Category: Learned List

If you receive these posts in email and the pictures in the post don’t show for you, tap here janabotkin.net. It will take you to the blog on the internet.

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).

If you receive these posts in email and the pictures in the post don’t show for you, tap here janabotkin.net. It will take you to the blog on the internet.

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?

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.