Bloggery - Highlights - Archives

Trav Meets a Harrow

September 25, 2010 - View Single Entry

Late Friday afternoon Trav and I were returning from a bike ride. Just after turning on to Halcyon Way, we heard a familiar rumble behind us. Trav tried to do a 180: yep, it was the UPS truck. We pulled into the nursery school driveway to let it pass, then we followed. Woo-whee! Prey drive and pulling are closely related, so the malamute people tell me, and I believe them. Trav chased the UPS truck, and I hardly pedaled at all the rest of the way home. I wish I had a picture of Travvy running, but even if I'd had my camera with me I needed both eyes to watch for sand and rocks and both hands to steer around them. It was so cool. I can't wait to get a scooter!

Yesterday there were two vintage Allis-Chalmers tractors on the big field at Misty Meadows, along with a flatbed trailer that was nearly as old. The Sheriff's Meadow Foundation (SMF), the conservation group that owns the fields, has been plowing a large section of the field in its ongoing effort to keep the meadow a meadow -- left to its own devices, the meadow would be a scrub oak jungle in a very few years. Travvy tried to challenge the trailer to a duel. Once again, I wished I had my camera.

This morning I slipped my little digital camera into the hip pocket of my shorts. One tractor and the trailer were gone, but the other tractor was on the other side of the field, attached to a harrow. Here is Trav challenging the harrow to a duel:

Too bad my camera doesn't take snapshots with sound. Trav was unable to get the harrow to break and run so he could chase it, but he was able to prevent the harrow from chasing him. So I'd call it a tie.

Trav, at any rate, was quite pleased with his morning's work.

Coming of Fall

September 20, 2010 - View Single Entry

My tomatoes have me looking at the end of summer and coming of fall from a different angle. I don't especially like summer. Most years, including this one, it settles in like an occupying army and you just have to live with it till it goes away. I love fall. Fall slips in, darts away, plays catch-me-if-you-can. Night closes in slowly from both ends of the day, polishing the remaining daylight hours till they sparkle, and the leaves rarely stop rustling.

This year, my tomato vines are still laden with green tomatoes, and I can't help noticing that they're ripening more slowly as direct sunlight decreases and the temperature slips downward. Yesterday morning, with a 7:15 boat to catch, I rose in the dark, at 5:45. When Trav and I headed out, about 6:20, the sky was getting lighter, but the sun wasn't up and the thermometer on Malvina's dashboard said 45 degrees. I had a long-sleeve shirt on and a sweatshirt over it, not to mention honest-to-cool-weather jeans. It was chilly, not cold, but once the temperature hits 45, freezing becomes thinkable. Come on, green tomatoes: Ripen, ripen, ripen! There's no time to waste!

I picked 18 this morning, after not picking for several days. Six are green-tinged enough that I set them in a window to ripen another day or two. The inside staircase that goes down to my bathroom has two oblong windows. That's where I put them. The sill of the window beside the front door isn't high enough to be safe from the jaws of Travvy, who has a taste for tomatoes, as for so many other things.

Dog Trials

September 19, 2010 - View Single Entry

Was it only a year ago that I went to my very first dog shows?  I was accompanied by Travvy, who had never been to a dog show either but since he was only one and a half at the time this was not a big deal. I, on the other hand, was 58, and here I was stepping into a world I'd been only dimly aware of all those years.

This weekend those two shows came around again, and once again off we went, in a caravan with our best dog friends. What a difference a year makes -- and maybe that's why it's especially cool to be beginning a new cycle, in which it's not quite so new and some places are actually familiar. I remembered how to get to the fairgrounds. The place looked familiar when we got there. I knew what the ring would look like, and where the restrooms were.

Last year Trav and I got the first two legs on our Rally Novice title at those shows. We finished our title at our next outing, in early March of this year. By that point I thought we finally knew what we were doing. We did a "bumper leg"* later that month. In early June, we took off for Wrentham and managed, wonder of wonders, to earn the first leg on our Advanced title. Advanced is done off-leash, which makes it a huge step up from Novice. We tried for our second in mid-August in Fitchburg. No dice, or no leg: Travvy went AWOL just as we were completing the Stand, Walk Around Dog, jumping out of the ring in pursuit of a stuffed toy that I hadn't noticed. Jumping out of the ring is an automatic NQ (Not Qualified).

Yesterday was like Wrentham, only better. I had to work at keeping Trav's attention, but I managed, and we Qed (Qualified). Today was like Fitchburg, only worse: at the beginning of our run, I barely had contact with Trav's attention, and by the third station I'd lost it. He struck out across the ring, jumped the ring gate, and rather startled two Dalmatians and their handler between the ring gate and the wall of the (big, warehouse-like) building that the ring was in. He was more interested in scavenging trash than in having a dust-up with the Dalmatians, so I got a hold of him without further incident. (If you hear stories that I leaped the ring gate in hot pursuit of my dog -- these are not true. I was moving pretty fast, but I went through the opening in the ring gate, not over it.)

Both days, though, Trav behaved really well. He traveled like a trouper, made friends with lots of people, hung out in his crate (shaded with a space blanket) while I did other things, and was so much calmer and more attentive than he was a year ago, or at the trials we've been to since then. That seriously outweighed the NQ -- we have come such a long way, and besides, we're nowhere near ready to think about competing in Excellent, a prospect we'll have to at least contemplate when we finish Advanced.

Katy and Dundee, and Valerie and Toby both finished their Novice titles yesterday, and earned impressive bumper legs today. Valerie and Toby won the class. Karen and Nolan got their first Advanced leg yesterday, but today Nolan, like Travvy, was in a gate-jumping mood. Unlike Travvy, Nolan jumped back into the ring when called. Unfortunately you don't get extra points for that, so they NQed, just like us.

Tomorrow we get back to work on maintaining focus (and getting it back when we lose it). Training Travvy is like learning anything: challenging, sometimes frustrating, and so rewarding when we have a breakthrough or I look back and see just how far we've come. When your dog doesn't do what you expect, the chances are good that your dog isn't reading the message you think you're sending. So you pay closer attention to what you're doing and saying, and sooner (if you're lucky) or later, you'll figure out what needs adjustment. Travvy responds to me and I respond to him in this ongoing dance and the challenge is to zero in on what's triggering what.

A non-canine high point of the day was Captain C's food tent. Yesterday I had kibbeh balls and hummus; today I sprang for a lamb gyro. Each cost $7, and both were delicious. When you eat out on Martha's Vineyard, you're nearly always disappointed by the food, appalled by the price, or (all too often) both. This stuff was great and downright affordable. At midday the line at the food tent was l-o-n-g, so I sprang for a (non-alcoholic strawberry daiquiri from another vendor. An extravagance that was totally worth it. And of course I have to mention the sausage egg McMuffin lookalike I got at the Dunkin Donuts near the Falmouth Ice Arena, where we gathered to walk the dogs before hitting the road in earnest.

The round-trip ferry fare was $31 cheaper than it was a year ago. Who knows why, but I'm not about to look that one in the mouth. This morning my reservation was for the 7:15 freight boat but they squeezed Malvina Forester onto the 7 o'clock. Coming home, we all had reservations on the 5:15 freight boat but fit handily on the 5 o'clock instead, the same boat I was on yesterday. We still had time for a beer at the Leeside before they started loading. This time I was prepared when the ferry doors opened and it turned out we were in Oak Bluffs, not Vineyard Haven.

*Each title requires three qualifying scores, each one of which gets you a "leg" on the title. (Don't ask me why four-legged dogs are competing for three-legged titles!) When you finish one title but continue to compete at that level before moving up to the next, the additional legs earn are called "bumper legs."

Tomato Glut

September 11, 2010 - View Single Entry

Years ago Marge Piercy wrote "Attack of the Squash People". It's about gardeners blessed or cursed with an overabundancIe of zucchini, and the lengths to which they'll go to dispose of this overabundance. You recognize the scenario, right? Some poems never go out of date.

I've never grown zucchini, so my role in the seasonal drama is to devise excuses for why I can't take more than one or two. At some point, the most eloquent and true excuses fail to persuade the desperate gardener, so it's best to duck around corners when you see someone approaching with an armload of summer squash, any variety. "No zukes!" you cry.

Way back in June, a neighbor did offer me a zucchini seedling for my little garden. Remembering "Attack of the Squash People," I thanked my neighbor but declined her offer. So my garden isn't overrun with squash.

The tomatoes, on the other hand, are going nuts. I hear it's a banner year for tomatoes, especially cherry tomatoes, which is what mine are. They're called "Black Cherry" because that's what they look like. Here's a bowl of my cherries. The writers and editors among you will probably recognize their pedestal as Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition.

They're very pretty. For two or three weeks now I've been picking between eight and a dozen almost every morning. I like tomatoes well enough, but this is more than I can eat. So I've been making regular deliveries to my neighbors (they're a family of four, all of whom like tomatoes, so I don't feel too guilty), taking them to my writers' group, and packing a few whenever I go visiting.

Piercy's zucchini growers are reduced to leaving their bounty on strangers' doorsteps, pressing the doorbell, and running away. I'm not that desperate, but the tomatoes keep coming and the first killing frost isn't likely till the end of the month, so this afternoon I went looking for Things to Do with Tomatoes. Some while ago my friend Cris gave me What's a Cook to Do, by one James Peterson. It's a handsome book that tells you how to do stuff that cookbooks tend to assume you already know. Neither my mother nor my grandmother being cooks, I knew diddly about cooking when I left home. My repertoire has increased considerably over the years, but I'm not the type that seeks out new recipes and culinary techniques for the hell of it.

"Sundried tomatoes" crossed my path years ago. At first I was puzzled: were these tomatoes that had been made miscellaneous? No, these tomatoes were missing a hyphen. They weren't sundried, they were sun-dried. To this day they're my #1 argument for why the hyphen can't go extinct in U.S. English.

I wasn't about to sun-dry my tomatoes, but the thought occurred to me that I could put my oven to work. What's a Cook to Do confirmed this and suggested two or three hours at low heat. I poured a little olive oil into my small skillet, sliced half a dozen cherries in half, arranged them face-up in the pan, and, when the oven reached 250 degrees Fahrenheit, put the pan in it.

The experiment was so successful that I ate all the semi-dried cherry tomato halves before the night was over, sans garnish of any kind. I plan to repeat it soon, and maybe try baking the semi-dried cherries in some rice. Rice was one of the few things I did learn from my mother. She cooked it in a saucepan on the stovetop. So do I; it's the only way I know how to cook rice. The other day Cris explained her technique for braising rice and then baking it. What's a Cook to Do has something that sounds similar. I bet it'd be good with semi-dried cherry tomatoes.

Hold off, first frost. Keep those tomatoes coming.

Better Safe than Sorry?

September 08, 2010 - View Single Entry

This is based on my "Reverse 911" blog posted on September 4. It's much distilled and probably more polite. Getting from one to the other took a while, and every time I worked on it (write, thwack, write, thwack, squeeze, tweak . . .), I was sure it was never going to say what I wanted it to say so why not just give up now? Around noon today it fell into place. About 20 minutes later I e-mailed it to the Vineyard Gazette -- probably too late to be considered for Friday's paper, but what the hell, writing for possible publication helped me turn it into something that works. Thanks to Sara C. for pointing out that "Better safe than sorry" was all over the place. It provided a place to hang my hat. Ben Franklin helped too.

Hurricane Earl has come and gone, leaving little trace of its passing besides drawers full of candles and batteries that will take months to use up. For this I am grateful. Before memories fade, however, let's spend a moment considering the emergency preparations that preceded the storm. You'd think certain Martha's Vineyard officials had never battened down for severe weather before. Before there was reason to believe that power or traffic would be seriously disrupted, they told businesses to close at 2 p.m. Friday and stay closed for 24 hours. Was this edict warranted? How about the "CodeRED" phone calls that many of us received?

In the wake of the storm, such questions have frequently been met with "Better safe than sorry." This is supposed to end the discussion. It shouldn't. "Better safe than sorry" makes good camouflage for sloppy thinking and poor judgment. Allowed free enough rein, it undermines the U.S. Constitution: are we only entitled to free speech and due process as long as the authorities don't get nervous?

A few decades ago, we didn't have enough advance information about incoming storms. Damage was done that can be avoided today. No one wants to go back to those days. Our problem today is not too little information but too much. It comes in 24/7 over wires and cables and through the very air. Sorting through all this information is a challenge. As excitement and anxiety rise, we don't stop to think how likely we are to need more gas or a dozen D batteries or enough food and water to last for two weeks.

Big storms aren't uncommon along the New England coast. I've lived through a few, among them Hurricane Bob, the "no-name nor'easter" of 1991, Hurricane Edouard (Labor Day weekend, 1996), and some memorable but unnamed snowstorms. Each one brought its challenges -- after Bob I had no electricity or running water for nine days -- but the overwhelming majority of us have managed to get through them, often with the help of friends, neighbors, and emergency workers. Hospital and other essential personnel got to work. Snow plows cleared the roads. Electricity and phone service were restored in amazingly short order.

So as Hurricane Earl approached, I and a few thousand other Vineyarders knew the drill. We pulled up boats, stowed what needed to be stowed, tied down what needed to be tied down. Checked the flashlights, located the candles, filled a bottle or two with water. Checked on friends, relatives, and neighbors who might not be able to manage all their own preparations. We hoped for the best and reminded ourselves that no matter how well prepared we were, some things were out of our hands.

In Earl's wake, I remain confident that if I or anyone else needs emergency services, they will be available. Many Vineyarders work year-round to make this possible. I'm glad that shelters are available for campers, householders in flood-prone areas, and anyone whose home is damaged. I'm glad that NSTAR mobilized to restore disrupted power as soon as possible, even if (this time) power was not disrupted.

I have less confidence in the judgment of our public officials. The first of those "CodeRED" calls was made days before it could be determined that Earl's course, speed, and wind velocity posed a serious threat to Martha's Vineyard. They contributed to the perception that danger was imminent and hence to the overall anxiety level. The rash talk of closing roads was worse, and actually ordering businesses to close was worse still. Let business owners weigh the pros and cons and make their own decisions. They're the ones who have to live with the consequences, not the town official who makes a bad call.

Some people don't function well under pressure. In times of high excitement, these people shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a bullhorn, a microphone, or a CodeRED authorization code. When private individuals lose their heads, usually little harm is done, but when public officials lose theirs, they infect everyone in the vicinity with their nervousness and their misinformation. Rather than promoting safety, they encourage the anxiety that makes safety less likely. If they overreact often enough, we will stop paying attention.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety," wrote Benjamin Franklin on the cusp of the American Revolution, "deserve neither liberty nor safety." He didn't say "Better safe than sorry."