i have successfully made a pie crust.

tonight

vegetable pot pie made with homemade whole wheat pie crust and the last of the stock from joyce's chicken.

madison deluxe

For my birthday, Ben helped me pay for a banjo. This is the first real musical instrument I've ever owned--and my first real attempt at learning to play.

It all came together rather suddenly. While I had been thinking about this instrument for a while, I decided that it was absolutely the thing I wanted to learn how to play after my discovery of a band called Mumford & Sons. I told Ben that I wanted to get one and he said to wait, that he would buy me one for my birthday. We had no idea how much we would have to spend, where we would get one, what kind to get. I also had no idea who was going to teach me.

One morning at Mott's, I asked Noah Maxner (whom I was working with) if he knew anyone who could teach me the banjo. His whole family is deeply involved with music on the Island, so it seemed feasible. What I was not expecting was that Noah's own dad, Steve Maxner, was a banjo player and could possibly give me lessons. This was really excellent news because I already knew Steve--Ben and I have spent a lot of time at the Maxner house since last summer because we milk goats there.

So suddenly I had, not a banjo instructor, but a banjo mentor. Right away Steve gave us the advice that anyone considering learning a new instrument should heed: do not buy something cheap. I did this once with a guitar and it almost turned me away from learning music for good because the thing was a piece of shit that could not stay in tune. I held onto it for several years always thinking I would learn how to play eventually, with each attempt ending in frustration and crushing self-doubt because I assumed I was just bad at it.

So, Steve not only agreed to teach me, free of charge under the condition that I work hard, but he helped us choose the instrument.

Another piece of Steve's advice, which really just follows the first thing, is that to succeed in learning an instrument, you must love it--not just love making music, but love the instrument itself.



And I do. This banjo looks and sounds incredible.

Already this learning process is tremendously frustrating. Progress is slow, and it is difficult to commit practicing every single day. And there are all kinds of physical hurts--my fingers, neck, and shoulders all have their protests. But above all that is an intense feeling of pride. For years I've whined about wishing I could play an instrument. So many people make those kind of idle wishes without ever acting on them. But now, instead of wishing, I'm doing. Nothing can beat that.

winter means root vegetables

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2010/01/roasted-root-vegetable-wheat-ber/

Definitely making this, or at least something inspired by this. Not tonight, because it's late and I don't have all the ingredients I would like... perhaps tomorrow. Yum.

We still have a good stash of various kinds of potatoes that we bought at the Morning Glory end-of-season sale. And an absolutely enormous bag of organic carrots.

I miss the fresh kale and summer squashes from my garden, but I do love winter veggies.

Unfortunately, though, the time of local eating appears to be drawing to a close 'til spring. The farmer's market is long over, Morning Glory has closed, and the local produce stocked at Cronigs has dwindled to almost nothing. I've made many adjustments to my diet to accomodate the change of season, forgoing many foods that I'd really much rather still be eating (not that out of season produce trucked from California or South America tastes good anyway). When fall came, I happily made the switch to potatoes and carrots, and as much acorn squash as I could eat. But I can't give up everything. We'll still keep the classic cooking vegetables in our fridge--onions, peppers, celery, carrots. We'll probably keep buying potatoes after the Morning Glory ones run out. And sometimes, just sometimes, I really need salad greens.

February will be all about grains and legumes.

I hope our plans for a rooftop garden actually come to fruition...

new friends

After we lost Janus, Ben and I decided that it was time to build a proper cage for our rats. We had actually tried to do this once before but they didn't like it, so they were living in a 30 gallon glass aquarium--much too small, and tanks are notoriously bad for their sensitive little respiratory systems because airflow is so poor.

Because what we were planning on building was going to be so much bigger, and because Bandit and Appa seemed forlorn after the loss of their cagemate, we decided to buy some new rats. Now, everything you'll ever read on the internet about rats says to always buy from breeders, but of course there are no ratteries on the Island. I also find it rewarding to rescue a feeder rat from its terrible fate. Bandit, Appa, and Janus were all originally going to be snake food. No, such rats will not always live as long, but the life that you give them is so much longer and fuller than anything else they could have had.

So, we ventured up to this weird little pet store in West Tisbury called Little Leona's. We had no idea what we were going to find there. It wasn't too bad, really--very small, but I've seen much worse. And they had rats for sale!



We found the two loveliest little rats. One chocolatey black with white feet and a white tummy, the other white with black head and shoulders. They were a little older than we were hoping for, but still definitely babies. Skinny but fairly healthy looking. But very, very skittish.

It was difficult to get them out of their cage. They were extremely nervous of all the new attention, and I don't think they were used to being handled at all. We let them climb on us and tunnel through our jackets and get used to our smell. Another customer laughed at the whole scene and commented on how she couldn't quite believe how at ease we were with these rodents--the pet store employees had similar reactions. I still have to get used to the idea that we are "rat people."

In a sort of homage to Janus, whose name we took from Greco-Roman mythology, we named the black rat Erebus--the Greek god of shadows and darkness. The black and white rat we named Quiz, or The Grand Inquisitor--after one of the cats from Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles. We're pretty dorky about names, I know.




I don't think they were handled well at all prior to us adopting them. They are still extremely skittish and mistrusting. But they're slowly coming around. They seem to be getting along with our other rats--so far, nobody had tried to be the alpha, and they all just snuggle together in a pile. I can't wait to watch them grow and flourish the way Appa and Bandit have, now that they're a part of our lives.

Nano

One problem with blogging about the past is that I don't always have much regard for chronological order...

There's this thing called National Novel Writing Month, which is a challenge to write a novel 50,000 words or longer during the month of November. In other words, it's madness. This November, Ben and I decided to try it. It seemed like a good time to do so: we weren't in school anymore, and neither of us were really working much. It all seemed very promising. We were making the beginning of our winter so productive!

We both chose old, neglected, but much loved projects for our novels (which is allowed as long as all the writing you do is new, which worked out because whatever either of us had written was so old that a new draft was necessary anyway). I wanted to use Nano as an opportunity to compete a draft of a fantasy/science fiction story I've been trying to write for, like, probably half my life. I had already been trying to get back into it before we decided to do this Nano thing, and it just felt awful to abandon it and spend the next month furiously writing something unrelated. I stand by this decision, but I think it was ultimately the reason for my downfall.

Nano is meant to be an experiment in writing. This is made very clear. You are not meant to get a great novel out of it. But you are meant to over caffeinate, go a little crazy, churn out a lot of nonsense, discover some great ideas, and learn a lot about yourself and about writing. Sounds nice. But the NaNoWriMo experiment doesn't work terribly well with ideas that you love. And let me just tell you, I love my story. I love it to itty bitty pieces--so much, that I am afraid to work on it because I'm afraid of failing, which is why I have never completed a full draft. Focusing on a daily word count (1667 is the magic number that will get you to 50,000 by the 31st) did help me lose some of my inhibitions about writing, but it was very difficult to write badly enough to generate that many new words every day. I just couldn't let go.

I also fell behind immediately. The first week of November we hosted three couchsurfers--one guy by himself and then a pair. It was the first time we were able to host anyone and we didn't want to pass up the opportunity. The first surfer was a distance biker and he invited us to accompany him on a forty mile ride to Aquinnah and back (which was beautiful, but nearly killed us). I have no regrets about any of that, but it did get my writing off to a bad start.

I made it to 27,650 words before I decided I was not going to make the goal of 50,000 by the end of the month. It was the most progress I've ever made on a draft of this story (not the most words, but definitely the most progress). I now have a clearer idea of what I am going to do with this story and how to do it. Somewhere between zero and 27,650 I discovered new ways of telling the story, new characters, new plots... so many ideas that will make it so much better. I've never felt so good about it before.

Deciding that I didn't want to try to make 50,000 by the end of the month didn't mean I was giving up. But after that decision (and after Ben also reached the same decision) I just lost steam. I haven't worked on it since--and this happened around the middle of November. It's difficult now to find the motivation to begin again. I opened up the document the other night and realized that I could barely remember where I was going with a particular passage that had been left unfinished.

I'm looking now for a way to recreate that frantic dedication that came from a contest like NaNo. I'm good with deadlines and pressure, which is what allowed me to do so well in school, I suppose, but that's really not how I want to live. I have plenty of time to work... but no motivation. Where does motivation come from?

for janus

Our rat, Janus, died on the 26th of November from a respiratory infection. She was less than one year old, and her sickness seemed to come out of nowhere.

I needed to create something beautiful for her. She gave this poem to me. I had been wanting to get back into writing poetry for a long time, but the words had previously refused to come.

I held her cold body,

And I thought

Of what people sometimes say

About the dead:

She is no longer in there.

She has gone somewhere else.

But I do not think this is true--

For we are only our bodies.

But I understand

Why we say this of our beloved

For I looked at the little body in my hands,

Felt terrible stiffness of her,

Once warm, wriggling,

But frozen now--

I was almost scared to touch her.

Where has all that life gone?

A rat’s life is swift

And full of motion.

Adventurous creatures who meet their small world

With bright eyes and twitching spider-silk whiskers.

Rarely still--

The little heart beating time away

So quickly.

It was the utter stillness of her

That shocked me.

I imagined phantom movements

A breath, a nod of the head--

Where have you gone, little one?

If you are not here, then where are you?

We buried her beneath a dark pine,

Nestling her body between its roots

So that the tree might drink of her,

Drawing new life from her death.

Her fur was bright against that hole we made.

We covered her with the dry, golden needles

That had fallen all around.

Death is another door that

We walk through.

Nothing ever truly dies,

For all the matter of this world is recycled, for all time.

And though she might not feel it,

This little one who spent her brief life in warm, happy domestication,

Safe, content, but ever bound

to a world of walls,

Will become a part of the forest where we laid her body down.

She will be the bodies of a thousand-thousand tiny beings of the soil,

And the soft new leaves of spring,

And the air, and the rain.

We are all made of things that were.

--------------------

Rest well, Janus.