What I Learned Today

I made my first pie the other day—and followed it with my second pie a few days later. They provided the perfect final destination for my nectarine tree’s bounty. There’s something satisfying about making a pie and the crust and using your own homegrown fruit! Now if only I’d grown some sugarcane, harvested wheat, and milked my own cow… that would have been my own pie!

Now, while making pie-filling is trivial, making a good pie crust requires a bit more effort. I didn’t have the vegetable shortening that the recipe called for, so I substituted butter. I baked the first pie on an infernally hot day, and as I was squishing the butter into the flour, it was melting all over the place. The result was a gooey, sticky dough. I rolled it out anyway, with the liberal use of additional flour, using 2/3 of the dough for the bottom and the last 1/3 on top as the pie cover. And it turned out great.

But I suspected that the dough wasn’t supposed to be quite like that, and consultation with other pie-making friends confirmed this. So when I rolled up my sleeves to bake the second pie, I incorporated two useful tips I’d received.

• Instead of trying to cut or mash the butter into the the flour, freeze the butter and then grate it with a cheese grater.
• Instead of flailing around with rolling pin and flour, and scraping the dough off the cutting board with a knife, chill the dough and then roll it between two sheets of wax paper.

Both of these suggestions worked brilliantly, even though I didn’t bother to freeze the butter or chill the dough! I’d had success with the cheese grater before, when making biscuits, and it worked perfectly here—faster and less messy than other methods, and the mixture I got out was the appropriate “mealy” consistency, actually needing the recommended couple of tablespoons of water that caused it to glom into a dough.

The wax paper trick is so fabulous that I wonder why it isn’t a staple of all pie recipes. (The one I have recommends rolling out the dough, folding it in half, lifting it into the pan (scraping with a knife if needed), and then unfolding it.) The wax paper not only saves you from having to add any flour (thereby altering the consistency slightly), but it is trivial to transfer the flattened dough into the pie pan (top or bottom) without breaking it; you simply invert the empty pie pan over the bottom crust, flip, and peel off the paper, and later flip the top crust onto the filled pie and again just peel off the paper. My wax paper worked a couple of wrinkles into itself, which left an interesting linear pattern on my pie crust, which I left because I liked it.

The end result with pie #2? A tasty, satisfying, even-thickness, flaky pie crust, with minimal effort.

Never content, friends are now giving me tips on cosmetic improvements, like crimping or fluting the pie crust edges, carving my initials in the pie top, or crafting a lattice. I’ll be sure to share any interesting future developments.

Henry David Thoreau was a fascinating character: intense, passionate, obnoxious, arrogant, and possessed of a lyrical mind. I cannot help but like the man, even as he exasperates. He was given to making jabs at society, the government, technology, law, his neighbors, and anyone who wanted to give him advice:

“I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.”

Yet he had his own heroes, and looked up to Emerson (as just one example) enough to follow the latter’s advice on variety of subjects.

Walden itself starts humbly enough:

“I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life…”

but quickly moves on to convey a sort of impatience with us as readers, lazy desperate folk that we are; if only we would wake up and realize the brilliance of his own plan, that we could live mortgage-free and debt-free by simply walking into the woods, building our own simple houses, and giving up meat.

Thoreau is most pleasurable to read when he is least snarky (he does love a good pun), as when advocating an open and curious approach to life:

“We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries each day, with new experience and character.”

or when he is exalting in the beauty of his beloved Pond and its surroundings:

“Sky water. It needs no fence. […] a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush,—this is the light dust-cloth,—which retains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.”

And I know what he means when he says he cannot spare his moonlight (and I know he does not mean that he dislikes people).

And he offers some other valuable ideas, aside from the musings on solitude and self-sufficiency that pepper Walden:

“… the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

“I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust.”

And most everyone’s heard the bit about why he went to the woods in the first place. But this quote perhaps is the one that will stick with me most, for now:

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”

We have so very many lives to live! As many as we choose. Kudos to Thoreau for being willing to try out his Walden experiment and, when he’d learned what he wanted, to move on. Everything changes.

Today I got to show off my ability to alphabetize. I’ve been volunteering at the library for the past two months, and I have encouraged them to give me any and all odd jobs that may need to be done (I do love variety!). So first I served as a greeter, helping patrons find their way around the library; then I stood around the computers and helped people log in, save documents, and print; then I learned how to mend books (repair spines, tape dust jackets, repair ripped pages); then I learned how to re-barcode books. They’re now discussing how to set up a special station near the computers for me, so that I can do one of these craft-tasks but be “on call” for any computer assistance that is needed, freeing up the reference librarians to do, well, reference things.

I had also offered to help out with book shelving. Apparently this task falls into a sensitive subject zone: how much work to allow volunteers to do versus work that is reserved for qualified librarians (or librarians in training). Initially I was told that shelving was for actual employees (called “pages”, which still cracks me up), but then today that’s exactly what I was asked to do. The volunteer coordinator said, “I told them that you have a Ph.D.”

I was first given a test cart of books to alphabetize. My trainer gave me tips that effectively translated to “I like to do selection sort, but let’s start you with insertion sort because it’s more straightforward.” Alas, when he checked my results, I had in fact mis-ordered one Babysitter’s Club book. I was however forgiven this mistake and then sent off to shelve the books.

It ended up taking me over an hour to shelve about 30 books. Juvenile Fiction was in a serious state of disarray. For every few books I shelved, there was a new one I discovered out of place that needed fixing. I was also “fronting” the shelves (bringing all the books forward to the same level for easy viewing). The amount of existing disorder was likely not attributable to the “pages” but instead to the happy, careless browsing of the under-10 crowd. I spent a good ten minutes on the Babysitter’s Club section alone (apparently I am not the only one who has made a mistake there). There are over 100 books in this series, most of which the library owns. I garnered great satisfaction from each decrease in entropy that I achieved. Really, is there a task better suited to my sensibilities? I already start twitching from the effort it takes to avoid doing this in bookstores.

As a side effect of this shelving, I now know the Juvenile Fiction section better, and can even respond usefully when children ask where the Horrible Harry or Magic Treehouse or High School Musical books are. Next time I may even be permitted to work with the Dewey Decimal System. Non-fiction, here I come!

(Book image by David Sillitoe)

I’ve dabbled a little in cross-stitch embroidery, but never tackled anything this spectacular. beche-la-mer was so inspired by a topographical map of the Moon that she decided to embroider it, in full color and texture. After just one month’s effort, she achieved her goal.

You can read more about the process at her blog:

• The project begins
• The project complete

I think it’s awesome that she chose the far side of the Moon to immortalize.

(Thanks for the pointer, Jim!)

Jim suggests that a Mars follow-on would be another fun project. I think this image, showing the Tharsis bulge, Olympus Mons, and Valles Marineris, could make a particularly fine work of art:

But oh, all those French knots! Maybe I’ll finish the sock I’m knitting first.

Traveling holds such a tingling allure, rising up out of the promise of new views, new experiences, and exploring into your personal unknown. I’ve previously written about the concept of vagabonding, an extreme form of travel that involves really living in some new world, not just visiting it, and often for extended periods of time. An isolated page in Vagabonding (by Ralph Potts), titled “The Pioneering Women of Vagabonding,” listed 14 women vagabonders, only one of whom I recognized. Neither did this book provide any information about them—which I took as an opportunity to do a little fun research on who these women were. Here are summaries of and excerpts from the first four on the list:

• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an accomplished author, philosopher, and feminist. In 1796, she published Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, based on a trip she undertook with her infant daughter, Fanny, to address business negotiations for Fanny’s father, Gilbert Imlay. Truly a courageous vagabonding experience, if ever there were one! An excerpt from one of her letters:
  

  “The cow’s bell has ceased to tinkle the herd to rest; they have all paced across the heath. Is not this the witching time of night? The waters murmur, and fall with more than mortal music, and spirits of peace walk abroad to calm the agitated breast. Eternity is in these moments. Worldly cares melt into the airy stuff that dreams are made of, and reveries, mild and enchanting as the first hopes of love or the recollection of lost enjoyment, carry the hapless wight into futurity, who in bustling life has vainly strove to throw off the grief which lies heavy at the heart. Good night!”

  She later married William Godwin, who among other things was drawn to her because of this same book. They also had a child together: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley), who wrote Frankenstein.

• Isabella L. Bird (1831-1904) is already a great favorite of mine; I’ve very much enjoyed her stories of traveling through Japan (Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, 1880) and Colorado (A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 1879). Born in England, she wrote about visits to America, Hawaii, Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Sinai, Persia, Kurdistan, Tibet, Korea, and Morocco. (Really, is there anything beyond her?) She is eloquent, fearless, curious, polite, adventuresome, and successful, and her descriptions of the scenery in which she finds herself are unfailingly, soaringly poetic. You can listen to two of her books read aloud: A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (delightful!) and The Englishwoman in America (I haven’t read this one yet). She also offers a description of evening:
  

  “The sinking sun is out of sight behind the western Sierras, and all the pine-hung promontories on this side of the water are rich indigo, just reddened with lake, deepening here and there into Tyrian purple. The peaks above, which still catch the sun, are bright rose-red, and all the mountains on the other side are pink; and pink, too, are the far-off summits on which the snow-drifts rest. Indigo, red, and orange tints stain the still water, which lies solemn and dark against the shore, under the shadow of stately pines. An hour later, and a moon nearly full—not a pale, flat disc, but a radiant sphere—has wheeled up into the flushed sky. The sunset has passed through every stage of beauty, through every glory of color, through riot and triumph, through pathos and tenderness, into a long, dreamy, painless rest, succeeded by the profound solemnity of the moonlight, and a stillness broken only by the night cries of beasts in the aromatic forests.”

• Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) was born in France, but by age 18 had embarked on solo adventures in England, Switzerland, and Spain. She later traveled to India, Tunisia, China, Japan, and others, but seems to have been most drawn to Tibet (and Buddhism). She first crossed into Tibet in 1916, was discovered and sent away, and then re-infiltrated the country in 1924, disguised, for two months.
• Mary Kingsley (1862-1900) found the opportunity to vagabond in Africa only after both her parents died, freeing her from caring for her invalid mother in England. She collected fish, studied cannibals, and climbed Mt. Cameroon (an active volcano more than 13,000 feet tall). Her Travels in West Africa is available for reading online. She begins with:
  

  “I succumbed to the charm of the [Gold] Coast as soon as I left Sierra Leone on my first voyage out, and I saw more than enough during that voyage to make me recognise that there was any amount of work for me worth doing down there. So I warned the Coast I was coming back again and the Coast did not believe me; and on my return to it a second time displayed a genuine surprise, and formed an even higher opinion of my folly than it had formed on our first acquaintance, which is saying a good deal.”

Reading their writings, it’s hard not to feel the pull to follow in these women’s footsteps, and enter one’s own foreign lands, wherever they may be.