My carpal tunnel release surgery has healed enough so I’m ready to start playing music again. So here’s a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers.” It fit my mood after a long, draining day of virtual teaching college students, and didn’t strain the surgical scar with any hard bar chords or long stretches. Hope you enjoy it. Recorded using a 2-channel Yamaha USB mixing console direct into an iMac running QuickTime video app. Post editing to fix out of sync video and audio in iMovie. Thanks for listening! More music on my YouTube playlist: Front Porch Tunes.
You might also enjoy a cover of “Angel from Montgomery” by John Prine, with Aaron Lambert contributing a socially-distanced percussion audio.
When I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes I started using the cooking skills I had developed to create lower carb meals. There’s no reason low carb, reduced calorie food can’t be filling and fun. Here’s one that my son is crazy about, too.
Makes 1 serving of approx. 474 Calories and 38g carbs
Ingredients
2 oz square “White Castle” burger, prepared ahead of time (216C, 4.2g carb)
Spray oil (0C, 0g carb)
1 oz slice onion (16C, 3.8g carb)
1 egg (80C, 0g carb)
1 slice low fat American cheese (30C, 3g carb)
1 tbs salsa (approx. 7C, 2g carb depending on brand)
1 Thomas mini bagel (125C, 25g carb)
Directions
Step 1
Prepare ahead of time “Almost White Castle” burgers, using this recipe from allrecipes.com.
Step 2
Spray a saute pan with spray oil and place in pan: burger, onion slice, cracked egg. Turn each with spatula as needed to finish cooking.
Step 3
Place opened bagel on a plate. Add slice of American cheese and salsa.
Step 4
When cooked, add the egg, onion, and burger. Top bagel. Wait a moment for the cheese to melt. Enjoy!
Variations
Add a 1 oz slice of tomato for an additional 5C, 1.1g carb. Use mini burger buns instead of a mini bagel. Add a dash of your favorite hot sauce. If your diet can afford it, sub 1/2 tbs butter or non-dairy spread instead of spray oil for an additional 50C, 0g carb. If you need to, use a smaller “Almost White Castle” square of 1-1.5oz (108C, 2.1g carb/oz). You won’t notice the difference.
Note: Calories and carbs are calculated using raw ingredients. Eggs are usually listed as around 70-75C. The eggs I use are large or extra large and laid by our own chickens and tend to be richer, so I counted them as 80C.
A few years ago, Sarah and I decided that we didn’t need an entire acre of front lawn to mow. So we prepared a small meadow, a rectangle of roughly 50×120′, by clearing and rolling in seeds for Indiana native flowers and grasses we purchased from a supplier we researched online, American Meadows.
Every year we watch the colors emerge, diverse species of birds frolic, and monarch butterflies, carpenter bees, honeybees and other insects feast on bee balm, butterfly weed, cup flowers, cone flowers, milkweed, and so much more (here’s a great guide at Indianawildflowers.com).
Purple milkweed blooms. This gorgeous plant full of berrylike flowers hosts monarch butterfly eggs and caterpillars.
Being native, the meadow is resilient to weather (doesn’t need watering or mowing), shows off an ever changing palette of blue, purple, orange, yellow, and red petals, and needs minimum maintenance to avoid succession.
Before the meadow
The meadow one year later.
We find it amazing how small an area makes a viable and interesting habitat right in front of our house. Lately I’ve been able to track some of our night visitors using a Bushnell trail camera that takes nighttime images, like this little buck who wandered through the other yesterday.
A little buck wanders through our meadow at about 3:15 am, setting off the “Meadowcam.”
The buck is a great reminder of how, with a little sweat, it’s possible to make a beautiful, sustainable meadow, help the ecosystem, and bring nature close to home. Great for teaching the kid natural science, as well!
Monarch feeding on a cup plant flower.
Monarch warms in the sun.
(1) Our son releases a monarch he raised from a caterpillar.
(2) (1) Our son releases a monarch he raised from a caterpillar.
Six years ago this month, we closed the contract on our house and moved to our newly mortgaged homestead of about two acres of field and forest. Sarah quickly discovered thorny blackberry bushes growing on a rise behind the house. What a treat they’ve been.
This year, they’ve sprung up on the sides of the drainage ditch in our easement by the street. No doubt we can thank the propagation of wild fruit to the many birds that flock to the native wildflower meadow we planted in year three. So now we have two spots for daily picking handfuls of berries to sprinkle over cereal, yogurt, or to just eat plain.
A profusion of wild blackberries graces the drainage ditch by the road this summer.
The bushes in back of the house are becoming pretty choked out by a profusion of a weed or creeper we haven’t yet identified. So one of my self-appointed chores these summer days is to untangle and pull out the seemingly endless twining stems running up the bushes and along the ground. Though the reward for my labor includes frequent stings and bloody cuts from sharp thorns (whether gloved or not), it also includes biting into a sweet explosion of fruit whenever I need motivation.
We don’t know whether our blackberry bushes are a wild, native Indiana variety or started as a cultivar planted by a previous owner. Either way, fresh blackberries make up some of the magic of the slowly revolving seasons on our homestead.
So jazzed to announce that three of the poems from my Letters from Spickert Knob chapbook manuscript that I’ve been working on will be forthcoming in The North Meridian Review, a new interdisciplinary, open-source journal of culture and scholarship from Marion University. The poems are “Letter 2,” “Letter 3,” and “Letter 4.” Looking forward to seeing them in print and online and sharing the links with you.
In the meantime, if you’d like to read some of my published poetry now, have a look. Or read more about my publications and have a free poetry lesson on me.
I am a person who has served my university as a diversity coordinator, hired speakers, and even facilitated workshops and discussions on diversity. So as I have myself taught that white passivity is viewed by victims of racism as complicity, it would be terribly wrong of me to refrain at this time from expressing my public support of the aims of the protests breaking out across the United States. As a writer I also want to express my support as writers should not be separated from the world. Racist policing has got to change. #blacklivesmatter
Good morning! Continuing my travels through W. H. Auden’s Selected Poems, I arrived at this lovely verse. Auden seems to be channeling Shakespeare in this stage, with formal syntax and even in setting looking backwards (nothing like the American inventions of, say, William Carlos Williams et al.) But my, how he is finding his own interesting and inventive verse forms, rhythm, and rhyme.
Certainly, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
#36, “Lay your sleeping head, my love,” January 1937
