Email from my daughter

I got this the other day and thought I'd pass it along. I'm so proud of  all my kids, but this is pretty special. When one of your children do this, you know you've done something right.

Sounds delicious! If the pie turned out well, perhaps I can convince you to make it for Christmas? This year, I'm grateful for Whole Foods. We've all been sick so much, and with the exception of Fiona, we're all still a little sick, so it's quite a load off not to be cooking this year. And we ordered both pumpkin and pecan pies. A pecan pie with NO CORN!!! One thing I'm doing new this year is submitting a letter to Your Holiday Mom. http://www.yourholidaymom.com/ They publish one letter, with audio and picture, every day from Thanksgiving through New Years. They're for the LGBTQ kids who are rejected by their families during the holiday season. Did you know that the AVERAGE age of homeless LGBTQ youth is 14??? That means there are 12 year olds who are living on the street because their parents couldn't accept who they are. Heartbreaking. I hope you guys have a delicious meal and a great day. Give David and Helen my love. Love, Kate Oh, and here's the letter I wrote for Your Holiday Mom: My dear one, My name is Kate, and I'm a mom of 3. I knit, snark on the internet, read and watch sci-fi, cook, and fail to clean my house like a Proper Mother(tm) should. My husband and I and our middle child, who is genderqueer, are active in sci-fi fandom in our area. My youngest, who is only 3, reflects our family culture pretty well. She loves Doctor Who, knows all the permutations of gender-neutral personal pronouns, and has expensive taste in cheese. I'm writing to tell you I love you. (Yeah, I love YOU. You, specifically.) And to tell you that the spirit of warmth, light, rebirth, and celebration, all belong to you. I hope this letter finds you well, but if it doesn't, please know I'm holding you in the light all through these dark nights of the season. This season can be a hard one to feel different, when we see families around us all drawing close, and honoring their oneness and their traditions that bind them. I do know some LGBTQ adults who still feel apart from their families, and they've made their own traditions, with friends-who-are-family. We usually have a number of them at our house for Thanksgiving, for what is usually called an Orphan's Thanksgiving, meaning, a bunch of people who don't have their own big family gathering. But we do consider each other a big family, and one of my foster kids is an actual orphan, so we prefer to call it Geeksgiving. Everyone brings something, I cook for days, and we have a houseful of warmth, among people we love, and are so grateful for all the love that we've welcomed into our lives with our created family. I'm going to set a place for you, because we love you, and we welcome you. I'll be holding you in my heart on December 2, when the Christmas Season begins in our home. See, December 1 is the birthday of one of our family, and one holiday at a time, thankyouverymuch! So on Dec. 2, when we crank up the carols, and if the cleaning got done after Thanksgiving, we start decorating. When I put up lights, I'll be thinking of you, and holding your unique and wonderful soul in the light. When we assemble the plastic tree, I'll be grateful that you're the real you, not a pretense of you. When I sing Joy To The World, horribly off-key, I'll be wishing Joy straight to your heart. When you hear your favorite carol, imagine it off-key, in a loud alto. That's me, singing to you about the joy and love and hope of the holidays. When you need a hug, close your eyes. I'm probably thinking of you right then, and sending you a hug from my soul to yours. I want you to do something for you - for me - this season. Do one thing you love. Give yourself an afternoon to just appreciate who you are, who you have been, and who you will be. Or go get a manicure. Or that hat you've been wanting. Ride a carousel. Sing at the top of your lungs, do a cartwheel, or immerse yourself in music that makes you feel good about yourself. I love you, Mama Kate

A Modest Dinner

With the likelihood of not being here in 70,000 years when the next confluence of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving occurs, my buddy and I had a suitable dinner. We both agreed that turkey was not inspiring either of us, and we both like duck, so with that in mind we prepared. Last week I got two ducks, frozen. After thawing for 4 days in the fridge I put them in a brine on Tuesday. Wednesday I delivered them to David for smoking, then yesterday they were baked and served.

They turned out so good I thought I'd share the recipe. 

First, the brine:

I used a 5 gallon stainless steel pot, probably 4 gallons of water, to which I added:

1.5 cups kosher salt

several cloves of mashed garlic

soy sauce, maybe .5 cup

fresh sage, oregano, rosemary and thyme, chopped 

.5 cup red wine vinegar

about 2 tablespoons of Tom Ka Gai soup paste my daughter gave me (adds a Thai spin)

The ducks sat in it for 24 hours, sitting on my cold back porch. (note: a buddy of mine did a similar thing last year near here, he put the container in his back yard overnight and made a black bear very happy)

I cut some alder branches for the smoking wood, David smoked them for 16 hours at around 120f. 

When finished smoking, they went into a 475f oven for 20 minutes, then sat out to rest. 

Accompanying the ducks at dinner were latkes, local potatoes shredded with the usual egg and flour, also as a nod to the Southwest, some of the hatch chilis I had a run in with earlier in the year, fried in a cast iron skillet. Green beans, steamed then sauteed with various herbs and duck fat, a sourdough Challah with poppy seed crust, cranberry with port wine, and it was washed down with a nice Malbec. 

Full though we were, we were obligated to have a piece of my squash and ginger pie:

We talked about our kids and times past, the time we made them go camping on thanksgiving and cooked a turkey in a dutch oven, and the 40 years we've known each other. We missed the kids, but, as David reflected, "at least we didn't have to make them a separate pie". 

 

Sunday trip to the river

I drove a half hour to the Big Hole river yesterday, hadn't been in a couple weeks. No thoughts of fishing, breaking ice out of my fly rod guides was unappealing. I just wanted to see if winter had started to settle in to the river.

Ice is forming along the shore, in a couple weeks it probably will be across the river. The picture does not show it well, but there is drift ice floating in the open water. 

On the way back along a frontage road a small herd of antelope were grazing the brown range grass.

Not much snow yet, but it'll come, rest assured. 

Tomorrow I start preparations for the combination Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, after all the next time the two coincide will be in 80,000 years, and I might not be around. My buddy the cook down the street and I are having it together, first time in a couple years, it used to be an annual event. This year we're doing duck, I'm going to start brining two of them tomorrow, on Wednesday I'll deliver them to him for smoking, then Thursday we'll probably try pressing one of them for a Chinese style, the other will be slow baked.

Enjoy your holiday. 

Veteran's Day 2013

This particular veteran is in Iraq in the first photo, Afghanistan in the other two on another deployment. Between deployments he was stationed for awhile in Alaska. He sent me an email telling about a training mission where they loaded his company on a jet in full gear, flew for 12 hours, then jumped at 1,000 ft AGL. As  he was floating down under his parachute he saw jungle, rice paddies and farmers in black pajama's. He said his first thought was "Am I having one of dad's flashbacks??". They hadn't told them their destination, he jumped into Thailand on a training mission. 

He's now at university, and his family love and appreciate him very much. 

I've had the opportunity to travel a fair amount in my life. A lot of domestic travel and abroad. I've thought about the idea of living somewhere versus visiting, beyond our shores and within. Also is it possible to actually be 'home' somewhere else, other than the place you think of as home.

With the exception of North and South Dakota, I've been there in the US. There are differences between say Los Angeles and Wichita, or New York and Milton Fl, but beyond the obvious palm trees or snow on the ground, one can function in one as well as another. The plains of Eastern Montana look different than the suburbs of Detroit, but the inside of Safeway looks the same. The people of Texas and New Hampshire may vote differently, but they communicate quite well about maple syrup and bbq. When you cross the state line from Washington to Oregon you don't think "Whoa!".

2,000 miles apart:

I've lived from Alaska to the Bay Area to Toledo to Annapolis. It was different, sure, sorta. But it was really the same, outside the presence or absence of mountains and oceans. Daily life was pretty much the same, stores had different names but the same stuff. I wasn't a 'stranger in a strange land'. I've been disgusted by pictures of KKK rallies in a South Carolina cafe, but not surprised. 

Abroad, it was different. I've had the chance to live in a different country twice. I've traveled in Central and South America, Europe, and Asia. In the late 60's I lived in Japan for almost two years, working at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission hospital in Hiroshima. I lived in a small town, almost a village, about 10 kilometers north of the city and commuted on a train. Everything was different, from the house to the shopping to the language. A block away from my house there was a tea house that delivered beer twice a week in wood boxes to my door.

Long story on how I came to be there, but at the time I thought I'd never leave; I was going to become Japanese, this would be my home. I learned the language passably well, I immersed myself in 'Nihongo', and would go months without speaking English. Everything about the culture was different from what I'd grown up with. Idea's of privacy (you never ever just 'drop in' on someone at their home), expectations of life, and one's place in the world were different. 

It took me over a year to figure out that I could live there for the rest of my life and never be 'Japanese'. I'd always be an outsider, looking in. All the wishing in the world would not make it so. 

The next time I lived outside the country was decades later in a different hemisphere. Germany, again working, but with no plans or even wishes to stay permanently. 

This time, with no illusions of 'becoming', I was able to notice and process the difference between 'visiting' or vacationing, and 'living'. I was able to experience day-to-day life, working, shopping, living. The rhythms of life when the size of your kitchen and fridge require daily shopping, the attitudes of coworkers, the interactions with neighbors. And to compare and contrast this with what it was like at 'home'. I had been to Europe enough before for it not to seem 'foreign', and move beyond staring at  old buildings. I had time to take a Saturday and sit in a market plaza and let coffee cups pile up, not worry about wasting time. 

I was also able to see the difference between travel in Europe and at home. The scale is so much smaller there; often a few kilometers, between one country to another or even from a city to it's outlying towns can bring real difference. A days drive can easily take you from Germany to Italy, and the two are very, very different in most respects. 

Where was I going with all this? Good question, maybe it's just time on a Saturday morning with nothing else to do. Or maybe it's that we have this illusion, reinforced by the fact we can get in our cars and drive three days and still be in the same place, that the whole world is like this, and like us. Or maybe it's the illusion that we can truly change into something else, we can change from what we are to something very different than our upbringing and genes have made. 

Or maybe it's this new coffee I'm trying. 

Scientific Imagination

Most of you have read about the Higgs boson, or Higgs particle. A elemental particle thought to be pivotal to the standard model of particle physics. How the physical world is put together and works. It was theorized in 1964, but only as a possibility, and not confirmed for nearly 50 years. The theory was based on circumstantial evidence, and were it a criminal trial the defendant would be said to be not guilty. It was also based on scientific imagination......the cumulative result of knowledge from the past and present, then the undefinable "Eureka!".......the "I can't prove it, but it's gotta be...."

There are many other examples of this, but the one that occurred to me was that of Marie Krogh.

Marie Krogh (1874-1943) was a scientist and physiologist living in Europe. Around the turn of the century the theory of how oxygen got to the cellular level to be used in metabolic process was active secretion of oxygen by the lungs, it's adherents were the chief scientists of the day: Bohr and Haldane. To disagree with them about their theory was tantamount to professional suicide, similar to a first year undergraduate telling his Nobel Laureate department chair he was wrong in his work.

Marie Krogh, working with her husband August, published a paper in 1909 in the scientific journal Skand Arch Phiol refuting Bohr's active secretion theory, claiming oxygen actually passed across the alveolar-capillary membrane by passive diffusion; that the partial pressure of oxygen, higher in the alveolus, passed to the lower partial pressure present in the capillary. 

Then she did something that to me was remarkable: she described a test that could test the theory by delivering a small concentration of carbon monoxide to the lung, measuring the percentage inhaled and exhaled, and calculating the amount passed into the blood stream. She also calculated a 'constant', a mathematical factor that would be needed for the calculation of the transfer factor of oxygen. 

The rub was that there was no way at the time to determine if she was correct. There were no mechanical devices or sensors that could perform the test. 

In 1957, a noted pulmonologist, C.M. Ogilvie, read her paper published nearly 50 years earlier, and decided it could be done. Her theory and even the mathematical calculation of the constant turned out to be correct. 

She didn't live long enough to see her theory proven, but I'm sure she had no doubts.   

Hometown

While I consider this my hometown now, it's an odd place in some ways. Identity is very important here; you were either born here, and therefore 'from' here, or not. Local politics are almost exclusively based on that identity, few officials are not 'from' here. Here are some of the things I see every day as I drive around my hometown.

A little music to listen to while you look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6LABdHtkUA

(open in 'new tab', otherwise it screws up the pictures)

Maybe the reason I like it here is it's like me.......seen better days, a little shabby, but still here. And, like me, it's hoping for better days.