Eight Things Learned in July

Most of these fall under the category of Cowboy Logic, but it is fun to learn and see them in action.

  1. When diverting flowing water from a trail, go to the highest point of trouble first; then look for the first best place to send it down to its correct channel. 
  2. When repairing a sinkhole in a road, put boulders in first and fit them together as close as possible; keep adding rocks of progressively smaller sizes, and put the dirt in last. Also, be sure to have a backhoe and an operator handy.
  3. Baby peregrine falcons could get blown out of their nests by the concussion if you explode a boulder nearby. But the real reason for not using explosives near a nest is that drilling the rock is the most upsetting sound to them.
  4. This Irish saying tickled my funnybone: “May those that love us, love us, and for those that don’t love us, may God turn their hearts, and if he can’t turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles so we know them by their limping.”
  5. Ever heard of a “tulipiere“? A friend told me about them. They are special vases, invented in Holland in the 1600s for holding tulips, which were considered expensive status symbols. (The tulips, not the vases). It is pronounced, er, never mind. Can’t write it correctly.
  6. When your radiator disintegrates, it is best to not be on a steep road on a hot day, but if the road is closed, everyone who shows up will be a friend. (No photos of Fernando disabled on the side of the road nor as he was being towed away; he is repaired now.) 
  7. Every heard of “24 7 Day”? It is July 24, which is 7/24 or flipped, 24-7. This has been turned into a day of appreciation for first responders, and many stop-and-rob stores honor people that day who have badges or are wearing uniforms of first responders. (“honor”– maybe they get free coffee)
  8. When you have a skittish cat with a booboo (nope, not showing a photo of Tucker with a fat face) who cannot be captured in a carrier or a box, it is good to find a traveling veterinarian and to have a large bank balance. (THANK YOU, DR. McCONE, 559-942-1101)

Thus we conclude a month of some difficult circumstances, new experiences, and random pieces of trivial information, (but no talk of hiking in Mineral King when it is closed to the public.)

P.S. Anyone know of a Honda or Toyota (no Civics, Elements, or Tercels) for sale with less than 100,000 miles and a manual transmission?? I am ready.

Eight New Things Learned in June

 

  1. Mulberries are SWEET. Some friends brought a bowl to church to share, and they were so sweet that my teeth almost started humming.
  2. A gabion basket is a wire mesh cube, perhaps 4x4x4 feet. It gets filled with rocks, and then it serves as a solid piece to built up a road bed or shoulder.
  3. A Foley fork, also called granny fork or a blending fork (because “Foley” is a brand name) is an old-fashioned kitchen tool that some people just cannot be without. There is interesting info about it on this website, called The Baking Wizard. (Nope, I don’t want one—simply found it interesting.)
  4. There is an entire subculture of foragers, with a website called “Falling Fruit“, which maps where there is free stuff for the picking all over the world! The Central Valley’s flyover status is confirmed in that although we feed the world, we do not appear on that map (unless it gets greatly enlarged and you locate an orange or fig tree overlapping a sidewalk in Fresno). I love to glean walnuts and citrus from friends’ groves, have occasionally picked Miner’s Lettuce to add to salads, wished to find the wild berries along the Mineral King Road (but never stopped to look), picked elderberries for jelly, and never hesitated to ask someone with a pomegranate tree if they had extra. Foraging in public spaces in a city sounds very bold.
  5. The price of flat screen televisions has dropped significantly. However, there is catch: you have to pay someone techie to hook it up and teach you how to operate it. (If it was up to me, I would not own one.) Furthermore, there is no way to get rid of “non-smart” teevees. No one wants or needs them, even if they work. (The cable company said it was the teevee, but it turned out to be their cable box that got fried in the 2 power outages and restarts.)
  6. A friend who participates in 12-step programs told me about a list of questions for consideration that she received in one of her meetings. The question that grabbed my attention is one that we all need to ask ourselves in many situations: Why am I talking? (I once heard Rush say “Before you pick up your phone and dial this show, ask yourself the question ‘Does anyone care?'”)
  7. There is a monastery in Dubuque, Iowa, where the monks make caskets. This sounds like a weird thing to learn, but the caskets are beautiful. They provide free caskets to people who have lost a child, and they do not accept orders online, only over the phone. They are called “Trappist Caskets“. I hope none of you need this information anytime soon, but it is an undeniable truth of life that none of us will leave this planet alive (unless Jesus raptures us outta here.)
  8. Have you ever heard of terramation? This is a new alternative to cremation also called “human composting, a process whereby your body is turned into compost and then spread in your garden. It is legal in five states and you can read about it here.

Well. Alrighty then. Ahem. This had a bit too much morbidity. What does it mean? 

Why am I talking?? 

Over and out.

Ten Things Learned in May

This month’s Learned List will be full of irrelevant photos. Not much was photogenic.

  1. Did you know that only 2% of the population takes the stairs when there is an elevator nearby? I learned this from Michael Easter, the author of The Comfort Crisis.
  2. The Mineral King Road repairs are in progress.
  3. I learned (again) that sometimes there are no answers; my viburnum snowball bush is dying for no apparent reason; I also learned that all the websites say the same things, which is a whole lotta nothin’. This is how it looked about 4 years ago (the white flowers on the left).
  4. I read The Comfort Crisis after hearing the author on a presentation called “America’s Labor Shortage”; one day after I finished it, Mike Rowe interviewed the author. I highly recommend this book.
  5. The author I am working with on the book about TB taught me two new words: “grok” and see #6. “Grok” is a verb that means “to understand profoundly through intuition or empathy.” 
  6. “Tyro” is a noun meaning “a beginner in learning something”.
  7. Milorganite is a slow release fertilizer that just might solve many of my gardening woes, along with something called “Nitro Humus”. Can’t wait to try them!
  8. The Frugal Girl mentioned having “titers drawn”: titers are blood draws to test for antibody levels  for immunity to things like measles, mumps, rubella, etc. If antibody levels are high enough, you can avoid unnecessary vaccines.
  9. Sometimes, a person needs to know when to say “When!” I have withdrawn from painting the murals at the big Catholic church until October; they may have to choose another muralist if they don’t want to wait. They contacted me last September, with the idea I would be finished by December of 2022. Perhaps I will be able to finish by December 2023, or perhaps a more hardy soul will be able to tackle this in the heat of summer. (Not this little gray duck.)
  10. I knew this, but you might find it helpful. A gopher snake resembles a rattlesnake. If you can see the head or the tail, you will see a gopher snake’s head isn’t diamond shaped nor does its tail have a rattle. But the patterns and colors on the body are awfully similar. This is a gopher snake. I have no photos of a ratttler. (Nope, don’t want any either). #10’s photo was gross. Here. Wash your eyes out with this.

Eight Non-Art Things Learned in April (plus one art-ish item)

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  1. Dragon Arum is the name of a beautiful black and maroon calla lily in my yard.
  2. I asked my trusty mechanic if he would allow his wife to drive my car to Oregon and back (I wasn’t offering my car; I was looking for advice). The answer was immediate: NO WAY. Phooey. 
  3. Rocky Hill is 5 miles in circumference; the seeds of wild cucumber make a good binder if you plan to mix it with pigment to paint on rocks (but don’t do this on public property, okay?)
  4. Grant applications are crazy hard, and don’t appeal to straight talking commonsense folks like me. However, I had the privilege of helping CACHE do an application, and learned several things, the main one being not wanting to ever apply for a grant on my own. Or possibly at all.*
  5. A friend taught me how to grow sweet potatoes, something I’ve been wanting to learn for awhile. She starts them using a potato from the grocery store, similar to growing an avocado from a seed, EXCEPT you don’t plant the potato—you root the individual shoots, and then plant those. She hasn’t had any great crops, but like me, she never gives up trying to be successful at gardening.(Bonus: the leaves are edible, good added raw to salads and taste like spinach, according to my friend.)
  6. Barbara Kingsolver’s latest book, Demon Copperhead, might be the best one yet. I found her in the 1980s with The Bean Trees, and her work just gets better and better. The story was hard hard hard, the main character fabulous, too much cussing, tons of sad difficult things, but a decent ending. It is patterned after David Copperfield, something I haven’t read and don’t want to.
  7. The one art-related item: There is a new style of drawing, called Zentangle. (The one a friend showed me reminded me of Spirograph designs.) Look it up—very interesting, very different from my style.
  8. I learned how to make a QR code; just put it into the search bar and you will find methods. It was shockingly easy.
  9. There is a new type of laundry detergent; it comes in thin squares in a small box. There are several brands, mostly called “earth something-or-other”; I bought a brand called Ecos. Instead of a giant heavy box of powder or a giant heavy jug of liquid (prolly mostly water), it weighs nothing. You can get it without scent, and it seems to work just fine. I think it is brilliant: lightweight, small, uses few materials, utter simplicity.

Good grief! I thought I was an artist, a Central California artist, a regionalist from Quaintsville**. Instead, I’m going on about all sorts of things. I hope it scratches your itch to learn new things.

*Cache didn’t get the grant. This reinforces my distaste for the process.

**I use pencils, oil paints, and murals to make art that people can understand of places and things they love for prices that won’t scare them (while I am learning all sorts of random life information and skills).

Following up on Earlier Subjects

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Does “following up” mean finishing? Concluding? Completing? Then why don’t we say that instead?

Sorry. Sometimes I get caught up in words.

  1. Remember in the Learned in March post that I showed you chocolate navels? This is how they look on the inside.
  2. Remember seeing this table in progress?This is how it turned out.
  3. Did I mention anything about going around the neighborhood with clippers and buckets to pick wildflowers? This is how they were used.
  4. Still nothing to report on the two murals in the courtyards at St. Charles, the largest Catholic church in North America, in Visalia, where I was asked to paint some murals back in October. I redid the contract to reflect the increase in mural paint prices and the customer’s request that I train someone to paint a third mural, someone who doesn’t speak English or have experience. The saga continues. . .

Nine New Things Learned in March

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Each month I wonder if I have learned anything. I seem to forget much of what I post in these monthly learned lists and wonder if anyone else does too. If you are curious, and if your screen shows Categories with searching capabilities, you can click on Learned List and see as many of the 71 past lists (I began doing this in 2017) as you care to waste, umm, no, spend time reading. Here is March’s tidbits for you to mull over (and then forget).

  1. Masonite can only be ordered in 100 sheet bundles so local builder supply stores don’t stock it; you must go to one of those dreaded big box stores.
  2. Three Rivers Drug Store closed. They’ve been in our town since 1963, and it will be quite an inconvenience for many residents.
  3. Making ricotta cheese looks easy when one reads the recipes; in reality, it’s a different story.I ended up with about 1/2 cup of very squishy cheese and a whole lot of whey to use in baking bread. It might make sense to make ricotta if one owned a cow and had a tremendous amount of milk to use up. I’ll stick to making yogurt.
  4. People need to keep their culverts cleaned out, even in dry years. If they don’t, they will lose parts of their driveways in wet years.
  5. The Mineral King road is wrecked; it will get fixed. (That is Tulare County’s problem).
  6. The East Fork flume is wrecked; it might get fixed. (That is SCE’s problem).
  7. Chocolate navels are very peculiar in appearance, and mild in flavor. They do NOT taste like chocolate; the name comes from the brownish color. I wonder how they’ll do in the markets.
  8. Ringing the bell is something that cancer patients do when they complete chemotherapy. I learned this from a blog I follow, called The Frugal Girl. Someone in the comments mentioned that she “rang the bell”, and many of the other commenters congratulated her, so I looked it up.
  9. The liquid surrounding canned beans is called “aquafaba” and can be used as a substitute for eggs in baking. It can also be whipped up like egg whites. Isn’t that bizarre?? I regret all the gallons I have wasted when making hummus: “drain the beans”. . . NO!! DON’T DRAIN THEM!! THINK OF THE COST OF EGGS!

P.S. I added the word “new” to the title because the search engines give me a higher rating with that word there. . . sometimes I find myself caving to such nonsense. If I learned it, then it must be new, eh?

Ten Things Learned in February

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February is my favorite month, especially when it has rained and snowed around here. Orchards begin blooming, yard flowers and wildflowers are out (I saw some poppies across Lake Kaweah on February 21), the air is clean, and the weather is exciting. So few days, so much to learn.

  1. The Dream is a podcast with a series about multi-level marketing companies, and another about the wellness industry. The main lessons are A. Multi-level marketing is a useless exercise in trying to earn a living; B. There are 13 vitamins—A, C, D, E, K, and 8 different B; C. Supplements are not vitamins and are not regulated by the FDA.
  2. Remember when I told you what those scribbly squares are called? They are QR codes, and now I am participating in them. An upcoming show in Exeter’s Courthouse Gallery (now called CACHE) will have recordings with the art so that you can hear artists tell you about each piece if you scan the code with your smartphone (and I think you are supposed to bring ear dealies).
  3. Ever heard of a “sweetheart table“? This is a fad with brides and grooms: they sit at their own table at the head of the wedding reception. You ask, “Who cares?” So glad you asked. Trail Guy and I care enough about a couple getting married in April to build their sweetheart table for them. This involves more learning than you care to read about today.
  4. I learned what our average monthly propane use is. This is helpful information when one’s gauge doesn’t work, although I am pretty good at guessing by feeling the tank. (The delivery man pooh-poohed that method until he saw that I was right.)
  5. We tried a new coffee supplier: Community Coffee Company. It was part of my feeble attempt to stop using the giant A, to buy American, and to stay stocked up. They didn’t have a lot of choices, which made things easy. (There are many American coffee supply companies; no need to use the big A or drive down the hill.)
  6. A friend (Hi CK!) told me her favorite tea is Rooibus. Excuse me? It is pronounced “ROY-buss”, it is herbal (no caffeine), and it is hard for me to find any discernible flavor, so I like the version with vanilla from Celestial Seasonings, which is described here: Rooibus  (they don’t offer it any more!)
  7. I bought a huge pair of overalls (made in China, sigh) and converted them to a jumper! (Phooey, bought them from the big A).
  8. Eggs are “only” $3/dozen (fall down laughing) at Costco. My neighbor has kindly brought some to me for that bargain price.
  9. Gas was “only” $4.13/gallon at a Sinclair station in Tulare. I don’t make it a habit of driving 45 miles to save money on gas, but I certainly don’t pass up a good price when it appears.
  10. Occasionally tightening the screws on a roof of heavy gauge metal is a good plan if you like to keep your roof intact and attached. Three of our neighbors plus our church lost pieces of roofing in February storms.

Pippin isn’t too interested in learning anything other than how to sneak into the house, shove me out of this chair, and spend as much time as possible near the woodstove.

Fourteen Things Learned in January

The Learned List is Longer than usual, maybe because I was just lollygagging around while waiting to begin painting the murals in Visalia.

  1. Pam, the cooking spray, stands for Product of Authur Meyerhoff; he invented it the year I was born. Yeppers, that old Pam and I are yearmates. (You too, JC. We are triplets.)
  2. When Tulare County Roads does not remove the removable railings from bridges in town during big storms, those bridges get damaged. (What is wrong with that department?? The bridges were designed with removable railings, and they used to do that sort of preventive maintenance.)
  3. Living in California has its benefits. By January, most gardeners have passed the window for buying and planting bulbs. This means those of us in warmer climates can get the leftovers at a tremendous discount. I used Holland Bulb Farms and indulged my love of iris. 
  4. Rain is terrible for the specialty orange called Sumo. (Have you had one of these? They are FANTABULOSO. They are also astronomically priced, although maybe not as high as eggs).
  5. A bad bird flu is killing hens all over the country. Or maybe is causing the birds to have to be killed to stop the spread. (Aren’t you thankful that wasn’t necessary to stop the WuFlu??) And that is why I recently paid $11.49 for 20 eggs and felt as if it was a bargain. (I heard they are $14 for a dozen in Three Rivers.)
  6. Watches are made to NOT have their batteries replaced. My current wristwatch is 4 years old, is on the verge of needing a new battery, and there is no way to pry the back off. The last time I replaced it, a friend got the back off somehow, and then I had to go to a jeweler to have the back replaced. I looked it up on YouTube, and realized that if it involves a C-clamp along with some other tools, I probably won’t be getting the back off or back on again. Such a waste.
  7. More about eggs: Those 20 eggs I bought were huge, so when I made a cookie recipe that called for 4 eggs, I just used 3. It turned out fine.
  8. There were 2 Ott lamps in my life, super bright floor lamps that bent over to illuminate tasks. Both stopped working. Neither one needed a new bulb. Maybe a new switch would do the job, so 2 friends and I started experimenting. We dismantled one lamp, and the friend least intimidated by electricity messed with the wires, determining that it wasn’t the switch that was disfunctional. So, he dismantled the base, which was: A. very well constructed; B. impossible to understand. Both of those lamps are now in a landfill somewhere. WHAT IS WRONG WITH MANUFACTURERS??
  9. Headlights on old cars get foggy and dull. It is the piece of plastic covering the bulb which gets messed up by sunlight. There are multiple options for restoration, all of them involving heavy elbow-grease. I combined that with baking soda, white vinegar, and used a magic eraser. They got better, but not like new. Fernando was grateful, but he is getting camera shy in his old age, so no pictures.
  10. Often when I reply to someone’s email, it bounces back as “undeliverable“. I have observed this is mostly g-mail accounts. This hands me the burden of responding over and over, checking and rechecking. I tried to understand it, but realized it will require hours on the phone with someone passing me along to supervisors, senior consultants, best of the best experts, on and on.
  11. Weird messages about viruses keep popping in and out on my laptop. I spent a fair amount of time on the phone with Apple. After installing an upgrade and then running a virus detection software, the conclusion is that my laptop is virus free and the only way to stop those messages is to not be connected to the internet. The Apple technician said all the creeps out there invent new scams faster than Apple can create ways to stop them. This is difficult to accept, but often reality is difficult to accept.
  12. My neighbors’ dog likes to get in their pool, even on a cold day in January.
  13. I stopped by my church during a day in the week and saw this on a pick-em-up truck, there to do pest control spraying.
  14. Did you know (I didn’t) that when you use a plunger properly, it doesn’t just shove the muck down; it brings it back up so you can (oh gag) pick it up with your hands and throw it away.

That was fun.

Not.

And on that note, we conclude another month of learning.

Eight Things Learned in December

  1. Do you know those little squares of scribbles that can be scanned to take you to a website? They are called QR Codes. Do you know that QR means “quick response”? Simple name for weird techie magic.
  2. Central Valley Holocaust Memorial in Bakersfield now has a wall made of 6 million buttons. Read about it here. A friend’s mother-in-law learned about the project and began collecting buttons. The idea is that upcoming generations don’t know about the holocaust, and the number 6,000,000 is just incomprehensible without a visual aid. This photo was taken by my friend of her mother-in-law. (Hi Carol and Fran!)
  3. Instead of simply burying my kitchen waste, I learned a new way of composting. This one uses a vertically buried 8-10″ diameter PVC pipe (about 1 foot tall), randomly drilled with holes. After an undetermined length of time, you end up with worm castings, which are considered gold for the garden. Time will tell.
  4. I experienced inflation in a live and shocking encounter. An 18-pack of eggs was $5.00 in the summer in Visalia, California, while it was still $2.50 in Salem, Oregon. In December, it was $6.78 at Winco in Visalia. And Trail Guy paid $9.99 for a package of 3 romaine lettuce hearts in Three Rivers. Holy guacamole!
  5. Acta is the name of the yearbook for Exeter Union High School. A friend sent me the photo from the 1957 version to ask if I knew where it was taken. I told him it was Vandever, the peak on the right side of Farewell Gap. But it was bothering me, because something was off. When I showed Trail Guy, we both saw it: the photo was flipped horizontally! When I flipped it over, it became the right version. It puzzles me how I was able to recognize it despite the backward orientation.
  6. I puzzled through why so many of my friends don’t read my blog, coming up with the following reasons, all guesses on my part and many overlapping: too busy, non-techie, overloaded with too many other things on their little machines, accustomed to more exciting things, annoyed that the photos don’t show up on their phones, already hear enough from me in person, not interested in art, not interested in Mineral King, they forget I have a blog, don’t know what a blog is, or find it to be boring. I am touched when people actually read it. THANK YOU!
  7. Some friends in Texas have a house in escrow on about 4 acres of land, in something called an “ag extension“. This means they have to do some paperwork about raising “meat animals”, actually raise some of those animals, and then they get their property taxes greatly reduced. So interesting. . . I cannot picture these friends raising anything except children (currently have 4 while planning for numbers 5 and 6), nor can I understand why Texas has such a program. If it were me, I’d raise chickens for the eggs and never be able to kill a single living creature except for some bugs (which I would not eat).
  8. The day before Christmas Eve (sometimes called Christmas Eve Eve) is called Christmas Adam. This makes me smile every time I think about it.

What did you learn in December?

More Truths (Some Borrowed)

At the end of 2021, I posted a list that I called Ten Truths of Life. Since then, I have gathered of a few more, and borrowed a few from Reader Anne, who is both wiser and older (by EXACTLY 5 years I think – we are birthday twins).

  1. You are getting older, and so am I. It is easier to accept it than to pretend it isn’t happening. Go ahead and get injections, peels, colors, eyelashes, etc., but it won’t change the truth.
  2. Old age makes you more of who are you; it would behoove you to work at being a better person right this very minute (yes, You, Cranky-Pants!)
  3. Life is too short to dry dishes or iron jeans or listen to excuses or read poorly written books. 
  4. A question: Why is Standard Time called “standard”, when we are only allowed to enjoy it for 4-1/2 months of the year? That is definitely NOT standard. This is the truth: getting our clocks changed jerks us around and it is NOT pleasant. In general, city folks prefer Daylight Savings Time and rural folks prefer Standard Time.
  5. The truth is always best. Lies just make things harder (and you have to remember what you said so you can tell more lies to keep your story consistent).
  6. Truth is often confused with opinion, so pay attention both to what you are saying and what you are hearing, in order to discern the difference.
  7. The bigger a company is, the more difficult it is to deal with. Think banks, phone companies, electric companies, mega-churches, home improvement stores. . . those giant outfits don’t allow you to talk to real people who can make decisions based on your real problems. (“Your call is very important to us” –NO IT ISN’T SO STOP LYING! “We are currently experiencing a high volume of calls”–NO YOU AREN’T, BECAUSE YOUR ROBOT SAYS THAT EVERY TIME I CALL!) Stay local, deal with manageably sized places whenever possible, and your life will be easier.
  8. Everything is easier said than done. Exception: often it is easier to show than to tell when explaining how to do something.
  9. The only pattern to covid is that there is no pattern—not in contagion, symptoms, length, lethality, avoidance, treatment, incubation period—nothing. Get used to it because it is here to stay.

  10. Change is inevitable; sometimes it involves loss and other times it involves added complications. If we accept it gracefully rather than fight it, life will be smoother for all involved. So when your favorite jeans are no longer available, find another style or brand. When your familiar computer functions get “upgraded”, learn the new methods quickly or just dump that function. When your favorite employees at a favorite store leave, get to know the new people. When a plant dies in your yard, plant a new one. When you lose a cat, get another. Better yet, get 2 more, or even a whole litter of kittens. (Pippin is just fine, thanks for your concern. So are Tuck the Dripper and Jackson the Biter.)