not bored, exactly......

We had to be there. You can probably tell.

Co. Cork, Ireland

WEST........NORTH.......EAST.........SOUTERRAIN

The Battle of the Cucumbers and the Tomatoes

A bit late in the spring, but better to get going than not. Taking advantage of the offer of a load of soil from John, friend of neighbor, Nancy, restored the raised bed a previous tenant had built. 

It's big, around 10 feet by 16 feet. 

Well built; layer of gravel, lined with heavy plastic, then soil on top. 

This way the plant roots are discouraged from tapping down into the ground below where the dreaded Black Walnut roots lurk, drooling their toxins into the glebe. 

A sure killer to many plants, it is essential I am told to prevent contact. The new soil added to the weeded-and-turned original soil layer came from Ann Arbor's city-owned composting depot out on Platte Road.

 

 It is very rich.

I planted four cherry tomato, one heirloom, one mongrel, two thick rows of carrots, some green cabbage, some purple cabbage, some other thing and five plantings of cucumber. I also planted some rosemary (did not do well), some chamomile (struggling) Thyme, Basil, Silver Thyme, and Oregano as well as transplanted a bunch of mint. All that took a sweaty while. Some I did from seed, most from small potteds. 

It is difficult to adequately express the thrill/joy/pleasure/deep satisfaction of digging around in wormy dirt with bare hands and a trowel. It goes right into you.

Pleased with the orderly rows and overjoyed to see tiny sprouts emerge after a few week, I fussed and tended the plot, inspecting it closely for weeds and being careful to discern carrot from clover sprout. 

Other than following directions on the back of seed packets and running to the internet for every question that came to mind I just poked around and peered at the plants a lot.
Nancy thought I might need more robust stakes. But the tomato plants looked so demure, so tame,- like those gremlins long before they find the swimming pool - so I didn't worry too much. But sure enough, as they began to grow up I found myself racing against imminent droop, driving everything I could find; sweeping-brush poles, tent poles, sharpened branches and even an old tripod into the ground to catch their swoon. 

Cucumbers began to drill out of the ground and go walkabout. Those things can really travel! I had laid out strings in order to remember where I had put things down and these were soon overwhelmed. 
The string was soon repurposed in the tying of vines to poles and stakes. Finally I nailed together a 10 x 4 x 2 foot frame which I lowered over the whole mess and to it tied long bamboo poles, both laterally and vertically, to support what has now become an inseparable union between the cucumber vine and the tomato plants. 

Here are the cucumber sprouts; two round leaves followed by a serrated leaf. It is when this third leaf appears that it is good to thin the herd.

Dapple

The cucumber grows a spiral tendril out of its blossom part, and this waves about till it finds something to cling onto. It is fascinating to see how it winds itself and to what it attaches. 

Thin threads find tomato leaves and gently take hold of them, gripping them but not tight enough to damage the leaf causing it to die. It is unnerving to see and realize this is somewhere in the 'decision-making" process of the plant. The cucumber vine is by now a bit weighty. It has loads of blossoms and a couple of tiny cukes! 

The tendril will find without any trouble a post or leaf or branch (although it may already be in possession of this piece of intelligence before it goes wandering) and will snake around it for one or more windings. Then, surprisingly, it doubles back on itself, following the opposite direction, at times backing up on the first wind a bit for extra grip. It is evident when one proceeds to undo the tendril, as I had to do repeatedly in order to save the poor strangled mint and the chamomile which were gasping and under the pressure.  
When one vine has found a secure grip on a pole, a second vine comes up and tendrils move out from each to find one another, winding about one another so that the second one is secured, too. Holding hands. Such cooperation! 

Preoccupied with this cucumber marvel, it took me a while to notice the tomatoes were doing the same thing. The tomato vines, now a number of feet in length would sail out from the center stem and turn this way and that, entangling their leaves in those of nearby vines, thus supporting themselves as they expanded their horizons. 
One day a thick vine kinked, succumbing to it's weight, and the leaves drooped. I was disappointed as there were clusters of small tomatoes on it. In a day or two, though, the leaves perked up again. 
Later when I was out along the road I passed a large Heirloom tomato plant in a garden and noticed one of it's stems, thick as a dog leg, had keeled over, too. It also did not die. It just adapted. It's amazing to see this self-sufficiency and interdependence among the plants.

Bees and butterflies are regular suppers now that the blossoms are open and so numerous.

Here is one forager upended into a blossom.

Here are the first two heirlooms to appear.

Green...........

.............to orange........................

............to red.

I barely had time to take a picture with the one hand before the other grabbed the pair and catapulted them into my mouth. No control.

When I had regained my composure I made a garden salad of chard, cherry tomatos, basil, co-op cheddar on hamemade bread, drizzled with balsamic and olive oil. 

Banshee snail (Helix Aspersa Fletus)

visits the house every evening, snacks on whole cabbages and any chicken parts left laying around. The moaning sounds emitted by this species are a combination of the movements of it's tail tip against the flagstone and high-pitched keening sounds it makes by sawing it's love dart over it's shell much in the manner of a violin bow against a violin. 

Baking a Logic Board.

Nov 2013:     Update: 
2nd logic board bake yesterday.           It worked!       

Following the first bake in July, the problem resurfaced after about a month. 
I did not get a chance until now (Nov) to perform a rebake.  ( It can be done multiple times.)

It was a lot easier and faster to go through the process a second time.
I paid close attention to the finicky cleaning and application of the Arctic Silver to the processors. Drawing the heat from the processors is critical, it seems.

July 2013:      A few weeks ago my old Macbook Pro suddenly started flashing strobe-like and then froze. Very suddenly. A reboot, nothing. Halfway through the boot attempt a tinted curtain slowly descended, as if on a stage, with a message in three or four languages to reboot. This kept up, so after pulling the files off by booting as an external hard drive, I took it to Apple. Their diagnostics showed broken communication with the nvidia chip. It fell off the edge of Apple-repairable because it is more than 5 yrs old. It is now "vintage"(it feels like only yesterday). 

After a visit to a secondary establishment who talked up a whole bag of ozone I went online to any forums I could find on the subject before a last resort of dumping it for parts. 
Found problem with these chips in older MBPs posted all over the place. It's used in gaming systems so there are plenty of posts by individuals on the problem along with details of solutions and follow-ups, as well. all good. 

step by step for taking apart the mac. Here is that info.

One thing that helped keep order in the process was to employ some regular adhesive tape turned sticky side up, secured with more tape attached to its edges, and set each tiny screw head-side down in the pattern of their location in the computer. 

Above is from the interior of the computer; all the screws on the logic board and the fans and the optical drive, which must be removed.

Then I watched this VIDEO to get a handle on what I was about to do: 

this is the underside of the top keyboard part with optical drive removed and perched there upper left and the two chips of ram removed and sitting on the lower right. The brownish ribbon thing has a 'snap' connector which needs to be carefully popped from the logic board as keyboard top is removed.

strips of tape secure the fans, (see right side fan flipped up on its tape) which i peeled back to pull them out entirely. using a small artist's paintbrush I swept the fans while holding it near the nozzle of the house vacuum cleaner. (nylon-stocking mesh over tip prevents important parts from shooting down the hose and co-mingling with revolting stuff you don't want to stick your hand in). ditto the rest of the interior of the computer, which collects a lot of dust over time and inhibits the effectiveness of the fans, I read.

 

BOARD UNDERSIDE VIEW

 In the middle of the logic board you can see the three big main chips with gray splodges of thermal compound on them. This compound provides conduction between the chip and the heat sink bar thing on the floor of the mac, which is in turn connected to the fans. The fans connect to sensors on the board, so they know to turn on when things heat up. 

Video makes things run really hot, so, I guess if any of these links are weak the system encounters problems. 

When replacing the board after the bake it is important to replace every connection again. There are twelve in all. (on mine. Not sure if that differs from year models up or down.) 

The following BLOG by Russel Heistuman I found very helpful.

Not only are the details on the problem and procedure clearly laid out, the author follows up regularly (he baked his 6 times!). Here is his BAKE procedure. It is worth spending time reading all the comments, too, as there is a lot to be gleaned from them.

One important thing is the thermal compound. It is important to:

      BEFORE BAKE: gently remove the old compound ,then clean and polish the surfaces, 

AFTER BAKE: apply 'surfectant' (however the hell you spell it) which enhances the conducive properties of the newly applied fresh compound - a one-inch line oozed onto the chips, before reassembling the computer. 

I found an equivalent Arctic 5 thermal compound kit at radio shack and the Torx 6 and Phillips #00 at Sears (which sells them individually)

BOARD TOP VIEW

In addition to the dozen or so screws which are removed, there are also some foam buffer pieces sitting on top the usb ports, as well as two plastic gripper/washer type things at the rear edge of the board which pull off easily - if they haven't already fallen off during the extraction. In short; anything that is likely to melt in the oven should be pulled off.

The RAM had already been removed (this is pulled following the battery removal at start).

Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and roll additional pieces of foil into four balls. The board will sit up on these raising it a couple of inches. Helps to get even heat all round I suppose. 

Preheat oven to 375 F and place board-on-baking sheet inside for 7.5 mins (if in any doubt about oven's ability to reflect accurate temp, procure a separate thermometer to sit inside so you can verify).

Remove and allow to cool for about 20 mins.

Reassemble board into computer simply following backwards along all steps. At this point you will be uber glad you laid all the screws out on a "map". Ha!

Presto!.... and 5 days later is still going fine. Better in fact.....

This is good. It means all the parts are talking to each other. So far all the ports are working fine, too. What's interesting is that the fans are not cranking up to high speed so often as they used to, so i imagine that has to do with the improved communications and heat draw-off via thermal compound. 

Chanterelle mushrooms

I found a load of Chanterelles the other day. They are easy to identify though have a kind of look-a-like called Omphalotus olearius, or Jack-o-Lantern, which are poisonous. 

The gills on chanterelles are fleshy. They are known as false gills, since they are more a continuous blend of the stem and cap. 

The Jack-o-lantern (which btw glows green in the dark) has real gills. 

Once you handle them it's easy to tell them apart.

After you are sure they are the edible kind you get to saute with butter, put them on homemade bread toast and eat them....!

more mushrooms

Having only discovered jelly fungi quite recently, I was amazed to find this specimen laying innocuously on the concrete just outside the back door. I recognised it so immediately it was hard not to read it as a sign a-knocking  

From reading up I knew it was 

Auricularia auricula-judae , or, Jew's Ear which grows all over the world and is popular in Asia. 

Dried jelly fungi found in Asian grocery stores will most likely be this. 
It looks eerily like an ear too, so the effect of handling them is oddly intimate. 

 

The wiki entry explains: " Its specific epithet is derived from the belief that Judas Iscariot hanged himself from an elder tree; the common name "Judas's ear" eventually became "Jew's ear"".  

It is a effective way of remembering what it grows on. Mushrooms are quite particular.

It is firm yet pliable to the touch . What was it doing there on the ground, detached from it's Elder? Eavesdropping on conversations taking place inside? 

 

Is this what is meant by the expression "keeping an ear to the ground"?

and then with strong light shining through it...

Here it is four days later, dried and about a quarter of its original size. 

and with light shining through it again..

A couple of weeks ago I found a large amount of jelly mushroom and, having too much for soup that day, I spread it out on a mesh with a fan underneath and waited three days for it to dry out. 

It went (in volume) from over one quart to barely half a cup. 

Having weighed one pound when I started it now weighed a few grams.

It's incredible how efficient drying is.

Put into stock it will reconstitute and take up the flavour of the stock. It has no particular flavour itself (not that I could discern) but has a good texture.

Bug on a Tree

A watercolor painting by Peter Murray. (bug for scale)

MUSHROOM FORAY

Essential background info for a mushroom hunt.

.. a delightful animation on how a happy basidia makes another happy basidia!

This (above) is one of the specimens collected in the local wooded island (surrounded by a never ending pressure of human colonization).  

 

The cap measures about a centimeter and the texture is stiff and rubbery. The red is very bright.

This is called Ductifera pululahuana. It is a jelly fungus, firm in texture even though quite jellylike in character. It is white but is also faintly translucent. I found about half a pound (it has heft) on a rotting log of hardwood.  

                                             

After brushing all the dirt out of the crevices under running water, in it went to a soup. 

Potato, onion, carrot, thyme, oregano, chicken stock then when potato is cooked add the mushroom, snipping it into the pot with a scissors.

A Sound picture

It is a spring day in a small park surrounded by houses. The weather is warm so people are out and some are busy with roof repairs. Walking up the slope into the park and then around its area, stopping every now and then to capture the sounds heard in the moment. Sometimes the wind rises unexpectedly because of the shape and topography of the park. It shook the leaves, sometimes the microphone was close by, sometimes at a 30 foot distance. 

 

The last sound is that of a man shouting out the cost of something in thousands. There is the wild wind and an untamed bunny, but the economy is never not nearby. 

All were laid out on a single track with short fade in/fade outs linking them and a few trims applied to shorten the duration of some of the takes.

A few days after making this I dipped into R. Murray Shafer's The Tuning of the World (1977) over an afternoon sandwich and found this quote by Thomas Hardy whose prose description of a 19c English pastoral landscape strongly resonated with my local urbanite listening experience in the park. 

I marvel at his prose, at how its forthright rhythmic exposition emulate the declarative call of the shepherd from the hill and magically connects the ears to the imagination through the words on a page. 
  
" The shepherd on the east hill could shout out lambing intelligence to the shepherd on the west hill, over the intervening town chimneys, without great inconvenience to his voice, so nearly did the steep pastures encroach upon the burghers' backyards. And at night it was possible to stand in the very midst of the town and hear from their native paddocks on the lower levels of greensward the mild lowing of the farmers heifer, and the profound, warm blowings of breath in which those creatures indulge."
                                        Thomas Hardy  "Fellow Townsmen", Wessex Tales 1920

Lima beans

Giant lima beans, overnightly soaked and popped out of their skins (that part is uber satisfying). 

They cook fast, are a cross between bean and potato in taste/texture and go well with Balsamic vinegar...

a sun room

....a sun room

......moon room, too, is the idea....

One side a set of doors leading from the main house into the sun room. These are planks normally used for scaffolding rigs which Peter has flayed with a wire brush attached to a drill, and then joined together with sticks of dowel and glue. It weighs a lot and with 8 more pounds of hardware attached should prove an interesting challenge to hang.