Plump Perfection with pterostilbene: blueberries

My plumply perfect blueberries are at an end. I get a solid month-long run from July 4 to August 4, give or take a day or two. The harvest from four mature bushes in a climate they love lasts me a full year.  My freezer is stuffed with them; overflow baggies are in my neighbor’s freezer.

I eat them on my cereal every morning.  Supposedly they are full of nutritional goodies – anti-oxidants. A study in 2004 says they’re also good for lowering cholesterol because they contain pterostilbene – which is similar to resveratrol, another antioxidant identified in grapes and red wine.

Of course the new nutritional darling is beets.   I have a few planted but not enough to keep at bay whatever ails they prevent for more than a month.

Perturbed but not yet pessimistic

Perturbed: greatly disturbed, made uneasy or anxious, confused.

Pessimistic: a tendency to take the gloomiest possible view of a situation.

Times are getting tough. People are perturbed. The usually optimistic are beginning to rethink their positions.

• An old friend stopped by today. She is visiting from the Bay Area for a long weekend with her husband. Just before leaving town yesterday her boss at Oracle called her in to say she was being laid off.  Part of a purge.
• My ex has a real estate investment that just went belly up.
• My gig contributing feng shui articles to the local newspaper was terminated because that section of the paper is being eliminated (along with 20 more staff members).
• My investment portfolio is down 22% since Jan.1.
• Food prices have increased 5.3% in the past year.
• Gas prices are $1.32 a gallon higher in Washington state than a year ago – more than 25%.

It’s not all bad:

• My laid-off friend found a job in a different division of Oracle and will be able to work when she returns from vacation.
• Many of us are driving much less and much less aggressively, which is good for the environment and our stress levels.  Some of us even have enough spare cash to buy a Prius
• Many of us have returned to growing our own veggies… I’ve got lettuce, spinach, herbs, and blueberries right now. Beans, squash, tomatoes, beets, grapes on the way. How locavore can you get?
• I still have a roof over my head, with enough rooms in my house to sleep extra folks if necessary. I don’t know if I can extend that offer to my ex though… (he still has his own roof).
• The less I have, the more appreciative I am of what I do have: friends, family, health, music, dance, books, children, beauty, laughter. On and on. So much.

Pest Patrol – slug edition

In my garden I have a bunch of lettuce babies which now have leaves just about big enough to pluck.

But when I went to gather some for supper last night several of them had become slime-covered nubs. WTF?

Of course I knew who the culprits were.  Unfortunately they don’t come out till after dark. So at 9:30 I fetched my flashlight and my clippers for the hunt.

I thought I’d see one big slug. HA!  It was a family of four, all about three inches long – each on his/her own lettuce leaf which was bent to the ground from the weight of the hungry beast.

This is where the clippers come in. You can’t step on these monsters because they just ooze into the soft dirt unharmed, so (apologies in advance for grossing you out) I clipped each one in half.

Do I feel bad about this murderous act? No.  They could have chosen all sorts of other tasty vegetation – but they crossed the line by going for my lettuces. And they’re not exactly sympathetic characters: if you don’t move the bodies away from the plants their cannibalistic buddies come out and eat them.

You thought that was disgusting. The worst part of this process is trying to wash the slime off the clippers.

Potting and perseverance

I have two large ceramic pots flanking the steps to my front door. A month ago my ex extricated the two strappy plants that had filled the pots with their roots over the past four years.

Since the pots had smaller openings than the main body, this was not a simple matter of yanking the plants out or overturning the pots to dump them out. It required surgery. Careful hacking and lots of patience.  I would have given up and tossed everything.  But that’s not my ex’s nature. He perseveres.

So then I had two empy pots.   They sat there for a couple of weeks while I recovered from watching my ex work so hard.

Eventually I bought some fresh potting soil and some new plants.  But then it got really hot – and plants don’t like being transplanted when it’s really hot. I’m not keen on working in the heat either.

Finally the stars were in alignment and the weather had cooled. Time to piss or pot.

The potting soil came out of the bags as dry as dust. It took a couple of hours to get it properly mixed and rehydrated. I mixed it in a giant plastic laundry tub with intermittent doses of water,  hydrophilic plastic bits,  and Osmocote timed release fertilizer.

I got filthy, sweaty, and impatient. This took WAY longer than I had expected. And it took way more potting mix too, because once the water had been absorbed the dirt volume shrank by about half and the pots turned out to be bottomless. I wanted to quit and do something fun, like cleaning toilets.  As I’ve said before, perseverance is a virtue I’m still seeking. (In fact this is my fourth post on perseverance – at least I persevere talking about perseverance!)

But I finished the job. The plants still look puny and pathetic, but my virtue is restored.

Plant plethora

I loved this recent New Yorker cover by the French cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé. The woman emerges from her country home with clippers in hand to snip an armload of posies. Someone has been there ahead of her to water and otherwise tend the garden, so all she has to do is cut and arrange the flowers.

Not a bad life.

Once a year I have an ecstatic experience like this – the day after my garden helper and I have hacked back a truckload of overgrown shrubs and he has spread dark compost over the bare patches where weeds once thrived.

This morning was the morning when I was able to emerge from the house, clippers in hand, with no task before me but to snip posies for a big bouquet. Oh happy day.

Tomorrow I’ll be back to hauling hoses, deadheading, weeding, fussing.

Potent or poppycock: a feng shui cure too strong?

Potent: possessing strength or power

Poppycock: senseless talk (from Dutch pappekak, meaning soft dung, if you know what I mean)

Last week I was clearing out a drawer and came upon a small compact mirror for which I had no use. I was about to give it the heave-ho when I remembered that it could be used for a feng shui cure.

Here’s the feng shui cure: when you have negative energy coming at your home from outside (like from a problem neighbor, noisy traffic, etc), you tape a small mirror on the wall with the shiny side facing towards that negative energy with the intent of warding it off by reflecting it back out.

My next door neighbors to the south are perfectly nice people, but they are renting the house and the owners live up in Seattle. Neither the renters nor the owners seem to give a rip about the condition of the house or yard. For ten years the place has become increasingly unkempt.

I haven’t been in the house, but the shades are all wonky and the garage is stuffed to the rafters with cardboard boxes and garbage bags full of who knows what. That’s their problem.

My problem is that their yard is completely overgrown with noxious weeds – blackberry, dandelions, ivy and a big thicket of Canada thistle. All of them are getting into my yard. The thistle is the worst because it spreads underground as well as by wind-born seed – and it’s nearly impossible to kill.

Which brings me to yesterday.

I was sitting at my desk, with a view of the street, when suddenly I hear a fire engine rumbling up the hill, siren wailing. It stops at the end of my driveway. Then another one arrives. And three more! Within a couple of minutes the joint is jumping – I counted 23 firemen in full regalia at one point – some clambering over this neighbor’s house, some hauling hose, some standing around pointing or talking on a cell phone.

My neighbor was up on the roof with a puny garden hose, trying to douse the flames. It turns out he had been burning cardboard in the fireplace (WTF?? especially since we have curbside recycling). The chimney is uncapped and the roof is (old, dry) wood shake. A formula for disaster.

With 23 young bucks on the case (why are firemen always so cute? Is that a job requirement?), the fire was put out before it destroyed more than the attic and part of the roof. No one was hurt and no important belongings were lost.

I certainly meant no harm – I just want the owners to sell the property to someone who will care for it. They’re coming down from Seattle to assess the damage this weekend. Here’s hoping they decide it’s time to let it go…

Pings and Productivity

An article in today’s NY Times about the perils of “pinging” – my word for the constant interruptions we face in our modern daily lives.

As the parent of young children, the pinging came from them: “Mom, I’m hungry (bored, tired, angry, mad at my brother, sick, in danger, have a dirty diaper); I need you NOW”. I don’t think I had a coherent thought for a seven-year period, except when they were in childcare. I was good only for low-level functions: buying and preparing food, cleaning up, running errands, arranging play dates.

Now, kids long gone (chatty husband too) the distractions are back. But most of them are (or should be) under my own control. It’s between me and the internet. Ping! I’ve got email! I do research for an article on Vitamin D (thank you google) and suddenly I’ve gotten from Vitamin D to auto-immune disorders to fatigue to distraction to this article – and now instead of further work on Vitamin D I’m writing a post about being distracted.

Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age has this to say:

What’s needed is a renaissance of attention — a revaluing and cultivating of the art of attention, to help us achieve depth of thought and relations in this complex, high-tech time.

The first step is to learn to speak a language of attention. The exciting news is that the enigma of attention has just begun to be mapped, tracked and decoded by neuroscientists who now consider attention to be a trio of skills: focus, awareness and so-called executive attention. Think of it this way: You can be “aware” that you’re in a beautiful garden and then you can “focus” on an individual flower. The last piece, “executive attention,” is the ability to plan and make decisions.

Coincidentally I was dead-heading the amazing Westerlund rose earlier today in the garden. Hundreds of blooms in thick clusters. A few branches so heavy they had broken (below, the flowers on just two stalks). I was clip clip clipping but somewhere else in my head. Suddenly I realized I wasn’t present and began to focus on each spent head and the shattering petals that fell as I snipped. Such abundance! Wow.

I used to do most of my writing on my laptop, which I keep offline. It is so much easier to focus when there’s no place else to go, no emails to worry about. I talk about self-discipline, but talk costs nothing. I feel myself with a big SHOULD coming on: I SHOULD ONLY CHECK EMAIL ONCE A DAY. I SHOULD ONLY CHECK DailyKos ONCE A DAY. I SHOULD ONLY….

What will I actually DO????

Portland for pedestrians

This morning, as a culmination of the Carfree Cities Conference here, 6 miles of street in North and NE Portland were closed to autos so that people could walk or bike or skate or whatever around several neighborhoods. The organizers hope to make Sunday Parkways a regular event.

A friend of mine and I came over from Vancouver to join the fun, and fun it was. Not to mention good exercise. What I loved:

First, this is a gorgeous time of year in Portland. Everyone’s gardens were at their baroque best, with roses at their peak on every block. The Rose Garden at Peninsula Park is a true gem.

Second, it was a treat to explore neighborhoods that were new to me, mostly of modest but well-kept older homes, front porches, trees.

Third, to live in a neighborhood where public transportation and grocery shopping is within an easy walk on real sidewalks (Vancouver has a shocking dearth of sidewalks), means you really could live most of the time without a car. Bringing the MAX light rail line out Interstate has transformed North Portland.

Everyone was so happy and friendly. Serious athletes, little old ladies, dogs, kids, couples with strollers or kids in bike carts, policemen.

Oregon’s income tax rate is 9% (Washington has none), housing prices are steeper than in Vancouver for comparable properties, and their property tax is pretty high. But if I didn’t have to drive everywhere? If I could hang out on my front porch and meet my neighbors? Truly I am ready to move over there.

Peony plus = perfection

Peony ‘Krinkle White’. Rose ‘Just Joey’. Now why can these blooms stay like this forever?

Oh, and they’re both fragrant.

Update: On Prairie Home Companion this weekend, Garrison Keillor mentioned peonies in his news from Lake Wobegon.  Something like: ” having a bouquet of peonies is like inviting a Las Vegas showgirl into your living room. They’re always surprising to find in a Christian home.”

I don’t have a Christian home, but peonies ARE outrageous and I welcome them.

Plants and permanence

Permanent: fixed and changeless; lasting; not expected to change in status, condition or place
Permanence: the condition of quality of being permanent

I spent much of the weekend in the garden, dealing with my plants (wanted and unwanted). Last week I hired Joe to deal with the plethora of my unwanted plants (otherwise known as weeds), and the garden looked fabulous. The rhodies, iris and peonies were at their peak, and the roses coming on.

But now the rhody bushes are covered with dead florets and look like hell. Ditto the iris and peonies. I want everything to STOP! Why won’t the rhodies just STAY in perfect bloom? Ditto the iris and peonies.

If there is one thing plants teach it’s impermanence. A plant is at its peak only for a couple of weeks. Cut a flower to bring inside and maybe it lasts a few days.

A few years ago I took an Ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) class at the Shambhala Meditation Center in Portland. The teacher had brought all sorts of plant materials as well as just enough low vases and kenzan (the spiky base that hold stems in place) for each of us. I have had a fair amount of ikebana training so the lesson wasn’t particularly new for me, but some of the materials were novel (those flat sweet little peaches, for example).

We all fixed and fussed on our own arrangements for maybe an hour. Mine turned out the most beautiful, the most interesting, the most wonderful (etc etc etc) arrangement I had ever created (at least I thought so). It totally tickled me, particularly how I’d used the peach and picked up its subtle colors in the other plant materials I used.

The teacher walked us from arrangement to arrangement tweaking here and there and discussing what worked in each one. We were inspired by each other’s creations.

Then she said, “OK, take them apart. We’re going to do another arrangement and you’ll need to re-use that vase.”

WHAT !?!?! My chef ‘ouevre? The pinnacle of my ikebana career? Destroyed after only one hour??

I know that plants are ephemeral, but to KILL an arrangement after only one hour was unthinkable! And I didn’t even bring a camera to capture it on film for my continuing pleasure.

Buddhist teachings stress that all is impermanent, that attachment is suffering.  I got it.