It may just be my imagination, but there seems to be a huge number of ground squirrels running around my yard this spring. Just this morning I counted six scurrying about the garden looking for food. They like nuts, but my yard doesn’t have a single tree or shrub that produces nuts, so what it is they survive on is a mystery to me. They are cute buggers, but do create some damage in the yard with their tunnels. They love living under my patio concrete. They could be one of the reasons my patio floor is sinking. Another reason might be the clay beneath the concrete is drying out and shrinking. Based on the amount of rain that has fallen this spring I suspect the squirrels to be a larger problem than water.
At the same time the ground squirrel population seems to be increasing, I have seen fewer regular tree squirrels. I know for fact that I have driven the tree squirrels out of the yard as I did all the birds. The simple answer is I stopped feeding the buggers, but I also don’t have the pleasure of seeing their antics on and about the feeding station. One of my hobbies has been to invent schemes to outwit tree squirrels in their attempt to raid the feeders. The internet is loaded with inventions and videos demonstrating the intelligence and athletic ability of squirrels jumping, stretching, squeezing around obstacles to get the seed. . Stay in place has cut my activities and inclinations in those regards. Instead, I hunker down writing blog posts, pulling weeds, and grinding wood.
Last evening, I was surprised by my youngest grand daughter. She came to deliver a mask I ordered from her. She is a creative little person (5′-6′) who jumped at the opportunity to help me out with a custom mask. (www.creatingbyjenna.com) Last month she painted a pair of gym shoes for her friend in Arizona. Michael Jordan never had shoes like these. I like the mask so much I will wear it about town with pride. I’ll also use it as my Facebook marker.
The big news today is Illinois’ move toward phase three COVID-19 policy. The news is buzzing about things opening up, mainly restaurants. The hook is that they may allow only outdoor seating and must provide social distancing. That means in Frankfort we will have about a half a dozen restaurants available for some thirty six tables. Outdoor venues in our town are available, but in very limited numbers even when there is not need for distancing. Regardless, plans are being formulated by businesses for opening again.
Frankfort has a rather unique venue just outside the village limits which has become a popular place over the last ten years. CD&ME opened as a place to have catered events. Realizing that the business of catering large events leaves them with a very expensive venue 5-6 days a week they dreamed up various ways to make it busier. One of the things it has become popular for is their Thursday night concerts through the summer. They have several buildings that open up around a beautiful patio area and several outdoor stages. You pay to get in and then buy drinks or food to your hearts content.
Rumor has it that next Thursday, 4 June 2020 they will open with a parking lot concert. Limit 100 cars parked in every other parking slot. A band will play and a food vendor will have a rolling cart with food available. Drinks are BYOB. Cars will be limited to four occupants. That can make for four hundred people in one big party, or rather one hundred separate car parties. What ever, the town is buzzing with anticipation. I just want to be able to get a haircut.
Meanwhile the COVID-19 confirmed cases in Will Township is still at 104 and growing. The virus lives among us. I am curious to know just how this virus spreads so quickly and what mechanism does it use to jump. I am sure a lot of scientists would also like to know the answers. A new report today suggests that the virus doesn’t spread from surfaces as easily as we thought. That points more strongly toward human to human contact, but how does it do it? I can see the obvious like coughing and sneezing, but I haven’t seen another human coughing or sneezing, no matter where I am.
If anyone spreads this thing it will be health care workers who touch people while attending to them, Taking temperatures, blood pressure, swabbing, drawing blood, etc. What I don’t see is how normal day to day activity of shopping is dangerous. Another thing I have trouble understanding is why is it so much dangerous in nursing homes? What are they doing in those places? I’d also like to know the death rate for people in th seventy-eighty age group that are not in nursing homes.
Even though I am in my eighties, I don’t feel or think like I’m eighty, in fact I feel like fifty, so does that makes me less vulnerable? Nature is an amazing process. If we ever figure it out we will be transporting from planet to planet with Star Trek’s transporter beam.
This stay in place business has made me light headed. very morning is a hangover. I must be enjoying the wine by consuming more than usual. The hangover gets me going much later in the day. It seems like I drag my sorry ass behind me like an anchor.
Yesterday, I finally accomplished a new goal, I cooked another one of Mom’s favorite dishes, toltutt kaposta with umlauts over the o’s and an accent over the a. In our language it is simply stuffed cabbage. I watched my mother roll these beauties out in the kitchen too many times, but when it came time to remember what she did, I drew a blank.
As usual, I watched videos of my favorite cook Oma making stuffed cabbage. Oma is currently ninety-two years old and reminds me of my mother. She concentrates on Hungarian and German recipes. What a piece of cake this is, I thought. Wrong! I never handled a cabbage before and got into serious trouble with blanching. The pot I used for this gimongous head of cabbage was just a tad too small. Blanching is a pretty simple process, but since this was the first time I was doing it I made it hard to do.
Mixing the meat with rice, and spices was easy, but when it came to handling the cabbage leaves I was all thumbs. Mom’s recipes leave out all the basic stuff you need to know when cooking. Like how to trim the main rib of a cabbage leave to make it more pliable. The next thing she left out was stuffing the leave and closing it around the meat. That is a practice thing. Mom had been stuffing cabbage leaves since she was twelve, and for her it was an automatic process. Here hands and fingers were so well conditioned from repetition that it was automatic. For me it was a comedy of errors, I was all thumbs. I managed to make about twenty rolls and learned my next mistake was also my first mistake, the pot was a tad too small. I had cabbage rolls stacked to within a half inch of the rim.
Miraculously, I completed the job and ate stuffed cabbage for supper last night. It is not 100% KETO, but it is close. The only non-KETO ingredient is rice. The whole process got my mind off the COVID-19 b-s for a few minutes while I struggled with stuffing and wrapping the rolls.
The kitchen was a mess after I finished as it always is after making something for the first time. Lucky me, the dishwasher was broken and the repair man didn’t come until today so I had to wash all the stuff by hand.
At my Tuesday Night At The Stray Bar Club Zoom meeting yesterday I learned about two things:
1. CD&Me a local entertainment venue is going to open under strict guidelines the first week of June. It will be a parking lot event limited to one hundred cars spaced one car apart. There will be a live band entertaining and a roll out bar for food by the Dancing Marlin. Adult beverages will not be sold but will be permitted (bring your own). Admission is by ticket bought online.
2. One of our group told us a story about her great grandson who is making a ton of money off videos on Youtube and Tik-Tok. I searched Youtube for him and found his videos. They are stupid of course, but he is a very energetic and out-going personality and pulls off his stunts with his girlfriend Mariah. As an example the video I watched had 39,000 likes. As another example this blog GrumpaJoesPlace is lucky if a post gets ten likes. I guess I’ll have to start doing dumb stuff if I want to make some money doing this. The funny thing is I feel like I am doing dumb stuff when I write these posts. Another example is my own grand daughter who writes for a blog called Fan Fiction and gets 5-10 thousand views per post. While my daughter-in-law in Michigan has a blog about her horse hobby and will get hundreds of views for a post. On my best day if I get fifty views and two likes I feel I’ve reached the pinnacle of success.
Making money in the digital world is for the very young. We old folks will only shake our heads in wonderment as to how it can be. I see it happening, I believe it is happening, but I’ll be damned if I can make it happen.
After a slow start, I made a day out of it yesterday. The sky was grey and oppressing, it looked cool outside, so many excuses to not go out into the garden. Instead, I sat by my desk and wrote Day 60. I don’t even remember today what it was about, but it happened. This is a similar day. My big excuse today was I am waiting for the Maytag repairman, really. He hasn’t been this lonely guy trying to stay busy while calls for repair never come. I can tell you this, This is the second time I’ve called in four months. The first time was for my relatively new washing machine, nine months old. It just quit working. Thankfully, it cost me nothing because of the warranty. This time it is my dishwasher. The latch to open and close the door is broken. Once it is locked I need to put my foot up against the cabinet and yank with two hands to reopen it and to retrieve my dishes. At least this machine is ten years old.
I finally made it into the garden by 2:30 in the afternoon. The chore was to thin the irises out of the pond. Irises grow with a strange root system. They aren’t called roots they are rhizomes. They don’t grow down into the ground but kind of surf the top. What the books don’t say however, is that the rhizomes send out roots.
When my pond was brand new, I planted a single iris near the edge. In the past twelve years that single plant kept expanding and now cover an area of six feet by four feet. That is way to large a bed for a single species of flower in my small pond. It has to shrink.
June 15, 2008 June 11, 2018
The design of the pond is simple. A kidney shape with an ess-shaped stream flowing from a waterfall. The water falls into an widened area almost like a mini pond and then meanders about twenty feet to the big pond where it widens. What I found out yesterday was that the mouth of the stream had narrowed by fifty-percent. The mass of irises had grown its way across the mouth. Had I not ripped them out, within another few years they would have blocked the stream . Another finding was that below the rhizomes was a two inch thick mass of fibrous roots. I literally used a crow bar to pry them loose from the original gravel bottom.
All of these things have been contributing to the water loss I have when the stream is flowing. The thick roots make the stream bed shallower and thus the water runs higher and over the water retaining liner. It will be interesting to watch what happens this summer when I turn on the fall again. Between the grasses that over ran the small pond at the bottom of the fall, and the irises overgrowing the mouth of the stream I was losing a couple inches of water a day from the pond. That did not make me a happy camper.
I just read an article that the irises are prone to getting a disease called iris rhizome root rot. The leaves become soft, and the rhizome root grows mushy. Iris root rot is a caused by Erwinia carotovora, a bacterial phytopathogen. It usually gets inside the rhizome through an opening created by some kind of injury. That last phrase got me. There is a very high chance that I will further lessen the iris crop when this root rot takes over. By cutting and breaking the rhizomes during thinning I injured them and left the ends open which allows the pathogen an entry point. Only time will tell. Next spring is when I expect to see the unintended effect of my work. The sad part is that I have to reduce the bed further which will take another two to four hours to accomplish. The sadder part is that for every two hours I spend working in the garden it takes me two to four days to recover. Thank God at least I am still recovering.
After two days of intense rain we have sunshine again. The wetland behind my house looks like a swamp, filled to the edge of my yard with water. The geese honk on a continuum, probably warning other geese to keep their distance. I haven’t seen any sign of babies yet, but I know they are there. My Mallard ducks are not in the pond, but I know they are close by. Yesterday, I watched the male sitting comfortably in a growth of sedum in the pouring rain with water running off its feathers like they were made from silicone. He was happy. I never saw his mate, but she may have been sheltering her clutch from the pouring rain.
I spent most of the day writing and watching videos. Later I descended into my shop and worked on intarsia. This project is turning out fairly well. It is the fastest I ever completed a piece, one week from pattern to production. Today, I will embellish it to make it uniquely mine.
The virus noise has changed its frequency and now smacks of how people are violating all the government recommended protocols for maximizing safety. For us in the Chicago area it was easy yesterday, because of the rain, but I sense a relaxation all around me. Traffic is heavier, there are more people walking the paths, more bicycles, more picnicking, more people shopping, as compared to a couple of weeks ago when we were still in full hunker. I will say one thing though, almost everyone wears a mask when in a building like a grocery store.
My phone went through an automatic update a week ago and I now have new feature on my weather program. I get a daily update of the latest COVIAD-19 confirmed cases. The very first report I saw showed 47 confirmed, and I was pleased that it was low. Then everyday since, the number has grown to a peak of 147 confirmed in a single day, and today it dropped again to 76. This tells me as I suspected all along that we are lagging New York and our epidemic is still on the rise. This is not the time to let our guard down. On the other hand, our businesses are really feeling it. Our little town has lost three businesses permanently. Thankfully, the sit down restaurants repurposed themselves into carry out places and are doing some business.
Last Friday, I treated myself to a restaurant meal. I dumped my KETO diet in favor of a good old fashioned Italian meal, chicken parmegian with mostacolli, topped off with the restaurant’s signature banana cream pie. KETO be damned, I needed that. Today, I am back on the regimen of low carbs, fat and protein. Since I haven’t lost any weight lately, I found a ketosis meter and test strips to see if I am really on a true KETO diet. My numbers so far have been .3 and .8 just barely in the range. Just like people relaxing the COVID-19 protocols, I have fallen off the KETO protocols. It is sad because I slowed to a crawl just five pounds short of my goal.
It is time for me to sneak off to the grocery store for the final ingredient in my mother’s recipe for stuffed cabbage, then the day turns into Cooking for Joe. I wish I had the sense to video my cooking, everyone could see how sloppy I am. Maybe that would be the title of my cooking videos “Cooking Sloppy With Joe.”
