Mulberry Jam

Naturally since the weather over the three-day holiday was not so good, today is just lovely. Sunny, blue sky and not horribly hot considering it’s July in Washington. The mulberries are finally fading after five weeks of creating their usual sticky, jammy mess on the front walk and street. I did get to make a batch of mulberry jam this year, and I think it turned out well. Now to decide who deserves one of the little labors of love. (Fritz, I’ve got one with your name on it, you lucky devil!)

This Spring raced by, filled with a heavy schedule of consulting and yoga teaching. At last the yoga studio session has finished, and I’m looking forward to a break from teaching. I’ve committed to just one class per week during July and August, which should allow a bit more breathing room in my weeks. I plan to use the extra time to catch up on some overdue writing projects, re-invest in my own personal yoga practice, and hopefully post to the Jam a bit more regularly. Most of all, I want to slow down and enjoy the summer by spending more time with friends and family.

We had the unexpected pleasure today of hosting our good friend and neighbor Chris Apostolou and his father for lunch. Chris’ father is a spry Greek gentleman with a gift for cooking. He’s sent many traditional pastries and other goodies our way through Chris, and today he finally accepted a long-standing invitation to drop in.

Mr. Apostolou emigrated to America from the mountains of central Greece in the early fifties, with no English and just $60 in his pocket. He’s a fantastic story-teller and an inveterate leg-puller. I was charmed to learn his name is Pericles! Greek names are so wonderful. I’ve met other Greek-Americans with names like Socrates or Athena. It’s enough to give a person a cultural inferiority complex.

We lingered over lunch for a couple of hours, listening and laughing over Mr. Apostolou’s stories of working as a haphazardly trained waiter at high class hotels like San Francisco’s Fairmont and Washington’s Mayflower in the fifties. His best punch line: “And how do you want your steak tartare done?”

If I worked in an office I’d never get to have lunches like that.

Thanks to Fritz for this one– another great film about cats. Very important viewing for all my cat-loving engineer friends out there. You know who you are.

Should I admit this? I’m really looking forward to a television show. There are very few programs I watch regularly, and most of the ones I do watch seem to be on the Food network. In a complete departure from my usual pattern, last year my husband got me sucked into the show Deadliest Catch on the Discovery Channel. The first episode of the new season airs tomorrow, Tuesday April 15.

The show tracks the captains and crews of six crab fishing boats in the Bering Sea as they fish for king and opilio crabs through the fall and winter season. First time I heard about it I thought “Hmm. Sounds a bit dull.”

Oh, no, baby. It’s compulsively watchable. This program gives a whole new meaning to the idea of reality tv. It’s nothing like the “reality” of shows like Survivor or The Bachelor or the new one I watched for five horrified minutes last week on MTV (with Flavor Flav choosing among three harsh-looking women). Deadliest Catch is true documentary, and it doesn’t get more real than this.

The show title doesn’t exaggerate the danger these men face. Since Discovery began filming these boats in 1999, several boats in the Alaskan crab fleet have gone down in the dangerous winter seas. Over that time 48 men have had to be rescued at sea, and 44 men were lost. In 2005, the crab boat Big Valley, sister ship to one of the show’s featured ships, went down fast in rough seas with only one survivor. The money the men earn is good, as much as $40,000 for a crew member on a boat with a good haul over a four-to-six week season. But man do they earn it. Shifts of up to twenty hours for two weeks straight on the heaving deck of a ship. Ice-cold waves tossed up over them all day sometimes.

The men are all characters, to say the least. There’s plenty of salty language that gets bleeped out. But much of the time it’s under circumstances that would have me swearing the air blue as well. For instance, there was the time last season when Captain Jonathan of the Time Bandit was gingerly steering his ship through a field of crushing ice that threatened to tear his hull open. I sat on the edge of my seat, feeling the stress and fear he felt for his boat and crew.

This year’s winter crab season is over, and I look forward to seeing how the men fared. I dare you to watch this show and not thank your lucky stars. That your work isn’t life threatening. That you don’t have to show the kind of endurance and raw tenacity that these guys put out in an ordinary day. That you know for sure you’ll be going home at the end of your day.

I realized that I never have posted about one of my favorite blogs: Shorpy. It’s quite different from the text-based blogs I usually follow. This is a photo blog, that draws on national archival photos for high-resolution images dating back a hundred years and sometimes more. It’s especially strong on photos from documentary photographers like Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine. Civil War-era photos also get included with regularity.

The most touching entries are the many photos of working children. These little factory workers, oyster shuckers and tobacco pickers show faces and bodies marked by hard work, but also by a kind of pride. They have a self-possession and self-reliance you won’t see in our era, but many also look old before their time. See this photo of an oyster shucker in 1917.
What fascinates me most are the unsentimental shots taken of mundane, everyday scenes. Places like street corners and fairgrounds, community gatherings and schools. The clothes, the architecture, the advertising signs! I can look for hours.

I had a fabulous weekend. Well, half fabulous. Sunday I worked an eight hour day, but Saturday! Saturday I got out into the garden for the first time. The photo beside this post is me, out raking leaves off the bulbs. My tulips and daffodils were starting to smother under their winter blanket, and I have definitely been smothering after a cooped up winter. I spent a happy day cleaning things up and finding out how my plants have come through the winter. Mostly it seems they’ve done very well, after a mild winter.

My spring nesting impulses come out in gardening. Other creatures are also feeling the bug. I had been out working for about an hour and had left my garden shed open as I went in and out to get various tools. At one point I stepped into the shed and was startled by something flying around my head. I backed out quickly and then peered into the gloom of the small shed. Two pairs of black beady eyes peered back at me– a pair of Carolina wrens. They were perched on the edge of a basket hanging from a nail on the eaves. I think they had just discovered the nesting spot of their dreams in that basket. Can’t you imagine? “Look honey! It’s high and dry, out of the weather and up away from cats. Let’s move in right away!” I felt terrible to dash their hopes but I had to shoo them out, poor dears. They didn’t shoo easily. They thought they’d hit the jackpot.

My mother thinks if I really loved the birds I’d hang the basket outside for them, but I use that basket myself so they’ll just have to make do with one of the shrubs this year. Sorry.

Every place has its spring rituals. A few days ago I read about the spring ice lottery in Nenana, Alaska. Since 1917, each year this town has held a lottery to bet on exactly when the Tanana River will “go out”, or melt. In early March, townspeople erect a tall tripod of painted spruce logs, attached with a guywire to the shore. When the ice melts enough to topple the tripod and snap the wire, that’s the official time. I read about it in connection with a study of climate warming, since this precise timing of the ice melt has given climatologists an almost 100-year record of conditions at this far northern town. When I went to the town’s official site, I was charmed by all the photos documenting the event. Putting up the tripod is a big festival in Nenana, marked with snowmachine and dogsled races, dances and big parties. Last year the winning time was 3:47PM on April 27, and 22 winners split $303,273. Big money is this small town I’m sure. I love that they’ve developed their own holiday tradition here. Maybe the world isn’t yet completely uniform and predictable, with a single global culture created by Madison Avenue. I hope not.

Here in Washington, this week has been full of signs of spring. This daffodil was the first to bloom in my garden. I thought for a moment about leaving it, but decided I’d enjoy it so much more if I brought it inside. The weather has been alternating between days warm enough for a top-down convertible and days so cold and raw all I want to do is stay inside under a blanket and a cat. The birds are beginning to sing more each day, and as I stepped out several mornings this week I saw large flocks of geese heading north. I wondered what it must look like to them, flying over a metropolis like Washington.

You may notice that Mulberry Jam is looking different today. As in the last big change I made to the blog’s appearance, this one was more or less forced on me at short notice. While working on website administration over the weekend, I noticed that Google was flagging my blog as potentially dangerous. I have no idea why, and my first reaction was, “But I write about birds and gardens and yoga?  How could that be dangerous?”  Because of the possibility that there could be some problem with a script in my blog’s theme, I’ve changed the theme that governs the appearance of the site, just as a precaution.  Fortunately the blog software I use, WordPress, uses CSS so changing the look of the blog is relatively simple. The new theme is called Fauna, one of the best free themes I’ve seen.

All the old content is still here. In fact, the new theme offers an improved archive page, which I encourage you to check out. I’m still learning my way around the new design, so you may notice tweaks here and there in the coming days. Or if I find something better, there might even be another wholesale change to the site.  Though I sincerely hope not– I have other things to do, believe it or not!  (Like actually writing a few more posts!)

Since this change was made on the fly, I haven’t had time to test it with all browsers. If you see anything really odd, please don’t assume I wanted it to look that way! Coincidentally, I’ve redesigned my professional website at slschramm.com.  That re-design was neither quick nor simple, and I’m very glad it’s finally launched.  I’d love to know what you think about both new designs.  Please drop me a line via e-mail to let me know what you think.  All opinions welcomed, positive or negative.

I have a new toy tool this week, a sheet feeding scanner from Fujitsu. I hope to use it to get rid of some of the paper I’ve amassed over the years. And there is a lot of it. My husband and I are both writers, plus we’ve had our own business for years and have all the IRS-required paperwork to prove it. I have nearly a dozen banker’s boxes of papers I don’t expect to ever need but am afraid to throw away. If I can scan them into digital files and keep them on one of my extra hard disk drives, then I can save a ton of space.

But I admit to some nervousness, too. At least with paper you don’t have any software format problems. Plus you know paper will last. Who’s to say what the long-term durability of DVDs and hard disk drives will be over the decades?

And I’ve experienced the problems outdated formats can cause. Remember zip disks? For a few years in the 90s that was my backup solution. Zip disks were great for a while, but pretty soon they were just a problem. My external zip drive output to a parallel cable, but after 2001, my iMacs all came without a parallel port. For years I hung onto an old Dell laptop, vintage 1996, so I could read the files. However I still had no way to get the info off the zip disks onto anything else since that machine only had a floppy disk drive (remember floppies?). Like most backups, nine tenths of the stuff was useless junk, but the other one tenth included the only copy of my book manuscript. So I hung onto the vintage Dell, afraid to get rid of it, even though it could only run Windows 98 (and just barely creaking along at that). A friend finally came to my rescue last month with a laptop that had both parallel port and a USB drive that I could plug my thumb drive into. Now the old documents are on a DVD, which I sincerely hope will have a longer shelf life than the zip disks.

Despite my trepidation at the prospect of shredding most of my old paper and shifting to digital, I feel like I have to take that step. I live in a small house, and twelve boxes of boring records are taking up space I could use for better purposes. So I’ll take my chances and hope for the best. Have any of you faced these format problems? How did you solve the issue?

Our February weather roller coaster continues. Monday it reached 70 degrees, today it is snowing lightly. No doubt about it, today feels like winter. But the signs of spring are out there. My snowdrops are blooming, and tulip and daffodil foliage is starting to peek up. Robin flocks have already been passing through, though I don’t believe they’re the most reliable harbinger, since some of them overwinter here. More exciting is the fact that yesterday I heard a cardinal singing, a sure sign he’s beginning to think about staking out nesting territory.

The photo is a closeup of one clump of snowdrops that I naturalized years ago among the roots of the mulberry tree. Now they come up faithfully every spring, usually in early to mid-February, and I don’t have to do anything. Bulbs are so great for the lazy gardener!

An unexpected dose of winter weather hit us last night.  The result was beautiful, but dangerous.  This was one of the few times I can remember when the weather forecast was not more dramatic than the actual weather itself– the TV and radio weather people really missed a chance to get everyone all alarmed this time.

By the way, technical difficulties from earlier today have hopefully been resolved by now.  A little upgrade attempt that didn’t go quite as planned.  Thank heavens for webmeister Seth and his amazing multi-tasking skills!  Bless you Seth.