Origami · 41 days ago by Julie
I found this site after watching a ted talk on origami.
Muskrat · 43 days ago by Julie
Do you have a pond with muskrats?
Listen to Chet Atkins and Merle Travis in Muskrat Ramble.
Same tune by Louis Armstrong.
Muskrat Ramble Dixieland style by Kid Ory.
A bloody poem by William Stafford.
Redneck Park on muskrat trapping.
Once you have your muskrat, you’ll want recipes.
Wrong, and Proud of It · 53 days ago by Julie
If you read this article, you will find that people who are wrong can’t be convinced otherwise by text. They sometimes can be convinced if an authority figure talks directly to them.
Luckily, this doesn’t apply to me. I’m pretty much right all the time anyway.
The Bunny Story · 82 days ago by Julie
Bob sat in our living room, feeling expansive. “Yeahp,” he said, “Did I ever tell you about the time I went to visit my friend Jim back East?”
“No, I don’t think you did,” I said, cautiously.
“Well, he’d just moved out to the country like he always said he would. Had him a trim little house, a plot of land with a bunch a trees on it, and got himself a dog. Wasn’t a big dog, but a dog. You know the kind I mean.”
I nodded. Java looked nervous.
“So, he went around shaking hands with everyone in his neighborhood, thought he’d get started out on the right foot, but there was one neighbor who just didn’t warm up to him. His neighbor on the right. Same situation as him, newly moved out to the country, but instead of getting a dog, those guys had a pet rabbit. Hated Jim. He couldn’t figure out why, they just didn’t like him.
“So, one day, he’s sitting on his porch, enjoying his new situation, when his dog comes trotting up the front walk with a rabbit in his mouth. “Oh, no!” thinks my friend Jim, and sure enough, it was the neighbor’s pet rabbit.”
“Was it dead?” I asked, looking sternly at Java, who has been known to misbehave in the matter of rabbits.
“Stone cold dead. Jim is appalled. What’s he going to do? Here he wants to be friends with his neighbor, eventually, and now his dog has killed their pet bunny. So, and mind you, this is while I was standing there, he rushes the bunny into the house, and runs warm water over him to get the dog spit and dirt off of him. That wasn’t enough, so he got out the shampoo and conditioner, and got every last bit of dirt off this poor dead bunny, and finally he blow dries it with his personal blow dryer. Then he sneaks out the back door, and scuttles through the bushes so his neighbor can’t see him, and sneaks the bunny back into its hutch and closes the door on it. Now it’s laying there, dead but nobody would suspect the dog, right?”
Java looks guilty.
“So then, we’re sitting there with our mimosas, and all of a sudden the neighbor lady bursts out of her house holding the bunny, and screaming “He’s back, Bunny’s back!” She didn’t stop screaming for awhile, but eventually we got her calmed down, and she told us that Bunny died three days ago, and she buried him in her back yard, but now here he was again, just as she’d found him on the day he died.”
Small Feet · 115 days ago by Julie
Wealthy Doucette, who lived here in the last century, would approach people and say, “My God, you have large feet!” They were supposed to say, “And yours are deliciously small.” She’d made her living with her feet as a dancer in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. Her dancing shoes, says Elaine, are buried in a pit just outside Elaine’s front door.
Grafting the Apple Trees · 124 days ago by Julie
Our small apple orchard was planted with semi-dwarf trees I rescued from Bob’s bulldozer. He’d been experimenting with new varieties, but decided he could make more money selling tulips. I wheelbarrowed the trees to our place, and David and I spent many puzzling hours trying to figure out why stretching a string, marking spots, and planting trees makes such a wavy line.
Over the years, all the trees got anthracnose, a fungus which splits the bark. Some trees are less hardy than others, and a few died. We pastured the sheep under them to keep the grass down and to fertilize the soil. One year, we had a ram who girdled several of the trees before we noticed.
Then, about five years in to the venture, all the remaining trees were suddenly leafy and full of apples. The boys ate the apples off the trees as soon as they ripened, sometimes before.
After the boys moved away, the trees reached full size and productivity. A couple of the trees have apples so delicious that I’ve come to think of the ones from grocery stores as some other kind of fruit, not bad in their way, but not really apples. And some of the trees, the most prolific, have apples so mealy and tasteless that not even the sheep are interested. Our boys must have been really hungry.
A different Bob offered to teach us how to graft good apples onto the bad stock. He cut some scions of Gold Rush and Karmijn for us when his trees were still dormant. Then he left for a few weeks, and as soon as he returned we left, and by the time we were ready to graft it was too late.
“Will you show us anyway?” I asked. Then I saw his expression and amended, “Not because we expect it to work, but so next year we won’t have to co-ordinate both our schedules? Please?”
Bob gave me one of those inscrutable looks, like a kindly grandfather who is tempted to give a scolding but realizes that it would be better to give an object lesson instead. “Julie. It is too late to graft now,” he said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yep,” I said, pretending not to see his face at all.
“Well then,” he said, and collected his knife, tape, and wax in a marked manner. He showed us how to throw out 95% of the scions because they’re too shriveled, and how to cluck sadly over the remaining ones because they’re not really in good shape either. He showed us how to cut the scion butts into a wedge shape, and slice the bark of the mother plant to receive the scions. Then you wrap it firmly and put wax on anything that will dehydrate.
A few weeks later, I met him at the May Day celebrations. “Bob,” I said.
“Yesssss, Julie?” he asked cautiously.
“You know those grafts? They all took! Their buds are plumping up and some of them have full leaves.”
Bob sighed and compressed his lips. “Julie. I hope you understand something.”
“Yes?”
He sighed again. “You did not deserve this. You did not do your grafting at the right time. By all rights, they should have failed. As long as you understand that.”
Bees · 132 days ago by Julie
Young Charles decided that I need to keep bees. “A top bar hive shouldn’t take more than about three hours to make,” he advised me.
As is my habit, I believed him. The above photo represents the first five hours of that three hour session. But, a fun five hours.
Music · 133 days ago by Julie
Amazing Grace
Or, you can play a carrot.
Volcano · 139 days ago by Julie
She flew to France, but then her husband in Norway died. There is no air traffic because of the volcano. Maybe the train? No, there’s a strike.
Gender · 146 days ago by Julie
I showed up at the K-8 school to teach creative writing, a malleable class with a changing number of students. “Why don’t you send me the students who are independent writers,” I said. “Don’t worry if they can actually write, I just want them to be okay with pencil and paper.” My class consisted of all the girls and none of the boys.
Later in the day, the science teacher and I, as art teacher, asked the kids to choose between our classes for the afternoon. He would set off an explosion in the sandbox and I would give kid the supplies needed to illustrate one of their stories. All the girls came with me, all the boys went with him.