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Tuesday, May 20, 2008

bean sprouting

The Nikon (remember The Nikon? That was before THE NIKON) took this video for me this afternoon. It's rough and kind of choppy, but I still think it's neat to look at. (I'm going to try again tomorrow.)

Weekly garden update

itty bitty corn seedlings.

Peas.

Aliens. I mean beans.

Spinach, and C's ceramic frog.

There are more photos (including several more seedling shots! so exciting!) in the Garden 2008 Flickr set.

Saturday, May 17, 2008

I knew it would tick me off...

...but I didn't know it would tick me off this much.

We were casting around for something to do for me for a belated Mother's Day, and I hit upon the idea of going to dinner and to watch Prince Caspian, even though I had guessed from the trailer that it would not be an entirely relaxing experience for me. Little did I know.

As usual (this is a common theme in my reviews of film adaptations of beloved novels), if there had never been a C.S. Lewis, and he had never written a charming and inspiring series of novels about a group of four ordinary British children who staunchly face down frightening odds with the help of a God-figure, then this would have been a fine movie. The effects are quite good, acting is fine, casting is great, costumes are lovely, etc. etc. etc. But there was a C.S. Lewis, and if people actually turned over in their graves, the poor man would be rotating at an alarming rate right now. A lot of people don't mind changes in the story as long as the idea is the same, but I would be surprised if even those people can appreciate this adaptation, since what the writers did was skin and gut the story completely and then fill out the bare remnants of its distorted skeleton with something that was barely even remotely related to what had been there before. I've had people defend way-out adaptations to me by saying that the original book is still intact and I can always go back and read it again if I want. This is true, but it doesn't excuse this kind of flagrant rip-off for me, for two reasons: First, it's an insult to the author. The screenwriters and directors in effect said to Lewis, "Hey, old chap, you wrote a jolly good story but it just won't sell in today's market, so we're going to tweak it a bit, you know? Make it more like those Lord of the Whatayacallit movies that made so much bank a few years back." Second, there are going to be thousands and thousands of kids who see the movies first, and instead of being drawn to the books by them, they're going to find that the books are much less action-adventurish and also there's this whole religion angle, and those same kids who might have given the books a chance and learned to love them probably won't get past the second chapter because of the expectations they had going in.

I don't even know where to begin. Well, I may as well start with a disclaimer: I am about to spoil the living daylights out of this movie. If that bothers you, stop after this paragraph and come back after you've seen the movie. I mean, if you've read the book, you might think that there aren't any large-scale details I could give away that you wouldn't already know... but you would be very wrong. Yes, people, it was that bad. I'm going to leave out little unimportant stuff like the fact that they emerge in Narnia on the beach instead of in a thicket (actually, there is no thicket on the island) and the fact that they rushed the first few chapters of the book so terribly that they completely neglected to have the children come up with an explanation for why the Narnia they had known a year ago had aged by a thousand years.

The London scenes at the beginning are bizarre. Peter... getting in fistfights? Because... he used to be a king and people should... respect him more? Or... kings don't walk away from fights? Or something.

Also, as everyone noticed in the trailer, Caspian looked to be about five or ten years too old (IMO, Peter and Susan were too old as well), and as Paula pointed out (she said it -- I didn't), Caspian is "not supposed to be that hot". Except he had to be for this film, so that he could be a love interest for Susan. Yes, you read that right. THERE IS A KISS. (My son covered his eyes.)

Caspian blows the horn before the badger and the dwarves take him into their house. Also, Trumpkin doesn't go off looking for the kings and queens; he gets himself captured by Miraz's army as they chase after Caspian who has barely escaped (by a matter of seconds) the henchmen who were coming to kill him in his bed, in a very LOTR-ish killing-a-person-in-bed-who-turns-out-not-to-be-there moment.

The Narnians storm Miraz' castle in a very long (LOTR-ish) battle segment. Because Peter says they need to strike out on their own, because they've waited too long for Aslan.

Peter and Caspian draw swords on each other at least twice and spend a lot of time sniping at each other. It's those rampant teenage hormones, see.

During the consultation around the Stone Table with the Hag and the Werewolf -- where Edmund, Peter, and Susan are present -- the White Witch appears as the result of an incantation, encased in ice, and very hokily demands a drop of Adam's blood to bring her back to life.

The bit where Lucy walks away from the sleeping group at dawn and meets up with Aslan and sees the tree people move? It's beautifully done. I actually was thinking that it was going to be the one part that really clung to the original, until it turned out to be a dream. In fact, nobody actually sees Aslan until Peter is in the middle of the fight with Miraz, and that's because Lucy and Susan take off into the woods alone on Caspian's horse to look for him, only Susan stops to fight off attackers (she really likes to hit people with her bow; it must be a very strong one, and she's got a heck of an arm) and has to get rescued (flutter eyelashes) by Caspian while Lucy goes on alone. Aslan and Lucy finally show up together just before the water god wakes up and destroys the (newly-built for the battle) bridge with Miraz's army on it, after another LOTR-ish battle scene complete with giant trebuchets.

Good moments: Um. The sword battle with Miraz, and what leads up to it, are pretty good, except that they're filmed in that modernish jerky kind of way, which seems out of place in among all the lush (LOTR-ish) cinematography. The attack of the tree people was interestingly done. Reepicheep was well-animated, although he was more smartass than valiant warrior and I found his voice to be too deep. And oh, yes: Regina Spektor sings the first song in the closing credits. Still, overall, that is $35.50 and two hours of my life that I'll never get back. At least we didn't buy any popcorn. Now please excuse me while I stay up all night curled up with the book, to get the taste of that film out of my mouth.

Friday, May 16, 2008

It's a good thing I'm determined to like summer from now on.

Otherwise I might make a list of reasons to loathe this time of year. Like, say, this list. (I just can't stop myself.)

• Grasshoppers. Stupid nasty ugly chirpy GARDEN-HUNGRY grasshoppers. After all the precautions I have taken against deer and pocket gophers, if all the hard work I've put into that garden is laid waste by a Little-House-like plague of clicking insects I may have to go mad. (Although watching Scout chase them is amusing.)

• My car does not yet have functioning air conditioning, although T is working on that.

• Stickers. For a country girl, I am terribly wimpy about stickers in my socks. Always have been. I will never forget the humiliation I felt on the summertime hike I went on at the age of eleven or so, with my mom and my city-bred Bay Area cousin, when I was the one pitching a fit because my socks and shoelaces were a mass of stickers. And yet I just couldn't stop. Now I get to weed-eat them, which flings them all over my clothing at high speed, which I dislike intensely.

• The annual onslaught of the phrase "Dads and Grads" (it hurts me even to type it) has begun, and just like it has every year since I learned how to read, it makes my stomach heave a little bit every time I see it. I am not sure why.

• THIS.
  
  HELLO. It is not even Memorial Day yet. (Fortunately, it's supposed to be back in the 80's next week.)
  

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Hey, remember the garden?

The seedlings survived, the ground's been dug, the beds are made (by me) and lined with aviary wire (which is very poky when you cut it) and filled (by me and LT, and what a job THAT was), the hills are mulched, the seedlings are transplanted, and the seeds are planted in neat little rows.

In other words, the garden is in the ground, and nothing has died yet. Including me! Also, I have a bona fide farmer's tan and my arms are a bit more buff than they were before, thanks to two weeks of hard labor with a shovel. (My hands would never pass Rhett Butler's muster, though.)

Pictures!

Two weeks ago (not even quite that): T and LT pounding in fence poles. We didn't have a post driver handy, so T went up the ladder with a sledgehammer while LT held the pole straight, wearing my dad's old football helmet just in case.

Tomato seedlings, still in their flats a week ago.

This was a week ago too.

And this is today! Going clockwise from right in front of you, there's the corn patch, two rows of beans that you can't see very well (they need a trellis), two beds of Siletz tomatoes, a bed of spinach and broccoli with peas and gherkins on a trellis, a bed of bell peppers, one with pepperoncini and a watermelon mound (kids said we didn't have enough watermelon), one of carrots, one of cherry tomatoes, and one of cucumbers and *another* watermelon. Then there are 18 hills further back and to the right of the photo, planted with several varieties of melons and squash (guess who's going to learn to hand-pollinate this summer?), mulched with pine straw. (I always called them "pine needles" until I started gardening, but now that it's mulch it's "pine straw". Don't ask me why.)

The kids and I, in all our dirty glory, having just put the last seeds in the ground. Well, I cannot lie, I went in and washed my hands before handling THE NIKON.

Detail of my silly floppy monkey hat, which has been a yard-and-beach staple in my wardrobe for a couple of years now.

Spinach seedlings. Aren't they all cute and vulnerable-looking? Poor guys. They have no idea what they're in for.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

I need an intervention.

I am determined not to live 12 years in this house with blank walls like we did in our last house. For a long time, I've planned to use a chunk (but not a HUGE chunk) of this economic stimulus tax rebate thing that we've just received to buy prints for our walls. Some will be of my own photos (OK, most, because hello, cheaper). We have a Jack Vettriano print that we absolutely adore but I'm thinking it might reside long-term in our bedroom which is not the main focus of my effort right now.

Anyway. I NEED YOUR HELP. That's what I came here to say today. Hi, my name is Rachel and I am clueless about decorating. Mainly, I need your help with two specific problems.

First, remember this view?

It still looks like that. (Chain/cord ensemble and all, although I am begging on bended knee for my husband and his electrician friends to please please direct-wire things to light switches sometime this millennium. Or maybe for Mother's Day even. But I'm not holding my breath; they're all very busy. Moving on.) There's that big blank yellow wall that's just aching to have... something on it. It's the first wall you see when you walk in the front door, so a big nice statement might be appropriate, and yet we all sit there and stare at that spot while we eat, so we don't want something on too grand a scale. The thermostat interferes with the possibility of some kind of nice wide print of something, don't you think? Or maybe something panoramic could go above the thermostat and there could be a row of smaller somethings beneath? The other thing I've thought of for that space is a wall with a lot of different prints in various sizes (family pictures maybe?), but that seems to have the potential to look really badly cluttered. DO YOU SEE HOW CLUELESS I AM? PLEASE HELP.

You know what I think would be fun for that spot, would be a good-sized print of a work with overall eye appeal as well as a lot of interesting little details. Not quite a giant Where's Waldo, but maybe something like The Fall of Icarus, only less depressing. Any ideas?

OK, so that's the first problem. For most of the other areas of the house, I have some idea what I want to do -- what size prints I want, how many, etc. The thing is that I don't know which ones to use. Obviously there will be some family photos involved, from different eras. And I'm planning to use square prints of a few of my animal shots (maybe this one, definitely this one, but not this one, obviously) in the guest/children's bathroom. Mainly I'm wondering (finally she gets to the point) if you could maybe meander through my old photo blogs and my flickr photostream and point out any shots that you think might be good for just general-purpose art on walls, in varying sizes. This is not an ego-stroking exercise -- I'm certainly not expecting any screaming-fangirl THIS ONE THIS ONE OMG IT'S THE BEST PICTURE I EVER SAW kind of comments. But with my own stuff, it's hard for me to look through it and know what other people might find appealing, or even blandly inoffensive in an "oh, has that picture been there all along?" kind of way.

Also, if you know of any art prints that might be nice, send along ideas if you want. I'll be looking at places like Michaels and Target and Costco this weekend, and then there are online sources too.

Comments are (as always) open, and I think linking works, but maybe I'd better check. Thanks in advance for any help. :)

Sunday, May 04, 2008

pinching them hard

I have been sort of plotting a post about the way costs are rising and how that's impacting our lives, and I sort of touched on it in my last post and figured that was all I would do, but then the lovely (and I do mean lovely) and talented (and I also do mean talented) Beck posted about it and pretty much dared everyone else to do it too, so now I have to, right? Of course right.

So. We already knew we were going to have to tighten things up this year because of the new mortgage, and when gas prices didn't go down but instead kept going up, that became a problem too. We can't afford more than $350 per month for gas without going into a Deficit Spending Situation, and since we aren't the federal government we prefer not to do that, so that means that as gas gets more expensive, we have to drive less. A LOT LESS. I haven't been to the valley in so long I've forgotten what it smells like down there. (If you knew what the valley smelled like, you'd know that this means that every stupid and ugly *$&#*$-$4/gallon dark cloud has a silverish lining. They farm, we eat, I know, and I'm not really complaining, but in valley towns you find yourself checking your shoes for dog poop every time you get out of the car.)

O-K, moving on. So as it turned out, along with the mortgage thing and the gas price thing came the food price thing. The $6 for 18 eggs that cost $2 last month thing. The $4/gallon milk thing. The SEVEN FREAKING DOLLARS FOR 48 OUNCES OF VEGETABLE OIL THING. (bye-bye, once-a-month deep-fried buffalo chicken strips night.) So, with costs for very necessary things at such levels, we had three options: We could accept a few credit card offers and spend a year running them to their limits on groceries, or we could let the bank take our house back and go live with family, or we could economize. Guess which one we chose? Now, we already thought we were economizing, but people, we did not know what economizing WAS.

You might not know this (HAW! I so funny! That's a joke!), but I've always been kind of an imaginative person. The drama queen in me just thrives on a challenge like this. I am no longer Rachel, boring rural mom. I am Rachel, victim of the new depression who WILL NOT GO QUIETLY. So. I don't remember exactly where I first heard the phrase -- probably in a book -- but the economic rallying cry from WWII has become our household mantra:

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

I know, oh so original, right? I swear I am going to stitch it onto a sampler. Maybe even one for every room of the house. Just saying it makes me feel serene and wise and determined and maybe, I dunno, Scottish or something. (There is not actually a single drop of Scottish blood in my veins.) Thriftiness becomes less of a burden and more of a challenge, and when we do it successfully we feel immense satisfaction. Some of the ways we implement our new family motto (so far I haven't made anyone recite it with three fingers in the air or anything, but give me time):

If there are leftovers in the fridge, nobody eats anything but leftovers for lunch, or sometimes, if there are enough leftovers, dinner, until the leftovers are used up. I used to throw away so. many. leftovers. Every time I cleaned out the fridge (which, OK, was not as often as it ought to have been), whoosh, dozens of dollars worth of food (in 2006 food dollars) would go in the compost. Everything from the pizza that everybody loved but then forgot about to the jar of applesauce that sat in the back almost full to the oatmeal that somebody (and I don't cook oatmeal) made too much of -- it was frustrating even before Money Crunch 2008, but it's unconscionable now. People, I ate leftover Cream of Wheat for breakfast on Wednesday. Such is my newfound commitment to thriftiness. And this new policy really has saved us money. It helps if I keep a mental inventory of what we have open and perishable right now -- bread is a biggie. I'm so bad about making sure bread gets used before it goes bad. It just sits there in the breadbox turning blue, all quiet and resigned and wasteful-like, while we gallivant around eating macaroni and cheese or Spanish rice.

Also, I restrict my allowed grocery shopping trip frequency. I mean *really* strictly. Not just because of the cost of gas to get to town, but because, of course, every time I go into the store I risk coming out having spent more than I intended to (although in the New Economy I'm better about that, no doubt about it). The simple fact of denying myself the opportunity to go to the store to get stuff for supper has made me come up with some really tasty meals from things we have on hand. I used to shop like a European when we lived in town -- daily trips to the market, musing over what I'd make for supper that night. Since we moved out of town, our grocery bill has been cut by at least 30%. Next challenge: coupons. I've never been much of a coupon clipper but I am by-golly going to start. I pity the fool who gets into the grocery line behind me once I have it all figured out.

In a related vein, we have all had to learn to like (or at least tolerate) foods we might not otherwise have chosen to eat, because they're nutritious and they were cheap. (I'm honestly glad that I've taken this nutrition class lately, because if I hadn't I might have been inclined to neglect nutrition as I've been scrimping for groceries; not being able to allow myself to do that has made me find out that it really isn't THAT much more expensive to eat with at least some kind of attention paid to nutritional values of foods. In other words, we're not on an All-Ramen-All-The-Time diet.) Fortunately for us, we're all relatively free of food intolerances. T is the only one with any restrictions; he can't eat eggs, bananas, carrots, or sugar. I can only imagine how much more difficult this would be if one of us were gluten intolerant or something.

If we need to build something around the house, if it's at all possible, we use things that we already own. This sounds simple, but it's alarming how many times my knee-jerk reaction has been to take a trip to the hardware store, and yet when I've stopped myself and looked around, I've been able to make do with supplies on hand. The raised beds for the garden, made from the repurposed rickety back deck, are one example of this.

In fact, the garden is a pretty good example all around, although we did have to buy some PVC pipe to run water to it, some concrete for the fence posts, and a roll of chickenwire to use under the raised beds to keep the #$%&* gophers out.

• The fencing we got from a couple of different places. There was an old fenced enclosure -- 6-ft high 4" hogwire -- beyond my carport when we bought this house. Initially we were going to use the area for a garden, until we looked in it and found that it really wouldn't do (many big rocks and also large tree roots). Then it was going to be a goat pen, but goats are not a this-year project; the dog is more than enough in the new-animal department at this point, and before we get into goats we hope to get our chickens going. Anyway, the boards that held the fence up were rotten and falling over, especially when it snowed, which, you may recall, it did a LOT when we first moved here. So we had LT take the fence down and roll up the wire fencing, which turned out to be just right for our garden. My parents had just built a kennel for their dog, and we asked them if we could buy their leftover fence (also just the right height), and they just gave it to us, along with some metal pipe for posts (Dad collects metal pipe for use in welding projects). That, combined with an old gate from the ranch and a WHOLE lot of work on the part of T and LT, made our deer-resistant fence.
  
• Instead of buying dirt (oh how I wished we could buy dirt), we -- well, I -- have been investing the "sweat equity" required to fill the raised beds with actual dirt from the actual ground, which I think I have mentioned previously.
  
• We are using heirloom variety seeds so that hopefully we can save them for use next year.
  
• We are planting enough of the things we use a lot (tomatoes, corn, beans, winter squash) that if all goes well we -- oops, I again -- can preserve some to last us during the winter.
  
• We are about to get our heinies in gear and start really and truly composting our compost in an actual compost bin so that we can use it in the garden, instead of just piling it in a heap behind the carport, where it makes a lovely snack bar for the local wildlife while we buy fertilizer.
  

Some of the other economizing we do is pretty basic, and is essentially an extension of the kind of thing we've always done because we've never been precisely flush with funds, living in California on one income and being rather undisciplined and stuff. For example:

We use propane instead of electricity wherever we can, and we use as little of it as possible. We use wood for heat and a swamp cooler (which only works because "it's a dry heat" -- lucky us) for cooling instead of an air conditioner. Our house came with a solar water heater on the roof, which annoyed us at first (the roof leaks where it's bolted on), but since it's been warmer and we decided to go ahead and hook the thing up, we've noticed a serious difference in the number of times we hear the propane water heater switching on. I use a clothesline to dry our clothes. They can sometimes come in linty, so we have a lint brush, and the towels are scratchy but they actually work much better that way, and you can't beat the fresh feeling of line-dried bedsheets.

Food-wise, when there is an amazing sale on something we use a lot (Vons has $.99/pound bone-in beef steaks this week. When is the last time I saw beef for a dollar a pound?) we buy as much as we can reasonably afford at the time and freeze it. This is pretty much a no-brainer. We are on the lookout for an inexpensive but relatively new (=relatively energy-efficient) chest freezer to make this even more profitable. This means that there has been a shift in the way I plan meals; it is more reasonable under a system like this to build your meal plans around the food deals you find, rather than making a chart for a month's worth of meals and shopping accordingly. Now I plan maybe a week or ten days in advance, based on what I have a lot of in the freezer and pantry.

A Costco membership really is worth it. I kept track one year and the savings in chicken alone pretty much paid for the membership. Also, there's a store in Fresno that we LOVE with a whole area full of bulk bins and the stuff is CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP (no membership required). Bonus: It's far cleaner and less depressing than Food 4 Less, where, just as an example, Jenn and I once saw a mouse running across an aisle. Fresno is $50 away (I don't think in terms of miles anymore but in terms of dollars worth of gas; town is $4 away in the car but $8 in the truck, etc; we may not go to Morro Bay this year, much as we love it, because it is over $150 away) but sometimes we HAVE to be in Fresno, and while we're there we always stop off at that store and stock up on stuff. Do you buy those yummy steel-cut oats in a can? Don't. Buy it in bulk; it tastes exactly the same and you can get something on the order of five pounds for the cost of a little 12-ounce can. And five pounds of steel-cut oats lasts even my hot-cereal-loving husband quite a long time. The bulk bin area at Winco is bursting with many such amazing discoveries.

Treats are now genuine bona fide treats instead of daily occurrences. Ice cream, candy, Diet Cherry Coke... all the little things that we used to think of as staples (I wonder why we all struggle with our weight?) Oh well. We appreciate them more when we do have them, right? We have had to give up buying Diet Coke, but we participate in MyCokeRewards.com, and people give us their codes, so we get the occasional pleasure of a free 12-pack.

Store brands, duh. We are lucky in that our local grocery "chain" (it's an independent chain, not sure exactly what the difference is except that nobody has ever heard of IGA, whereas everyone knows about Safeway) has a generic brand that is really quite good on most things. (But never, ever buy anything called Nutty Nuggets.) Even if it wasn't good, though, we'd still be buying it these days. You get used to minor differences.

There are a few little luxuries that we haven't made ourselves give up yet. Our domain names, which cost $15 a month plus $15 a year, seem like an obvious choice when it comes to something we can stop paying for, and I'd be willing, but T... isn't. I've discussed this before. I'd be just as happy at blogger with my $25 a year Flickr pro account. DSL has gone from luxury to near-necessity in the past few years -- so much of how we stay connected with the world and our friends and even (most importantly) my college classes depends on having a solid Internet connection. Also, my cell phone: every time I think about getting rid of it, I almost can, but not quite. It's really so very useful, although it's less so now that we are traveling so little (see above re: $4/gallon). Still, it's worth the cost to me just to know that I have it in case I ever truly need it, like say if I ever break down in that looooong no-man's land on the way home from grocery shopping in the valley when it's 110 degrees out. If things get much tighter, though, these are some things that will come under intense scrutiny.

Oh, my goodness, this got very long. I'm tempted to split it into two entries but I'm not cool enough to need to do that. Maybe I'll post a garden update tomorrow; we've been veryvery busy with it and it's actually starting to get exciting. There are actual seeds in the actual soil! Yippee!