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Crunchy Crashola

July 08, 2010 - View Single Entry

So a week ago last Sunday, June 27 by my reckoning, Morgana V woke up with a big headache: the blue screen of "one of your key system files is corrupt or missing." This made it my headache, because I had to reinstall Windows and most of my software. Well, it had been 14 months since the last sinking of the Mary Ellen Carter, so I was ready to suck it up and rise again, so I did.

The problem didn't become apparent till I tried to update my AVG the next day. Connection speed topped out at a whopping 2 Kbps. Seriously. I hadn't seen a transmission speed that slow since my little 14.4 Kbps external modem, or maybe the palm-size one whose speed was even slower. Back in those days I wasn't trying to download multi-megabyte files so it didn't seem all that slow. This AVG update should have been done in a very few minutes but it went on for hours, many, many hours, during which, fascinated, I occasionally looked at the connection speed: 1.6 Kbps, 1.4, 1.2 . . . After six or seven hours, when the file was maybe two-thirds downloaded, Windows had a mini-crash and all was lost.

The next morning Outlook Express couldn't find either comcast.net .or gis.net, which is to say I couldn't send or receive e-mail, and Internet Explorer had no better luck finding the World Wide Web. My cable modem seemed to be functioning fine, and so was my phone. Morgana V, however, was like a telepath who's lost her powers, and without Morgana, I am like a blind woman who's lost both her dog and her cane.

I'll spare you the gory details, aside from the essentials: Comcast was helpful throughout, even though it wasn't their problem. I cancelled the first technician because I was 98% sure it wasn't a Comcast problem, but on the other hand, why was everything else working, sludgily, true, but it was working. Mark the technician solved the conundrum yesterday: Something went wonky during the crash or the reinstall, and the folder that's supposed to be called Network Applications is now listed in Windows Explorer as Unknown, and Morgana can't access it. Every afternoon I've been trucking over to Cris's house to use her computer -- download e-mail, transact business on the web, and copy clients' files from hard drive to CD or vice versa.

Being an "If it ain't broke . . ." kind of girl, I'd been thinking for years of getting a laptop: being so computer-dependent and having only one computer is risky, but for 25 years bad things have happened seldom and generally been fixed PDQ. Not this time. So I did my research and finally ordered myself a Dell Inspiron. (I was already to order a Toshiba, but their website drove me nuts, so I defaulted to my second choice.) It arrived today. Now I'm trying to get acquainted on the fly with Windows 7, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Office 2010, and especially with the touchpad on the computer. (The external mouse I ordered also arrived today but I haven't plugged it in yet, partly because I've discovered the joys of sitting out on the deck in the early evening, reading e-mail on battery power.)

Outlook Express has apparently been left in the cyber dust, which is too bad because it and I have gotten along fine through several ISP providers. Trying to get MS Outlook set up with my two POP e-mail accounts proved frustrating and unsuccessful, which is why I downloaded the two Mozillas. Persuading Thunderbird to communicate with comcast.net and gis.net was also challenging, but at about five minutes to six about 140 e-mails cascaded into my inbox. Whew.

Something I've noticed in the computer world: When people claim to have made things easier for the average user, I almost always have more problems with the new improved one than with the old. I must be in the cyber-DMZ between knowing too much and knowing too little. Average user probably doesn't have an e-mail account where the incoming and outgoing servers are different. Outlook Express had no trouble accommodating this. Both Outlook and Thunderbird searched for the server based on my e-mail address and choked when smtp.gis.net didn't work for outgoing e-mail. Their "configure manually" option was cagey about where to put my incoming/outgoing info. It took at least a dozen failed test transmissions before I got it right, and I'm still not sure how I did it, but it's done.

Oh yeah, I also bought and set up a wireless router, which is why I can sit out on the deck and download e-mail with no wires in sight. This is cool -- literally, because it's been very hot and humid the last few days and in the early evening outside is more pleasant than in, even though David finally finished installing my new ceiling fan just before July got beastly.

Next step is to get a diagnosis on Morgana -- can this computer be saved, or, more accurately, how much is it going to cost to get her up to something like her old speed, and restore my Network Applications? I may have a new desktop in my near future too. There's probably a word for people who buy two new computers and a car in the same calendar year, but I don't know what it is.

June License Plate Report

June 30, 2010 - View Single Entry

Here we are at last, belated and backdated, for reasons that will become apparent in the next couple of blogs. June brought in a sizable, varied, high-quality haul: Iowa, Utah, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Arkansas, Nevada, Alabama, and Tennessee.

The eastern half of the country is almost solid red: holdouts are Mississippi, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The vertical stack in the Midwest, however, is solid white, from (guess who) North Dakota at the top to Oklahoma at the bottom. Also AWOL are New Mexico, Montana, and Alaska.

Beach Day with Sibes

June 26, 2010 - View Single Entry

So somehow my friend Carole hooked up with the Snow Dogs, a bunch of people in the Boston area who do fun things with their Siberian huskies, and one way or another they all thought it would be cool to visit the Vineyard. This was back in mid-May, like a long time ago, and I'm not sure how all this came about, but the short version is that shortly before 11 a.m. this morning Travvy and I headed down to the Land Bank's Sepiessa Point property, on the shore of Tisbury Great Pond. My friend Trav tends to get a bit hyper in exciting situations, and since six Sibes, several people, and Carole's three dogs (two Springer spaniels and the fast and fearless Pipster, a 10-pound terrier mix) added up to at least as much excitement as a Rally trial, I guessed we'd last about 20 minutes before Travvy went so over the top that prudence required a retreat to calmer climes.

We got to the Sepiessa trailhead just in time to see the tail end of the group disappearing down the trail that runs along the eastern shore of Tiah's Cove. This was actually good strategy. Trav had ample opportunity to get used to the fact that there were dogs, lots of dogs, just ahead. Boy, were the smells fascinating! But he was managing to pay attention to me most of the time, so I let us catch up with the others so he could start meeting the other dogs. A few were on leash but most were loose, and Ernesto was bike-joring with one. First contact went amazingly well. The Siberians were very well-behaved. They and Trav sniffed each other in various configurations. We walked on toward the pond shore, encountering several other people and two golden retrievers en route.

The pond was pretty high, but there was plenty of beach to sit on. Trav wanted to go wading, so I took off my hiking boots and went in with him. Dogs were running, fetching, digging, swimming, and Trav was alert but under threshold. I got to talk with the people -- Kristin, Tania, and Ernesto -- and admire the dogs. I stayed long enough to get a bit of a sunburn, almost two hours, and when I took my leave it was mostly because it was pretty hot out there for a dog in a heavy overcoat. We walked back on the trail that leads alongside the old wire fence at the edge of the Jones family properties.

I was thrilled. Earlier this morning I'd finally entered Trav in two mid-July Rally trials in Vermont, one in Tunbridge on the 16th, one in Essex Junction on the 17th. I have a hankering to see the Tunbridge fairgrounds again, and also to get off the rock for no good reason. True, entry fees are the least of it, and I haven't made motel or ferry reservations, but this was still the beginning of a commitment. Watching Travvy cope so well with a demanding situation made me think that maybe I'm not nuts after all.

Laundry Strikes Twice

June 18, 2010 - View Single Entry

I did laundry twice this week. Scary, huh. The first time was for the usual reason: I was about to run out of underwear. I loaded my two canvas laundry bags, detergent, and Travvy into Malvina and off we went to the laundromat. While our three washers spun (at $5.25 each), Trav and I strolled around the airport and through the terminal. He was perfectly behaved and didn't try to snatch anything. Back home, I hung out the wash. Lots of T-shirts, a couple pair of long pants, a couple of short-sleeve shirts -- and one last dirty saddle pad. One of my former barnmates bought all but one of my saddle pads, along with my bridle and a leather halter that Allie never used because she was given one right after I bought it. Before the end of the afternoon, the clean pad was back at the barn.

I finally decided it was time to take the flannel sheets off my bed and bring out the lightweight cotton ones. No, that's not quite right. I decided at least a month ago that it was time to do this. That's not quite right either: I've decided several times in the last two months that it was time to take the flannel sheets off the bed and replace them with summerweight ones. Yesterday I finally did it. The dark green sheets and the Indian print spread went into the empty laundry hamper.

Last year dark green flannel sheets stayed at the bottom of the laundry hamper till cool mid-autumn nights suggested it was time to put them back on the bed. Then I took them to the laundromat. This morning was bright and clear, and I decided it would be really nice not to have to look at dirty winter sheets in the laundry hamper all summer. (This isn't quite right either. Dark green sheets never look dirty. That's one reason I bought them.) So off we went to the laundromat for the second time in a week, with sheets, bedspread, one T-shirt, one pair of shorts, and three days' worth of underwear and socks.

The sheets are folded and stored for the summer in the cedar chest. The bedspread is on a shelf in the closet. The laundry hamper is empty.

Family Food

June 16, 2010 - View Single Entry

This began as the lead-in to "Staff of Life," about my penchant for bread baking. My writers' group suggested that I separate the food part out from the bread part. Good idea. "Family Food" grew, and it pulled in two of my 1980s poems. "A Kitchen of My Own" is part of the six-sonnet "Winter Rental" series. "Sunday Dinner" stands alone and is quoted in its entirety. This is (you guessed it already) part of To Be Rather Than to Seem, my memoir in progress.

Say you grew up with "New England WASP cooking" and people roll their eyes in sympathy. "New England WASP cooking" means meat, potatoes, and boiled-to-death vegetables. Sure, it also means maple syrup, cider, and cranberry sauce, but everyone knows you can't live on those. I'm suspicious of stereotypes, and averse to unfair ones, but this one's got too much truth in it. British cookery has long been similarly scorned, and for similar reasons. Fifteen months spent in mid-1970s Britain yielded few culinary surprises for one who'd grown up on classic New England fare. At suppertime nearly all the youth hostels I stayed in while traveling reeked of boiling Brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts weren't the only green vegetable I ever saw in the United Kingdom, but offhand I can't remember what green vegetable I saw second most often.

New England cooking was meant to keep the body going, especially in cold weather. Pleasing palate, eye, or nose wasn't a high priority. Neither was laborious preparation or exacting technique. The years have added a few frills and flourishes, but that's still my basic approach to food. If it tastes good, I don't mind eating it three or four times a week.

My mother wasn't much of a cook. Neither were either of my grandmothers, and my father's culinary expertise extended no further than pancakes, waffles, and supervising the grill at family cookouts. Most dinners were divided in three parts: meat occupied one third of the plate, something white another third, and something green completed the meal. Hamburger Helper was the closest we got to a casserole, TV dinners were a treat, and boil-in-bag vegetables were OK as long as I didn't have to eat too much of them.

So there are no handed-down recipes in my kitchen repertoire, and when anything is advertised as "just like grandmother used to make," my immediate thought is "I sure hope not!" Grandmummie did make fine fudge from scratch, but I don't associate any specialties with Grandma, even though I inherited her copies of Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer. The bite-size cheese cookies my siblings and I all adored were from Grandmummie's recipe, but when Grandmummie made them, they came out dry and wizened. When Jessie, who cooked for Grandma and sometimes helped out at our house, made them, they were plump, moist, and altogether superior. My mother's culinary claim to fame was spoon bread, a southern corn meal soufflé that we often requested for our birthday dinners. The recipe is tucked in my Joy of Cooking, but I've never made it: it feeds six, doesn't keep well, and is side dish rather than entrée, all of which make it less than ideal if you're cooking mainly for yourself.

I've been making fun of my family's cooking and eating habits for several decades now. It wasn't till I got out in the world that I understood that the most remarkable thing about the food I grew up with was that there was always enough of it. Meals appeared pretty much on schedule. As we kids got older and took up various after-school pursuits, they appeared on two or three or four schedules. The younger kids would eat supper together at the table in our small kitchen. Sometimes I ate with them. The portable black-and-white TV sat on the dryer, just behind where brother Roger sat. Supper began toward the end of Gilligan's Island, continued through F Troop, and wasn't officially over till the final credits rolled on Hogan's Heroes. Before I had my license or when I couldn't borrow my mother's station wagon, my father sometimes picked me up at the barn on his way home from work. Then he and I would eat later , in the dining room. My mother didn't eat with any of us. She usually ate between shifts at the kitchen counter, the telephone at her left elbow, Huntley-Brinkley, Reasoner, or Cronkite for her dinner companions.

In the mid-1980s, I wrote "A Kitchen of My Own," a sonnet that begins:

If Sisyphus were female, hell might be
a kitchen, and her sentence to prepare
an endless chain of balanced meals. Then she,
too tired to eat, must coax this gourmet fare
down gullets primed for sloppy joes. . . .

Of course it's about my mother. She's sitting on the yellow metal stool, the one whose two flip-out steps let it double as a step ladder, huddled over either a supper plate or a drink, usually gin and tonic, sometimes scotch and water. By the age of twelve or so I wanted no part of Mrs. Sisyphus's labors, ever. In other circumstances, I might have had little choice in the matter. When Mommy is alcoholic, dysfunctional, or otherwise absent, or when she works full-time and there are several children and a daddy to feed, it's often the eldest daughter who picks up the slack. If there was slack to be picked up, I managed to not-see it: by the time I got home from the barn, the younger kids had usually eaten and my supper was on the warming tray or in the oven. Mummie didn't slip over the line from drinking to drunk until everyone was fed. When drink loosened her tongue, though, we got a taste of her feelings on the matter. You couldn't say 'thank you' once in a while, could you. Oh no, not you: you're Just Like Your Father. And the culminating mantra, engraved in memory by ten thousand repetitions: What do you ever do to help?

No matter how often Dad and I protested that we could get our own supper, supper was there when we got home. Nothing to be done but eat it, and clean up after ourselves.

Unlike Mrs. Sisyphus, my mother didn't prepare "gourmet fare," and I didn't develop a taste for sloppy joes till later, when I got over my dislike of tomatoes. Gourmet I wasn't, but picky I was. Not only did I disdain tomatoes, I wouldn't eat fish of any kind. I turned up my nose at reconstituted potato flakes, but this may have had less to do with taste or authenticity than with hearing my father express a preference for real mashed potatoes. If my father liked something, that predisposed me to like it too -- my father's preference for tea over coffee set me on the road to being a lifelong tea drinker -- but there were significant exceptions. My favorite ice cream was never strawberry, and my father's passion for fish and shellfish was nowhere near enough to overcome my revulsion for anything that smelled fishy, a visceral disgust that memory dates to a sixth-grade field trip to a Gloucester fish-stick factory.

My kitchen repertoire was likewise limited. I learned to make hamburgers, hot dogs, and grilled cheese sandwiches. I could boil water for spaghetti and macaroni, pull the pot off the burner, and strain the pasta before it got mushy. I could heat frozen vegetables and add water to and stir anything that came in a box. I even made banana nut bread by following the recipe in Joy of Cooking; this was one of the few baked goods that my mother ever made from scratch.

Before I left home, I didn't learn much about how the rest of the world ate. In high school, my Jewish classmates did introduce me to bagels. Bagels were a wonder. Bagels slathered with cream cheese, I thought, might be the secret to solving the Arab-Israeli crisis, in which I maintained a keen interest.

College greatly expanded my gastronomic horizons: I discovered such wonders as Spam, Velveeta, and Franco-American macaroni and cheese in a can. What else had my mother been holding out on us? During my Georgetown University years in D.C., after long meetings or bull sessions several of us might link arms and skip up 35th Street, singing antiwar songs or "We're off to see the Wizard," heading for the all-night bakery on Wisconsin Avenue. Around 1:30 a.m. fresh doughnuts in several varieties were borne out from the kitchen on big trays, to a salivating crowd that could include students, professors, parents with young kids, and anyone with a compelling case of grass-induced munchies. The honey-glazed doughnuts were ambrosia, and the late-late-night social scene made them taste even better.

After transferring a couple of years later to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, I snacked and sometimes breakfasted or lunched on hot pretzels from the pretzel vendors' carts: mustard took on new significance. As a kid I devoured unadorned hot dogs and hamburgers. I didn't care for ketchup or anything else with tomatoes in it, and didn't see the point of relish or mustard. I still don't like ketchup. Salsa, barbecue sauce, and mustard, however, have long been staples in my refrigerator.

My sister, Ellen, and I are eight years apart in age, but our coming-home experiences were similar after we went off to college: we'd volunteer to fix supper, nothing fancy -- omelets or stir-fry -- then have to make a run to the Star Market in Auburndale when we discovered that there were no onions or garlic or fresh vegetables in the house. My mother made do quite nicely with onion flakes, garlic salt, and frozen veggies. She did have a taste for hot and spicy food that the rest of us didn't share, so she usually kept a bottle of hot sauce on hand. This affinity I attributed to her birth in Mexico City and her upbringing in Spain and other European countries. My own taste for food just this side of fiery developed gradually, and only after I outgrew my determination to have nothing in common with my mother.

Sundays, holidays, birthdays, and other special occasions we'd eat together in the dining room. Each of us had our place at the oval dinner table: Dad at the head, with his back to the kitchen; Mummie at the foot, with her back to the chimney (the fireplace was on the other side, in the living room); Ellen and me with our backs to the plate glass window and sliding door that separated dining room from screened-in porch; John and Roger opposite, with their backs to the sideboard where the rarely used silver service items were displayed. Once out in the world, when we returned for a special occasion, we all invariably gravitated to the exact same places. When Grandmummie, any of the uncles, or any other guests joined us, one leaf or two could be added to the table, but this meant very tight quarters because the room was small; the tall, skinny table behind Dad where current magazines were spread out had to be moved into the hall.

Here we learned basic table manners. Hands had to be washed before we came to the table. No one sat till Mummie (or Grandmummie, if she was present) was seated; we passed plates and waited till everyone was served, whereupon Dad said grace and none of us lifted a fork till Mummie had taken her first bite. "Please" and "thank you" were expected, cloth napkins were used (we each had our own engraved silver napkin ring), and if anyone rested an elbow on the table, my mother would say, "Coude," the French word for the errant body part, to remind us that one's elbows belonged at one's sides. My father carved the meat -- usually roast beef or roast chicken -- and my mother served the green stuff and the white stuff.

Here we also caught up with each other's weeks, and talked about current events. No topic was taboo, but my father and I regularly dominated the political discussions, mainly because the others couldn't keep up or didn't especially want to. We were a quick-witted and good-humored bunch, and we laughed a lot. But the family dinner table could turn dark and dangerous with little warning. It often did. When terrorism was much in the news in the mid-1980s, I wrote "Sunday Dinner" about it.

We come to the table with clean hands.
Our mother's hands are clean, she
has been in the kitchen cooking.
We stand behind our chairs until our mother sits
at her end of the table, opposite our father,
then we sit. I sit next to my mother.
We say grace. Bless, O Lord, this food to our use
and us to Thy loving service, for Christ's sake. Amen.
Our father's hands carve the roast.
Our mother's hands serve peas and potatoes.
Our hands pass the plates
and wait poised over knives and forks until
our mother takes the first bite.

My father is a sword thrower. I
am his apprentice. He has a keen eye.
A small dagger whistles past my mother's head and lodges
in the wall.
That will teach you to be wrong.
My father shows me how to place the blades just so
they quiver in the brick and leave no mark.
That will teach you to have any answer at all.
I sit next to my mother.
God always gets his way.
God never makes mistakes.
Don't move and you won't get hurt.
I am next to my mother.
The only safe place in the world is behind
the throwing arm of God.

I cover my ears without moving my hands.
The end of the table explodes
a crater at the end of the table.
We take no notice.
Water flows into the crater and sits
a deep deep pool of silent water
at the end of the table. I
sit next to the dark and take
no notice.

God is hurling His sword at the water.
Monsters lurk in the silent pool.