A mighty wind

The winds were light when we landed yesterday in Palm Springs, but it was still a bumpy ride down along the mountain range into the valley.

When you finally disembark that stuffy plane from a northern clime, the beautiful open airport feels almost surreal on a warm day.  Unfortunately, this sweet place is a victim of its own success, and the old-fashioned infrastructure now strained by hoards of high season tourists.  It took us almost two hours to get the rental car and finally be on our way!

By late afternoon the storm picked up across the Coachella Valley with 60+ MPH gusts. Fortunately, we were at our destination by then in Desert Hot Springs and off the highway.

The wind was so strong it ripped shingles right off the roof of the motel.  These palms can apparently endure an amazing force without snapping off. We heard the wind howling all night, but by morning a light breeze was all that remained.

I woke up early and sat in the warm mineral pool to watch the sun rise and listen to the birds.  The resident old roadrunner came by and looked me in the eye.  We ate breakfast in the room, and I was suddenly overcome by a strange lassitude.  Am I getting sick?  

No,  I believe the unfamiliar sensation is called "relaxation." Mineral water does that to you.  John is partaking of the same cure.

The nasty wind will be back again this afternoon, so we're planning to drive into Palm Springs and visit the art museum.

Palm Springs weekend

I'm listening to rain beating on the window and contemplating tomorrow's forecast for Palm Springs: hot and (unfortunately) extremely windy in the afternoon.  But after Thursday it looks like things settle into normal desert spring weather, with highs near 90 and lows in the 60's.

That will feel good, since haven't even come close to 60 yet in Seattle this year.  Not to mention, well and truly drying out for a few days.   I'm looking at the pile of summer clothes I never wear and thinking, really?  Packing for a warm weather trip is always fun.

We're dividing our stay between the old spa motel we like in Desert Hot Springs, and a bed and breakfast place in downtown Palm Springs.  We'll go up the aerial tram and to Shield's Date Garden as usual, but other than that no special plans. Last night I was watching Rick Steves on PBS lead an intrepid group on an educational but exhausting tour through Poland.  A "non-adventure" vacation is pretty nice now and then.

I'll try and check in with some pictures as the weekend progresses, if I don't get too lazy.

Weeds

At least the forsythia lights up the window on another grey, gloomy spring afternoon. We continue to break monthly rainfall records in Seattle.  Now March has fallen by the wayside.  But the sun is trying its hardest, and came out for a few minutes when I was weeding this weekend.  It felt downright hot through my lumpy layers of black fleece. 

Oh, good. I see today is Weed Appreciation Day.  A weed, of course, is just a plant that is not in a place you want it to be.  That includes edible, medicinal, herbal plants, and flowers, like the dandelion. In the past, the dandelion was considered a folk medicine cure-all. Used in soups or tinctures or made into wine, dandelion was thought to be a blood cleanser, good for the liver and the kidneys and rejuvenating as a spring tonic.  And best of all it was free, like ramps, wild onions, nettles and sorrel.

We always had dandelion salad on the farm in the spring. The first greens of any kind were a big deal. In those ancient times when I was a child, you couldn't just go to the A&P and buy lettuce all winter long.  I have a distinct memory of watching mom digging little sprouting dandelions out by the root with an old paring knife. You ate the plants very early in the spring while they were still small and tender, so filling and washing a family-sized colander was quite a bit of work.

The Germans and Pennsylvania Dutch always made dandelion salad with a warm, creamy, gooey bacon dressing.  You can still find recipes on the Internet that would be good with any chewy green,  like endive or kale.  I can't remember what we ate "with" dandelion salad, other than dessert, which was always on the table.  Like many farm meals, whatever was in season was always the star attraction.

Bless the animals

Someone sent me this sweet picture of a horse visiting a nursing home. It looked so much like my Sizzle it took my breath away.  She was a spirited mare, but had that same way of lowering her head around children, or when she needed to be gentle.

Old pictures of Amanda saying hi to Sizzle, right before Nova was born.

Miss Amy Trotter hasn't been featured on the blog lately, so here's a cute picture of her posing for fans at the Seattle Kennel Club show last month.  I couldn't make it this year, but Dolly and I went once before and had a good time. We enjoyed seeing Lori and Amy, and patting her clean, bristly head (Amy's, that is :-)

For a miniature pig breed, Amy is definitely in the top size percentile.  I think she is done growing for now, as long as she watches the carbs and sweets.  A big shout out to Lori, who works full time at Boeing and still finds time to get out into community with Amy for their "therapy pig" work. I'm sure their visits have brightened many a day.

Easter around the corner

Nova, Adelina, Finbar, Maya

Amanda sent this picture yesterday.  She takes care of the kids on Fridays, and they decorated Easter eggs after the big girls got home from school.  Looks super fun and super messy.

I got out my little old collection of eggs and bunnies. I always clean the windows inside and out before Easter.  That's my Easter tradition. Easter this year falls on April 16th and I hope it stops raining by then.

Other Easter customs are more ancient. Eggs were once forbidden during Lent, and so symbolized new life at Easter.  The Easter bunny might recall the hare, an Egyptian symbol of fertility.  The origin of the word Easter is unclear, but might be derived from the Anglo-Saxon dawn goddess Eostre, whose feast was celebrated in the spring.  But it doesn't really matter.  Wonderful Easter will always represent the triumph of good over evil, sin, death, and the physical body.


See the land, her Easter keeping,
Rises as her Maker rose.
Seeds, so long in darkness sleeping,
Burst at last from winter snows.
Earth with heaven above rejoices...

~Charles Kingsley

Loveliest of trees

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E. Housman

National Chip and Dip Day

Did you make corned beef this week?  This one from Costco was delicious, just the right amount of roasted, melted fat on top. I cooked it slowly in the oven for about five hours.

Not exactly healthy, but hey, St. Paddy's only comes once a year.  Fortunately, the temptation to nibble is gone now, although I stashed a small piece in the freezer to make corned beef hash and eggs for a special weekend breakfast.

Today is National Chip and Dip Day.  Chips and dips first became popular in the 50's, and every hostess-with-the-mostest had one of these sets hogging space in the cupboard.

That reminds me of a hilarious cooking blog called Mid-Century Menu.  The lady cooks these crazy vintage recipes she finds in old cookbooks, and then makes her long-suffering husband critique them.

In honor of Chip and Dip Day, here's a Corned Beef Spread Recipe (made with canned corned beef, of course) and the hub's reaction. 

 

Jades

Meanings of the word "jade" include:

A hard, typically green stone used for ornaments and implements and consisting of the minerals jadeite or nephrite.

An ornament made of this.

A light bluish-green color.

A bad-tempered or disreputable woman. (I like that.)

An inferior or worn-out horse. (sad)

Jaded: tired, bored, or lacking enthusiasm, typically after having had too much of something. 

And of course, the Jade plant.

Mine are still beautiful and have only lost a few leaves, considering they've been inside the dark house all winter.  Succulents love bright light, but can survive for a while if you don't water them-- these got one small drink in January.

In April they can go in the basement stairway outside, if they still fit and if I can carry them.  Unfortunately they get top-heavy and need transplanting into heftier pots that won't tip over. Big Jades are extremely heavy but fragile and hard to handle.  They like to be left alone, basically, and not hauled in and out of houses. 

The Jade is known as the "money plant," "dollar plant" and "friendship plant" in Asian cultures.  The Jade plant is a popular good luck charm and a symbolic of wealth and prosperity. It's a traditional gift for businesses, and many business owners place a Jade plant near the entrance of their shops. During the Chinese New Year celebrations, Jade plants are set on top of stock and investment certificates so they will increase in value during the coming year.

I stop at the Metropolitan Market occasionally because it's convenient, and one of the few supermarkets left in West Seattle that doesn't involve a parking garage and elevator. So I'll run in for a carton of milk or a loaf of bread-- but it's expensive and I'm too frugal to do my real food shopping there.

By now I'm pretty "jaded" by the high prices at Metropolitan Market, so not much surprises me, like $4 organic cucumbers, $8 jars of salsa-- that sort of thing.  But I was floored by the price of these Jade plants in their floral section: $199.

And they're ugly compared to my natural beauties!  Someone had chopped them them into bonsai forms, planted in cheap, tippy plastic bowls.  Money plant, indeed. Mine must be worth at least $500.  I noticed they've been there a couple of weeks already, so maybe a $200 plant is over-the-top, even for the Met Market clientele?  

Spring?

Officially here, but you wouldn't know it yet.  The first day of spring (surprise!) was grey and damp with a sharp breeze blowing.  My poor eyes were streaming from the cold wind by the time I got to ukulele group yesterday.  Very attractive.

We had a little teaser of nice weather on Sunday. Seattle went slightly crazy, as we do here in the spring. The streets were jammed with distracted drivers rushing about, convertibles with the top down, and there wasn't a parking spot to be had on Alki Beach or near the parks.  I saw people in shorts and t-shirts, walking around pasty white in the chilly air.

According to Cliff Mass, our local weather guru, many Northwest stations have already received their total water year amounts for the meteorological year.  That's right, if there isn't another drop of rain or snowflake for the next 6.5 months (ha ha)  these stations would have their full normal precipitation for the water year.  Goodness.

We're dreaming of dry, warm places and counting down the days until our little Palm Springs vacation next week. 

Mandala

I started a new Granny square project, and when John saw it he commented that "old people like bright colors."  Very funny.

There's a blog called The Owl Underground that I enjoy reading, written by a lady in the Texas Panhandle.  I can't imagine a place more different from Seattle, but that's the marvel of the blog universe, connecting like-minded people from places you would least expect.  Anyway, she is a very fine knitter and wrote recently about how needlework can meditative. She described knitting as a “back-brain-centric” type activity.  My friend Julie is a superb seamstress and quilter, and I think she would say the same thing. 

I was at Barnes and Noble recently, and they had whole new section just for the mindful magazines. Of course that's a good thing, but the faddishness turns me off.  I went to that meditation retreat with 40 other people who had nothing better to do on a nice Saturday, and by the end of the day I was anxious to get home alone for a bowl of soup and glass of wine.

We don't have to sit on cushions. Just about anything can be meditative if it tamps down the brain chatter.  I think our minds are happier when our hands are busy-- crochet, knit, garden, cook, clean the bathroom, play the ukulele, sharpen knives, ride a horse down the trail.  The activity doesn't really matter if we give it our undivided attention.

The Buddhist monks spend weeks making those painstakingly perfect colorful sand drawings-- then destroy them in a single swipe.

Most of the drawings feature the mandala, a spiritual symbol that represents the universe.

Literally the word "mandala" translates to “center and its surroundings." A center point and a circle, surrounded by some sort of symmetrical design. Not that different from the humble granny square, really. 

The sun shines on our little world

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay. 

Robert Frost

Welcome, Spring!

The Little People

A clip from Darby O'Gill and the Little People (1959).

One of the scariest movies ever made by Walt Disney.

If jigging leprechauns and wailing banshees are a bit much at the top o' the mornin', here's Disney kid Sean Connnery belting out an Irish love song.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

As promised, the cake report

I try to not say "OMG" in any text, blog or email, but-- OMG, what a cake.  Was it that chopped up TJ candy bar?  The pinch of black pepper?  The whiskey?  The coffee? The extra dark Hershey's cocoa powder?

Or the fresh whipped cream.  What a dense and delicious dessert, almost like eating a dark truffle,  but not cloyingly sweet.  That recipe made an enormous cake, so I squirreled away half in my little freezer for later.  

It stopped raining briefly yesterday afternoon and a strange, blinding light appeared in the sky. A real sun break.  I ventured out like a blinking mole from its burrow to have a look at the soggy garden.

Weeds growing everywhere! The crocus were flattened from the rain, but the daffodils are finally starting to bloom and the tulip leaves look sturdy poking up from the mulch.  The garden loves a good Spring drenching, and now we just need a touch o' warmth. 

Chocolate whiskey cake

I woke up with a headache from this dang daylight savings time change. Or maybe I'm fighting off the little girl germs I brought home over the weekend.  It's still pouring rain in Seattle, but at least it's a warmish rain now.  Instead of heading to the gym early with the other head-achy drivers, I decided to make a cake from one of those Internet collections of St. Patrick's Day recipes.  This from the New York Times, my newspaper of choice.

OK, getting down a bottle of bourbon at 7 am doesn't sound like the best idea with a morning headache-- but you'd have to ask an Irishman about that.

 "Hair of the dog" breakfast cake

This is a fairly simple but rich recipe, whisked up in separate bowls and baked in a spring-form pan (make sure yours doesn't leak, or use a Bundt pan.) It's my kind of baking, when you don't have to get out the stand mixer.

As you can see, it makes quite a hefty cake and looks like it serves about 25.  It needs a dab of vanilla ice cream or whipped cream. Anyway, I'll give you John's opinion tomorrow.

Chocolate Whiskey Cake

• 12 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces, more for pan
•  3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I used Hershey's Special Dark)
• 1 ½ cups brewed strong coffee (the dregs of the pot this morning)
• ½ cup Irish whiskey
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup light brown sugar 
• 2 cups all-purpose flour 
• 1 1/2 tsp. baking soda 
• 3/4 tsp. salt
• ¼ teaspoon black pepper
• ⅛ teaspoon ground cloves
• 3 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 cup mini semisweet chocolate chips (I chopped up a Trader Joes 85% chocolate bar)
• Powdered sugar, for serving 

1. Heat oven to 325 degrees. Butter a 10-inch spring form pan. Dust with 2 tablespoons cocoa powder. 
2. In a medium saucepan over low heat, warm coffee, whiskey (you could also use bourbon or brandy)  12 tablespoons butter and cocoa powder, whisking occasionally, until butter is melted. Whisk in sugars until dissolved. Remove from heat and cool completely.
3. In a bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, salt, pepper and cloves. In another bowl, whisk together eggs and vanilla. Slowly whisk egg mixture into chocolate mixture. Add dry ingredients and whisk to combine. Fold in chocolate chips.
4. Pour batter into prepared pan. Transfer to oven and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center emerges clean, 55 to 65 minutes. Let cool on a wire rack, then remove sides of pan. Dust with powdered sugar before serving.

Feeling out of it?

You are not alone. Daylight savings time was first introduced as a fuel-saving measure in Germany during World War I.  It may have worked for Kaiser Wilhelm, but in the modern world it leads to an increase in car accidents, heart attacks and work-related injuries.  Not to mention spousal crabbiness.

Today is Albert Einstein's birthday, born in 1879.  It is also National Pi Day in his honor.  Pi is a number that never ends...at least no one has found the end yet, but we keep trying.

Pi has been calculated to over one trillion digits beyond its decimal point. Mathematicians describe it as "an irrational and transcendental number that will continue infinitely without repetition or pattern."

Something to contemplate while making a Pi Day pie.

 

Methow Valley weekend

Look at these big girls!

Having fun at the Trail's End Bookstore in Winthrop.

Grandpa promised to buy each girl a book, so Nova did some careful consideration.

A deer drops by the store...

Then takes a peaceful afternoon nap outside the bookstore window.

And this flock of wild turkeys gobbling around the motel room this morning.  The weather is overcast but dry today and well above freezing. There's lots of snow still on the ground, but melting fast and moving into "mud season."  Having a good time but must head back to rainy Seattle tomorrow morning.