Burning Bridges Like Matchsticks

When my sisters and I were growing up, our family used to gather in the living room, Norman Rockwell-style, and my father would read from one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. I have the memory span of a fruit fly (which we now know is about 24 hours) so many of the details are hazy. I do remember that Pa used to go out to shoot things from time to time and during a hard winter, the family was forced to eat the body of a Scotch-Irish farmer next door. And if they slaughtered a pig, Laura and Mary always got to play with the inflated bladder. Apparently standards for entertainment were much lower back then. Also, there were leeches in Plum Creek, which left me so terrified I refused to enter natural bodies of water for another decade.

At some point we read Farmer Boy which was all about Almanzo growing up. I don't remember anything about that book except for the vivid descriptions of food. One of the dishes mentioned was fried apples and onions, which I tried to recreate a while ago. Here's my take on this American classic.

4 slices of bacon
3 onions, sliced
2 tart apples, cubed
cinnamon
cumin
nutmeg
ground cloves

Fry the bacon till it's good and crisp and pull it out to cool. Caramelize the onions in bacon grease. While you're waiting, chop the bacon into half inch slices. When the onions are soft and sweet, add the apples and toss in a dash of each spice. Add bacon back in. Cook for a minute or two, until the apples are warmed through, but still crunchy in the middle.

Obviously, you have two choices for the serving. If you're kind of scruffy and have mismatched dinnerware, you can make a pretentious comment about recreating the bold taste of classic American cooking. Hopefully your guests will not punch you in the crotch (which would be perfectly justified). If you've ever used a hair removal product, you're going to have to bite the bullet and use this as the filling for a truly delicious quiche. I recommend putting it under smoked gouda or cheddar.

I've been keeping that skillet hot and greasy as of late, not so much due to Woody's advice as my own apathy. When I don't feel like cooking, I end up frying things. There's been lots and lots of frying recently. And here's a dish that hops from the skillet to your plate real quick-like. You ought to make it. Right away, if possible.

2 onions, sliced
2 red peppers, sliced
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 hot pepper, ground up
oregano
bread
cheese (I use smoked string cheese because it is so unbelievably cheap)

Caramelize the onions. Stir in some oregano. Add the garlic and peppers and cook till they're soft. You may want to drizzle with olive oil somewhere in here. Add salt and crushed black pepper to taste.

Now, take that mess and spread a bunch of it on a slice of bread. Cover with cheese and throw it under the broiler (or into the toaster oven) till cheese is melted and starting to brown or bubble.

If this dish had a name, I think it'd be called soffrito crostini, but who knows. Those crafty Italians have all sorts of clever names for things. This dish is especially good for first dates or just prior to a dentist's appointment.

There were a bunch of slightly tipsy middle aged women dancing at Gomeroke last night. But one stood out as having a particularly good time. Now, I know a lot of people are self conscious about their dance skills (maybe even you), but just remember:

You're not wearing forearm crutches.

So relax and get funky. This lady was, and did.

To me, the most wonderful thing about computers is how easy they make it to store old things. My desk is heap of partially read papers shuffled together with barely legible notes from seminars. The pile is dotted with post-it notes that have long since fallen off their original papers, which is a shame, since useful information like "ubx == wing gene?! bullshit!" is now lost to humanity.

My computer is organized in the same way, but while I periodically shovel the flotsam covering my desk into a recycling bin and hope that there wasn't anything important in it, I can just copy my hard drive onto a few CDRs and throw them in a desk drawer. Which means that I have pretty decent collection of snapshots that describe the chaos of the past.

The whole point of this extended intro is that a few days ago, I was looking through my old journal entries and found a college era entry bemoaning the fact that I'd not heard a shocking statement about sex for a long time. That's right, folks. Despite my tender age, I was a dreadful sophisticant, so well read and cosmopolitan that I had Heard It All. You can imagine my delight at finding this bit of teenage ennui, but here's the thing. Just a week before I dug that chestnut out of the ashes of a previous computer, I had someone tell me something shocking about sex. A decade older and a few days wiser, but I was still shocked.

He and his wife were using "the rhythm method" for birth control.

We were discussing this at a party; and those of us in our little huddle must have looked a bit taken aback because he hastened to explain.

"You see, the way that they used to do it was just counting days on the calendar, but the new way is based on body temperature and other cues --"

"--Like viscosity of cervical mucus," I interjected, perhaps a bit too loudly. Words like "cervical mucus" tend to carry more than you expect, and I have a gift for saying them at those odd moments when everyone simultaneously stops talking. No matter.

"Right." He proceeded to explain how a woman carefully takes her temperature (and presumably palpates her cervix to determine if it has "risen slightly" and if the mucus covering it is more slippery) at the same time every day and records it. After the basal body temperature has been elevated for four days, ovulation has occured, the fertile period is over until next month and you can go at it like little bunnies with no fear of getting knocked up (my words, not his).

He paused slightly.

"So you see, it's scientific."

It sounds very logical and straightforward, doesn't it? And since my high school health class wasn't terribly clear about which "rhythm method" they gave failure statistics for, I started doing a little research. Because, you know, this sort of thing is important to know when you're entering a betting pool as to when said couple are going to become proud parents.

A few things struck me when I was poking about on the web. First of all, there are plenty of web pages which are advocate use of the rhythm method, but it's a devil to find the failure rates on them. When I did find them, they were always set up something like this....

1% failure for perfect use
3-15% failure if couple doesn't follow the rules perfectly

Gosh, well, if you follow the rules, that's pretty good.

Now, Planned Parenthood has been on my shit list for continuing to endorse Joe Lieberman (despite his embarrassing attempts to simultaneously fellate Sam Alito and position himself as pro-choice) but they get major points for spelling out the ways that "the rules" of the rhythm method can be broken. Read that page carefully, folks. You're going to be looking for a body temperature change of .1 to .5 degrees F. And look at the list of ways that your body temperature can be affected. And the ways that consistency of cervical mucus can change. I'll bet that "following the rules" is more of "not having any of those conditions that can mess with your temperature/consistency of mucus" and less of "we're really horny, so let's go for it."

Regardless, down there at the bottom of the page is the real heart of the matter. It's the likelyhood that a couple will be pregnant in a year with "typical use.*" And that's the number that really measures how effective a birth control method is.

---

*On an interesting side note, the failure rate for condoms is almost as high as the rhythm method, at least in the typical use category. This boggles my mind, since the rules for "perfect use" of condoms are simple and straightforward. I have no good explanation for this, but will say that you should use condoms religiously (pardon the expression) in non-monogamous relationships, since they do a good job at minimizing STD transmission. But obviously, with a failure rate pushing 15%, make sure you back 'em up with another birth control method.

n: What are you up to?

M: Well, tomorrow I'm going to look for club moss.

n: What for? Are you going to eat it?

M: No, I'm going to look at it.

n: Like with a microscope? I'm confused!

M: (exasperated) No! I'm just going to look at it!

n: Like people go birdwatching? You're going mosswatching?!

M: Yes! I am going mosswatching!

This is the first post of my blog. As usual, I don't have much to say, but if I want to tweak the layout, I have to have at least one post up.

So this is it.

But rather than just leave this a filler post, let me give a shout out to my favorite snake, Nerodia sipedon. The Northern Water Snake comes in 31 flavors of coloration, but where I'm from (upstate NY), it's usually covered with latitudinal stripes or blotches of brown, tan or gray. As they get older and larger, the coloration often darkens, so that the striping is completely obscured. Down south, there's a whole passel of snakes that look kind of similar, but up north, if you see a something snakey that's close to water, has keeled scales and doesn't look like a viper, then it's probably Mr. sipedon.

They're also noted for their general ill disposition. While these fellows aren't dangerous to humans, their salivia is chock full of anticoagulents and they bite and snap like rabid schnauzers when picked up. Also (like many snakes), they'll shit all over you (like many babies).

My love affair with this lovely serpent began when I was in college. I spent a summer working as a field hand in an ecology project (run by this fellow) and during my copious free time I would spend a lot of time at Six Mile Creek. It was very dry that summer and the stream had largely stopped flowing; instead the creekbed was dotted with puddles full of trapped minnows. I would walk up the dry bed to the dam at the top of the park and at every puddle I'd stop and scan the surface. Sometimes there'd be a water snake sunning itself on a nearby rock, sometimes there would be one rapidly disappearing into a hiding place, and sometimes, there'd be nothing at all. And then I'd wait a few minutes, watching the fish dart back and forth, until one got a little too close to a particularly large rock on the bottom and a cloud of detritus and blood exploded, following a strike too fast for the eye to track.