Snow and more snow

Here's a picture worth a thousand words... Thanks Janice, and everyone who sent us great snow pictures from the east. If you're watching the Vancouver Olympics, you can see just how wet and warm we are in the Northwest this "winter," if you can even call it that.

I hate to flaunt the first daffodil in my garden, but if we have an afternoon of sun this weekend, I'll get out and take a picture. The forsythia is pretty right now, and a few of the early crocus were blooming until our juvenile delinquent squirrels came along snipped them off. I assume, just for the fun of it...

Hope you have a nice Saturday. I'll be avoiding John, who is spending the weekend holed up in the basement reconfiguring the new hard drive on his Apple, which crashed last week. He's been coming upstairs to gloat occasionally, because the Apple repair depot "accidentally" loaded Leopard free, instead of his old Tiger operating system. All you Macs out there will understand that. He's very excited-- if it were me, I'd be peeved at having to learn something new.

The queen of hearts

A few years ago for Valentines Day, I made a batch of sugar cookies for John to take in to the ladies he works with. Hey, I'm a nice person! But once you start a tradition, you can't just forget about it the next year. People might be expecting a Valentine cookie! I don't mind-- and besides, these nice ladies have to put up with John eight hours a day. ;-)
And it gave me a chance to try out the hand-powered cookie dough beater my brother-in-law sent. Works great, Dan.
After my Christmas baking orgy, I thought I'd never make cut-out cookies again. But here I go...
And the decorating part is fun, with a cup of coffee and the right music on the stereo.
Speaking of Valentine's Day, hope you spend a warm and happy Sunday with someone you love. Keep it simple...

Seattle Arts and Lectures

Last night I did something more interesting than eat pasta
and watch PBS reruns. The Seattle Arts and Lectures is a series of live readings and talks by writers and other literary personalities. One of the reasons I love Seattle is that an author's lecture can nearly fill Benaroya Hall on a dark and wet Wednesday night. I don't have season tickets, but go to lectures occasionally with an old and dear friend, which makes the evening even more special. Not to mention a nice dinner before at the Wild Ginger!

Dr. Abraham Verghese (pictured here) spoke last night, and I was looking forward to hearing him ever since I read his first novel, "Cutting for Stone". We often say someone is a "remarkable person," but it would be hard to summarize this man's gifts and great humanity. He spoke simply and brilliantly on topics ranging from fiction writing to the rituals of healing, and the dehumanization of medical care in wealthy western countries. Having practiced medicine in Ethiopia and India, he spoke about how technology and the economics of our medical system are contrary to the most important traditions of doctoring: common sense diagnosis, listening to patients, and the healing effect of simple hand's on attention. And as for medical school, he mentioned the "gateway to medicine in America is too narrow." The education system has not changed in decades, and now we need broader and more varied gifts and talents.

We tend to think of physicians as left-brained: logical, rational, analytical, objective. Yet here is a man who quotes T.S. Eliot, defends fiction reading and writing, and along with teaching and practicing medicine at Stanford, in his "spare time" writes beautiful novels in his second language. And it truly spoke to me when he said, "we write to understand how we feel."

"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 three score years and ten
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy years 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
1859-1936

A nice poem but, oh dear-- the math. A score is 20 years, and A.E. Housman was only 20 when he wrote this poem. He expected to live a total of "three score years and ten," and that would be age 70. So the young fellow is bemoaning the fact he has only FIFTY more springs to see the cherry blossoms. Ah, youth. Boo-hoo. If you flip flop the numbers, I have about a score of springs LEFT...

Not to be morbid, but a thousand years would not be long enough anyway to look at cherry trees like these. I took this picture last spring when I was taking classes at the University of Washington. There's nothing that spectacular blooming here yet, but soon. Yesterday I noticed the earliest flowering trees along our banana belt street are just starting to show some pink and while color. It was a pretty sight in the afternoon sunlight.

A new "job"

Over the years, I've had fun volunteering at all types of different non-profits, but it's always more rewarding to find a "job" that exactly matches my interests and work experience. So I'm really excited about a new project I've started at the Museum and History and Industry.

In January I wrote about our local archivist's group tour of MOHAI, and how impressed we were with the staff and collections. So-- I decided to send in a volunteer application, and as it turns out they're happy to have me work at the museum archive a few hours a week. Right now I'm working with memorabilia from the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. My job is to write a detailed description of a collection of records, called a "finding aid." The definition of finding aids from the Society of American Archivists sounds dry as dust (as most archival terms are) but if you love history and research, writing a new finding aid is one of the most interesting things archivists get to do.

Finding aids are important, because they give researchers background information on collections, and help them find exactly what they need. Here's a good example of a finding aid from the Northwest Digital Archives:

http://nwda-db.wsulibs.wsu.edu/findaid/ark:/80444/xv64650

I'm also learning about the many sources of local history. Of course the other bonus to working in this museum is just being in the museum. Each time I amble my way past the exhibits down to the basement library, I see and learn something new. The location of the museum is nice too, right on Lake Washington. Not to mention a birding trail and free parking, a big deal in Seattle! So, I'm happy to go down to the cocoon of the library a few hours a week, and forget about horses that won't eat their hay, and gardens that need weeding.

Cottage pie

I don't usually get excited about making (or eating) casseroles, but we put a big dent in this cottage pie the other night. It was cold and dark, and we were hungry and tired. Cottage pie is just an old-fashioned beef mince (hamburger) pie with a crust of mashed potato. If you use lamb mince instead of beef, they call it a shepherd's pie.
The potato has a fascinating history. It's hard to imagine England, Ireland or Russia without the potato, but spuds weren't introduced until the 1700's. They were considered food for the poor, but even the Russian peasants refused to have anything to do with the potato until they were starving in the famine of 1774. Frederick the Great gave them free potatoes, and soldiers were sent out to "persuade" people to eat them. What an image! The Irish hated them too, at first. But nothing like starvation to whet the appetite.

All types of meat and potato pies are popular in Great Britain. In early cook books, cottage pie was a way to use up leftover meat and potatoes, and to this day it's a popular Monday night supper, made with meat and gravy from Sunday's "joint." I threw mine together with what I had on hand, but you can find hundreds of recipes on the Internet, some of them elaborate with mushrooms, tomatoes, cheese, etc. I stumbled upon a website called Cooking for Engineers and ran away as fast as I possibly could. But if you like following fussy charts and precise, illustrated directions, this may be the cooking site for you.