Peaches and Kevin Skinner

Washington peaches are in! I went to the Federal Way farmer's market today (after getting my tire fixed and my hair trimmed), and what a beautiful day it is. Not too hot--around 75 to 80 degrees F when I went--with a slight breeze. I often make it to the market just short of closing time around 3 pm, but this time I got in around noon.

There is something wonderful about the bounty of a farmer's market. It's all laid out there for you to see on the tables, with the farmers or pickers themselves manning the outlay. It's so fresh, you can smell the scents of the fresh vegetables, fruit, and cut flowers, in addition to the lunch-time treats made up by local restaurants and cafes. The colors are gorgeous; today there were the first tomatoes I've seen of the season, huge heirloom tomatoes that go from the rusty orange red kind, to the ones that are more of a red with a purple undertone. Some of these tomatoes are huge, bigger than my outstretched hand. Some of them are the smaller ones on the vine, small enough to pop into my mouth so that when I bite down, the sweet-tart tomato juices flood my mouth all at once (a.k.a., a tomato orgasm). Glistening green zucchini, gleaming bulbs of onion, and corn! The first corn that I've seen at the market today, the candy-sweet kind with alternating white and yellow kernels. There were apples from Quincy on the other side of the Cascade mountains--Fuji, Pink Lady, Braeburns--big and beautiful, blushing red over light green. Deep red raspberries and dark purple blueberries. Bing and Rainier cherries (the Rainiers are my favorite--I eat them like candy). Flowers, from delicate fragrant pastel-colored sweet peas to huge white and magenta lilies.

And the peaches. Washington peaches. There is nothing better than ripe, fresh-picked Washington peaches. Oh, I'm sure the California ones and famous Georgia ones are lovely, but you know they're shipped not-totally-ripe so that they keep well in the stores, and the fact is, they just aren't as sweet and juicy as the local ones. I'm sure this is why buying local fruit and vegetables is simply better. You get them ripe, you get them fresh, and they are incredibly delicious. You can smell the scent of them, and I'm sure that lends a great deal to the anticipation of the flavor.

I have a peach now at my computer desk, and I have to have a damp towel as well, because this big luscious, golden-dawn-colored early New Haven peach is so dripping sweet, the juices just run off my chin and over my fingers, that's how good it is. There are few treats better than this on a hot summer day.

So when John comes home from his bike ride, he is going to be presented with a NICE dinner. Fresh clams from Quilcene Bay (from the farmer's market) just picked this morning, corn-on-the-cob, a side of Swiss chard (my newly discovered favorite vegetable), and toasted pita bread with either aioli sauce or sour-cream dill dip. Dessert will be a strawberry smoothie, made with frozen strawberries (earlier bought at the farmer's market, then frozen).

I can hardly wait. Yum!!! There is nothing like fresh fruit and vegetables in season.

Later: I changed my mind. Instead of pita, I decided to have crackers and dip instead, as I wanted to save the pitas for pita pizzas. Just the right size for the two of us. Also, I decided to combine the Swiss chard with some Russian pirogi dumplings, which is looking pretty good (I'm cooking them now. The pirogi, I bought at the farmer's market, and the gentleman there suggested that if I were to eat them later, I might want to fry them. (They are cheese and potato stuffed pirogi.) But...just by themselves? So I sauted some garlic, added chopped Swiss chard, and it is looking pretty danged good. I will report back after dinner.


About Kevin Skinner:

I'm not fond of reality shows, and the talent ones often pain me because of how the not-very-talented ones are booed so horribly and made fun of. However, I can bear to see the ones on YouTube, as I love discovering new talent, and I love seeing talent from ordinary people get a chance to shine. I especially love it when ordinary-looking people upset people's very surface opinions of them. Susan Boyle was one such, and Kevin Skinner is another.

I will listen to country music every once in a while--I only came to listen to it as an adult, and a middle-aged one at that. But Kevin Skinner made me want to listen to more of it.

I suspected that since he was the last one to audition for that day, he was going to be better than most. Indeed he was. He has a southern backwoods accent which I have never heard before, so I was intrigued (I love hearing different accents), and wore clothes that were casual in the extreme--stuff that I'd probably wear at home when gardening in cool weather. He talked a bit about his past employment and what he wanted to sing, and though I don't think Ms. Osborne was malicious when she laughed at his accent (she seems like a very kind person; I think she was more surprised and delighted than anything else, and you know, his accent was so very strong), I don't hold out much hope for some in the audience.

Yet, the audience seemed spellbound to silence when Mr. Skinner played and sang in his warm and kind voice, and with good reason. He did indeed play well and with grace and plain dignity. I read some of the comments on YouTube, and he did what all good singers and musicians do: he moved so many to sit by their loved ones and cherish their time with them. I saw more than a few from soldiers and sailors going off to war, and I think it must have been a comfort to them, as well as to those who wrote that their loved ones were ill or dying. And what better thing can an artist do than to uplift and give comfort to those in need of it?

Regardless of how Mr. Skinner does in the rest of the competition, he rose above petty expectations and gave the world some comfort and hope. So God bless you, Kevin Skinner, for gift of that moment.

Testing to see if I can blog via e-mail

Yep, it works!

Auburn Farmer's Market

Decided to go to the Auburn Farmer's Market today to browse the stalls. I could wish for a little more variety in the types of vegetables sold. No broccoli or cauliflower--I go to the Federal Way Market for that, as the Sidhu Farm (I believe they are from India--the parents have that lovely lilting accent, but their kids sound like your average middle-class American teenager) from Puyallup has beautiful, flawless specimens of those vegetables. But the Auburn market does have lovely Swiss chard, which I bought, and which I didn't see in the Federal Way market last week. Nice that Auburn has their market on Sundays, whereas Federal Way and Kent have theirs on Saturday.

The Auburn market does have nice-looking pasta, however, and so I bought some garlic lemon pepper angel hair as well as spinach fettuccine. I plan to use the garlic lemon pepper with perhaps a salmon alfredo or a seafood Italian stir-fry with a basil and oregano wine sauce. The latter is the hubby's favorite, as I use a good deal of garlic in it--fresh garlic from our garden. I have also used leeks on occasion from our garden when I don't have onions. It has a less harsh taste than onions, less of a bite. I like both tastes, so it doesn't matter much to me which one I use.

Of note also at the Auburn market is local organic beef (from nearby Covington), as well as honey. Two local, small bakeries are also featured, one of which specializes in European goods (Euro Market). And then there are the superb Gosanko chocolates.

I didn't get the chocolaes, but I just might get a few the next time I go there.

Later: I have never had Swiss Chard before, and now that I've cooked them, I'm going to get more--they're like spinach, but without the harsh edge on the tongue, and with a sort of nutty aftertaste--very nice! It went well with the garlic lemon pasta and seafood, very, very nice.

Repeating myself

I just noticed that I mentioned the shorter commute, etc. on Twitter as well. I guess I must be REALLY happy about it. :-D

It's good to have more time

...at home. I timed how long it takes for me to get to work, and it's only 10 minutes. Ten minutes! Compare that to 1 1/2 hours at the old job. God, it's so wonderful. I actually came home for lunch, did a few errands, and then went back to work. Then I came home, cleaned up a bit, then went to pick up the hubby from the airport.

I know, I know, it sounds so mundane. But all this time to do stuff. I can actually have some time to have breakfast in the morning, and then have some time to relax in the evening before going to bed.

I don't have to pay for parking, and I use less fuel. There's a Safeway nearby, so I can buy inexpensive lunch food if I forget to pack a lunch, instead of going to a deli that charges at least $9 for lunch. It's as if I got a raise, seriously.

So now I am going to devote some of that lovely time to writing on a regular basis. There are a few empty cubicles at work, so I can probably go in one of those to write. I'm happy.

New book cover!

The new book cover has arrived! I've posted it up on my web site. I rather like it--the colors are nice, although the gal holding the chalice looks a bit spacey. I don't know if she represents any of the heroines in Jo's, Mary Jo's, or Barbara's stories, but she doesn't look anything like mine. But that's fine. It's hard to represent different elements of an anthology, but I think this one works all right.

I'm looking forward to seeing the whole book. I've become used to seeing my books in the final stage, but there is nevertheless the sheer simple pleasure of holding the finished product of one's labors in one's hands.

I'll put up an excerpt once I see the manuscript in its copyedited form.

The Cows are Gone

I live on the hills just above the Green River Valley, and there is not one week that I don't go down to the valley and drive through lush farmland. Not far away is Smith Brothers dairy farm. When we first came to live in our house about 23 years ago, there were cows along West Valley Highway, in fact there were cows just down the street from where live. I loved seeing the little calves walking their wobbly way to their mothers every spring, and how they'd gain coordination over the course of a month, and run around the grassy fields.

The cows are all gone now.

I heard that most of the dairy farmers in Western Washington have either gone out of business or have left to go to Eastern Washington. Between the lower price of milk, and the extremely high cost of complying with environmental regulation these days, farmers can't afford to run their dairy farms any more. I'm not seeing as many vegetable farmers in the valley much either, which is too bad, because the Green River Valley is one of the most fertile river valleys in the world.

Instead, there are warehouses and strip business offices all along West Valley Highway, empty because of the recession. I'd prefer to see the cows grazing along the highway instead of the empty warehouses. At least there'd be productive use of the land.

Smith Brothers is still delivering milk, though--that's where I get my milk and dairy products. I guess they get their milk from the few remaining dairy farmers around, although I expect they most likely get it from across the mountains. It makes me feel sad to think that farmers are being booted out of the most fertile land in the world. There's something wrong about it being paved over and industrial warehouses being built over it, only to be left empty. Covered over wasted space, so that even passersby can't see the land any more.

I see this happening because I live close to these farms. But I don't think those with the biggest voting and political impact--people who live in the bigger cities of Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, and Everett--know, perhaps even care, that their local food sources are disappearing.

The weird thing? If we kept environmental regulations reasonable enough so that local farmers could afford to operate their farms, we wouldn't be having huge trucks burning tons of fossil fuel to transport our food hundreds of miles. The food would be available much closer to home.

Buy local. It's the sensible thing to do.

New Job, new story

Two good things:

I got a new job, MUCH closer to home, and will begin in a little more than two weeks. It's good because it's only 10 minutes to drive to work at worst, the parking's free, and the pay's the same. Compare that to 45 minutes (if all is well, as much as 2 hours if the traffic's snarled, or an hour and a half by bus) to where I work now, and parking fees that are anywhere from $12 to $18 per day. It'll add as much as 10 to 12 hours a week to my life, seriously. I'll use less gas. It'll be a freakin' savings. It'll be like getting a pay raise.

The second good thing is that I've sent in my edits for my Regency-set novella, "Miss Templar and the Holey Grail," and it was such amazing fun to write that I feel rarin' to go on something else (elements of the book: the Holy Grail, the Spear of Destiny, Sir Walter Scott, Almack's, and "where's Waldo?" Trust me, it works). I went through the different story ideas I've salted away over the years (as long ago as 1999!) in my "ideas" folder on my computer. I believe I will look over my demon book to see how that looks and maybe send that out. It's finished, but I haven't looked at it for years, so I will probably need to do some editing.

I actually found a number of books I began writing years ago, but left off writing. Some of them paranormal, a few of them Regency (which aren't published any more except as historicals). One of them that I really do like is "The Spy and Lady Nye," which I think is a fun title. I was reading it over, and it reads well, and I wouldn't mind continuing it. However, it's a Regency, no paranormal that I can think of, but I do believe I was intending to put a few explosions in it, as I haven't put explosions in a book before. Unfortunately, print publishers aren't publishing Regencies any more. I suppose it could very well become a Regency historical, but I truly don't want a duke as a hero, I have a baronet instead. Publishers tend to want dukes and such, but seriously, I am tired of dukes.

Oh, and then there are a few pages of a humorous Regency-set story regarding the children of Corday and Simone (of Night Fires). It looks like their son has turned out to be an experimental wizard.

Let's see...there is the fully-fleshed out plot for an Irish story set in 1798. That one is a keeper. Involves fairies, a werewolf, magical spells, spinning wool and knitting (my hobbies!), and the Irish rebellion. I might work on that one.

It's fun looking over these potential stories.

Great music and art are not expensive

My brother Dave has a nose for finding music that's very, very good. Back in the late 70's and 80's he used to listen to as much live music as he could, on the cheap, because he was a student at the University of Washington, and let's just say our family couldn't afford to pay but a small fraction of the cost of our college educations.

This meant that he hung out at as many places as would offer live music, listening to bands not too many people knew about, like The Presidents of the United States of America, or the Robert Cray Band. He used to bring out his own guitar and sometimes jam with this guy from The Presidents, a guy named Dederer.

What, you've heard of those bands? No kidding.

Now this is the thing: poverty-stricken college student Dave used to see all these bands--The Presidents, Robert Cray, and on and on--live on the income he had as a grocery bagger in a store, sometimes part-time store clerk. How did that happen?

Because he saw them before the rest of the world heard about them. Before they went big-time. Before Seattle became known as a place for music. And you know, these musicians were amazingly good before anyone heard about them, so good that Dave was sure they'd hit it big some day. He has a good ear for that.

Tonight, the Dear Hubby and I went to Mason United Methodist Church in Tacoma, not to hear a sermon or other churchy thing, but to hear the Northwest Repertory Singers, "a premier vocal ensemble whose mission is to enrich and educate the Northwest community through the promotion and development of choral music," as it says on their web site. With them were two choirs from local high schools.

I can just see the snooty lifted noses right now.

Trust me when I say that both the DH and I know about music; I've grown up around music, and the DH plays music himself--has since he was a kid. We've gone to concerts given by top musicians and seen great art in the Big City, and I mean New York as well as Seattle. We know good music and great art when we hear and see it.

So it means something when I say that I did brush away a few tears when I listened to the choirs, and shook my head in amazement at the pure young voices of the soloists, and the nuanced voices of the older singers. The Northwest Repertory Singers sing not only old-style classical, but they sing contemporary music, and tonight they sang music composed and arranged by people you never heard of (well, one--Loreena McKennitt), including one member of our own congregation, who composed a piece that used one of Rilke's poems for lyrics (in, yes, German).

It made me reflect that we've had a lot of talent pass through our little church. One international opera tenor; one baritone who sings for the Seattle Opera; one international, prize-winning Irish fiddler and his band; one composer who is shortly going to present his choral piece to the Pope; and a lot more singers and musicians both amateur and professional that you've never heard of.

And the DH and I--we got to listen to all of them for pocket change. $15 tops, or a donation. Or free.

I was thinking about this, about the Susan Boyle phenomenon, and about how new art and new voices are usually created first on the fringes, not where everyone's swimming in the big pool. And what people don't seem to get is that there is great music, great art, not in the huge arenas in the big cities, but in cramped little bars, tiny churches, out in a town called Ritzville in the middle of hundreds of miles of rolling wheatfields, in primitive tropical islands, and in the back streets where urban youth rap their way through their days and nights.

Music and art are everywhere, but most people seem to think you can only get the best in New York or Hollywood or Motown. But the truth is, it's as close as your neighborhood bar or church, and the funny thing is, you may see the same act playing at both. The last time I'd gone to a NW Repertory Singers concert, the Tacoma jazz band, Kareem Kandi was playing along with the singers, and I just wish there had been enough room for me to get up and dance, because I would have. Certainly, the kids there were up and dancing in the church aisles.

Some months ago, the hubby and I decided to try out a hardly-noticeable Italian restaurant on Auburn Way in Auburn, WA, and not only did we get delicious food but live music--a Hispanic guy who was playing amazing, amazing guitar--no cover charge. He was not advertised, no one announced his name, he just played.

Think about this, people. Sure, you go to New York or Hollywood or other big city, and you see all the great talent. But think, think! Where did they all come from? Were they all born there? No, not by a long shot. The vast majority came from smaller cities or towns, played their music first in churches or small bars that you probably hadn't heard of. Kurt Cobain didn't even come from Seattle--he grew up in Aberdeen, a small town in Washington, born in Hoquiam, an even smaller town.

The opera at the Pantages theater in Tacoma is a fraction of the cost of opera in Seattle, and you get to sit in an amazingly beautiful 19th century historic theater, too. Free parking if you go on the weekend. You can see some great music acts at Jazzbones night club and restaurant in Tacoma for a $10 to $15 cover charge, and the dinner they serve there is great and not very expensive either. Kids can go there before 8 pm and hear some great music as well. The Tacoma art museum--much less expensive than any in Seattle, except the Frye.

Looking at pulling in your belt in these difficult economic times but still want to hear some great live music? Don't bother with the big city--you can't afford it anyway, or at least I can't on any regular basis. Do a search for the closest church, a little bar or restaurant, and I am willing to bet you will hear some marvelous live music for a pittance compared to what you'd have to pay elsewhere. You may discover the next Pavarotti, Nirvana, or B.B. King, and these budding geniuses will be glad for the audience and the financial backing--as much as you can afford--that'll help them make it big, or at least enough to put a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Call me crazy, but...

Is there a similarity in voice between Susan Boyle here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI2DxkrgpgQ

and Madonna's here:

http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=075992620925

(Click on the song, "Sooner or Later.")

Or am I just kidding myself? When I was listening to Ms. Boyle's rendition of "Cry Me a River" I kept thinking her voice in that one sounded really familiar, and then I got a picture in my mind of Madonna as Breathless Mahoney singing in the movie, "Dick Tracy." I thought, did Madonna ever sing "Cry Me a River"? I don't think she ever did, and when I did a search, nothing came up of her ever singing that song. But I did find a short sample recording of her singing "Sooner or Later" in the Dick Tracy movie, and sure enough, there's a similar breathy sultry sound, a similar vibrato.

I don't think anyone's made that comparison, but I do think it's there.