Birthday Bounty

I am 26 now, as of last Friday.

And a glorious day it was. 

Friday has always been my favorite day of the week.

I have been thinking about the placement of birthdays, and I am glad to have my birthday at the beginning of the year. 

Probably each month has its benefits, but January has a crisp newness that is bigger than me. I like that. Plus, now that I am old enough to forget how old I am, being born at the beginning of the year makes it easier to calculate, which is probably why most of Asia traditionally adds a year to their age on the Chinese New Year regardless of their month of birth.  (Happy Year of the Dragon by the way.)

Nathanael was the crafter of almost all of the things that made my birthday so fantastic.

The main thing I created was the wonderful brightly colored outfit that is not shown here...but probably would have landed me a part as one of the Wizard of Oz munchkins back in the day just so that Technicolor triumph could have been fully appreciated. Though, Nathanael did help me decide that it was not too ridiculous for work...being that it was Friday and all.

Isn't this wrapping job fun? 

Newspaper never looked so fine.

Nathanael received some restaurant recommendations from people in his office, but he decided that he could make a more delectable meal at home (and without spending our using up all of our money). So, while I relaxed in the living room reading some junior fiction, he created a mystery dinner masterpiece. The first course, was beer cheese soup fit for any Wisconsin palate.

Next was a salad of romaine lettuce, pecans, craisins, and apple poppy seed dressing. 

Next, because our kitchen is small, he brought these into the living room to cool, which should have probably keyed me in on the main course, but I was still oblivious...

to the seasoned hamburgers sizzling away.

But once I figured it out I was pretty excited about both the burgers, and the toppings; red wine caramelized onions, slices of avocado, and shoe string potato chips for a bit of crunch.

I went to bed stuffed to the top.

Then, the next morning, my second day of 26, Nathanael took me out for a mystery breakfast. I was a little worried he was taking me to ihop (I love waffles, but I just wasn't in the mood for that particular atomosphere). Not only was I not disappointed, but I was quite excited. He brought me to a beignet shop. The setting of which is more like a European cafe. 

(Taking more pictures of the two of us together is my one New Year's resolution. As you can see, it is in its early stages. Also, those are the clothes we are wearing indoors and out these days.)

Ah beignets.

If you haven't tried them...

well...

get yourself down here to Louisiana to visit us!

Weekend Links : The Alphabet

The alphabet, she inspires me.
And even though I have a leg up in that department, here are a few prime ways for everyone to have fun with all 26 letters.

Small fabric scraps can be used make a fabric alphabet, which is not only a fun learning toy (I love these big letters for toddlers, or smaller, magnetic ones for new spellers), but the letters can also be clipped to a ribbon and used for a birthday banner or bedroom name bunting.

You could also make a leaf alphabet. It's just about the perfect craft right now if you live somewhere with changing leaves. I have always appreciated creative alphabet books, and this project reminds me of Eric Carle.

Another thing that might be fun to attempt on your own, Garret Steider created a food alphabet, with prints available to decorate your kitchen and entertain your guests.

If you aren't in a crafty mood, but would still love to decorate with letters, whip out the cardstock and try these well designed free printables!

Finally, this fantastic alphabet montage might just shoot creativity straight into your mind.

More alphabet fun:
homemade alphabet pretzels 
 food alphabet on etsy
animal alphabet on etsy
whimsical German alphabet on etsy

(And if you're in the mood for reminiscing, why not watch everyone's favorite giant yellow bird being ridiculous? If you didn't watch Sesame Street as a child, this video is a very important part of your cultural education.)

Fall Gardening in the Land of Ever Growth

I told you about the Indian peppers already.

But they are not the only thing growing while we slack off on our tending. You see, gardening in the
"fall" here is a little different than gardening in Wisconsin in the fall.

Our pumpkins and other squashes were planted relatively recently, as were the root vegetables, because 
the weather was just too hot for them earlier. However, the exotics we chose are still growing with delight.

Gongura. 

Beautiful, no?

We planted a row of these plants by the name of Thai Roselle for their flowers, and each plant turned into
a gigantic bush taller than us in all directions. The dried flowers are often known in tea as hibiscus (not the
same as the ornamental hibiscus) and turn herbal teas--like Tazo Passion, and Celestial Seasonings
Raspberry Zinger--purple and tangy. Well, all summer the flowers fell off, and we figured we would never
have a use for the giant bushes. But one day, a friend of ours from India noticed the plant and told us how
excited she was to see that we were growing gongura. 

And now that we have been taught to concoct Indian chutneys out of these tangy leaves we are pretty excited too.

However, with the cold nights we have been having, the flowers are finally persisting to maturity.

And these leaves?

Okra. A local favorite.

These were our first five, and we fried them up for a crunchy cornmeal dinner. But, I do have a very good
 recipe for something more interesting (and spicier) to do with okra that I will be sharing shortly.

Yes, our vegetables are in that pecan tree.
Getting them out was a group effort, as you can see, but getting them in was the work of one man...
I'll let you guess who.
This particular handsome fellow trained our Sweet Honey Sponge Gourds to grow up this particular tree
 because we like to do fun things with our gardening. And having edible gourds hanging higher than a pruner
or fruit picker could reach really was entertaining. 

If you think you're not familiar with sponge gourds you are probably right and wrong. Because, while you
may not have eaten them as a vegetable (like a looser, sweeter echo of a zucchini), you probably have seen
them sold in the bath section by their other name, loofahs. If we let them grow past the young tender eating
stage, they gradually grow more fibrous until they are ready to decompose, and then everything except the
fibers falls away, leaving a spoungey gourd skeleton (which usually needs to be washed, and sometimes left
 to sun bleach).
I have been using one of our grown loofahs instead of a plastic "poofah" lately and I have been quite happy
 with it. Though mine is smaller and has finer fibers than the ones at most stores.

Also in a tree, I found this spider.
I have never seen anything like it before!
I would assume he is well defended from birds.

Out of the trees and into the yard, we have also found crawfish, who like to wander especially after a rain.
And don't worry, we didn't take this one's portrait and then eat him.
He is another creature we set into the wild.
And isn't he just perfect at posing? He didn't even need to be told to look at the camera.

Beneath the Clemson Spineless...a Tiny Turtle.

A couple of months ago, when we were uprooting the old amaranth bed, we found a dozen of what we thought were snake eggs.

We relocated them under the okra, but I forgot...and when I went to plant the spaghetti squash I found this little guy.

The last one to hatch. 

I think the fire ants scarred him a bit, and may have gotten to a sibling or two.

He was groggy, until I put him in the water.

Only a puddle really.

Then he swam like the expert he was born to be.

We set him free.

Touristing

I have been staying overnight for field work during nearly all weekdays since August began, so Nathanael and I have been making the most of our weekends. On one of the first weekends in August we decided to drive around a bit and see some of the Acadiana coastal areas. Egrets are everywhere, but we also spotted many Louisiana Herons (above)...and since seeing Herons fly always makes me think of dinosaurs, it was great. We also snuck up on some Roseate Spoonbills (of which I did not snap a picture), and I was very excited to finally see pink birds in person and in the wild!
Flamingos are next I tell you.

Sabine National Wildlife Refuge turned out to be a lovely place to wander, as it is home to marshland creatures galore. Unfortunately, amongst the flying wildlife, mosquitoes were the ones who seemed to mind the 100 °F heat the least, so if you visit, wear long everything. 
(And no, we did not see any alligators, but we know they were around somewhere.)

We had planned to swim when we got to the ocean. 

It is the same Atlantic, technically, the same ocean as the lapping the beaches of New Hampshire, but instead of being hypothermic in the summer the waters are actually quite warm here. Unfortunately, that warmth and the fact that the Missisippi River drains here means all of the beaches have bacterial warning signs... permanently installed (though they have hinges and can be closed if the levels drop).

 Also, the water is brown. 

So now we know why the beaches of Florida and Mississippi are well known and those in Louisiana are not; everything west of where the Mississippi River hits the ocean is virtually unswimable.

But, it's fun to be at the beach anyway. Especially with a friend like this.

If you look carefully, all of those little nubbins on the horizon are oil rigs. (Click for a closer look.)

Apart from wildlife and waters, the structures on the Louisiana coast were also neat to see. A prime example being the Johnson Bayou Library in Cameron Parish.

I love libraries, and this one would have been especially hard to resist if it hadn't been a weekend.

Who wouldn't want to visit a library with a clearance of nine feet and six inches?

Once back to more inhabited areas, we went out for a date of po-boys and followed it up with dessert at this place...

I got a butterfinger malt.

(Nathanael was looking more stylish than me, as usual, but I figured I should put one of me in here somewhere.)

On the weekends that we are home, we do still garden, though things have slowed down a bit.



Our Indian chili peppers have been doing amazingly well, and we've been harvesting 40 to 60 peppers each week from our three plants.



We have also let a few ripen so we can save the seeds for next years crop.
(The ribbon reminded us which ones we were leaving on the plant for seeds.)



The Zinnias are still growing nicely, and some of them are this unbelievably brilliant orange color that you probably thought was some kind of photo editing mistake...but no, that's really what they look like.
The Zinnia plants have mixed with the weeds in the front of our garden and created what is pretty much a meadow facade covering a giant mass of underground kamikaze soldiers. Nathanael still risks his ankles and picks the flowers for me though.

He also makes me doughnuts.

Yum.

The Music of the Vegetables

Last week while I was writing about goat song, I sent Nathanael a video demonstrating yodeling and told him he should learn take it up. Over the previous few weeks we had been discussing how a banjo would suit his persona nicely, and I always associate the two; banjos and yodeling.

   As you know, on YouTube, one thing leads to another, and by the time I got home the next day he was learning a couple of methods of Mongolian Throat Singing. I had heard bits of throat singing recordings in the past, and even a few that a friend had recorded in Tuva, but I had never recognized the amazing overtones (whistling type sound) that can be created. And even though Nathanael had only had one day of practice, his demonstration for me produced the same reaction I had the first time I had heard yodeling: giggling. (Despite the variety of wonderful videos on the internet, there really is nothing like hearing these things in person...thus the laughter with glee.)

    For some reason I had also assumed that only guys had the ability to throat sing, but woman (in Mongolia and elsewhere) can, and do throat sing. This video is a good example of both a woman throat singing, and a good example of the overtone aspect of throat singing, because the familiar song she chose helps you pick out the melody.

   And just as yodeling leads to throat singing, searching through obscure Asian videos of people making music in their living room leads to a man playing vegetables as a musical instruments (heita3).

 It's the next big thing, I assure you.

I want to meet this guy.

I want to shake his hand.

What other musical bits from around the world have I been missing out on? 

Do share.

Goat Song

I have the opportunity to read a good number of books while I am away doing field work. Each week I bring a tall stack of books with me from the library and blast through them at a pace of one every day or two. So, I figured I would mention some of the ones I have enjoyed the most. The first is Goat Song.

Goat Song, by Brad Kessler, was just what I expected it to be, a romanticized snippet of goat farming.

 I thought it was super.

 A mixture of prose about nature, etymology (that’s right, words, not insects), animal companionship, milking, mating (enough to make you giggle), and cheesemaking. Even if you’re not interested in becoming a goat farmer, it is a pleasurably restful book to read. Bits of knowledge just waft off the page like steam from a warm cup of tea. I read it between batches of paperwork, I read it in a recliner, I read it by the pool, and in all of those places I felt neither a hurry to finish it, nor any boredom, just gladness that there was still more of it to read.

One of my favorite sections of the book was the author’s discussion of the word Pastoral and how it used to refer to the poetry and songs written by herders--songs often sang only for the livestock. I also learned about the different varieties of “singing” used in different cultures to get the attention of goat herds. Yodeling and kulning being two examples of high vocalizations to which all kinds of animals are more attentive. (This is where you go look kulning up on YouTube for a while...I'll be here when you get back).

Another of my favorite of Kessler's discussions is best summed up by this quote he used from the naturalist Henry Beston,

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they moved finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the sense we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time."  

 I think I appreciated it so much because I have been thinking about all of the things we don't know about the world around us. Just as when we meet a new person we can’t know their story just by looking at them, we really will never know how birds perceive the world, or whether the cows think we’re silly, or whether elephants pass down history. And I can’t help but wondering whenever I hear people looking for intelligent life in outer space (wondering why they are, that is). Not because I don’t think there is any, but because there is so much mystery right here, and just because the goats and raccoons aren’t communicating to us with radio signals doesn’t mean we have figured out what makes them tick. God has breathed life into all that breathe...I just wonder what it is like to be a goat or bird or zebra.

But ask the animals, and they will teach you,

or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;  

or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,    

or let the fish in the sea inform you. 

Which of all these does not know    

that the hand of the LORD has done this? 

In his hand is the life of every creature    

and the breath of all mankind.

Job 12:7-10

From my field work
(nothing to do with the field work, or with goats, just a fascinating little creature).