the deep moans round with many voices

Mom drove up to visit on Sunday, mostly because it was the Finger Lakes Chamber Ensemble's last concert of the 2013-2014 season, and thus the last concert for which I had a pair of tickets. (Or rather, a season pass for me + a guest, but psssh, details!) This one was not at First Unitarian, but in the Lodi Historical Society building. Lodi is about halfway up the lake, and closer to Seneca than Cayuga, so there was no way I could get there on my own without a car.

She arrived shortly after 11am, carrying some frozen leftovers and household supplies (she likes to bring me food and toilet paper and stuff, which I obviously have no reason to object to), and also bringing two plastic pots and the fabric mesh nets to hang them (the intent is to pot several of my baby spider plant crop and hang them in my kitchen windows). She also brought a random bell pepper she'd acquired and didn't particularly want to grow herself, so I now have twelve peppers to manage. An embarrassment of riches!

We ran one errand before hitting the road: namely, we went to Agway to buy a new pair of screws and two of the little plastic sheaths you use to anchor them better in drywall, because the hook I use to hang my pajamas fell off the wall last week. I'm going to fix it on Wednesday, when I will have good midday light and also won't run any risk of banging tools around after general working hours.

Anyway! We ate at Dano's Heuriger, which is... kind of like an Austrian version of tapas. We started by ordering a small bread basket, accompanied by two spreads and one small salad. The breads are an assortment that includes a really nice oat bread, a white baguette sort of thing, and a rectangular white bread with interesting spices. We chose the Hotel Sacher spread (very interesting, involved peppers and dill and some other stuff), the roasted red pepper spread, and the cucumber & dill salad; the latter was for Mom alone, obviously, since raw cucumber is tied with tomato for the vegetable I am most allergic to. *wry* Then we each ordered a sausage -- bratwurst for Mom, smoked Hungarian sausage for me -- and split a side dish of spätzle and a side dish of seasonal vegetable (which was green beans that day). The sausages come alone on a plate, with a little cup of coarse spicy mustard to use as a sauce if you wish.

It was definitely an odd meal, but quite tasty. And now I really want to fry some bratwurst, cook a bunch of sauerkraut, and make a bratwurst-and-saurkraut sandwich. Which is a delicious sandwich that I first encountered in Nürnberg back in the 90s, and wish were more common in America. It's best if the bratwurst is charcoal grilled, of course, but frying will do in a pinch. :-)

After lunch we visited two Seneca Lake wineries before heading back to Lodi for the concert. The music was as follows: Mozart's String Quartet in D (KV 575); four of Max Bruch's Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano (Op. 83); and Antonin Dvořák's String Quintet in G (Op. 77). The Mozart was lovely; he is not my favorite composer, but I don't think I have ever disliked any of his music; he is very listenable. The Bruch was a really interesting combination of instruments. I think it works best when the viola and clarinet are not playing in unison, since they have such different tonal qualities that they can sound slightly out-of-tune with each other even when they're not. The four pieces chosen were the "Allegro con moto," the "Nachtgesang: Andante con moto," the "Allegro vivace, ma non troppo," and the "Rumänische Melodie: Andante." I liked the second and fourth best. And the Dvořák was awesome, particularly the second movement. Mom was not wildly enamored of it; she said that string pieces with a lot of sawing back and forth are not really her cup of tea. Which is fair enough!

We headed straight back to Ithaca and Mom left immediately after changing her shoes, since this was a one-day visit and it's a long drive back to New Jersey. And that was pretty much that. :-)

Today I picked my remaining two bell peppers and made stir fry for dinner. This involved both peppers (as you can see, they were pretty small. very cute! but small), half an onion, half the squash, one third of the chicken (aka, two boneless thighs -- dark meat all the way, baby!), and a handful of spinach leaves. I think on Friday I will buy a red bell pepper at the grocery store and do it all over again, since I will be eating the rest of the current stir fry Wednesday and Thursday... and maybe Friday lunch, too, depending. Stir fry makes a lot of leftovers.











I think next time I should add some black pepper to the mix, or maybe cook with soy sauce instead of the salad dressing -- the end product is just a little sweeter than I prefer. Possibly this is because of the onion; a red onion might produce a sharper flavor. *ponders options*

I have no recipe as such, but my method is to add the ingredients in the following order: first onions, then peppers, then squash, then chicken, and finally spinach at the very end so it cooks just enough to wilt. The mushiness of the vegetables is intentional. I like my onions and peppers very thoroughly cooked, thanks ever so.

For those who may be curious, the bread is sourdough bought from Collegetown Bagels, because why the hell not. :-)

My peppers, on Tuesday Sept. 17, 2013. The biggest of the bell peppers is just starting to ripen and change color! Do you see the faint smudge right near the stem, facing directly at the camera? That is where green has begun to shade into red... which of course photographs as muddy brown, blargh.

I gave both plants a bit of MiracleGro this evening, though not much as they were both still quite damp from this weekend's interminable drizzle.

Before stargazing on Monday night, I lit a candle for Meteora, the great goddess of weather and airplanes, asking her for smooth travel. I also asked Constricta, the goddess of travel delays (traffic jams are her particular specialty, but she is not restricted to them) to ensure that my flights were on time, and Wayland (the god of rest areas and other temporary journey stops) to ensure that nothing would go wrong in the various airports.

Hey, it makes me feel like I'm doing something to alter things that are, in reality, beyond my power to alter, and aleviating one's own sense of helplessness is highly beneficial whether the ritual does anything to the outer world or not. :-)

Anyway, all did go well. I got up around 8:30am on Tuesday, we left the island at about 10:45am, and reached Bemidji airport a bit past 11:30am. All my planes were on time -- even the minor delay embarking in Detroit turned out to be a tiny, easily fixed mechanical problem and we landed early in Ithaca despite losing five minutes in Detroit.

I bought a trade paperback edition of Wolf Hall at Simply Books in the Twin Cities airport; I enjoyed reading it so much I wanted my own copy! I also bought Bring Up the Bodies -- a much shorter book covering a much shorter period of time, apparently -- which I will start as soon as I finish Anna Karenina.

Anna Karenina had been my intended island reading project -- I got halfway through last summer and planned to finish this year -- but Hilary Mantel distracted me wonderfully. Nonetheless I got back into Tolstoy on Monday and read a bunch more on Tuesday. I am now about halfway through Part Six (of eight parts), or more technically, on page 605 of 817. (Long book! Still shorter than War and Peace! Eeesh.)

My peppers survived my absence, though they are still not ready to pick. I will post pictures of them tomorrow, maybe, along with a bunch of pictures from Star Island. The thing about picture posts is that first I have to email the pictures to myself from my phone, because I don't have any way to do a direct data transfer to my computer. (I should probably look into that sometime...) Then I have to download the files from gmail, then post them to Tumblr, then make image links from Dreamwidth since DW doesn't have its own image hosting service. It is a stupidly long and convoluted process.

But, you know, pictures! I like pictures. So I persist, slowly and awkwardly. *wry*

My peppers, as of Monday afternoon. :-)

The bell pepper seems to have settled on producing three good-sized peppers. A couple of the other tiny proto-peppers have fallen off the plant, and the others are kind of in stasis, neither growing nor dying. Perhaps once I pick the three large ones the others will begin to grow again.

As for the jalapeño, it inched upward maybe another couple centimeters, but seems to have stopped growing taller/bushier and is now concentrating on the all-important business of flowering and producing actualfax peppers. As you can see, the first lone blossom has already become a distinct pepper, while a couple others are shedding their petals to reveal tiny baby peppers. The jalapeño flowers themselves are interestingly different from the bell pepper flowers -- for one thing they face downward rather than sideways, and for another their petals spread into a much wider and flatter array.



( cut for more photographs )