pameladean

lydy has given me the following words to play with:

Geodes. When we lived in Nebraska, several times we drove to a place I don't recall the name or location of, but it was rich in small fossils and also in geodes. It was completely unshaded and rocky and dusty and barren, and you walked along sweating until you saw a dark lumpy round thing, which you then picked up. Sometimes we broke them open on the spot and sometimes we took them home and did it. I did not have the knack of choosing good ones, and never got the coveted purple crystals, but I did get one or two very small ones with white or clear crystals. I think I still have one somewhere.

Cardamom. I love the taste and smell of cardamom but haven't used it much in cooking. Raphael used to make a roasted carrot dish that used it. I just ordered some online because it's curiously hard to find in the places where I get my groceries. The coop usually has some in the bulk spice section, but they were out. I think of it as a dessert spice primarily, but I actually ordered it to put in a vegetable curry I want to try, if I can remember where the recipe for that was. I had been assuming it was in Made in India, which I was given for Christmas and have been cooking out of intermittently ever since, but I haven't tracked it down yet.

Elephant. I am actually too sad about the fate of elephants at the moment to write about them. But I will retell the story of how Eric and I got a very close look at an elephant seal because we had been firmly shooed away from the official elephant-seal viewing, which was by reservation only. I was visiting him in the Bay Area, before he moved back to Minnesota. It was a rainy day, so we decided to drive slowly down the coast and stop if the sun came out. It did so just as we saw the sign for Ano Nuevo State Park, so we pulled into the parking lot, only to be stopped by somebody in a uniform asking if we had reservations to see the elephant seals. We did not, of course, and said so, whereupon we were told firmly NOT to go to the right or down along the beach, where the group walk to see elephant seals was being held. We could go to the left and wander among the dunes if we wanted to.

We read some signage about elephant seals and dutifully set off in the direction indicated to us. We ended up following a little stream that meandered, as streams do, down to the ocean. We figured this was okay, since we were going the wrong way along the beach from the one intended for elephant-seal viewers. But one elephant seal had not gotten the memo. Asleep on the sand just the other side from the stream from us, in an increasing drizzle, was a young male elephant seal. He snorted and snored. Once he jerked awake, considered us, shook himself, rolled over, and went back to sleep. I had a camera and began to take photos, but the camera, an old Epson that David had handed down to me at some point, stopped working at that precise moment. It would automatically open the cover over the lens and extend the lens when told to, but it stuck partway through this process. I assumed it was the drizzle, but David thought that unlikely; it was just an old camera, and perverse in the way that inanimate objects sometimes are.

We stared at the young elephant seal with its imposing bulk and its goofy short flexible trunk until it stirred again, and then crept quietly away.

If you want three words from me I'll be happy to provide them; and if anybody wants to give me three more words, I'll be happy to write something about them.

Pamela