It's all about me and what I've been doing, right? I've haven't blogged much lately, but I have been busy. I'm trying to plan for the upcoming trip to the UK, but I'm afraid I've done more research on luggage than on the sights of London. My new Travelpro Crew5 Rollaboard has just come in at Harlow's (the owner's very nice and helpful, and they now have discount coupons on the WRSI website) in Noho and I'll be picking it up tomorrow. It's the first wheelie bag I've ever owned. I usually use really cheap nylon travel bags for air travel or my ivory marble vintage Samsonite luggage from the 1950s for car travel -- it's very stylish and mod, and has great features like places to hang actual hangers; I feel like Gidget when I travel with it. I'm a sucker for features, and my Rollaboard is chock full. I'll try to post some pictures of it, empty and packed. Mine's ivy -- I wish it came in orange, but no luck. Orange would have looked so nice with my new pale lime green microfiber hooded raincoat with zip out lining.
As my travel anxiety creeps steadily upward, I'm focusing more of my energy on the actual trip planning. I'm now deep into Eccentric London and am just beginning to read about the walking tours in the book. Yesterday I discovered via Flickr (yeah, Flickr! I use it for research almost as much as Google) that there is a self-guided walking tour, endorsed by Michael Palin (step aside, Rick Steves -- Michael Palin is the travel god), of Belsize Park. So now I have my first activity on my first day planned.
Oh, yes. You've all been waiting for my report on the North Quabbin Garlic & Arts Festival. Let's just say that I haven't seen so much tie dye or dreadlocks on white people since the last time I was on the Hampshire campus. It looked like Spring Jam, except the bouncy castle and the cloud of pot smoke were missing. All the new age-y, crunchy granola folks of Franklin County had rolled down from the hills to taste the garlic treats (the pesto was really good, but I thought the pickles made without vinegar were suspicious), engage in non-competitive games, march in the Garlic City parade with the mayor (photo above), or try out some expensive hula hoops. I didn't engage or march or hula, but it was a good opportunity to replenish my garlic arsenal since I had depleted it in the war with the red army (see Tomatoes! below).
Between all the tomato freezing, trip planning, and garlic festing, I've managed to do some photo shooting as well. See Flickr for the latest.
I feel like I need to be treading very lightly these days -- leaving a soft footprint on the earth and all that ecologically-minded stuff, and, more importantly, avoiding any more accidents or breakages that end up costing me money or causing pain and suffering. Here's how things stand this week:
Replaced: 21-year-old garbage disposal
Recovering: Sadie (from her urinary tract infection)
Bruised: The instep and ankle of my left foot (tripped on tomato support at the Food Bank Farm -- don't ask)
Broken: The ancillary speaker of my Proton stereo clock radio
Awaiting repair or replacement: Dripping kitchen faucet
Acting up: Both toilets are occasionally running
At this rate, I could end up with a home equity loan to cover all these plumbing repairs. In the meantime, I'll flush less frequently and try to pick up my feet when I walk.
Staying indoors yesterday to freeze more tomatoes would have been just too boring and a waste of a beautiful autumn day. Blue sky, crisp air and nice light made for good photo ops. ShadowbrookShutterbug and I drove up Rte. 202 from South Hadley, took lots of pix in Granby, and then cut over to Rte. 116 to see the goats, pigs, sheep and chickens at the Hampshire College Farm Center. On the way to Hampshire, I was yammering something about how, given my choice of squirmy creatures to photograph, I preferred critters to kids. Now I'm not so sure about that. At least you can suggest to kids that they hold still or do that [whatever they just did] again. Critters don't pay a bit of attention to anything you say. But you don't have to ask their parents for permission to take their pix, and you can post the pix online without anyone thinking you're a weirdo. My Granby and Amherst pix are up on Flickr, along with a few artsy-fartsy ones that I took in the center of Florence.
With the Labor Day weekend added in, my week of vacation actually totalled up to 10 days off. It was great to have that much time to lounge around, but the overly-responsible compulsive in me feels like I need to account for how I spent my time and to have something to show for it all. It was a mixed bag and the weather wasn't entirely cooperative. When the weather sucked, like when Ernesto blew through, I froze tomatoes and managed to get entirely caught up on donor database stuff for the abortion fund. (Don't tell anyone, but I had gotten three months behind on entering donations and doing address updates.) When it was nice (3 days, I think), I went to the pool, listened to my mp3 player, read parts of two books of secret and eccentric things to see in London in preparation for the upcoming trip, swam some occasional laps and worked on my tan. Also, on the rare afternoons that there was some blue sky and nice light around 5 p.m., I grabbed the camera, jumped into the MINI, and drove around the Happy Valley taking pictures. One exception to the blue sky/nice light thing was a mid-day pre-Ernesto mission to the laundromat in the Florence Mini Mall combined with a walk around the block avec camera while the towels were drying. The product of all of this pointing and shooting is now up on Flickr. Oh, yeah -- I broke the garbage disposal and Sadie got another UTI and has to be on antibiotics. (That's a picture of Sadie above when she was just a wee thing. The day after Labor Day is the anniversary of when I got her in 2002.)
I have an idea for a photo shoot project with a pal or two. This involves parking our butts on a bench somewhere in downtown Noho and taking pictures of the town scene as it passes by. No date has been set yet. Let me know if you want in.
I'm going back to my tried and true method of putting up tomatoes. In my search for a method that both minimized time/effort and maximized product quality, I first tried blanching, peeling, and halving the lovely Romas that I picked at the Food Bank Farm. I put the peeled halves into quart-size plastic freezer boxes, squishing them down as I packed in each layer. This is a pretty good method except that all of that peeling took forever and was a real drag. I'm sure the product, however, will be mighty fine.
The next method I tried was one that came highly recommended by Farmer Michael of the Food Bank Farm. This involved cutting the tomatoes in half length-wise, placing them cut side up in a glass baking dish, putting a blob of crushed garlic and a leaf of basil on top of each one and drizzling the whole red army with olive oil. No peeling!!! The pans (I did two of them) then went into a 220 degree oven for twelve hours, in my case from 8 p.m. to a little before 8 a.m. The final product is a little strange. The pan on the top rack looked good -- the Romas still have some red tomato juiciness to them, although the basil leaves got toasted. The bottom pan, however, looks like a tray of dessicated cockroaches. I transferred all of the flat blobs to a cookie sheet and froze them individually, then packed them into baggies for their return to the freezer. The jury is still out on the taste and consistency. I think the juicier ones will be good to pop into sandwiches, and I'll try putting the cockroaches into soups or stews this winter.
Tomorrow's batch will be done in the old fashioned way. I plan to halve them (still haven't decided if I'll blanch and peel first), put them in a big enamel pot and simmer them for a while. This will make the house reek of tomato-ness, like when my mother was in Major Canning Mode when I was a kid. The sauce will then be cooled and poured into plastic freezer boxes. I'll just keep picking, saucing and freezing until the freezer is full or I run out of containers. There's going to be a lot of minestrone in my future.
I'm a little frustrated with Blogger. They're gradually rolling out a beta of the blog management program (the "dashboard" where you write your posts, configure your template, etc.). Since Blogger is part of Google, they are integrating it with all their other Google products and one username/password will work for all. I use lots of Google products, and I keep my fingers crossed that my measly number of shares of Google stock will soar in price. I really like the way you can one-click from Gmail to your custom Google homepage to Google calendar to Google spreadsheets. And I use Froogle and Picasa all the time. I've drunk the Google kool-aid. So, when I logged into Blogger one day last week and the invitation to migrate to the beta was sitting there, I clicked. So far I like the new dashboard -- publishing is instantaneous now and you don't have to wait while some icon goes round and round telling you that you're 25% published, 67% published, blah blah blah. But something is screwy with the feed for my blog now. My new posts don't show up as new in Bloglines under the old feed. I seem to have a new feed, and I guess that means that my 4 or 5 loyal readers will have to update their blogrolls in order to get notification of new posts. I've changed the "Sub with Bloglines" button on the bottom of the right panel on this page so that it points to the new feed. Or you can use the "Sub with Bloglines" icon you may have on your browser toolbar. Blogger support has not responded to my e-mail asking for assistance. I guess this is what you get for trying to be an early adopter. Yeeeesh.
Sometimes I'm an early adopter (like having a DVD-recorder when everyone else was recording their favorite tv shows on VHS tape), but other times I have a hard time giving up my old ways. For the 10 years that I worked at Hampshire, I had free dial-up internet via their PPP server. It was painfully slow (28.8 most of the time), but you get what you pay for and I was content. So, last summer when I had to find a new ISP, I went with RCN since it was the cheapest at $11.95/month if you prepaid for a year. At first I was pretty pleased with the 53.2 connection, but the service got worse and worse as time went by. Either I'd have trouble connecting, or I'd connect at a really slow speed, or my connection would be dropped. Their tech support was entirely useless in all regards -- anytime I called them, they told me the problem was my phone line. Needless to say, this crummy connection wasn't good for uploading photos to Flickr or downloading music.
My prepaid year just ended and so did my patience with RCN. Last Friday, Comcast came to the house to install high-speed internet, and I installed the wireless router and adapter. The process wasn't without its hassles, however. First, try getting someone at Comcast to give you complete and/or accurate information. It's not going to happen. Second, I found out when the tech guy arrived at my house that I'd have to lug all the parts of my desktop computer to the basement where the modem is mounted in order for him to do the installation. We set up the computer in the dim and the dank, on top of my foot locker. He commented that the basements in my complex are usually finished (mine isn't). Excuuuuuuuse me! That would involve money, and as you may have guessed, I'm incredibly cheap. Why should I pay a couple thousand bucks to finish a basement that's really just a storage room for Spooner's stuff? (BTW, Spooner, the Comcast guy had his eyes on your aqua beauty parlor chair and asked if I'd sell it!)
Aggravation aside, I'm now happy as a clam and zipping along at lightening speeds. The first thing I did was upload a photo to Flickr. Next, I bought a couple mp3s from Musicmatch. Uploads and downloads that used to take a half hour or more now happen in 1-2 minutes. Diggie-do!
Oh, yeah. Here's something to ponder: If the internet was invented by Al Gore and/or the Defense Department (on company time), wouldn't that mean that it's owned by The People? I think the government should therefore provide The People with universal, free internet access. Ditto health care.
In Spooner's screed (see comments to post below), he neglected to mention one of the important MINI protocols: MINI drivers wave to each other. This protocol isn't universally followed, but MINI and I have several pals with whom we always exchange waves: the cute red MINI with white bonnet stripes in So. Hadley, the aqua Cooper S with black top in Noho, and the other purple-blue MINI with white top (no sun roof like mine) in Florence. I always wave to the lime green MINI grease car (I think it lives in Leeds), but it doesn't wave back (yet). I'm not sure if this is a Happy Valley protocol, a MINI-USA one, or what. I'll bet MINIs in the UK don't wave at each other. The Brits would probably be unnerved by that. I'll research this when I'm over there in the fall.
Posted Tuesday: There's a story here, but I'm too exhausted right now to write about it. Stay tuned. Meantime, look at the Flickr page for pix of our Holyoke Canal and Chesterwood adventures.
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Updated Wednesday: I've now had a day of R&R, including swimming, lounging and cocktails, so I'm ready to tell the tale of Spooner's last day in the Tofu Valley.
We took his laptop, with the new airport card, down to the Haymarket so that he could get online and find a rental car. The car places in town wouldn't rent one way, with drop-off at Logan, so he reserved a car at Hertz in West Springfield for pickup that afternoon. While we were online, we set up a Flickr account for him (screen name = exspatula).
That done, we did various errands in Noho. We went to the hardware store where he purchased two cans of Zud. Apparently this cleanser is uniquely powerful enough to tackle the lime scale that adheres to any surface touched by tap water in the UK. When Molly and I went to London to visit Spooner two years ago, we each had to take a can of Zud in our carry-on bag. The expressions on the faces of the two baggage inspector women as they looked at the Zud, at each other, then at us, were priceless.
Next stop was the storage facility at the Industrial Park. I love watching Spooner open the door and set his eyes on some crap that he hasn't seen in the past year. "Look, it's my _________!" Even though he threatens repeatedly to take a match to the whole pile, he always finds something that he just can't live without and must take back to the UK with him. Last year it was pots and pans and a kitchen scale. This time, the first thing he spied was his Webber grill. He pulled it out from under some old boots and picture frames and said he could really use it in London.
"What? They don't have grills in the UK? Can't you buy one there?" I asked.
"Yes, but not like this one. And I already own this one."
Sanity prevailed and the grill went back into the storage unit. But the carpenter's level and the vintage tin Rainbo Bread sign went into the MINI.
Back at my house, the packing commenced. Spooner rounded up all his stuff from upstairs and added it to the pile in the living room. Not only did he have the things he flew over with -- laptop, external drive, camera, books, clothing -- but he now had the things he had acquired at the factory outlets and the crap -- er, I mean precious stuff -- that he had pulled from various storage spots around Massachusetts: the John Lennon-esque portrait of himself done by a former student, some photo albums, and a salad spinner.
"What? They don't have salad spinners in the UK? Can't you buy one there?"
"Yes, but not like this one. And I already own this one."
The photo albums and the salad spinner disappeared into my cellar where they joined his other precious possessions, packed three years ago into boxes labeled "Treasures" and "For Future Antiques Roadshows." The other stuff, including the portrait, carpenter's level, Rainbo Bread sign, his new Randy Deihl painting and 3 bottles of some nasty Magner's cider, went into the MINI. We headed off to West Springfield so that he could pick up the car. That's when the nightmare began. Long story short: Hertz wouldn't let him put the car on his debit/credit card because they said it was a debit card even though it is both debit and credit. I could rent the car and put him on as the second driver, but he'd have to pay for insurance and that would bring the cost (highway robbery) up to $400+ for 3 days. Fuck that.
We activated Plan B, which involved him taking the Peter Pan bus to Newton where his friend Jen would pick him up and drive him to pal Steve's in Billerica. In the parking lot of the bus station in Springfield, we pulled all the stuff out of the car and consolidated. It was quite amazing to watch the bottles of cider, can of smoked almonds, books and whatnot disappear into his suitcase and backpack. When it was all done, three things were coming back to Northampton with me: the Rainbo Bread sign, the carpenter's level, and the portrait of himself.
That's the story.
I should have handed him the keys to the MINI. Instead, when Spooner suggested that we drive back to Northampton via a different route, I gave him the book of maps of western Mass.
The drive to the Berkshires had been normal -- a gentle uphill climb on the Mass Pike, exiting at Lee to hit the factory outlets, then an easy cruise through Stockbridge, ending up at Chesterwood where we saw the contemporary sculpture exhibit. We had fun pretending to be all artsy-fartsy with our cameras. There weren't many people on the sculpture walk in the woods, so no one looked at us like we were crackers.
It was the return trip that quickly got hairy. Spooner thought it would be good to go through Becket to Washington. He navigated, and I turned left onto Summit Hill Road and suddenly found myself driving up a very steep hill, like a 50 or 60 degree angle.
"You didn't tell me we were going over a fucking MOUNTAIN. How long are we on this road? The sign said 'Summit.' Are we at the summit yet?"
"Stop your bellyaching. Do you want me to drive?"
"No. That would mean I'd have to stop. I'm not stopping on this hill. No way."
We went through Washington, turned onto Washington Road and crossed the line into Peru.
"Is this the Andes? Where's the continental divide? When is it downhill to Northampton?"
"You're perseverating. It's the Berkshires -- you know, the Berkshire Mountains. Just keep driving."
We were on East Washington Road for a while and then turned onto Smith Road, for no good reason other than that Spooner's last name is Smith. It was a gravel road, the steepest road yet, wide enough for the MINI but that's about it.
"'Road Closed.' Did you see that sign? What are we going to do? I can't turn around."
"That's only in the winter. We're almost to Peru Center. Just keep driving."
In Peru Center, we got onto Route 143, a proper state road with lane lines. Next came Worthington, which looked like a real town, and Chesterfield with a traffic light! And at last we were going downhill.
"Where's the sandwich shop? You promised me a sandwich shop in Washington. I still haven't seen one."
"We're almost to Williamsburg. You'll know the way from there. Just keep driving."
We finally got to Burgy, and I did indeed know the way but there was still no sandwich shop. We stopped instead at Mad House Minis to look at all the old Astin and Morris Minis that they're restoring. My MINI had been very brave on this mad adventure, braver than I. From now on, I'm hiding the map book.
