Author: Laura Conrad

Aged Mead

[Thyme Mead]
Thyme Mead bottled on February 14, 1993.

What I was doing earlier today instead of posting was
celebrating the apple harvest at the annual Wort Processors cider party.

There was a lot of good cider, and because of having cleared
out a little storage room to make a guest room, I had come across
some of the stuff I brewed back in the early 90’s. The beer went
down the drain, but I had hopes for some of the meads, so I
brought a few bottles. There was the 1993 Cyser, which won
several awards at club competitions when it was about 10 years
old. There was also the 1991 cyser, which may have been the first
one I made. And there turned out to be a case of 12 ounce bottles
of the thyme mead.

20 years aging does seem to do a lot for a mead — all of them
had developed sherry-like flavor, but still tasted of honey and
the cysers had remnants of apple flavor, although not as much as
they probably did ten years ago.

Electric Pressure Cooker

I mentioned yesterday how convenient my
pressure cooker was for bringing food
somewhere. I realized I haven’t blogged this gadget that I
acquired over a year ago.

It’s one of the really successful cooking gadget purchases I’ve
made recently. It’s called a multi-cooker, which means that in
addition to pressure cooking, it will also slow-cook at low or
high temperature. There’s a button for rice, which runs the
pressure cooker for 6 minutes, which is the right time for most
white rice. I’ve been cooking Basmati white rice on that setting
and it comes out well, although a little stickier than when I use
the same ratio of water to rice on the stove. These days I use
the stove when I’m using the cooker for something else, but
otherwise the cooker is a bit easier, and I like the result just
as well.

This article,
which is otherwise very good advice about pressure cookers,
advises against buying the electric version, on the grounds that
the pressure isn’t as high as the stove-top ones the recipes are
written for, but I haven’t had trouble converting. I think for
someone who’s sometimes doing something else while cooking
(e.g. walking the dog while the breakfast oatmeal cooks), having a
digital timer that will turn the pot to warm when the time is done
is a real convenience.

The controls are a bit confusing at first, but when you get
used to always pushing start after setting a time, it’s pretty
good. You have to check every time whether the “pressure” valve
on the lid is in the position you want, and if you’re pressure
cooking you have to be careful to seat the gasket in the lid
correctly or it won’t reach pressure and all the water will boil
away.

I bought it because my slow cooker had died and I found I
missed it. I ended up getting the one combined with a pressure
cooker because I figured it would make slow-cooked dishes with
beans faster. It does — now when I want to do that I just
pressure cook the beans for 15 minutes first, and then add the
other stuff and slow cook it all. But I’m using this gadget
several times a week, not the once a month or less that I cook
beans.


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Sorrel Soup

Most people think of Sorrel as a Spring crop, but this year my CSA decided to try
growing it in the Fall as well. I think most of the greens these
days are from the greenhouses, so the exact climate outside
doesn’t matter so much.

I had cream left over from the gettogether,
so I decided to make sorrel soup, although I’m sure it would have
been good in my greens for
breakfast, too.

So I tore up the sorrel and sliced some potatoes and leeks
thin, and put them in the slow cooker with some cooking liquid.
(In my case, I used a cyser
that had come out too dry to be an enjoyable drink, but still has
good apple flavor. I think just water would work fine, or any
kind of light-flavored broth.)

My slow cooker is also a pressure cooker, which has the
advantage that the lid seals nicely and has a handle on it, so I
took that without packing, and the stick blender, and the cream to
my sister’s house where I was having dinner that night.

When the potatoes were tender, I creamed everything with the
stick blender and added the cream. I tasted it to see if it
needed salt or pepper, and decided it didn’t.

There were three of us at dinner, and everyone had seconds
(there was lots of other food, so they must have liked it).

It reheated well in the microwave for after the band the next
day, and there was a small mug for me the day after that.

Perdido Street Station

I had read a couple of books by China Miéville and remember not
particularly liking The City and the City and
enjoying Embassytown pretty well. I read Perdido
Street Station because John Scalzi said it was the best SF book of the current century.

I finished it yesterday, and I think he may be right.

In terms of plot, it’s the normal fantasy plot with a giant
monster (in this case a moth of enormous strength whose wings have
changing patterns that mesmerize potential victims so that their
brains can be sucked dry) who goes around killing everyone until
it’s the end of the book and something works so that it gets
killed instead.

But the world-building and characters are both superb. The
world is inhabited by a number of intelligent species, which over
most of the world coexist by having their own territories, but in
New Crebuzon, the city where the action takes place, most of the
races are represented. Most of the main characters are humans as
we know them, but one is a hybrid beetle/human, who communicates
by sign language
with her own species, and with humans, such as her lover, who have
learned the signs. But she can communicate, although slowly, by
writing on a pad. And she’s a sculptor. In the climactic scene, she reenacts the
Orpheus/Euridice myth, with Eurydice’s motivations much
better explained than I’ve seen them in any other work of art
based on the story.

Another is a bird/human hybrid, who has been
punished for a crime by having his wings sawed off. There is also
a large population of the “remade”, who have been altered as
punishment, either just to punish them, or to make them useful for
some industrial process.

The main character, Isaac, is a scientist who makes a number of
morally dubious choices in the course of saving the city from the
moths, but is forced at the end to realize that all the choices he
could possibly make for using his invention to save his friend the
wing-deprived bird hybrid are wrong.

So if you want to know what the state of the art in Science
Fiction/Fantasy is, read this book. There are two others set in
the same world, and I have the next one on hold at the library.

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News of the week of October 15, 2013

Meeting Report

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.

We are a little low on people for the dropin format we’ve been
using. It depends on my transcribing something on Tuesday morning
which we can play on Tuesday night. This means I
have to pick a piece with a number of parts that we will be able
to play. Some people even expect a dropin group with a variety of
voices and instruments to play only
pieces with the exact number of parts that there are people
present, so that no part is doubled.

So I would appreciate knowing by Tuesday morning if you’re
planning to come on Tuesday evening. It would also be good if
people could plan to come on time and stay until the end of the meeting.

Water Department Warnings

The EPA requires water departments to send out warnings to
their customers when the required tests show any results that are
outside of the normal range. I get them from Cambridge quite
frequently in the winter, because the reservoir is next to a lot
of roads and parking lots that get salted in icy weather, so the
salt content of the water temporarily goes above the limit.

I was visiting Fall River yesterday, and there was one next to
the toilet about some pollutant I’d never heard of. It was one of
20 testing sites that had showed a slightly higher than allowed
value.

There were “reassuring” sentences after this required
information about how it’s not something you have to worry about
drinking a little of — you might get cancer if you drank that
much for years at a time. I understand a waiting room full of
cancer patients failed to find this reassuring.

What struck me about it, though, was that it was written for a
pretty high reading level — I’m not an expert, but I’d guess at
least seventh grade if not higher. When I get these notices from
Cambridge, they’re translated into three or four languages, with
information in a dozen more about where to go to get it in those
languages.

In Fall River, where half the population speaks Portuguese, and
although many of those also speak English, they haven’t had their
primary education in English, they had a paragraph similar to this
at
the bottom of the English letter:

Este relatório contem informação muito importante sobre sua água potável. Por favor traduza-o ou fale com alguém que-lhe compreende. As cópias deste relatório em Português podem ser obtidas no escritório do Departmento de Água no terceiro andar em Government Center, ou chamando 508-324-2330.

Which is a translation of:

This report contains important information about your drinking water. Please translate it or speak with someone who can, if needed. Copies of this report in Portuguese may be obtained at the Water Department’s Offices on the 3rd floor at One Government Center or by calling 508-324-2330.

I don’t have the actual document to point you to, because it
isn’t on the website. The Portuguese paragraph is from another
document that is on the website, but I’m sure it was similar.

I think if it’s information important enough to mail to all the
customers, it might be important enough to send it out in both
languages. Or at least to put the translated version on the website.

Serpent Stand

Choruses usually practice in a place where
there are chairs so people don’t have to stand all the way through
a long rehearsal, but when the group is going to practice any long stretch
of the music, they will be encouraged to stand up, because
the breathing muscles work better that way.

Bands (non-marching) and orchestras, on the other hand, have a lot of
instruments that are usually played sitting down, like cellos and
tubas, so they just have chairs for everyone who can play sitting
down and the people like the percussion and string bass players
who pretty much have to play standing up stand in the back.

Most of the people who play serpent come from a band
background. There are two ways to hold the serpent, and the one I
learned (French, or vertical style), requires putting the weight
on something underneath the instrument. So I was taught to
balance the weight on my calves, and to play sitting down.

A few years ago, I found that when performing with the Cantabile Renaissance
Band, I was having to switch between singing and playing
recorder and playing serpent, and I prefered doing all of that
standing up instead of switching between standing and sitting, so I bought a tuba
stand so that I could play the serpent standing up.

Last year at the Boston Recorder
Society, we were in a room with terrible chairs that angle
back so that the knees are higher than the hips. These are even
worse than normal chairs for the breathing muscles. One meeting,
the coach suggested that we all try to play standing up (I was
playing cornetto on that piece, so it wasn’t a problem) and we
agreed that it sounded better that way. Only two of the seven of
us kept on doing it, though. After that, I thought about the
previous meeting when I’d been playing serpent on the bass line
and had been completely unable to produce an in-tune low F. It’s
not the easiest note to play with a focused sound, but I don’t
usually have trouble producing the slightly fuzzy sound at the
right pitch. So I started bringing the serpent stand to those
meetings and playing everything standing up.

Last week I had a rehearsal with a flute player who has decided
she plays better standing up, so we all tried standing up, and it
really did help. I had warmed up the serpent very badly, and I
was having problems making some of the leaps the repertoire
demanded, but the notes I got were in tune in spite of the bad
warmup.

So I decided to play both
performances last weekend with the serpent stand. It involves
carying more stuff, but the convenient bag to pack the serpent
stand in is a duffle bag, which ends up weighing fairly close to
what the serpent case with serpent in it weighs, so although I’m
carrying more weight, I feel better balanced with the stand than
with just the serpent case and my other stuff in my backpack.

I was still badly warmed up on Friday. I’m getting more
comfortable playing the bass lines on the serpent, and we did have
one tune where I managed to do something with the melody, so it
wasn’t a total loss as a serpent performance, and several people
said they enjoyed it, but I felt better about the recorder
playing.

On Sunday, however, I had practiced both serpent and cornetto
quite intensely in the morning, so the serpent was really ready.
One of the visiting directors from England went out of her way to
tell me how good I was sounding. The bassoon line I played wasn’t
embarrassing at all. So I think I’ll keep on using the stand.


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Monarch Butterflies

Those of us who read Flight
Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver were interested in Verlyn
Kinkenborg’s column
this morning about the monarch butterflies.

The novel is about a family in Apalachia who find a remote area
of their farm covered in butterflies one Spring morning. It’s
because of a fictional change to the pattern of monarch
butterfly migration.

The column is about what we now know about the real reasons for
the decline in the monarch butterfly population. He writes:

One recent study suggests that the long-term survival of the species may be in doubt. A few weeks ago, one of the scientists devoted to studying monarchs, Ernest Williams at Hamilton College, summarized for me the threats that have been reported in recent studies.

Nearly every link in the monarchs’ chain of being, he said, is at risk. Illegal logging in Mexico has reduced their winter habitat — an already vanishingly small area, which is itself being altered by the warming climate. Ecotourists who come to witness the congregation of so many butterflies disturb the creatures they have come to see. But perhaps most damaging is the demise of milkweed.

Monarchs have the misfortune to rely exclusively on a plant that farmers all across the Midwest and Northeast consider a weed. There is a direct parallel between the demise of milkweeds — killed by the herbicide glyphosate, which is sprayed by the millions of gallons on fields where genetically modified crops are growing — and the steady drop in monarch numbers.

To anyone who has grown up in the Midwest, the result seems very strange. After decades of trying to eradicate milkweed, gardeners are being encouraged to plant it in their gardens, and townships and counties are being asked to let it thrive in the roadside ditches. What looks like agricultural success, purging bean and corn fields of milkweed (among other weeds), turns out to be butterfly disaster.


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A why not to use Microsoft Word link

One of the most popular posts on this blog is Why not to
use AOL, which explains in detail why you don’t want to use
AOL to deliver your email. The answer is that they don’t actually
care whether they deliver your email or not.

Before posting that, I did an extensive google search and
couldn’t find anything that explained the issue on that level of
detail, although there was of course an assumption in the
technically literate community that using AOL was a bad idea.

There are a lot of people in the technically literate
publishing community who assume something similar, but they seem
not to have actually managed to carry their point of view, because
lots of publishing opportunities which might otherwise be useful
(smashwords for
instance) require or encourage putting your material into Word format.

So I was glad to see a post by a good
writer entitled Why
Microsoft Word must Die. (I don’t actually like much of what
I’ve read by Charlie Stross, but he’s certainly an effective
writer, and lots of people do like what he wants to write.)

His post is a bit long, but does make a number of the right
arguments very cogently.

For instance, here’s how he explains the problems the
planned obsolescence model causes even for people who never use
Word themselves:

But as Word’s domination became established, Microsoft changed the file format repeatedly — with Word 95, Word 97, in 2000, and again in 2003 and more recently. Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program. If you had to exchange documents with anyone else, you could try to get them to send and receive RTF — but for the most part casual business users never really got the hang of different file formats in the “Save As …” dialog, and so if you needed to work with others you had to pay the Microsoft Danegeld on a regular basis, even if none of the new features were any use to you.

I don’t have much hope for the people who have no idea
how to use the “Save As…” dialog, but maybe the people who are
establishing publishing businesses will read this article and
think about their system.

Come hear me play this weekend

[Laura and Frank with serpent and dulcian]
Laura Conrad with serpent and Frank Jones with dulcian at NEFFA, 2005

English Country Dance in Harvard Square

The Harvard
Square English Country Dance is tonight at 7:30 at Harvard-Epworth Church. It’s open band, so you can play some and
dance some or just dance or just play.

I will have both the serpent and some recorders, so it’s a
chance to hear the serpent.

West Gallery Quire

The West Gallery
Quire is meeting this weekend, with guest leaders from
England, and four new tunes.

One of the new tunes is scored for two bassoons, so if you play
bassoon you would be especially welcome. We have two dulcian
(ancestor of the bassoon) players who come from time to time, but
at least one of them will be out of town this weekend.

So it’s likely that we will simulate the bassoons on serpent
and trombone. This is quite authentic — the original West
Gallery musicians just played whatever instrument they had on
whatever part they wanted to. There are complaints from congregation
members about bands where the cello played the tune and the
clarinet played the bass one or two octaves too high.

In any case, this is actually the best way to hear the serpent
— I’m a better West Gallery musician than I am a country dance
bass line player, and the serpent was invented for singing with,
and you’ll be able to sing with it.