Vigilante Justice

What I was going to say was that Huck was sent out of town last week.  Because it's summer vacation, of course. And that means the kids are home and Huck's gone.  He was at Hanford, helping out a with that Super Fund, instead of here, helping with the Super Fund in my kitchen.  This seems to be more and more obvious (but so far no one's saying much about it): before we do things, we should first know how to clean them up.  Take oil drilling, for instance.  PBA's.  Mining.  Space junk.  Or nuclear waste making.  If you can't clean up the mess, don't make it.  Rules I learned in Kindergarten.  And should learn in the kitchen.

And then I was going to tell you that while the cat was away, the mouse tried to play.  I bought myself a Rose', a wine type that Huck hates.  It was from France.  Unfortunately, it was a very crappy thing.  Either the French have totally lost their vintage touch or they just don't get the $5 range AT. ALL.  I mean, there are decent wines in the $5-$10 range and this was not one of them. It had such a cute label.  I can just hear the French: "Zee Americanzz, they juzt like the bicicletta, in zee pink, wiz zee bubbles on zee label.  Tahehehe.  Ziz is zhit.  Total zhit wine, I pizz it when I pazz zee kidney ztones.  Zee? American Rozze.  Heh. Heh. Heh."

But then, I realized that this 109 year old house makes enough creepy noises with Huck here and if I told the world, or all five people reading here, that he was gone, the house would probably make even weirder noises.  As it was, I barely slept.  Lights on.  Such a ninny.  I was so tired during the days, I fell asleep on the park bench "watching" the kids.  It's not like we didn't do 3 whole months like this before... and this was but one week.  I've lost my grit.

And while that cat was away, other mice did play.  These pests always emerge when the man of the house is absent.  When my dad left town, we ALWAYS had a bat in the attic.  Count on it.  Mom would scream and we'd all know just what it was.  Maybe it's the testosterone pheremoney things those men exude that repel rodents. 

It happened so fast... I was in that much denial.  First there were a few tiny pellets on the counter top.  But maybe they were flax seeds.  And then there was the beheaded and disemboweled mouse in the hallway and a proud, bloody cat.  And then, the final straw on Wednesday:  I opened the silverware drawer and there was this little brown mouse with big chocolatey eyes and the longest eyelashes I've ever seen.  It squatted and gazed up at me, this big pathetic, hopeful expression, "Hi, my name is Fivel and I'd like to be your pet.  Do you have any spare wheels or balls or anything around here that needs to be incessantly turned all night?  Something squeeky?"  If it hadn't been so placid in the face of something 2000x its size, I might have just shut the drawer and continued on my little Denial Way.  Mouse?  I saw nothing of the sort!  Just a brown straw slipping behind the forks!

Although we live not in squalor, we've gotten a little lax, not sweeping before bed, leaving dishes on the counter over night.  Upon moving in we noted: old house + big field = mouse heaven and we vowed our vigilance.  We'd done battle with the mini-beasts before.  In Pullman.  One night, Huck returned from the shed proclaiming that something VERY LARGE had taken up residence in there over the winter.  It'd been months since we could open the door due to, actually, five full feet of snow and then some.  The next morning, we smelled, we saw, we marveled.  And the brown shag carpet draped all over the shed turned out to be mouse droppings.  You see, our cat needed special food for his urinary blockage problem, and our vet-friend scored us a bunch for free.  So we'd stored it, in it's original and secure paper bag.  Mousey gluttony ensued.  And those mice had the best damn bladders and urethras of the mouse kingdom.  And with such an infinite source of food, they felt their future would be bright enough to feed no less than a thousand kids. We suited up and scoured that shed, and made it to shine like the top of the Chrystler building. 

What could the suddenly starving mice do now but rush the house?  Within hours, there was crap in the pantry and sighting hotline set up.  We stopped feeding the cat until he pulled his weight, which wasn't hard.  These mice were so slow and stupid.  It's like what we'd all be if something should happen to our tenuous food supply chain.  We'd all just wander the streets going: "doh, de, doh!  Were'd the food go?"  Until some giant man stabbed us with a garden stake...just like Huck.  Traps.  Plug in anti-mice sound machines.  I foamed up all the holes around the pipes, causing massive stink bombs under the house a few days later.  Ick!

So we knew.  Yes, we knew all about mice.  We have the trash and compost cans they can't get in to.  And trap expertise.  Yes.  I may be mostly vegetarian, but when mice (and outside: gophers) get into my food stash... it's war and war is not pretty.  Even so, the physical and glue traps creep me out.  I mean, who would want to listen to a stuck mouse cry for four days before it finally gives up the ghost?  And the traps that hold up to five live mice?  What are they going to do in there until they starve to death? Well, what would you do? Breed.  ICK!! Doomed mouse orgies under the fridge and I'd have to listen to it while making dinner.  I don't think so.

So, we've got this black box and the mouse goes in, completes an electrical circuit, usually in some very bizarre position, and bam! Instantly fried, its little sizzled tail pointing out the back.  I open the lid and drop it into the trash.  Viola.

After admitting to myself that I'd been running and screaming for five whole minutes.  I had to come to terms with what was now fact: mice had invaded my drawers.  I searched the nut, seed, rice, bean drawer below the flatware drawer.  This is the drawer where, when we moved in, I vacuumed up "flax seeds" and a few stray lentils.  And I guess, subconsciously, it registered as a "suggested serving"  and I stuck my dry goods back in there.  And bought blond flax seeds.  So I spent the night vacuuming out drawers, dumping torn open bags of rice and beans, scrubbing, pouring unscathed food stuffs into glass jars, sweeping, mopping and setting traps. 

Sweaty and exhausted, Huck rang then to tell me, of course, that he was at a winery tasting the best wine he's ever had (not this Pepe le Pew crap I've been trying to come to terms with) and the best meal and a fabulous stroll along the river and he misses me.  Well.  @#%$&^*.  I miss you too, honey, but for all sorts of different reasons.  No... it was sweet of him to call; the right message, but at the very wrongest time.

So, I killed them.  Two.  I think that's all.  They're in the trash together, side by side, the beautiful one with the doe eyes and the blander one too.  A pair, and hopefully they weren't too busy in those walls eating and pooping and breeding. 

The Longest Day of the Year was three days ago.

CHEESE!

I made a new cheese this week and it was an awesome feta-type thing.

I took a Mozzarella making class a few weeks ago.  I paid for it!  I showed up on time!  And here in lumbers the instructor, who had just been informed he was doing it THAT morning.  And now he tells us that he only has goat milk and you can't make mozzarella with goat milk.  So he's going to show us how to make un-named cheeses.  "If you want something with a name, you have to get all scientific.  Which I don't do.  Basically, if it's harder than yogurt and edible, it's cheese.  So let's see what we make this morning!"  Um... but I can already do that, and do do that, in my own kitchen, for free!  Regardless, I figured a 20 year veteran of random cheesing might have some thing to teach me.

When I take a class, I asked lots of questions, trying not to be annoying or interuptive, of course.  Normally, teachers LOVE me.  They love that someone doesn't have a glazed look in their eyes.  They love that someone's engaged enough with the topic to actually ask relevant questions.  But sometimes, I get a dud who can't see what a gem of a student I am.  One professor YELLED at me to stop thinking.  Another professor walked out on the class when I innocently asked for clarification on the topic of the Roman's being totally egalitarian... apparently there was a pile of personal history there and I stepped in it.  Another teacher, concerned about my having a pulse and some enthusiasm, apparently a very rare trait in her classes, suggested I get my thyroid checked.  And this one slowly drawled, "You...know, that's...the...great... thing...about... the...internet. You...can...just...look...up...all... these...questions... on....Google."

The one thing I did get out of the class was a more cavalier approach to cheese making and the edibility of disasters.  Hence, my totally rockin' feta, which I then used in a fritatta (which we have weekly now) made with my yard's own lamb's quarters, my own chicken eggs, my own cream (from the cows, of course!), and some left over rice noodles.  Yum! 

And then, here's the real story.  Huck's Birthday cheese cake.  He wanted cheese cake.  Me, I am from a Betty-Crocker-Box family.  And Huck's from a scratch-learned-in-Switzerland family.  I'll be making a cake and he'll suddenly have feedback about the direction I'm mixing the batter (apparently you go different directions depending on which side of the equator you live on!), the types of peaks my eggs whites have crested to (Rockies vs. Appalachians)... whatever...some sort of esoteric bakery knowledge he pulls from a universe with which I have had no contact.  His helpfulness has unintentionally made me very conscious of my complete vacuum where this world of knowledge might exist.  Sensing my performance anxiety, he offered to make his own cake, but I just couldn't let him. After the "Fred-Flinstone-buys-Wilma-a-bowling-ball-for-her-birthday" present fiasco, I felt I just had to make it.  And guilt, fear and a total lack of confidence are always the best places to start with any endeavor.  Right.

I hunted through several hundred cheese cake recipes searching for the right, gluten-free one.  I knew he didn't want gummy cream cheese.  So we needed a marscapone or cottage cheese recipe.  And I thought I found what I was looking for in our antique cook book.  A fabulous looking recipe promising "basic" cheesecake.  I have since concluded that cheesecake recipes have come a long way, baby, in simplification.  This can't be what everyone else is making.

I thought I had enough time.  One hour to piece it together.  One hour to bake.  And one hour to cool while I picked up Blue from her day camp.  But one hour later, my miscreant egg-whites still wouldn't fluff.  My whipped cream was quickly regaining consciousness.  I was very confusedly creating "dry cottage cheese" by rinsing the cream off the curdles. Meanwhile, I was frantically searching for a substitution ratio of cornstarch for gluteny flour (1.5 tsp for 1 TBS wheat flour!).  So, I figured I would finally fold in my sickly egg-whites right before I left to pick Blue up, slap the baby in the oven and get back just in time to take it out, assuming no traffic.  But my cottages weren't blending with my crest-falling whipped cream, so I got out the food processor.  And I proceeded to dump the mixture in, before looking to see if I had put the blade in, which I hadn't, so it gushed straight through to the counter.  In the mean time, my 12 minute egg-whites completely deflated.  I quick called Huck, cried, hung-up (as if it was some middle school prank!), and ran out to pick up Blue.


Upon return, I screamed through 8 eggs to get my three egg whites, thanks to separation anxiety.  But these hard won whites went from placid ocean to Grand Tetons in less than two minutes! Lucky me!  I finished it up, poured it all into the spring form.  I transferred the top rack to the middle and we were on our way.  Right.

I checked back an hour later to find something strange going on with the oven rack.  I'd moved only half the rack down.  So there was my cheesecake, perfectly cooked and practically flowing over one side, while the hazelnut crust plummeted into an abyss on the other. 

Huck's assessment was that it listed like a drunken sailor yet to find his sea legs.  The recipe said NOTHING about cooling the cake, so we slopped the hot cream onto my nifty display pedestal. And there, the force of gravity and the fact that the solid was still hot enough to be a liquid took their tolls and we blew out the starboard side while the port side imploded in emptiness.

And the only candle we could find was the nine from Blue's birthday.

Nevertheless, it the was the best tasting, best textured damn pile o'cheesecake any of us have ever had or ever hope to have in our lifetimes.  Seriously.  God, it was so WORTH THE PAIN!  I'll do it all again, I swear.

Happy Birthday Huck

Huck's birthday is tomorrow and I'm in the same muddle I always am this time of year.  What do you get for a man who wants nothing?  He's as non-materialistic as humans come. And yet I feel compelled to materially display my appreciation for his birth.

The first time he dropped by my place in Seattle, he was wearing a brown leather jacket from the late '80's which he'd found in some wiser man's dumpster.  It was not the first, nor the last, turn-off he had to overcome to win my "hand."  Currently, he loves our old '94 Oldsmobile as a political statement.  The door squeaks, LOUDLY, when/if it opens.  The automatic windows don't go up without serious midwifing.  The transmission is nearly dead, slips out of gear in intersections and takes about five minutes to find a gear, any gear, upon start-up.  In fact, it can only find reverse with any certainty, and only after pressing the gas down as far as it will go, then it leaps back, howls at the moon, and runs off.  So you have to parallel park it where no one can get in behind you.  The oil pan has a huge crack in it.  Once that goes, the whole car will be gone in seconds.  And now there's thumping around the driver's side tire.  We plunked down the $1800 trade-in value my grandma wanted back in 2003.  Aside from an occasional tire or two and a few oil changes (with the leak, it's really a self-changing system), we've spent nothing on it's upkeep.  And the insurance is about three pennies a month.  And so, what could ANYONE buy for a man that loves to drive this butt-ugly crime against Detroit to work when he's not riding his bike?

I've given him a fancy trombone case.  A full tuba tune-up.  Socks.  Jazz from France.  Culinary tools.  Socks.  T-shirts.  Good running shoes.  Bike accessories.  And that's it.  I'm done.  I've got no other ideas hiding up here in this feeble cranium.

The kids had no problem: a hula hoop and boomerang!  In the bag!

Every year this birth day thing comes up and every year it stumps me.  I suppose I could get him a tie, but he's got a lifetime supply of four already.  And he'd only like if I got it on clearance from Goodwill.

Lingerie?  I have the best already. 

The thing I think he'd really like, is a big fat deposit in our bank account.  But that's not something I can give him with my current job.

I feel like, pretty much, the lamest wife ever at this point.  Every six months.  It's my twice-yearly I-suck-fest. Like the Macy's sale.  Lowest pride of the year.

But it's kind of his fault.  He wants nothing.  He doesn't want.  He doesn't like to want.  He's is fulfilled. Damn former-Hari Kirshna.

Perhaps I can count as his gift our trip last weekend for him to play at the Conscious Culture Festival in Tonasket.  And what a gift it was!  More like the Unconscious Chronic Festival. My reward for this lameness was pretty awesome, in all honesty:  playing in the parade on the go-cart drum set, created for Burning Man, but moved up to the site of Barter Fair by a sweet guy named Quill.  It wasn't all lame stonerness, which I should say isn't Huck's thing either.  He's allergic, actually.  (these are the photos you see, and I'm including one of myself this time, because someone took one finally).

Recently he mentioned, fervently frustrated, that our covers are a mess.  Here I thought he was a "toss another blanket on" kind of guy.  So, every time I wake up cold, I trek down to the basement to rustle up another blankie for our growing mound.  Making the bed takes about an hour.  The covers have to go on in a certain order.  You don't want the wool ones right on top of you, but they're kind of stained army-surplus numbers that you don't want to see every time you walk in to the room either.  It's a "full" size bed, which means that you could just lay one arm across it and it would be FULL!  And the kids like to join us some mornings.  Someone always ends up crying on the floor with a split lip or sprained ankle.  King Louis sleeps at the bottom of my side...which means that I spend my nights in perfect cannon-ball form, as if I'm getting ready to make my big splash at the community pool.  Meanwhile, the motley blanket lasagna slides off in all directions.

Huck finally declared that he wanted a comforter for his birthday.  And I insist on all natural, so a down comforter (which I've wanted for decades) is on the menu.  Unfortunately, the price is not on Huck's birthday wish list.  I found a deal, but then spent two hours searching for a duvet cover, which they don't sell in this town, apparently.  The kids were getting wacky (it's summer vacation now, so they come with me everywhere, wacky or not) and I was getting grumpy and suddenly I realize it's 6:00pm!!  And we're all hungry and tired.

The day is gone, wasted, a duvet-cover-less sunset and Huck had to make dinner, I'm that demoralized.

And Sunday is, DOH! Father's Day!  When will this madness stop?! 

Otherwise: Coyote lost his first tooth, Blue's in rafting camp this week - in the rain, the fridge is full of my own yogurt, cheeses and raw milk again, my heart is filled with joy every morning at five am, as odd as that sounds, for the sweet smell of sunrise and a cozy barn. And Lucky Farm's broadcast pasture seed is feeding fascinating Eastern Kingbirds and Brewer's Blackbirds. Happy Birthday Huck.

Coyote's world view

I always like this boy's shots of the world: