Day 2 Day radishes

October 13/ new address

 

Please go to new address.  Once there, book mark it.  

October 12/ Dear Radish

Dear Radish,

 
I hate my house.  I hate my house.  I incorrectly chose this house that I live in.  The roof has leaked,  there are tadpoles in the toilets, the walls have huge flakes that come off the wall.  I chose this house in a weekend.  What to do?

Anon.  

Dear House Sufferer, 

Tad poles in the toilet?  Need I ask if they turn to frogs.  Get out of that house straight away.   If you are moving to a new community, as in different state or even country, do not choose a house before you move.  First put yourself up in a grand hotel, and from that vantage point look for your precious new home.  

Now given the climate, decide in what direction you want your house to face.  Where is the sun?  Do you want to see it?  Do you want to see your neighbors? Neighbors are such a hit and miss.  Do not move next to a house with men in black suits standing in front of the house.  Generally this means there is a drug cartel member living inside.  Look to see where the snivelers are going to be.  Will the house be quiet or loud? Is the kitchen big enough for your husband to cook when you are flattened.   Flush toilets, turn on the faucets and the lights. Sleep on it.  Go back through the house.  

Ask your self if you are going to run this house, or is this house going to be running you.  

Fondly, Radish

 

Try to go to new site   http://day2dayradishes.squarespace.com

October 12/ New Address

This is a heads up that I will be changing my blog to here.  Just click on the link and when you get there be sure to bookmark the link.  

 

I will put up a post latter today.  Try out the new site.  

October 11/ Social Networking

Just got back from the movie, Social Network, This movie is about the developers of Facebook, and how it got started and the people that got stepped on along the way.   It takes place at Harvard and Palo Alto.  You witness  a concept grow from an idea worth zero to 50 billion dollars.  
What struck both Mr. Radish and I were the youth, drugs, sex, alcohol and sex on the campuses.  Facebook was founded on the premise that students could look for all of the above on Facebook.  People could look at your face, your relationship status and your interests, and determine if they wanted to date you.

While everyone drank when I was in college, and I had my share of  totally drunkenness, drugs were not a problem.  In fact, I hardly knew they existed.  Sex was a private matter,  generally taking place in cars. There were  the exception of the “loose” girls who went up to the top floors of the fraternity house.  There was not a plethora of them.  Guys at least had to stand in line.  Only some guys had their very own sex machines. 

I did like the movie and do recommend it.  The cast is great.   Mr Radish has had a lot of fun reading about all the lawsuits etc on the Internet.  But the two things, I started think about when I got home.    One, my grandaughter will start college next year. This movie is not kind to Stanford and Harvard.   I want my grand daughter to go to this movie with her mother and her father.  The second thing is that I realize why when I need technical help from a dot.com company, they do not take phone calls.  This is because they are drunk, drugged or having sex. This also is why they do not read beyond the first paragraph when you ask for help.   

October 8/ Dr. Brene Brown

 

Dr. Brene Brown who has a blog  Ordinary Courage.  She is a student of shame, joy, imperfection and she has a new book, The Gifts of Imperfection.  She has started a movement on the Internet on being Imperfect. Visit her blog and sign up for imperfection .

October 7/ Our Lady of the Rock Chapel

At the monastery of Lady of the Rock at Shaw Island along with the nuns, there is one priest.  I think over the five years that our group has gone there have been at least three consecutive priests.  The priest attends to two or three of the San Juan Islands as well as the nuns.  This year’s priest was from the Congo.  Short, round of face, and the color of the inside of a licorice stick when you take off a bite.

 
He came down to meet us on the Saturday night and have a glass of wine.  He arrived last April with his languages of French and one of the three Congo languages.  In the meantime he is learning Latin and English.  His English is understandable, and he has done well on learning the tenses.  I do not know about the Latin, but he seemed to move through it nicely through the mass.  The nuns love him.  He talked of the wars in the Congo, mainly for the control of their minerals.  He will return to the Congo, but his bishop wanted him to have the experience of America before he got on the church track to higher positions.  

Saturday night he tried out his homily on us.  
There were two farmers, and they each had a large plot of land.  One farmer went out daily with his hand plow and worked on a little part of the land.  The other farmer would go out to his plot of land and point his finger.  “Tomorrow, I will do this, and this, and this.  Day after day the one farmer took a little plot of his land and worked the soil with his hand plow.  The other farmer , went out and pointing with his finger said tomorrow I will do this, and this, and this.  Then our priest injected that this was an old African grandmother story.  In any case,  at the end of the month,  the one field was plowed ready to be planted and the other was not.   Father said he wanted this to be  a parable about faith.  Each day doing a little bit towards your faith.  Then a much greater faith comes.  

October 6/ Strategies for cooking working mothers

My daughter, Meredith, is wanting me to give her a 30 minute recipe each week. . .sort of a recipe for working mothers.  I can not come up with a new recipe for 30 minutes each week.  Barbequing in the summer is the only time that really works for me.  But I do have a lot of strategies that I have used over the years. 

I am back in saddle buying cookbooks.  I have a wall of cookbooks and the main reason that I buy them is to read them, frequently going to bed with one.  I recently purchased The Urban Pantry by Amy Pennington.  The book is almost too green for me.  As Mr. Radish said, if he ever hears the word “sustainable” it will be too soon for him. This is not her fault, the pretty woman is decades younger than ourselves.  But she does have a few good strategies. One of which is clean out your refrigerator minestrone. Hers takes hours because she cooks her beans, but I used canned cannelloni, and I had to cook up some pasta.  If efficient you can cook this in 40 minutes, really efficient, 30 minutes.  

For three:

Bring water to a boil, and add some pasta. Cook and drain.  Even better if you have some leftover pasta.

Take some onion, sauté it in a little olive oil,  add  six cups stock or water.  Bring to a boil.  Simmer ten minutes or more,  put in about 2 cups diced vegetables*  from the refer or garden.  Cook until vegetables are cooked.  Add a can of cannelloni beans, and the cooked pasta, cook about five minutes, and add a cup of fresh parsley  mixed with what you want.* tomatoes, carrots, onions, celery, zucchini, green beans, cauliflower, etc. etc.

 
Naturally this recipe can be increased.  Do not forget the salt.  Although I only salted mine at the table.  

Dear Radish/ Saying sorry

Dear Radish, 

The other day I think/know I hurt  a friend’s feelings.  I corrected her in front of others. She talks all the time, and she insisted  that she could hear God even when she was talking.  I,  even after sleeping on it, said to her the next day, what if God wanted  to speak through me to her. She would not be able to hear.    I know I hurt her as she would not look me in the eye.   

Upset, Sally

Dear Upset Sally,

Do you have any other friends besides these church friends? 

You speak directly to her in person and say you are sorry.  You look her in the eye, and say  you hurt her feelings and especially in the company of others.  Do not say you are sorry like those jerk politicians say when they do something like commit adultery or steal money from the Postal fund, and suddenly the press finds out.  Do not be a  Tiger Woods. Speak from the heart. 

Now do five loads of laundry, scrub your toilets, and make a chocolate cake, and be done with it. You just never know.  Maybe God did mean for her to hear it.  

As always, Radish

October 4/ Shaw Island

Where is paradise?  One place is Shaw Island, WA where Our Lady of the Rock Monestary is. Eleven women from our Episcopal church went to this Catholic retreat for the week end.    This monastery is Benedictine.  One of the aspects of the Benedictine Rule is hospitality.  They are to welcome visitors as if they were Christ himself.   Other aspects of the Order is that they are to sing the offices six times a day.  But they pray at  services and through day through their work.  I went to Friday Vespers, and Sunday Mass.
Rome does not send any money to them and they must make their own way.  They do this by raising special breeds of cattle, lamb and llamas, plus their little jars of mustard and tarragon vinegar.   They are pretty self sufficient.  They have a set of cars and trucks that they use to get back and forth to and from the ferry;  also  to pile the animals into.  The nun’s  doctors are either on the mainland  or a larger Island.   But always they have to take a ferry. One nun told me that they all carry Medivac insurance, because if someone has a heart attack, the helicopter is very close but it costs $10,000.00.
The women have two sets of clothes.  The black habit is for the church and their chanting, and being in public, and a denim one is for the work in the garden, kitchen or fields.  All the women are  well educated, and at least two there have advanced degrees.  There are about seven nuns and two novitiates. No one is under 50, and I think one precious nun was in her nineties.  She walked by me with her cane  and some vegetables in her hand.  I think she was less than five feet. She said going to her green house was about all that she could manage.  She was an inspiration.

  
There was a young vagabond man of about 23 who was working at the monastery  for a month.  For room and board he patched fences, built little buildings for them and likely helped them with the haying.  Our group got their herb garden back in shape for the winter.   Sunday morning we cleaned our rooms, changed the sheets, left a donation. We went home with peace in our hearts.