What do cats do all day?

l-cat-patrol-3.JPG

A recent experiment, which involved putting cat cams on 50 cats, found that indoor cats spend 22 percent of their time looking out windows and only 6 percent of their time sleeping.

That’s consistent with what my cat, Lily, does during the day if the weather is rainy and she wants to stay in. However, though she has a favorite window (my bed upstairs, where she can either sleep or look out the window), she moves from window to window, all around the house. I call this “patrolling.”

During the summer when the foliage is high, I rarely see her when she’s outside, and it’s not at all clear what she does. But, during the winter, I can see into the woods, and there are fewer hiding places, so I can watch from the windows and often see where she is and what she’s doing. Guess what. She patrols. Roughly, she makes big loops around the house, moving from point of interest to point of interest. Favorite places include the woodpiles (where she finds mice), the rock pile (where she also finds mice), the stream below the house (where I am pretty sure she fishes), and the woods (where she often climbs trees, just for fun).

I believe she seldom goes more than 100 yards from the house in any direction. She sometimes digs (for voles?) because she sometimes smells like fresh soil and moss when she comes indoors. All these are hunting behaviors, I think. Lily is a lucky cat, because she has a safe place for what cats instinctively do: solitary hunting. I have seen her with mice many times, but fortunately I’ve never seen her with a bird, though she has climbed on top of the bluebird houses a few times.

l-cat-patrol-2.JPG

l-cat-patrol-1.JPG

l-cat-patrol-5.jpg

l-cat-patrol-4.JPG

'Lassy cookies

a-blackstrap-cookies-1.JPG

I guess there’s no such thing as truly healthy sweets. But one can at least do what one can to minimize the damage. I did a Google search for “vegan molasses cookies” and modified a recipe I found. The cookies I made this evening were made with olive oil, raw sugar, King Arthur whole wheat flour, and blackstrap molasses. They were very chewy and very good. There was no reason to miss having butter and eggs in the recipe. It took only five minutes to stir them up and get them ready to pop into the oven.

Blackstrap molasses may be hard to find in some places, but not around here. Molasses-making, like making apple butter, was an art often practiced in the Blue Ridge Mountains. They used outdoor vats heated by wood fires.

That English teacup, by the way, came from an antique shop in Walnut Cove. I paid $5 for it. Coffee, it seems to me, is best drunk from a truck driver mug made of heavy china. But tea wants to be drunk from a cup and saucer.

a-blackstrap-cookies-2.JPG

After Rome fell, brutal hardship

holbein-death-plough.jpg
Hans Holbein the Younger, “Death and the Plough”

Part of getting older, I think, is to increasingly wonder how the world came to be the way we found it. To answer some questions, to try to get to the roots of culture, one must go back a very long time. Just now I’m trying to better understand what happened after the fall of Rome.

Most histories of Rome leave off around 410 A.D., when Alaric I, king of the Visigoths, thoroughly sacked Rome. Or 476 A.D., when the last western emperor was deposed by a Germanic chieftain. What happened then? How did the conditions of medieval Europe unfold out of the ruins of Rome?

I just finished a book on this period. It’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, by Bryan Ward-Perkins, Oxford University Press, 2005.

With historians, there are trends. For example, a history of Rome written a hundred years ago will probably be an administrative and military history of Rome. The Roman record will be accepted with little challenge and skepticism, and profound questions probably will not be asked.

According to Ward-Perkins, a new trend of Roman histories arose starting around the 1960s. Many historians of that era questioned whether Rome really fell at all. Rather, they saw medieval Europe evolving or “transforming” smoothly and nonviolently into the medieval world. Ward-Perkins does not agree with that view, and the purpose of this book, really, is to challenge that idea.

Ward-Perkins does this partly by invoking the archeological record. Much of this archeological work is new and was not available to earlier historians. It is dull data, but very revealing:

— Coins: How many were found, and when, and where?

— High quality pottery: Who had it, who didn’t and when did it disappear?

— Cattle: How fat were they during the pre-Roman, Roman, and post-Roman eras? (This can be determined from the bones.)

— Tile roofs: Who had them and who didn’t, and when did they disappear?

— Buildings: How big were they, and were they made of timber, or stone?

We know that, by the 6th century, Germanic tribes had moved into the Roman territories and had taken control — the Lombards into Italy, the Franks into northern France, the Saxons into southern and eastern Britain. The Roman army was no more. The Roman administrative system also was dead, the system that had kept the trade routes open, the infrastructure working, and merchandise flowing into the provinces along the Roman roads. The provinces were now on their own, with new Germanic chieftains in control.

Ward-Perkins’ view is that what happened from the 6th to the 8th century was not a smooth “transformation.” It was a catastrophe. The food supply, which had depended on trade and shipping, dropped sharply. In some areas, for lack of food, the population fell by as much as 75 percent. Coins vanished. No one had good Roman pottery anymore. Buildings became small, and they were built of perishable materials like wood and thatch. Cattle, which had been big and fat during the Roman era, became fewer, and skinny. The archeological record shows that people became poor and miserable. There was widespread violence, strife, and crime.

Adaptation to the new conditions was slow. Some technologies that were lost (such as high quality pottery made on a wheel) did not reappear again until centuries later. Food production did not return to Roman levels until centuries later. Literacy collapsed. The security and order that had been maintained by the Roman troops was gone. In Ward-Perkins’ view, what followed the fall of Rome truly was a dark age.

Ward-Perkins elaborates on the price of specialization and complexity in the Roman economy. Even in the more remote provinces such as northern France and Britain, people did not need to produce locally everything that was needed because so much could be bought so cheaply from so far away and brought in over the Roman roads, or by ship. When that was no longer possible, the improverished and now isolated local people found that they no longer had the skills and infrastructure to produce what they needed to maintain anything like their former standard of living. It took centuries to recover those skills. Until those skills were recovered, there was deprivation and misery.

Ward-Perkins does not use the term, but one could say that the Dark Ages were a period of relocalization following the failure of what was, for that time, a globalized economy.

Ward-Perkins writes:

“Comparison with the contemporary western world is obvious and important. … We sit in our tiny productive pigeon-holes … and we are wholly dependent for our needs on thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of other people spread around the globe, each doing their own little thing. We would be quite incapable of meeting our needs locally, even in an emergency.

“The enormity of the economic disintegration that occurred at the end of the empire was almost certainly a direct result of this specialization. The post-Roman world reverted to levels of economic simplicity, lower even than those of the pre-Roman times, with little movement of goods, poor housing, and only the most basic of manufactured items. The sophistication of the Roman period, by spreading high-quality goods widely in society, had destroyed the local skills and local networks that, in pre-Roman times, had provided lower-level economic complexity. It took centuries for people in the former empire to reacquire the skills and the regional networks that would take them back to these pre-Roman levels of sophistication.”

That, I believe, is stuff worth thinking about.

The hens won't quit

s-eggs-2009-12-16-1.JPG
My best layer

s-eggs-2009-12-16-2.JPG
December 16: 3 eggs

My four hens have barely slowed down for the winter. I’m still getting three and sometimes four eggs a day, faster than I can give them away, since I try to limit myself to eating four eggs a week.

I have one Golden Comet hen and three Barred Rock hens. I can recognize my Golden Comet hen’s eggs because they’re darker brown. She has not missed a day since she first started laying in August. She’s also the sweetest and most sociable of the chickens.

I am not giving my hens any artificial light or artificial heat. I’ve bought the apparatus to do it if they seem stressed by the cold, but so far they seem fine. These chickens are said to be hardy enough for New England winters. Their little house is snug and filled with hay. I also put hay on the ground underneath the chicken house to help keep their little feet off the cold ground. The chickens do seem to be eating more in cold weather. They always have laying mash available, and I take them some kind of treats every day — vegetable scraps from the kitchen, leftover gravy mixed with cracked wheat, and sometimes sprouted legumes. Nothing goes to waste in the kitchen. Every day I also give them alfalfa pellets that I got at the seed and feed store. The pellets contain nothing but ground, compressed alfalfa and cost $16 for 50 pounds. That was the best winter source of chlorophyll that I was able to come up with. I keep ground oyster shells on hand. I also have a big bag of flax seed. I try to vary their diet as much as possible, not only for their health, but for their entertainment. Treat time is the high spot of their day.

One thing I’ve noticed about my chickens. When they were maturing and approaching laying age, they spatted fairly often. Now I never see one chicken being mean to another chicken. I assume this means that they’ve worked out the pecking order, and now they just enjoy each other’s company. If I take them particularly exciting treats (they love leftover pasta — they probably think it’s worms) one chicken may grab the treat and run, but they don’t spat.

Sprout farming

j-array-of-sprouts-1.JPG

If you’re not already a sprout farmer, and you’ve been thinking about getting started, winter is a good time to start. During the summer produce season, I don’t think much about sprouts. But during the winter, there’s no better and cheaper source of little vegetables.

The best source I’ve found for seeds and such is sproutpeople.com. They’re in San Francisco, and you can order online.

Audiophilia on a budget

d-infinity-speakers-2.JPG
Infinity SM 152 speakers, made around 1994

d-pioneer-sx3500-1.JPG
Pioneer SX-3500, made in 1980

The Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network opened its radio season today with Puccini’s Il Trittico. It’s the 79th season of Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, and it’s the longest running classical program in radio history. Lucky for me, I have a new sound system on which to listen to it.

I would not say I’m a true audiophile. I’m way too poor to be an audiophile. There’s no limit to what you can spend on sound systems. But I’ve been to an awful lot of concerts in my life, and when some of the sound in recorded music is missing, or distorted, listening to music is not much fun. I stopped at a second-hand shop in Madison yesterday, and they had a giveaway price on two Infinity SX 152 speakers and a Pioneer SX-3500 tuner/amplifier. The speakers, each of which weighs almost a hundred pounds, each has a 15-inch woofer, two midrange drivers, and a tweeter. The balance controls on the front of the speakers really work. The Pioneer SX-3500 amplifier is a nice match for these speakers. I have a weakness for 1980s electronics. The 1980s was a great period in electronics manufacturing, and prices for 25-year-old electronics are low.

The Saturday broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera have an exciting, old-fashioned feel, a live performance. It’s what radio used to be, and ought to be.

Vegan green bean casserole

k-vegan-greenbean-casserole-1.JPG

While watching the ABC Evening News (not one of my normal news sources), I saw a commercial for green bean casserole. Once you get something like that in your head, you’ve got to have it.

I wanted to make a high-protein, reasonably low fat, vegan version. I just happened to have some leftover cashew gravy. To the gravy I also added a smooth sauce made from sesame tahini and ground roasted pumpkin seeds. I mixed in some cubed tofu. So the sauce contained nuts, seeds, and legumes. There’s a lot of sautéed onion, of course. The bread crumbs came from the last remaining slice of a loaf of sprouted wheat bread. The green beans were frozen.

If you do a quick survey online of recipes for green bean casserole, what you’ll find is pretty terrifying — heart-stopping mixtures of salt and fat. I’ve never met a traditional dish that couldn’t be greatly improved with good ingredients and some imagination.