Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
With the snow clouds gone, the snowscape was very bright last night from the nearly full moon. Here the moon sets during a very cold sunrise — 13 degrees. The photo was taken from the window of my radio room.
The same photo, converted to grayscale, with contrast increased.
It’s been snowing for about 20 hours. Here in Stokes County we have about 10 inches or more on the ground. On my deck, where the snow and rain pour down from the valley on my roof, the yardstick is showing a pile of snow 31 inches deep and growing.
Lily does not like the snow. She’ll go as far as the front porch, tiptoe around for a few minutes with a look of wonder and disgust on her face, and then demand to be let back in the house.
This has been a pretty good winter for replenishing the underground water aquifers. The nearest USGS measuring wells are in East Bend and Mocksville.
The moon will be full tonight. It will be the biggest full moon of the year. That’s because the moon’s orbit is elliptical, and the moon will be at the apogee of its orbit, about 30,000 miles closer to earth than at its perigee. According to Spaceweather.com, that’s makes the moon 14 percent wider and 30 percent brighter than lesser full moons.
Unfortunately the moon probably won’t be visible here. The sky is cloudy, and up to 16 inches of snow is forecast between now and Saturday night.
New York Times
The New York Times Magazine for Sunday has an interesting piece on the developing field of ecopsychology, which explores the ways in which mental processes and mental health are affected by the environment.
Solastaglia is a word for what we experience when we see damage to our world. This experience varies from place to place. But around here, that would be what we experience when we see a beautiful farm we knew as children bulldozed away for a development. Or woods cut down for timber, leaving behind stumps and mud. Or a new road cut through the countryside. It makes us feel sick.
Biscuits and rolls are so similar, and yet so different. They’re not interchangeable. Who would want rolls and gravy and scrambled eggs?
There’s one way that rolls win hands down: they’re healthier. The shortening adds a lot of fat to biscuits, and the soda or baking powder is a big hidden source of sodium. Biscuits are quick, though.
Still, I think you can make perfectly decent rolls in 90 minutes or even a little less. Just let them rise once, in the baking pan. I think rolls have a better texture if they have no oil in the dough at all.
A Walmart avocado
When I lived in San Francisco, shopping at Walmart was unthinkable. All big box stores (or book stores) were scorned for a number of reasons, not least for what has happened to small, neighborhood merchants. But it also was easy to not shop at Walmart in San Francisco. I’d have had to drive way out into the suburbs to get to one, and there were so many other alternatives in the city. Heck, one day when I was in line at Borders book store on Union Square in San Francisco, Armistead Maupin was in the checkout line in front of me. It’s a fair question, and I don’t claim to have an answer: How far should we go to support local businesses when a big business has something better, for cheaper?
If we pay more for something when we could have gotten the same thing cheaper at Walmart, we’re basically making a donation to a business. Is that the best form of charity? I have my doubts.
In any case, here in the rural South, everything is different. There aren’t so many choices. And we don’t have big-city incomes to spend in better stores, even if there were lots of better stores. So I don’t know.
This winter I’ve bought avocados at Walmart, for $.99 to $1.08 each. Every one of them has been good and has ripened beautifully. Should I pay $2.39 each for avocados at a grocery store, half of which rot before they ripen or are stringy and dry?
I buy at Walmart only those things that seriously beat the competition. For another example, Walmart has the best deal in organic, unsweetened soy milk. That’s the best accommodation I’ve been able to come up with so far.
And there you have it. Apple’s new iPad is everything we hoped it would be, except that Apple is staying with AT&T for its Internet connection instead of moving to Verizon. All the iPad models will work on local wifi networks, though.
It seems to me that the book publishing industry will now change very quickly. Apple did it right — agreements with a bunch of big publishers, a new iBook application, and support for the ePub format, which democratizes publishing and makes it as easy to make and publish a book as to make a web site.
The biggest surprise was the price. You can get one for as little as $499.
I paced in circles in the kitchen this evening, trying to figure out what I wanted for supper. Something over rice seemed appealing. I knew that I needed a heavy dose of garlic to try to fend off the cold I’m afraid I picked up on a trip to town last night. And I had some fresh beets from Whole Foods that needed to be used. So I made something up: beet curry. I didn’t Google for beet curry until after supper. It’s not unheard of, but I don’t think it’s common. But anything will curry.
I used a whole head of garlic. I blanched some almonds and chopped them a little in the blender so they’d soak up more flavor. I added tomato paste to thicken the sauce and deepen the red. I served it over Uncle Ben’s rice. Now, before you go and say something snobbish about Uncle Ben’s, keep in mind that it may have been Julia Child’s favorite rice. She called it “L’oncle Ben’s.” Uncle Ben’s is just parboiled rice. It also has a lower glycemic index than most rices.
Believe it or not, it was delicious. I already knew that beets like spices, and garlic, and tomatoes. You’d be surprised how good beets are when added to spaghetti sauce. Just dice the beets and add them to your regular spaghetti sauce, and simmer until the beets are tender. I realized while eating the beet curry that beets probably would like roasted peanuts. That will be a future experiment: coming up with something that includes beets, tomato sauce, garlic, and roasted peanuts or peanut butter. Some sort of lasagna, maybe?
From the red splatter in the kitchen you’d think I’d murdered a chicken, indoors. But this was a totally vegan dish.
Beets, almonds, minced garlic
Sautéing the almonds with the curry spices
Today’s two sunspots: spaceweather.com
Much has been written in the last couple of years about how quiet the sun has been. We are just starting to emerge from the low part of the 11-year sunspot cycle. For months, there were no sunspots at all. Today there are two active sunspots. In another five years, this cycle will peak, and it’s during that peak period when, because the sun’s surface is heavily riled, the earth is particularly subject to big geomagnetic storms of the type that disrupt communications and even affect the power grid.
Just how much solar variance affects the earth’s climate is hotly disputed, but we do know that the 11-year sunspot cycles dramatically affect the amount of ionizing radiation (that is, high frequency radiation such as X-rays) that hits the earth’s ionosphere. It’s this process that causes the Northern Lights. The process also causes radio waves of certain frequencies to travel much farther.
Since we had two good sunspots today, I thought it would be a good time to fire up a ham radio and see who can hear me. I made quick and easy contact with EA1ABT in Spain (at 14.19175 Mhz) and CU2CR in the Azores Islands (at 14.198 Mhz).
All it takes is a 100-watt transmitter and a modest wire antenna hidden in the attic.
Ron Taylor in Priddy’s store with some of his products that Priddy’s sells
Coming home from the post office at Danbury, I stopped at Priddy’s General Store today to pick up a few things. There were a lot of customers, but in between ringing up customers Jane Priddy still found time to talk with me about local issues, as we often do when I’m in the store. We were discussing the local farmers and local products and ways to better connect customers like me with the people who have local produce and products to sell. Jane was telling me about a man in Eastern North Carolina whose business has expanded to help get local products on the market. For example, he produces and cans the sweet potato butter made from the Stokes Purple sweet potatoes.
By the strangest of coincidences, a man in the store who had overheard much of our conversation let us know that he was that very man. He was on a business trip to this part of the state, and he had stopped in to have a look at Priddy’s store, which he had never seen before.
People like Ron Taylor and Jane Priddy are the kind of people who have done much to help rural North Carolina find its way to a new kind of local, sustainable economy. Ron is the president of Taylor Manufacturing, which has made equipment for tobacco farmers for many years but which expanded to make make equipment for winemakers. Ron has also started a vineyard, Lu Mil Vineyard. He served in the state legislature for several years, and he has served on a number of boards having to do with economic development and agricultural tourism.
Ron gave Jane and me bottles of his new muscadine wine. I can’t wait to try it.
On the left is an alcohol-free juice made from the native muscadine grapes. On the right is a new muscadine wine that Ron is now producing.
Priddy’s General Store
