Making, Working, Doing, Experiencing...Being?

So far, in this blog, whenever I talk about what I've been doing, it's been mostly about what I've been making.  Somehow, that's seemed a good measure of my existence.  I have another long-dormant blog about music that I guess is about experiencing, so this one has been about making.

But sometimes I'm too busy for making stuff.  Dinner is just sausage and salad, or leftovers, or going out.  There is no jewelry, no homemade bread, the garden is asleep for the winter.  What the heck am I doing with the rest of my time? 

I've got to learn to value the things I do, even when there is no concrete product as an outcome.  I mean, first of all, I'm a child and family therapist for a living.  I spent ten years in school, and another couple of years writing that damn paper, and in many ways, my career is hugely important to my identity.  I love what I do.  And in that career, I don't make a damn thing, at least not anything tangible.  What I create is clearly not the only measure of who I am, and I think I understood that better six or eight years ago.  Before I really became a Portlander, where making is such a huge part of the culture.  So let's file my job, my career, under doing.  And working, I suppose.  I probably put in 45 hours most weeks, or more (almost never less), with some really rewarding time with kids and with families (okay, and some really crappy time with a few families), and some not-so-rewarding time with documentation and meetings and wrangling people who haven't done what they said they would do, or what their job descriptions say they'll do.  I'm good at these things.  Oh, except the documentation part, I'm always behind on that.  But I work intensely with a small caseload of young, severely mentally ill children and their families, and even with some that don't have families.  I currently work with three of the twelve most mentally ill children between the ages of 5 and 14 in the state of Oregon, by at least one measure.  I do feel some significant satisfaction from doing my job well.  And really, a big part of my job is about being even more than about doing.  I am most effective in my job when I can be the person who makes a child feel safe, and when I can be the person who helps a family feel confident they can try things differently.

The really big thing I did since I last posted oh-so-long ago should be filed under experiencing.  The Lovely Boyfriend and I decided to avoid the increasingly irrelevant holidays-apart-with-our-respective-parents-in-places-that-were-never-our-homes and went to Greece for two weeks around Christmas and New Year's.  Why Greece?  Because it was interesting and cheap.  It is always financially a great idea to go somewhere where the economy is worse than it is here, whether our economy is booming or sucking.  I remember going to Canada a few years ago and spending nine (US) dollars every time I wanted a beer.  No thanks.  Greece has six thousand years of history to explore, and hotels and food are cheap right now.  It was amazing.  We ate well, stayed in beautiful places, and took advantage of both the off-season and the Greek collapse to do it all for less than I even thought possible.  Tons of people have asked me whether the protests were a big deal.  No, not at all.  In Athens, we saw some armed folks looking bored, guarding parliament.  Crete, where we spent most of our time, was marvelously removed and truly amazing.  The towns there are smallish, and some things were closed for the winter or had limited hours, but we had more than enough to do, see, experience, explore, eat, and drink.  My favorite tradition there was that they would automatically charge us a euro for bread, but then would sometimes bring us amuses bouches (there's probably a Greek word for 'tiny appetizers' that I don't know) that they wouldn't charge us for, and nearly every restaurant on Crete and a couple in Athens brought us a little vial of after-dinner drink and a small dessert for free.  One place brought us two desserts, one small and one full-sized.  Cretan after-dinner drinks were always 'raki' (not the kind Wikipedia describes, a Turkish or Eastern European anise-flavored liquor, but rather something much like grappa), also known as tsikoudia.  Very nice.  One place in Athens brought us a mastic-flavored liqueur that was one of my favorite things of the trip.  We saw ruins, and archaeological finds, and 15th-century Venetian-built marvels (and stayed in them! Our hotels for six days in two cities on Crete were close to six hundred years old), and olive and orange groves, and beaches, and monasteries and churches and mosques, and all sorts of history, and ate lamb and sausage and cheese and yogurt and vegetables.  And lots of olive oil.

When we got back, we got four baby chicks that are going to grow up to be egg-laying backyard chickens.  The Lovely Boyfriend is busy designing a coop, and we're both feeding and cooing over and trying to make friends with the chicks.  We made (okay, that's making, I suppose) a brooder box for the chicks out of a salvaged kitchen cupboard.

So from now on, I plan to give some credit to everything I do.  Making is important, but so is working, and doing, and experiencing.  Learning, and trying, and tasting, and exploring.  Pushing myself, growing things, involving myself with people, enjoying, embracing, and even relaxing and letting go.  As long as I can do these things while minimizing buying, using, and consuming, I'm moving in the right direction.  It's not about the product, it's about the process.  And I love process!

As Autumn Blurs Into Winter

The last week in September and the first week in October, it rained like January showed up early.  All my tomatoes exploded and rotted.  It was awful!  I got enough green tomatoes for three little half-pint jars of pickled cherry tomatoes, and not much else.  Thankfully, that kind of weather doesn't hurt the green beans, which kept producing up until the end of October.  I dug up the potatoes, and for six plants, I wish I had gotten more, but three pounds of fingerlings isn't something to turn your nose up at, I suppose.  It's amazing how nice home grown potatoes are.  I mean, you think there can't possibly be that much room for improvement in the potato world, but it's pretty impressive how potatoes out of the garden are that much better.

The last week in September, while my tomatoes were starting to explode, the bathroom was being ripped out and rebuilt from the studs.  The only bathroom.  It is kind of fun to take a vacation right here in my own town, though if it were just for fun, I'd pick something other than the airport hotel offering the best discount.  It was actually pretty nice, a sizeable room and a monster king-sized bed, clean and new, but not much else to recommend it.

The first weekend in October (the only day it didn't rain for probably three solid weeks), The Lovely Boyfriend and I climbed Mount St. Helens.  I have never done anything like that in my entire life.  Even after training all summer, it was impossible, and it was beautiful.  We made it to the top, but I wasn't totally sure until I saw the car that I would make it to the bottom.  8500 feet or so straight up, in about five miles.  Then 8500 feet or so (I was sure it was 20,000) back down.  We emerged through the clouds early on, then scrambled up rocks in the sunshine, wind, and even a bit of snow on the ground.  

I've got to find my next challenge like this!

We've had sun on and off through some of October and a surprising amount of November.  The garden is all ripped out.  Farmer's market pears and asian pears are made into butters.  Apples (from the Portland Nursery apple festival) have been made into pie (though we've got more to go).  Pie cherries and Rainier cherries are in the freezer waiting to be made into jam.  There are a few last fingerling potatoes to be pan-roasted with rosemary.  Garlic is laid out to dry in the basement.  Garlic is planted again for the winter.  Last weekend, we raked two full huge trash-can-sized yard waste bins worth of leaves, only to have the wind and the rain kick in again and leave the yard littered anew within just a few hours.

Now, it seems, it's time for nesting.  Mostly figuratively.  Though the Lovely Boyfriend has been telling me for years that I need chickens.  It didn't take long for me to figure out that this wasn't about me.  HE wanted chickens!  So for his birthday, I bought him A Chicken In Every Yard, the chicken-keeping book from Urban Farm Store, a gift certificate for four chicks, and a promise to help build a coop.  We'll see what Cat thinks about chickens.

Other nesting projects:  We need to paint the living room.  Those frozen cherries need to be turned into jam.  I made, and will make more, no-knead bread.  Soup (lots of soup).  A clafouti with some of the berries in the freezer.  Maple custard.  I bought some cheap port to go in the cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, and I have this great (?) plan to cook some of it down with some sugar into a syrup to make into a port soda with sparkling water from the Sodastream (perhaps the best hundred-and-some bucks I ever spent).  Now here is a toy I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of yet.  I've got a gazillion ideas for ginger ale, fruit sodas, spice and herb sodas (Biwa makes a black pepper soda that is indescribable, fascinating, and delicious), and there has to be a vast world out there of sodas I haven't even thought of yet.  Yet we usually just stick to sparkling water, maybe with a dash of orange bitters. 

Time for me to go to sleep and dream of sugar and bubbles...

Nine Pounds

How do you pass that up?  The little hand-written piece of paper says, "Box pears $4."  "This box?" I ask.  "Really?"  And then I hand him four dollar bills and run as fast as I can before I'm caught.  It must be stealing.  Right in the middle of the farmer's market, I must have somehow just pulled off the heist of the century.  Or at least of the fall fruit season.  I took it home, and there was no way my food scale was going to help me here.  I put it on the notoriously inaccurate bathroom scale, which said nine pounds.

Oh my god...what have I done?

The only answer, of course, is pear butter.  I looked up two recipes, because this was going to take both crockpots.  Of course, I messed up a bit.  So one is pear butter with rosemary, white wine, and white pepper; and the other is pear butter with orange zest, nutmeg, vanilla...and white pepper.  Oops.  But how can it be bad, right?  The whole house smells like the most amazing pear perfume, like that one white wine that smells like pears and flowers.  


I wonder if there's a book that's specific to crockpot canning?  Because this whole "make pear sauce on the stove, then put it in the crockpot to make pear butter" thing is far too many steps and too many dishes.  I just tossed everything in the crockpot, and after a day at work, I came home and ran it through the food mill and put it back in.  But then the whole thing looks like it will ultimately take somewhere between 15 and 20 hours, and I have no idea when it may start to scorch, or whether I'll be at work when instead I should be at home prepping canning jars.


After a fairly cool summer, I was fearing for the tomatoes, but they're going strong now.  They made an amazing sauce with white wine, basil (from the garden too!), and garlic (also from the garden!) for steamer clams.  I would be happy to make that sauce and put it on everything until there are no more tomatoes.  Though tonight, instead, I combined them with some farmers-market chiles, cheddar cheese, and canned black beans to make burritos.  Delicious.


I've been aiming for low-calorie-density food, tons of vegetables and grains with only a little meat or cheese, since I got home from vacation.  Traveling always means eating like crap.  I mean, sometimes I eat an amazing meal or two, but I regret it the next day.  Probably the best thing I ate all week I was on the east coast was the bacon and cheese omelet with tomato and avocado salad that my little brother made, though.  Simple, but made by a damn good cook.  "Boston is not a food town," he told me, and from my experience, he was sorta right.  I'm sure there are amazing places to eat there, like any city, but I sure didn't eat there.  The food was fine, and there was a little coffee shop in Cambridge that did simple things that were usually pretty delicious.  Quiche, pastries, sandwiches, that sort of thing.  


Bumbershoot, Seattle's big music festival, was pretty much a total bust on the food front.  In Portland, a big to-do like that would have some kick-ass food, with the best food carts duking it out to be a part of the event.  Seattle's laws don't make food-cart culture easy, though, so the options were standard festival crap like the yakisoba stand, the falafel-and-gyro stand, and the corn-dog-and-elephant-ear stand.  The pelmeni stand was a relative highlight, and discovering that there was a burrito stand hidden away in a corner was kind of a revelation (oh, there are beans here!).  Deep fried sweets on a stick was a mistake.  No matter how curious you are, the deep-fried pudding is NOT a good idea.  While in Seattle, however, we did discover this damn good ramen place called Samurai Noodle.  The half-shoyu, half-tonkotsu broth is the most amazing liquid ever to touch noodle.  I've been a ramen fiend since Lucky Peach #1 came out, and this was both remarkably creative and deliciously authentic (these two things do not always go together).


Speaking of ramen, Portland has exploded in marvelous places to get a bowl of alkaline noodles or whatever other small Japanese plate strikes your fancy.  Biwa pioneered the pan-Japanese perfection, several years ago, and has cornered the market for a long time.  A few izakayas have come on the scene, but haven't seemed to have the foodie cred that Biwa pulls.  But then, a few months ago, Mirakutei was born, and got the buzz like mad.  And I've got to tell you, I have never in my life spent a dollar that has made me as happy as the dollar I spent to get an egg in my ramen there.  Delicious ramen, for sure, but that boiled egg...I have no idea what they do to it, but it was the most amazing thing I have put in my mouth.  And then, just a few weeks ago, Wafu hit the scene.  It doesn't even have a website (restaurants not having websites makes me want to cry).  The Lovely Boyfriend and I hit the D Street Noshery cart pod looking for a light snack one night, and almost nothing was open.  We ended up in a long, friendly conversation with the Oregon Ice Works guy (go try his frozen astoundingness!), and he noted that this place had opened just a few blocks down the street, and we gave it a shot.  We weren't hungry enough for ramen, so I'll have to report back on that later, but everything we did eat was just about perfect.  Onigiri stuffed with shrimp and rolled in bonito flakes...utterly inspired!  


Perhaps the perfect melding of my own personal zeitgeist right now would be for me to make my own ramen, featuring my garden produce.  Though I'm not quite ready to make my own noodles.  Or onigiri.


Okay, back to reality and two bubbling crockpots of not-quite-yet pear butter.

The Busy Season

First off:  Nicoise salad.  From my garden.  Well, I didn't grow the tuna, olives, or eggs (though if my boyfriend had anything to say about it, I'd be growing the eggs).  But I grew the lettuce that was the bed under the salad, the potatoes (my first of the year!), green beans, cherry tomatoes, and basil.  And I made the dressing, which is a little like growing it, but not at all like that. So despite the cool early summer and the worries that I'd never get anything to grow, and the hard work, it is suddenly worth it.  

The rest of the summer has been pretty wildly busy with a music festival and all the business that goes into being on a committee that puts one on.  Summer can be the slow season at work, but not when 1/6 (or more) of the therapists are on maternity leave or changing jobs at any given time for...well, it's been nine months so far, with another two months to go before the last one is back from maternity leave.  Makes me want to get pregnant just to get a break.  My last big project has been trying to train to climb Mt. St. Helens.  I've got my passes, and my motel room booked...now I just need the lungs, thighs, and knees to actually pull it off.  

Back to the garden:  I've discovered that the tree in the backyard that sheds all those nutshells is actually a filbert tree.  The squirrels manage to eat about 9 out of every 10 nuts before they even fall (you're supposed to harvest them after they fall out of the tree), leaving me with maybe a half a pound of hazelnuts drying in the basement.  We'll see if they're any good.  The garlic is all harvested, and the black raspberries (and just a few red ones) were delicious.  One of the four tomato plants died before it could really even flower, but the other three look amazing.  It's been too cool for the peppers, so I have just three tiny ones on the two plants.  One of the three blueberry bushes we planted this spring actually gave us a couple dozen berries this year, which was a nice bonus.  The artichoke actually grew (this spring, I thought it would stay six inches tall forever, and that the slugs would then eat it down to the ground), and I'm going to get one nice big one and maybe two babies.  I've got some lettuce (second time's the charm, after cabbageworms and aphids ate the first batch), basil, sage, thyme, and rosemary.  The cabbageworms are back to work on the parsley (sigh).

At one point this spring I was disappointed that I didn't get more grass dug up for more garden.  Now I don't know what I'd do if I had managed that!  I would like to get some fall things planted for overwintering.

The last garden note is that I'm experimenting for the first time with non-food plants.  The lovely boyfriend is a big fan of jasmine, so we planted some to twine up a privacy fence, and so far, so good.  The roses that came with my apartment, and the roses and hydrangea that came with the boyfriend's house, I've adopted out of necessity, but this was a choice.

What I've noticed lately is that time goes so fast when I'm busy all the time.  It makes it really hard to be in the moment, and every deadline and new challenge comes at a rush.  I've got a couple of vacations planned, and I don't know if that will ease things, or just make life a little more hurried.  In about a week, we're going to Bumbershoot music and arts festival in Seattle, taking an extra-long five-day Labor Day weekend.  I'll go back to work for one day before we head out again, this time to Boston.  Boyfriend's got a conference out there, and a best-friend-from-high-school whom I haven't even met yet, and the friend's new wife neither of us have met.  Once his conference starts, I'll go visit my brother in Connecticut for a couple of days before heading home.  I'm counting that all as one big two-week vacation.  More off in the distance, we're increasingly seriously planning two weeks in Greece around Christmas.  No plane tickets yet or anything, just a guidebook and some vague ideas.  It sounds more fun than Arkansas, or even Myrtle Beach...and we might as well be fair and slight both sets of parents, rather than either his or mine.  That was actually the original, admittedly a bit passive-aggressive, motive for traveling for Christmas.  Spend the holidays together without having to pick one family over the other.

Next up:  Cherry jam!  Two kinds.  And more canning, which I haven't done a ton of this summer.

P.S.  The strawberry-balsamic-thyme jam turned out awesome.  Like regular strawberry jam with just...something.  Depth, mystery, richness.

Check! Check! Check!

I'm checking things off lists left and right.

First off, I finished moving.  After five solid months of a carload of things here and there, I hired movers for the last of the stuff (check!), had a yard sale (check!), donated all the yard sale leftovers to Community Warehouse and Free Geek, a couple of organizations I admire greatly (check, check!), cleaned the place (check!), actually moved the compost bin and all the compost (check!), and returned my keys (check!).  Whew!

Then I joined some sort of wellness challenge at work.  The list of things I get points for is totally random and disorganized.  I got up this morning and took a multivitamin (check!), made a meal (breakfast) at home (okay, I scooped last night's dessert of strawberry-rhubarb pudding cake into a plastic container to take to work, but still, since I didn't eat out, check!), ate five servings of fruits and veggies by lunch (check!), came home and made dinner at home (ditto check!), then went for a very long walk...to Beermongers for a Raging Bitch Belgian IPA from Flying Dog that was rad, a marvelous balance between Belgian candy spice and IPA bitter/aromatic hops (I get a point for each 10 minutes of walking... checkcheckcheckcheckcheckcheck checkcheckcheckcheck...!!!).  I'm trying to decide whether it's fair to count drinking a delicious beer and watching the 9th inning of the Twins beating the Mariners as "Doing something that makes me feel good" for 20 minutes or more.  I mean, I have to fill in what that thing is, and I'm not sure "sports-watching beer-drinking barstool-potato" won't get disqualified.  But damn, it sure felt good.  Given that I'm turning this thing in to Human Resources every week, I'm also trying to decide what to do about good sex.  Healthy, good for me physically and mentally, absolutely.  Do I really want to report how many times a week for a point apiece?  Um...I'll get back to you on that.  Before bed, I plan to collect a few more points for writing in my journal (okay, blog), drinking another glass of water to make eight, volunteering (I've got some nonprofit-related emails to return), and flossing my teeth (hey, decades of dentists haven't convinced me, but make it a competition and I'm on that shit!).

Things that aren't on this checklist that really ought to be:  Eating breakfast.  I'm terrible at it.  Eight or more hours of sleep would be another good one.  I'm pretty consistent in getting more than 7 and a half.  I'm going to count going out to see live music as one of the "things that make me feel good."  I think I only get to list three of those things per week, though (though each one I can check every day for a point).  This diversity/ADHD in hobbies is going to kill me on that front.  What about learning something new?  I get "exploring a new physical activity" as an option, but there isn't a whole lot I've never done even once that I can fit into a Tuesday evening.  I guess I could try an introductory karate class, but I'm probably not experimenting with kayaking or kiteboarding or skydiving every day for a week.


Things I'll be doing to kick some ass in this wellness competition thing:  Crafting.  Finally, some impetus to really make me get back to making some stuff and keeping up my Etsy site!  Gardening.  Those tomatoes have got to get in the ground, and that compost has got to get laid down.  Biking to work.  It's only seven blocks or something, that really ought to be an easy three points per day. 

Also work-related, I've discharged three clients in the past two weeks, and I'm down to four.  That's just crazy.  I'm getting caught up on paperwork!  I hope.  I've got a ways to go.

Next on the to-do list: Sunburn!

Holy shit was it beautiful out today.  Beautiful!  The sun was shining, it was about 70 degrees, it was real spring to go along with May Day.  I spent the entire day, literally, in the yard.  My back is sore, my thighs are sore, my ass is sore, and it feels wonderful.  I have approximately 600 bulbs, almost entirely dug out of a 12-square-foot area, mostly (400 or so) some sort of bluebell-like thing (the closest I can come up with is Spanish Bluebells) and about 200 daffodil bulbs.  I could rip up the yard and do it all in flowers in what I dug out of that little spot behind the fence.  And then I dug up some dandelions (maybe 0.2%) and raked up some winter-leftover leaves.  Today was all about the yard, and I didn't leave home.  (Then tonight, for fun, we watched Roman Holiday...such a wonderful movie.  All about running away for the day and forgetting everything just to have fun.)  Oh, yeah, and I made biscuits and eggs over-easy for breakfast.  For the record, until I have a pastry blender, I don't intend to ever cut butter into anything.  Ever.  Sheesh, that was hard!  But the biscuits are pretty delicious.


Yesterday, I put a big push into moving.  "She's still doing that?" you're thinking?  Sadly, yes.  But...and this is big...yesterday I managed to get all my CDs packed!  Now all I've got to do is hire movers for a half dozen pieces of furniture that won't fit in my car, deal with the yard stuff and the basement storage, and have a yard sale.  Whew!  We also went to the farmer's market (the big one at PSU, my favorite) for some chard and collards, radishes, black trumpet mushrooms, bok choy...and ribs.  That was Lovely Partner's project for today, and they were delicious (he also tossed the bok choy on the smoker which was lovely, though needs some adjustment so the leaves don't end up crispy).  We found a recipe for winter greens pesto that sounds like an awesome thing to do with the chard and collards.  A week ago I made a wild sorrel pesto that was pretty good, too.  I tossed it into some (from a box) mac and cheese this afternoon and I was pretty pleased with the results.  The plan for the mushrooms is a quiche, because the black trumpets have such an affinity for eggs.  

The one thing I didn't get done this weekend was a hike.  I was going to do that today, but I was totally wiped out by crouching and wresting bulbs out of the clay for hours on end.  My plan is to work up to being able to hike up to the top of Mt. St. Helens.  Well, that and I didn't make anything that wasn't food, I suppose.  I dug stuff up rather than making stuff.

I feel creative.  I feel productive.  And yet my only visible end products are consumed (or composted) by the end of the week.  Huh...I think I'm okay with that sometimes.  

P.S.  The potatoes are sprouting!  A couple dozen leaves!  I am a real gardener officially for this year!

Sprouts

It's later in the spring than I'm used to, but I'm finding my enthusiasm again!  It's poking through the ground, a little late thanks to the cool and wet spring, but little green shoots of it are unfurling.  Two leaves, then four, then those leaves that really look like leaves...

THINGS I AM EXCITED ABOUT:

MAKE IT POP!  This is going to be pretty damn cool.  I've been working with PDX Pop Now!, the organization that puts this on, and I'm pretty bowled over by how great it's going to be.  Laura Veirs, Eric Earley of Blitzen Trapper, Laura Gibson, and Israel Nebeker of Blind Pilot is a pretty remarkable lineup for a show.  The way this annual fundraiser show works is that the organization works to get some pretty significant local talent, then puts on this show in a tiny, intimate venue (the Ace Hotel's event space called The Cleaners), so you get to get all up-close and personal.  I've been twice before, and it's always a memorable experience.  And now I'm a part of the process, so I'm pretty much just buzzing about now, waiting for April 28.

Sherry Vanilla Bean Jelly.  The Lovely Partner's mother, out of the blue, bought us a night at a downtown hotel and dinner out.  We went to Clyde Common, and while we were waiting for our table, we got a cheese plate that came with this amazing sherry vanilla bean jelly.  Turns out it was remarkably easy to replicate.  I googled "sherry jelly" and added vanilla instead of the spices in the recipe.  I also tossed in a cinnamon stick, which turned out to be utterly superfluous, and if I could take it back I would.  But it's still amazing.  I wish I had the money to try it with a good sherry, instead of the cheap Christian Brothers stuff, but damn.  I'm thinking about all the other possibilities.  Tawny Port?  Madeira?  And then there's the whole realm of wine jellies...I want to make one out of a nice floral, fruity, aromatic viognier or a muscat.

Renewal and growth.  At work, I've been working with a too-high number of kids, since one of my coworkers (there aren't many of us) was on maternity leave and is back but only part time.  After a while, it seems like all the kids that only need to be in a residential treatment setting for a little bit and then can move on, have moved on.  Eventually, I have seven-eight-nine kids who seem like they'll never leave.  But as spring buds and flowers burst forth, so have my clients.  I sent a kid home on Friday, and another goes out tomorrow (the most hopeful of the bunch, I think she'll do great).  I've got two or three more who look somewhere between sorta and really ready to move on, and now it's just about making the plans for where.  And at the same time, I see the first shoots of lettuce and radishes emerging in the garden.  Stagnation is turning into growth all over the place.

The Farmer's Market.  I've missed it the last couple of saturdays, but the two saturdays before that, I made it down to the first two weeks of the Portland Farmer's Market.  I've gotten root veggies and greens and vegetable starts for the garden, and pork and salmon, and dried cherries (damn, the Lovely Boyfriend is soaking those cherries in bourbon and Maraska, and they are pretty unbelievably tasty), and always an amazing lunch and some great coffee.