Category: General

Dried mushrooms

The last two company dishes I’ve made have been lots nicer
because I bought an 8-ounce package of dried trumpet mushrooms from Earthy
Delights.

It was recommended on the New York Times Bitten
Blog, with some very flowery language about the texture of
the mushrooms after reconstitution being very similar to fresh
mushrooms.

That isn’t my experience — they seem as slimy and rubbery in
texture as other dried mushrooms I’ve reconstituted. But if you
buy in bulk they are cheaper, and if you chop them up fine
enough you don’t mind the texture.

And you get the reconstituting liquid to cook with. These seem
to have less sand in them than some, although you still watch
the tail end of the liquid when you’re adding it to
anything.

My favorite thing to do with the liquid so far was to use it to
cook kasha. The kasha is already an earthy taste, and having
the mushroom soaking liquid makes it even better.

Little Dorrit

I watched the last episode of the television adaptation on
Sunday, and finished rereading the book yesterday.

It’s a good adaptation, and the plot of the book is convoluted
enough that seeing the adaptation helps in reading the book, even
if you’re used to the
the convoluted plots of nineteenth century novels and soap
operas.

Of course, an eight hour TV show has to leave out a lot of
stuff from a 900 page book. I was especially sorry to lose the
impoverished music publisher. (He’s Mrs. Plornish’s father, who
at the beginning of the book is living in the Workhouse so as
not to take food out of the mouths of the Plornish
children.)

I think even the experienced adaptors who did this one chafed
at the restrictions, because the end seemed unusually
compressed, leaving us with no idea of what happens to several
characters who have been fairly carefully described (most
notably Minnie Meagles and her husband).

Of course, Dickens’ treatment of the business tycoon who steals
from one fund to pay off the investors in other funds and finally
loses money for all the main characters seems especially
contemporary.

The subplot where Miss Wade convinces Tattycorum (Harriet) to
leave her employment with the Meagles and live with her is a
little harder to translate to the twentyfirst century. One
reviewer suggested this was because of the hint of a lesbian
affair, but actually Dickens does hint at that. Mr. Meagles says
to Miss Wade:

‘If it should
happen that you are a woman, who, from whatever cause, has a perverted
delight in making a sister-woman as wretched as she is (I am old enough
to have heard of such), I warn her against you, and I warn you against
yourself.’

The problem is
that we are initially inclined to sympathize with Harriet for
feeling oppressed and ignored, where Dickens really believes she
should be grateful and submissive to such excellent people who are
being so kind to her.

Here are a few notes on things I picked up on on this reading
that you might not have noticed.

White Sand and Grey Sand
This is mentioned when Mr. Panks is hanging around the
Marshalsea while he’s researching Mr. Dorrit’s inheritance. He
explains to Amy and Mr. Clennam,

‘I am spending the evening with the rest of ’em,’ said Pancks. ‘I’ve
been singing. I’ve been taking a part in White sand and grey sand.
I don’t know anything about it. Never mind. I’ll take any part in
anything. It’s all the same, if you’re loud enough.’

It’s actually a round — the person who taught it to me thought
it was Ravenscroft, but I don’t find it there.
[music]

Prunes and Prisms
I first ran into this phrase in Little Women, where Jo says
to Laurie:

“Hold your tongue!” cried Jo, covering her ears. “‘Prunes
and prisms’ are my doom, and I may as well make up my mind to
it. I came here to moralize, not to hear things that make me
skip to think of.”

If I’d thought of it, I would have known it was a quotation, and would
have probably guessed it was Dickens, but I wouldn’t have
guessed anything as good as what Mrs. General tells Amy Dorrit
when explaining why it’s more genteel and feminine to say “Papa”
than “Father”.

‘Papa is a preferable mode of address,’ observed Mrs General. ‘Father is
rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to
the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism are all very
good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism. You will find it
serviceable, in the formation of a demeanour, if you sometimes say to
yourself in company–on entering a room, for instance–Papa, potatoes,
poultry, prunes and prism, prunes and prism.’

Plethoric
I also learned a new word. It means having a florid, ruddy
face. It occurs describing the customers at the inn in the
Swiss alps:

The third party, which had ascended from the valley
on the Italian side of the Pass, and had arrived first, were four in
number: a plethoric, hungry, and silent German tutor in spectacles, on
a tour with three young men, his pupils, all plethoric, hungry, and
silent, and all in spectacles.

The derivation is from plethora, implying that the face is red because
of a plethora of blood.

Swine flu

With the coverage of the swine flu, I’ve been thinking about an
arcane fact I was told once about the epidemic of 1918.

A friend I went to college with went on to study demography in
graduate school. At that time (early 1970’s), the way you got a PhD in
demography was to study the “demographic transition” (when people
get prosperous enough to consider children an expense instead of
an asset) somewhere. We lived in Rhode Island, so he studied it
in Rhode Island.

This meant that he looked at essentially all the death
certificates issued in the first few decades of the
twentieth century. And one of the things he and other
demographers noticed about the spike in deaths from Spanish
Influenza in 1918 was that it
led to a decline in deaths from tuberculosis over the next decade
or so.

So the theory at that point was that the people who died from
the flu tended to be people who already had low-grade
tuberculosis.

So if the current flu coming out of Mexico is anything like the
1918 flu, and if the theory based on death
certificates in the twentieth century has any validity, then we
might be in better shape than some people are worried about. I’d
be very surprised if the level of low-grade tuberculosis, at least in developed countries, isn’t a
lot lower now than in 1918.

Of
course, further research may well have invalidated the theory
about the 1918 deaths, and there may be very little resemblance
between the viruses in 2009 and the ones in 1918.

Following up

Garden

Yesterday I forgot to include a picture of the sedge, which doesn’t wither in the Winter, and this year is
blooming in the Spring.

<img src="http://www.laymusic.org/pictures/apr09/img_0234.jpg&quot; width=500
alt="[sedge]"

NEFFA

I took it easy this year — no trying to play fast dance music
I don’t know or to figure out how to fit serpent into music I
don’t know and the people who do know it don’t know the
serpent.

As I said on Sunday, I sang the Shape Note
singing, and then played serpent for the West Gallery
Quire.

Then I had lunch, and the Cantabile
Band members who are performing at the Walk for Hunger got
together outside and ran some of our stuff.

Then I caught the tail end of a singers’ workshop, taught by
Jerry Epstein. He really made a surprising amount of
difference to the performers he coached in only a few
minutes. He’s doing a two day version of it for the Folk Song Society
of New York in May.

Then I went and sang along on gospel songs and spirituals, and then had a nice conversation about the serpent with some shape note singers fom Minnesota and then I went home.

Garden

It’s too nice a day to spend all morning at the computer, so I took
the camera and the pruning shears out to the back yard, and I’ll
show you what’s going on:

The rhubarb is coming up nicely, but there’s something eating
it already.

[rhubarb]
[rhubarb leaf with insect holes]

There’s a pansy from the pot that someone brought to Bonnie’s room at the hospice last year about this time.

<img src="http://www.laymusic.org/pictures/apr09/img_0227.jpg&quot; width=500
alt="[Pansy]""

The woodruff is coming up nicely, and even has some buds.

[woodruff]

One of the two lavender bushes I transplanted from Bonnie’s
place has survived, although it’s a little scruffy. I pruned some
of the dead branches off it, and pulled up the dead one. It was
pretty dead even before I moved it, so I’m not surprised it didn’t
revive.

[lavender]

The Angelica plant I brought from Bonnie’s garden looks
healthy.

[angelica]

NEFFA

This will be a short one. If you’re anywhere near Mansfield,
Massachusetts, go to NEFFA
(The New England Folk Festival of the Arts).

That’s where I’ll be. I’m going to do the Sacred Harp Singing
at 10, and then at 11 I’ll be playing serpent in the West
Gallery Quire. This will be your best chance to sing with a
serpent for at least two weeks.

Normally, if I were taking off before 9 AM, I would leave a
normal post on the spindle, but I’ve had dinner guests the last
two days, and there just hasn’t been time.

Upgrading the Desktop

I said I was looking forward to doing it
based on how well the new version worked on the laptop. I’m
pretty well done, and I’m not really looking backwards with
fondness, but upgrading is really a lot easier than it used to
be in the bad old days.

Doing the upgrade

To begin with, when I first tried it yesterday via the standard
network upgrade, it downloaded a
few packages and then hung. When I tried it again, it downloaded
a few more and hung.

This didn’t happen when I upgraded the laptop, but that’s
probably because I didn’t do that the day after the release was
official.

So I read the instructions, and found a way
to use a bittorrent to get the CD and upgrade from the CD
images. This was quite fast, and I had the upgrade completed in
only 3 or 4 hours. I didn’t have much time between then and when
my dinner guests arrived to check things out, but there wasn’t
anything obviously wrong.

Finding the problems

As I mentioned, I use the desktop for a lot more different
things than I do the laptop, so it’s only to be expected that
there will be more problems.

First, the good news — I can use the -# option to the lpr
command again. This is going to make Tuesdays, when I print new
music for the Cantabile
Band, much less irritating.

Now for the (relatively) bad news:

  • The other problem that seemed to be fixed on the laptop was
    that audacity didn’t make any sound when it played music. This
    was still true on the desktop. So I deleted the
    $HOME/.audacity-data directory, and now audacity plays. Maybe
    that would have worked without the upgrade.
  • When I went to send mail, I got an error message about
    gnutls-cli not being there. I checked and mail seemed to be
    being sent anyway, but I posted a message to the gnus newsgroup,
    and two people replied with the name of the package that now
    includes gnutls-cli. So now I’m not getting the error message.
    I didn’t get an answer to my question about what gnutls was
    doing, and of course I should file a bug on gnus in ubuntu for
    the upgrade not having happened correctly.
  • My key repeats have gotten a lot slower, so I’m going to
    have to figure out how I set that and set it to a different
    number.
  • When I post to a newsgroup, it now complains that my .sig is
    too long, when it’s any longer than one line. I thought four
    was a fairly standard limit; I’ve never heard of two being
    considered asocial. I tried two different mail2news gateways
    and they were both doing the same thing, so it may have to do
    with the upgrade. I’ll try to find it; I know some of my quotes
    are too long, but you should be able to say something.

On the possibly good news but not yet verified front — firefox
may be leaking less memory.

Bonnie: Diagnosis

I posted previously about
the complete misdiagnosis when she first went to the doctor
complaining about being out of breath.

Once she got to the hospital, and they were running all the
tests they could think of all the time, things proceded much more
efficiently. She had scans during her time in December in the
Salem Hospital which indicated some kind of tumors in the
abdominal cavity.

She wrote my sister, who has a large Christmas party every year, on December 30:

As you probably know, I’m just out of the hospital after a stay of 3
1/2 weeks. Laura kindly bailed me out on Friday. I was hoping
against hope that I would feel well enough to come to your concert and
party today, but, with the long drive and all, it just wouldn’t be
prudent. Though I have short bursts of feeling fairly energetic, I
seem to need lots of bed rest and naps. I’m sorry to have to miss it.

Unfortunately the future won’t be clear sailing for me. Though the
underlying cause of the blood clots hasn’t been definitely diagnosed
yet, most likely I’ll be undergoing some type of chemotherapy at Lahey
Peabody, where my regular doctor is located. I’m trying to keep a
positive attitude, but everything feels very uncertain. So, please
think of me when you sing “Let memory keep us all”.

We thought of her not only when we sang Let memory keep
us all, but also during the singing of
Messiah, where she had for several years been the
reliable person on the top line.

It must have been shortly after this that I asked her directly
if she had a diagnosis yet, and she said, “Yes. Cancer.”

I replied, “That’s not a diagnosis — a diagnosis is something
like Stage II Pancreatic Cancer, or Stage IV Liver Cancer.
Once you have that, then you can go on the internet and look
up the possible treatments and the 5-year survival rates.”

She said she thought she was scheduled for more tests that
might be to produce something like that.

When I asked her later, probably very near the surgery that
ended her life as a vocal conversationalist, she said it was a
cancer of the reproductive system. We assumed that this meant
ovarian, as that would be the scariest kind, and didn’t press
her.

I assume they had a diagnosis on paper, because there was one
course of chemotherapy in early February.

After the surgery on February 15 (see timeline), the
doctor reported on there being a lot of cancer, but not on any
specific diagnosis. It was only after this, when I became her
health care proxy, that I was talking to the doctors
directly. The first lengthy conversation with an opportunity
to ask questions not related directly to particular treatments
was on March 12. The doctor we spoke to (Phyllis, who was the
alternate for the health care proxy, and her husband were
there, too) definitely told us it was uterine cancer. I have
checked with Phyllis, and she remembers it that way, too. He also
said that the chemotherapists had agreed that there was no
benefit to further chemotherapy. So I didn’t press him for a
stage or anything, because it didn’t seem likely that there
was any treatment to consider. His prognosis, which was that
she had a small number of months, did turn out to be correct.

Here’s something that’s different from the TV shows — when I
actually started seeing pieces of paper with the diagnosis on
it, it was always ovarian cancer. There was an application
the Rehab hospital filled out for MassHealth (her insurance
was hitting limits on numbers of days in various kinds of
care, after only three months of this), and the admission to
the hospice, and finally the death certificate, and they all
said ovarian cancer. So I assume the doctor just had it wrong
(he was a respiratory specialist, because at that point the
major aim of her treatment was to wean her off the ventilator
she’d been on since the surgery). I can’t imagine why at that
point he’d think there was any point in misleading us. Or
maybe earlier tests had suggested a different primary site for
the cancer, and he hadn’t read all the later material.

When I was talking to people immediately after Bonnie died, I
said I’d like to write something about the experience, and
particularly about the ways in which it wasn’t our health care
system’s finest hour. One of the things the social worker at
the hospice suggested was that I might want to get a copy of
the medical record to do that with. It probably would have
been a good idea, and certainly might have shed some light on
this particular conundrum. But I haven’t done it.

What to put on a Linux netbook

A friend who’s going to England soon and doesn’t want to carry
his Macbook, but wants to be able to check email, bought a
used netbook with Linux on it. He’s used Unix at work quite a
lot, so he wasn’t expecting to have much difficulty with
Linux.

I don’t know that it was especially difficult, but he was
complaining about how time-consuming it was while he figured out
the package management system and found the names of all the
programs he needed to load.

I have a lot to do this morning, so I thought posting this
correspondence might be useful and quick.

At one point, he wrote me:

Spent far too much time figuring out the netbook. Have better
understanding of the Package Manager now. Installed emacs, ed,
lynx, audacity, ghostview and some other stuff. Still need
ssh and scp. Still need codecs for audio and video — probably
a big list, including h.264 and AAC/FLAC for sure. And MIDI —
Acer’s version of mplayer won’t play midi files!

Any suggestions for codecs, utilities?

and I replied:

I use timidity for playing MIDI.

In ubuntu there’s a package called something like nonfree-extras that
has all the codecs you generally need. It will install it if you try to
play something it doesn’t have the codecs for.

If you don’t have xpdf, you need it. The default in ubuntu [evince] has some
bugs that make the lilypond output look bad.

If you run into audio problems, gnome-alsa-mixer can usually fix them.
It has more knobs and buttons than the other mixers. Their names don’t
make sense, but if you twiddle them for long enough, the audio starts
working.

If you want to read books, get FBReader. The latest version will go out
to the web and get anything out-of-copyright for you.

For system monitoring, I use something called gkrellm, which has a bunch
of little programs (called krells) that will tell you the weather and
the phases of the moon and how busy your cpus and disk drives are.

ssh is probably called openssh, and you probably need both server and
client.

I don’t know what you use for graphics, but getting imagemagick is
probably a good idea. Gimp is overkill unless you really want to do
high-powered stuff, but being able to convert between formats is good.

I find gnumeric less bloated for spreadsheets than openoffice. And you
can read Word documents with just the wv package.

Hope this helps.

Later, in a message titled
Yahoo! Acer runs stuff!, he wrote:

I saw more of the useful ssh stuff in Add/Remove today,
Oh is there stuff. Pages and pages of stuff, most of which
I’ll never need nor want to put on here.

and I replied:

I forget what the command line search for rpm’s is [rpmfind], but I never use the
GUI for exactly that reason. On ubuntu, I would say something like
“apt-cache search openssh”, and pipe it through grep if it gave me too
much stuff to read.

Roasting coffee

Some of my homebrewing
friends have been experimenting with roasting their own
coffee. I’m not able to taste the results of their experiments,
because I’m extremely sensitive to caffeine, so I only drink
decaffeinated coffee, and that isn’t what they brew.

But the smell of what they do is certainly tantalizing, so I
spent some time drooling over the Sweetmarias.com website. I
ordered some coffeemaker cleaning stuff, and a new
German-engineered coffee grinder, and found I was enjoying
spending a bit more time on my coffee-brewing method and getting
better results. So last week I took the plunge and ordered a Fresh
Roast Plus 8 Home Coffee Roaster and eight different kinds of
decaffeinated green coffee beens.

If you want to try this without spending money and kitchen
space on a single-purpose gadget, you can read the instructions
for doing it in a popcorn popper at SweetMaria’s, or this instructable.

Anyway, I have roasted one batch of Kenya AB
Auction Lot WP Decaf coffee and I can
report:

  • Next time I will follow the instructions to do the roasting
    under the stove hood, or outdoors on the fire escape. Compared with how
    good all the other smells to do with making coffee are, the
    smell of beans roasting just isn’t the way you want your house to smell.
  • But once you’ve roasted it, and are handling the beans, it’s
    definitely worth it to smell the fresh roast. I like opening a
    new bag of commercially roasted coffee, and this is much
    better. The description of this coffee on the bag is:

    Lively, bright cup with citrus, meyer lemon,
    caramel and floral sweetness.

    You can really smell
    most of that without brewing the coffee at all.

  • I knew I was going to have to make adjustments to my brewing
    method when I changed my buying and roasting methods. This
    first batch is definitely not as strong as I like my coffee, but the
    flavor is really good.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000PC3FNM&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr