Tales From The Coal Patch

Just because I need a change of pace once in awhile. Once when I was home visiting mom, I took her to a church spaghetti supper where we met up with her sister, my beloved Aunt Betty. This was at a time when I still couldn't really eat anything with onion in it, without immediately getting a migraine. Of course, the spaghetti sauce for the church dinners was chock full of onion. No problem, I said, you ladies enjoy your dinners and I will get something to eat later. This was not acceptable to Aunt Betty. She went into the church kitchen and whipped up a spaghetti sauce just for me.…

I've been taking care of my mother's finances for well over two years now, since she moved from the house she lived in all her life to an assisted living home. It still astonishes me, sometimes, that managing her paperwork requires more time and effort than managing my own. I wrote here about the sense of sadness and loss involved with something seemingly as straightforward as establishing a new bank account to make it easier for me to manage mom's finances. Loss accumulates and accelerates in one's lifetime. Last January [2008], we moved Mom to assisted living...today I wrote to the…

Arborvitae. It is snowing. Again. Snow, then freezing rain, then more snow with a vengeance that promises to keep on all day through to midnight. This is on top of the batch we got last Saturday. Philadelphia got 28.5 inches though round these parts it seems we "only" got about 17. It was enough to give the arborvitae quite a beating, even though we brushed and shook the snow off them as soon as possible. That snow last Saturday was light and fluffy. This batch is wet and heavy and the arborvitae are sad, sad, sad. Arborvitae, you will recall, are supposed to be upright, hedge-like…

Well, with a little pork. My mother used to make haluski, which is basically chopped cabbage fried in butter and served over boiled noodles. In the old days, the bubbas made their own noodles, but we used store-bought packaged. As I kid, I was not fond of haluski, but as my palate became more refined, I fell in love with the treasure that is fried cabbage. I like to eat haluski in the winter and so does Mr. Z. Lately we have been mixing up the basic, simple recipe. Tonight we got a little carried away. You could make this without bacon and it would still be delicious, but we started…

This is a story about making chicken soup completely from scratch, with local, organic ingredients, and starting with the carcass of a roasted chicken. The soup was very, very good, and looked like this: The chicken in question came from Pikeland Pastured Poultry. All the vegetables in the soup came from Landisdale Farm. But the chicken had to do a little traveling before its bones came to rest in my soup pot. I bought the chicken frozen at my local farmer's market. And then, on a trip home to see mom last fall, I took it with me for a dinner I had planned to cook for her and her…

I see erv is blogging some trash-talking shit about how she would "bet a large sum of money that [she is] the fittest person on SciBlogs". Bah! Kids and their puny bragging! I am totes the hairiest-legged feminazi on SciBlogs! AND the most out of shape! And furthermore, if you mess with me, I will absolutely make you sit your ass down and eat with me some of the sour soup (sauerkraut, water, mushrooms, barley) my mom used to make us eat every year on Christmas Eve, and count your blessings and be grateful. And then I will puke that crap up on your shoes. Not hungry? You'll eat what your…

When my mother was a little girl, my grandfather would drive her - almost all the way - to the dentist in Point Marion, PA. They would stop and park on the Greene County side of this bridge, and walk across to save the ten-cent toll on cars. Money was that tight. Mom always said it was bad enough to have to go to the dentist without having to walk across that bridge in the bargain. The bridge is just a few years younger than my mother, and you can see in the photo, which I took last week, that it is not in very good shape. It was already not in very good shape when I was a young girl…

Regular readers may know that my mother has been living in an assisted living home since January of 2008. Making the move to the AL home was agonizing for her and everyone in our family. Previously, my mother had been living still in the same house that she had been born and raised in, the house her husband, my father, moved in to when they were married, where all of us kids were born and raised. We had a difficult time finding a place for her - the choices are limited in southwestern Pennsylvania. And while my mother is fortunate to have enough money to afford some reasonable care, she…

Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad frets about committing physics heresy via a reading of Goldilocks and the Three Bears to his young offspring. The story may convey a useful moral message, but it's way off base on the physics. After all, the Papa Bear, being the biggest, presumably has the largest bowl of porridge. Here, the story fits what we know about thermodynamics, as the largest bowl should take the longest time to cool, and thus should be the hottest at any time before the porridge bowls reach thermal equilibrium with their environment. The description provided of the other two bowls…

This past Friday morning, as per my usual routine, I sat down to read the Philadelphia Inquirer with my coffee and breakfast. And I came across an article that nearly made me vomit back all that delicious Toy Cow Farms blueberry yoghurt I had just spooned down. I refer, of course, to the piece on the "quaint Victorian home" shared by Darla, Chelsea, and Coco Puff. Their dwelling has a cedar-shake roof, vaulted ceilings, and hardwood floors, heating and air-conditioning, moldings and casement windows, drapery with valences, and fanciful wallpapers. At Christmas, music from the RCA Victor…

Whenever I go back home to see my mom, I usually spend some time visiting with her cousin D., who lives in the house across the street from my mother's house. D. has spent a good many years taking care of his elderly mother, my great-aunt. I have known D. all my life. As a child growing up, he was one of my elders. As a young adult, coming back home now and then for visits, I often didn't know what to say to him when our paths would cross, thinking I didn't have much in common with him. Now we are both intimately involved with the care of our elderly mothers and this brings us a…

It was snowing again last night as I drove back from the assisted living home to the house my mother was born in, and it was cold - very cold. It was supposed to get down to around 10° F, with windchills as low as -5 to -15. My route took me past the bathhouse (third picture down on that page) my grandfather used to use before and after his shifts in the coal mine. Mom and I had been talking about Pappap and his miner's pick-axe. I thought about our conversation as I drove by the bathhouse. I tried to imagine what it would have been like, on a winter's night much like this one, to be…

Technically, this is my 500th post at Scienceblogs, although I believe that includes a few I wrote but never published. So, 500 within a slight margin of error. Let us now celebrate this arbitrary milestone!!!!! And now, on to the post. September Scientiae is up at Lab Cat's place. At the end of the summer, the Scientiae Labor Day BBQ was held at Lab Cat's place. After eating mounds of delicious food and drinking a few good drinks, our women scientists came together around the fire holding the last of the marshmallows over the coals for a last bite of smores and summer. Ella…

The theme for August's Scientiae is transitions. All month long I thought I would write something about the transition that was forced on me some time ago, to which I am still not quite adapted: from happy participant in the paid workforce to migraineur on disability. But as it happens, I've got other things on my mind. The major transition in my life this past year has been helping my mother move from the house she lived in all her life to an assisted living facility. It's not just been a transition for her; it's affected the whole family. The very notion of a stable "home place" has…

At my mother's assisted living home, the staff helped my mom and other residents put in a small garden in the spring. Onions, featured in the planting, are now being enjoyed by all. Mom says they are past that first delightful small green onion stage; the bulbs are getting bigger, and the tops thicker and stiffer. Which takes her back to childhood, and some creative onion engineering. Image originally uploaded on 3/8/08 by Matter=Energy Mom says when she was young, and the onions got to this point, they would cut off a top to use as a bubble blower. They would cut off the top end of…

My hometown sits in the Southeastern Greene School district of Greene County, itself the very southwest corner of Pennsylvania. And therein, I believe, is born my perennial confusion of east and west. When I lived in Kansas, my hometown nevertheless often seemed to the west of me - because Greene County is in the west (of Pennsylvania), right? When I think of driving home from Philadelphia, I know I am going to southeastern Greene, hence I must be traveling east. It's always a fun time, that moment when you have to choose which direction on the turnpike. These days, with distance driving…

Alice recently told her ethnic story over at Sciencewomen, and asked others to join in the attempt to "displace white from the default position". Of course lots of comments ensued; her follow-up is here, and well worth reading. In the follow up you can find links to others who took up Alice's challenge. I've been lying around with headaches most of last week and this one, thinking about what kind of post I might write as part of Alice's challenge. I have to admit I find the task quite daunting, which gives me some new insight as to why some of my fellow Sciencebloggers were loathe to…