A week in photos

This was a long week but a good one that saw the rain finally give way to sun, time spent with friends and family and tending my Nutmeg, and some good food thrown into the wild mix. I'm now on the bus to New York to meet up with my parents and enjoy a thirty six hour getaway. 

I've been wrapping Nut's cast so he can enjoy some outdoor time. 

This earnest little fern in my yard makes me smile. 

Jack and I enjoyed going to a mother-son dance.  

Fava bean purée is the ultimate show of spring.  

Can you even with Columbines? 

Oliver's first section of The New Fart Times,   a section on fart inventions. 

Ailing fur baby, truly hysterical "article" on birds

For starters, because the world really feels awfully grim on the regular these days, it is important to laugh. As such, I beseech you to read this Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America. Now, I actually love birds and enjoy watching them every day. But this is HILARIOUS. It's like the Williams-Sonoma Hater's Guide but for birders. It took me about five tries and more than twenty minutes to make it the whole way through because I was laughing so hard I was wheezing and crying. I am not kidding! It really picks up on bird 3, the white-breasted Butt Nugget, so don't sell yourself short by quitting early. 

It is also important to share love and peace in all ways possible as often as possible, because doing so is a helpful counter to wanting to make targets from approximately twenty politician's photographs each day and then play many rounds of darts. I present my love and peace pie. We ate it in less than a day which says something both about how much we needed such positivity and also about how good pie pretty much always is.

Nutmeg came home with a bloody paw earlier this week, and after a limp emerged a couple days later, I made an appointment with the vet. Poor love got his paw stuck somewhere and ripped a nail clean off in getting free. Because cat nails grow directly from the bone, the trauma of the nail loss broke or fractured his toe. You would never have known by how composed and wonderful he continued to be. I swear he feels this cast is worse than the limp. :(

Look at his whiskers shooting forth from the cone of shame. Sad.

Fortunately, he hasn't even tried to sniff his bandage so he does not have to wear his cone anymore. It's really the saddest, most pitiful accessory. He could not access his food with it on and obviously felt his balance was terribly off.

We have taken to calling him Peg Leg Nut, and I have carried him like a baby pretty much exclusively since the cast was put on because his hobble is too depressing to watch. I even slept downstairs with him last night as I didn't want to worry about him trying to get upstairs to find us. And what if he needed anything? 

I have taken to calling myself CAT LADY.

My heart just breaks for him. I'm thankful we have good veterinary care, can afford to access it, and that Nutmeg will be ok. Poor babe.

Miscellany I want to share with y'all: In the Darkroom; Two Wolves parable; Nutmeg cat; March for Science

In no particular order of import:

Nutmeg, aka the most delightful cat in the world

Despite the apparent rotundity, we have been SO diligent with Nut's diet, and he has lost 1.5 pounds. I believe fur, loose skin, and positionality are to blame here. Plus, that damn camera adding pounds...

Two Wolves - a Cherokee parable

An old Cherokee chief was teaching his grandson about life...

"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. 
"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.

One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt, and ego.

The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. 

This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, 
"Which wolf will win?"

The old chief simply replied, 
"The one you feed."

In the Darkroom

Friends, you MUST read this book. Written by Susan Faludi, it is ostensibly about after her estranged, then 76-year-old father undergoing sex reassignment surgery to fully transition to a woman. And while it is an incredibly powerful discussion about self and gender identity and the recovery of a parent-child relationship that had long stood on shaky ground, it is also broader than that, taking us through considerations of national and religious identities through the lens of Hungary, historically, during World War II and the Holocaust, and more presently, since the turn of the century on. It's like a riveting history text + a mesmerizing personal tale.

I rationed my reading of it and was truly crushed when I finished it Monday. Tom and I spent some time in Budapest in 2004, just weeks after Hungary had joined the European Union. (Because I am forever talking to everyone) we found that many Hungarians felt deeply vexed about what impact(s) EU membership might have on their national identity. In light of those conversations (which led me to imagine that Hungarians had a long-standing, deeply-rooted, unified sense of what their identity was), I found Faludi's explication of Hungary's fraught history with its sense of self particularly fascinating. 

And for anyone worried about just how bad hyper-nationalistic, pro-Christian, anti-Semitic (and Muslim and Roma and...), anti-LGBTQ administrations can be for a country, just how far down a scary hole those can go, look to Hungary today where an uber-rightist, intolerant government aided and abetted by a far-right propaganda-based internet presence, has, in many ways, driven the country into the ground. Sound familiar? It's alarming to say the least.

Food

Thank god spring is (nearly) here. Grilled bread with ricotta, lemon zest, olive oil, salt and sauteed pea shoots, snow peas, and English peas is fab.

So is grilled focaccia with sauteed mushrooms (oyster, shitake, lion), creme fraiche, and thyme.

Also fab? A homemade birthday cake- chocolate and chocolate-from my mother-in-law. 41 in binary (lit/unlit candles) courtesy of my nerdtastic husband and J.

Science (and knowledge and facts) is great!

Who's marching in the March for Science on Saturday? Jack and I are marching in DC, and last I checked there were 571 satellite marches in the US and abroad. Find one and make your voices heard!