Three words from Yoon
Jun. 30th, 2019 02:18 pmI have hikes to write up, but seem to have no inclination to actually do so. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yhlee kindly gave me three words.
Before I get to them, I want to say that if I gave you three words and you found them uninspiring, just say so and I'll pick three more.
Butterflies
I love seeing butterflies in their season. I'm not as attached to them as I am to dragonflies, but they are beautiful, and they give me a sense that, at least very locally, things are more or less right with the world. I like to look for the mourning cloak and red admiral ones in the spring and I feel a weird throttled hope any time that I see a monarch. In recent years I've learned to identify the hackberry emperor and the silver-spotted skipper. Raphael and I saw several of the skippers at Wild River State Park last week, at the Sunrise Landing. The hackberry emperors were all over Montissippi a year or two ago. Raphael could identify the butterflies and I could identify the trees -- the butterflies were, somewhat surprisingly, actually all over a grove of hackberries -- so that was a pleasant collaboration. A few summers ago, or maybe only last summer we saw a great many giant swallowtails at Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge. Those are magnificent. And at Sherburne in the fall of last year we saw part of the monarch migration. In the afternoon they were floating about all over the vegetation, and at dusk there were even more clinging to the trees. I kept thinking a little oak sapling was covered with dead leaves and then realizing that it was dozens of monarchs, opening and closing their wings in the last of the light.
Napkins
If I am going to have actual cloth napkins, I prefer really old soft linen ones, even if they have ineradicable turmeric stains on them. That said, the only story about napkins I can think of comes from Noreascon 3, the 1989 Worldcon in Boston. David was involved in a fairly ambitious photo project run by friends of his (ours). This was to recruit photographers to document many aspects of the convention and turn in their work to David, Scott, and Sally, who picked out the good ones, made them into slides, and put together a slide show of the entire convention to be shown at Closing Ceremonies. The slide show was great and seemed to be much appreciated. David didn't get much sleep and I didn't see much of him, but at least I always knew where he was. In any case, the room where they were working generally had some uncollected room-service items in it, since they mostly didn't have time to leave to eat. I helped a little with packing up everything at the end of the convention, and in the frenzy I ended up using some hotel napkins to pad fragile items. These went into a box or bag of some kind, went home to Minneapolis with us, and were unpacked quite some time later, when we realized we had inadvertently stolen one dark-red polyester napkin and three pink cotton or polyester-cotton napkins from the hotel. I think I thought we'd go through our stuff when we stayed with Scott and Sally for a few days after the con and retrieve the napkins at that point, but you can imagine easily enough how that never happened. I should have laundered the napkins, popped them into an envelope, and returned them, but that never happened either. I still feel vaguely guilty whenever I catch sight of them.
Spinach
I like spinach and have even grown it. Curly spinach collects an incredible amount of dirt while growing, it's really amazing. One of the people I cook for doesn't like raw spinach, which limits the uses I can make of it, though of course there's nothing preventing me from making myself a salad of it and nomming it all. That aside, for years vegetarians were warned off of spinach because the oxalates in it prevent the absorption of calcium and iron. Raphael and I have largely gone over to kale for this reason; you can put kale in most dishes requiring spinach and it will take longer to cook if it's mature kale, but it tastes fine, and it doesn't get slimy the way spinach does if you look at it sideways. I've also used mustard greens to replace spinach in some dishes. But sometimes I just give in and eat it. It has other nutrients in it and baby spinach is much easier to deal with than huge crinkly greens that are full of sand. I once clogged up the kitchen sink by washing mustard greens. Technically that was just the last straw, since the whole line was clogged and putting plain water down it would probably have had the same result not much later, but my brain still associates mustard greens with the sink failure. I've tried to look up recent research on whether spinach is really a serious problem for calcium absorption, but results were mixed.
P.
yhlee kindly gave me three words.Before I get to them, I want to say that if I gave you three words and you found them uninspiring, just say so and I'll pick three more.
Butterflies
I love seeing butterflies in their season. I'm not as attached to them as I am to dragonflies, but they are beautiful, and they give me a sense that, at least very locally, things are more or less right with the world. I like to look for the mourning cloak and red admiral ones in the spring and I feel a weird throttled hope any time that I see a monarch. In recent years I've learned to identify the hackberry emperor and the silver-spotted skipper. Raphael and I saw several of the skippers at Wild River State Park last week, at the Sunrise Landing. The hackberry emperors were all over Montissippi a year or two ago. Raphael could identify the butterflies and I could identify the trees -- the butterflies were, somewhat surprisingly, actually all over a grove of hackberries -- so that was a pleasant collaboration. A few summers ago, or maybe only last summer we saw a great many giant swallowtails at Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge. Those are magnificent. And at Sherburne in the fall of last year we saw part of the monarch migration. In the afternoon they were floating about all over the vegetation, and at dusk there were even more clinging to the trees. I kept thinking a little oak sapling was covered with dead leaves and then realizing that it was dozens of monarchs, opening and closing their wings in the last of the light.
Napkins
If I am going to have actual cloth napkins, I prefer really old soft linen ones, even if they have ineradicable turmeric stains on them. That said, the only story about napkins I can think of comes from Noreascon 3, the 1989 Worldcon in Boston. David was involved in a fairly ambitious photo project run by friends of his (ours). This was to recruit photographers to document many aspects of the convention and turn in their work to David, Scott, and Sally, who picked out the good ones, made them into slides, and put together a slide show of the entire convention to be shown at Closing Ceremonies. The slide show was great and seemed to be much appreciated. David didn't get much sleep and I didn't see much of him, but at least I always knew where he was. In any case, the room where they were working generally had some uncollected room-service items in it, since they mostly didn't have time to leave to eat. I helped a little with packing up everything at the end of the convention, and in the frenzy I ended up using some hotel napkins to pad fragile items. These went into a box or bag of some kind, went home to Minneapolis with us, and were unpacked quite some time later, when we realized we had inadvertently stolen one dark-red polyester napkin and three pink cotton or polyester-cotton napkins from the hotel. I think I thought we'd go through our stuff when we stayed with Scott and Sally for a few days after the con and retrieve the napkins at that point, but you can imagine easily enough how that never happened. I should have laundered the napkins, popped them into an envelope, and returned them, but that never happened either. I still feel vaguely guilty whenever I catch sight of them.
Spinach
I like spinach and have even grown it. Curly spinach collects an incredible amount of dirt while growing, it's really amazing. One of the people I cook for doesn't like raw spinach, which limits the uses I can make of it, though of course there's nothing preventing me from making myself a salad of it and nomming it all. That aside, for years vegetarians were warned off of spinach because the oxalates in it prevent the absorption of calcium and iron. Raphael and I have largely gone over to kale for this reason; you can put kale in most dishes requiring spinach and it will take longer to cook if it's mature kale, but it tastes fine, and it doesn't get slimy the way spinach does if you look at it sideways. I've also used mustard greens to replace spinach in some dishes. But sometimes I just give in and eat it. It has other nutrients in it and baby spinach is much easier to deal with than huge crinkly greens that are full of sand. I once clogged up the kitchen sink by washing mustard greens. Technically that was just the last straw, since the whole line was clogged and putting plain water down it would probably have had the same result not much later, but my brain still associates mustard greens with the sink failure. I've tried to look up recent research on whether spinach is really a serious problem for calcium absorption, but results were mixed.
P.
