These days I run whenever I can grab an hour of time from something. Now that it is getting light early, that hour most often comes in the morning, before the kids, and all their attendant requirements, are awake. The joy and satisfaction I get out of the run is worth dragging myself out of bed for on most mornings.
Our dog, Panther, recognizes my running clothes, and is always waiting eagerly to be let out and explore while I plod along. The first thing I noticed as we headed out the door this morning was the CROK of a raven. The ravens have control of this valley (and our compost pile) and it
is only by dint of their constant attention and diligence that they keep it clear of invading crows, hawks, osprey, and eagles. We are often treated to mid-air battles out over the pasture. So it is no surprise that they were broadcasting our presence almost before we are out the door.
I blearily began running down the driveway and the loud CROK of one raven sounded out of the mist right above me. I wondered at why it was keeping such close tabs on us this morning, but then moved on to comparing the cold mist I was inhaling with each breath to the hot steam I had been breathing in a sauna a few days earlier. Though probably equally wet, the weight of the humidity in the sauna slowed my day almost to a stop while I was enlivened by this morning's mist.
Contemplating this and other equally inane things I ran the first half mile. Again I heard the CROK loud and low above my head, and this time another answered from across the valley. The raven flew ahead of me, perched in a tree and waited until I had run past. Then it swooped over me again, so low I could hear the rustle of air in its wings. We live pretty closely with these ravens, so this wasn't all that unusual. This morning, though, instead of turning back as it usually does, it continued this behavior for all of the almost five miles of my run. It must have passed over me about 20 times, CROKing every time.
Despite spending most of my run-time thinking of lots of mundane and outlandish reasons for this behavior, I am at a loss as to why the raven kept our company this morning. Panther and I, with our decidedly pedestrian and terrestrial habits, certainly don't seem of much consequence to the ravens. I enjoyed the company, though, whatever the motivation.

After Dinner

Summer is here and I am going to try to post once a week. Yesterday eve was lovely and so rather than back shortbread for the strawberries, we rallied outside for a walk.

We headed down to the summer bridge site (not in yet; still waiting on the water drop) and decided to go canoeing. The canoes were still there from the teammates visit last weekend, so we flipped one over headed upstream toward the ford. Just past the willows and under a medium-sized ash, there is a deep excavation were the beavers have dug a den. It is hard to see up inside with the brightness out and the darkness in, but the claw marks of the beavers are scoured all across the margin with the water. Interestingly, there weren't any beaver sticks lying around. Maybe its otters instead. I'm still trying to sort out raccoon, otter and beaver tracks and these weren't full prints, so there was no way to tell.

Done with canoes, we headed over to Evening Sun Beach. Evening Sun just formed this past winter. The creek is always shifting and moving like a hose writhing across a lawn. This year it threw up a big, west-facing sand bar just above the giant logs the Forest Service put in to provide structure and salmon habitat. I hacked through the blackberries and we traipsed across the big logs to the beach. Lucie immediately undressed and started playing in the water. Helen and Opal began to explore underneath the logs. Mizu and I weeded canary grass. Opal got brave enough clamber on the logs by herself and realized she could jump the six feet down onto the sand without getting hurt. Helen sloughed off a chunk of bark to reveal a swarming ant colony. After they'd run off, she found a crawdad carcass/slough to poke with a stick. The stink determined it was a carcass.

Time for bed. On the way back across the pasture we stopped to swing on the rope swings hanging from the wedding tree. It was my turn to exercise, so Mizu put the girls to bed and I went for a bike ride. It was still a lovely evening, but the high point was watching a family of beavers for about ten minutes. There is a flat stretch in the road above our house where the creek and the road run parallel for a couple hundred yards. I love looking in the water at that stretch, particularly during salmon season because it is so easy to see into. Last night I was rewarded by three beavers just chilling. They spent about 80% of their time grooming, scratching, licking, rubbing. They had an incredibly human way of sitting on their haunches and scratching their chest with both front paws and an incredibly doggy way of scratching the side of their belly with their hind feet. (A fat, fat, fat dog.) They did a little snuggling and grooming of each other. They'd kind of circle hug in the water and gnaw gently on each other. They ate a little, mostly gnawing on sticks that I assumed were willow, but that Mizu who has also watched these beaver, thought were blackberries. I also saw them eating canary grass!

Then home. I made a Manhattan and read while Mizu worked.

Pure gold on a cloudy day

All morning the kids had been playing pretty much on their own. I knew that it couldn't last forever, so the first time they came to me to play referee I fed them. The second time I sent them to get warm clothes on and hustled us outside.

I had a mission in mind. Having a mission in mind is a dangerous thing around here. Usually all my well-laid plans are twisted beyond recognition by the ruthless needs of the kids. I find I am better able to roll with the punches if I avoid all but the most amorphous plans. On this particular day, I am working hard to let go of my agenda when all of a sudden the kids begin running up the hill, yelling to me that they want to beat me to the skunk cabbage. I can't believe it! They have co-opted my plan and are running away with it. From that point on I am just along for the ride as they propel us from one spring wonder to the next. We hit all the special places I wanted to go to and it took no cajoling or bribery from me.

Here's a themed sampling of what we saw:





Skunk cabbage on the left

Johnny jump-up on the right









Daffodils at an old house site Crocuses on Japhy's memorial






Forsythia in the garden





I got my dose of golden color today, even without a glimpse of the sun. I was cheered by it and so were the kids. Here they are about halfway through our walk:






What I wasn't able to capture with a camera was just as cheery. Like the the way that Opal and Helen independently decided who got to carry the bouquet of grass that they were picking: They turned to each other with their hand behind their back, counted one-two-three and both brought out scissors. Again, paper this time. Finally, Opal threw paper and Helen scissors. Opal handed Helen the grass and they ran to catch up to Lucie and me.
Or Lucie sticking her head into a tiny culvert because Opal and Helen tell her she can crawl through because she is the littlest.
Or Opal and Helen carefully settling the snail that they unearthed into Opal's grass-lined pocket so that "no bird can see it to eat it". (I doubt the snail was very concerned with the dangers a hypothetical bird may pose as it was tossed about in a five-year-old's pocket.)

I'd like to remember this day.

Mizu's standard disclaimer, or "The pasta is probably a bit overdone and I think I undersalted the soup."

I've been recurrently thinking I'd like to post more often, but up to this point a mild frown and an "I'll work on that tomorrow evening" are as far as I've gotten. This kind of writing is always difficult for me--I get paralyzed by who may read it and will I offend anyone and should I say this or that....you get the picture.

At the same time, there are many things each day that I would like to record and my shoddy memory does not seem to be up to the task. Somehow this format, with the ability to include picture, videos, and links, is more appealing than the rarely opened diary sitting beside my bed. Now I plan to throw caution to the winds (and if you believe that...) and will focus on writing about everyday things I want to remember--even if they will be yawn-inducing and even though I may cringe a bit as I hit the "Publish Post" button. Nobody has to read them, right?

If you do read them, I'm sorry for my lack of expertise with the formatting.....

Monday Night Pizza

Yesterday we had a final, bonus edition of Monday Night Pizza. This would have been especially sweet if we had done it for this game, but instead it was this game and sour. Since our Dink Days back in Seattle, Mizu and I have made pizza Monday nights during football season. We started small making a mere two pizzas a night. We've gradually worked up to the point where a low-key, nuclear-family-only night is four pizzas and a big night might be eight. We've never gone as high as ten, but I imagine we'll get there some day.

Mizu makes the dough and I make the sauce. My years at Zeek's endowed me with a vision of how it should be done, so I usually do all the rolling, throwing, saucing, cheesing, topping and baking. This year, Opal and Helen have really taken an interest in it, so they usually make their own pizzas as well.

Traditionally, we start off with a plain cheese. It's the classic and it's the classic way to show off your sauce and dough. Also, it's the one pizza all three girls will eat and by the time it comes out they're usually grumpily hungry.

Then we get creative. Mizu and I love pepperoni and pineapple, but Pop and Kaki don't eat the pig and the girls think it's spicy, so we make that one only occasionally. Goat cheese, caramelized onions and roasted peppers is another favorite (made it last night) but most nights we just throw together whatever. The two best pizzas we made this season were Margie's Birthday Leftovers and German Christmas Leftovers from the last two weeks. Here are the recipes.

In General
Use Mizu's Dough. Roll and throw a pizza's worth. Put it on parchment paper and that on the paddle. That'll get it in and out of the oven easily. Use a pastry brush to spread a glistening of olive oil around the edge.

Margie's Leftovers
Take the leftover enchiladas out of the fridge. Eviscerate them and discard the tortillas and cheese. Spread the enchilada filling on the pizza like it was sauce. It'll be quite thick. Sprinkle on a thin layer of grated mozzarella. (Following the Zeek's mantra, I don't use very much cheese. It's just preference, though.) Top with red peppers and jalapenos. Bake. (See below.) Top with fresh chopped cilantro when done.

German Christmas Leftovers
Cook bacon. Drain, dice and set aside. Take leftover Swedish Meatball Gravy from the fridge. Spread on the pizza like sauce. Sprinkle on the mozzarella. Take the German Potato Salad from the fridge. Glop on pizza. Sprinkle bacon on pizza. Bake. (See below.) Top with fresh chopped parsley when done.

Baking
Bake the pizza on a pizza stone in an oven set as hot as possible. At 550, which is the max temp for most ovens, the entire cooking time will be 7-10 minutes depending on how many pizzas you've made, rest time between pizzas and how crispy you like the crust. At 3 or 4 minutes, when the crust has set up a bit, pull out the parch paper so the bottom will brown up. (Don't throw away the paper, you can reuse it 2-3 times.)

Big Deadwood Ditto News!

A front page story in and about the Deadwood Ditto is one of the coolest things I've heard in a while. Our neighbor, Bill, donated his complete collection of Deadwood Dittos dating all the way back to 1976 to the Knight Library's Special Collection at the U of O.

It's amazing that Bill had the foresight and capacity to save thirty-five years of Dittos. I can't believe he willingly gave them up. People in the valley have been lusting after that collection for years and at least one person has offered to watch them "to keep them safe." It's really generous of Bill to give them up. Thanks, Bill! And the Knight Library wanted them. That's might be the coolest part of all.

Below is the first ever electronic edition of the Deadwood Ditto. Enjoy.

11:51

…and two minutes later we were asleep.

It’s a Deadwood New Year’s tradition for the Kinney house (and now the Kinney-Burruss house) to host the Donut Party. There’ve been about 25 of them; the first one was sometime around 1984, but there hasn’t been a donut party every year. We make up some sweet dough, fire up the grease and make a huge cloud of black smoke accompanied by huge platters of donuts. In the past, the donuts have been mainly confined to powered sugar and cinnamon-sugar, but I really love a good glazed donut and there isn’t an American alive who doesn’t have a weakness for some kind of filling, whether it’s lemon curd, custard, chocolate or jam. We did all those this year.

Our process for making donuts is strange combination of baking bread, working at McDonald’s and tending bar. Mizu made the dough in the afternoon and set it in covered bowls by the stove to rise. At 630, she started cutting them out and laying them on boards for a second rising. Each batch (and we made eight) turns out about twenty donuts. There is a slight difference depending on the ratio of holes, rings and filled you make. While the first donuts were rising, I put four gallons of oil on the stove and sent it off toward 375 degrees. Once the oil was hot, we started dropping the plumped donuts in. They sank for the barest second and then rose again quickly to the surface where they floated palely, surrounded by a corona of bubbles and waited to be flipped. Flipped and then quickly out onto towels to dry. Once they’d cooled enough to handle, it was time to get them dressed up to serve. Easiest and fastest was to drop them into sacks of sugar (powered or cinnamon) and shake them up. Filling was easy, but slower and messier. I started by filling a cake-decorator-icing-piper-bag-thing with the lemon curd (or vanilla custard or raspberry jam or chocolate sauce) and then Van Helsing it into the donut. A quick squeeze on the bag and the donuts was ready to eat. Messiest and funnest are glazed donuts. To make those, I dumped the donuts into a tub of glaze and then set them aside to drip for a bare minute. Then I shook rainbow nibs or coconut or sesame seeds over the whole run of donuts. Last step for all of these was to dump them all onto a tray and send Opal trundling around giving them away.

At 1030, the donuts and most of the guests were gone. Helen, thenLucie and finally Opal had collapsed into bed leaving Mizu and myself with one small thing left to do…wash the dog.

One of the coolest things about living out here is seeing the salmon in the creek each fall. They’re huge and powerful and fill up our tiny creek with their thrashing and fighting and spawning. If you know anything about the salmon life cycle, you know that after they spawn, they die. After they die, they rot. Yesterday morning Panther’s friend Shadow appeared from way up creek. Like usual, they ran around, fought, played and explored. There was a special treat today, though. The creeks have been running crazy high for two weeks and a couple cold rainless days shrank them a good two feet. When the creek falls, it leaves things behind…things like dead salmon. Maybe someone, somewhere knows why dogs like to roll in dead things, but I don’t.

So Mizu and I took turns holding Panther down and pouring stuff on her while she writhed and fought. First water, then V8, then some scrubbing, then more water, then dish soap, then scrubbing, then more water, then more water. Did I mention it was raining and 34 degrees? Good times.

Finally showered and in bed, I looked at the clock. 11:51. “Mizu. Look at the clock.” “Yeah.” Pause. “I love ya, good night.” “Love you, too. Good night.”

Here’s the recipe:
2 packages yeast (2 Tsp)
¾ C milk
⅓ C sugar
¼ C shortening - room temp (Mizu used butter)
1 tsp salt
2 eggs – room temp
3 to 3½ C flour

Dissolve the yeast in warm milk and a bit of the sugar. After the blossoming, add the remaining sugar, the eggs and the butter. Mix mostly and then add 2 cups of the flour and the salt. As you beat, gradually add flour until you get to moderately soft dough. Turn out and knead until smooth. Shape the dough into a ball, grease and return to bowl for rising. After it has risen, punch it down and roll it out to ½ inch thickness. Cut with donut cutter and set on a floured board to rise again. (A real donut cutter is really nice. You can fake it, but it’s a pain in the ass.) Heat oil (the more the better so it doesn’t lose heat as you drop in the much colder dough) to 375 degrees. Drop the donuts in a few at a time and fry on each side until golden brown. Drain on paper and dress them up.