Leap Year

Julius Caesar came up with the idea of leap year over 2,000 years ago. The Julian calendar required that each year divisible by 4 would become a leap year. The Romans were on the right track, but that simple formula soon created too many leap years. A math teacher could explain it, and the Gregorian calendar finally made the complicated adjustment 1500 years later with this leap year criteria:

1. The year is evenly divisible by 4.
2. If the year can be evenly divided by 100, it is NOT a leap year, unless:
3. The year is also evenly divisible by 400. Then it is a leap year.

In the old days, leap year was more than a calendar correction-- it was a holiday. February 29th was that special day every four years when the girl could grab herself a husband.

I love vintage postcards, and there are lots of funny ones for leap year. Some show modern young women being assertive, but others show the old maids doing whatever they can to snag, rope or wrestle down a husband. Ha ha. It's too bad people don't have the time and leisure to send goofy postcards on odd-ball holidays anymore. Well, I guess some of us still do, so we post them on our blogs.

School of coconut cake

Here's my takeaway from coconut cake class:
1. Coconut pastry cream is a good thing.
2. Never feel guilty about a cake mix.

Let me explain. First, until it came time to assemble the cakes at the very end, this class wasn't hands-on. We stood in the pastry kitchen for 3 hours watching the instructor make a yellow cake, pastry cream, coconut syrup and whipped cream. Don't get me wrong, that's a good learning method although I wasn't sure why we were supposed to bring an apron and our own cake pan.

Baking is science and art. If you bake from scratch, especially cakes, then you know the slightest thing can cause a major flop. So we watched the instructor mix up a batter for a plain white cake with a recipe that called for a cup of egg whites and a large amount of butter. The room was chilly, the butter was chilly. She expressed concern that the batter (despite being whipped to death in a KitchenAid) wasn't quite right when she poured it in the little pans. It did look a bit grainy.

We weren't worried because she was the expert. She gave each one a hard smack and twirl on the counter to "even it out." That seemed like harsh treatment for an egg white batter. Never mind, into the oven they went.

The 15 minute timer went off. She looked in, she didn't look happy. She closed the door and reset the timer. I knew the feeling. Several had already boiled over, but worse-- all were sunk down in the middle. Finally they came out and life went on. She cut them out of the pans (they stuck like glue) and put them "good side up" to cool while she finished the meringue and pastry cream.

Honestly, I'm not a mean person or one to gloat. But it was somehow reassuring that a professional pastry chef could pull something out of the oven that looked like one my own dismal scratch baking attempts. We picked the hard baked bits off the sheet and made polite comments. We all know the universe is not a fair place.

On to the good part. Pastry cream is that magical filling in chocolate eclairs, tarts, cakes, cream puffs and cream pies. It's basically just a very rich cooked custard, and her recipe added coconut cream (not milk) that made it especially luscious. This was the filling for the cake after the crumbly slices were brushed with a "simple syrup." The choice of icing was either plain whipped cream or a tricky cooked meringue that looked like more trouble and heartache:

I choose whipped cream, and slathered it lavishly on my little cake. Whipped cream hides everything. It was fun at the end of the class to actually be doing something. The only problem with these "icings" is that the cake needs to consumed pretty much the day you make it. So this major cake is for a holiday dessert, or something you would make for a big hungry family to devour in one sitting. Coconut cake is very popular in the South at church suppers and such.

John was sound asleep when I got home last night, so I put the sad looking little cake in the fridge. No guarantees on that whipped cream when he gets around to eating it after work today.

I get an A for effort. But when I got home, I realized in the fuss of cleaning up the kitchen I forgot my recipe sheet for the marvelous cake. That's OK, I know where to find a Betty Crocker Yellow Butter Recipe Cake Mix.

Eighty percent of success is showing up.
Woody Allen

Happy anniversary

February 27, 1993

Nineteen years of good luck and happiness, but the greatest blessing of all is that our loved ones in this picture are with us today.

Sam, Marge, teenage Amanda, me, John, Dave, Wilda, John Sr.

Now, what do you get a fellow who has everything for his "bronze" anniversary? How about a coconut cake? There won't be any romantic evening at home tonight, because I'm headed to the community college to take a class called "Delicious Coconut Cake." More on Coconut U. tomorrow.

Free show tonight

If the sky is clear, put on a coat and go outside between 7 and 9 pm. Look toward the western horizon. You should see Jupiter, Venus and the crescent moon jammed up together in a tight little triangle. We saw this bright sight from the front porch last night, when the clouds cleared out right after sunset.

My new friend "Casey"

"How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?"
~Satchel Paige

Casey is pushing 35, but he doesn't know it.
He's been a working horse forever, and he's an honest old teacher.
He's not young and beautiful-- he's old and beautiful.

And the nice lady fed him a pan of Equine Senior grain after their good lesson yesterday.

Bean soup

The Soup
Pablo Picasso 1902

All I have for you this morning is a melancholy painting by Picasso and a recommendation for a can of S&W beans. (Yes, it really is that dull this week.)

Beans

As they say, the secret is in the sauce. If you can buy the S&W brand in your part of the country, this particular variety is perfect for adding to soup or making white chili with chicken, turkey or pork. I usually rinse canned beans, but in this case the "light seasoning" thickens and flavors chili perfectly. It's another ones of those easy meals you don't need a recipe for.

Brown a pound of ground turkey or chicken, then drain it in a colander. In the same pot cook some diced onion, garlic and peppers. Add a can of diced tomatoes, two cans of beans with liquid and season with chili power, cumin, salt and pepper. Add some canned or frozen corn.
A nice supper for a cold boring night in February.

Mardi Gras leftovers

How about these gaudy Mardi Gras flowers? Yesterday on Ash Wednesday, a stack of bouquets were discounted for $5 at Safeway. I guess they underestimated the number of wild carnival parties in our dull little corner of Seattle. This damp cold weather would discourage any frolicking mood--we're about 10 degrees below normal for the end of February.

Today is supposed to be "nice" before the rain comes back over the weekend with a chance of snow flurries in the lowlands. We were thinking of spending another Saturday morning at the movie theater watching the live Met broadcast of Verdi's early opera Ernani. This is the fifth of Verdi's 28 operas, and it isn't performed as often as the blockbusters he wrote later. The music sounds pretty good and we've never seen it before.

John wants me to bring sandwiches along so he can watch the live backstage interviews at intermission instead of running down to the mall food court for Chinese. At these Met live broadcasts I've noticed senior couples eating food the wife pulled out of a big purse. I guess we're now in the "too-cheap-to-spend-$6-for-a-concession-hot-dog" demographic. I'll let you know if there's an embarrassing bust for eating outside food in the theater. Honestly I don't think they spend much time policing the early morning live Met crowd-- the ushers are barely awake to take our tickets when we show up at 9:30 am.

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday, a day of repentance that marks the beginning of Lent.

Since I'm usually rambling on about weather, birds and casseroles, T.S. Eliot is a bit much first thing in the morning.

Eliot's poems can be hard and confusing. But as the years pass, they mean something different each time you read them. About forty-five years ago, I randomly pulled The Collected Works of T.S. Eliot off the shelf in our tiny high school library and since then he's been a part of my life.

The long poem Ash Wednesday was written by T.S. Eliot in 1927, right after his conversion to Anglicanism. It deals with someone who lacked faith in the past, but now struggles to move toward God. It is an ambiguous and strange poem about hope and human salvation.

A few lines from Ash Wednesday:

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are...

Things you can do with a toaster oven

Eggplant Parmesan.

Teriyaki chicken wings.

Tater Tots. Yum.

Tony Roma ribs.

Homemade granola.

Store bought (little) cherry pie.

The house cook has been wondering, what does she need a fancy new gas oven for, anyway?
Well, there is that day called Thanksgiving, when folks show up and you want something on the table bigger that a Cornish hen.

The house cook has noticed that when she runs her toaster-broiler oven, a certain man takes a special interest in hanging around the kitchen, peering inside and asking constant meddling questions about the progress of his dinner. I guess some people are naturally attracted to gadgets.

Fat Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday. It is also known as Mardi Gras Day or Shrove Day. It's a day when people eat all they want of everything and anything as tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.

So the February days have been going by like a string of Fat Tuesdays. In case you were worried, no one is wasting away in this house for lack of an oven.

Tahiti in February

Tahitian Women on the Beach
Paul Gauguin
1848-1903

Sounds good, doesn't it? We went downtown yesterday to the Seattle Art Museum to see their special exhibit called Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise. It was a blustery cold weekend and a good time to be inside looking at tropical paintings.

In 1891 Gauguin sailed to French Polynesia to escape "everything that is artificial and conventional." This included his wife and five children. He died and was buried at Atuona on the Marquesas Islands at age 54, from alcoholism and other diseases.

Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Paul Gauguin had a rocky friendship with Vincent Van Gogh. It didn't help that both suffered from depression and suicidal tendencies. In 1888, Gauguin and Van Gogh spent nine testy weeks together painting in the south of France, but Gauguin was disillusioned with Impressionism. They quarreled and the famous episode with the razor blade and ear followed.

The SAM show was crowded yesterday but good. All those reproductions of the famous Tahiti paintings only give a sense of the Primitivism and subtle colors of the originals. Gauguin's work was an important step in the development of modern art, and young Picasso was especially influenced by him. As often happens to the artist, his work came into vogue right after his death. Much of it was immediately bought by a Russian collector and is now on display at the Puskin Museum. The paintings we saw at SAM are on loan from collections all over the world. Gauguin paintings are rarely for sale and get snapped up for $40 million dollars or so.

The World Discoverer on Bora Bora

So all of this tropical paradise sent our minds happily wandering back to the mid-1990's when we took a cruise through French Polynesia and the Cook Islands on the World Discoverer. We flew from Los Angeles to Tahiti and the cruise started from there. Our small ship could maneuver into tight harbors and channels and it also had inflatable dingies that took us to remote shorelines, atolls, beaches and tiny islands along with the expedition naturalists. Near Papeete, Tahiti, we toured the Gauguin Museum on a dripping wet warm day. The original Gauguin paintings are long gone from the tropics, which is probably a good thing. His museum in the countryside only had a few reproductions, but was one of many interesting experiences on that trip.

The World Discoverer today

We have our happy memories, but the World Discoverer did not have a happy ending. In April 2000, the ship struck a reef near the Solomon Islands. Unlike the recent disaster in Italy, this rock really was unchartered. The same German captain and crew we had a few years earlier were congratulated for their heroic and professional actions during the crisis and there were no injuries. I remember the rather serious "abandon ship" practice drills we had on our cruise, so it must have paid off.

The closest ship salvage yard was in Australia, and when they finally arrived the World Discoverer had already been boarded and stripped by locals. Now the wreck is somewhat of a tourist attraction and cruise lines pass by so people can gawk at it. Society Expeditions refurbished another vessel and launched it in 2002. Two years later the ship was seized by creditors and the company declared bankruptcy. So I'm glad we went to paradise when we did.

Here's John sharing the SAM elevator with a couple of Tahitian beauties.

Wonderful horses

One of the Family

Frederick George Cotman

Their Christmas Eve
John Sargent Noble

The Gardener's Daughter
Richard Ansdell

The Unicorn at Bay
Unicorn Tapestries

by Walter Georgi

Don Juan movie poster

Black Beauty illustration

Wild ride vintage postcard

The Barnum and Bailey Wonder Horse

Frank Cheyne
"She put her good steed to the walls and leaped lightly over them..."
Russian story

Wrens

Bewick's Wren

Seattle weather is about as dreary as it gets this week. When isn't raining the sky is overcast and the temperature is stuck in an 24 hour range of 40-45 degrees. That might not sound all that cold, but it's bone-chilling in a way only Seattle can be. Spring is trying hard to break through, and the sparrows are already fussing with their first nest of the summer on the old garage. Despite the weather I'm heading up for a riding lesson today. Seeing some friends and being on a big, warm fragrant beast might cheer me up.

Wrens are secretive little creatures, so when I went out the back door the other day I was surprised to see a Bewick's Wren just hanging out on the deck railing. Maybe he was cold. He even stared me in the eye for a bold second before he flew away. Bewick's are year-round residents in Seattle, but in the winter we hardly know they're there; they don't have anything to sing about. But in early spring I hear them about 4:15 along with the robins.

All the birds (except thankfully the crows) like hiding out in the laurel hedge and overgrown ivy tree in the messy corner of our yard. When I'm out working in the garden I've made myself almost crazy trying to sneak up on the source of some lovely, random singing. Of course they shut up and/or fly away as soon as you get near or run inside to get a binocular.

A wren would fit in the palm of your hand, but the song that comes out of those tiny vocal cords (smaller than a grain of rice) can carry for a quarter of a mile. In Seattle this time of year, a male Bewick's Wren has between 15 and 20 different songs which have been described as "prolonged, varied and expressive, sweet and exquisitely tender." Bewick’s Wrens learn songs first from their fathers, just two or three weeks after hatching. Later on they plagiarize from other males in adjacent territories (i.e. content scraping) until they have a large repertoire.


Unfortunately you don't have Bewick's Wrens in the East. But then you do have all those warblers and cardinals that never cross the Mississippi.

Here's a link with free birdsong from the English countryside called birdsong.radio . Thanks, Candi!

Methow Valley family fun

Nova taking her dad out for a Sunday drive.

A chilly ring-around-the-rosy: Gina with Baby Finn, Amanda, Nova, Adelina and Roger.

Best friends Adelina and Nova...

Amanda, Adelina and Nova group hug...

All of the above taken by Papa Michael at Northrup Canyon.
For more of his excellent pictures click HERE.