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Belle Bacon Bond. Drusilla and Her Dolls. Boston, The Four Seas Company, 1921.
I usually try to post some type of creepy book on Fridays and I think this one qualifies. There’s something about that picture that gives me the shivers.
©voyager, all rights reserved
Jack wanted to check on things in the woods on the east side of town, so off we went to the Vansittart Trail. We don’t come here often for a few reasons. The first reason is bugs. There are a lot of mosquitos and ticks around these parts, but it was a few degrees below zero today so I thought that was safe. I was partly right. There wasn’t an insect in sight, but the trail is not maintained in winter when it is also seldom used (that’s the other reason we don’t come here often), and our walk was anything but safe. The path was covered with ice and we had to wend our way between the trees to keep upright. The closer we got to the pond, the more snow we found, which actually made walking a bit easier. It was nice to see that the water was entirely frozen over, and there was no evidence of flooding here at all.
Jack seemed satisfied with the state of things and told me the fairies and little ones here were in deep winter sleep. Nonetheless, he wanted to check out their communication centre (who knew fairies even had those?) and so we veered off the path towards the meadow, and this is where Jack stopped – at a hollowed-out stump. He says this is an important spot for the woodland people and told me on the quiet that the fairies use it to send smudge signals, I have a general idea of what that is, but when I asked for more information, Jack wandered away as usual. I love that boy, but I wish he was a bit less recalcitrant.
In 2007 we had a major blackout in our town, three days if I remember correctly. In the winter. So when I got back from work I literally could do only things that were possible to do by candlelight – reading and drawing. It was the last time I have sat down with a piece of paper and a set of pencils and finished a drawing from start to finish. The drawing is below the fold since it is possibly NSFW.
This is fairly representative of what I have drawn, in addition to fantastical beasts, dragons, and trees. And depressions. I hope to brush-up on my drawing skills and get back into it now that I am unemployed and a master of my own time for a while. I have a few unfinished paintings too. A few finished as well, but I did not get round to taking pictures yet.
The original is a bit bigger than A4 and is now unfortunately irreparably damaged from an incident a few years ago when workers repairing my roof shuffled stuff in my attic whilst completely ignoring my advice about strong winds in my area. So they stored the folder with all my drawings and sketches under an impromptu shelter that was ripped off by a wind gust during the next rain. I found out only several weeks later when everything was moldy and I could not even plausibly require the company to pay the damages. I tried my best to salvage what I could, but I lost most of my drawings at that time.
[Read more…]
Winifred Kirkland. The Boy Editor. Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913.
I promised a more in depth thread on the tamales we had for New Year’s Eve. I’ve been wanting to make them for a while, since they a re one of my favourite Latin American street food, and just in time I found an online shop specialised in Mexican food where I could get the most unusual (for Western Europeans) ingredient: dried corn husks. I also go some quality corn flour and frijoles negros (which are from Canada…) so I could also make refritos (fried mushed beans).
©Giliell, all rights reserved
I chose a recipe with chicken filling, so I started by cooking the chicken. Well, actually it was the second step if you count soaking the corn husks. I thought it was daring from the people who wrote the recipe to tell folks to cook the chicken in liquid and later mention chicken stock but not to mention that of course you just made the world’s best chicken stock. Once I had that it was time to cream the butter for the batter. The original recipe called for lard, but the local Aldi doesn’t stock any lard any I won’t set food into the megamarkets before/during the holidays. You are supposed to add some of the stock and I swear this was the first time I made chicken buttercream. I then added the flour, more stock, salt and seasoning and let it rest for a while. The batter is quite fluffy at this point.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
I used the resting time to prepare the filling. I deboned my chicken and minced it a little. I then prepared salsa with onions, garlic, tomatoes and seasoning and added the chicken. The filling needs to be well flavoured or it will be lost in the batter.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Yes, I’m a messy cook, why do you ask?
Then it’s time for preparing the tamales. You use your soaked corn husks and spread some batter onto them. You add a spoonful of filling, close the batter around it and then wrap the corn husk like it’s a burrito.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
You then put them into a pot with a steamer and steam. The recipe calls for two hours, but my pot and steamer don’t actually fit one another so I cannot close them properly. The test run was therefore a bit soggy and for the New Year’s Eve dinner I probably steamed them for 4-5 hours. Looks like another piece of kitchen equipment that I need to upgrade.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
They were yummy with that particular flavour of actual corn flour and so savoury that the dog begged for the leftovers.
Modern Warfare by Chase Meuller
This morning Jack and I came across a pile of papers scattered on the sidewalk near my house. This isn’t unusual. We live near a high school, and I often find littered test papers and assignments on my lawn, but this pile was pristine and on examination looked lost, not tossed. There were a few job applications and several pieces of art, including the one above. Luckily, the young man’s name and phone number were on the applications, so I phoned him to let him know what I’d found. He hadn’t known he’d lost the papers and was quite glad to hear from me. He was very polite and thankful, and we made arrangements for him to stop by tomorrow to pick up his things. This piece of art appealed to me, and I asked him if I could post it. He’s given me his verbal approval, and so I present to you the artist, Chase Mueller.
Good Luck with the job search, Chase.
On my last post about a mother sharing my private phone number with her son, brucegee1962 remarked the following:
I would never put anything on any social media that I wouldn’t want my students to come across.
This is why, aside from anonymously commenting on other peoples’ blogs, I don’t use any social media.
Obviously I have a different opinion here, and I really wanted to reply to this, but then I thought it deserves its own blogpost. This is in no way meant as a take down of brucegee1962 but an explanation of why I think having a pseudonym is a good thing for a teacher.
It’s not that I’m in any way ashamed of what I write. It’s just that it’s occasionally very personal. I’m not one of those teachers who jealously guard every titbit of their personal lives. I always found that type to be quite stuck up when I was a kid myself. I share certain general information like my family status, I chat with kids about hobbies and movies. There’s a bunch of teenage boys who also play Pokémon Go. I occasionally will also tell them about times when I had problems or felt bad, because we’re all humans and I want them to know that it’s ok to have problems and that you can still make it. But we are not friends, we are just friendly. On here I will talk about health, grumble about Mr, share anecdotes about my own kids, and occasionally well cover issues like sex and pregnancy and childbirth. While there’s nothing bad about these topics, they’re pretty intimate and nothing I want some teenage boys to know.
Writing pseudonymously means that my students are also not identifiable. This allows me to talk about some cases, to raise awareness to issues concerning education, abuse and child welfare. Just take the easy case of yesterday’s post: If I wrote this under my legal name, the kid would be identifiable. Instead of me complaining about a breach of trust on part of a parent and raising awareness about the issue of parents disrespecting a teacher’s privacy, I would be publicly shaming a kid whose friends and family could all read about it. And that’s just the easy case and not cases where I talk about abuse and such. If I ever outed a kid like that I would and should lose my job. But we need to talk about these issues, so I will do so as Giliell.
Well, they’re teens. Not exactly the kind of people with the best decision making skills. Occasionally a kid will be angry with me and I really don’t want to have my Twitter mass reported and permabanned because I gave somebody detention. While I talk with the kids about Pokémon I won’t tell them my team or my name. And that’s just the kids and not their parents. We’ve had an older brother chasing the principal around school and the family of an expelled student making threats so they were only allowed to pick up his stuff with the police present.
Sadly, in 2020 that’s an issue. The right wing AfD has several portals where you can “report” teachers for being “too left” (i.e. not a Nazi and standing up against them). And while the school I work at has a high proportion of migrant kids, it is also in a place with a serious Nazi problem, the kind of Nazis with motorbikes and baseball bats. They know that I won’t let their kids use slurs or racially abuse the other kids. I guess I’m not on their Christmas Cards List.
I hope this makes clear why I don’t want my students to discover my online presence. Not because I’m ashamed, but because it’s better for all of us.
Anna Palmer Campbell. Lady Gay, The Story of a Little Girl and her Friends. Boston, Lothrop publishing company, 1898.
©voyager, all rights reserved
It’s a triple gravity sort of day for me and my brain can’t seem to organize itself to write. Rather than leave you with nothing, I thought I’d share this poem by one of my favourite authors, James Joyce.
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Gold-brown upon the sated flood
The rock-vine clusters lift and sway:
Vast wings above the lambent waters brood
Of sullen day.
A waste of waters ruthlessly
Sways and uplifts its weedy mane,
Where brooding day stares down upon the sea
In dull disdain.
Uplift and sway, O golden vine,
Thy clustered fruits to love’s full flood,
Lambent and vast and ruthless as is thine
Incertitude.
Many things happened since the last Teacher’s Corner. I don’t always have the time or energy or emotional strength to post about them, because mostly they involve vulnerable kids in difficult situations. Today’s story is a different one. It’s one about a good kid from a good family (whatever that means) and a serious WTF moment.
Some of the boys in grade seven told me today that their classmate J (home sick) has my WhatsApp number. I was like “yeah, you’re kidding”. I thought they tried to provoke me, with J being at home and not there to defend himself, but then they went on describing my profile image in detail, and while “you with your family” may still be part of cold reading, “with some blue box around you” really isn’t.
I went straight to the phone to call his parents because I had no clue where he could have gotten hold of my private mobile number. the father cleared up the matter: two years ago we had a charity run through the local woods and as part of our volunteer group, his mum had access to my phone number. She’d then passed it on to her darling teenage son “in case of an emergency”* and left it at that.
Now I can only hope that he just bragged about it without sharing it. I’d hate it if I’d have to get a new number. But I know why “dual sim” was another criterion for the new phone.
Just in case any parents ever wonder why teachers are sometimes “like that”. Even if you are the nicest, most trustworthy people, your fellow parents have ruined it for good.
There is one last grove of California Giant Red Sequoia trees in private hands and like all forests in the Sierra Nevada area, it is at risk of damage from environmental pressures, including a heightened risk of fire. The grove is highly important and contains some of the oldest and largest trees on the planet. Nearly 500 of the trees are over 6 feet in diameter
Now, a California conservation group is beseeching the public to step up and fund the purchase of a huge grove of the towering trees. “It’s an awe-inspiring place,” says Jessica Inwood, Parks Program Manager for the Save the Redwoods League. “It’s the last, largest giant sequoia property left in private ownership.” One sequoia on the property, the Stagg Tree, is believed to be the fifth-largest tree in the world.
Though the sequoias do not burn as frequently as other trees in Californias, the league intends to reduce tree overgrowth in order to mitigate the damage of future fires. “With fire frequency and intensity predicted to increase due to climate change and with significant fuels accumulation in the forest, the ecosystem is vulnerable to severe fire damage,” Inwood says.
The fires are nothing new, but the warm conditions that foster them are becoming more frequent, and the vast fires that result are difficult to combat. “Drought in a warmer climate is a big threat,” says Roger Bales, director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at the University of California Merced. “Also high-intensity wildfire, which is more likely with a warmer climate.”
The 530 acres, known as Alder Creek, currently belong to the Rouch Family, and they have signed a purchase agreement to sell the land and the trees to the Save The Redwoods League for $15 million. Now the group needs the public’s help in funding the purchase.
Story via: Atlas Obscura from September 2019.
I will add as a happy update that thanks to people from around the world, the Save The Redwoods League has met its fundraising goals and Alder Creek is now protected. If you’d like to know more about this non-profit organization and the vital work they do, they can be found here.
©voyager, all rights reserved
! Jack and I are on the lam. We wanted to see how much flooding there was over the weekend and when we arrived, we found both trails closed – due to flooding. Jack was the first to cross the barrier, and he quickly trotted off toward the river.
“Hey, Bubba. Come back here. You can’t go there, the sign says it’s closed.” I called out, adding “Hey, wait up.”
“Silly Mummy,” he replied, “Dog’s can’t read.”
First, that’s an outright lie. Most dogs read very well, and many are multi-lingual, but they don’t want people to know because they’re afraid someone will make it a job for them to do.
Secondly, he wasn’t waiting up for me. By the time I’d adjusted my scarf to protect my camera from the mizzle, Jack was already in the water and out far enough to be in the current, which frightened me, so I called him to come to shore.
“Don’t worry Mummy, the water isn’t too fast for me.”
“Yeah, yeah, You’re super-dog. Now come here,” but as I got closer to the river, I saw that Jack’s assessment of this situation was accurate. The current wasn’t very energetic, and the banks were only mildly flooded. We’d seen much worse earlier in the month, after the first January thaw. I told Jack he could stay in for a few minutes and stood at the edge of the water, watching him swim upstream and away, then relax and float back downstream for a bit. His sister taught him this “surfing” method at the beach, but Jack doesn’t have the drive that Lucy did, and he soon tires of the upstream work part of the equation, and sure enough, he came into shore after only a few minutes.
“I don’t know how you can swim in such cold water. I don’t know why you’d want to either.” I told him.
“Mummy, it’s invigorating and much healthier for you than that heated therapy pool that you use.”
“I’m not so sure about that, Bubbs. That river water doesn’t look too clean to me.” I said as he shook the water out of his coat and onto mine.
He harumphed and padded off down the path farther away from the car. I almost called him back but decided that the mizzle wasn’t that bad, and the fish police weren’t too likely to be waiting for us back at the car, and I was right on both counts. The walk may have even been a bit sweeter than usual because of the rebelliousness of crossing that barrier, to which I say,
“Take that Mr. Conservation Officer. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster.”
