Happy Easter!

It's Friday . . .

How about a Musical Friday? Nina Simone singing I Think It's Gonna Rain Today. It isn't raining now but it's supposed to this weekend. I'm feeling in a kind of rainy mood though.

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Kay Ryan is the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. Therefore it seems appropriate to post one of her poems!

We’re Building the Ship as We Sail It
The first fear
being drowning, the
ship’s first shape
was a raft, which
was hard to unflatten
after that didn’t
happen. It’s awkward
to have to do one’s
planning in extremis
in the early years -
so hard to hide later:
sleekening the hull,
making things
more gracious.

The Future

This is kind of funny - The Future According to Google Search Results

Daffodil Hill

I went to Daffodil Hill yesterday. It's a family farm in Volcano, CA that is open to the public for about a month every year when the daffodils are blooming. They have about 300,000 daffodils planted around the 4 acre farm. It was a perfect day to go - not too hot! I went with my brother & sister-in-law who are always good company, it was a lovely drive and we saw lots of beautiful flowers. What more can you ask for!

If you'd like to see more daffodil pictures, you can go to my Picasa album!

Another poem

Late Poem

" . . . a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern."

I wish we were Indians and ate foie gras
and drove a gas-guzzler
and never wore seat belts

I'd have a baby, yours, cette fois,
and I'd smoke Parliaments
and we'd drink our way through the winter

in spring the baby would laugh at the moon
who is her father and her mother who is his pool
and we'd walk backwards and forwards

in lizard-skin cowboy boots
and read Gilgamesh and Tintin aloud
I'd wear only leather or feathers

plucked from endangered birds and silk
from exploited silkworms
we'd read The Economist

it would be before and after the internet
I'd send you letters by carrier pigeons
who would only fly from one window

to another in our drafty, gigantic house
with twenty-three uninsulated windows
and the dog would be always be

off his leash and always
find his way home as we will one day
and we'd feed small children

peanut butter and coffee in their milk
and I'd keep my hand glued under your belt
even while driving and cooking

and no one would have our number
except I would have yours where I've kept it
carved on the sole of my stiletto

which I would always wear when we walked
in the frozen and dusty wood
and we would keep warm by bickering

and falling into bed perpetually and
entirely unsafely as all the best things are
—your skin and my breath on it.

Cynthia Zarin

Musical Monday

Good advice for all of us!

Silent Sunday

 

Front Street in Sacramento, 1869. 

National Poetry Month

Since April is National Poetry Month I'm not going to choose a monthly poet. I'll just share poems throughout the month! I'll start with one by Louise Gluck, one of my favorite poets.


Lamium
By Louise Glück

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don’t all require
light in the same degree. Some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.

Cookbooks

I think I've mentioned before that I collect old cookbooks. I love the small leaflet style and have quite a few of them. Some were my mother's, some belonged to my grandmothers and the rest I've picked up at yard sales or on ebay. One of my long-term projects that I've yet to start on :( is to create a database of all of them so I know what I have. In the meantime I thought I'd share a few!

This was published in 1955 and has some tasty sounding cake recipes. I want the Orange Cake with Orange Fluff Frosting! Good thing I'm too lazy to make it!

This was from the 1955 Pillsbury Bake-Off where Mrs. Henry Jorgensen won $25,000 for her Ring-A-Lings (on the cover). It was her 7th try at winning - apparently persistence paid off for her! I have quite a few of the bake-off cookbooks. I know I have number 4 and I think I have 3. Those are the oldest, the rest are number 7 and beyond. I want to get them all out so I know exactly what I have!

Published 1957 (the year I was born!). The introduction says that Nestle's Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels are "a staple product found on the pantry shelf of the modern homemaker."

Oh phooey, I realized that I took a picture of the back of this one. Oh well. I have to confess that I love jello cookbooks. I have no idea why. I like jello ok but if I never had it again I'd be fine. I just like the recipes. This is an old one - it was published in 1928. It includes recipes for Cherry Sponge, Maple Walnut Jello, Prune and Raisin Jello, Paradise Pudding, Pineapple Rice Sponge, and Sea Dream Salad. The inside back cover has a coupon with an offer to purchase molds for .30 cents each.

Another one from 1957. It's only 27 pages but it includes lots of nifty sounding recipes! How about Pizza Boats made with a hotdog, cheese, chili sauce and biscuit dough shaped into a boat. One of the menus is called Company's Coming for Dinner: Chicken Patty Shortcake, Peas & Mushrooms, Citrus Salad, Sundae Short Pie and Coffee!

This one's a hardbound, spiral cookbook published in 1964. I don't remember where I got it but it's clearly been used. Some of the pages are sticky and dirty. Anyway it's pretty amazing the things you can do with Bisquick!