Open Serendipity

Fall is a lovely time of year – the beginning of the green season here in Santa Clara Valley, with colorful fall leaves and early blooming bulbs and other flowers.  But it is also the end of the Two Small Farms Community Supported Agriculture season, no more veggie boxes until March 19!!!  I will miss them.  My son gleefully welcomes the sudden absence of “green stuff,” though he enjoyed the strawberries, apples, carrots, onions, etc.

I will read The Ladybug Letter during the winter season since I wont be getting it on the one-page insert, with recipes on the back, that comes with the veggies.  But living in the moment, I can rejoice that tonight we will feast on organic goodies: German Butterball Potatoes, Gold Beets, Erbette Chard.

I’ll save the leeks and one of the two perfect butternut squashes for a delicious Squash Leek Tart using the recipe that a friend gave me.  The other I’ll keep for a while, based on this information from the weekly CSA newsletter of September 29:

Here’s a hint; squash from the Cucurbita pepo group, like Sugar Pie pumpkins or Delicata squash have about as much sugar as they’re ever going to have right after harvest. They’ll keep well for a couple of months, but after that their starches begin to change to starches and they get to tasting flat. On the other hand, squash from the Cucurbita moschata group, like Butternut, taste starchy right after harvest, but over time those starches turn to sugars and the flavor gets better and better. Butternut squash are great keepers, and if they are stored out of direct sun, and if they aren’t cut into or nicked, they can last for a very long time. This year I grew Sugar Pie pumpkins, Delicata squash, and plenty of Butternut.

We love Delicata squash, one of the many veggies we discovered through this CSA.  The above confirms our theory that when we bought it at a farmers market once, one of them must have been older than the others.  We roasted them all sliced in half, and one was almost tasteless, while the others were as sweet and delicious as the ones we get from “our” CSA farm.

Wow, I’d better start blogging every weekend or else I’ll never blog at all! To cope with all the newness of the job, I dip into fiction when I have the energy to read for fun.  I love the “15 books” note that floated by on Facebook and I’m looking forward to reading the books that “will always stay with” my friends.

For example, I discovered that years ago (BK) when I thought I’d read every book written by Mary Renault, it turns out I’d only read everything in my outstanding local library.  It did not have a copy of The Friendly Young Ladies, and it still doesn’t.  But recently my daughter researched the various book swapping sites and decided we should join PaperBack Swap, so she could order used books for Honors English and write in them, and I got a copy  that way!

The Friendly Young Ladies is not ancient historical fiction, like all of the other books that I read by Renault, it is set in the early 30’s.  It is an excellent book!  It has a few shortcomings, but they are minor compared to the strengths.  She draws her characters much like Jane Austen does: some caricatures, others life-like characters with depth.  But in both cases, she is absolutely ruthless in her descriptions of their errors and shortcomings, and yet, somehow, at precisely the same time, totally compassionate.  You cringe at the thought of how she would describe you, the reader, with all your shortcomings and past errors, and yet you sort of wish that she could.  Such ruthlessness is highly entertaining to read.  Some of the caricatures are hysterical.

More recently, because I was looking for something else on the P aisle in the library, I noticed a book by Sara Paretsky that I had never read, Ghost Country.  She is another author that I read years ago, but I missed this one, or chose to skip it as it is not part of the murder mystery series of hers that I did read.  I got it, and enjoyed it in spite of several shortcomings.  For example, near the end of the book, the first sentence of one chapter made me burst out laughing and I kept giggling for a good 30 seconds all by myself, it was that funny.

One shortcoming is interesting though.  Paretsky writes about a lot of social injustice, and she has some downright nefarious characters.  But unlike the ruthless descriptions by Renault, Paretsky is harsh.  The consequence of this harshness is distance from the reader.  I did not like some of the characters in Renault’s book, but I could identify with them in spite of that, which was quite unsettling.  I did not like some of the characters in Paretsky’s book, and I could dismiss them easily.  I would never, ever, be anything like that or make any of those mistakes.  Probably not true, but reading the book, I was quite sure of myself.

I thought that was an interesting difference between the two.  The author who has done the best job of making me uncomfortably recognize the humanity of truly dreadful characters (several of them in one book!!!) is Toni Morrison.  I’ve only had the courage to read one of her books so far, The Bluest Eye, but I know I will read some others eventually.

Driving home from work one evening, I caught a part of a Fresh Air interview with Karen Armstrong. I recognized her name and wondered if she is the author of Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, a wonderful book I read some years ago. But then I realized no, she is the author of A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, a book that I started a year ago but sits on my shelf unfinished. My daughter read it, along with a couple of others, crammed in to the end of last summer as requirements for 10th grade honors English. She said the beginning and the end of the book were great but the middle was a little long. I have plans to finish it someday…. and her newest book as well: The Case for God.

Meanwhile, Armstrong’s Fresh Air interview was very entertaining. I particularly enjoyed this story she told about Brahman priests who devised a ritual, which was a sort of competition, in the 10th century before Christ. From the transcript:

They went out into the forest, and there they made a retreat, put themselves into a different frame of mind.

They’d fast, and they practiced certain sort of breathing exercises, early forms of yoga, and then they came back, and the competition would begin. And the challenger would try to define the Brahman – that is, the ultimate reality in Hinduism, something that lies way beyond the gods, that is way beyond anything we can know and yet is within us all.

And he had to do this definition in a very sort of poetic and enigmatic way. And his opponents would listen to him very carefully, and then they would respond, moving on from what he had said and make their own definition of what Brahman – or we would say God – is.

And the winner was the priest who reduced everybody to silence. And in that silence, the Brahman was present. The Brahman was not present in the wordy definitions of the divine. It was present in the stunning realization of the absolute powerlessness of language and speech to describe this.

And that, I think, is an authentic model of religious discourse. A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

I love this story! At first it seems so odd to have a competition about such a subject, but consider that the “winner” cannot go on babbling indefinitely because his opponents have stopped talking, so he won already, and must fall into silence himself. (Safe bet: these were all men.) And then, the entire concept and usual feelings that accompany winning and losing would have been left far behind by the time silence fell upon each of them in turn.

I cannot honestly say I would like to participate in such a competition, because it would seem like a self-indulgent waste of time to me. I wonder, who was feeding them? but no, they were fasting, maybe that is how they could afford the time out? (Oops, I’m revealing my modern obsession with time as a finite resource akin to money.)

On the other hand, if one is going to spend time in worship with others, this seems like a very creative way to go about it. My Methodist church is very big on small groups, I wonder if anyone would be interested in this unusual practice and how it would work! Hard to imagine, although it would be a good way to practice resistance to the human compulsion to desperately want everyone to believe the same thing we do. Even if we believe that God is beyond human understanding, but not beyond love, we remain delighted when someone else seems to share our limited ideas about who or what God is, and equally uncomfortable (or worse) when someone has an idea that is at odds with ours.

I am new to working by the hour.  It is really odd.  I think that once I am no longer feeling “new” and suffering from periodic imposter syndrome, I might actually like it.  Right now it is just confusing.  But like it or not, that is how I am paid, so I must keep track of my hours and put them into a timesheet, and not just in one block, either, but according to which of 4-6 projects I have been working on.

The nameless timesheet tool is awkward and unloved by one and all.  We have to use it for now, but no one uses it for actual tracking, just for the official record.  I wanted something simple to use.  I googled about and tried a few things and settled on TimeBoxed.  It is really just a timer, and I noticed quickly that it stops when I shut the laptop and prompts me when I open it up again with: Resume timer?  Nice.

Also nice, it said you can extend it with Apple Script, and comes with a bunch of little example scripts that do one thing or another.  So I started with the Basic Dialog script and modified it to prompt me to choose from a set of half a dozen tasks and optionally add a short comment.  When a timer ends, this script runs and then puts my answers along with the duration of the timer and the date into a monthly logfile, a csv.  I can open that as a spreadsheet and add up the times by day and/or by task.  It is only as complete as I make it, but it is good enough to help me accurately track my time.

This was all fun and easy, only my second time writing Apple Script and the first time was so long ago I cannot even remember what it was.  Even better, I submitted my tiny script to the makers of TimeBoxed and was delighted when they responded with a nice thank-you note and a free license!  The product only costs 9.90€ to purchase, but as my financial fortunes that seem to come and go have been mostly gone lately, I was very happy to not spend money on this fun little tool.

I wanted to make my script better, and still hope to eventually, but I also wanted to keep using TimeBoxed and I only had one day left in the two week demo, so I had to “turn it in” as it is now.