Morfydd St. Clair

Marieke De Jong wrote:
Hi everyone,

Interesting question Nancy, and I never seem to manage enough or fully functional pea sticks no matter how I vow to do it!
Anyway, I just happened to come across a Dutch website on rare seeds and they listed a pea that's been saved by one if their farmer - seed growers and they described their technique of growing the peas together with wheat (or some grain, but I think they said wheat). I'll try this one of these years once I get grain going in my garden. I can see it work even if you wanted some fresh peas, as long as you leave space you can just walk along the rows and pick some.

Hi Marieke, which website was that?  Thanks!

This week the apple roller, to pick up fallen apples, got a good workout.  The apple picker is a close second.  Then a leaf rake and big “claws” to get leaves from the pile into the barrel, to be dragged to the compost pile.

A trowel to plant fall bulbs, and soon clippers and saws to prune everything.  I can’t believe how enthusiastic I am about pollarding some of the hazelnuts.  (I could do a full coppice but have aggressive rabbits, so leave 1-3 big trunks about hip-high just in case.) There will be sunlight again!  Briefly.

That's great feedback.  I don't know how to paint, but it's very clear for next steps (or next try) for you!

I do think it's lovely as is, but I understand that it's not where you want to be.

Night Watch is one of my favorite Discworld novels.  I sometimes re-read Guards! Guards! and then Night Watch immediately after.  G!G! is the funny pastiche I think you might be looking for.  It's very early in the series, introducing a lot of characters for the first time, in very broad strokes.  NW is fascinating after everyone having grown and matured.

Should you ever decide to sell a copy, please let me know - this is a very sweet piece.

(edited: grammar)

Susan Mené wrote:Oh, and we call those bugs "water bugs".

Huh.  When I was in Baltimore for college, we called the 1-inch-long, black cockroaches "water bugs".  (I was like, no, that is a roach.  I even looked it up in a paper(!) dictionary - I'm old - and it said it was a roach.) I thought they were the worst until I moved into a place with the 1-cm-long brown roaches, which we called "German roaches".  Not as terrifying but occur in the hundreds.  I am pleased to note that in Germany I have never seen a roach.  I'm sure they exist (and actually the climate is pretty similar) but so far so good.  Knock on wood.

In Baltimore, people would say they were going "down'y'ocean" to mean Ocean Shores MD.

We were at the garden today so I staked up the three female plants.  The fuzzy brown branches in the foreground are one of the females; a few thorns but not many.  The white spiky branches in the background are the male; thorns aplenty.  (Despite looking dead in this photo they’re all leafing out nicely.)

Apologies for crappy photo, the garden is chaotic right now and the camera couldn’t focus on “scraggly thing here, no, here!”

Nicole Alderman wrote:

Matt McSpadden wrote:In the north we say "you guys" to mean everyone in the group, not just males. Similar to the South's y'all. I actually had a teacher get upset with me (it was a college in Virginia, far enough south that "You Guys" was not used) one time when I was planning to have the class all go out for ice cream. She wanted to know why I hadn't invited the girls. As a matter of fact, there was one particular girl I was hoping would come... but that is another story. My intention was to invite the whole class... and we eventually go it all straightened out. And I got a lesson in regional phrases :)

I'm on the other northern coast of the US, and also use "you guys" to refer to any group of people. If I were referring to a bunch of my female friends, I'd probably call them "you guys"!

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I think one of our weird linguistic things in the pacific northwest is that we call land isopods "potato bugs." Most places call them "woodlice" or "rolly polly" or "pill bug"

Yes to potato bugs!  I have heard that there is another insect with that name out there, which is horrifying looking.  I’m a big fan of not-clicking on the horrifying thing, so I don’t know what that corresponds to.

I also grew up with “you guys”.  “You guys and gals” is not really an improvement, in my opinion .  I like y’all or yins (short for you-uns in the Pittsburgh area).  You would think that in Germany, where there are not one but two words for second person plural, that would not be a problem, but I had a director who addressed us all as “Mädels”. That’s young girls, in a room where I was usually the only woman.  There were layers of ick there.

Christopher Weeks wrote:

John Weiland wrote:My wife had grown up in central PA and recalls "the car needs washed..."   or "the lawn needs mowed...", proposed to be a shortening the German "needs ....... to be" where the "to be" was at the end of the sentence.  This is not something I've ever heard here as a near life-long Minnesotan.

Interesting! The only person I know who says that routinely is from Sedalia, Missouri.

if they misbehaved, they would end up in the "hoosegow"...

I guess I thought that was from out west or something. Colloquial for jail.

there is "A guy could....".

Neat! That rings immediately true, but isn't something I'd articulated to myself. A guy could go crazy trying to list everything. :-)

As someone with an English teacher mother (and all-the-maths-and-sciences teacher father, yes I was doomed), “the car needs washed” makes my teeth itch, and yet sometimes in a hurry I say it.  I don’t think it’s a PNW thing; maybe I picked it up from my best friend, whose parents were serious Okies, or deeper from my Lancaster-area mom.

Re: “A guy could”, that sounds a bit like the way you construct “you can”/“you could” in German: “mann kann”/mann könnte”.  In a way it’s a bit more polite!  You is very direct, where someone-out-there-not-necessarily-you gives you some distance. :)

(Edited for grammar, English and German. :) )

Born and raised in and around Seattle:
“The East Side” can mean east of Lake Washington or east of the Cascade Mountains, depending on context.  Veeeery different areas.
Despite the rainy stereotype, it has always been dry from July 5 (after the traditional rain messing up July 4 fireworks) through September.  With climate change now it’s a hot dry and a real drought.
The “Seattle Freeze” is complained about by newcomers, when they meet new people who are friendly and say, “we should totally meet up again!” and then… never do. I blame the Scandinavian settlers.
Drivers are terrible.  This is true.  Partly it’s so many newcomers with radically different driving styles trying to coexist.  Yes, snow shuts the city down. a) It’s probably been +/- freezing for days so there’s a sheet of ice under that snow.  b) Hills. c) We only have to drive in snow every other year.  d) We’re bad drivers.  

Living in Hamburg, Germany:
They don’t call it the Seattle Freeze but when I describe it, locals get it. I blame the Scandinavians.
Plattdeutsch - actually closer in my head to English than regular German, but wiiiild sounding.
Platt means Flat.  Which the northern third of Germany is.  Good Lord is it flat.
There used to not be droughts - my bf once showed me a graph of precipitation by month, and it was a flat line.  Now there are droughts.
I don’t drive here much. Aside from me, I think everyone here drives pretty competently.

It’s been (cough) 30 years since my metallurgy classes, but I think they’re still safe.

At high enough temperatures they could warp, or even oxidize, but that’s just rust that can be scraped off.  They might lose their structural integrity, so they could break unexpectedly.

I’d be more worried about starting a fire with whatever was in the pot, or at least setting off your fire alarms.  And you’re probably getting more toxins from the gas stove than you ever could from your pots.

(Edited to add: I love old Revere Ware! At least donate it to charity!)

My understanding is that salting/draining/rinsing eggplant is to reduce bitterness, not flatulence.  But most modern eggplants aren’t very bitter, so you can skip it.

Fuschia Dunlop wrote the first Western cookbooks of Szechuan cuisine, and this is her favorite recipe: https://andrewzimmern.com/recipes/fuchsia-dunlops-fish-fragrant-eggplant/

(Fish-fragrant is a weird Chinese term and has nothing to do with fish.  She explains it in the recipe.)