Vernal Ramble
25 March 2007 - 7 ניסן 5767 by Huw
Does lemongrass leave an odd taste in anyone else’s mouth? We’re talking like for hours, here… I love lemongrass. Makes good Thai. Makes good tea. But there’s this stuff it leaves in your mouth - and I’m not talking “aftertaste” so much as the oral version of “Gee, I smell you had garlic for lunch yesterday, huh?”
Spring is here - it’s beyond gorgeous. We saw a butterfly, a wasp and a bumblebee yesterday. Hmmm. That’s like a joke, huh? “A Butterfly, a Wasp and a Bumblebee fly into a bar and order a drink. But the Bartender says ‘We don’t serve Butterflies here’.”
There are flowers everywhere. And birds. And at night there are crickets and frogs. The windows are open. The smells… argh. I wish I could blog the smells! The winter’s death smell giving way to flowers and pollen and that mild, warm wet that is Spring.
In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin’s breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
Or, in this case, a middle-aged man.
My grandmother will be at Mom and Dad’s for Easter this year (eastern and western feasts falling on the same day). I’ll be visiting them… And because I’ve got all of the preceding week off, I’ll be travelling north again, to Hamilton, Ontario, albeit by a more direct route this time. There will, of course, be pictures!
In the fridge there is a second attempt at “spicy thai peanut butter cookies”. They’ll be put in the ove this afternoon. Will blog if successful. The last batch was tasty, but I’d not repeat it.
We’ve got some sort of wasp-like insects in the church lately, a half-dozen swarming around up in the apex together with occasional forays down amongst the people. Argh.
And I’ve put off my home tree-trimming too late for the early-warm weather, and the pear tree et al. are already blooming, so I’ll have to deal with the bees and such now when working on that. Argh too.
I don’t begrudge their stinging existence. Really I don’t. I just with they’d do it somewhere else. :-)
One of said wasps disrupted Communion today. It was harassing an allergic congregant, who swatted it away, and moved on to one of the servers holding the cloth, landing on the back of his head. When it started crawling around, he reached back to brush whatever-it-was off (we also still have ladybugs inside), and it went down under his collar and stung him. And one knew that everyone saw trouble coming, as the singing started to falter as soon as the thing lighted on him. At least he reacted better than I would have, :-) and we had a spare server to take his place. Now they’ve moved beyond annoyance, and they *must* go–certainly by the latter half of Holy Week and Pascha when there will be lots of people packed in with candles and all. If only we could figure out where they’re coming from. (We hates ‘em, nasty little buggins and their sting.)
I don’t know much about lemongrass, but I have discovered that Thai-influenced cuisine is excellent for avoiding starvation when you have so little money the ATM verbally scorns you when you request an account statement. Rice noodles and a sauce made from peanut butter and whatever vaguely Asian condiments one has accumulated over time (soy, Thai chili, rice vinegar, whatever…) make for a surprisingly convincing facsimile of real food. And it only costs about 4 shekels. I wish they had taught me this in school…
Michael - I go through phases where I live on that odd PB sauce! Rice noodles sound like an extravagance though! I usually just pour it over pasta.