I’m Clearly Procrastinating on Writing, Now. But… (Pancake recipe)

shlomi on April 17, 2016

Just made the best batch of pancakes EVAH.

  • 2/3C whole wheat flour
  • 1/2C rye flour
  • 1/2C buckwheat flour
  • 1T Stevia (you can use 2T sugar)
  • 1-1/3T baking powder
  • 2 jumbo eggs
  • 3/4t vanilla extract
  • 1+C kefir (unsweetened, but you can use a fruit version)
  • 3T liquid coconut oil (heat to soften)
  1. Preheat a cast-iron skillet and use coconut oil to grease
  2. Mix dry ingredients thoroughly
  3. Beat eggs into kefir
  4. Add coconut oil just before (to prevent it cooling into a sheet on top of the liquid)
  5. Add wet to dry and combine thoroughly
  6. Ladle batter into skillet. 3 minutes one side, 90 seconds the other. Regrease between batches.

Yield:6×6″ or 3×10″ pancakes.

I lightly sprinkled a little more Stevia on the ‘cakes. Maple or agave syrup would work a treat. Goes well with kefir (I don’t drink raw milk).

 

Wow. Just wow.

 

Generative Activities

shlomi on April 16, 2016

Short post here.

I write, but I also bake and cook. Bringing food to people is, for me, very similar to giving the literary nourishment of poetry of fiction. After a drought of creativity in the kitchen I’ve been (financially) kickstarted into the kitchen. Here’s something that’s slipping out of culinary favor this time of year: cholent.

It’s a simple recipe, that folks tweak for every different village and family. Orthodox Jewish law doesn’t allow for cooking on Shabbat (the sabbath), and it’s hard to keep, for example, a nice steak on hold for eighteen hours until it’s Saturday lunchtime.

Enter cholent. Take ingredients, toss ’em into a pot, cook it until it’s mostly done before Shabbat begins (a little before sundown on Friday), then go to the baker and stuff it into the bread oven. Overnight. And most of the morning. When it’s pulled out, it’s a heavenly, creamy, yummy thing. Below is the one my mom made, which pegs it to Sosnowiec in pre-WWII Poland.

Ingredients:

  • 3-4 oxtail bones
  • 1-2 lbs. Flanken. Well, my mother would say ‘flanken,’ but I think we’re talking about a skirt steak kind of beef. Given my mom knew 9 languages and my dad 10, I think fuzzy would be a good way to describe her recipe ingredients. At any rate, a fatty piece, in one piece.
  • 5-6 kartofel. That one’s easy: use huge Idaho baking potatoes with thick skins. My mom skinned some, but kept others unskinned. In either case, cut in half.
  • 2-3 medium onions, whole and peeled.
  • Garlic. At least a 1/2 bulb. Peeled but whole.

That’s it. Put it in a crock pot until there’s no more room. Put the lid on, then leave it be on low heat for about eighteen hours. When you open it up, the potatoes are brown and buttery, the beef fat and oxtail marrow is everywhere, and basically it’s salted and then a feeding frenzy ensues until it’s all gone.

Some folks put whole eggs, in shell, into the mix. Or (shudder) red or garbanzo beans. Or bulgar. Or other travesties upon the pure Holiness of the recipe above. They shall be purged when the Truth is Known. 🙂

Okay. I feel better now…

On to writing.

The Vagaries of Vagueness

shlomi on April 7, 2016

GMOs are the red dye #2 of the decade. Vilified as poison, sanctified as nothing but yield increasing. As with everything outside the soundbite universe, it’s a bit more complicated.

The basics: A “genetically modified organism” includes every food plant and animal, and all the service animals humans have touched in the past 14,000 or so thousand years. GMOs in the protested context are ones where scientists have diddled with the genes to create changes in a single generation, tinkering in ways nature couldn’t. The unintended consequences of these changes are what’s at debate, not the initial intent. After all, it’s not as if we’re trying to invent a carnivorous plant.

It’s what you add. There’s a tomato, one of the first GMOs, that’s had a salmon gene added so that the tomato’s flesh is firmer and less likely to go soft in transit. Aside from the weirdness of having different kingdoms’ genes muddled, there’s not too much of an issue.And there are a lot of fish for which modification is in their future.

The most popular GMO to hate are the Roundup Ready™ soybean and corn and crops. Economics aside, adding pesticide resistance to the genome is a question of the unknown: there have never been any long-term very large scale, double-blind studies of any side effects. It looks good, but that’s as far as it goes.

The other kind of modified food is exemplified by adding not a gene to change the food’s taste or portability, but defenses. While organic crops are sprayed with microbial agents that produce the Bt insecticide, they can be washed off. The GMO versions cannot, as the active chemical in Bt is part and parcel of the plant.

 

The bottom line (and this is a post on writing, not organic farming), is that lumping a huge swath of anything under a single banner muddies the waters for all and creates a monolithic concept from which it’s harder, as a writer, to finesse nuances that give a scene, character, or even a more interesting reality.

Oh, and check out a mythbusting blog post on GMOs in Scientific American, as well as a whole raft of responses.

Stale Writing and Technology

shlomi on April 4, 2016

The novel I mostly wrote back in 1985 can’t be finished now. Technological advances and political events have overtaken major story points so unless I want it to be an alternate universe fiction, it’s dead.

And that’s a good thing, I think. Writing the ten-year novel should be about the things that are unchanging: the nature of people, of personal growth. Wanna write science fiction? Write it and get it out there: dawdle and the po’on (POH-ohn, a Hebrew word literally meaning “‘here’ device”) is leapfrogged by the smartphone. And the Israeli-Palestinian stupidity has surpassed even the blackest of my noir fantasies. At least I got Syria and Jordan right.

I’ve been re-reading a slew of science fiction novels (latest: the Barrayan Saga books), and, as Lois McMaster Bujold has stated that most of the novels were written to stand alone, it’s been eye-opening to see how she avoids infodump in pursuit of establishing character and milieu when readers attempt to peruse them in order. Learn from all that’s been written, not just the latest.

Yearly Writing Prompt

shlomi on March 31, 2016

CaptureSeeing Google congratulate me on my (purported) birthday gave me quite the startle. Not that I have a birthday: that I forgot that Google Knows All (even if the date it chose wasn’t quite right due to my obfuscation). However, it brings up a thought on writing: prompts. There are prompt generators [1][2][3] to help, but I’ve got two dates that I’ve used, more or less regularly, as starters for poems. Yom Kippur (the Jewish holiday commemorating the ‘sealing of the judgement’ of a person for the coming year), and my birthday.

The former invites reflective meditation. Frequently the subject is personal, based on my experiences that year. The latter is a poem, with the number of syllables equal to my age that year, and functions as a sort of momento mori for my life to that point. I’ve some really good ones and many that stretch and strain to syllable count instead of content.

But there they are: days for reflection based on a habit of {shudder} decades at this point.

Have you prompts? Please share!

See that Little Box on the Right?

shlomi on March 28, 2016

Small steps on the web site. QOTD has been a feature of Linux since the beginning, as it was for the Internet since… well, since a long while back. There are many “here’s a quote on topic “blah,” but I’ve found Quote of the Day — www.qotd.org — has a great selection. That’s great, but what about content from your own site? I’ll have a new plugin, ‘content-tapas’ available later this week, but it’s been crunching on my web site for a few months already. More on it when it goes live. I have several changes to my web site that I want to repackage as plugins. So stay tuned!

Trainventure: Yet More Character Sketches

shlomi on March 27, 2016

These were taken on the train ride from Chicago to Seattle.

Amish

Lots of Amish women and children wandering up and down the train on the way to Seattle. Didn’t see any going up to Chicago. Saw a few couples all sitting together in a coach car: stereotypical beards, shleykes (suspenders) on the men, white hats reminiscent of lampshades, crisp and pleated, on the older womens’ heads. Kids wearing what looks like it might be homemade clothing; if it is, there’s a business model somewhere that should be looked into.

Two men in their bowl haircuts and vests came in with a little boy in his little vest. He’s been coughing all over the place at his seat in the lounge. Hope it’s not the Black Plague.

Medieval Fatigues

Wild, wiry gray hair, a blouse-like shirt, slightly wild eyes. Wandered down the lounge car.

Nerds On A Train

Sat down with dinner with a 24-year old pre-med school, post-baccalaureate student, a nurse supervisor, and a retiree who ran a print shop. Within five minutes the former two and I were involved in a discussion about EMR software, which turned into a discussion about MUMPS and then IPT-10 code humor. W.TF.

The Stop Singer

John was the conductor working without a net – an assistant. Short, rotund, balding white hair with a short-trimmed beard. We started chatting in an open area in the crew/passenger sleeper downstairs, while I stretched in the open space. Like most Amtrak folk he was very passionate about what he did: a priest of the worship of the iron horse. He spoke with a moderate stutter. Nothing big, but certainly a sentence stopper when he got to certain words. Except when he got on the PA system to tell people about upcoming stops. Then his voice turned mellifluous and warm, smooth as cool honey pouring from ceramic ewer onto plush, steaming pancakes. No trace of a stutter in that well-modulated, cordial, ‘I own this train’ patter. Didn’t collect model trains. How odd…

Queen of the Lounge Car

Most of the Amtrak folks are, at least, perfunctorily polite. The woman running the bar downstairs in the lounge did her best to provide a comparative exception. Grimly professional, rising not to politeness nor small humor (okay, my humor can be very small, I agree). I asked about Advil™ and she looked at me as if I’d asked about buying meth: “Sir, we don’t sell any medications on this train.” Okay then.

Later… Was eating breakfast with two passengers: one a young man studying criminal justice, and another guy. The subject of the lounge car came up.

“What a bitch,” one said. The other nodded.

“I mean, I’ve been a waiter, and she’s just rude as hell.”

Quote from her on the PA system: “And please remember: shoes, shirt, and courtesy must be worn at all times in the lounge car.”

The Trump of the Train

The Seattle-bound train is built interestingly, to best suit the majority of passengers, and not the sleeper folks:

From my berth in the crew/sleeper car, the dining car is the closest car with tables on which I can spread out. I found an empty table and started spreading out. “What are you doing?” came the sharp question. The conductor.

“I can’t work here?”

“No,” she said, with a distinct Dakotan twang. “This is my office. I sit here.”

“Okay, I figured this was less of a deal than the tables in the sleeper car.”

“What tables?”

“The ones downstairs in my sleeper car. With the open space?”

“Well, that’s my office too. You can’t sit there.”

I forebore from asking if her last name was Trump. But only barely. I packed up as she primly spread a white towel on the seat I just vacated and carefully plonked herself down in front of the magazine or crossword puzzle – I didn’t stick around to see which was her next office chore.

Trainventure: More Character Sketches

shlomi on March 25, 2016

These sketches were from the Amtrak boarding lounge in Chicago.

Therapy Lady and… Dad?

Woman in her forties wearing a hijab sitting next to an older man in a vest and sports coat with a distinguished goatee. He’s operating a large apple mac and she keeps repeating “the orange leaves are moving in the direction of…” and “the points are pointing in the direction of…” again and again and again. Patiently. I’m guessing it’s either some kind of therapy the silliest game I’ve ever heard. I later realize she’s working on one of those “brain building” web sites to help older folks with cognitive skills. She changes the patter almost every time and is ever patient with him. He seems focused and concentrated, with nary a sign of frustration. On second look the jacket seems about four sizes too big on him. His voice, when he speaks, is furry and slow, but he’s clearly thinking.

Turns out she’s a physician “two of my daughters are,” says the proud papa, waking up from the snooze in his chair. I complement her on her patience. “You should ask my daughter how patient I am,” she says. But smiles. I bet she’s a great doc.

The Bike Master

72, looks like a rugged, pudgy white guy. Casually talked about biking. Was laid up for a bit “because I had a cancer thing up my nose.” I realized while talking with him that the ‘painter’s cap’ on his head was actually a mesh biker’s cap with a bill.

Regaled me with taking the train (another train buff who spends a lot of time riding the rails) to Alberta, then biking down through Montana, then down through Eastern Oregon to meet his daughter for his grandson’s birthday near San Francisco. “You’ve got to go get out of the train in Whitefish, Montana,” he says. “While everyone is out there smoking and filling, check out the scenery. Really beautiful.” ‘Filling,’ he explained, was filling up the engines with diesel. Asked if I smoked after he said that, looking a bit abashed. I feel his angst; nice to have someone who speaks more plainly than politely, sometimes.

“When I biked the train route from Chicago out to Seattle it was beautiful.” “Wasn’t it a bit bumpy,” I asked? Took a minute, but I got the eye roll. “We would get up every day, my grandson and I, and every day we’d time with the train would come the other way. It was fun how it came by earlier and earlier each day.”

I asked him about biking in Europe, specifically in the Netherlands. “Flat and small,” he said. “I paid five euros to take the train to the beach,” he said. “Three stops later bang, there we were: sand and water. Small place. Americans don’t understand how small the rest of the world can be.” I chuckled and told him the old piece about driving at highway speed for 17 hours and not leaving Texas.

“During the war my wife was heading out to see me at my base. When the conductor said they’d entered Texas she gathered up her things and got ready to get off. Took another day or so, but she got there.”

I told him all about Daughter the Elder and her intended journey. “She’s going self-contained?”

“Yes.”

“Well, remember it’s five dollars to camp and all the hot shower water you want in Oregon,” he said. “California it’s another two quarters to get the water running.”

“And packing food is tough,” I said.

He nodded, and patted his belly. “It never fails,” he said. “I eat whatever I can get my hands on, but I lose 35-40 pounds every time I do a long ride.”

I’m jealous in so many ways…

Trainventure: Some Character Sketches

shlomi on March 23, 2016

I recently took a vacation that was supposed to be a train writing adventure: Austin → Chicago → Seattle, get to Olympia, then again on a train to LA and from there back to Austin. My goals were:

  1. Finish a couple of stories
  2. Get some train experience for my writing
  3. Write a piece entirely on the train

12829496_10153794963230813_1653401339937989656_oThis… Did not go as planned. My PTSD precludes sleeping on moving vehicles unless I’m totally exhausted, and even then only for a couple or three hours max. I’ve known about cars and planes forever, but not trains. I figured they wouldn’t be an issue. I slept three hours en route to Chicago, then three 2-3 hour chunks as exhaustion allowed. The roomette (feels like closet) was just large enough for me — if I were 2″ shorter.

I was a zombie in Seattle, and in Olympia that night and the next day, although a good, hard sleep helped, but I was only operating at 80%.

774697_10153794963415813_744799248641000499_oThen I pulled a Shlomi, and realized Monday evening, after a day in Seattle and dinner with family back in Olympia, that I was supposed to be on a train Tuesday morning. I’d thought I had an additional day (me, not reading dates on ticket, oy!), and suddenly I realized that no, another four days of this and I’d be a zombie. So I canceled reservations and, in a fluster the next morning, just booked tickets for that day. Screwed up people’s plans to be with me, but, worst, left without having some more time with The Son. Stupid move on my part, driven, I see now, but exhaustion and wanting it all to stop (still felt like I was on a train even a day later). But I made the (bad decision). End of guilt trip. And by midnight Austin time I was back home, ready to enjoy several days of crazy jet lag, back pain, etc.

But.

I finished one short story, at least to the point where I could start on the rewrite. Got the train experience sticker, and several character sketches that I’ll publish. and made some great progress on Shabbat Queen, which I’m rewriting for the nth time.

I’ll post more character sketches in the coming days; here are the ones from my Austin to Chicago leg:

Preacher Man

Leather right eye patch, right leather and metal leg brace, long brown hair past his shoulders and a full white beard almost as long. Felt Stetson (dimple on the top, flattish brim). Tightly crocheted yamulka covering 1/3 of his head. With all the other damage, I first thought maybe it was an artificial skull covering.

First I see of him is drinking a cup of coffee a little noon as we chug through the rain. He raises his covered cup. “It’s better with Bailey’s though.”

“So,” I say, after chatting about the semi vs. pickup accident three years back that brought his trucker career to an end (“I’m retired now. Time to drive around, and healthy enough to do it now that I got my truck set up so I can drive it with one leg. Just not the money to enjoy it.”): “Is that a yamulka?”

“Yep.”

“You’re Jewish?”

“I’m a rabbi,” he declares. I hope I haven’t just given him a gimlet eye.

“Really? Where did you study? In a yeshiva?”

“Yep.”

“Which one?”

“I studied scripture in Seguin.”

I bit off the next five things I want to say. This is going to be a long train trip, and he and I are forced company all the way up to St. Louis.

 

Later that evening I’m talking with Cal. “Wow,” she says excitedly, “I want to be Jewish.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because all I gots do is be good to others and be nice!”

The next twenty minutes are my attempts to put Judaism in a scope unrelated to Preacher Man’s Messianic delusions of Judaism. And it bugs me, even as I write this, that I’m having to defend a religion I don’t believe in from the god perspective from an evil parasite that would weaken it further. And embarrassed that I’m not confronting this shill on his lies. “Lies.” Feel the cognitive dissonance.

8:30 in the morning: after an hour-long breakfast “dining, we’re dining,” Cal says when I say hi, he’s sitting with them an hour later, tippling at a bottle of Bailey’s, sans coffee.

Sunny

“Rain is for springtime,” she said. “It’s when everything comes back to life. But we can stop it if we do a sundance.”

“But it’s raining,” I said.

She takes a section of an orange and holds it up near the window. “See now it’s sunny out, we can do it!”

She’d appeared in the dining car the previous evening in full flapper mode, complete with hat, narrow, matching, eggplant-colored jacket over a dark purple top and a short pencil, but not fringed, skirt. Bright red hair, wide cheekbones and eyes a bit too wild to match the eyes. She works in a used book store, which, she says, gives her time to travel. Austin to Kansas City. But the Missouri side, not the Kansas side, she assures me. “It might be great for sunsets, but otherwise the Missouri side is better.”

Cal and Erin

Lesbian couple living in Michigan. They call each other their fiancée and plan on getting married “soon.”

Cal’s a black, 31-year-old woman with sport-style prescription glasses who lost 200 pounds after meeting Erin. She dresses in layers of clothing from neck down, still coyly disguising her (self-described) deflated figure.

Erin’s a curvy, outgoing woman (26) who confides that she’s got a bad case of shyness: she just can’t speak up in public. In one sentence she says she wants to work in particle physics and that she’ll never do it because she doesn’t have a degree. I try chivying around some assumptions. Afterwards Cal says “thanks for saying that: she doesn’t listen to me.” Then: “I’ve been working on her and you should have known her back then. Takes a village to build someone up, it does.”

Cal said “it’s great we’re both into boobs: it’s like we’re 13 year old boys!”

Meth Man

Taller than me, baggy jeans and maybe a pair or two more. Corduroy coat, a couple of t-shirts under a denim shirt. No teeth, flapping cheeks and wild eyes.

I walked past Cal and Erin later in the evening. “Oh thank you thank you thank you,” Erin says. “We thought he’d never leave.”

By morning he’d disappeared.

Mom & Daughter

25ish yo black woman in stretch pants with similarly attired 2yo daughter, who is smart, vivacious and outgoing if not very verbal. Mom is a chef, who started our conversation by talking about how much she needed to smoke, and how she would use the stroller hood so she could puff and how hard it was to smoke when it was raining out. When I said I was allergeric she said “what? Which are you allergic to?” “Both.” “Oh, wow,” she said, shaking her head. “Tough.”

When she was drunk later that evening she went circular on me for getting the best deals on travel by rail and chided me for paying too much, saying she was getting all the way up to Chicago for under $200 for them both, then the same to go from Canada down to Florida the next week and I needed to figure out to push them on prices and get discounts booking ahead or being part of the club. Much later that evening she and Cal and Erin were all talking at max volume with the daughter’s far overwrought tired whines as a counterpoint.

Pre-Navy Writer

First three time he walked past me I thought he was on the Autism spectrum. “Looks good,” he said, looking at my writing. 5’6”, intense, glasses. “Like the font,” the next time. When he settled down near me he showed me the laptop rest he fashioned from the back of a metal chair. Writes fan fiction, “but that’s not real writing. It’s all erotica,” he says. “Ever hear of Fallout 3? That’s where it’s at.” Lists several games. Seems nervous, discounts his writing. Talked to him about nanowrimo. Going into the Navy in May.

Retired Gummer

Retired 21 years ago, train lover. Took the train from Cairo to Alexandria with his son who’s a train buff because he is. Asked “so, you look like you know how to order meat. I don’t have any teeth – I mean, I’ve got dentures, but I don’t wear them. What’s the best way to order my meat so it’s easy to chew? I explained about aging and protein breakdown, but that medium would be the best for low quality meat. And wondered why I was the elected poobah for that. Also a self-taught computer guy, doing the apocryphal DOS->building computers to building them for family to linux guy. Self-effacing, polite, nice. Neatly trimmed beard/mustache, 5’4” hobbit-ish but balding, white hair.

Evie of the Trains

Black rubber boots, eminently practical, with a pink ribbon in pigtails in her dishwater blonde hair. A nose ring, pink cell phone charger cord. Piano pen case, a journal, three books, plastic bags. A rosy flush, possibly rosea, puts her age from anywhere from 17 to 25. Gray sweater tunic and stripy pink pants.

Tweed Couple

In their 70s, chatting while looking out the window. Woman mentions geospatial intelligence agency as they chat while downtown Springfield, IL passes by. Satisfied silences as they look at the window and occasionally continue the patter of a couple long familiar with one another and eminently comfortable with their silences.

Reboot

shlomi on March 21, 2016

A short post. I’m rebooting (yet again) my web site. The gaps in posting relate to my focus on work, other projects, and a personal life.I’ve used a well-guarded Facebook account for most of my small posting, but I’ve found it limiting when I want to publish a longer (200+ word) piece to the general public, and not just to family and friends.

So it’s a return to the blog venue. I look forward to sharing my writing struggles, writing in progress, and wins (not to mention an excellent use of the Oxford Comma).

So, real commentary:

Instagram’s changing its algorithm to reflect displaying what it thinks is important instead of straight chronological order would violate the First Amendment if Facebook were a government entity. Facebook already did this to its news feed.

CNN looks to be doing this, and the effects are good for them and irritating for news junkies. A news story that trends upwards rolls through a series of clickbait headlines, and moves around the front page. Stale video pieces are promoted on the video section, and appear in feeds when reading a related article, even if they’re three years old.

By sorting post into an order advertisers want instead of a straight chronological one, it, perforce buries information that a poster might want others to urgently see, but not deemed relevant by The Machine. What folks I follow say may not conform to the monetization algorithms Instagram (Facebook, really) uses to entice advertisers to pay a higher rate for their ad placements.

When I follow someone on Facebook it’s because I want to know what they’re up to. With multiple people I have the expectation that when they take the time to say something, I should take the time to see it. What I see shouldn’t be ‘promoted’ or hidden under a pile of posts I’ve already seen based on their wishes to sell me stuff.

I appreciate that I am getting all this service for free, and that advertising is what pays the bills. But the value of this service is eroded when I need to decide whether the Instagram entry for the smiling couple is before or after the one for their house burning down.