It's Your Favorite Foreign Movie

Listen to them talk. For some these bikes represent the cool old bikes of the past. For many, these bikes are THEIR past. When I stroll around vintage motorcycle shows with my camera, I listen as well as look. The bench racing alone is worth the price of admission. This is time travel - holding tight to parts of the past, returning to visit them on occasion.

Look in the eyes of the old guy leaning on the cane as he gazes at the knucklehead Harley, remembering how he first learned to ride one just like it. Walk past the gray-bears standing in front of the Triumph and listen to the laughter as one recalls how he had one "just like that .... I chopped it". Or the guy tell the owner of the BSA that he learned to ride in the dirt on one just like it. "Man I wish I still had that bike..." These guys are not bikers but motorcyclists - they've ridden for the better part of their lives and still do. Motocross. Trials. Flattrack. They talk forks and ignitions and frames. They hunt through the swap booths and recognize pieces in a pile of seemingly worthless metal. They can spot a needed linkage for a Matchless at fifty paces. They walk straight across the grass to a booth because they recognize the rusty tank as the perfect replacement for the BSA they are restoring - the tank dented in a race long ago. You wouldn't recognize them by their attire because there is no uniform. No costume. But, as you weave through the bikes, you'll hear the words: "Oh my God, I had one of those"...over and over.

When the show was over on Saturday, some were in no hurry to leave but leaned on their pickups, listening to the Blues filtering across the bay. Their conversations started and stopped as the memories were compared. These are men for whom motorcycles represent as much of their history as the girls they loved. I suspect many were more nostalgic about the bikes.

Pick Up a Flat Rock and Skip It Across Green River

Pick up the rock, encircling it with your thumb and finger, holding it flat side parallel to the water. Stand sideways to the water. Squat slightly, pitching the rock across the surface of the water. Count the skips....

I was going through some vacation photos and realized how often my family ends up skipping rocks when we're on road trips. Maybe it's the still water that's so different from our crashing waves. The one above was taken at the base of Cape Enrage lighthouse in New Brunswick (eastern Canada). We climbed around the slate shoreline for quite a while while Mark and Glo skipped stones on the Bay of Fundy. Do kids learn how to skip rocks anymore? I was talking to co-workers the other day after more than a week of our e-mails being down...."What did people even DO without the internet?" Did you know you can play solitaire with CARDS? No way! What about 'football'...paper folded into a thick triangle and snapped through the finger "goal posts" of the opposing player? This red soil is on Prince Edward Island, northern province on the eastern side of Canada...land of Anne of Green Gables. Not many shells for mom but plenty of flat rocks for skipping.

What other skills are kids missing out on while watching TV and playing video games? Climbing trees? Playing hopscotch? We have to fix this. If we remember how, that is.

I Want to Break Free

Like prisoners, caught in a cell, free to go but for the lack of a key.Trapped inside my canner are eight pints of albacore. The key? A rubber gasket.

The old floppy gasket was leaking at the end of last season and I finally found one at Shafers sometime this past spring and, upon comparing it to the old one, found it to be correct and tossed the old one. The first tuna of the season, purchased from the Captain of the F/V Sunlight, was sweet, half of which disappeared at Sunday dinner leaving the remainder to be savored at a later date. The jars of albacore were placed in the canner, the gasket tucked into the lid. The lid would NOT close. No matter how I tried, no way, no how. I warmed it. I oiled it….methods the generally work no matter WHAT you’re working on but the lid would not go on the canner. Finally, Mark got involved and HE pushed. He pulled. Finally, face red and veins popping, he managed to twist the lid of the canner closed. "We may not get it back open but…there it is." Funny guy!

Last night, I played the Tuna Canner symphony, the infernal rattling of the canner, with a 10# weight for 110 minutes which is an interminably long time to endure the clatter of metal-on-metal. This morning, the canner was cooled down and I attempted to open it to extract the jars. Not budging. I called Mark; he too was unable to move it. We worked together with me holding the lid and him twisting the bottom. Then I held the pot and he twisted the lid. His arms hurt. My LEGS hurt. I am not butch enough for this kind of business. He brought in clamps to try to gently, but forcefully turn the lid. We put the pot back on the stove just to warm it gently. and tried again. Crap!

No help at ALL from Mirro who agreed that this was likely a faulty gasket, too thick for the application. Tricia in Customer (non-)Service suggested I toss this one and buy a new one. No suggestion on how to accomplish this SINCE IT WAS STUCK IN THE FREAKING POT! No compensation due me since “the vendors [in Brazil] are responsible, Ma’am, not Mirro.” Grrr.

The canner is still sitting on my counter. Eight pints of tuna are encapsulated inside, presumably intact. Any thoughts?

UPDATE: Another half hour of struggling with clamps and pieces of kindling for wedges, the tuna is free! THAT seriously took the fun out of canning.

I Can Dig It, You Can Dig It

Unlike the lady of the home (above), my decision did not take much pondering. For the first time, I decided to take gardening blog, Gardening Gone Wild, up on their monthly photo contest. This month's theme, "On The Road Again" asks us for photos of gardens we found on our travels "on unfamiliar ground with an open mind and open eyes". While I'm sure photos will be submitted with fabulous formal gardens in exotic locales, my mind went immediately to the simply, rather crude kitchen gardens I saw at the Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts.As we wandered the Plantation, amidst the role-players in period dress, deep in character of the time, we took a look inside the way the settlers lived. Without benefit of Martha Stewart or Sunset Magazine, their gardens were not fancy nor decorated, but functional. No fancy construction. No fancy tools. The dirt clods among the corn plants were worked with simple hand-tools. The raised beds of greens were built from scraps and pieces of wood leftover from building the fences that kept the goats from the garden as were the trellises and supports holding up the beans. So simple, yet so uncluttered and pretty.

Don't Make Me Laugh...

In the olden days, there were party lines. For you younguns, that was when two households shared a phone line - that's right, not just two family members but two homes. Separate families. SHARING!. I suspect that there was a price break though it may have just been too expensive to have a private line. We shared with the neighbor who was rather intolerant our house with chatty teens with our chatty ways. She would occasionally come to the door and demand we vacate the line. Occasionally we would.

We have now progressed to cellular devices. Or have we? When the text came in, I didn't recognize the number:

INCOMING TEXT: Wus up beezy?
ME: not sure you want to know. Wrong # I presume.
IT: Wat?
ME: Who are you? This is Debbie.
IT: Oh Im sorry wrng numbr. But wat r u doin tho?
ME: you're funny...I'm working.
IT: Im not tryna b funny. But, how old r u debbie?
ME: old...really old.
IT: Married?
ME: very
IT: Alrite. Im sorry 4 takin u away from your work. It was nice chatin wit u. And by the way, my name is Don.
ME: bye Don.

I figured this inane text "conversation" was over...then again with the "beepbeepbeep"

DON: U kno later maybe wen u get a break if u feel like chatting a little more y dnt u give me a buzz? If u feel like it. No pressure.

Dood, are you serious? Does this work for people? I told him I'm old. I told him I'm married. I USE PUNCTUATION in text message for craps sake. I tried to Google search the phone number but no luck. Did he really expect me to jump on this opportunity with someone who can't spell worth shit? C'mon! Are people really lonely enough to get picked up by a wrong number? Please tell me "no".

I Been in the Right Place but it Musta Been the Wrong Time

I could easily have been on a ship. The clang of the bell buoy rolling in the fat swell. The echoing of two fog horns, talking to each other from the spits at either side of the Channel. The surf hardly visible in the thick fog and only noticeable when it rumbled against the hull. In reality, it was just a walk on the north spit jetty and the water was thundering against the rocks underfoot. Slowly, the fog began melting away but not until after my walk.I took the day off work and was pleased to see a zero-tide was due at a reasonable hour. I headed out to the Breakers and climbed down into the rocks that make up the jetty, checking out the lifeforms normally hidden under water. Squatting down to see under the bigger rocks, I could see the beautiful purple and orange sea stars gripping the rock along side the anemones, drooping down like gooey wet stalactites. I could hear the chattering of the barnacles, searching the salt air for food that wouldn't be theirs until the water, once again covered them and brought them dinner. See the tiny little crab scurrying around the barnacles? Little devil was no bigger than my thumbnail and obviously too shy to allow a good focus. The low tide and fat swell brought out a number of surfers, many of whom entered the water from the jetty to save their arms from the paddle out to the break. As always with the surf, you have to be in the right place at the right time or the ride just isn't yours. Luckily, a few were in the right place at exactly the right time.

Hot Town, Summer in the City

While parts of the country have been dealing with triple-digit temps and cranking up the air conditioning, we who have chosen to live where 70 is a heat wave are asked to conserve. So we dutifully live in the dark while others luxuriate in their pools or in front of the air-conditioning. I've lived in the heat and have returned to my senses, thank you very much.

I grew up in a middle class neighborhood, built mostly in the early 60's. Nothing fancy but we did have curbs. No sidewalks; those were for the rich people on the next, newer street. We also did not have swimming pools. That, too, was for the fancy people above us. We had sprinklers and we had a Water Wiggle. For those of you not fortunate enough to have owned one of these entertaining devices, the attached commercial might refresh your memory. Looking at that commercial through the litigious eyes of a person who would, say, spill hot coffee in their lap then sue the restaurant that sold them the coffee, I see dollar signs. Through the eyes of a child, it was a blast. Oh sure, there were times it would THUNK you on the head or, better yet, wrap around your ankle then continue to ensnarl you like a boa constrictor until you could free yourself. Of course, as the hose got shorter and shorter, that put that vicious little smiling head ever so close to your face. You'd reach out and grab the hose trying to prevent it from smacking your face. Now THAT is a good time cooling off.