Cat Ladder

Nikko used me for a ladder to see what was in the upper cupboards…

… then posed for pictures.

Return

"Old Sam Peabody!"'
Calls the white-throated sparrow
Brisk autumn morning

Peep

Dark October sky
Far away, a distant call —
Night-migrating birds

Kimchi, Circa 1963

Spring Kim-chee (Pom Keem-chee)

3 cups celery cabbage
3 Tbsp salt
3 green garlic onions
1 clove garlic
1-1/2 cups water
1-1/2 tsp chopped red chili pepper
1 tsp chopped candied ginger

Wash the cabbage and cut into pieces 1 inch long and 1 inch wide. Sprinkle with 2 Tbsp salt, mix well and let stand 15 minutes

Cut the onions (including tops) into 1-1/2 inch lengths and shred lengthwise.

Chop the garlic, red pepper and ginger in fine pieces. After the cabbage has stood 15 minutes, wash it twice in cold water. Mix the prepared vegetables with the cabbage, add 1 Tbsp salt and put into a stone or glass jar. Add enough water to cover the cabbage and let stand for sever several days. In warm weather one day is sufficient, but in cold weather, five days are needed. Kim-chee can be kept several weeks in the refrigerator.

Six (6) servings.

From Hawaiian Cuisine, A Collection of Recipes from Members of the Society Featuring Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese and Cosmopolitan Dishes. Published for the Hawaii State Society of Washington, D.C. by the Charles E. Tuttle Co., Rutland, Vermont, and Tokyo, Japan, 1963.

My notes and variations

I transcribed this recipe faithfully, but made corrections to editing and typographical errors (shown by strike-throughs). Note the publication date, only a few years after Hawaii's statehood (1959).

This recipe seems to be simplified for Western kitchens. I've found what are probably more authentic recipes online which are more complicated, include ingredients like fish sauce, dried shrimp, sugar, vinegar and chili paste, and require a longer fermentation. This recipe is more of a quick pickle, with the kimchi being ready in a few days. Also note, I'm not making this in spring but in late, late summer.

Celery cabbage? Never heard of it, but it seems descriptive of the Napa cabbage typically used in traditional kimchi recipes. I used good ol' regular cabbage. I also used fresh ginger instead of candied, fresh chile peppers instead of dry, and adjusted the heat with powdered cayenne pepper. Other vegetables could be added to kimchi, such as turnips, daikon (as in photo, above), celery or carrots.

UPDATE Oct. 15, 2012: "Quick Spicy Kimchee" recipe on the Food Network: 
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/quick-spicy-kimchee-recipe/index.html

Fresh Gravel, Part 2

Rip out weeds.

Lay down weed barrier cloth
(I'm on my third 100-foot roll).

Shovel.
Haul.
Dump.
Rake.

Repeat.

"Phase 2" on the north side is nearly done. Later this autumn
or winter I'll clean, weed and replant the border along the fence.

Along the south side of the house.

 
Looking better all the time!

I'm Not a Slacker

Really, I'm not.

But you wouldn't know it, based on the lack of recent posts. Fear not: Updates are in the offing. Cross my heart.

In the meantime, here's a little self-portrait-with-photo-bombing-cat illustration project I began last night:

I haven't done an illustration project or a self-portrait in a while, so it's a good challenge. Nikko, our cat, looks pretty good and just needs a few more details, but didn't quite succeed at my attempt to make my expression look more surprised.

Fresh Gravel for the Garden Paths

"What do you want for your birthday?" asked my mother and dad.

"Three yards of gravel," I replied.

The gravel company truck delivered it to the back gate on Saturday morning. The driver was amazing -- he angled the truck toward the entrance, coming within a couple inches of the fence, and hit the bulls-eye on the tarp. I gleefully handed him a check, and started shoveling right away.

Dad also got me a sweet little garden cart. Originally I didn't think I wanted one, but father know best! It turned out to be the perfect thing for shuttling around loads of gravel.  

That's what three yards of pea gravel looks like. Pretty intimidating.
Time to start moving it, one shovel-full at a time.

I'd been at it for an hour or so when Laura arrived, and the two of us pecked away at it for the rest of the afternoon. Tiring work, but entirely gratifying. (Whenever she has a ton of gravel to move, I'll be there in a jiff!)

Before...

... and after!

Before ...

... and after!

It looks a little deep, doesn't it?
That's because this is the gravel stockpile for Phase Two.

Phase Two: Down the north side of the house to the fence.
There's a lot more work to do.

The World Is Too Much With Us

The Poetry Muse has been on vacation -- it is summer, after all. She suggests a sonnet by Wordsworth instead:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

— William Wordsworth

Poetry Corner

Haiku is in the news today.

NPR's Morning Edition and AZCentral.com report that the Arizona Department of Transportation is tapping Twitter poets to compose haiku about sand storm safety.

To publicize the dangers of driving during the storms, sometimes called haboobs, the agency issued a challenge this week to its more than 14,000 Twitter followers: Write a haiku about safe driving amid blowing dust. http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2012/06/14/20120614arizona-dust-storm-safety-17-syllables-haiku-haboob.html#ixzz1xsWofZ3w

Visit AZCentral.com or Morning Edition to read selected poems, then tweet your own with #haboobhaikus.

:: :: ::

More Twitter-related poetry

Following tweet by Annette Makino @Ant99, my browser turned to Pune Juice, a quarterly online journal of senryu, kyoka and haiga. Submission deadlines and past publications are at http://prunejuice.wordpress.com/ or follow them at @prunejuicemag

Cross posted from horaizons.blogspot.com

Which way? Which way? Which way?

Or "Wichity-wichity-wichity," if you prefer. Either phrase is a mnemonic for the song of the common yellowthroat. The male is olive drab above with a shocking yellow breast and a black mask which makes him look like a burglar. He uses his lyrical song to mock birders while he skulks about in willow thickets. These birds are known for being "shy," but anthropomorphizing birders not satisfied with merely hearing its song might use words like "cagey" or "devious" to describe its secretive behavior.

Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge

"Which way? Which way? Which way?"

Scan the foliage, refocus binoculars. Continue to scan foliage while continually refocusing binoculars. A flash of yellow, it that it? No, a leaf. Scan the foliage again. Another flash of yellow! Focus on it, quickly! Defeat: another leaf.

"Which way? Which way?" Cup hands behind ears, strain to find the source of the song. Pause.

"Which way? Which way? Which way?" Scan the thicket with naked eyes this time, look for movement.

"Which way? Which way?" There! It's got to be right there, but no bird – only song. 

Then nothing. The wind rustled willow leaves. Sparrows and wrens filled in with their songs. Either the bird moved off or now it was mocking the birders by remaining silent.

Marsh wren (not hiding)

I tromped through the Wildlife Refuge on a fine June morning with a jovial crowd of 10 or so on a Redwood Region Audubon Society walk led by David Fix. With the exception of the least bittern, other birds seen that day were neither sneaky nor shy: marsh wrens, song and savannah sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, common and snowy egrets, turkey vultures, great blue herons, black-crowned nigh herons, lingering or non-migrant Canada geese, greater scaup and blue-winged teal.

Savannah sparrow (hiding out in the open)

New Favorite Lunch Spot … with CALPICO!

Z & J Asian Subs… oh, how I love your delicious sandwiches,
convenient location and mango Calpico …

Computer lab

keystrokes softly click
chairs creak, mouse swish, clicky-click
printer whines, urgent


4/9/12

Count the Legs, Divide by Two

The announcement went out on the Yahoo group email list and on Facebook: the shorebirds are preparing for migration, and their numbers are "mind-blowing." According to the May 1 post authored by Humboldt birder David Fix, there were "in excess of 400,000 shorebirds" in the northern section of Humboldt Bay, near the Arcata Marsh and Wildlife area. His count, corroborated by seven compatriots:

300,000 Western Sandpipers
100,000 Dunlin
10,000 Least Sandpiper - hard to figure but there seemed to be great numbers of them in the peep flocks based on voice. This is still only one out of every forty peep-types, if so. I visually identified them consistently as they flew past in droves, as well, sometimes in flocks composed mostly of them
Short-billed Dowitcher 3000 - fewer than lately
Marbled Godwit 275, fewer than lately. These and the remainder below were counted pretty firmly.
Black-bellied Plover 200
Long-billed Dowitcher about 100
Semipalmated Plover 30, again
American Avocet 30
Willet 20
Whimbrel about 11
Black Turnstone at least 5
Ruddy Turnstone at least 4
Red-necked Phalarope 1

It was irresistible. The next night there were nearly 25 birders, but fewer birds. They had begun their migration, presumably northward to their Alaskan breeding grounds. Still, the flights of shorebirds were mesmerising, and it was especially rewarding to see so many of them in breeding plumage.

Pi-ku for Pi Day

March 14 (3/14) is Pi Day! Here's part of a rhyme I learned as a mnemonic for remembering pi to the 21st place. The number of letters in each word represent a number in pi (sir=3, I=1, send=4, etc.).

Sir, I send a rhyme excelling
in sacred truth and rigid spelling.
Numerical sprites elucidate
for me the lexicon's dull weight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piphilology

Now, what better way is there to celebrate Pi Day than to eat pie and write Pi-ku? A Pi-ku is a poetry form very similar to the Haiku but rather than following the 5-7-5 form, it follows the form 3-1-4: the first line has three syllables, one syllable in the second line, and four syllables in the last line.

Here is a Pi-ku to me from my husband:

                  Darling Wife
                  Oh,
                  How I love you.

Read more about Pi Day here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/03/pi_day.html

Birding O.D.

Hardly. Just making up for lost time.

The backyard birds have been doing well lately, despite my jaundiced eye. The two seed feeders need to be filled just about every other day. The most frequent visitors include house finch, house sparrow, pine siskin, dark-eyed junco, white-crowned sparrow and yellow-rumped warbler. Steller's jays, norther flickers and robins make regular appearances. A special leap year day bonus was a varied thrush, a first for our yard.

Varied thrush

On Saturday, I took a canoe trip down Hookton Slough with friends. Birding from the water level gives one a different perspective than birding from land, and the canoes acted as something of a disguise, allowing us to drift much closer to shorebirds than we could by approaching on foot. The weather was clear and sunny, and made for great birding and paddling: greater yellowlegs, marbled godwit, common and snowy egrets, willit, double-crested cormorant, American avocet, Western gull, Canada geese, ruddy and bufflehead ducks, green-winged teal, greater scaup, a merganser, brown pelican, pied-billed and Western grebes, peregrine falcon, northern harrier, raven and song sparrow. In the zone where the slough joins Humboldt Bay, we saw a dozen or more harbor seals sunning on mudflats, and several Bonaparte's gulls.

Birdspotting: Pia, Laura and Holly.
Photo by David Luckhardt

The Aleutian Goose Flyoff was hosted again at the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge, so I took the opportunity to do more birding, this time with a co-worker/fellow bird enthusiast Drew and his girlfriend Angie. Thick fog diminished visibility but created a mysterious atmosphere -- geese, flying overhead, could be heard, growing louder and louder as they approched. Then they would gradually materialize overhead, pass overhead and disappear again into the gray. Decent birding, despite the weather: Aleutian, cackling and Western Canada geese, green winged teal, northern shoveler, willit, marbled godwit, American coot, least sandpiper, song sparrow, marsh wren, redwing blackbird, robin, house finch, raven, northern harrier, black-capped chickadee, yellow-rumped warbler and ruby-crowned kinglet. I caught a quick look at a non-harrier, non-red-tailed hawk, but the fog made identification difficult.

Three subspecies of Canada geese are in this flock:
Aleutian (foreground, with white neck ring),
cackling (mid-group, no neck ring) and
common/Western (tall, in back, no neck ring).

Least sandpiper, with crab

Waiting for the geese

One-Stroke Dragon Paintings

Hitofude Ryu gallery in Nikko, Japan

This gallery was closed the day we visited Nikko. I recently saw a YouTube video of the master at work, creating his amazing dragon paintings:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDCvPHiqlS8&feature=colike

The Not-Too-Bad Backyard Bird Count

I'm ambivalent about this year's Great Backyard Bird Count. My birds were decidedly run-of-the-mill, with no exciting accidentals like the orchard oriole of 2011. On the other hand, Saturday morning's observations were launched with a sighting great blue heron perched on a neighbor's roof, and I logged 20 species on Sunday. Not too bad, really, considering our lazy method (Nikko, the cat, and I watched out a window our feeding stations and the surrounding skies). I even had time for a quick 15 minute count this morning, which I'll post later. Here are Saturday and Sunday's reports:

Observation Date : FEB 18, 2012
Number of Species: 15
All Reported: yes
Checklist:
       Great Blue Heron - 1
       Northern Flicker (Red-shafted) - 2
       Steller's Jay - 1
       American Crow - 1
       American Robin - 1
       Yellow-rumped Warbler (Myrtle) - 2
       Yellow-rumped Warbler (Audubon's) - 1
       Townsend's Warbler - 1
       Fox Sparrow (Sooty) - 2
       Song Sparrow - 2 (one of the song sparrows may have been a female, but didn't get a long look at it.)
       White-throated Sparrow - 1
       White-crowned Sparrow - 3
       Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon) - 8
       Pine Siskin - 7
       House Sparrow - 4

Observation Date : FEB 19, 2012
Number of Species: 20
Checklist:
       Cackling Goose (Aleutian) - 50
       Turkey Vulture - 1
       gull sp. - 1
       Eurasian Collared-Dove - 2
       Anna's Hummingbird - 1
       Downy Woodpecker - 1
       Northern Flicker (Red-shafted) - 1
       Steller's Jay - 1 (vocalizations only, no visual)
       Common Raven - 1
       American Robin - 5
       Yellow-rumped Warbler (Myrtle) - 2
       Yellow-rumped Warbler (Audubon's) - 1
       Townsend's Warbler - 1
       Fox Sparrow (Sooty) - 2
       White-throated Sparrow - 1
       White-crowned Sparrow - 2
       Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon) - 3
       House Finch - 5
       Pine Siskin - 2
       House Sparrow - 3

The song sparrow of previous post and fame was quite active on Saturday morning (and reliably every morning for the previous four weeks), but entirely absent Sunday and today:

Observation Date : FEB 20, 2012
Number of Species: 11
Checklist:
       Cackling Goose - 500
       American Crow - 2
       American Robin - 1
       Yellow-rumped Warbler (Myrtle) - 3
       Yellow-rumped Warbler (Audubon's) - 1
       Fox Sparrow (Sooty) - 1
       White-throated Sparrow - 2
       White-crowned Sparrow - 1
       Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon) - 6
       Pine Siskin - 1
       House Sparrow - 5

Bloom

Golden flags unfurl
The bright messengers of spring —
Daffodils are up

Correcting the Record

For the record, I'm not really an idiot. I just act like one.

A bold, streaky sparrow took up residence in the neighbor's apple tree and blackberry brambles a few weeks ago. It hit our feeders along with The Usual Suspects. ID: song sparrow.

A few days later. Singing. Not a song sparrow song I'd recognize. Get binoculars and camera; observe bird, record video, take photos. Cinnamon flanks. Funny song -- like part of a song sparrow song, but missing parts, and buzzy. Surely not a song sparrow. Lincoln's sparrow?

Oh, boy! A Lincoln's sparrow!

Listen to online recordings of Lincoln's sparrows and song sparrow. Neither sounds like my sparrow.

A week later. Singing again. This time, I listened to that song. Hard. For about an hour. And the song had not remained the same. It had changed. It was now the song of the song sparrow.

Every morning that little devil is the first bird to sing. And he sings, unfalteringly now, for hours. Sometimes I even hear him in the afternoon if I'm around the house.

I must also correct the record of a previous bird-related post: juncos are back. Just had to wait for a cold snap. Saw six or eight of them this morning. Fox sparrow last weekend, too.

Hmph.

Where's Winter?

This morning we were visited by our resident flicker pair and it seemed they had a juvenile with them! But mostly our winter backyard bird action has cooled down. The dark-eyed juncos, fox sparrows and warblers seem to have moved on, and the pine siskins have moved in. A Lincoln's song sparrow* is still hanging around, and he sings his territorial song regularly each morning. Still, I'm looking forward to the Great Backyard Bird Count next weekend, Feb. 17-20.

Here are some photos taken in January:

Fox sparrow

Townsend warbler

* See "Correcting the Record"