Ahhhh….
What a relief!

I just looked at my latest credit card bill online.  They’d
considerately sent me an email notice that it was ready.  How
sweet they are.

That I owe them money isn’t the cause of my relief.  I’m relieved
that there are no charges on the bill this month that I have to
dispute.  I’m getting really tired of bogus charges.  I
suppose that’s the cost of doing business online and having my numbers
out there to be plucked by the scam artists.  They’re usually
small amounts, and the credit card company is fast and polite about
crediting me for them, but making those phone calls can be a pain.

It’s
usually the same:  the charge on my bill lists some name I don’t
recognize and a toll-free number.  I try to call the number and
get a recording telling me the call can’t be completed.  Then I
have to call my credit card company.

When I was telling Greyfox about the latest crop, he suggested that
there are many people who would just disregard a $9.95 or $19.99 charge
on their bill, either because they didn’t read the itemized statement
or assumed it was something they’d authorized and forgot, or because it
was small and not worth their bother.  I’ve learned that if it’s
under $10, the credit card company just writes it off and doesn’t
bother with the disputed charge routine.  Probably costs them more
to chase it down than it’s worth.  Maybe there would be a
lucrative career in that somewhere, if I  had the skills and the
inclination.

While
I was writing my first paragraph above, I noticed the rising sun
lighting the new snow outside, and went out to capture the light. 
I should have put on a coat, and maybe some socks  I got a little
chilled out there in my pajamas — it’s thirteen degrees
Fahrenheit.  My fingers are still cold, the snow that got into my
right boot hasn’t all melted yet, and my breathing is just about back
to normal.   But I caught some great light, anyway.

Doug has just gotten up.  I’ve been up for a while, packing up a
necklace to mail to Kansas and sending emails to Kansas and Canada
about the transaction.  Neither of us has had breakfast yet, and
for me the blood sugar is overdue.  It’s okay, I’m almost through
here.  He assured me upon my query that he wouldn’t cook breakfast
for us both, so instead of having him fix himself a Hot Pocket or a
pizza, I’m going to cook oatmeal for us when I’m done with this.

He
has to shovel out the car, load it with water jugs and buckets (unload
the summer tires and put them in the cabin if he hasn’t done that yet)
and get ready for the water run later today.  We must get water
today, so he can wash dishes tomorrow.  Isn’t that fine motivation
for shoveling snow, though?

Update on Canneto di Caronia mystery fires

Some of you here — I think one was JennyG
– asked me to keep you informed if my Google news alert turned up
anything new on the strange events in Canneto di Caronia.  I have
been getting alerts every week or two, but until the latest one they
were all rehashes of the old news served up in a London tabloid. 
This is the latest:

The Promises –

–wherein
Susitna Sue, your sourdough cornball philosopher, dissects a key facet
of AA dogma and distorts it into the keystone of her own New Age
paradigm.

Disclaimer:  Although I am currently an active member of both
Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, and have received
substantial help from an online version of Food Addicts Anonymous, I am
not a True Believer.  The Twelve Steps were introduced to me in
prison over thirty years ago in a generic version and I used them then
to achieve a tenuous abstinence from my addiction to
amphetamines.  However, it was not until I experienced Reality
Attack Therapy a few years later that I transcended my addiction.  

I am a twelve-step heretic.  Don’t read my writings if you depend
on a belief in the steps and the program and they are working for
you.  I go to meetings to do twelfth step work and to be among
fellow dope fiends, but I work a program with some radical
differences.  One area where I diverge from the 12-step party line
is at their belief that addiction is an incurable disease.  I have
known too many people (including myself) who have transcended
addictions to swallow that line.

The, “phase of our development,” about which this passage from the Big
Book speaks is Step Nine, making amends to those we have harmed. 
This presupposes that one has already worked steps one through eight,
as well.

Please note that nowhere in those promises does it say we will stop
using alcohol.  That’s the part of the program that is left
entirely up to the individual alcoholic.  Many times I’ve heard it
said that the program (whether AA, NA, FAA, SLAA, GA, whatever) won’t
stop you from indulging the addiction, but will certainly take all the
fun out of it.

The Promises comprise one of my favorite parts of the AA program. 
Occasionally at a meeting I will pick up the laminated sheet and read
them aloud to the group.  Once when no one had a topic to suggest
for the meeting, I suggested The Promises.  I’ve been at a few
meetings when others suggested The Promises as a topic.  They are
always good meetings.

Once, at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, Greyfox brought up The Promises
and after he’d talked a bit about how he was transcending his
insecurities, someone “reminded” him (of a fact he never knew because
although he holds the position of Literature Person in our group, keeps
the inventory of books and pamphlets current and sells the program books, he has
never bothered to read them) that NA does not subscribe to the AA
Promises.

I find this interesting, that the old original 12-step program promises
just about every spiritual benefit but doesn’t pledge freedom from
drinking, while its daughter program promises only the freedom from
using.  Go figure.  Still, despite that promise, many in NA
use the old, “won’t keep you from using, but will spoil it for you,”
line.

But I digress.  I was going to dissect and distort here, so here goes –

Thank God that the Steps use the phrase, “God as we understood Him,” or
I’d be out of there in a flash.  The God of my understanding is
not a Him, for starters.  My diety is genderless, incorporeal,
omnipresent.  It resides not OUT THERE somewhere but within my
essence.  A huge leap upward in my spiritual development occurred
when I grokked the concept, “Thou art God!”

I reconcile the promises with my BS (belief system) by altering the
phrasing of that bit about how we, “will suddenly realize that God is
doing for us what we could not do for ourselves,” and inferring that
the “self” involved there is the lower self, the “Human Biological
Machine,” as E. J. Gold terms it, and the God is the Higher Self, the
essential self, the “Thought Adjuster” to use Urantian terminology.

That is truly the only “distortion” or correction I need to make to
those promises, except for a minor quibble over whether it is truly the
amends that make the difference and not the gestalt of the entire
spiritual process.  The reason I took to the promises so quickly
and wholeheartedly a year and a half ago when I first heard them is
that they are so eloquently true for me.  They resound with truth
within my soul.  I recognize them as some of the beneifts that
came to me as I grew on my own metaphysical path.

The, “amazed before we are halfway through,” is particularly
fitting.  I’ve not managed to make all the amends I have to
make.  I’ve completed the eighth step, know who I hurt and how and
have become willing to make amends.  I have made my indirect
amends and continue to do so.  There are just some cases where I
have been prevented from making direct amends, but still have the
intention to try.

Otherwise, I’ve realized everything promised there:

Yes to the “freedom and… happiness.”  That did not occur for me
in the “spiritual kindergarten” (the Founder’s words) of AA or it’s offshoot NA, however,
but a quarter century earlier, through a combination of radical
psychotherapy and the New Age metaphysics of the Urantia Book.

I do not regret the past and rather than seeking to shut the door on
it, I seek to recall as much as I can and write it all down in my
memoirs.

I do comprehend “serenity” and though turmoil comes and goes my natural
state is peace.  That deep understanding of serenity came to me in
prison as I read Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. 
His thoughts on “serene acceptance” merged with the serenity prayer I
found in that generic 12-step article in a magazine I read around the
same time.

 Ever since then, there has been no way for me to separate the
ideas of serenity, courage and wisdom.  Each one is nothing
without the others.

I did go fairly “far down the scale,” in fact I hit bottom several
times — one for each of several drugs, and for each of a number of
non-substance addictions.  
If I did not see that my experience can benefit others, you Xangans
would set me straight.  I don’t even need to write new memoir
segments to get comments and guestbook entries with testimonials of how
my autobiography is reaching and inspiring some of you through those
links in my sidebar.  

I didn’t do it for you originally, really.  I devised that way of
organizing my memoirs so that I could find all the entries for editing
into a finished version, and to forestall questions about things I’d
already written.  It’s great knowing that others get something out
of it, too.

The old, “uselessness and self-pity…”  Yes, I remember
that.  “Why me?” I used to ask, and “Why bother?”  I no
longer ask.  It’s not that I got the answers, it’s just that I
stopped asking.  That bullshit fell away with Dick Sutphen’s New
Age Bushido training… that, and the Bene Gesserit Litany against
Fear.  In Dick’s BS, the Warrior doesn’t ask “unevolved ‘why’
questions.”  If you never read Frank Herbert’s Dune series or don’t remember, the Litany goes like this:

To my way of thinking, selfishness is a manifestation of fear and as
fear falls away so does self-seeking.  When one realizes one’s
Oneness with All, then Self takes on a new meaning.

My “attitude and outlook upon life” have changed radically since the
first half of this lifetime.  I have nothing to fear from any
person.  Economic insecurity — what a waste of energy that would
be!  Given the state of my finances and my frequent inability to
work, if I were inclined toward that attitude I’d worry myself to death.

If I were ever to need a reminder of that, I wouldn’t have to look very
far to find one.  My Old Fart, Greyfox bobs up from his insecurity
from time to time, then sinks back into that morass.  More than
one of my friends here at Xanga, other family members, neighbors and
associates in 12-step groups… examples of the painful futility of
economic insecurity abound.  Not the least of all of its
consequences is the way it tends to make us look foolish as we pursue
the almighty dollar.  Oh, the schemes and daydreams!

I do “intuitively know how to handle situations that used to baffle”
me.  Chalk some of that up to experience, and the rest of the
credit goes to Spirit.  In the days and years of my bafflement,
first I found oracles:  the Tarot, Runes, crystals and the
like.  I used them to answer my own questions a lot, then started
using them in service to others.  One greatly enlightening
unanticipated consequence of that was that I found a set of “stock
answers” to common questions.  

I have come to think of them as pillars of reality, laws of the
universe or rules of conduct.  Most are as simple as these:  

Don’t move away from something you fear.  Look instead for the positive outcome you desire and move toward it.

Any thought that makes you uncomfortable, that you tend to shy away from, needs to be examined closely.  Face your fears.

I’m pretty good at pattern recognition, and once I began to see how
such bits of wisdom were being channeled through me for my clients over
and over again, I made them part of my lifeway, and now apply them
“intuitively”.  One of the things I’ve done with the KaiOaty site
was to incorporate as many of them as I can think of into the FAQs, for
the benefit of all.

When any situation arises that’s not covered in my “rules of reality,”
then I just ask Spirit how to handle it.  That’s the “conscious
contact with God.” which features prominently in the 12 Steps. 
For me, the Serenity Prayer is the HEART of those programs, and the
conscious contact with Spirit is the SOUL.  In the program I work
there isn’t and never has been a “sponsor” for me, except for
Spirit.  This, to some, is heresy.

It tends to piss off some of the True Believers and party-line
followers at 12-step meetings when I talk about HOW I came around to
the realizations of the promises, and how I relate on a
moment-to-moment basis with Spirit instead of having a routine of
getting down on my knees as soon as I’m out of bed in the morning as
some of them recommend.  To them the fact that I reached
all that outside the Program somehow invalidates the program.

I don’t see it that way.  I see it as independent corroboration of
the validity of the spiritual principles the founders incorporated into
the program.  Knowing that those men in the Oxford Group
eighty-some years ago came up with some of the same New Age
metaphysical principles that I picked up on my own path half a century
after they did, makes the Steps and the Promises they codified all the
more valid to me.
 
Unfortunately, many who have followed them have lost sight of the
spiritual principles and have sought to find some magic in the
code.  Theirs (those benighted True Believers) is a program of
fear and denial, and my voice of dissent to which they shut their minds
at their meetings can just piss them off for all I care.  That old
revolving door is there for their use.  Maybe on one of their
trips back around they’ll get it and get with the program.

Hobo Signs and Monikers

I
have been signing my moniker to my writings, my psychic readings, and
anywhere graffiti is appropriate (maybe even a few inappropriate
places) since 1972.  Ironically, it has never shown up on a
boxcar, railroad trestle or underpass, nor on any hobo “register” on a
railroad water tank.  The impetus to conceive of a moniker, a mark
all my own, came from hobos I met during a brief period riding freight
trains in late 1971, but I didn’t develop the drawing itself until
later that winter, and I never rode the hobo rails again after
that.  In my hitchhiking rambling across western states and to
Alaska, I marked it on more than a few highway bridges, light poles and
such, but mostly it has appeared on paper or as pixels on a screen.

History
Men snagging free rides on freight trains is a
practice probably as old as railroads.  Many of them through the
years have been tramps, just moving from place to place, rootless
wanderers.  Tramps generally beg or steal to get by.  The
term “hobo” originated from “hoe boys”, itinerant farm workers
following the crops.  Although it wasn’t until after World War I
that they got much public media play, the practice really burgeoned
following the Civil War half a century earlier.  Especially in the
South, men returned from the war to find that they had no home, no farm
to go home to.  As the Transcontinental Railroad was coming
together with a big celebration on the driving of the Golden Spike in
Utah in 1869, men looking for work as hoe boys were riding the trains.

Language
For many, it was a brief span of time before they found new homes and
settled down.  Many others made their home on the rails.  A
culture developed and an argot was born, words and phrases once
exclusive to the men who rode the rods (connecting rods under rail
cars, secure from detection but not such a safe place to
ride).   Many of those words have passed into common
usage.  Words such as “bindle”, “hotshot” and “punk” are hobo
words.  Some of the colorful phrases of hobo slang reflect
realitites of life on the road:   “walking dandruff” are
lice;  “scoping the drag” means to watch for an open boxcar or
empty gondola — a place to ride — as a train slows down.

They developed a written language, too.  The “words” are symbolic
scrawls designed to inform others of conditions in the towns and rail
yards.  They also reflect the realities and the hazards of the
lifestyle.  Many of them are warnings.  There have been
variations in the symbolic language over time, and there are regional
differences.  Below is a sampling of a few:

To find more, just do a web search for “hobo signs” or “hobo symbols.”

Art
Monikers are a particular type of sign.  Each person has one, and
they are used to let others know which way you are going, what your
destination is, etc., or just to put your “killroy was here” on the
landscape.  A traditional rite of passage for a new ‘bo was to
sign the register.  It meant climbing up to a water tank to carve
or chalk your moniker there.  Chalk has always been a popular
medium for writing signs and monikers, as has charcoal, but “registers”
are often carved more permanently.

One
of the best-known monikers is A-No.1.  There have been subsequent
imitators, but the original A Number One was Leon Ray Livingston (b.1872, d.1944). 
He was portrayed by Lee Marvin in the movie, Emperor of the North
Pole.  Livingston wrote a series of 12 “tramplife” books,
chronicling his life as a hobo and warning young boys to stay in school
and not go on the road.

Another
much-imitated moniker is Bozo Texino.  It’s simple and
easy to copy.   The one above is NOT the origina’s
work.  I recall seeing Bozo’s moniker when I was riding freights
in
1971.  Ironically, the originator of this one wasn’t a tramp or
hobo, but a railroad worker, J. H. McKinley.

Another railroad worker,  BuZ Blur
or Russell Butler, developed a harder-to-fake moniker.  He has his
imitators, too, but they just don’t really look like his work. 
One of his distiguishing characteristics is the ever-changing line of
text beneath the cowboy profile.  I found several images online,
but this is the one I like best.

It was thrilling to find Herby’s moniker when I was searching these
images online, and a bit saddening to see that he’d died.  But he
was an old guy, had been on the rails at least three decades.  I
met Herby, rode and drank with him, and saw him draw his sombrero clad
guy under the palm tree.  I’ve also seen a few obvious fakes of it.

I wonder how easy or hard my moniker might be to fake.  My family
and friends haven’t been able to do it credibly.  The ink artist
who did Greyfox’s tattoo didn’t even get it quite right.

If I’ve just whet your appetite here, you can learn more from North Bank Fred and the High Tech ‘bo (especially his excellent page of hobo signs).

Snow Again

When
I woke today, I could hear drips coming off the roof.  I asked
Doug if it was snowing or raining.  He said when he was out there
it had been snow, but it could have turned to rain.  When I got
up, I opened the door and stuck out an arm.  It was rain mixed
with snow.  The temp on my newly-installed indoor-outdoor
thermometer was 33.3°F.  What I can now see out my window, a
couple of hours later, is a thick, windless, vertical fall of big wet
flakes.  It comes down that way for a while, then switches to a
more watery precip.  In the time it took to write that, it made
that switch again.

At least now the leaves are off the trees.  The first two
snowfalls this year came early while there were still some green leaves
on.  That snow melted and we had a brief Indian summer that has
now passed along with the leaves.  It gave me some time to get
some outdoor work done, but I still have a few tasks out there that
need to be done.

I
didn’t want to go out in it.  The pic through the window was too
indistinct, so I stood in the doorway and took one pic looking straight
out into the yard and another back along the side of the house toward
the back yard.  That latter one is here on the right.

When I stumbled back to the bathroom this morning first thing, I was in
there half an hour or so.  I came back out and told Doug I can’t
seem to go to the bathroom lately without getting hung up cleaning
it.  This time I’d noticed the amber plastic translucent panel
between the sink and counter area and the alcove that once shielded the
porcelain throne.  That hunk of porcelain fell victim to a
freeze-up-and-burst phenomenon during the tenure of an earlier set of
housesitters here, and Mark never got around to replacing it.  Not
a big priority, since he’d not gotten the septic tank dug,
either.  I can’t help wondering why the thing was full of water in
the first place, since this trailer was never connected to a septic
system since it’s been here.  I filled that alcove with a steel
shelf unit where I store tools, ammo, spare computer parts, camping
gear, etc.

Anyhow,
since I’d already cleaned just about everything else in there, I
decided to clean the translucent panel.  That was when I
discovered that it wasn’t amber at all.  It had just accumulated
an amber-looking layer of grunge.  The panel is
clear-translucent.  Wow!  Cleaning it was challenging and
time consuming because one side is textured with a diagonal
channel-and-bump pattern.  I did a lot of wiping back and forth,
round and round, in and out of those channels until my virgoan
persnicketiness was fully satisfied.  Then I wandered back out
here and got a laugh out of Doug with my “hung up” statement.

He also laughed when I told him the corn flakes on the kitchen floor
were making it slippery.  Go figure.  I guess some geniuses
are just easily amused.  I indicated that I thought he should
sweep up his corn flake spill before he started washing dishes, and he
has now done that.  It’s probably a good thing I didn’t point out
that wet corn flakes wouldn’t be as slippery.  He just now
commented that it was counterintuitive that corn flakes would make the
floor slippery, but, “I suppose it’s the same principle as lubricating
with graphite.”  That reminded me again of my freight train ride
in 1971.  I’m percolating a blog about hobo signs and monikers, so
that trip has been in the forefront of my mind a lot lately.  I’ll
explain the graphite connection then, I suppose. 

This from NASA:

David
Hathaway is a solar physicist.  He noticed last week that for the
first time since January 28, there were no sunspots visible on our
sun.  He says this is a sign.

Solar Minimum is Coming

It is sooner than would be expected, based on the average time of eleven years from minimum to minimum.

What it means for communications on earth and for astronauts outside
the atmosphere is a relief from the disruptions caused by sunspots and
radiation storms.  What it means for us living in polar regions is
no aurora… a darker winter.

Three ayem…

That’s what my computer clock says right now.  I’d no idea it was
so late.  I don’t know what time I got home, but since I limped in
here I’ve been putting away groceries.  As a gauge of how
exhausted I am, when Doug made a little joke about my “decorative
arrangement” of winter squash needing some dried flowers (actually it’s just piles of squash in baskets
wherever there’s room for them — food for the winter), I was more
annoyed than amused.  My sense of humor suffers when I’m fatigued.

This was my first trip to town to drive the rehab van to the NA meeting
in over a month.  The meeting was good, and I felt great being
back among those people.  The rehab residents were appreciative of
my being there to take them to the outside meeting.  But I’m
terribly tired now.  It was a full day.

I got to the tire place right after they opened at nine this morning,
got my winter tires put on, loaded the summer tires in the back of my
station wagon, and went to breakfast with Greyfox while the tire guys
replaced one of the worn tires on his car with a better one that I’d
taken into town for that purpose.  Then we picked up his car from
the tire place, went back to his place at Felony Flats, and shifted
junk around, made space in my car for a collection of things he’s
scrounged out of the dumpster there and collected thereabout.

There was a little time for shopping and a taco before I had to go to
the rehab ranch to get my load of passengers.  Around that time we
went through a hailstorm.  Things at the ranch were
uncharacteristically chaotic when we got there.  A “ranch hand” is
supposed to check the signup list against the sign out sheet, count my
passengers and give me the keys, but one hand had recently been fired
and the new one was clueless.  I’m glad I knew what had to be
done, and there were a couple of women employees there to do the
checklist business and all.  If I hadn’t know where they kept the
keys for the van, the trip wouldn’t have happened.

Then, after the meeting, once I’d returned my passengers and the van to
the ranch, the serious grocery shopping started.  Two treks
through big supermarkets and some artful packing of purchase in among
the tires, a crippled end table Greyfox salvaged and wants me to
repair, and the case of motor oil, big bag of dog food and other bulky
items we’d gotten earlier in the day, then I was on my way home…
after I stopped to gas up the car, of course.

I ran into the first patch of pea-soup fog about ten miles from
town.  A couple of miles in it and then a few miles of relatively
clear visibility, then two more extensive thick fog patches in the next
25 miles.  About four miles from home I had to stop to let the
heat from the engine melt the ice in the carb intake that was choking
off my car’s air supply.  That’s routine in wet or foggy weather
when the temps are within ten degrees or so either side of the freezing
mark.  I’m just glad I’m on the ground when it happens.  That
could be messy in an airplane.  But it only takes a minute or two
with the engine off, and it’s ready to go again.  We (Streak
Subaru and I) were going slow through the thickest fog yet, when we got
to our turnoff here.  I almost missed it, the fog was so thick.

First thing Doug asked me was if I’d felt the earthquake.  He
described it as just a sudden hard jolt, nothing broke or fell from
shelves, which suggests it was local and minor.  We’re only a mile
from the big Susitna Fault, and the area is riddled with smaller
faults.  We get little quakes all the time.

Well, I hope this made sense.  I’m too tired even to proof it
tonight.  But I don’t have to do that drive to town again for two
weeks.  G’nite all.

What to do with
freezer-burned blueberries:
(updated with recipe for pinto bean pie — and the recipe for pickle pie in comments)

I defrosted the freezer yesterday.  The housecleaning started in
the back of the house and has progressed past the middle now.  I
skipped Doug’s room because I redecorated it last summer and the mess
he has made in there since then is his own.  While the fridge was
turned off and defrosting, I worked on cleaning up my worktable, which
used to be the dining table for previous residents who did that sort of
thing.  We eat standing over the sink or sitting with plates on
our laps.

Now the work table looks worse than before (it’s always that way at
early stages, when the things that were stashed in the corners get
dragged out into the light), and the freezer is frost free.  That
latter circumstance leaves me with two problems: 

a) I’d never checked the temp of fridge and freezer, but did so after I
fired it back up yesterday.  I learned that in order to get the
freezer below the recommended 0°F, I’d have to get the fridge itself
below freezing.  It’s supposed to be between freezing and
40°F.  So it is, now, but I had to compromise.  Fridge is at
36°, and freezer at 10°.

b)  I now have some freezer-burned fruit and vegies to deal
with.  Can’t throw them away.  Mama (my dear deceased
Scottish mother) wouldn’t approve, and besides, it’s wasteful.  I
had purchased some bagged frozen fruits and vegetables about a year and
a half ago at a time when I was only going to town every month or two
and did not have ready access to fresh produce.   Then
Greyfox went on his last monumental drink and drug binge and in the
aftermath of that I’ve had mucho access to supermarkets.

The bags of vegies, and a bag of sliced peaches and one of blueberries,
have languished all this time in the rack on the inside of the freezer
door.  Doug and I both do this:  we open the freezer door and
peer in to see what’s to eat.  We never look behind us at that
door rack.  I almost forgot to clear it out yesterday when I was
unloading the freezer prior to defrosting.

I love blueberries.  My last sugar binge, in fact, at least half a
year after I’d started abstaining from refined sugar, was on fresh
blueberries.  Yesterday, I opened the bag and gave a small dish of
them a quick thaw cycle in the microwave.  They tasted yummy, but
had the appearance and mouth feel of soaked raisins.  Mama used to
soak raisins in hot water for me when I was little and complained about
having to chew them.  Only in later years have I developed a taste
for chewy foods.

Now there was really nothing wrong with that dish of blueberries, but
ever since I ate them I’ve had blueberry pancakes on my mind. 
Pancakes are a pleasure I’ve been denying myself ever since I quit
eating wheat and went on a gluten-free diet a year and a half
ago.  Today it occurred to me that if I can improvise passable
muffins with gluten-free flours, I can make pancakes that way, too.

I have no recipe to share.  I put together a little bit of
garbanzo and fava flour, about the same amount of sorghum flour, a
heaping tablespoon of tapioca starch, some nonfat dry milk, a little
dab of honey, baking powder, tiny bit of xanthan gum to make them stick
together, salt, an egg, olive oil, water — and stood there at the
griddle and ate my fill before the last batch was cooked.

All the time I was flipping flapjacks I was thinking about pickle and
pinto bean pie.  That’s because of the pie beans.  In my
housecleaning, I found a heap of aluminum pie weights, a high-tech
reusable substitute for the beans that bakers used to use to weight
down unfilled pie crusts so they didn’t bubble and puff as they
baked.  They had come out of their bag and sifted out the damaged
back panel of a kitchen drawer and had to be gathered up off the floor
under the drawers.  Doug washed them last time he did dishes, and
seeing the pie beans spread out to dry reminded me of pickle and pinto
bean pie.

On our Big Field trip eleven years ago, Doug and I visited many
National Parks and Monuments.  One of the best was Capitol Reef in
Utah.  There was no ATM anywhere near the park, and so on two
occasions during our stay we drove to a small town about thirty miles
away where there was a bank where I could get a cash advance on my
credit card.  Each way to and from that bank, we passed through
another small town where a cafe had this sign it its window:  “Try
our pickle and pinto bean pie.”  We never did.  Restaurant
meals, except at user-friendly places such as Denny’s, were a rarity on
that trip.  Besides, really, pickle and pinto bean
pie!?!  Still, I wonder.  Was it a joke?  Did they
really serve such a pie?  If so, was it sweet pickles or dill, and
how did it taste?  I may never know.  It’s not something I’d
want to try without a recipe.  So many ways to go wrong and only
one way to get it right.

UPDATE:

Thanks to SansMerci, who googled the pickle and pinto bean pie, I learned that (a) it’s two different pies. (Yes, that was the cafe, in Bicknell, Utah.) and (b) the recipe for pinto bean pie is:

Grandma Raven’s Pinto Bean Pie

• 3 cups Pinto beans, cooked unseasoned and mashed fine
• 4 Eggs
• 1-½ cups Sugar
• ½ cup Milk
• 2 tbs. Butter
• ¼ tsp. Salt
• ½ tsp. Nutmeg
• ½ tsp. Cinnamon
• ½ tsp. Allspice
• Pecan halves

Mix all the ingredients well. Place in an unbaked pie shell, top with pecan
halves, and bake in a moderate oven (350°F) until done.

So, how do we make a pickle pie, eh?

My Son, the Slacker
[said with pride]

I wonder how many women can utter the words, “my son, the slacker,”
proudly.  Most would be proud of achievements that were
tangible:  titles, degrees, awards, etc.  I happen to love my
kid unconditionally, but beyond that I feel very good about what he’s
doing.  In typical maternal fashion I wonder how he’s going to
make it on his own in this world, but I staunchly refuse to
worry.  He’s a genius.  He’ll figure something out.

In point of fact, he’s only a slacker in a limited sense.  He
seems to lack worldly ambition, it’s true.  If there’s blame to be
assigned for that, I’ll accept it.  As he was growing up, I had
only two objectives:  keeping him safe and thinking for himself.  
The  only rules in our household were safety rules.  I never
censored his intake or his output.  Consequently, he never was the
sort of potty-mouthed little rebel that most of his schoolmates with
conventionally strict parents became. 

Unthinkingly, I tried to apply my own standards of personal hygeine to
him.  Consequently, that being the only thing he had to rebel
against, he now chooses not to bathe, groom his hair, brush his teeth
or change his clothes until he’s going stir crazy and I refuse to take
him to town unless he cleans up.  This, I’m fairly sure, could
lessen any chance I might have for grandchildren from his line, but
I’ve already got great granchildren from my oldest daughter, so I’ll
let Doug off the hook there.

So, he’s not climbing the corporate ladder or knocking himself out in
service of god or Country… thank God!  At least I have that much
to be thankful for.  But he really does knock himself out at what
he does.  All I ever need to do to get his attention from wherever
it’s focused (and he is extremely adept at focusing attention — had a
great teacher there **glances down, smiles modestly**), is say, “I need
your help here, now.”  The magic words.  They never have
failed yet.  So there’s that, and I cannot adequately express how
important that is to me.

And there’s more:  he washes dishes, shovels snow off the roof,
chops wood and carries water, all tasks I might (or might not) be able
to perform myself.  If I were to have to do them myself, it would
take me a lot longer than it does him, and there would be precious
little time or energy left for doing anything else, I know.  For
any of my readers who does not already know, I have chronic fatigue
syndrome, and don’t have a lot of energy to spare for physical
activities.

When Doug is not working to maintain this household and keep the fire
going, or “playing” to challenge his mental and digital skills at some
game, he’s usually either reading, writing, or working on some
artistic/creative project.  He is so seldom really “slack” that
when I see him sitting staring into space I usually wait until he comes
back to earth and then ask him to tell me what he’s been thinking
about.  It’s always interesting, often original, and usually
amusing.  He’s a master of the ironic twist, and his comedic
timing is exquisite.  In that, he has had two master teachers –
Go Greyfox!

A week or two ago, fatgirlpink
asked me if he has any of his writings displayed on the web.  None
of his stories is out there… none is finished, really, and when he
does get one into a shape he’s satisfied with, he intends to submit it
to publishers (so he’s not enitirely oblivious to monetary
realities).  But the bulk of his creative writing work goes into
an ongoing series of survivor-style role-playing tournaments at  randominsanity.org, where he is known as Dareon.  Among his creations there is the hilarious Bustinator sequence I posted here, from a beta-test in which he participated earlier this year.

Now, I’m proud to announce (and this is the whole reason for this
post), next week he will be beginning a new
tournament.  He has chosen to play the role of the same character
he assumed for that riotous beta test, Bam Margera (shopping cart
commando from Jackass), and for good measure, George Carlin as
well.  When I saw the graphics he’d come up with, I decided I had
to post them — too good to keep to myself.

Here’s his avatar:

And here is his sig:

I had forgotten that there was a new tournament coming up soon, until I
sat down at the computer a couple of days ago.  I moved the mouse
and the screen saver gave way to that.  I couldn’t wait to tell
Greyfox that Doug had decided to reprise the Bam character and to add
Carlin as well.  Then I decided to tell you, though I’m pretty
sure nobody outside our twisted family will appreciate it as keenly as
we do.

I responded yesterday to a question about my moniker from sobasysta
and that set me thinking about hobos and monikers and the arcane
symbols that hobos have used to warn each other of hazards such as bad
dogs or keen cops and inform of benefits such as a free sit-down
meal.  That took me on another googletrip, which I wanted to post
but decided to get this one, and maybe another one or two that have
been in the works, out of the way first.

Happy
Birthday,
Greyfox

Don’t celebrate
(except by gloating over knives and catching the NA meeting tonight). 

Don’t let getting older get you down. 
Remember:  it beats the alternative.

Now that I got the don’ts out of the way, do enjoy your day. 
Reflect on where you are and how you got there.
Don’t worry about where you’re going.
– sorry, I thought I had them out of the way, really –
Take it as it comes, one step at a time.

I love you.
(But you knew that, didn’t you?)