Someone made a batch of chx soup at the farm Friday, but put off the noodlemaking because he wanted to use a mixer, and didn’t have one there.
He finally got around to the noodlieoodlieoodles last night, and started running them through the marcato lasagna attachment, which cuts nice, inch-and-a-half wide noodles with a scalloped edge. He wasn’t sure this was the width he was looking for, and he wasn’t especially excited about the scalloped edges, but he noodled boldly forth because it was getting late and the soup had been sitting in the fridge for two days now.
He laid out the noodles along the counter, and threw the strip of excess dough that had run outside the cut in a pile to the side, to ball up and roll out and use for another go when he finished with the first run. But when he glanced over at that little discard pile he was struck by how much it looked to him like the tentacles of an octopus. See for yourself:
Whoa, he said, because there is something deep in him that resonates with the octopus. So he made the rest of the noodles that way. It was, as you can see, unquestionably, utterly, totally worth it. Look at that noodle. Tell me it isn’t hot. Not hot like spicy. Hot like, you know, foxy.
Though it is nothing to brag about apparently. I thought it was a good thing until I read that it was the orchid’s response to stress. I also read some orchids just do it, stress or no, as a way to propagate. I also read more than one expert recommend cutting it and tossing it because it leeched nutrients from the Mama and would take years to bloom. Let us address these three ideas (stressing, cutting, tossing) respectively.
1. Sure, maybe I stressed it — I’ve definitely accidentally gone twice as long as usual between waterings (on more than one occasion) — maybe not (none of my other orchids, all subjected to the same neglect, have issued spawn). Either way…
2. I’m going to cut it. Mama’s looking chipper, keiki’s getting bigger, and with a deft snip Daddy will have two (yes, I just referred to myself both in the third person and as “Daddy”) orchids where before there was only one.
3. As for blooming only after several years, permit me to direct your attention to the photo below, which clearly shows a bloom stalk (the reddish bud between the two lower roots) emerging from the keiki (keiki’s Hawaiian for “baby”). And after only a couple months! Never trust an expert, that’s my motto (along with “F@$k ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” and “no witnesses.”).
And while I’m thinking about it, are humans the only mammals with umbilical cords?
Henry was born one year ago right about….. now.
It’s been an amazing year: a tough year; a tired year, an exciting year; a gorgeous year, a thrilling year; but mostly, a year filled with a seven hundred and fifty million-billion gallon spill of you-oughta-be-ashamed-of-yourselves L-O-V-E love. Happy Birthday Henry. You made my life.
In closing, I would like to say that the Internet has become a veritable buzzing, stinging hornet’s nest of pings and pongs and klings and klangs, so please do not e-mail, text-message, instant-message, direct-message, Facebook-message (if you’re still on MySpace or Friendster, that’s just plain creepy), Facebook-chat, iChat, tweet, retweet (don’t even mention Twitter mentions), StumbleUpon, LinkIn with, zoom into, Google Buzz, Plaxify, Jigsaw, Digg, Skype, Spoke, poke, flick, or tag me. Don’t boxball, squareball, jingl, jangl, mingl, mangl, FairShare, Foursquare, twosquare, do-si-do, or swing your laptop round and round. I just want to be left alone.
we spend our lives trying to keep bad things from happening to girls, while we meanwhile try to keep boys from doing bad things.
double knock on wood plus reversies.
