Fermentation update

Voila, I have created life. Kraut unarguably a creature, developing personality by the day. Unsure whether to be frightened or thrilled by the unskimmable scum on top.

How to say stuff

Reading the Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations. It’s delightful, if a little shocking, to be corrected on so many things. Author is well aware of linguists’ general rule that however people say a word, that must be right—but says it’s still important to have rules about what is right and what is beastly. Linguistic relativism is beastly, I bet he’d say. I appreciate the book for caressing my own oft-ridiculed internal rigidity on grammar, spelling, pronunciation. But his linguistic-judging sense goes much, much farther; even opinionated I sometimes feel his opinions seem arbitrary.

Reminds me of a friend who came up with a way to teach small children linguistics: say they grew up with african american vernacular english, and then they have to go to school, where teachers and standardized tests and so forth have different ideas. The idea is have them learn the difference between the two versions of english, and where to use them appropriately.

But I agree with the author: there is only one way to pronounce ‘nuclear.’

Greyhound: for the rich

Every time you see another story about the price of gas, or milk, or beer, you’re probably on the receiving end of some reporter’s therapeutic venting. Said reporter, for instance, went to store with $40 for groceries and was unable to purchase all needed items; indignance prompted pitch to editor; and thus you had to read about it again.

I have so far avoided such stories out of self-awareness and kindness for my readers. In addition, the price of milk doesn’t interest me because I’m lactose-uneasy. However, today I was appalled.

Campari: $37 at Fred Meyer.

I came back with orange juice.

Fortification

I will spend my Saturday morning doing overtime, writing about the death of the Southeast Alaska timber industry. On the side of light and goodness, though, I have excellent coffee and scrambled eggs with cream, arugula, basil, and nutmeg. I cook eggs in the spirit of MFK Fisher’s instructions in the 1942 “How to Cook a Wolf.” She says:

Scrambled eggs have been made, and massacred, for as long as people knew about pots and pans, no doubt.

And then the recipe. The essence: “This takes perhaps a half hour. It cannot be hurried.” I first discovered it in Africa, with malaria and limited rations, when we were really fighting the wolf, and it was one of those dishes I promised to make myself as soon as I got out.

I have almost never had scrambled eggs properly made outside my house. (The exception was someone else’s house in Valancay, France, and the quality of my eggs have rarely approached hers.) As much as I love my diner breakfasts, their eggs are compromised by the proprietors’ decision to serve me in a reasonable amount of time. So I make my own eggs at home, several days a week, before I descend into my harried, often lunchless reporting. They tempt me to another pace and fortify me.

And now to fight the wolf. He comes in different forms.

Tipping the balance in favor of more driving

A little-considered bonus of global warming is that in some places, kitten season has begun to extend throughout the entire year. Cats are having more sex because the weather is better. The Oakland Animal shelter is still giving away one-pound furballs, I learned this morning

In related news, last night I dreamt I adopted 10 tabby kittens and two pink juvenile hogs, the latter just for eating. I had to take the kittens back because my landlady reminded me we’d only agreed on the two I already had. But the hogs we determined to keep until we could slaughter them together. They stayed in 9-year-old Gabby’s treehouse.

clean paint off cat

–that’s my only use of Google today.

I’ve just transformed my olive-green den into a friendly orange one. I have also transformed my gray kitten and black-and-tan cat into friendly orange-streaked ones.

In other news, my downstream bathtub pipes have been frozen for two days. Attempted to mix warm water in to melt. Made humorous attempt at plunging tub. Failed, failed. Am starting to miss hot water. But the small child in me rejoices at having an excuse not to wash.

Cats drinking water

Why does it taste better out of a glass?

To Alaska

North I go. Off to report the news in the land of drill rigs, rigged elections, smoked salmon, black bears, brown bears, moose and gun-toting tax assessors. Alaskans, I’ve noticed, tend to relish their own stereotypes. In Valdez each year they have a Duct Tape Blue Tarp Carrharrt Ball, at which your costume is to be composed of those three universally available and useful materials. My Oakland life has grown so soft that I have stowed my Carharrts in the back of my closet.

The salmon are calling me

I may be moving soon.

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Bringing up myself

Disclaimer: Dear parents, I know you tried your hardest. Any deep inner flaws are the fault of the author. Or her sister.

I’ve been thinking a lot about parenting lately. It’s that time of life, I suppose. I’m a healthy hormonal 27-year-old female. The other night I dreamt I gave birth to a kitten. It was very cute after we washed the amniotic fluid off it. (My dreams are often physiologically detailed.) We were so proud. By ‘we,’ I mean me and my boyfriend — who in real life enjoys other people’s babies and, if I’m being real euphemistic about it, cats from afar. I have informed him that I do not wish to have babies unless they are kittens. Babies, ick.

Which is why the next part of the dream was a nightmare. The brain riffed; and in the next one-act I had birthed a baby. Mind you, the baby never surfaced in any scenes. One minute I was thinking my pants were getting a bit tight, and the next the belly was pancake-flat again, and it was clear something had exited it. At the time I was on some kind of quest, let’s say a Hajj. The whole thing made me feel hard-core and resourceful, because I seem to have had the baby on the side of the road.

I’m hoping this isn’t my entrance into the Zone. That place women go from 27-33, where hormones rule and babies suddenly stop smelling funny and their minds have an inability to remember how horrible it is when babies, toddlers, or teenagers screech, especially in inappropriate places, embarrassing their parents.

As my friends all know, my plan has always been that I’d only have children if I could take fertility drugs. Some cocktail that would splice the egg, not release a bunch of them. I’d like to have a passel of identical children, so that I can do psychological experiments on them with a sample size to support reasonably good statistics on the results. As a conscientious scientist I would have to send some of them away as controls — to be raised by wolves, penguins, cats or Eugene Oregonians. I have considered naming them all George Foreman, but just for fun. They’d have to have nicknames, too.

I’ve always known, anyway, that I needed a lot more parenting before I could legitimately traumatize another generation. Example 1: Hygiene and tidiness. I was finishing an audio job early this morning; I absently took a sip of coffee from the mug on the right while staring at the screen; but today’s coffee, unfortunately, was the mug on the left. Also, I actively avoid looking at my kitchen sink. Example 2: An overdeveloped sense of fairness, wrought by intense sibling rivalry, which manifests in times of need as an overdeveloped sense of unfairness. Do not eat the last donut alone. You will discover my wrath. It is embarrassing to see my own childishness sometimes.

My own parents cannot help me. They have moved on to cats, themselves. I think they prefer them. The cats are Abyssinians, which respond to commands like ‘fetch.’ That’s more than I ever did.

But I discovered a solution. I will parent myself! I’ve been considering bidding for a video-podcast editing job for a parenting-science center. The example vodcast was a lesson in gratitude. A cheery woman parent explained to her cheery interviewer that each night at bedtime, she asks her child to list three things about the past day that she’s grateful for. Over time she has begun to compile the list during the day. Mommy was most pleased the day that the child declared, upon receipt of an afternoon ice cream sundae, that this would be one of her three things that day. It’s a way to raise a person who is conscious of and grateful for the good things in her life. A glass-half-fuller, the cheery women explained. It’s certainly preferable to having one of those children, and we’ve all heard them, who screeches “But I wanted the PINK FLAVOR!” at the top of her lungs in public.

I’m going to abandon my Inner Taskmaster (who is named Vladimir, by the way) and cultivate my Inner Cheery Mom.

Today I am grateful for:

(1) My adherence to high coffee standards, even in poverty. High-quality work cannot be done on low-quality sludge. And I have already finished for the day!

(2) Pirated software. I can say no more.

(3) My landlord, who brought me smoked-turkey soup last night when I had to work late.

(4) The two kittens I am about to pick up from the SPCA. People who know me, don’t worry — it’s only temporary. I’m becoming a foster cat mama.

But we all know kittens are the gateway baby.