Mice, Again

The mice are back; they love the change of seasons. Even though it isn't really fall yet and the weather is still hot, still their tiny mouse brains and their even tinier little mouse day planners tell them that it's time to come into my kitchen and curl up snugly for the winter among my canned beans and oven insulation. Bastards. I hates them. One died some time back in the cabinet and was recently discovered: so that's what that smell was. A called me at work last week to tell me about the dead mouse - you know, breaking news, my daughter the anchorperson, coming to Mom live from the kitchen with a complaint about the dead mouse. So I cleaned out all his horrible decayed mouse corpse detritus and put down some more traps, lavishly baited with peanut butter.

Evil little bastards ate the peanut butter and didn't spring the traps. Naturally. At least, I guess that's what happened, unless it evaporated into thin air and I don't think peanut butter does that. Rum apparently does: I had a big old gallon bottle that I bought for my party in early August, that I figured would last me until Christmas, since I rarely drink liquor. Alas, no, even though it was all sealed up, it's mostly disappeared: just evaporated, I guess. Gone. Vanished. I haven't heard any sounds of mousy revelry coming from the walls (well, no more than usual this time of year) so I doubt the mice removed the cap, constructed a siphon and drained the rum. Perhaps we have Borrowers (she said sarcastically, with an evil glance towards her oldest child.) I wouldn't even have known it was almost gone if it hadn't been for the mouse, so I guess he did do me one favor: without him, I wouldn't have had a chance to rant and rave and holler at the kids and loudly mark the bottle level with a sharpie.

In other breaking news, I went out to lunch today with my mother and my friend S at Fig Bistro and it was lovely. There's something about a really nice lunch and a glass of wine that just makes one feel all civilized like - civilized and ready for a nap. While we were there we saw this lovely creature out the window: truly one of the biggest praying mantises I've ever seen and he posed so graciously for the camera. I keep on trying to take pictures of the orb weavers at work at night on my back porch, because their webs are astounding but alas, my photographic skills are not up for it. The spiders also get exasperated quickly and I have found in my long years of life that it is not wise, oh my children, to exasperate a spider. Or a praying mantis, or a mouse, actually, now that I think about it.

End of August

It's the end of August and the orb weavers are busy on both porches, building huge webs of unestimable beauty and waiting in them, flinching a little when the dog barks but staying put. They weave at night and my best efforts can't seem to take a picture of how fantastically elegant their webs are; they're very elegant spiders in general, golden, bulbous, patient.

My friend J and I and Theo the dog went out to Douglas Falls near Barnardsville today. It was awesome & totally beautiful - should be some pictures up on Flickr momentarily. It's a long and gorgeous drive up a dirt road up the mountain to get there and then a short hike down to the falls. I'm so glad I found it again; it had been years since I'd been there. Then we went and had dinner and a beer at the Lucky Otter. It's days like this (except for the morning, when not one but TWO carefully set alarm clocks failed to go off and so I was late all day) when I'm glad I live here, when a lovely drive through the country can take you to a (more or less) pristine waterfall with noone else around, and then 45 minutes drive again, past the same bucolic cows, and you're having a beer on the porch of the Otter, watching West Asheville go by. It's perfect here sometimes, in late August, under the sunset.

Giant Mushroooooms! Oh, and Class Structure in America

I went and picked up my friend D on Saturday and brought her down off the mountain where she had been trapped for 10 days without a car and with a crazy, deeply crazy, neighbor. On the way up to her house I stopped my car on her twisty narrow dirt road to take pictures of these amazing mushrooms. I swear when I saw them out the window I thought they were fake: twee little ceramic or resin thingies from the Kountry Shoppe in Chimney Rock Village or something, but no, they are quite real, and the biggest one was easily a foot across. One of these days there are going to be two cars going opposite directions on that road, and I'm not sure what's going to happen then. It's too narrow to pass, there's nowhere, not even a driveway, to turn around, and it's over a mile long; I was thinking about this the other day and even briefly wondered if I should google it, because I want to know if there is some kind of etiquette to cover such a situation, like, does the uphill car start reversing? Or the downhill one?

Poor D got immediately submerged in the city, as I promptly dragged her along on the Drinking Liberally/BlogAsheville blog slog pub crawl, which was huge fun. I was reluctant initially to take place, feeling like a)I would be a slumming yuppie and b)that was exploitative of me and c)besides, if I was going to be the only girl I was SO not going (there turned out to be more girls than guys, actually, which just goes to show you, uh, something.) It's terrible, when you think about it, how segregated "old" West Asheville and "new" West Asheville are. We "new" people - never mind that some of us have been here for a long damn time now - go to the Westville Pub and Burgermeister, the Lucky Otter and the Gray Eagle, while "old" West Asheville goes to Cowboy's Nite Life and the B&D Bar, Mike's Side Pocket and the Burger Barn. Separate but equal? Not really. The new places are all spruced up; someone spent time designing them; they have light and windows, plants and funky paintings and, perhaps most striking, they're clean, which you can't say about the old places. The old places hew to the design ethos of the original local bar'n'grill which just got that way without anyone thinking about it: panelling (why, oh lord, is panelling?) darkness, a beer mirror or two, some neon and one helluvalot of good old fashioned dirt on the theory that the darkness and the smoke covers it up.

So what makes the difference? Why does one group go to one set of watering holes and the other go to the other? We all know, even though as Americans we're wildly uncomfortable talking about class. We try to cover it up by talking about education, and opportunities, and "old" versus "new" in much the same way that we try to cover up racism (that's not an issue in these bars, btw, I mean, it IS, of course, but this is a pretty damn white neighborhood and these are all white bars.) But it is, of course, a class issue, this segregation of my neighborhood. Because we the crawlers are the "educated" "new" people, I think we were all a little worried about our reception: we thought it was possible that those rednecks were going to kick our yuppie asses. We are chickenshits, and clearly prejudiced to boot. The people in the "old" bars were uniformly pleasant and funny and welcoming and thought our pub crawl idea was great. See what unfamiliarity can do? Scare you silly - for nothing.

The pathetic thing about this - okay, one of the many, many pathetic things about this - is I'm not sure when I made this transition to group A: for years I hung out in redneck bars by choice. Well, on the other hand, for years those were pretty much the only kinds of bars there were where I lived. Being as how I have a liking for bars in general and have always lived in a state of complete and dire poverty which lends me a certain low class dollar store shopping cred with The Working Classes, I became and remained a redneck bar habitue for many years. Redneck bars or art bars: it is also true that I always have gone to the art bars but then sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference and yes, I'm thinking about you, Mount Royal Tavern. Then I got older and discovered a fondness deep within myself for a real beer selection, the occasional fern and the ability to see what it is I'm drinking and I moved away from what are blithely called Holes in the Wall, although usually they stand alone and are made of either cinderblock or panelling and duct tape.

I doubt I'm going to suddenly switch back to the group B bars, although it's cool to feel like at least I know my neighborhood options now. And, people? The jukebox at Mike's Side Pocket? Awesome.

A Trip to Bat Cave

So my friend D is happily ensconced in her incredibly beautiful new house perched snugly at the top of a mountain in Bat Cave and S and N and I drove up there yesterday to visit her. On the way back we stopped to take pictures of kudzu and cows, since there were plenty of both, although not, sadly, in combination. We rejected some brown and black cows as being not photogenic enough, but these spotted cows are perfectly glamourous and in fact enough to make a Barbizon painter turn faint and green with envy. Kudzu always looks like monsters to me; as if the monsters had been ambling along through the valleys and suddenly been caught up by the vines and stuck there, helpless in a sea of green. Either monsters or fairy tale castles, vistas from another world: things we wouldn't know were there at all until the kudzu captured them for a summer.

D's house is spectacular. It's posh without being ostentatious, homey without being shabby - it reconciles all those good things effortlessly and even has a tiny, wonderful guesthouse and a vegetable garden which the previous owners left fully running along complete with mountains of tomatos and squash and greasy beans. There's a big open field above her and a tiny creek running alongside and woods all around; a dirt road, a patch of lawn and really, what more do you need? I was overcome with jealousy but only briefly; I did my country living time in Maryland and while I enjoyed it, I don't want to go back. I like living near the city, on a bus line, close enough where I can get downtown in a heartbeat and yet still have my big garden. I need people around me or I start to get way too introverted; it doesn't take much for me to forget how to talk to people (shut UP. You should see me when I've actually been alone for days and days and you could tell the difference then.) and get really strange.

Granted my garden is not as good as D's, but then clearly I am much lazier than the people who used to own D's house. I'm great in the spring, but by the time July rolls around I've kind of lost interest, and by August I really can't be bothered. Oh well, you can't change your nature, and mine is just suited to the city, I think, But I'm delighted D is here, with her parrot and guinea pigs and bunnies (the female bunny lives in a big pen with 3 or 4 male guinea pigs who are constantly humping her; she takes it with equanimity and D says so far there have been no hideous mutant guinea rabbits resulting) her salamander and cat and little dog Cookie. I have full intentions of spending a lot of time out there in the country now myself, now that she's here and I can go anytime I please, oh yeah.

Rejuvenating the Spirit and Channeling the Yip Yip Martians

bunny!
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

Today is Wednesday, which is to say it's the day I spend an hour with my zen therapist. Today's lesson was about refreshing & rejuvenating the soul - right now I'm feeling very frazzled and harried and I'm doing a lot of things all at once, which means that I'm not doing any of them particularly well. Zen therapist says that that means it is time to drop everything and go refresh myself. So I went for a wander around the Botanical Gardens, where I'd never really been, and I saw this bunny. This bunny let me stalk it until I was quite close, like 10 feet away, snapping all the time. It was fun as hell, waiting til he turned his head, walking three steps, then freezing as he looked at me again. And it did throw me out of my head and into my body, into total "I am a camera" only mode. Which is good for me.

Zen therapist says that I am smart and also that I am very much in touch with my intuitive side and the dreamworld, the unconscious, the symbols, but the problem is that I second guess myself, overanalyze the symbols until they lose all symbolicness (this is via Jung, he says) and I then get tangled up in an indecisive mess of intellectualism vs. intuitive self vs. emotionalism and thus nothing gets done. Zen therapist is right, of course.

However, I also channel the Yip Yip martians, and so I think I'm actually in pretty good shape. I was driving over to Zen therapist's office, late as usual, a bit frantic, and on the Patton Ave. bridge there was a big livestock truck. In the truck were 4 or 5 goats, all huddled together in one corner with the big daddy goat sort of protecting the smaller lady goats. It took me a while to figure out what they were, from a distance and through the bars of the truck, and as I did I went "Yip. . yip. . .calf? Yip. . yip. . goat? Gooooooat!!! Yip yip yip gooooaaaattttsss!!" and then finally as I passed them I yelled out the window "Como estas cabrones?" and they ignored me. It was cool.

Lately I have been reading the Iwanna, because I need a new monitor and possibly a new computer, but instead of reading that section I almost always find myself magnetically pulled to the animals and livestock section. Did you know that goats are amazingly cheap? There are even some free goats in the Iwanna! And chickens are cheap or free too! I can't believe it! I am so tempted to get some goats and chickens I can't stand it. My emotional intuitive side says Go for it! You need goats! And chickens! And possibly a llama and maybe an iguana too! But my intellectual side says, Felicity, you have finally and completely lost your mind.

Avatar of Domesticity in the Year of the Albino Zucchini

The annual garden deluge is well under way. That means that the garden itself is deluged with morning glories and other less attractive weeds as well as horrible demon bugs of all descriptions, including, but not limited to, Japanese beetles, the showy, glamourous Gianni Versaces of the insect world. Morning glories and Japanese beetles are terribly similar, really, to the kind of thing found in the garment district: parasitic, decorative as hell, amusing and yet slowly killing their struggling hosts.

There are bugs everywhere. Something ate my eggplants; the rest of the squash are succumbing to what is either a horrible fungal infection or the depredations of the cucumber borer beetle and it's hot. Meanwhile, I am deluged with green beans, hot peppers (one pepper plant fell over, so burdened with fat jalapenos that it could no longer stand) and zucchini, which curiously this year are almost all albinos. Go figure. Squash is promiscuous and has weird offshot babies whenever you plant more than one variety but I can never resist in the spring. It's delicious anyway, even if M did refuse to finish his last night, saying "God, it's so, so squashy."

So in a fit of enthusiastic pioneer style old fashioned good womanhood (I have them occasionally. Stop snickering.) I decided to can the green beans. Apparently just canning green beans plain is inviting certain death unless you own a $80 pressure canner: I read the articles and the brochure that came with a box of Mason jars and it scared me right off. I don't want to drop dead of botulism or some other less savory doom just because I want fresh canned green beans next December. Instead, I pickled them. After that, having some pickling stuff left over and all those aforementioned jalapenos, I pickled some of those. That's an experiment. It may be a bad, bad one but I'm already half planning to give them away anyhow, sneaky evil me.

Pickling is a lengthy process. First you have to heed all the dire warnings and wash all the new jars and the lids and the rings and then you have to put them all in pots of hot water on the stove and simmer them. During this process some of the lids will inevitably weld themselves together in a touching display of affection and physical love which winds up being a royal pain in the ass. Why? You try separating them using tongs and you will know. Then you take the hot jars and you stuff them with your prepared (washed, trimmed, inspected closely) vegetables. This is also harder than it sounds, since raw green beans and peppers don't like being stuffed into small spaces and also the damn jars are hot as hell. Eventually, however, you get them all in there along with some garlic and a head of dill and some other stuff for the hot peppers and then you pour a boiling mixture of vinegar, salt and water over them. You will burn your fingers again putting the lids on, and it would be good to admire them then, because after processing, they won't look so bright and fresh, which is a pity, but I suppose it keeps you alive and that's all for the best. Processing, for the uninitiated, means that you put the sealed jars into a big huge pot of boiling water and you boil the everliving fuck out of them for as long as the recipe says, 10 or 15 minutes. They are supposed to be on a rack: I don't have a rack, so I use dishtowels in the pot to keep them from banging up against it or each other and cracking. That's why there's a huge pot of water and wet dishtowels on my stove right now, actually. In case you wondered. Then you pull them out with tongs and put them on a towel on the counter and moon over them with pride and if you have done everything right, they will eventually each make an extremely satisfying little Pop! noise which means that they are sealed.

So okay, the lawn isn't mowed, the living room isn't vacuumed, the dishes aren't done and the less said about the bathroom the better, but I have 6, count them, 6 beautiful glass jars of pickled things and I am proud. Proud, I tell you, with the kind of housewifely pride that made this country great. Now I can fulfill all my families needs for pickled green beans (none of us have ever actually tasted pickled green beans or pickled hot peppers, by the way, and the kids are showing a distressing lack of enthusiasm at the prospect) for the whole winter.

Turtle In the Park

box turtle 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

The picture and the title kind of say it all, actually. I woke up in a bad mood, because it is kind of getting to be that time of the month when I want to kill, kill, kill and also because I'm feeling overwhelmed, swamped and too busy. I was thinking about all the ten bazillion things I have to do and instead of making me happy, it was making me miserable and tired, so I took hideous Theo to the park for an hour. I was trudging grumpily along trying to achieve pure Zen walking meditation mind and failing spectacularly when along came Turtle, and that's satori right there.

I love box turtles; I have loved them since I was a small child and we used to catch them and put them in elaborate cages made out of cardboard boxes and chickenwire from which they would inevitably have escaped the next morning. Last summer or the summer before, I found one up at Bent Creek who was patiently trying to get up a steep hill into the woods. He kept slipping back down, so I gave him a lift in the direction he was going and he thanked me: the next day there was a box turtle in my vegetable garden, where no turtle had ever been seen before or since. Once too I was scared shitless by a box turtle. I was out hiking on the bike trail in Maryland that runs along the Gunpowder Falls when I heard a tremendous crashing coming through the underbrush at me. I thought it was probably a rabid dog or raccoon or, god knows, some kind of horrible transdimensional creature of the vortex and I was terrified, I mean my heart was thumping and I thought it was probably all over for me. It was a box turtle making his way noisily through the tall weeds.

Yay box turtles and their ability to knock you out of the everyday!

Near Barnardsville, Somewhere

panorama near barnardsville
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

This is about the best panoramic stitched shot I've done yet, which isn't, I recognize, saying much. I'm still getting the hang of this stitching thing. Click on it, and then when you get to Flickr, click all sizes to see it in a reasonable version. My brother and I went and got mildly lost outside Barnardsville today. I was looking for Douglas Falls, which I vaguely remembered as being "easily" accessible: you take the Barnardsville exit, follow the road on past where it turns to dirt, go way the hell up the mountain looping along, and then the road ends at a parking area and you hike on down to the waterfall. Nope, that is not true. Either I remembered it totally wrong, which is probable, since it's been around 3 years since I was out there, or they've changed it, which is sadly also possible, since lo and behold, at the way the hell point up the dirt road are a couple of McMansions in various states of construction. At any rate, the dirt road turns back to pavement, and that pavement eventually takes you to, of all places, Burnsville. We tried going up another dirt road - that ended at a locked gate, and then we walked for a bit, although my brother was slightly worried that someone with the key to the gate was going to drive up behind my car, see the hippie stickers and shove my car over the cliff.

I do not get McMansions, hideous things, anywhere but particularly not up there, which is eleventy hundred miles from anywhere. Even with our new, milder (tm) winters, that road has to be impassable from November to March and it's no picnic in July. But what do I know? I'm poor, and I think spending millions on a house is immoral, and building a slew of houses in the middle of nowhere, up on a ridgeline, destroying the ecosystem and spoiling everyone elses view is double immoral. However, in the silver linings department, it was either the development or some logging that took me to the clearing where I shot this picture and, bonus, the clearing was full of wildflowers.

Note: Damn, it's my own stupid fault. I forgot about the turnoff onto Dillingham Road.


don't mind me, I'm tweaking. These lovely things are from my friend taz' site, and I want them as my backgrounds, oh yes I do. In a further design type note, isn't it interesting how the eye reads the one on the left as a hole in the white page, but the one on the right doesn't read like that at all? YMMV, I guess. But that's how I see it. HEY! What do you think about the new design?