Am I a mean, immature person for loving this?

Finally

For as long as I've known him, my husband has been fantasizing about "a charismatic leader" for this country, someone in the mold of JFK. Last night he got his wish.

We spent the evening at an election night party on the next block. What a wonderful contrast to 2000, when the mood started out fairly optimistic but turned nightmarishly grim. There were tears of joy this time around, instead of rage and frustration.

It's raining this morning in Portland, but the future of this country seems brighter than it has in years. Good luck, Barack. It ain't gonna be easy.

Preaching to the choir

A Permanent Part of Portland

A little over a year ago, Jerry and I bought a brick in Pioneer Courthouse Square. We specified that the inscription read JEREVA, 8.3.2005- . Shortly after I submitted the order, the brick mavens got in touch to make sure we were aware that they couldn't go back sometime in the future and add another date after the dash. I assured them that this wasn't a tombstone-type engraving.


They batch the brick orders, apparently, so ours wasn't installed until a couple of months ago. We got a map and a certificate, suitable for framing, signed by Mayor Potter. Ours is brick number 2273, in square 49 on side C, on the upper level near Broadway and Yamhill. We finally got over there to look for it; it took us a while to find it, but I think we have it triangulated now. I suppose we'll have to add it to our tour-guide itinerary. You've been warned, out-of-towners.

August 3rd, 2005, was the day we moved to Portland and began our new life in the Northwest. We're planning to keep that dash open-ended as long as we possibly can.

Subtle

No, I'm not referring to Sarah Palin's performance (and that's what it was, in the sense of scripted and theatrical) in her debate with Joe Biden last night.

I've had this quilt on my design wall since last spring. Now that fall is here, I was determined to git 'er done. I posted about my original inspiration and design process here. My hangup was that the brownish squiggly fabric that I'd conceived as a unifying element just wasn't strong enough to do the job. I tried shadowing with fabric paints; still not assertive enough. (This is a very busy quilt!) Eventually, over the course of several sleepless 3 AMs, it came to me: dark organza.

The penultimate version is on the left, the finished product on the right. Unlike Biden and Palin, you can barely distinguish them, especially on a computer screen (though you can click the image to enlarge it), but to me, the sheer overlay makes a huge difference. I had just enough yardage from a natural-dyeing workshop (Was it walnut? Logwood with an iron mordant? Who knows?) to lay over most of the surface, quilt roughly along the seams of the problematic brown squiggle fabric, and then clip away the excess. Here's a detail of the overlaid and stitched-down organza:


I'm pleased with the result, and glad to get another UFO out of my workspace. It looks like fall is here for sure, and with it, quilting weather.

Harvest

My main accomplishment last weekend was harvesting the bulk of the plums from our backyard tree. These are gorgeous, meaty Italian plums, with purple skins and yellow-gold flesh. I triaged them into (1) wrinkly: stew into compote for freezing; (2) firm-to-ripe: bake into tarts and/or eat over the next week or two; and (3) ready to go NOW.

I can't think of too many things more fulfilling than standing on a stepladder in your own back yard, shoulder-high in fresh fruit, sunlight glinting on the leaves all around you. Abundance.

The yield looked a lot like this picture from the year before last. I see that the harvest was two weeks earlier this season. Curious, since we had such a late, cold spring and a not very warm summer.

Speaking of matters agricultural, I've been meaning to post something about the bee-in (my term, not theirs) that we attended at Zenger Farm -- a working organic farm about 10 minutes from us in outer Southeast Portland -- a couple of weeks ago. A beautiful young woman, Jill Kuehler, executive director of Friends of Zenger Farm, introduced us to the place (note the solar panels above her) and then turned us over to a series of mini-tour guides -- Laura Masterson of 47th Avenue Farm, Mace Vaughn of the Xerces Society, and finally Wisteria Loeffler of Zenger’s Community Bee Project and her comb-wrangling colleague whose name I didn't get.

We learned more about pollination than I thought was possible at our age, including the fact that tomato flowers, because of their structure, are very hard to pollinate and require specialized vibrational behavior (a hum job, you might say) on the part of the bee.

The filmmaker who produced The Real Dirt on Farmer John happened to be there, with a sound guy, shooting footage for his next film. He really got in those little guys' faces.

Yesterday, I pitted 170 plums (I counted the pits) and stewed up a vat of plum compote. I'll freeze most of it in smaller containers. It'll be great for spooning over pancakes this winter, or ice cream, or folding into cake batter, or eating straight. Tomorrow I plan to bake a plum tart or three.

Back in April when the plum tree flowered, the blossoms seemed fairly sparse compared to the last couple of years. Plus, we had to cut one major branch in preparation for building the deck. I thought the harvest might be down this season, but that's obviously not the case. Good job, bees, on that pollination thing.

When I'm 74

Today is Jerry's birthday. Doesn't he look good for a boy his age?

I got him a super-geeky gift, a t-shirt that displays wi-fi signal strength at the wearer's location. See? It's four bars inside, and two on the porch. This should be lots of fun strolling Hawthorne.


And here's the cake. It's chocolate, of course, under all that chocolate. Some people make fun of quilters for cutting up perfectly good fabric and sewing it back together again. This icing is just bittersweet chocolate, melted and mixed with a little cream. When it sets it's basically pure chocolate again. I see nothing wrong with that.


I've discovered that eating chocolate late in the day -- say, after a dinner of poulet Dijonnaise en filo, which is Jer's traditional birthday request, therefore on the menu for this evening -- keeps me awake at night every bit as much as coffee. So I encouraged the birthday boy to cut into his cake for breakfast. It didn't take much to persuade him. Happy birthday to you, sweetie.