What comes in the mail consists mostly of advertising and bills.

When was the last time you got something fun in the mail? When was the last time you got a letter? Let’s put it this way: 50 years from now, no one (and I do mean no one) is going to put out a book (electronic or on paper) entitled “The Complete Collection of Newt Gingrich’s Tweets.” There will also not be an excited headline reading, “Steven King’s Grandson Finds Lost Blog.”

There are no secret diaries, letters, or hidden boxes of little bits and pieces now. We are splayed out for all to see. The only way to keep something hidden is to write it down and put it under the bed. Seriously. I cannot imagine what love letters are like now; I suppose they consist of a text reading “You?” with the reply of “Yes, you?” or something like that.

But this is a plea for the simple ‘sit down at the table, pull out a piece of paper (with or without lines), and envelope and stamp and write a letter. Chatty…heartfelt…funny…all the little things and happenings of the day. With drawings if you like, and enclosing a photograph (God help us – an actual printed on photographic paper photo. Egad), or a newspaper clipping, or a picture of a new dress ripped from a magazine with the words “I love this!” written on it. Or a sample of fabric.

Trust me – for people who have totally given up on finding the one gift that the other person does NOT have and will not get this holiday season, regular ‘snail-mail’ correspondence is the right size, the right color and will definitely please.

And while we don’t forget the thousands of people who died that day, and we try very hard not to forget the fire, medical, and rescue people who endangered themselves to respond to the attacks in DC and New York City. At the same time, we have two very very powerful men in this country, Rep. Eric Cantor and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas who basically are saying ‘Having funded public safety is not only not important, it’s wasteful and we’re going to cut the funding.’

That’s right. Aunt Toby, for the very first time on this stage, is going to get up on a soap box and do a rant. So, if you’ve come here for a recipe, a sewing or money-saving technique, or something on raising free-range chickens, you have my permission to leave now because the air is gonna get blue and I do not apologize for it.

The past couple of weeks in Upstate New York (and in Vermont and in Pennsylvania and all over the eastern seaboard have been hellaciously horrible. Between Hurricane Irene and then ‘the hurricane that turned into a tropical storm’ Lee, we have been blown apart and inundated. My home area in Upstate New York basically has become the ‘flooded city icon’ on Weather.com and the news. The governor has basically made so many trips down here from Albany and fly-overs that he probably is having his people look for a hotel room for him. The amount of response from local police, fire and rescue people has been amazing. Literally thousands of people in one city in our county alone have been evacuated and will probably not be able to get back into their homes to start the process of gutting and cleaning for quite some time. There’s at least one elementary school that was under 8 feet of water and probably won’t be able to be used … this school year.

The National Guard is here dealing with rescue, food and water drops. Wegmans, a large regional grocery chain, has been getting food, water and cleaning goods here in double quick time despite the fact that we are cut off in terms of interstate highway access both to the northeast and the west.

But it is the local fire, medical, and rescue folks who have, along with people’s neighbors, just given everything for this effort.

Texas is, at the moment, going through the worst wildfires since 1895. It could have been less bad except for the fact that Governor Rick Perry cut the Texas Forest Service budget by $34 million AND he also cut 3/4ths of the funding for matching grants for Texas volunteer fire departments, which make up about 80% of the fire fighting resources in areas that get wildfires. In addition, he also slashed the budget of the state agency that examines and certifies fire fighting equipment for fire companies in the state, putting fire fighters at risk for using equipment which may fail during a fire or rescue, endangering lives and property.

Eric Cantor is a totally different (though similar) breed of cat. The president has requested $500 million dollars in disaster relief (and given what we’ve had this year, even that will not be enough), Cantor has publicly said that there will be no disaster relief without equal cuts in first responder funding in the Homeland Security Budget. Now, first responder funding has already taken a 19% hit – with what Cantor is demanding, their total reduction would be 59%. This funding, by the way, supports recruiting, training and equipping first responders.

These are the people we depend on in emergencies such as what have been experienced this summer in Upstate New York, Vermont, North Carolina…and Virginia (they DID get an earthquake down there and it happened in Cantor’s Congressional District, too). These are the people who put their lives on the line when the planes struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in DC.

And these are the people who will NOT be there or who will have poor training, or equipment that does not work, or no protective clothing, if we allow people like Perry and Cantor to have their way.

Remember – in most of our cases, when something happens, the first responders are our neighbors. They are part of our community. Supporting first responders by writing, calling, emailing, faxing your state and federal representatives is supporting your neighbors and friends so that they disaster strikes, they can support you and your family.

At the moment, Eric Cantor and Rick Perry (and others like them) are, for political purposes, holding the ability of first responders in your community hostage.

All it takes for people such as this to win (and all they care about is winning, believe me – no matter what they say about ‘saving money’ and ‘small government’ and so on – it’s all politics) is for the rest of us to moan and groan and sit on our hands and hope they go away. They will not go away. If you are not involved, then THEY get to make the decisions.

If you don’t know who your state and federal representatives are, find out. Go to your state legislature web sites and find the names , email addresses and phone numbers. Call and write. Call and write again. Go to www.senate.gov and www.house.gov and do the same. This is serious stuff. No matter what party your are registered with, no matter how you feel about specific policies and programs, this is something we can all support.

So, today, in addition to giving a thought to those who died on September 11th, let’s also give some thought to the First Reponders. Because, when you are in the middle of a hurricane, a flood, an emergency of any sort, you want first responders to be there. You are not going to care if that person is a Republican or a Democrat, a member of the Tea Party or if they’ve read Ayn Rand, Karl Marx or Groucho Marx. When you and your family are up in the attic with the water up to your waists, what matters is that they are there, they are your neighbors, they are trained and equipped and that they are there to rescue YOU.

(photo courtesy of Swiftwater Rescue, Greenville, NC)

Now, what I meant to do, at least what was in my head, was a spirited defense of not dressing in all black. And I pulled out the stuff that I thought would work best and …it’s all black. Sheesh.

Usually, I go with a ‘theme’ when we travel and then I can put together outfits and everything goes together. Part of my problem is that a good chunk of this visit is in the hands of some of my UK cousins and so we don’t know exactly what is in store for us. It could be hiking, or we could be going to churches and botanical gardens. No way to know since they have Plan A (good weather) and Plan B( bad weather) but there will be a theatre performance, so I need something a little bit dressy. So I have to be able to get maximum flexibility out of this. What you see here does NOT include the outfit which I am going to wear on the plane, which is my attempt to put as much stuff ON my body to keep me warm in the flying fridges plying the not-so-friendly-skies these days. And that outfit consists of a pair of knit black ankle length pants paired with a 3/4 sleeve beige and red top and a wool/cotton cardigan (actually, it started out as a giant Landsend turtleneck but that is a tale for another time) and black sandals from Aerosoles (I quite dote on Aerosoles since they have shoes in my size in wide which is as close to finding the Holy Grail as I’m going to get). Bogata

The other pair of shoes is a pair of walking shoes. I figure between the two, I’m taken care of.

Now, looking at this amalgamation of clothing, here is what I’ve got:
Bottoms:
The aforementioned black knit pants
Black pencil shirt
A red knit skirt
Black/white melange linen dressy shorts

Tops:
Black
Black with white pin dots
Black, cream, deep pink 3/4 sleeve top with matching ring scarf
Pink cami
The aforementioned beige and red 3/4 sleeve top

Covers:
The aforementioned red cardi
Black lacy cardi
Raincoat
Black hat

We are going to be away for almost two weeks and this does not look like a lot. I can run through all the permutations and combinations pretty quickly. So…we’re going to have to take a bit of time to do some laundry (probably in Glasgow, actually). I’m not one much for the ‘rinse out in the hotel sink’ thing. By the time we’ve been rushing around to museums, churches and botanical gardens (and, cough, shopping, cough), we’re pretty ready to find someplace to put our feet up for an hour and get the cleaning done. I know some people might argue with me that you don’t travel 3000 miles to end up in a laundrette dealing with dirty laundry, but it’s no big deal, truly.

And it leaves that much more room in the suitcase, ahem, if you know what I mean.

OK – folks, I am making the bold assumption that all of you reading this are comfy, cozy, and indoors. If I am wrong, raise your hands. Mmmhmmm? Oh yes..you in the back with the mukluks — how are you running your laptop? Oh, ok…
Back to the business at hand: Being Prepared. We haven’t turned out attention to that for a bit. Today’s news story about the hundreds of cars stranded on a section of the New York State Thruway (conveniently located just to the lee of Lake Erie and Ontario) because of a jack-knifed tractor trailer…in the middle of what is coyly referred to by all and sundry in the weather biz as a ‘lake effect snow event’ reminded me that it might be a good time to flog the idea that having stuff in the car ‘just in case’ might be time well spent.

Let’s imagine for a second the poor people hunkered down in their cars (probably idling until they run out of fuel) starting at about 3 p.m. yesterday. As of 3 p.m. TODAY, about 100 people had been rescued and taken to a community center, leaving hundreds of people still sitting in cars in the middle of snow coming down at the rate of about 1″+ an hour. With wind. I don’t know about you, but if I’d been in one of those cars at 3 p.m. yesterday, at about 4 p.m., I would have been cursing the fact that I was on an interstate and was not within walking distance of a bathroom, much less a coffee shop with something hot to eat and drink.

Having access to a bathroom is a biggie with me. It’s amazing just how painful and humiliating it is NOT to be able to…well, you know, when you need to. It’s not something like hunger that you can just suck up and sing funny songs about. And do not delude yourself that it will never happen to you. Actually it happened to the DH and I coming back from New York City, while we were stuck in the middle of the bridge at the Delaware Water Gap in the middle of a four-hour traffic shutdown. Not only no bathroom but no way to get off the bridge and find one. After about an hour, some of the other drivers, the guys, decided that they would – well, you know. Being in the middle of the bridge, we were not exactly in a position for me to jump out of the car and hightail it up into the pines to do a little garden watering behind the shelter of the evergreens.

This is when I became extremely grateful that for some reason, we had an empty plastic bottle in the back, which I doctored with a pair of nail clippers. Sweet relief, that, but I was lucky.

The DH and I once went up to cow country in Alberta on business and while there, we were introduced to preparedness Alberta-style, which for a vehicle includes a couple of milk jugs of water, several heavy blankets, blinkers, food of various kinds (including chocolate bars, etc.), and a five gallon can of fuel. Now, up in Alberta, the ‘law of the west’ basically requires that if someone shows up at your door in the winter, you take them in, no questions asked. And you get them warm and feed them and house them until daylight, when the RCMP can be called. You do those things because the next time, it might be you — and walking around in the dark when it’s -40 F in the wind is a sure way to end up in a snow drift, looking like cordwood.

So, being prepared is a good idea. One of the things about some of the people who were interviewed for this story on being stranded in the snow south of Buffalo, New York were the number of them who said something on the order of ‘I was just going out to (pick one: do a little grocery or holiday shopping, go bowling, visit my mom, go the post office…).’ Notice, they were not saying, “I was on my way out to Nebraska or Ontario.”

A lot of them thought they were just going on a thirty minute trip. Didn’t think to throw anything in the car. And then they got stuck at 3 p.m. and 24 hours later, they were still stuck out there in the wind and the snow – no food, no water and …no bathroom.

So. Here’s the list for the box that goes into the back of the vehicle in the fall. Leave it there until spring and then take it out. Then freshen it up and put it back into the vehicle in the fall again. Always have the box:

Two heavy wool blankets (three is better but we’ll go with what we got)
Ziplock(tm) bag with energy bars, chocolate, protein bars
Two big flashlights with fresh batteries — check ‘em each fall.
Beacons that blink – fresh batteries too.
Roll of paper towels
Power connection for cell phones and/or an extra power supply(search on ‘cell phone USBs”) that is fully charged up. Most of them will carry a charge for several months.
Plastic gallon milk jug, empty, with the top cut out of it so that the hole is 3-4″ across.

Also, whenever you leave the house, make sure you take at least one gallon of water with you and a gas can with 1-2 gallons of fuel. If you end up stuck and put the car into idle to keep warm, you will run out of fuel to run the car. And dress appropriately, which means: warm clothing and socks, boots, sweater, heavy coat, gloves, hat, etc. The number of people who just jump in the car to go down to the store in their indoor clothing is amazing to me. Sitting in a car in 25-30 degree weather with nothing on but jeans and a flannel shirt is going to get cold really fast.

OK? All straight?
Good.

But…you never know….that stuff is pretty yeasty smelling. So I tried an experiment. I frankly bought the cheapest beer I could find at the grocery store (no Oomegang Belgian Dark or anything like that), opened up a couple of bottles and left them open all night to try to make it flat. Next morning – no good. Still bubbly as ever, so I poured it into a big glass measuring cup and zapped it for 30 seconds and stirred it up. And I did that again. At that point, it was warm enough. I measured out two exactly the same amounts of the beer into bowls, added one teaspoon of sugar to each and a half a cup of flour to each and put them in a warm oven to raise. Then, I added one tablespoon of dry yeast to one of the bowls.

Well, NOW we know. Warm beer/sugar/flour? Zippo.

So, there I was with a bowl full of very bubbly starter so I decided to make bread out of it. I warmed up the rest of the beer (the total volume must have been close to 16-18 ounces of beer) and produced this:

Beer Bread With Multigrains

16-18 ounces of beer, opened and warmed up
1 Tbs. Yeast
1 tsp of sugar, honey, or molasses
½ cup of flour (I use bread flour but regular basic flour will work)

Stir up and put into a warm place to rise – this will take about 10-15 minutes. Should be very bubbly.

Put into a big bowl with 1 cup of whole wheat flour and stir. Add enough regular or bread flour until you have a sticky dough.

Add: 1/3-1/2 cup of multigrain hot cereal (if you don’t have that you can add other whole grains that you’ve got – amaranth, grits, quinoa, whatever)
Add ¼ cup of flax meal or flax seeds (flax meal is actually better for you; crushing it up allows for better absorption)

Mix all of this together and turn out onto a floured board or countertop. Put more flour on top and knead until it is no longer sticky at all. Put into a big greased bowl and let rise in a warm place for 45 minutes.
Punch down, turn out on your floured board or counter and knead a little bit. Grease up two cookie sheets and divide the dough in half, forming each into a ball. Taking a sharp knife, make one cut straight through the top. Put back into the oven and let rise for 30 min. Take out of the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Bake for 30-45 minutes, until the loaves sound hollow when you rap on them with your knuckles or a knife handle. Take out, let cool, slice and enjoy.
(Yeast micrograph courtesy of Dr. Maxim Zakhartsev, Dr. Sergei Rarozin, Carmen Momeu, International University Bremen, Germany)

It was one of those experiences where you meet someone and you feel as if you’ve been friends ever since middle school. Geri is a New Yorker through and through. Though Aunt Toby did work in ‘the city’ for about a year during the period when no one knew if the city government was going to go bankrupt (they didn’t) or if I would stay (I didn’t), I left to go back to graduate school for a degree in accounting (which did not stick; the director of the program told me I’d make the worse accounting graduate they’d ever seen), met the DH at a softball game (he was catching; I was pitching), switched programs and the rest, as they say, is history.

Geri has many very kind things to say about me here:
When Geri Met Toby

And I have to say that her web site and programming on the site are first rate and thoroughly enthusiastic about a demographic that frankly gets zip in terms of attention and the credit that it (ahem, and me too) deserves: Women over fifty years of age. When you look at that group, it is truly mindboggling in terms of what we have achieved over the past 40 years. Unfortunately, American business still believe that the only group that counts is under the age of thirty, which given the general buying power of women over fifty, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Geri has put together a great site, filled with inspiring stories, great ideas, terrific giveaways and contests. Worth daily visits.

(photo courtesy of Denis deFreyne)

Even when the water has been sitting out in a watering trough or water-er all day long and is the temperature of bath water, as long as they have access to it, livestock will drink it. And it will keep them alive. They might not like it; it might have slime on the bottom. But in 100 degree temperatures, it will keep them alive. The younger they are, the closer to birth they are, the more they need water and lots of it. And the greater the chances that if they don’t or if they don’t have access to it, they will not make it. The higher the temperatures go, the faster they will expire without water and access to it.

This past week, the temperatures up in our area were absolutely mind-blowing. High 90s every single day. The first day was a holiday and although we filled all the animals’ waterers full, we also took off to do ‘our own thing’ for the day, forgetting …that sometimes, things happen. The chicks in one of the pens tipped over the waterer. We did not get back until late in the day. You can guess the result, though we were lucky and only lost a dozen. These were not brand new chicks; these birds were 6 weeks old. But it did not matter. No access to water and within a few hours, overheating. For the rest of the week, our son was at home and every day, he went up a couple of times during the day to check on the animals, make sure they had plenty of water. No more losses.

Water – it’s what animals need. All the damn time.

(photo courtesy of oddobjects)

So, I was rescued by a couple of guys named Ernest and Carlos (father and son), who got me off the road, pulled my cell phone out and called the DH, and stayed with me until he showed up. Probably a half dozen other people stopped, inquired, or raced over to lend assistance. To everyone out there – my humble thanks especially to Carlos who held onto me while I was retching from the pain. I got lucky in the ER – mid afternoon on Friday is not so busy that I could not get seen right away.

Weirdest things about the ER:
The first question they asked me was not “Where does it hurt?” It was “Were you wearing a helmet?”
I was wearing my Rx sunglasses when I went in – they did not take them off until they sedated me
(and I mean “totally knocked me out”) to put my dislocated shoulder back in (which for some reason is referred to as a “reduction”). I must have looked very odd in my spandex shorts, bike shoes and sunglasses. Considering the amount of begging for painkillers I was doing, I do not think Lance Armstrong is going to be asking me to join LiveStrong any time soon.
The other thing is that I was apologizing constantly. I have no idea why.

I’ll be seeing the orthopedist on Monday. In the meantime, I’m discovering all the things I can’t do now because I don’t have the use of both hands.

Since the plants won’t be staying in that particular bed, I am not worrying about spacing at the moment; I just want to remember what I sowed where, so for memory’s sake, I drew a rather crude diagram that looks something like this:

===================Sugar Snap Peas====================
Chinese Kale============Brussels Sprouts=====================
Carrots================Beets==============================
Spring Lettuce Mix=========Starbor Kale=========================
Broccoli=================Chard=============================
Spinach================Red Kale===========================
Cabbage===============Curly Kale

Once they come up, I’ll be able to space the plants out into the other beds, but in the meantime, we will be digging over the other beds to get them ready. While I was planting the seeds, I found a lonely refugee potato that got left from last fall. Part of it is a little bit soft, but I transplanted it into another bed just to see if it will come up as a volunteer.

At the other end of the bed-under-glass, I’ve got two experimental rows going. A couple of years ago, I did a little experiment in hybridization with a hosta and with an iris (irises are actually really easy to hybridize). I’ve been keeping the seeds I collected in folded up paper towels in the fridge and I figure this year is as good as any to see if a) they will germinate and b) what we’ll get. So I put those in at the other end and we’ll keep an eye on that also.

Just a reminder, though; if you have a soil thermometer (and as you can see, I’m using an old meat probe there, so you don’t need anything fancy) and can get temperatures of at least 50 – you can put in anything from greens to anything in the beet and cabbage family and get them going. The soil is NOT warm enough for things such as squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, or anything like that, but for hardy spring crops, now is good. I know in various areas of the country, there are traditional dates of planting (in our area, Memorial Day is ‘get your garden in’ day) but with climate change, we need to be more flexible.

Until the next time..