A Steak Memory

Poppy's best friend comes home with her from school every Monday to play until her mom comes to pick her up after football practice. This works out very well for the girls, who are in different grades and would otherwise not see each other much.

This means that her friend eats dinner with us every Monday. Last night, we had steak. Before dinner, I asked her friend if she likes her steak more well-done or more rare. She said more well-done, and she accordingly got one of the thinner pieces that wasn't very red.

As I was choosing her piece of steak, I remembered when I was a guest at dinner at one of my best friend's houses, in high school. Her dad was grilling steak, and he asked me how I liked it. Well-done, I replied. The steak he gave me was SO FAR from well-done. It was, in fact, very bloody. 

Her dad was from Texas, which is probably why he considered a steak that was bleeding all over the plate to be well-done. Or maybe he was trying to teach me a lesson, since people who like their steaks rare tend to feel disdain for those of us who do not.

I of course ate the steak to be polite, but I didn't enjoy it.

Most of my family likes their steak pretty rare, which requires some deliberate attention on my part so I don't overcook it. Poppy agrees with me, though, and doesn't like bloody meat, so I usually cook one piece a little more for us.

We never all agree, as usual.

So tell me! How do you like your steak?

 

A Shortage of Wildflowers

Last year was such a great year for wildflowers. We had multiple kinds for months, starting in May and going through until about September.

This year? Not so much.

We just didn't get rain. At least, not early enough. It was so dry in the spring that nothing grew. No grass, no flowers, no nothing. The rains finally started, but too late for most of the flowers.

What has been coming is late, small, and underwhelming. Last year at this time, the roads were lined with exuberant yellow clover, vibrant orange globe mallows, and lots of other things. I made so many arrangements. For the dining room table, for the bookcase in the living room, for wherever I felt like putting flowers.

This year everything is stunted, sparse, and limited.

But still! I do have some flowers.

Early-morning arranging.

I do appreciate that the silver nightshade (the purple flowers) has finally recovered after getting mostly eliminated during a poorly-timed hailstorm a couple of years ago.

 

The bookcase flowers are harder because they have to be taller.

The yellow clover and apricot branches do most of the heavy lifting.

Even in lean years, there's always something. A good lesson in general, I guess.

Mission Complete

Poppy and I have been going to all the far-flung churches in our very spread-out parish for the past year. She wanted to see all of them. Most of them are quite old, some are very beautiful, all of them only have Mass once a month.

This past Saturday, we went to the final church. It's not that far from our house--about thirty miles--but it's in quite a dramatic location.

After turning off the paved road.

It's an adobe structure that was sheathed in local cut stone.

This is the only church in our parish that is privately owned. It is also the oldest church in our parish. The family that owns the ranch takes care of it.

Some of the older owners of the ranch are buried right under the church. Their tombstones are under the statue of Jesus there in the center.

Poppy and I climbed up to the rear choir loft, from which we had a good view of the giant pieta at the entrance to church.

Most of the grave markers in the surrounding old cemetery were hand-carved sandstone.

It was a good thing we had time to look around the cemetery before Mass, because this was what was coming towards us as we were going in to Mass.

Dramatic.

The storm hit during the Gospel reading. It was mostly over by the time we left, thankfully, and the dirt road was still passable.

And that's it. Our tour of the parish churches is concluded. It was fun, but I appreciate only having to drive ten miles to our regular church.

Room to Roam (and Park)

Although there are many things about the place I live that are markedly different from mainstream America, one that I am always reminded of when traveling is parking. 

Parking, you say? How can that be much different?

Well, let me ask you this: Do the places you park frequently have enough room to pull through in a crew-cab truck pulling a livestock trailer? No? Mine do.

Where I park at the bank.

Most places here--including schools, municipal buildings, and everywhere in the village--are set up that way because many people are driving such a set-up at any given time. That sort of thing can't be easily backed and turned, so pull-through parking is pretty much always an option.

I don't ever drive trucks with trailers, but I appreciate having parking set up for them. Back when I drove our 12-passenger van daily, I hated going into town and having to park in a small parking lot somewhere. So nerve-wracking to back that thing up in a tight space with cars hemming me in. But it's not something I have to worry about here.

Wide open spaces for cattle, people, and cars. Just the way I like it.

Almost There

Today marks eleven days until the last day of school. And that means . . .

The countdown candy has begun.

We started the countdown candy yesterday, because we always start when there are 12 days left, and we have four-day weeks. This year's candy is peanut M&Ms.

I have also changed the boys' inspirational getting-up music from their usual "Reveille" to "The Final Countdown."

We're gonna make it, one M&M and iconic '80s song at a time.

 

A Vegetable Lull

The current contents of my refrigerator crisper drawers include five medium carrots, two mini bell peppers, and the last few small interior leaves of romaine lettuce. It has been two weeks since I have purchased any fresh produce at a store, and even that was just a minimal stop at a very small store in a very small town.

And yet, I eat salad every day.

I have been doing this by eking out my remaining lettuce with chopped collard greens from the freezer and relying on pickled beets and onions as other add-ins, besides the carrots and mini bell peppers.

Last night's salad before adding the pickled beets from the jar.

Similarly, vegetables for the rest of my family have mostly been coming from the freezer.

Last night's fried rice included frozen peas, collard greens, beet greens, and a few dandelion greens I picked by the back steps.

There's still cooked cabbage, squash, green beans, peas, and corn in the freezers. There is sauerkraut from what I canned last summer in jars on the office shelves.

We have zero fresh fruit right now, but I do still have canned apples and pears and applesauce. Plus some store canned peaches.

It has been a recurring event in my adult life to have periods of time where the stock of fresh produce in my house is very low, but it doesn't really bother me. It's just part of living really far from stores. And it's why I keep fall-back vegetables and fruit in freezers and jars.

Anyway, it just makes it that much more exciting when I do finally get to the store and come home with such thrilling things as oranges, bananas*, and cucumbers. It's the little things in life.

* My children do actually consider having fresh bananas to be a notable luxury. Low standards, as always.

(Not) Free Falling

My sister was here visiting over the weekend with her boyfriend, who is a climbing enthusiast, as well as a climbing teacher. He happened to have a children's harness and all the equipment for climbing with him, and we happen to live near(ish) a canyon with lots of rocks and cliffs.

This was inevitable.

A couple of children weren't feeling well this day, so only Poppy and the middle boy went. The climbing in this canyon is too advanced for kids, but they could rappel down in some places. So that is what they did.

This started, of course, with lessons in safety equipment, how to tie off the rope at the top, and the proper form. I was reassured by how professional and clearly experienced my sister's boyfriend is, not only with climbing instruction in general, but specifically teaching kids. 

My sister rappelled down first, so that she could hold the rope at the bottom for the kids, and also encourage them from down there. Her boyfriend was at the top, getting them started and instructing them as they went.

Small girl, big rock.

Poppy was initially very nervous, but she made it all the way to the bottom and declared it so much fun after her first attempt that she wanted to do more. Middle son was extremely enthused about it all from the get-go.

They rappelled down the same place twice, and then our personal climbing instructor found an even bigger cliff that we could easily access for rappelling*. 

This one was . . . well.

That's a big cliff.

Nothing daunted, down the boy came.

Starting the descent.

He ran the harness back up for Poppy, and she started down.

Not quite halfway.

Poppy had a problem a bit more than halfway down when she got her hand too close to the metal device on the rope that will stop the rope from moving if you need to brake entirely. She got the skin between her thumb and forefinger caught in the device. All her weight was on the rope, so she couldn't get enough slack to get herself free. My sister had to free-climb** from the bottom up to the ledge closest to Poppy, balance with her knee up to set Poppy higher, and then free Poppy's hand.

Super-aunt saves the day.

Poppy wasn't hurt and continued down. Despite that little mishap, she announced that rappelling was the most fun thing ever and she wanted to go the next day. Her brother agreed. We were busy with other things the next day, however, so they didn't get to go again, but it was fun to watch them try something new (and initially scary) and enjoy it so much.

* Being able to get to the top of the drop safely and back up is just as important as being able to get down it. For obvious reasons of not leaving children in the bottom of an inaccessible canyon.

** If my sister hadn't been able to get to her, Poppy could have also been pulled back up to the top, but as she was closer to the bottom and reachable, this way was faster.

Summer Reading, and a Minor Announcement

The bigger boys start school this week, and everyone will be in school in two more weeks, so now's a good time to tell you all about the many books I bought this summer, right? Right.

Most of them were for Poppy, who has definitely become a reader.

Many books.

All the Ralph S. Mouse books

All the Ramona Quimby books

All The Borrowers books

All the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books (except the farm one) in a treasury format

Bed Knob and Broomstick (not as good as the movie, I'm told)

An Episode of Sparrows (I read this--it was fairly good, but not what I was expecting)

Poppy's absolute favorite was the complete Pippi Longstocking collection--three books--although that didn't make it into the photo.

Also not pictured, but for Poppy, I got The Little House Cookbook. 

A couple of books by William Durbin, including Dead Man's Rapids, that were mostly for the youngest boy.

The next Horatio Hornblower book for the middle boy, although he informed me it was in no way as good as the first one so I shouldn't get the rest.

We Live in the Arctic, mostly for the older two boys.

And then later in the summer, one son was remarking that he was thinking of writing an encyclopedia of monsters, which led to us investigating if there is one. We found several, but most of them are either actual encyclopedias for adults that are trying to establish the existence of Big Foot or whatever, or ones geared toward small children.

I did end up getting a DK book about mythical creatures.

The plant book was an impulse purchase.

Because it's a DK book, it's good. Poppy enjoyed this one.

I also got another DK book--bad day for impulse buys--called History Year by Year: The History of the World from the Stone Age to the Digital Age. This was very popular with all three younger children. DK wins again.

And for me . . .

A collection of short stories by Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen, including "Babette's Feast." Similar to Bed Knob and Broomstick, the movie was better, but the stories were okay.

I did not enjoy Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis. Extreme navel gazing, mostly.

I did enjoy Gilead, though I'm trying to decide if I liked it enough to read the sequels.

Not pictured, I got a collection of Erma Bombeck books, too.

For the eldest, I got the Divergent series by Veronica Roth. This is dystopian fiction, which I have no interest in, so I didn't read it, but he requested it and said it was good.

Also requested and enjoyed by the eldest, though I can't vouch for it myself, was Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds.

And now for the minor announcement: I did not renew my contract at the school for this year, which means that while the children are going back to school, and A. will be going back to driving the school bus, I will not be going back. Well, except as a substitute. I did tell them I could continue doing that.

This means I will shortly have more time for reading! Do you have any recommendations for me? Or for the children?

Plants and Things

When we got back from our five-day trip to Colorado, the flowers that had been on the table were wilted and sad-looking. I was quite busy getting dinner and unloading the car, but I made sure to dispose of those sad flowers and find a couple of lilies to put on the table before we sat down to eat.

Simple, but at least not wilted.

Later in the week, I managed something a bit more involved.

We're waiting on the sunflowers. In the meantime, I mostly have a lot of clover and grasses.

These flowers I had on the big bookcase in our living room.

The ornamental sage is starting to bloom, yay!

I actually grabbed that vase and brought it with me to church to put it on the altar by the lectern. I figured it might as well decorate the church during Mass and then I could just bring it home again. There are no other services at our church during the week, so there would be no point in leaving it there.

The hollyhocks in the garden are blooming profusely, despite being extensively damaged by the grasshoppers.

Very cheery, as long as you don't look too closely and see the holes in the flowers and the stripped greenery.

The grasshoppers continue to ravage the garden. They target weird things. Things I didn't even think were edible. Like rhubarb leaves, which are supposed to be toxic.

Obviously not toxic to grasshoppers.

They also ate all the leaves on the garlic plants, of all things. Luckily, the plants were pretty much done growing, so I just dug them all up.

They got to a pretty good size.

The grasshoppers did at least provide some entertainment for Poppy and her friends, who spent some time running through a field to watch the thousands of grasshoppers fly ahead of them.

These are some easily entertained kids.

The beet that is going to seed continues to develop. I discovered as I was bent over weeding around it that the beet seeds have a very sweet smell.

If this actually sets viable seeds, I'm going to have a LOT of beet seeds for next year.

Or maybe the grasshoppers will eat all the beet seeds. We'll just have to wait and see.

The End of the Paschal Candle

Remember when we brought home the old Paschal candle from church to burn? That turned out to be way more fun than I thought it would be.

First of all, it was cool to have such a big candle in the house. It was about a foot tall when we started burning it, which is the biggest candle I've ever had at home. 

Also, it was decorated on the outside with raised wax that burned in an interesting way. For instance, the blue raised cross on the front resisted melting when the wax around it was melting, which resulted in the cross being much more prominent for awhile. The gold paint used on it looked really neat when it melted, too, all sparkly and forming a separate pool of molten wax in the middle of the melted clear wax.

Since this is a Paschal candle, it is lit in our church only for the Easter season, baptisms, and funerals. I decided we would just burn it during the Easter season and then bury the remains.* The Easter season runs from Easter Sunday through Pentecost Sunday, which was last Sunday. We burned it all day on Sundays in that time, as well as a couple of other rainy, dark days. 

By this weekend, all that was left of the candle was a pit in the sand I had secured it in, with melted wax in it. I had sunk the candle down a couple of inches in the sand to make sure it wouldn't tip, so the pit was pretty deep. The heat from the flame continued to melt wax around the outside that then flowed into this pit, and so the flame kept burning, even with no actual candle left.

It was actually really neat to see this, particularly on Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost is the celebration of the Holy Spirit being sent to the church. The Bible story about this describes the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire from heaven coming to the apostles, which made this ever-burning little flame in our house most appropriate.

I kept thinking that surely the flame would go out anytime during the day on Sunday, but it was still burning when I went to bed. A. finally blew it out before he went to bed.

I was kind of curious to see how much longer it would have burned like this, but the children were adamant that Easter was over and so we couldn't burn the candle anymore. Poppy took it upon herself to dig the hole and bury the remains.

She marked the spot appropriately, too.

Thus ends the Paschal candle. We don't replace it at church every year--it's originally about three feet tall, so it doesn't burn down all that fast--which means we won't have one next year, but it was fun while it lasted.

* This candle had been blessed, so it had to buried, not just thrown in the trash.

Resolutely Storebought

A. was in a Walmart the other day in one of the larger towns we sometimes shop in, and on his list were both flour and corn tortillas. He dutifully got the tortillas, and then, while he was stopped and examining the hams, a middle-aged Spanish lady looked in his cart and admonished him for buying tortillas.

"Those are no good!" she said. "I always make my own. Your wife should make your tortillas."

Yes, I know. I should. 

However.

I can make tortillas. I do sometimes make tortillas. But I do not like making tortillas. Anything that has to be made individually is a huge pain when feeding six people, four of whom eat a LOT. Making enough tortillas for all of us to have them with a meal takes almost an hour, and, in the case of flour tortillas, requires rolling them on the counter.

Downer.

If all I was making in a day was tortillas and frijoles--traditional fare here in New Mexico--then I probably wouldn't even think about spending that hour making the tortillas. But I'm not. I'm making bread and pizza and yogurt and cookies and granola and chicken stock and coleslaw and LOTS of meat.

So tortillas are something I am willing to buy, even though, yes, the ones I sometimes make are a lot better than the ones we can buy.

We all make choices about our priorities. And my priority right now just isn't exclusively homemade tortillas. 

I'm okay with this, even if Walmart lady isn't.

So tell me: What is something you have decided is definitely not worth doing for you, even if others don't agree?

Season's Greetings from the Wild West

I never did do a Snapshots post on Sunday, but since many of my photos were of Christmas decorations, let's start there.

The wreath truck-loving Jack made at the school crafting event last week.

Saying he made it is kind of stretch, as in actuality he just chose the things to put on the wreath and pointed where he wanted them, and then I attached them. Because I didn't want him wielding a hot glue gun.

Ditto Poppy and the jars she made into candle holders.

The three in the middle are her new ones, and the two on the outside are older ones her brothers made a couple of years ago.

The jars are painted with glue, then rolled in Epsom salts.

I shocked all the women present by admitting that this was the first time in my life I had ever used a hot glue gun. What can I say? I dislike crafting. And although this was a fun event, I still don't have any great desire to hot glue things.

Anyway!

Although we have several festive decorations up, we do not have our tree. As you may recall if you've read here for awhile, we cut a real tree from a friend's ranch every year. But, since we leave it up until Epiphany--12 days after Christmas Day--I don't want to get it too early. So we usually wait until pretty close to Christmas.

I guess Cubby thought that was too long to wait, so he decided to take matters into his own hands. He brought in one of the many (MANY) tumbleweeds that are choking the fences everywhere . . .

So. Many. Tumbleweeds.

Propped it in an industrial-sized pinto bean can with some rocks, and decorated it.

The other children all contributed an ornament as well.

And then, of course, we had to adapt the song for the occasion. The best I could come up with was kind of lame, but the children liked it.

O Christmas weed, 

O Christmas weed

You blew across the prairie

O Christmas weed, 

O Christmas weed

You blew across the prairie

We brought you in

Inside a can

To celebrate

God as man . . .

I was informed that this cannot take the place of a real tree, and we must still get one of those so there's enough room for the presents underneath, but until then, we have a Christmas weed.

If I may appropriate another carol . . . It's beginning to look a lot like a Western Christmas.

The Sound of Silence

When you look at this picture, what do you hear?

Nothing, right? It's just a picture! There's nothing to hear!

Except that's what I actually heard when I took this photo in that spot.

It's not usually silent on my morning walks. In the summer, there's a cacophony of birds and far more traffic on the paved road a half mile away. Any time of year, there's likely to be at least some wind whistling past my ears.

But in the winter, before the sun is even up, if there is no wind and no one happening to drive on that paved road while I'm walking, I can stop and hear the blissful sound of . . . silence.

I don't know if you've ever really heard silence before. It is certainly pretty much impossible in a man-made environment. It's not very common even in nature. The only times I've experienced true silence are in winter, often after a snowfall, when everything is muffled and the animals aren't moving around**.

But here, even when there isn't any snow, I can sometimes go out for a morning walk and stand still in perfect silence*.

Bliss. And the perfect counterbalance to a season that is, despite all the joy, a very loud one.

* What's funny is that perfect silence actually sounds a bit like faint ringing, I suppose because at such times it's actually possible to hear my own blood moving.

** Which reminds me of my favorite Christmas carol, an Austrian song called "Still, Still, Still." It's hard for me to find good versions of carols like this, because they tend to be sung by large choirs, which sounds beautiful but makes it hard to actually hear the words. Here's an a cappella version by a men's group in which you can hear the lyrics, although it's not my favorite version. 

A Short Rant About Lights

One of my favorite things to put up in the winter are the small white lights that I wind around the decorative iron thing that separates our kitchen from the dining room. 

Light in the darkness.

The lights I use were actually left here by the previous owner of the house, so I have no idea how old they are. 

But I know they must be pretty old, because they don't hurt my eyes.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to have noticed that non-colored twinkle lights now really are white. They're a glaring, stark, absolutely terrible white. The older ones are more yellow. They glow, they don't glare.

One of the strands I had stopped working last year, so I tried buying a new string online. I specifically searched for "warm" white lights. When I plugged them in, however, they were very far from "warm." They were awful.

So now I guess I'll just have to use my last remaining strand until it dies and then I won't have lights anymore. Or maybe by then there will have been a revolution and the people will once again demand lights that aren't an assault to the eyes.

An Unexpected Hit

I was a military child, which meant we moved every few years for most of my childhood. And every time we moved, I would roll up the change that accumulated in what my parents called The Penny Jar. 

Anyone else remember rolling up change in those little paper tubes you would get at the bank? I found it very satisfying as a child to count out the appropriate number of coins and make those neat little rolls that could be exchanged for paper money.

I haven't done that for a lot of years, because our bank in New York had a machine we could dump our change into and it would count it and give us a receipt to be redeemed with the bank teller.

Here, however, we have no such convenient machine. But we do have an old peanut butter jar on A.'s dresser that has been steadily filling with change and needed to be emptied.

So last time I was at the bank, I got some of the coin papers. And last weekend, I sat down and started filling them. I only did one myself before the children started trickling in and asking if they could do it, too.

So they did. And every single one loved it, just as I did as a child.

I'm not a homeschooling parent, but if I were, this would be an excellent school activity. They have to identify all the coins and know what each is worth, plus figure out how many quarters go into a roll that's worth $10. Also, since my method of counting out the coins is making stacks of ten until I get to the amount needed, it's a sort of introduction to multiplication. 

Although the second grader in my house rolled my eyes when I pointed that out. Not so into math, that one.

The one kid who's really into guns loved tamping down the coins with a pencil, pretending he was loading his musket in the Revolution. 

The only downside is that four kids counting out loud and asking for help when they couldn't get their tubes folded over or whatever is VERY chaotic.

But we got it done!

 

The children were all appropriately impressed by how much money was hiding in plain sight in that old peanut butter jar.

So if you, too, have a large collection of change and a bunch of children, go ahead and get some coin wrappers and let them go to town. Free (educational!) entertainment that actually results in money in hand. Doesn't get much better than that.

Changing It Up on Tuesdays

The time has come to end the Tuesday Tips. I just don't like giving advice. Who am I to tell other people what to do? So, I won't.

I can do that, you see, because here if nowhere else, I am Supreme Ruler.

So, what will I do instead? Who knows! I used to write every day--every. single. day--for years with no idea what I would write about the next day. I no longer write every day, but I think I can probably manage one free-wheeling day a week without short-circuiting my brain.  

I think.

It'll be like those free-write assignments from school. Who can say what might come out of my keyboard?

Let's start now, with some fine randomness.

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I overheard one of my sons at school yesterday tell someone, "When I tell people in New York that I live in New Mexico, they always say, 'You live in Mexico?!' And when I tell people here that I'm from New York, they always say, 'Have you been to New York City?'"

It is amusing to me how often people mis-hear "New Mexico" as just "Mexico." It's as if the majority of the country forgets there is a New Mexico. We do generally fly under the radar here, which I actually appreciate.

Just us and the tumbleweeds.

Also amusing is how people outside of New York can't get past the idea that the entirety of the state is not New York City. It's a really big state, and no, none of my children ever made the six-hour drive to New York City. 

I also have to note that I lived in the 50th, 49th, and 48th states* as a kid--in that descending order--and now I live in the 47th. There was a 15-year interruption in my progression there when I lived in New York (the 11th), but I still enjoy the orderliness of this. Which means to keep up the order, next I would have to live in Oklahoma. Stranger things have happened.

* Hawaii, Alaska, and Arizona, respectively.