Happy New Year, 1950-1951

I’ve recently found some non-recipes among my grandma’s recipe collections.

To distract myself in the evenings when I have trouble getting to sleep, I’ve been sifting through the cigar boxes, looseleaf cookbooks, and other places Grandma stored her recipes. I’ve been trying to organize them, transcribing them, too.

One of these sources is Grandma Schroeder’s copy of My Own Recipes: Loose Leaf Cook Book. It must date to the 1920s or 30s. The pages are exceedingly brittle (especially considering it’s a looseleaf binding), and the binder itself fell apart. Grandma fixed it together with strapping tape. That, by now, is not able to hold it together, either.

The printed pages of this volume are brittle and falling out of the two rings. So fragile.

This notebook, however, is chock full of handwritten recipes, written on index cards, note paper, the backs of envelopes, you name it. Grandma added to this collection her whole life (though later recipes mostly wound up in the aforementioned cigar boxes).

But at the very back of her copy of My Own Recipes: Loose Leaf Cook Book, I found a cute little handmade Christmas/New Year’s card made by my uncle Tom in late 1950, perhaps as a school art project, or perhaps in Sunday school. I think it’s obviously a gift for his parents.

It’s a winter scene, with a church, a night sky, snow, and a full moon. The snow effect was created by spattering white paint using a toothbrush, I’ll bet. The moon in the sky is rather fanciful, since it’s usually not visible when snow is falling, with the sky thus cloudy. In the upper left corner is a miniature, commercially printed calendar for 1951, sewn together in actual pages.

There’s evidence that this little artwork was tacked up onto a bulletin board, or something. Maybe the tack was only used for the creation of the piece, since there’s no white-snow-spatter where the thumbtack had been.

Uncle Tom, born in 1944, would have been six when he made this. And it’s clearly his, with his name written on the front and the back. (It’s hard to write your name in pencil on a piece of black construction paper.)

So even after 1951 came and went, and the little calendar was out of date, Grandma kept this little artwork all these years, tucked into the very back of her looseleaf cookbook.

So, being curious, I had to look up some things. First, the moon amused me. It’s so small. Generally speaking, I think I expected it to be about the diameter of a bottlecap, but instead, it’s not even half an inch wide.

Then I remembered what it was like to try to cut a perfect circle out of a piece of construction paper, using kindergarten scissors, and having no plan for how to cut a circle. My circles got smaller and smaller, as I rotated the paper and trimmed off all the offending pokey-out bits. If I’d traced a circle first, it would’ve been easier.

But it’s clearly intended to be a full moon in Uncle Tom’s artwork. I doubt anyone would have intended it to be, say, a gibbous moon.

And this got me wondering. Was there a full moon at the end of 1950, when these children were all making their little nighttime scenes of the church, snow, and the moon?

With the Internet, you can get this kind of information pretty quickly. And sure enough! The last full moon in December 1950 was on Christmas Eve: December 24, at 10:24 a.m. UTC, or around 4:24 a.m. here in Missouri.

So . . . this was an actual scene from Christmas 1950. How about that.

I’m also tickled at all this line of thinking, because for several years at Christmas, Uncle Tom has mailed us Moon Over Me Magnetic Moon Calendar, Almanac Card, and MoonMaggy Fridge Magnets. The fridge magnet shows all the phases of the moon for the calendar year.

The chart itself, in its geometric form, has an aesthetic beauty to it. And it’s good to know what the moon is up to, even if you don’t believe in astrology. When is the night darkest? When is it brightest? When do you get to see those beautiful “fingernail” new moons hanging over the western sky in the evenings, with the earthshine on the dark portion, revealing its true spherical shape? When will the lunar eclipses be happening?

And that’s really about all on this subject. It was just fun to discover, among all those recipes for cinnamon coffee cake, chow-chow, oatmeal cookies, and Christmas fruitcake.

I’ve found some other interesting non-recipe items, too. Maybe I’ll find time to blog about them, as well.

Big Nature, 2024

The year 2024 has been a notable nature year in several ways. Sure, there were some significant tornado, flooding, and other severe-weather events (some part of Missouri gets those every year); but if you lived in any of the places affected, it was definitely a year of “big nature” for you.

And we had an exceptionally mild spring, which is something, and by fall, most of the state was in some level of flat-out drought. (Which affected fall color in our state.)

In October, the drought stress caused our lilacs to bloom even as our green ash tree turned yellow. It was a really odd sight.

But I want to talk about much bigger nature. Like, once-in-a-lifetime nature. Like, there was that amazingly beautiful total solar eclipse in April (I still need to blog about it). Of course, I didn't even try to take pictures of it, but I sure soaked in the time and place—the way the event felt, and how unique it looked—sunny but shady, at once.

And there was that solar storm that ignited aurorae visible exceptionally far-south in May and October. If you got to see that, or get photographs of what you wished you could see with your bare eyes, then bully for you!

But let’s not forget the coolest nature thing that happened in eastern North America: the coincidental emergence of two big periodical cicada broods the same year! It was Broods XIII (17-year) and XIX (13-year). Realize, every “normal” periodical cicada emergence is an amazement in itself. That these insects can live 13 or 17 years below ground, sucking juices from tree roots, then somehow all emerge within the space of a few weeks, the same year, like clockwork, is a staggeringly cool example of big nature.

The last time the two broods emerged the same year was in 1803, the year the Louisiana Purchase was signed!

As of 2024, there appeared to be nowhere that the two broods overlapped, so it was a geeky thing to geek out over. It’s not like there were twice as many cicadas in most places (indeed, cicadas generally decline thanks to habitat disruption, and climate change is affecting them, too).

So it’s a mathematical convergence. When one thing happens every 13 years, and another thing happens every 17 years, it’s rare when they synch up.

So, when will the two broods emerge during the same summer again? How do you figure that out? Well, here you go: 13 x 17 = 221, and 2024 + 221 = 2245. The year 2245!!

What will the year 2245 be like? None of us alive today will see it . . . but Star Trek at least has offered some suggestions. According to Star Trek, 2245 is the year, on April 11, of the launch of the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701 (yes, THAT Enterprise!). Its first captain will be Robert April (who appears in later Star Trek series, including Strange New Worlds). James T. Kirk will take the captain’s chair in 2265.

It’s also the launch year of the Enterprise’s sister starships, the USS Cayuga (NCC-1557), later destroyed by the Gorn, and the USS Constellation (NCC-1017), under Captain Matthew Decker; both are destroyed by the Bugles-shaped planet killer in a memorable Original Series episode, “The Doomsday Machine.”

Star Trek canon also has it that 2245 is the year that Pavel Chekov will be born, and it’s the year that Leonard McCoy will decide to pursue a career in medicine.

I love it that these musings for 2024 have started with astronomical phenomena—the solar eclipse, the aurorae—then took a dive underground to consider the years our cicadas lived in soil, then fast-forwarded to the Star Trek universe. Science can predict, even project natural events: solar cycles, solar and lunar eclipses, and cicada emergences. And what do you think 2245 will be like?

Changes

The first snow of the winter of 2024–2025 came today.

I awakened at five and sensed something was wrong. As I grew more conscious, I realized I was smelling smoke. That’s never a good thing, unless you’re sitting near a campfire, or burning incense. And it was ugly-smelling smoke—not the pretty scent of someone’s fireplace or woodstove, wafting in the chilly air. No. It smelled like plastic, vinyl—acrid—nothing anyone should be burning, although we’ve had our share of neighbors who burn their trash in their backyards, in the early hours of the morning, trusting that no one will care about the smoldering dioxins and other toxins they inhale while asleep. Most of our neighbors smoke, anyway, so how would they even notice it?

But I was concerned. I tiptoed around our chilly house in my bare feet, making sure that all rooms on all floors were free of an obvious problem. I mean, we do have smoke detectors, but . . . Then I stepped onto the sunporch, which was colder still, and the attached “screen” porch (now with storm windows, of course, but still fairly open to the outdoor air, since we haven’t yet chinked the windows with insulation). And the smoke odor out there was much stronger. I moved back indoors and down the stairs to the front door, and stuck my face outside: again, smoky. Ugh. Whew.

This information led to another round of the second and third floors, this time with my glasses on, squinting more carefully out the windows. Is one of our neighbors’ houses on fire, or billowing smoke? Or is someone actually burning trash covertly? If the latter, I knew the fire might already be done with, even though the heavy, still air can let the stench linger for hours after the deed. But all I saw was a diffuse haziness in the direction of the motel on the expressway. (Hmm. And we need to clean our windows. Kind of late in the season for that, now.) Somehow, I managed not to awaken Sue with all this traipsing around at 5 a.m. (I also managed not to stub my toes on anything. Huzzah!)

Well, it turned out that around 2:45 a house had blown up on the east side of town. They haven’t yet announced a cause, but my money’s on a natural gas appliance or exhaust malfunction, possibly combined with electric space heaters or some such. It’s the first time this season that people’s heaters are running full-bore, and heating systems in poor repair are getting their dangerous shakedown this weekend. Yeah, while everyone’s observing Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and all that. Happy holidays.

And yes, if you know me, you know I’m too appalled about the results of the presidential election to feel very “thankful” this year. I live in a red state that was a purple state not long ago, before a Republican supermajority and gerrymandering, and toxic fundamentalist misinformation bubbles. I’m literally surrounded and ruled over by crazy, het, right-wing Trump-Jesus-gun worshippers. . . . And Thanksgiving? Are you kidding me?

Also, my parents are a grim situation all by themselves: it’s the inevitable collision between my mom’s unbending and increasingly unrealistic notion that she and Dad can continue forever to live in their home, with its staircases, and Dad’s flat-out exhaustion and increasing disability. He is her caregiver: he staggers and stumbles around their house; he fixes all her meals and carries them to her on a platter, brings her beverages and begs her to drink them, launders her clothes and bed sheets, supplies her with Depends and Poise pads, dispenses and tracks her (and his) medications, deals with all the house upkeep, pays the bills, everything. He exercises, does PT, walks, to stay in shape (“to keep myself physically fit . . .”). As she has for years, she sits in her puffy recliner and does nothing, not even the tiny amount of walking the doctors have been telling her for years that she must do if she wants to stay at home . . . and he’s simply exhausted. And so am I.

In retrospect, my brother and I should have talked them into moving a decade ago, and if they’d done nothing, at that time, we should have done it for them then. Too late for that now.

Mom, psychologically increasingly like a toddler, expects me to quit my job and move in with them until they both are gone, which, given my mom’s genetics and lack of serious chronic illness, could be another decade, in her case. Well, actually, I don’t think she knows I have a job, because I’ve been so generous with my time with them. As a freelancer, I’ve been able to skip some hours of work in the past five years to drive them to their haircuts and doctors’ appointments, to pick up groceries, computer supplies, and what-not, but those demands have exploded in the past few years, with Mom being taken to the hospital, often with rehab, six times in the past two years, and Dad twice.

Dad had a stroke, and he needed outpatient PT after it, and he needed me to drive him there a few times a week. And there’s always the questions about the computer. Or, Why isn’t the phone working? Or, I think we might need a new water heater. Your Mom needs more Depends: this size, overnight, super absorbency. . . .

Wash, rinse, repeat. I know Dad remembers I have a job, but I’m pretty sure Mom doesn’t realize it—or if she does, she doesn’t respect it.

Talk about pushing my buttons. I try to just see it, acknowledge it, know that it’s old, old material, breathe, and move on without, like, yelling. Of course I’m not respected. And I don’t need her validation anymore.

When I tell her she can’t expect me to come take care of them at their house 24/7 for the next decade or so, she tells me that she and Dad will simply have an elevator added to their house, or they will just hire 24-hour in-home assistance. I recently sketched out the math for her: $30 an hour, times 24 hours in a day, is $720 a day; multiply that by 365 days in a year, and you’re paying $262,800 annually just for someone (some person or persons—who?) to be there to help you, in a home that’s not going to accommodate a wheelchair, which she will soon need to be in—it does not count food or food preparation, transportation, incontinence supplies, heating and cooling bills, water, house maintenance and property taxes, medical copays and drug costs, and the ever-loving cable TV and landline/internet bills. It’s just fantasyland.

In our family, the dynamic has always been to go along with Mom’s ideas, because she’s always been “the practical one.” The one good with finances. The one who takes care of the house, the bills, the do list. Balances the checkbooks. (Kind of like the myth about Republicans being good about the economy.) She was always the one to deal with the plumbers, electricians, and handymen. She used to be sharp as a tack, “on top of” everything. But those days are long gone, as she becomes more confused and lives increasingly in the past. Actually, they both are.

So it’s past time for independent living; it may already be too late for assisted living, for Mom. She’s hurtling toward skilled nursing; she doesn’t want to drink, so she gets dehydrated and gets UTIs, she doesn’t move around, she’s weak, her blood pressure tanks when she merely stands up. The idea of getting her up the staircases is a horror for me. She’s been hospitalized three times in the past six months. But she still expects us to treat her as if she knows best, and we all still tend to twirl around trying to make her happy. Of course, that is impossible. People like her will never be happy; this is how ninety years of untreated depression and anxiety disorder, with a little side order of NPD, ends up. And so we are moving ahead with plans for senior living for them both. Dad is ready. We simply leave her out of our conversations, which is easy to do since she only ever sits in her living room chair and has grown pretty hard of hearing.

So we’re in a race to get them moved into a good place where they can be safe, clean, fed, comfortable and hopefully find things to be happy about, to be entertained with; to have people to talk with; to maybe even find ways to still contribute to the world (Dad would like that, I think).

You know, I started this blog in a state of deep stress and depression. Hopelessness. Things that used to cheer me only made me feel like I’d been slapped. I was repeatedly contemplating suicide. I thought that starting a blog about the things—the few little things—that I can unequivocally claim as good would help me regain a sense that there is something still to enjoy, even when my life seems in shambles, when my career—hell, my whole life—seems a big fat joke, when I see myself as the center of all my problems. Even when I’m almost convinced that I don’t belong here, that I have no place or purpose.

I truly don’t have any goddamn time to be fucking around with a blog, or anything, anything, that is not related to my job, or with the needs of my parents. I’m not going to fuck around with Christmas cookies this year. (Well . . . maybe I’ll make a few kinds. To give to the elders who remain.) Christmas tree? Bah, humbug. I’m down on Christianity, too—all the white Christian nationalists have turned me off of religion entirely—in America and globally, the trouble, the evil, that religion causes far outweigh its so-called blessings. Overall, religion is still, always, eternally a way that greedy, mean, power-hungry people convince other people into doing horrible, selfish, mean-spirited things. I’m sick of it. Grow the fuck up and learn how to be a good person without having the imaginary threat of eternal damnation hanging over your head, okay?

But yeah, I think I’m gonna attempt another year of “Jar of Goodness.” Because I kind of need it. At least, let’s give it try before I call my doctor and ask to “up my dosage.” I’ve been doing a lot of journaling the past few years, and I have a lot I’d like to say about that. And there are several other half-baked posts I can complete and upload. Let’s keep a-goin’.

My Tuna Pasta Salad

My humble contribution to the universe of pasta salads. I devised it in college, and it’s had real longevity among my go-to dishes. It’s tasty, filling, relatively healthy, and it makes a can of tuna go a long, long way.

As with other dishes of this nature, relative quantities are up to you. I’ve never codified it with exact quantities. I adjust the mayonnaise dressing as I go.

Serving: Serve it on a lettuce leaf, or on a bed of shredded lettuce, mixed spring greens, or alfalfa sprouts. Triscuits are a nice accompaniment. You’ll probably eat the last portion right out of the plastic storage tub you had it in, standing over the sink.

Julie’s Tuna Pasta Salad

• 1 lb. box of rotini pasta, cooked in salted water until done (I often use tricolor rotini)
• 12-oz. can tuna, packed in water (not oily) (break the large chunks into smaller pieces)
• 1 crown broccoli, trimmed to small pieces (include peeled, chopped stalks, too) (extra points: consider blanching the broccoli a few seconds in boiling water, then shocking it in ice water to stop the cooking, then drain completely)
• one half to 1 crown cauliflower, trimmed to small pieces (total volume about equal to the broccoli)
• 1 medium to large carrot, peeled, cut in matchsticks or coarsely shredded (about ½ cup)
• ½ cup sliced black olives, chopped, California/ripe (about half of a regular 6-oz. can)
• ½ lb. cheddar cheese (orange, boing-boing, government-style; medium or sharp) (but pepper jack or Monterey jack is good, too), cut into little bricks or cubes
• mayonnaise, your favorite kind, about 1 cup
• apple cider vinegar, about 1/2 cup
• salt, black pepper (to taste)

Mix it all together gently in a large bowl or stock pot. I usually whisk together the dressing ingredients (mayo, vinegar, salt, and pepper) separately before folding it in to the rest.

You may need to add more dressing or mayo. Adjust all the ingredients to your liking.

Preparation tip: after cutting the cheese into bricks or cubes, toss them with a pinch of flour, and the pieces of cheese won’t stick together before you stir them in with the rest of the salad.

This yields about 14 cups (or about 3 quarts) of tuna pasta salad.

Yes, it makes a lot, but part of the charm is that it’s tasty enough that we’re happy to eat it for lunch several days in a row. Just spoon it into a bowl and eat it with a few crackers; it takes virtually no time in the kitchen during our lunch breaks.

Cicadas: What’s Up With Their Eyes?

It’s just uncanny how insects seem to be looking right at you. No matter how you turn them, and from no matter what angle you look at them, they always seem to be looking right at you.

Right

at

you!

So, what’s up with their eyes? I mean, we “know” they’re compound eyes and that they are quite different from our own. Our eyes are basically a clear-jelly-filled ball, with sensors (retina) at the back, a lens-covered, expandable aperture (pupil) in the front, and muscles that rotate it (so we don’t always have to turn our head in order to look around).

But their eyes are quite different. They are fixed; they don’t rotate. So why does that dark spot on their big, buggy eyes seem to follow around, so it’s always looking at the viewer?

Wet or dry . . . they always are looking at you.

Even while they’re molting!

How does this work? It’s caused by the structure of their compound eyes. It’s essentially a result of tubes, shadows, and mirrors. To understand this, imagine a model: Think of their globe-shaped compound eyes as a cluster of narrow tubes, all pointing outward from a center point, and imagine these tubes are coated, on the inside surfaces, with silver. Closest to you, the tubes are pointed directly at you, and you can see into the whole long (dark) tunnel (you’re not seeing much of the silver), while the tubes increasingly angled away from you appear light-colored, reflecting the light.

That’s basically it: you are looking at a spherical cluster of tubes.

And it’s not just with cicadas; many insects have compound eyes that have this property.

Like this common meadow katydid.

Like this little baby, gray short-horned grasshopper. So cute, sitting on a leaf in his prairie.

And like this pretty green planthopper.

The next question is, why does this seem so freaky to us?

We humans—with our social nature, our interdependence, our allies and enemies, our capacities for trust and for deceit—have evolved to be masters at evaluating each other. We look carefully at one another’s eyes. You can tell so much about someone by their eyes! Yes, “the eyes have it.”

This is why those professional poker players so often wear mirrored sunglasses—they want to conceal their thoughts and feelings. (Why shouldn’t that be considered cheating?)

It’s why people who have eye-alignment problems have a real social disadvantage, because crossed eyes or other misalignments are stereotyped as a sign of severe developmental disability, or head injury, of being dazed or semiconscious.

It’s why silent movie actors wore such heavy eye makeup.

And so we, in our anthropomorphization of insects, can’t help but look into their eyes, too, and try to read their expressions. And what we get back is an unblinking stare, perpetually fixed upon us. Does it freak us out?

Maybe it should. Insects depend on us to not ruin the world for them. They need elbow room. They depend on the existence of their many native food plants; they depend on the habitats—prairies, woodlands, glades, wetlands—that support their various food plants. They need plenty of plants and habitat, because the usual existence strategy for insects is to create a bazillion eggs and offspring, most of which won’t make it to adulthood. On some scale, they need room, like cicadas, to have a bloom, a heyday, and then have a majority eaten by countless predators, and then return to the soil.

So yes, they depend on us.

If you feel stared at, it’s not surprising.

Do things to preserve and increase native habitats.

And vote for the environment.

The above text explaining the dark dot in insect compound eyes is loosely edited from a page I wrote for MDC’s online field guide, Mantids (Mantises). Mantises, of course, are one of the many insects with compound eyes that exhibit this phenomenon.

Totem Pole Is Up!

Ta-dahhhhh--! The totem pole is now standing in our backyard! This is its third location, and after more than forty years in Columbia, it’s back in Jeff City!

I told you about it in my previous post—how my cousin Phil made it, how it was in Aunt Minnie’s backyard, then got moved to my parents’ home in Columbia. It fell over last year, Dad gave it to me, and I’ve been rehabbing it.

The last thing to do was patch some missing broken wood on the wing, and let that dry, and dab it with some paint to make the wood filler look better, and wait for it to dry again.

On Saturday, Sue and I carried it out of the garage and up the steps to the backyard, where the two support posts and concrete platform were waiting. Sue held the totem pole against the posts while I wrapped wire around and around it, hopefully unobtrusively.

Later that day, we bought some solar-powered lights (for fun), including a solar-powered spotlight that is now pointed up at the totem pole. So I can look out the window and see it at night!

Earlier in the day, I mowed the lawn (first time this year!), so the whole yard is seeming really pretty right now. Despite the pollen, and the cold, gusty winds we had over the weekend.