Stream of Kasha-ness

We did have kasha for supper last night. Bill said "Where did you get kasha?" It was in a tall glass jar in the kitchen waiting for this moment. I threw in some small white onions chopped into wedges. The kasha was mushy but good, maybe it wasn't toasted. Easting toasted raw kasha sounds like something I'd like. I've had crunchy grain at the beer supply store once. It was malted grain sweet and toasted. The proprietor said he used it on his breads. Bill hasn't made beer in about 15 years.

There isn't a grain or a bean I don't like and I always feel like slightly virtuous when I am soaking beans. I think I just like incubating things. At the moment the breads are rising and the 450 degree oven is warming the ice cold kitchen. I just rinsed and am soaking some kidney beans. Speaking of incubating, the pigeons or rock doves abandoned their two eggs in their nest under the eaves outside of our third floor bathroom window. I have threatened to reach out and grab them for an omelet. The neighbors three family house is an arms length away but now it has been over a month of egg watching so I won't. I have seen many rock dove chicks hatch as punk rockers and grow up to be conventional pigeon citizens. The hatching has been entertaining to visiting children and our dogs and cats over the 17 years of living here. I hope the doves come back. Maybe the leftover eggs are preventing new doves from coming. I'm sure there will be a wind or ice storm that will knock the eggs out.

The only food I don't like is liver but I only had it once as a kid and I suspect I might be okay with it now given the opportunity. We bought hobnobs at JobLot last night along with a box of three large bars of black currant soap. It is always fun to see what they have and their food section has grown to four aisles! Shopping there no longer feels like dumpster diving, not that there's anything wrong with that. We used to buy cases of Twinnings black currant tea from our corner market when we lived on the west end in Providence in 1988. Back then we timed our tea because after five minutes the tea tasted like pencil lead. I drank a pot of tea or more with milk and honey every morning for courage before I could venture out of the apartment to walk my black Lab, Ruby. That neighborhood was annoying because people were assuming we were just like them! It was a bunch of neighborhood re-vitalizers trying to run our life and get us to buy the run down dark green house we were renting. The porch had no railing and was overlooking an empty boarded up maroon house and an alley where we occasionally heard gunshots. NO WAY will I stay here! I don't think I ever fully unpacked and moved in. I had a studio in the CIC building and would bicycle back and forth while Ruby, a puppy, was like a loose lawn mower. She chewed holes in everything we owned. I remember buying a whole chicken one night and bicycling home with it in the dark while having difficulty steering.

We moved to Woonsocket in 1988 to squat in a tiny rubble construction mill on the Blackstone river as we tried to buy it from the little old man who was ready to sell it to us, as soon as we got financing and a bunch of people involved. The bank crisis happened and that was the end of that adventure. But it had been a year and a half of showering at the YMCA and cooking on a hot plate and sleeping on a single mattress mounted on a hollow door in the 10' by 10' red and black linoleumed fluorescent lit machine shop office. It was comfortable and with our two eighty pound dogs squeezed into the remaining spaces on the bed. We were warm! My brother in law Jeffrey slept on my layout table one Christmas eve when he was visiting from Spain. We even had one party there with people drawing in chalk on the cement floor and kids being pulled around the room on the industrial dolly. I remember taking a day to wash up after the party heating the tan enamel dye pot from college, full of water on the hot plate to warm the water. My vintage 25 dollar washing machine was hooked up to the mill sink too and I would hang my wet clothes on a clothesline in my studio.

I like living in a city neighborhood although I still fantasize about living in the huge firehouse on Cumberland Hill road or the one on North Main Street but luckily they are working fire stations as they'd be saving us if we needed it. I did live in a cottage in Carrborro NC and the landlady Frances Parks Lloyd set the house on fire! Luckily I was not inside. Her ex husband was the fire chief. She was diabetic and didn't always take her insulin. That's another story. Unfortunately for her she had a witness - a contractor waiting in a nearby driveway to start work. He saw her go in and then come out a few minutes later, the house ablaze. I was flown from Providence to North Carolina to the Hillsboro court house to testify. I wore a black 1950's pinstripe dress I called my Perry Mason dress that I had found in a thrift store--it had rhinestones on the collar. I still have it. The detectives brought in the floor of the cottage to show that the fire had been set. That was in 1982.

An owner of a vintage fire truck wants to hire us to be his vintage fire brigade band. So we are all excited about the song possibilities (we compose or adapt our own) and the wool coats and caps provided we're not playing in July.

The sky is orange. Dawn is delicious.