Chris's Sixty-fifth

To Katrina Anne's in Wauconda for a surprise 65th birthday party. In spite of the large number of participants the surprise looked to be genuine.

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Another gray day, but cooler, with a wind out of the north. 

Fizzy Water

Another dingy, damp day. But thanks to the gift of a SodaStream carbonator we now have the world's best seltzer.  How so? It starts with the water, and today Pax and Buddy accompanied us out to the Flowing Well where we tanked up with what could be the best water on earth, water which has been percolating up out the the Kettle Moarine for the past 120 years. Pure and unprocessed. The SodaStream adds an impressive fizzzz.

Buddy is spending a few days and nights in Whitewater. He is a good house guest and friend to Pax. I actually think his presence is therapeutic. After tanking up with spring water we went to our favorite bit of forest preserve by Whitwater Lake and the two friends had a good romp. Pax appeared to have forgotten about gunshot worries. 

Annual Christmas Get Together

...at the Morrisons. Sally and Glenn. Andy, Kristen, Louise, Sydney. Garry and Kelly. Abby, Tony, Katy and Will. Bri, Renee, Ellie, Maddie, and Becca. Sue and Jim. Colette, and Sue's cousin Ron, and cousin Patty and her family. Quite a crowd.

'Twas The night....

Wonderful family Christmas Eve party at Bri and Renee's. Lots of presents, excited but well behaved kids, delicious dining (stuffed Cornish hens with a fig glaze), a romp in the back yard with flashlights putting out reindeer food, and of course "The Night Before Christmas."

Night Before the Night Before

Here is this year's Christmas card from Elaine and Murray, featuring a new painting by Elaine. We were thunderstruck when we opened the envelope at the beauty of the painting (as well as the subject matter). 

The weird weather continues. Warm and wet. Fifty-seven degrees with rain, sometimes heavy. Wind warning in effect this evening, and heavy thunderstorm warning for tomorrow morning. Poor Santa! How is he coping with all this global warming garbage?

Many Hats

Over to Fox Point for a few last minute things. Then over to nearby, old, historic Cedarburg for lunch at the Anvil.

This ample bit of headgear was an early Christmas present, and is, in theory, exceptionally good a shedding water—these days an attractive feature. 

Just scattered rain today though damp, cloudy and chilly. I think it's safe to say that Christmas preparations are pretty much wrapped up at this point, except for the actual wrapping up. 

Solstice, 2015

Food Notes: Niki sent some parched corn in her Christmas package—frozen sweet corn parched with a smidgen of butter and salt. Everyone, including the sender, agreed that it was awful. But one has to appreciate the direct experimental approach, and now we know, or think we know, that dry parched old field corn is the way to go.

With the demise of our grocery store and the need to shop elsewhere, we are enjoying shopping in stores with good stuff (probably spending more money, too). Apple cider from an orchard in Fort Atkinson, not pasteurized! After about a week in the fridge this stuff starts to taste really good. Also now buying eggs from JRS Country Acres of Lake Mills, and these eggs have shells so thick a hatchet would not be out of order in the cracking of them. And the cheese—the sharp cheddar prepared by an as yet unknown but local dairy for Cowley's Piggly Wiggly in Milton is brilliant. (How can someone named Cowley own a Pig?) 

In sum, local is delicious. 

Tonight, grilled steak and vegetable/barley soup (local, grass-fed beef from Festival) with friends kitty-corner across the street, and the new couple who recently moved in next door to them. 

My favorite old mansion in Mount Horeb

And! Tonight the shortest day of the year. A special night for the ancient Druids who were not quite sure that tomorrow would live up to its reputation as the end of the descending dark and the beginning of the return of life-affirming light.

To finish, a question: Where was Moses when the lights went out? 

Ding Hoy...

...feather merchants.  (Having watched a bit of early Chicago television, this greeting always comes to mind when I hear Sue's phone go ding.)

Milder. All traces of snow gone. And the town is quiet. A (relatively)silent night, and day too, with the campus on holiday shutdown, although weekend gunfire continues unabated. Pax and I got about half way around our big loop when a barage drove us home in a hurry. Both Pax and I don't think we could live in Syria.

In honor of the weather I went for my first real bike ride since rotator repair. And how fun was that. The empty campus is a wonderful ride provided it hasn't been overly salted, and this year it has been not. 

As the light was fading as it does now almost after lunch, and wearing a pair of decent headphones, I let Bruckner's Symphony #4 shake up all my preconceptions. I'm pretty sure Pax would not have liked it, though there were some clarinets and violins, so you never know.

Feels Like Sunday

The Janowiec family came down to Whitewater for a pre-Christmas get together—one of Mimi's traditional roast beef Sunday dinners.

The weather more suited to a pre-holiday party, and Mimi was able to cook with the windows closed. But just as last Sunday, the office was a busy place with lots of typing, printing, envelope stuffing, and phone calls.

Colder, At Last

Not above freezing all day, which seems appropriate, for this time of year. 

Mallards chilling in warm flood water. 

And a few hints of ice, here and there. 

A far cry from last year at this time, and an even farther cry from two years ago at this time. But a bright, chilly day, and Pax got a brush and a bath and a good long walk, so we enjoyed it.

Here in Whitewater we are now down to 9 hours of daylight (as we close in on the solstice) and that means 15 hours of darkness.  Of course, it's worse in Kagawong—just 8.39 hours of light. But it's better in Rockport where the inhabitants bask in 10.22 hours of luxurious light almost every day.

Solo

Maddie was the soloist at today's preschool Christmas program, and she did a fine job—no stage fright, and right on pitch. The large crowd in attendance was impressed.

Clouds, Air, and Wind

To borrow a title from Eric Sloane. Rain overnight and well into the morning. 

Then a front roaring through, boiling up windrows of dramatic clouds and, eventually, the need for sunglasses.

But by afternoon flat gray skies once again. The temperature is dropping and the barometer rising, but there is really still no sign of winter. 

Streaming

A little sun this morning, but then the clouds moved in.  Everything remains squishy, and there is more precipitation in the forecast. Whitewater Creek is high on its banks.

None of us went outside much at all today—Sue at the sewing table and me in the basement workshop. And Pax is still spooked about going outside. But he and I  are working on his phobia. No gunfire on meterologically unpleasant weekdays, so we can walk, and we take alternative paths, and we stop now and then to relax and enjoy life.  In this town here is always some kind of odd sound every so often, but we are learning to accept them and to move on.

Soggy

Rain all day and much of last night. Even a flood warning. The big question for me is what this implies for Lakes Michigan and Huron.  The past two years the Great Lakes have had record ice cover and water levels have risen as a result. This year there will be no ice cover, apparently. But, however, and on the other hand, will all the frequent precip events counteract the lack of ice?

A significant neighborhood ash now among the fallen. 

Ice boat work (new rebuilt tandem trailer and Wombat redevelopment) is coming along well, if slowly.  But this year slowly seems to be fine as there is no ice on the horizon. 

Back to snacks. Char commented on a previous post: 

Hello Sweet Sibs and Cousins,

Do you remember Lucy's dates, stuffed with cream cheese and a nut--a walnut, I think--then rolled in powdered sugar. They were a holiday staple, as I recall.

--Char

I for one am sure I do remember them, and as is well known, my memory is close to flawless. The memory I have is that of a young kid—and those stuffed dates were somewhat scary looking but tasted heavenly!

Tropical Party

The Nies family came down to Whitewater for a pre-Christmas get together—one of Mimi's traditional roast beef Sunday dinners. 

Ellie recovering from a bad head bonk. 

High temperature in the mid 60s, and pouring with rain.  But lots of fun indoors, especially "working" in the office. Ellie typed up and printed multiiple copies of a list of winter clothing. Maddie wrote words so small we needed a loupe to read them, and Becca, downstairs, cooked a full course meal on the play stove. And once they had my number, both older girls used the house phone to keep my cell ringing off the hook.

Sorry

Some blogs are so darn good the system automatically posts them twice.  

Small Rally but Big News

Over to Madison for climate rally organized by 350.org. Perhaps if it had been snowing rather than foggy, attendance would have been greater. There were more people at REI than on the Capitol steps, but we were glad to be part of the movement. And the news out of Paris is good!

Inside the Capitol, in the rotunda, a brass band was playing Christmas carols, which in my estimation was a bad idea; with the sound echoing around the marble dome and hallways we listeners were treated to at least eight bars at once, and each song went on quite a long time after the conductor waved the last beat.

As part of our outing we also visited Mount Horeb where Pax and I again walked past one of our favorite trees—a very old weeping beech.

A few posts back I mentioned a book that I failed to finish: H Is For Hawk. Nothing against the author (except perhaps a bit too much self-absorbed sentimentality).  Anyway, here is a clip from an article of hers in the NY Times:

********** 

Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognizing the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief. Virulent tree diseases hit the headlines, but smaller, less visible disappearances happen all the time. The flycatchers that nested in my neighborhood 10 years ago have vanished; meadows in my hometown that were full of all kinds of life have become housing developments full of nothing but our own. People of a certain age tend to look back elegiacally at the things that have gone: the store you used as a kid that closed, the room that became a memory. But those small, personal disappearances, however poignant, are not the same as losing biodiversity. Brands are not butterflies. Changes to city skylines are not the same as acres of beetle-blasted trees: Though they are caught up in stories about ourselves, trees are not ever just about us. They support complex and interdependent communities of life, and as forests slowly become less diverse, the world loses more than simply trees. It has been suggested that the rise of Lyme disease in many parts of North America and Europe is in part because less-diverse forests favor the ticks that carry it.

I am old enough to remember elms and the landscapes they made; people only a few years younger than me do not, and to them the elm-free fields are reassuringly normal. Are we now becoming inured to a new narrative of nature, in which ecosystem-level change in accelerated time scales is part of the background of everyday life? Children who are growing up watching glaciers retreat and sea ice vanishing, villages sinking, tundra wildfires raging and once-common trees disappearing — will they learn to regard constant disappearance as the ordinary way of the world? I hope it is not so. But perhaps when all the ash trees are gone and the landscape has become flatter and simpler and smaller, someone not yet born will tap on a screen, call up images and wonder at the lost glory of these exquisite, feathered trees.

Small Rally but Big News

Over to Madison for climate rally organized by 350.org. Perhaps if it had been snowing rather than foggy, attendance would have been greater. There were more people at REI than on the Capitol steps, but we were glad to be part of the movement. And the news out of Paris is good!

Inside the Capitol, in the rotunda, a brass band was playing Christmas carols, which in my estimation was a bad idea; with the sound echoing around the marble dome and hallways we listeners were treated to at least eight bars at once, and each song went on quite a long time after the conductor waved the last beat.

As part of our outing we also visited Mount Horeb where Pax and I again walked past one of our favorite trees—a very old weeping beech.

A few posts back I mentioned a book that I failed to finish: H Is For Hawk. Nothing against the author (except perhaps a bit too much self-absorbed sentimentality).  Anyway, here is a clip from an article of hers in the NY Times:

********** 

Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognizing the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief. Virulent tree diseases hit the headlines, but smaller, less visible disappearances happen all the time. The flycatchers that nested in my neighborhood 10 years ago have vanished; meadows in my hometown that were full of all kinds of life have become housing developments full of nothing but our own. People of a certain age tend to look back elegiacally at the things that have gone: the store you used as a kid that closed, the room that became a memory. But those small, personal disappearances, however poignant, are not the same as losing biodiversity. Brands are not butterflies. Changes to city skylines are not the same as acres of beetle-blasted trees: Though they are caught up in stories about ourselves, trees are not ever just about us. They support complex and interdependent communities of life, and as forests slowly become less diverse, the world loses more than simply trees. It has been suggested that the rise of Lyme disease in many parts of North America and Europe is in part because less-diverse forests favor the ticks that carry it.

I am old enough to remember elms and the landscapes they made; people only a few years younger than me do not, and to them the elm-free fields are reassuringly normal. Are we now becoming inured to a new narrative of nature, in which ecosystem-level change in accelerated time scales is part of the background of everyday life? Children who are growing up watching glaciers retreat and sea ice vanishing, villages sinking, tundra wildfires raging and once-common trees disappearing — will they learn to regard constant disappearance as the ordinary way of the world? I hope it is not so. But perhaps when all the ash trees are gone and the landscape has become flatter and simpler and smaller, someone not yet born will tap on a screen, call up images and wonder at the lost glory of these exquisite, feathered trees.

Oops

Another memory gone wrong.  Not  Limburger but this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liederkranz_cheese

"Take me to your Liederkranz!"

-John

Snack Time

It all started with Sherman. While visiting Aunt Janet he and AJ went into a Farm and Fleet where Sherm came across some (overly spiced) parched corn. That brought back memories:

About 60 years ago, your Dad once came home with a snack he called "parched corn".  In later years, I was able to get this (not very delicate) delicacy in the form of "Corn Nuts".  I hadn't had any for some time, so this past weekend while I was visiting Aunt Janet, and we went to Mill's Fleet Farm to pick up some supplies, I found a version of this treasure seasoned with something called habanero powder.  It turns out that (purely by empirical evidence) this powder is a very potent pepper.  But, even though my mouth felt like it was stung with a hundred cactus spines, I could not stop eating this highly addictive crunchiness.  So my questions to you are 1) have you inherited your father's taste for this snack, and 2) do you have a good source of supply (sans the extra flavorings)?
Sherm

Being rather weak on long-term memory myself, I sent out an APB to Nies family members for more information, and lots of info came flowing in. Brother John seems to have had the most authoritative: 

Hi all,  What lousy memories you all have!
Here is the lowdown on parched corn! It was always cooked by dad. It is Dried field corn, removed from the cob.  Cooked in a dry frying pan until the corn "pops" or is parched.  The addition of a bit of butter makes the salt stick. Corn nuts are deep fried soaked corn available in several flavored from Kraft Foods.The original process came from "Uncle Leon Wheeler."
--John

But, just as it seemed that the parched corn issue was settled, Sherm stirred thing up again:

"I just had another of my favorite snacks: herring fillets in wine sauce.  And it occurred to me that the first time I ever had that was one New Year's Eve when your Dad passed out a traditional treat for the occasion, which included that very snack."
Sherm

All I can say to that is, "Of course."

Yes, I remember the herring on New Years Eve.  I hated it! I hated the smell! But, we all had to take one bite on a cracker for good luck through the next year. I also did not like Dad's stinky cheese!   --Trin

Fortunately, John came through again, with the article below. But, before we get there, I have to say that pickled herring is right near the top of the essential foods list for me, and (I'm pretty sure) for John as well. But it has to come from Ma Baensch! 

 So, check out Ma Baensch. I posted a photo of the shop about a year ago which I snapped on the way home from a meeting at UWM.

Now——— I'm starting to hope Sherm doesn't bring up Connie's fudge or Granny's Dundee cake. And I agree with Trin that Limburger cheese should never be brought into the house.