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Gems From Larousse

During the pandemic I decided to read Larousse Gastronomique from start to finish, and I did. What fun. The 1200-page tome is considered by many to be the greatest culinary encyclopedia ever assembled. Along with over four thousand recipes, there are many thousands of fascinating culinary factoids, a few of which I will share with you now.

Cockaigne

A mythical land of plenty, where men live happily without working and there is an abundance of everything. The myth, which is found in Germany and Italy, is particularly deeply rooted in Flemish tradition and dates back to a time when the specter of famine often became reality. In the legend the lucky man arrives at the land of plenty by traveling through a tunnel cut into a mountain of buckwheat flour; there he discovers a roasted pig walking about with a carving knife in its belly, a table covered with pies and tarts, hedges made of sausages, etc. and roast pigeons drop into his mouth.

Colisée (Le)

A huge establishment for entertainment that was built in 1770 near the present Rond-Point on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. It catered to thousands of people and contained four cafes, several dance halls, an ornamental lake, shopping arcades, a restaurant with a fixed-price menu, and small indoor gardens. This leisure complex proved to be highly successful at first – Marie Antoinette went there twice! Eventually, it attracted too few people, and this, together with poor management, caused it to become bankrupt in 1780. It was demolished, and a road was named after it.

Duval (Pierre-Louis)

French butcher (born Montlhéry, 1811; died Paris, 1870) He supplied the Tuileries kitchens and owned several retail butcher’s shops in Paris. In 1860 he had the idea of creating a number of small restaurants serving a single dish – boiled beef and consommé – at a fixed price. The first ‘bouillon’, in the Rue de Montesquieu, was soon followed by a dozen others.

His son Alexandre successfully developed the chain of restaurants and made an immense fortune. A well-known figure of Parisian life nicknamed ‘Godefroi de Bouillon’ by humorists of the time, he composed a Marche de petites bonnes in honor of his waitresses, who all wore a coif of white tulle and, for the first time, replaced the traditional garçons in restaurants.

Fork fourchette

An implement usually made of metal with two, thee, or four prongs on the end of a handle, used at table either for lifting food to the mouth or for serving food. Forks are also used in the kitchen for turning food in cooking, etc.

The fork has a very ancient origin and is mentioned in the Old Testament. It was first used as a ritual instrument to grip pieces of meat destined for sacrifices; later it was used in the kitchen. According to the 11th-century Italian scholar Damiani, forks were introduced into Venice by a Byzantine princess and then spread throughout Italy. But it was Henry III of France who first introduced to the French the custom of using a two-pronged fork at the table.

restaurant

An establishment where meals are served between set hours, either from a fixed menu or a la carte. The word appeared in the 16th century and meant at first “a food which restores” (from restaurer, to restore), and was used more specifically for a rich highly flavored soup capable of restoring lost strength. The 18th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin referred to chocolate, red meat, and consommé as restaurants. From this sense, which survived until the 19th century, the word developed the meaning of “an establishment specializing in the sale of restorative foods.”

Until the late 18th century, the only places for ordinary people to eat out were inns and taverns. In about 1765, a Parisian “bouillon-seller’ named Boulanger wrote on his sign: “Boulanger sells restoratives fit for the gods”, with a motto in dog Latin: Venite ad me omnes qui stomach laboretis, et ego restaurabo vos (Come unto me, all you whose stomachs are aching, and I will restore you.) This was the first restaurant in the modern sense of the term.

One beneficial effect of the Revolution was that the abolition of the guilds and their privileges made it easier to open a restaurant. The first to take advantage of the situation were the cooks and servants from the great houses whose aristocratic owners had fled. Moreover, the arrival in Paris of numerous provincials who had no family in the capital created a pool of faithful customers, augmented by journalists and businessmen. The general feeling of wellbeing under the Directory, following such a chaotic period, coupled with the chance of enjoying the delights of the table hitherto reserved for the rich, created an atmosphere in which restaurants became an established institution.

fin

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Mantis From Outer Space

We had a praying mantis hanging out in our rose bushes for a couple days recently. This was the first praying mantis I’ve seen since I moved to Mendocino twenty years ago. I love praying mantises.

Not only are praying mantises exotic and beautiful and fun to watch, they are responsive to being talked to. This one in our roses, for example, looked at me when I spoke to her and seemed quite interested in what I had to say.

Speaking of which, this mantis visitation reminds me of the two times in my life I definitely had contact with aliens from outer space. And that reminds me of an article I published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser way back in 2011 and then posted on my blog.

So I went into my blog archives, which you can do, too, by going to the bottom of my blog page where several hundred of my articles are archived. Just type in key words and see what comes up.

I did that, typed in aliens, and up came my memoir of the two times I encountered aliens from outer space. I will now re-tell those two incidents.

*

On a winter evening in 1981 at Sacramento City College I read a few of my short stories to a receptive audience of about forty people. After my performance I was about to exit the lecture hall when a most unusual being approached me.

She appeared to be an extremely slender female human approximately six-feet-tall, wearing a sleeveless form-fitting dress made of glimmering silver fabric. At first glance she seemed exquisitely beautiful, and at second glance her face resembled the face of a praying mantis. Most striking of all were her eyes, huge multi-faceted diamonds suspended in large transparent globes floating in her eye sockets.

She was also radiant, and by radiant I mean she seemed to be glowing from within, and her inner light was indistinguishable from sunlight. She spoke with an enticing Serbian accent and I might have fallen in love with her had she not been so obviously an alien from another planet.

“I em Yanina,” she said, her diamond eyes turning subtly turquoise as she spoke. “I hev mosst unusual life to tell, bet I em no writer. Hearink your stories I em zinking, ‘Yes, he is what I em needing for to tell my story.”

Then she took my hand and I felt a fantastic flow of energy entering my body, a terrifying flow that made me quickly let go of her hand before I was rendered her compliant slave.

“I pay you very well,” she said, her diamond eyes glowing ruby red. “Come now to my hotel.”

So powerful was her magnetism, despite my fear of her, I almost agreed to go with her until I realized she was not alone. Standing behind her was a huge man wearing a black suit and a pulsating red bow-tie, his jowly face dominated by a stupendous carrot-red handlebar mustache.

Yanina noticed me noticing her gigantic companion and said, “He is Raul. My bodyguard.” Then she smiled a smile so multi-dimensional it might have been a 3-D rendering of one of Escher’s drawings of infinity.

“Oh,” I said. “Why do you have a…”

“When I tell you my story you will understend why,” she said, reaching for my hand again.

I shoved my hands in my pockets, and using every drop of my emotional strength I said, “Gosh, I’m so sorry but for the next thirty or forty years I’m focusing on my own stuff, though I sure do appreciate you thinking of me in this regard.”

“You are afraid of me,” she said, nodding sagely. “Don’t be. There has never been story like mine. We will save the world. I promise.”

Somehow I escaped.

*

My second meeting with an alien from outer space also took place in Sacramento, seven years after my close encounter with Yanina.

The summer day was blazing hot and humid, my garden a riot of basil and sunflowers and corn and tomatoes. I was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs leading from the garden up to the deck adjoining my house and thinking about where in my garden to stand while holding the hose running over my head to cool down, when I heard a whirring sound and saw something the size of a hummingbird zooming toward me at an altitude of about two feet.

In fact, I thought the thing was a hummingbird because hummingbirds do make a kind of whirring sound when they fly fast, though this was a different sort of whirring than hummingbird whirring.

A split second later the thing was hovering in the air about a foot from my face. It was definitely not a hummingbird. I should note I was not under the influence of any drug or alcohol at the time, though I was excessively warm and more than mildly depressed.

The thing was definitely a machine. I could hear other sounds accompanying the whirring, notably clanking and squeaking. I felt certain the thing was looking at me and checking me out.

I said something like, “Yikes!” and the thing flew away, and I never saw it again.

*

Some years after my close encounter with the alien flying machine in my garden, I saw a documentary made by Errol Morris entitled Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, the title referring to the work of Rodney Brooks, an M.I.T. scientist who designed tiny robots and wrote a famous paper suggesting we send one hundred one-kilogram robots to Mars instead of a single hundred-kilogram robot. That way, if some of the robots broke down or didn’t work properly, there would still be many more robots to carry out the exploring. The paper was entitled “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System” published in 1989 in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

After seeing this documentary, I was convinced that the flying thing in my garden was an exploratory robot sent from a distant solar system to check out life on earth.

Given the state of the world today, I regret not helping the alien named Yanina write her story. Maybe her story would have saved the world. I also regret not saying to the little alien spacecraft, “Hey let’s talk. Maybe we can figure out a way to interact that will help reverse humanity’s headlong rush to destroy the biosphere.”

Should aliens ever contact me again, I’m ready to communicate.

fin

Incongroovity from Todd’s album of piano tunes Incongroovity.

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Moving Right Along

Life, you may quote me, is a trip.

We’ve been without a functional well for a month and just got our water system back online today! We’ve got four cords of oak firewood to get into the woodshed before the rains come, and the gutters need to be cleaned in anticipation of that blessed rain.

The tubs need to be planted with potatoes, I’ve fallen behind on my pruning of rampant shrubs, the huckleberries are crying out to be harvested, and soon we must net the apple trees to keep the ravens from filching our crop.

I am finally over a debilitating case of food poisoning that rendered me fairly useless for the last eight days. I’m deep into writing a new novel Poets of Mercy, and we’re in the home stretch of preparing my fable The Dog Who Wanted A Person for publication.

Several new tunes are manifesting on the piano to be recorded in October after I have my piano tuned.

And beyond our little plot of land on the outskirts of our little town, the human world has gone batty with people of questionable emotional stability and questionable intelligence running large parts of the global and national shows and making a shambles of our economy, our healthcare system, our government, and what was left of our democracy.

The natural world is reacting to the excesses of greedy humans according to the immutable principles of Universe. And so it goes.

Here is an excerpt from my novel in progress, the novel’s narrator having a memory involving his Korean grandmother Nari. 

I’m fifteen, sitting at the kitchen table having an after-school snack and reading A Tale of Two Cities. Nari looks up from her cooking and asks me in Korean, “Is this homework, Ya’akov? This book you’re reading?”

“No. This is the antidote to homework,” I say, smiling. “This is what I love. I feel like I’m actually there in the midst of the French Revolution. The writing is that good.”

She comes to me and I show her the cover of the book.

“I read this book,” she says, returning to her cooking. “Do you know what the title means? A Tale of Two Cities?”

“Well… Paris and London. Half the action takes place in London, half in Paris.”

“That is not what the title means,” she says, chopping an onion.

I frown. “Of course that’s what it means. Those are the two cities where…”

“That’s the surface meaning,” she says calmly. “Dickens means something deeper. He is speaking of two states of being, two ways of feeling, two ways of perceiving. Sorrow and joy. He is asking us to contemplate how sorrow and joy can exist simultaneously in the same moment. That’s why you love that story and why it seems so real to you because it’s how life really is. We want to believe sorrow and joy are different from each other, separate from each other, but they are inseparable, just as you are inseparable from me and from everything else. If you understand this, then you won’t wallow in sorrow and self-pity. You will accept the duality of existence and be less confused.”

fin

Mystery Memory from Todd’s CD of piano/bass duets Mystery Inventions.

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Time Capsule Tidbits #2

Having had encouraging responses to my previous post featuring excerpts from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature published in 1939, a volume I love for being a delightful British-centric time-capsule full of fascinating factoids, here is another batch of goodies from that tome.

Auto-da-fé, a Portuguese expression meaning act of faith, popularly applied to the burning alive of heretics.

Bohemian, frequently used in the sense of a gipsy of society, especially an artist, literary man, or actor, who leads a free, vagabond, or irregular life, and despises conventionalities. This meaning was introduced into English by Thackeray.

Brummel, George Bryan (1778-1840), called BEAU BRUMMEL, a friend of the prince regent (George IV) and leader of fashion in London. He died in poverty at Caen.

Caligula, GAIUS CAESAR, son of Germanicus, so called from his wearing, when a boy, caligae or soldiers’ boots, was Roman emperor A.D. 37-41. The cruelties and vices that marked his reign were perhaps due to his madness. He was finally murdered.

Chiasmus, a figure of speech by which the order of the words in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second, e.g. He saved others; himself he cannot save.

Cook, Eliza (1818-89). Her complete collected poems were published in 1870. The most popular of these was The Old Arm Chair, which had appeared in 1837.

Darien Scheme, THE, a scheme proposed by William Paterson (1658-1719), the projector of the Bank of England, for a Scottish settlement on the isthmus of Panama; the scheme was abandoned in 1700. Practically the whole circulating capital of the Scottish people was invested in the scheme; and so, at the Union (1707), a sum of money was paid by England in compensation for the losses sustained by Scotland.

Derrick, a noted hangman at Tyburn, c. 1600, the origin of the word derrick, a crane.

Deus ex machina, God from the machine, an unexpected event or intervention in a play or novel, which resolves a difficult situation. When a god was introduced in the ancient Greek drama, he was brought on the stage by some mechanical device.

Dolly Dialogues, The, by Anthony Hope (Hawkins) (1894) They are amusing and witty conversations hung on a slight thread of story, in which figure Samuel Travers Carter, a middle-aged bachelor, and the attractive Dolly Foster.

D’Urfey, Thomas (1653-1723), familiarly known as Tom Durfey, wrote a large number of songs, tales, satires, melodramas, and farces. He was a scurrilous fellow, but the familiar friend of everyone, including Charles II and James II.

Elliot, Jane (1727-1805), author of the most popular version of the old lament for Flodden, The Flowers of the Forest, beginning with I’ve heard them lilting at our ewe-milking.

Field, Michael, the pseudonym adopted by Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913). They wrote several novels and some good poetry.

Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939) born at Frieberg in Moravia, of a Jewish family, is known as the inventor of psychoanalysis. His studies led him to important conclusions as the to the influence of a subconscious element in the mind and also as to the importance of the sexual motive in human behavior. He was expelled from Austria in 1938.

fin

Mystery Music Box, piano and bass, from Todd’s album Mystery Inventions.

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Time Capsule Tidbits

One of the few material possessions I inherited from my grandmother Goody is a book entitled The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature, first published in 1939 and reprinted in 1942.

I love this book for many reasons, among them: the perspective of the editors is extremely British-centric, much of the information is so antiquated as to verge on fiction, the writing of the entries is delightfully snobby, and the totality is a time-capsule of the English literary landscape eighty years ago, a landscape so unlike the literary landscape of today this book might be about life on another planet where they also happen to have Shakespeare, Dickens, and Jane Austen.

Here, for your enjoyment, are a handful of entries I especially enjoyed during my latest perusal of the goodly tome.

Southcott, Joanna (1750-1814), a religious fanatic. In 1792 she began to write doggerel prophecies and to claim supernatural gifts, and in time attracted a very large number of followers. She died of brain disease, leaving a sealed box with directions that it should be opened at a time of national crisis. It was opened in 1927 and was found to contain nothing of interest.

Macaulay, Rose, contemporary author among whose chief works are: Potterism (1920), Dangerous Ages (1921), Told By an Idiot (1923) Orphan Island (1924), all novels; also two volumes of verse. She is notable for a deft and epigrammatic style and for her wide reading.

Burnell the Ass, the hero of the Speculum Stultorum of Wireker, Burnell, an ass who wishes to acquire a larger tail, goes to Salerno and to Paris to study, meets with various adventures, and finally loses his tail altogether.

Genius, in classical pagan belief, the tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to every person at his birth, to govern his fortunes and determine his character; also the spirit similarly connected with a place.

Hesperia, the western land for the Greek poets was Italy. The Roman poets similarly gave the name to Spain.

Lover, Samuel (1797-1868), Irish novelist and song-writer, is remembered for his ballad, and the novel developed out of it, Rory O’More (1836), which deals with the tragic events in Ireland in 1798 and also for his novel Handy Andy in which he developed the whimsical aspects of Irish character.

Wilcox, MRS. ELLA WHEELER (née Wheeler) (1855-1919), American poet and journalist, described as the most popular poet of either sex and of any age, read by thousands who never open Shakespeare. She began to publish poems at the age of seven, and her last volume Poems of Affection was published posthumously in 1920. Her Collected Poems were published in 1921.

fin

The Way Things Go from Todd’s album Lounge Act In Heaven

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Extremely Local News

I grew sunflowers this year for the first time in several years and I’m so glad I did. Van Gogh bouquets for the table, gifts of bouquets for friends, a cheerful presence in the garden on the gloomiest of days.

We had a visit from my niece Lena and her daughter Della who is ten-months-old and rather cute, don’t you think?

Lena and Della and I went to the Mendocino Farmers Market together and Lena bought shishitos to go with our tamales.

Now Marcia and I are in love with shishitos. So easy to cook and so delicious.

The giant two-headed monster log that was way out near the mouth of Big River got moved inland on a big tide. Every time I go to the beach the behemoth is somewhere new. What a beauty!

Work moves apace on my book The Dog Who Wanted A Person with illustrations by Miruna Constantin, local wunderkind prodigy with a pencil. With good fortune we hope to publish the book ere long.

Marcia just posted a fun instructional video on YouTube teaching you how to play a 2:3 poly-rhythm with shakers. Not to be missed if you’ve ever longed to play such a thing. Such fun!

Thanks for visiting!

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Tides of Change

So here we are and things are happening in the greater world and in our own personal worlds, and more and more lately I’m finding it difficult to separate the two.

In truth it is impossible to separate the wildfires in Canada and California and in Europe from our personal world. We may not be in the fires, or in Gaza, or in the parking lot in Los Angeles where the ICE agents are grabbing people and hauling them away to horrid prisons, but those things are happening in the same world we live in, the same world where we grow lettuce, and buy groceries, and feel tired and anxious, and we aren’t sure why we feel that way, but we do.

A Buddhist teacher was asked, “How can we empty our minds of thought when there is so much suffering in the world, so much cruelty? How can we stop thinking about the suffering in order to calm our minds and meditate?”

The teacher replied, “Meditate on suffering. Do not try to block those thoughts. Allow them to arise and fade away and arise again and fade away again. This is the practice. When images and thoughts of suffering arise in your mind, label them. Suffering. They will fade away because they are thoughts, and thoughts have no substance. They will return. Watch them without attaching to them. Allow them to fade away. Yes. Life is full of suffering, and life is full of joy. One does not replace the other. They exist simultaneously. This is the challenge of being alive. Coming to terms with this ever-present duality by realizing suffering and happiness are not separate from each other, just as you are not separate from anything.”

What is happening in the greater world is happening in our personal world. Open your heart to this truth.

fin

Light Song from Lounge Act In Heaven on YouTube and Spotify

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Gaza Dream

I’m at the Mendocino Farmers Market with my basket as I am every Friday. I’m about to buy some tamales when I look to the west and see a big military helicopter hovering in the air over what I thought was the Mendocino Hotel.

“What’s going on down there?” I ask my friend Christine, the market manager.

She hesitates to reply and then says quietly, “Gaza.”

I set my basket down and walk toward the helicopter, and as I get closer I can see where Mendocino abruptly ends and Gaza begins.

I stand a few feet from the edge of Gaza and watch in horror as people run toward a pile of sacks of grain and bullets rain down from the helicopter killing many of the people.

Now two children, a boy and a girl, walk by close to the line between Mendocino and Gaza, and I reach out to them and they take my hands and I pull them across the line into Mendocino and we walk back to the farmers market.

The boy is so weak from hunger, he collapses. So I pick him up and the girl clutches my pants leg and we continue on our way to the market.

I buy two tamales from the Mexican woman I always buy tamales from.When I try to pay her, she shakes her head.

I carry the boy into the park adjacent to the market with the girl still clinging to my pants leg and we sit on the ground. I unwrap the tamales and give one to the girl while I feed the boy the other. The girl eats her tamale quickly and goes back to the Mexican woman who gives her another tamale.

The boy eats slowly. When he has swallowed a few mouthfuls he falls asleep. The girl eats her second tamale and curls up on the ground beside me and falls asleep, too.

Christine brings me my basket and says, “Now what are you going to do?”

And I wake up.

fin

Gaza prayer song by Todd on YouTube and Apple.

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Living In Fog

Twenty years ago while hunting for a house to rent in Mendocino, I had lunch with a local who gave me some valuable information about life here, including where here is. Mendocino is the name of a town, true, but when a local says he or she lives in Mendocino, he or she means they live somewhere between Westport in the north and Elk in the south, and somewhere on the coast to ten miles inland.

This local also forewarned me about the dense summer fog that can blanket the coast for weeks and even months at a stretch permitting no sun to shine upon the land. She said many people here succumb to fog-induced depression that can only be cured by going inland a few miles where the sun is shining brightly.

How right she was. We are currently in week two of Life In Fog, and though I’m accustomed to these stretches of gray timelessness, the body mind spirit consortium is really put to the test by this lack of sun. By that I mean, one doesn’t have to succumb to the gloom, but if one is already feeling a bit blue about something, the blues may easily grab one.

*

Speaking of the blues, for most of my life I felt mighty blue about the unwillingness of humans to forsake violence and greed to work for the greater good of humanity and to work for the good of our mother earth who is hurting so badly from humanity’s misuse of her.

Now I’m no longer blue about that because I came to realize with the ascendancy of Trump and how his adherents and many others behaved during the Pandemic, and watching how things are unfolding now, that humans are behaving as humans have behaved since we evolved into modern humans a few hundred thousand years ago.

As with all other species of life on earth, our priorities are: having sufficient food and water, not being too hot or too cold, procreating, and protecting our offspring until they are able to survive on their own. If we have the time and the means to do things to give ourselves pleasure we’ll do that, too. And most importantly, we don’t care about other species except to try to eat them or use them to fulfill our priorities.

Yes, a tiny minority of humans deviate from this self-serving behavior, and some pre-industrial societies developed collective behavior practices designed to not overuse resources so future generations would have enough to eat, but by and large humans do what all species do: we take care of ourselves in the short term. And we think anyone who suggests we do otherwise is crazy.

For instance, air travel has been proven through many meticulous studies to be the cause of at least 25% of all greenhouse gases and the attendant global warming, and that number is probably closer to 50%. Yet millions of people who claim to care about the environment and the future of the earth continue to fly in jets multiple times a year. This seeming hypocrisy used to give me the blues. Now I understand these people are simply being human and giving themselves pleasure in the short term. They don’t really care about anything else. That’s how humans are.

And that, I feel, is why we the people elected Trump. He doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is: a self-serving human being just like the rest of us.

Or maybe I just feel this way because I haven’t seen the sun in a week.

fin

Troo Romanz piano/drum duet on YouTube and Spotify.

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Good Things

Headlands Fleurs

There is a boggy place on the headlands just to the south of Main Street in Mendocino where the flowers this year are more lush and spectacular than I’ve ever seen them, and the bumblebees are in ecstasy visiting the myriad blooms.

Farmers Market

Every Friday from noon to 2:30 until October is the Mendocino Farmers Market. Such fun. I go every week and buy sunflower-seed sprouts and tamales, and this week I got a jar of ambrosial apricot jam, a jar of Laytonville honey, a jar of cannabis healing salve that really works, and a spectacular bunch of radishes.

The Bear Came

This morning I went out to cut a zucchini from my one zucchini plant growing in my orchard tub and found a bear had knocked over one our garden refuse cans to root around in the kitchen compost.

We call any bear who knocks over cans in our neighborhood the bear, though we’ve never actually seen the bear in the thirteen years we’ve lived in this house. He or she visits us during the night. We know the bear is different bears, but for some reason we like calling them the bear.

And though cleaning up the bear mess is a gucky chore, I’m always happy when the bear visits us so long as he or she doesn’t try to get through or over our deer fence. I like the idea of him or her out there sniffing around.

Sugar Snap Peas and Carrots

In my orchard tubs protected by the aforementioned deer fence, we have had the most successful crops of sugar-snap peas and carrots we’ve ever had. The lettuce crop has been good, the scallions marvelous, the sunflowers still stalks and no flowers, arugula plentiful, radishes ample, parsley galore, and the snap peas and carrots magnifico.

Lemons

Our lemon trees are also having a fabulous time this summer. I’m staying on top of feeding them and watering them, and we’ve had bumblebees and hummingbirds doing a great job pollinating them in the absence of honeybees. How lucky we are to have such a profusion of those tasty yellow orbs.

Reviews of The Farm at the East Cove Hotel

I’ve had several emails and letters and even some phone calls from people telling me how much they enjoyed my latest book The Farm at the East Cove Hotel, but until recently no one had posted a review of the book on Amazon, and finally someone has posted a nice encouraging five-star review there to go along with two good ones at Goodreads. Hurray!

fin

Todd’s happy song Wake Up Thinking About You from his album Dream of You