Trail" opened off to the left. It was large, graveled, and smooth enough for a car, so I knew there was no way I was going to get lost on it, even if darkness came.

There were no birds at all. I saw a few deer and once, in the distance through the woods, a couple of low-lying creatures that looked black in the dim of evening. They moved away quickly, with that odd, ungainly gait I associate with hogs in a hurry. They were fairly large around, too, so almost certainly hogs. Molly saw them too, and she agrees.

No birds. After about fifteen minutes we came to a juncture with a trail that was closed. Our trail went on, but it was time to go back. There was a bilboard map there and I studied it for a while, totally unable to determine where we were. Despite the big words "You Are Here" and the arrow on the map pointing to our location, it just didn't make sense considering where I'd come from and the direction I'd turned.

I later realized that the sign saying "Bluestem trail" probably meant "To Bluestem Trail" and we were actually on the Big Creek Bridge Trail. That made sense based on the direction we'd turned and the distance we'd gone.

We went back and made our walk longer by circling the campground on the road. When we returned at about 6:30, it was getting dark.  If I even get to come back to this place I'm going to walk (or jog) every single trail. They are superb! And especially I'm going to go down to the Brazos River==it's only about three-quarters of a mile away. Despite the name of this park, and despite the fact that all of this water probably flows into the Brazos River, we never actually saw it. The map says that, "Steamboat.......
That's a longer walk from the campsite, close to a mile out and back, but very doable.  There are several different routes I could take, too. No danger of getting lost with a map. I won't rely on GPS on my phone, though. Reception out here is spotty at best.

After we returned it was time for supper, and then it started in raining again. I guess I was lucky it didn't rain while we were walking. I had on a light hooded sweatshirt under my raincoat and I never felt the need to take it off, so that means it was pretty chilly out there.

Brazos Bend State Park, Alligator Morning

 11/2 Tuesday Day 4

Our first morning at Brazos Bend State Park--

Lovely. Noisy, with crows, woodpeckers and a red-shouldered hawk making a lot of racket about nothing. Crowds of small birds kept coming through, driving me crazy. Blue-gray gnatchers, chickadees, titmice, downy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker, a small, wing-flicking bird that was probable ruby-crowned kinglet, and a mystery bird I never could identify. It seemed to have white spectacles, an olive-colored back, and yellow wingbars. Which is impossible.

Then we went to 40-Acre Lake in search of alligators. 

 

We left the dogs behind, which was a mistake because Molly would have loved the walk.  Not far out we saw people clustered by the trail, taking pictures with an enormous camera (it really looked like a spotting scope.) What in the world?

Baby alligators! With Mommy floating in the lake nearby. She never ruffled a feather, even with us standing right by the trail and practically leaning over them to watch.  We were told later that if all the babies had started "pipping" at once, she'd have been up there in a flash. Per the volunteers at the nature center, alligator mothers are vigilant.

As you see in the picture, the babies are well camouflaged. But the black and white striped tail is distinctive. I guess they were on shore to sleep overnight in a warm den, because i don't see what they could have been eating up there. Need to research that.

Then on to the observation tower, where I saw an Anhinga! And another. And another. See:

Just a grebe, but what species? Dunno.

Also White Ibis, Coots, Gallinule, and Blue-Winged Teal.

 

It was a lovely walk all around 40-acre Lake. It was one o'clock by the time we went back to  get the dogs, so we took a little break and went out again later. We checked out the Nature Center first,  but it was closed. The volunteers manning it had a choice between keeping it open and facing a stream of people here in Texas where no one has to wear masks, or going outside to welcome people there. It was lovely weather outside and they made the sensible choice.

The volunteers had a small alligator to show us. They have a distinct sort of croaking noise they make to get the mother's attention--I hope I will recognize it if I ever hear it again...in time to make a quick departure to higher ground before Mama arrives.

They were really cool people. We talked about places we'd been and all, plus where they were planning to go next. Wish I could be friends with them. But some other people came up and we had to move on.

We went on to walk around Creekfield Lake, then we went to the fishing pier at Elm lake.  Then we went to the fishing pier at hale Lake. I liked Hale Lake best and after we were done, took Molly for a walk from the campground to it and halfway around it. I wish I'd gone the whole way around, but I didn't have the map and didn't care to take a chance I couldn't find my way back.

Such a superb place! And so many big, broad, well-marked but wildlife-full trails

Mammoth Heads to Brazos Bend State park

Monday, November 1 2021
Planned: 3:10
Actual: 3:44
Stops: quick Walmart stop to get avocado and chips. Gas stop at a Valero right by the park.

Goodbye to Lake Corpus Christi State Park and good friends.

We dawdled over goodbyes and didn't get on the road until eleven or so. And for good reason--I saw the Green Jays that Theresa and I had got a glimpse of the day before. Cool birds!

And then, when I went back to show her the picture of them, a Great Kiskadee sat on the post at the campsite next to us. (For some reason they'd set roune posts into the ground all around all the campsites.)

Two life birds in one day! Uh...sort of. I'd recorded having seen both of them long ago, probably during my trip out to the desert with a college field-trip class. In those days I had a bad habit of checking off birds that someone else had identified but I had not been able to stop and stare at for long enough to burn it into my memory. More recently I've taken time to write about birds seen, and that helps them stay put.

Campground at Brazos Bend

Mammoth Heading to Brazos Bend State Park

 10/31 Sunday

The lake

We mostly just hung out at the park all day. Bob went fishing; Ed worked on his tire monitoring system. Theresa and I took a nice long walk out to a CCC building by the lake. Sadly, on the way Molly got bitten by an ant and had to 3-leg it most of the way. I checked many times but could not find a wound or a sticker, so I'm concluding that it was the ant she stepped on. I know that the trail was marked by innumerable hills of big red ants, and I know that when she stopped, sat down, and started biting madly at her rear paw, there was a mangled carcass of an ant on the ground where the paw had been. But I never heard of an ant bite hurting that badly.

She went on that way for most of the walk, even after I let her cool it in the lake (and roll herself in the mud). But gradually she started putting pad to ground again. An hour later, it was over.

 

CCC building

 

 

 

 

Pretty plants by lake

Mammoth Goes to Brazos Bend (roundaboutly)

Saturday, 10/30

Planned distance: 402 miles
Planned time: 6:26
Actual time:7:42
Stops: quick pee stop at the Hillsboro rest area. 10-minute stop on the road, checking low tire pressure, then 10-minute stop at a Valero/Circle K where the truck pumps had tire air filler nozzles right there--very convenient. Second fill-up close to the park.

We'd planned to go to Choke Canyon State Park and camp next to friends Bob and Theresa, and we had reservations just across the street from each other. But that got canceled due to a water system failure at the park. On Thursday I'd gone jogging with my phone turned off, then left it in my purse while Ed and I went to the grocery, so I didn't hear the calls, texts, and emails from TPWD telling me my campsite reservation was canceled. I didn't get the texts or call from Theresa, either, until I returned at eleven.

But Bob had gotten online and found that Lake Corpus Christi State Park, 30 or 45 minutes farther south, still had a few sites available. We immediately got busy and made our reservations. We were about four sites away from each other, but at least we had sites!  The other options were not good--Lake Somerville, which I'd seen and hated, and various places farther afield. At least this place would be new to us.

The drive was really, really long, but otherwise not so bad. Got moving early--shooting for nine o'clock, we made it out by nine-thirty. We were trying out our new and highly necessary toy--a tire pressure monitoring system. For an ungodly sum of money, Ed found one that would monitor all six Mammoth tires plus the four on the Jeep. Installing the sensors was a pain, but he finished it in good time the day before.

Problem was, the alarm started going off on the Mammoth driver's front tire after about two hours of driving. Either the sensor was malfunctioning, or else it was slowly losing pressure. A quick stop on the road to check it indicated the latter issue.

Ed's theory was that the monitor was not well screwed on, so he tightened it up and then we went another ten miles down the road to a Valero truck stop. I forget the exact numbers, but I think it was in the range of ten pounds below the required pressure of 110 when we filled it up. not too awfully bad.

He monitored it closely from then, but the repair appears to have held. no more pressure loss, just the normal variation, Or maybe the sensors are a little off, but still the pressure never varied by more than a pound or two after that.

We arrived  t about 5:10 to find this a pretty nice little state park on a lake. Our site had big shady trees and a view of the lake through the trees. The park was crowded--Saturday night--but not full. Certainly not as full as the reservations page had indicated. Funny, when I made the reservation there was only one site free, but at the park, on the loop we were on, there were at least five sites free. And they never filled up, either. This really makes me wonder if people are making reservations "just in case" and not bothering to cancel them. That sort of thing really sucks for us out-of-towners who need the reservations to keep.

The only real issue with the park, other than a bit of noise from a party over the hill, was the sticker burs. They were worse than I'd ever seen. You couldn't even step in the grass beside your site without getting them all over your clothes,, socks, and of course, dogs. The dogs suffered.

Great Lectures Indeed

 Memory and the Human Lifespan
by Steve Joordens

One of "The Great Lecture" series and truly great, I must say. What I don't know about memory now, well...I can't remember.  I did takeaway the note that when people say they want to improve their memory, they're generally talking about their episodic memory. But things like crossword puzzles and Suduko only exercise their semantic memory, which doesn't decline all that much with age. Likewise your procedural memory (how to do things) doesn't decline much either although your ability to carry it out might.

If nothing else, the lecture reminds us of what most educated people already know--eyewitness testimony is horribly unreliable. But what we didn't know is that people tend to believe eyewitness testimony at an ridiculously high degree. "I saw the man in the black cap holding the gun," is, more often than not, a pure elaboration of an unreliable mind. It might have been a woman in a green cap with a banana.
And don't get him started on implanted memories. The scariest thing to realize is that people absolutely can't tell the difference between real memories, implanted ones, and ones that they have simply fabricated in their mind during the brain's attempt to add filler to the facts. If the facts are even true.

As to the lecture series, my memory tells me (hope that's right) that I enjoyed it tremendously. The only thing I didn't enjoy is the title--from the words "Human Lifespan" I'd fabricated the idea that it might touch on more than a single human's lifespan and instead talk about collective memory and even delve into anthropological questions. But none of that. "Human lifespan" means simply what happens as one person gets old--how does memory change? And he has an excellent section on Altzheimer's. With very sensible, practicable tips on managing patients.

A light to the point of absurd-ish mystery

 The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

by Alan Bradley

Amusing, twisty mystery, and clever. Too clever. Even when I laughed at the many jokes and turns of a phrase, I felt like it was forced...or rather, like I was being forced. To laugh. Odd, isn't it?

Flavia, the narrator, is an eleven-year-old girl with a passion for chemistry. She lives with a father who is rather distant and preoccupied with his hobby--philately--and two sisters who are greatly reviled and tortured. They torture her back, too. It's funny, but it struck me as kind of sad, too--if it had been real. But it didn't feel real, so it was simply funny.

And I'm not complaining. This is a perfectly funny, clever book with lots of cool chemistry in it and some very smart detective work. And the policeman, Inspector Hewett, was superb. He was not quite always, but sometimes, two steps behind Flavia.

Mammoth Returns

 

Saturday 10/23

Redbud Bay Campground to home
Actual time: 5:10 on the Paris, TX route

And home. It was expected to be a long drive, and we made it longer by stopping at the nearby park on the same lake to dump. That took about 30 minutes. And then we took the alternate route involving US 75, then the Indian Nation Turnpike, then some road (62?) to get around Paris, Texas, then US 82 West and TX-121 South to Melissa. There was a whole lot less traffic that way and less road construction, too. But in places the turnpike was so rough that Ed decided it was no better a route than the shorter one, through Durant.  Still, I liked it better. Lots of big pine trees and no dopey little towns to slow down for.

So the map time was about 4:40 and it took us 5:10. Not bad. There was a dog walk at the gas station in there, too.

So we're home. And the house smells foul, like cat litter or poop hidden in the corners. Maybe there's a dead mouse or two somewhere--I'll have to wait for Molly to smell them out.

Good trip, all in all. I wish there had been more trail hiking and less driving, but that wasn't the point of it all. So, good enough.

Mammoth returns to Oklahoma

 
Friday 10/22

Redbud Bay Campground on Lake Oologolah (or something like that) is tiny. But there's a bigger one down the road where we can go dump tomorrow. Or take showers, play on the playground, or launch our boat if we liked. Which we don't.

The campground host and hostess came by to check us in and proceeded to chat for a long time. No mention was made of the "six o'clock check-in time" stated on the reservations website. We arrived at 3:30 or so, after a disaster on the road involving the Jeep tire on the driver's side rear. It apparently busted at some point or other and we continued to drive on it for a long while, so by the time someone pulled up beside us and yelled at us through the window to tell us about it, there wasn't much tire left. Certainly not enough to diagnose the original cause.

The campground is extremely pretty despite it's tininess, and I'd recommend it highly. Some sites are very unlevel, especially the back-in sites on the way into the loop. Numbers 1, 3, 5, .... all very slanty.  Ours was a higher number, 11, and it was slanty enough that we needed six or so of our new leveling blocks Ed made out of heavy black plasticy kind of stuff. But I noticed there was as least one pull-through site that was very level. Wish we'd had that one.

Very odd fossil  at the lake shore:

But ours was nice, and it all was very nice. A little more crowded than the state park we came from, but very acceptable. And it's a Friday night, after all--I'd expect a corp of engineers campground to be full up on a Friday night. Of course, the neighbors on my bedroom window side left a strand of very bright rope lights on all night long. Gotta expect stupid.

Mammoth in Missouri Day 4

 Thursday 10/21

Today was the big "reason" for the trip--a visit to the Laura Ingalls wilder home site at Rocky Ridge Farm. But first we had to stop off at the trout fishing stream, park store and nature center.  All these things typically close at five, and I didn't want to get back from the homesite just to find everything else closed.

The trout fishing here is magnificent. There are millions upon millions of anglers standing hip-deep in the water or standing on the edge or standing on a fishing pier, teasing the fish with flies and soft bait. Oddly enough, some parts of the stream (Nauvoso river) are restricted to only soft bait. Do flies make it too easy?

We stood and watched one old guy pull in two in rapid succession. But later we watched a few more upstream, and realized they were completely surrounded by fish. With crystal clear water flowing rapidly, you could see the fish from the bank.  They were practically swimming in fish.

There were tons of vultures (mostly black vultures) hanging by the shore. And in trees and on bridges and circling the air. I thought that Cedar Ridge park on Belton Lake (near Killeen Texas) had more vultures than the law allowed, but those populations weren't shakes on these. I never ever ever saw the like.

I guess people tossed them the fish guts when they were finished?  I dunno. Molly didn't understand it at all, as to why all these big black birds were sailing around and she wasn't allowed to chase them. She nearly took my arm off trying.

On the the Rocky Ridge Site. The museum was magnificent--tons of artifacts arranged with quotes, newspaper clippings, and loads of family pictures. I spent an hour there and wished there had been more. At the entrance there was a computer set up with two fiddle recordings to choose between, but only two--that was lame indeed. They could have gotten a violin player to run off all of the repertoire they had listed in the exhibit, which was only a fraction of all the tunes she mentioned in her books.

But the fiddle was there, so I got to see it and also Laura's nine-patch quilt. I hoped for the dove-in-the-window quilt, but no.

< The farm house

All that looking at records of dead people got me thinking about my own deceased ancestry. I really need to get to work on that family history I started. Maybe this winter.,..no--definitely this winter.

The Rock House was a little boring, and later I realized why. The people staging the house had emptied it out. There were a few dishes in cabinets, a few quits hanging around, but none of the paraphernalia of ordinary life. They wouldn't have had to use actual artifacts of the time to make the place look real--a quick trip to a flea market would have enabled them to fill up the house with things that resembled the artifacts of Laura and Alamanzo's life.  Some chickens would have been nice, too.

 It was dead--and I wanted it to be alive.

Never mind--I've seen the trees and fields and the farm house built by Alamanzo. I can bring it alive in my mind. With chickens.

I took Molly for a walk down--and up!--this hill twice, Wednesday and Thursday. The second time I nearly made it to the top without stopping, but she insisted on taking a smell break. Good dog!

Vultures for Molly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And a little party at the ranger station.

Birds seen:
Pileated Woodpecker, Downy, probably Red-Bellied. Need to research bird calls so I'll know when I hear something I want to see.  Like the Hairy Woodpecker, darn it! Common as mud and I've never seen one.