Fangs for the Memories

One of our cats went to the vet today. They pulled his two biggest assets:


Quite the tusker, wasn't he? Thanks to chronic gum disease Petrucchio had just three teeth left in his head. But his condition made two of them seem huge. After today, only the one small tooth remains.

The procedure cost about $400. Every time one of our cats go into dry dock, the price is "about $400." As if the vet now has one price for everything, to make it easier on the bookkeeper. For now, we can still afford it.

Years ago I fed a small piece of beef burrito to one of the cats we had at the time. He'd been begging for it, and I gave in.

Bad idea. He immediately began spewing from both ends. I thought I'd poisoned him. We rushed him to the vet. They did a zillion tests. They gave him back. They told us, "Don't feed him burritos." And they charged us $170.

For years, Rhumba and I joked about the "$170 burrito." But if you adjust for inflation since that time, the price would be -- "about $400." So this game goes 'way back.

But we pay the price because we can (for now), and because we consider our cats to be members of the family. Small, feral, unsocialized members with poor hygiene, big appetites, and no work ethic. Who stay up late and sleep all day. Aren't there one or two of those in every family?

There exists an infant intelligence test that requires neither speech nor sight nor even hearing. A friend of Rhumba's uses it in her work with profoundly disabled children. Out of curiosity she tested her cats: they scored like 20-month-old toddlers. Fur-covered toddlers with fangs and claws. Think about it.

At least they'll never ask for the car keys.

The Weekend in Review

As we wandered around Santa Cruz this weekend I kept camera in hand. It wasn't exactly a beautiful day in the neighborhood, but it, well, was... Santa Cruz.


Yes, they stay on his face quite well, thank you. We got up Saturday morning and headed over to the Harbor Cafe, where you can eat outside and bring your dog. And everybody did:


I've got a soft spot for Corgis, for some reason. Ridiculous-looking dogs, but they're friendly and affectionate and just happy to be here. This one was the pampered child of a middle-aged couple who fussed over her endlessly.


But this is what I really came to the Harbor for: the dreaded Moco Loco, the Mike's Mess of the East Side:


Fried eggs and a hamburger patty on a bed of Spanish rice covered with pan gravy. What's not to like? Well, maybe the results of my next blood panel. But for now: MANJAH.

This was not the healthiest of weekends for me or anyone. Besides the cholesterol jolt, I and everyone else breathed smoke all weekend. Ten packs a day, easily:

Six thousand acres of forest blazed madly a few miles away (the "Lockheed Fire,") and the smoke came down to street level all over Santa Cruz. It was hard to breath; even the most rabid joggers took the day off. A minute after I took this shot an old lady with an old dog told me she'd barely made it home from her daily walk the day before, when the smoke was even worse.


A block away the Red Cross had set up a refugee center; and some did come for shelter, but not very many. The affected area, Bonny Doon, has home prices in the million-plus range, and most people who can afford to live there have a lot of options.

So despite the fire and smoek, life in Santa Cruz went on pretty much as normal:


This was a drug bust of the silly kind. Someone's been selling weed downtown out of that old camper -- in public parking lots -- so the cops finally got wind of it came to knock on the door. And the people inside actually tried to drive away around the massed cop cars. They didn't get very far before the cops blocked their path, but they still wouldn't come out of the camper. In the photo above, the cops are trying sweet reason.

I don't know if it ever worked, because I had to leave. Rhumba and I were headed out to a bakery for a snack. We have bakeries everywhere. Come fire, sleet, snow, rain, or no dope, Santa Cruzans will have their pastry:


I mean, it was six o'clock of a Saturday evening, and the Buttery bakery was packed. Cakeholism is a serious problem in Santa Cruz, and these poor devils were here to get their fix for the next day: Boston Cream, Princess Cake, Black Forest, Tiramisu -- the poor devils. They've got Betty Crocker on their backs. As for us, ah, well... we just came in for a glass of water. That's it. Water. We can quit anytime we want, ask anybody.

We went next door to Shopper's Corner to pick up a few things, and our usual cashier had had gold piercings placed in both cheeks -- the cheeks of her face, okay? To say she had a brilliant smile was factually accurate. I thought about snapping a picture, but... never piss off the people who handle your food.

The next morning we headed back down to the yacht harbor for morning coffee and a little wave action. We weren't the only ones:

People come down to the sea of a morning to watch the boats go out, watch the tide come in, or just watch.

Looks like he's staring into the primordial void, doesn't it? Fog and forest fire smoke together will do that.

And as a beach volleyball court is a terrible thing to waste, there was some of that action as well. C'mon people, it's too damned early:

Rhumba and I went home for a morning of laundry and borscht-making, but our plans were knocked awry by a message on the answer machine. As I've mentioned, Rhumba has a yen for knitting machines, and somebody was selling one at a ridiculously low price 30 miles away at an estate sale. Rhumba has a zillion of them, but we know someone who wants one and can't afford it -- at the price offered, we could afford to be Santa Claus.

So into the car it was and down to the Land of Artichokes, aka Monterey County. If anything, the air was worse down there; they have their own fire going as well. Fire season this year is just going to be a bitch, I can tell.


We pulled into Marina and found the estate sale -- "Just follow the signs," they told us, and they were right. The deceased's family had hired a professional flea market vendor to run the sale, and she had everything ship-shape and organized. An assistant led us directly to the knitting machine, which had been set aside for us. "I don't think it's ever been used," she said.

It hadn't. Thirty-five years old and yet new in the box. Fully tricked-out, all the accessories and add-ons there, all the original cardboard and foam spacers still holding everything in place just as they had when the packages shipped from the factory. Rhumba looked like she'd found King Solomon's Mines. A lot of the accessories haven't been made for 20 years, and yet are still in demand.

That said, the knitting machine is still going to our friend. But the chase, successfully running down a great deal, is always fun.

And yet there's always something a little forlorn about an estate sale, and I don't often go to them. I find it sad to watch someone's household being carted away a bit at a time, even if I'm doing the carting. Even though all the stuff is going off into other hands that will make good use of it.


Our business done, we headed home; there's not much happening in Marina. We stopped at Gayles in Capitola and treated ourselves to the first real Napoleons I had tasted in maybe 20 years.

I spent my post-college life in San Francisco, and that will spoil you. I lived two blocks from a bakery that turned out fresh Napoleons six days a week. It's not that they were cheap, but -- I could get one whenever I wanted. Five minute walk. On an impulse. Even Gayle's is 15 minutes by car, when traffic is good.

We headed home down Highway 1, and at the usual traffic jam at the River St. stoplight, about a zillion motorcyclists streamed past up. The pictures don't really do them justice:




We finally made it back to the house and turned our attention to a little laundry and borscht and some composting -- because when you're done with borscht, you've got a lot to compost. Look at all that organic goodness:


After that Rhumba turned to some knitting projects and I spent some time in the garage with my soon-to-be-finished (for the last three months) stained glass project.


It's a stained-glass representation of a fruit crate label; it's a little dicey because a lot of the "clear glass" is empty space; it's going to hang in a transom space over the kitchen door, and we want air to pass through it. But because of that, and because I free-handed large parts of the design, I'm having a hard time getting all the pieces to align so I can solder it. I'll think I almost have the pieces ground to complementary shapes, then one piece shifts slightly and nothing fits at all. Driving me mad. But I'm closing in on it. I am. Will have it soldered together Real Soon Now. I swear.

Can anybody guess what the electric frypan is for?

After I finished struggling with the glass, we had dinner and sat in front of the tube while Rhumba (who will never submit to a photograph) knitted and I worked on this blog. And there you have it. Time to head off to bed and get ready for another week in harness. It wasn't exactly a brilliant weekend. But I'm sorry it's over.

They're Alive! ALIVE

Looks like they're trying to escape, doesn't it? Well, they're beets, and escape is what beets do.

There's nothing more slippery than peeled beets. They've got a positive death wish. You finish peeling the thing in the sink -- leaking red juice everywhere -- and it shoots out of your hands and neatly down the drain. Little bastards.

I expected to live my life without ever peeling a beet. But the fine folks who provide Rhumba and I with a weekly order of organic vegetables decided that we would get to know beets -- better than we ever had before. Because they've been shipping us beets almost every week this summer. The little buggers were beginning to crawl around the kitchen and build nests.

We bought a share at a CSA farm; CSA stands for "community-supported agriculture," which is a big deal around Santa Cruz. You give a local farmer several hundred dollars for a "share" of the produce he grows, and he guarantees you a weekly load of fresh and (usually) organic fruits and vegetables for maybe five months of the year.

And the CSA farmers don't want to bore you, so they plant a veritable United Nations of vegetables. And you never know what you're going to get from week to week.

Strawberries? Sure. Blueberries? Absolutely. And lettuce, and plums, squash and new potatoes and cabbage and basil and dill and salad greens and green beans. Who could argue?

But then comes the stuff you don't know what to do with. The fennel. The kohlrabi, which looks like it came from another planet. And the rainbow chard. Week after week, bunches and piles, no, SNOWDRIFTS of rainbow chard.

I've talked to other CSA shareholders, and nobody's really dealing well with the rainbow chard. Nobody confesses to it, but I think in most households it's going straight to compost. As for kohlrabi: "Did you ever figure out what to do with them?" "No, you?" "Me neither." "I finally sliced one up and ate it raw. Ehh."


And then there were the beets. They kept piling up in the fridge, and they refused to rot -- or at least they resisted pretty damned well. But we're not beet people. Then a few weeks ago the CSA delivered more beets. With potatoes, cabbage, and carrots. "It's a complete borscht kit," Rhumba proclaimed.

Borscht? I can eat borscht. Sour cream makes everything possible. And as it turns out, borscht is dead easy; peel it all up, throw it in a pot, and cook it until everything turns red.

So we've been eating borscht three or four times a week for the past month. We cook up a big pot on Saturday, freeze it, and eat it on those weekday evenings when we don't have the energy to cook dinner, which is most of them. Early on in our relationship, Rhumba told me, "I'm really, really glad you don't mind eating the same thing day after day." I think we were on a black bean kick at the time. And I don't mind, as along as it's good. And there's sour cream.

And since I do tend to eat the same things over and over, maybe it's good that the demonic farmers down at the CSA keep throwing curve balls into our market basket. I've picked up on some good things. I've learned to make pesto out of about every green that comes along (except the dreaded rainbow chard). One week last month when the broccoli was starting to pile up, I even made broccoli pesto. Killer, definitely.

And we've learned to love collards, and bok choy, and lipstick peppers, and even -- I swear -- turnips.

Kohlrabi and fennel and rainbow chard, though -- still working on that.

Bonehead Borscht

Borscht is not rocket science, hence the name. You can put it more or less of any ingredient, and it's still borscht. Just different borscht.

Five potatoes
Four carrots
One small cabbage or half a big one
Eight ounce can of tomato paste or 8-16 ounces of tomato sauce
One 32-ounce carton of vegetarian stock (or meat stock of your choice)
Salt and pepper.

Peel and slice the beets, potatoes, and carrots into relatively small pieces. Slice the cabbage thinly.

Mix the stock and tomato sauce/paste in a big pot; add shredded cabbage. Heat until the cabbage cooks down a little and makes room for everything else. Add everything else. Cook until everything turns red and it doesn't resist a fork. The borscht will be thick, very stew-like; add a little water if you must. Salt and pepper to taste. Serve with (yum) sour cream.

Broccoli Pesto

6 oz broccoli flowers, raw
1 clove garlic 4 oz pecans (or hazelnuts or macadamias)
2 oz Parmesan cheese
1/4 tsp pepper
7 fl.oz olive oil

Grind it all up together however you do those things, smooth or chunky just as you like. We just have a cheap rotary chopper, and we get by. Serve over pasta. Different than your usual pesto, and delicious.

Turnip/Potato Mash

2 pounds of potatoes, cubed
1 1/2 pounds of turnips, cubed or sliced a little smaller than the potatoes
4 cloves of garlic
Four ounces of buttermilk
One tablespoon of butter

Steam the potatoes, turnips, and garlic together until soft, about 25 minutes. Drain, add everything else, and mash. Salt and pepper to taste. The best mashed potatoes I ever had -- probably because they aren't, exactly.

Saved by the Organist

I was hanging out on an Internet forum the other day, and somebody commented on a news story about 47 passengers in a grounded airliner. For some reason, the airline kept them on the plane for six hours.

The commentor said, "The fact that those 47 people were willing to not kick open the door and bail just for the hell of it is amazing. Not sure if it was an act of orderly calm or sheepdom tho."

And that reminded me:

Last Sunday was quite a warm day here in Santa Cruz. Rhumba and I spent the morning in a pew in a church with ventilation that -- well, "iffy" is the best word I've got. At the beginning of the service the temperature seemed pleasant. But it soon got warmer. And warmer. We all became a bit drowsy. During the long sermon, heads began to droop.

Now anyone could have got up at any time, flung open the rear doors, and let in some fresh air; I thought about it. But nobody did anything; we weren't sure if we would be stepping on anybody's territory, I suppose.

After the sermon, we sang a hymn -- very, very raggedly because we were all still drowsy. When the hymn ended, Igor the church organist got up from his keyboard, marched to the back and opened the rear door. As cool air wafted in, he hissed "Now, KICK IT UP A NOTCH!"

Whatever you call it -- orderly calm or sheepdom -- this sort of passivity is pretty normal human behavior for settled, comfortable people. (Igor, of course, is neither settled nor comfortable.) America has rewarded such behavior for much of the last 50 years. Only recently have conditions changed; and we haven't viscerally realized we won't be rewarded for staying in line.

Start getting mad about what's happening in the world -- how corporations and their stooges have destroyed our health care, our economy, our future -- or be prepared to sleep forever. A grouchy organist may not be nearby to save the day for you.