Pedestrians be us

TPP has been really fortunate career/job-wise. Living in a smallish college city in a pretty prosperous agricultural belt is a pretty decent, unless you've got some fetish about mountains and beaches. As mentioned many times the Phactors own a remarkable piece of urban property, a small personal botanical garden of sorts.  And the most amazing thing is that it is within easy walking distance to the university where TPP was long employted, although most of the other people in this neighborhood don't walk to work.  Actually in thinking back for only 2 out of the 46 years of his career has TPP had to commute by car, or if truly desperate by city bus (not convenient or anything in those days).  This adds a great deal to the quality of life compared to people with long commutes; you may get some affordable space, but when do you get time to do anything with it?  Being a committed pedestrian has the obvious health benefits and the time for creative reflection is both necessary and useful for your mental well-being.  TPP wonders and worries about the young people who maintain a constant sound input even when walking such that they take no time for the brain to free-wheel.  Such times are when you learn to think. Lots of times if a problem has been nagging a solution or an idea arises during the morning commute, but you have to let it surface from your subconscious, and then you have to learn to grab it and hang on to it before it escapes like a dream.  
Wednesday last, the first Wednesday in April, was National Walking Day, and nothing special was done to celebrate.  Mrs. Phactor can walk to work as well, but it's more complicated for her.  It's about three times farther, and her business and activities make for lots of appointments here and there, so there are practical reasons for driving. Three of TPP's colleagues lives about 3 blocks closer to campus and one doesn't even own a car unless her ancient VW rabbit was buried in her back yard after it quit for good. Another one walks, the third drives. A grocery is within walking distance in the opposite direction, and TPP often walks to get just an item or two. But our 'Mercan habit of buying food for several days produces a load to heavy to carry very far, so that remains a problem even if a cart were used. Unfortunately shopping in general moved from neighorhoods and urban centers to you-must-drive peripheral areas starting 5-6 decades ago, and only now is there some little tendency to shift back to some neighborhood shopping, but some places remain food deserts with no local shopping at all.  Even worse shopping in the myriad of little rural towns dotting our agricultural landscape at a frequency of about one every 10 miles (reasonable distance for horse drawn transportation) has disappeared almost completely leaving many of these towns with a library, a grain elevator, maybe a gas station/convenience store, and a lot of shuttered store fronts. Thus shopping for anything means a substantial trip. So glad our employment situation afforded us the luxury of being pedestrians.

Black Friday - Who is not with the program?

The daily newspaper on Wednesday must have weighed 10 pounds. News-wise it was a fairly scanty day; it was all the advertising inserts. If you live in the USA, and read a daily newspaper, yours was probably similarly fattened. For reasons that remain mysterious to TPP, the friday after Thanksgiving, which is always on a Thursday for reasons that remain mysterious to TPP, has turned into the biggest shopping day of the year. Part of this is because Christmas is only a month away although it's influence seems to creep into things earlier and earlier every year. Part of this is because almost everyone has Friday off, but since the stock market was open Friday AM, Mrs. Phactor had to woman her office until it closed. What this all means to TPP is big box and mall avoidance like they were handing out free ebola. It was even bad getting petrol for the car! For academics Thanksgiving means now is the headlong rush toward the end of the semester. A week or two (just a week this year) of classes left to cover maybe a third of your syllabus (they are only a promisory document) then final exams followed by reading them all and grading. TPP could just never get into a holiday spirit until all of that was over. And it always took quite a bit of desire to get TPP to go shopping even though he likes getting all the women in his life gifts (the cats are easiest). Mrs. Phactor annoyingly annouced that she was done with holiday shopping! The looks she received were not pretty. Of course in her defense this is a pretty busy time of year in her business and she does a fair amount of volunteer/chaity work as well. Since TPP's academic counterpart has retired, time should be no issue, but decades of habit are hard to change. You can't just listen to Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant one day and switch to Christmas shopping the next. It isn't done in proper circles, but it looks like it is being done on a grand scale by many. 

End of the semester, at last!

Well, that's another fine semester shot to hell.  While too busy because of competing demands upon TPP's time, it was a good semester student-wise, really!  Four-fifths of the students in my botany class got As and Bs at a ratio of 1:2, a ratio that has not changed in this class for over 15 years.  The other fifth got Cs and Ds (poor study skills that survived junior college and poor work ethics).  The more advanced rainforest ecology class was probably the best ever, uniformly hard-working, bright, cooperative, and not in the least annoying.  How great is that?  There's always a feeling of great relief to be done, at least with the course work.  TPP started the task of cleaning up the semester debris that had accumulated in the lab and other work areas (the desk is still piled high), and picked up a project started about 2 months ago to figure out where things stood.  Spent some time trying to figure out how to distinguish, easily, yews from plum-yews.  It's a piece of cake if you have reproductive structures, but how often does that happen?  Having always had trouble thinking about holidays during a semester, it was time to think about some presents and then take some action.  So TPP visited 4 shops this afternoon.  One clerk asked, "Panic shopping?"  What's the date?  "The 17th." Well, until it's the 24th, it isn't a panic.  The 17th is really early shopping.  This is the problem when you starting holiday shopping back in November.  Came home and got a lot of great help from the kitty girls wrapping a few things, well, just one cat really, but she's such a help especially with ribbons.  Still need some cookies and other treats for a few special people, so tomorrow, maybe TPP will bake some cookies.

Monday morning matters?

Monday is off to a slow start.  TPP has a mid-morning appointment right across the street, so going for coffee or going to the office would just be a waste of time.  Better to waste time blogging.
Item 1: Graded exams.  Quite a bit of time was spent this weekend reading the first exam in my economic botany class.  These are upper class students who obviously find botany interesting, and economic botany does a good job of convincing people of that.  The results were pretty good in fact the best class TPP has had in years (10 of 24 aced the exam).  Had to work hard, almost to the point of quibbling, to deduct 1 point from one exam, in two half-point increments to demonstrate that a perfect paper is a theoretical construct.  You should know that TPP grades one question at a time and has no idea who wrote what and no idea how a particular student or exam is doing.  Two other students will be surprised to find they did not get the highest grade.
Item 2: International Blasphemy Rights Day - Sept. 30.  TPP has never had the urge to hurt anyone's feeling about their particular religious beliefs, but in places with blasphemy laws and a state-supported religion, sometimes just being an evolution-teaching biologist is enough to break such a law because science causes some religious people discomfort.  Boo-hoo.  Glad the people who want the USA to be a Christian nation remain a minority, although it would be a grand fight over which flavor would get top billing.
Item 3: Barely some rain event.  TPP was completely correct. The recent rain totaled a scant 1/4 inch.  Some bulbs needed planting and beneath the mulch is was just dry.  Terrible. 
Item 4: Garden work.  Planted some yellow-flowered trout lily in the woodland garden.  Transplanted some Japanese peony 2-year old plants from a seed bed to the woodland garden.  Decided where to plant the Persian ironwood (look back a blog - too lazy to link it).  Did some weeding. How do they grow so well when it's so dry?  Removed tropical floating fern from the lily pond to transport to the university glasshouse for the winter.  Harvested some very fine oak-leafed lettuce and had a dynamite BLT. 
Item 5:  Mrs. Phactor tried a new recipe, a tian.  A baked casserole of slices of tomato, zucchini, salami (rustic Italian), and mozzarella cheese, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with mixed herbs.  Wonderful.
Item 6: Shopping.  TPP needed some clothes so he went shopping which he does religiously, about twice a year. A more interesting sale was at the local garden shop, which  had an end of season, "under construction" sale, but there wasn't much that we needed.  Mrs. Phactor bought decorative gourds and a couple of colorful mums.  TPP was called on to be the resident expert.  They like me at this establishment.
Item 7: Summer continues.  Highs in the low 80s for the next few days!  It's the end of September and it's still summer.  Tropical plants get to extend their summer outdoor sojourn another few days. 

Tapas Saturday Shopping

It's a rather bleak looking Saturday, not a good day for outdoor work, and this is probably a good thing because the indoors need policing prior to having our dinner group arrive.  Tonight's menu is Spanish and tapas, which should be fun.  Presently we're making a shopping list, and blogging, only one of which is deemed useful by a narrow majority of those present.  The hardest thing to find is one of the most central of ingredients: Spanish sherries. Over the past 30 years here in a small university city in the upper midwest many things have become much more common.  Cheese used to be a serious problem, but now even groceries have a reasonable selection.  Far more diverse selections of beer and wine are now available.  You find more exotic fruits and veggies. But for some reason sherries remain uncommon with little diversity.  TPP used to get a nice bottle every Christmas because my lovely wife went on a shopping expedition to ChiTown. This year he got an extremely nice bourbon, so that was not a complaint. A successful shopping expedition this morning will require that we find a fairly decent amontillado because obviously sherried chicken livers require sherry.  It's also important because obviously the cook needs a little glass to sip while cooking or the recipe won't come out right at all as is well known. Our foraging expeditions generally follow the 90-90 rule where 90% of all the items you want are found at your first stop, and the remaining 10% of the items take you to the other 90% of places to shop. Well, our caffeine titer seems to have reached a functional level, so our shopping is about to begin, which means the blogging must end.

Food quest

On the Phactor's honey-do list is a quest for several odds and ends, more the former than the latter, for some sort of cooking event. Five-spice powder is most commonly composed of star anise (a basal angiosperm), cloves, cinnamon (but the Chinese use Cassia bark instead of real cinnamon), Sichuan pepper (not real pepper) and fennel seeds, blended to achieve a certain balance of jin and yang. Sounds like a trip to an Asian grocery, which is always fun. Almond flour, and here we certainly hope this wasn't supposed to be "flower". OK, so some really finely ground almonds must be somewhere. Dill weed. This isn't a problem, and the weed means foliage as distinguished from dill seed, but while dill is rather weedy, it does seem rather a harsh label. Semolina flour is puzzling. By definition semolina are the middlings, the little pieces, left over after grinding durum wheat into flour, so it's either flour or semolina not both, and yet there we go. Maybe this is simply a way of designating durum flour from breadwheat flour, and it is hard to tell tetraploid endosperm from hexaploid endosperm once it's made into flour. My real worry is that everything is an ingredient in a single recipe, sort of like that goofy cooking contest show where the chefs get a basket of ingredients and have to combine them all into a dish. At least this list doesn't include cheetos like one of the baskets on the cooking show. Pretty funny that, giving cheetos to a chef. This happens frequently to the Phactor, monthly actually, and in high correlation with the arrival of one or more cooking magazines. Maybe that's why yesterday my shoppinglist included a turkey red wine, limoncello, and several bottles of very dry champagne. This is sounding better all the time. So we are thankful that we have, and can afford, and enjoy, such bounty.