Now Norma Knits

Adventures in The Kitchen

A couple of interesting things happened in the kitchen this week that are very simple and healthy and delicious, and I thought I would share.

You remember Baby Betsy, the bay leaf cutting, right? I blogged about her several days ago. Dave is really right -- the flavor of fresh bay is just about to die for. Or to live for. Depending on your point of view.

Well, I got a quirky idea in my head the other night, and damn if it didn't work out and taste really heady and lovely.  You might want to try this at home.  I slathered a bit of olive oil on the bottom of a baking dish.  I chopped up a leaf of Baby Betsy (fresh bay leaf) very fine and sprinkled it on the olive oil.  I laid cod filets on top of this bay-leaf oil, rubbed the tops with olive oil, and sprinkled them with garlic powder. I thought of using fresh garlic, which I normally would do, but for some reason I thought in this application the subtlety of the garlic powder would be the thing.  Then I sprinkled it with sea salt and freshly ground pepper.  I put it in the oven to bake at 375F until it just flaked with a fork.  (I think it was about 25 minutes)  Meanwhile, I cut a couple of summer squashes into matchsticks, roughly chopped some broccoli, garlic, and swisschard, and sauteed them all together (in hot olive oil with a dab of unsalted butter) until the broccoli was bright green and the chard wilted - again seasoned with sea salt and fresh-ground pepper.  I put a big pile of this on the plate as a bed for the cod filets, et voila!

I know. I should have taken a picture. But I'm so not a food stylist. When I have taken food pictures, they are terribly disappointing. Even when they aren't burnt to a crisp.  Hee.

Another discovery I've made quite recently is fresh turmeric. Wow, is that stuff marvelous. My healthy foody store has been carrying it on and off, and when I see it, I buy it. My favorite way to use it is to chop it really fine (about a one-inch piece of it) and put it in an omelet, although when I was searching for a link for you, I found that one there, and it had not occurred to me to put it in a smoothy.  Will try that soon.

We are up here at the ends of the earth and it's positively amazing that a shop is carrying fresh turmeric. You have no idea.  But if you live in a metropolitan area, I bet you can find it in an Asian store, if your regular healthy store doesn't carry it.  Hell, you're probably all using it and I'm wasting my breath. But anyway.  I highly recommend it, and it's so.very.healthful. 

You Seriously Need to Stop Stalking Me

You forgot I was knitting this.  Didn't you?

Don't tell me you didn't.

Because I did. I plum forgot.

So if you didn't forget, I seriously think you need to stop stalking me.

No, really.

Go. Get a life! 

Either that, or come help me get my house organized. Either one would be good.

So yes........... um, like.......with the advent of spring in these here parts (although I was reminded at the garden center that it's merely fool's gold), I'm a wee bit distracted and kind of uninterested in the knitting and in the blogs. Please don't stone me. And don't be upset with me if you don't see me around much.  I'm all into garden planning and enjoying the sun and the light.

For anyone with even a glimmer of gardening interest:

I took a trip to the garden center yesterday to buy some really cool willow supports for the vegetable garden and some skinny bamboo stakes for the lilies that I'm expecting to emerge from the ground this year. I did tons of garden restoration and new plantings last fall (of course, if you remember I was knitting the Backyard Leaves Scarf, you will also remember this).  It'll be interesting to see if I can identify half of what I've got there, because it goes without saying, I did not mark much.  At that time, the priorities were amending the soil, getting rid of some things I hated, dividing things, and getting stuff in the ground before the deep freeze of winter and before I collapsed of exhaustion or wore my poor fingers to the bone.

I started some new seeds last night -- Penstemon (Penstemon barbatus coccineus), Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia speciosa) and Hollyhocks (Alcea ficifolia) from the lovely Bird and Butterfly Garden kit that Cara gave me -- and I put the Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa) seeds in the refrigerator, as they require a period of refrigeration before they will germinate. 

I haven't done any seed-starting for a few years now. I have a full complement of seed-starting equipment -- grow-lights, bottom-heating mats, wicking mats, etc., etc., etc., but one year I overdid it with everything.  And as overdoing anything is prone to do, it turns one off from the whole thing for a good long while. I also had a horrible infestation of fungus gnats one year, and that was enough to turn me off fully, as well. A lot of time, money, energy, and, as Sandy described it yesterday "hope in a sprout" all for naught. The gnats lay eggs.  The eggs turn into larvae.  The larvae eat young plant roots. You can probably figure out the rest of the sad, sad story.

So I will not be able to claim that my plants this year (the ones I start myself, that is) are fully organic. The seedlings will be started out using Osmocote fertilizer rather than liquid organic fertilizer. You see, fungus gnats really like the liquid organic. Forget that shit. I know my limits. But they'll be organically grown once they hit the ground in my garden and from that point forward.

All right. Backyard Leaves, the scarf, is now about to get some attention.

G is for Green - Wherein our heroine, being extremely weary of words, chose to post eight photos signifying the return of Spring to the North Country

From the Royal Post

I got a present in the mail yesterday.

The British version. Signed, of course. The artwork on the cover is stunning. Thank you, Martin!

P.S. Guess which transcript was ordered. So I'm busy. Reading. And reading.

Whatever Will I Do?

Today I find myself in a most unfamiliar predicament:  I am all caught up with my work and I have no deposition scheduled. I finished the torturously long hearing I was covering for the past two days, and the fuckers attorneys did not order a transcript. As some of you know, the transcript is the bread and butter of my income. My "appearance fee" -- that's my charge for putting on my pantyhose (well, that's what we used to say, back in the ancient days when Norma actually wore pantyhose) or to show up on the job and set up my equipment -- is paltry and rather insulting, actually. We are paid by the page for the transcript, and that is where I derive the bulk of my income.

My work is a source of great mystery to the average person on the street, and I also get quite a few queries about it through the blog. The uninitiated who enter the courtroom or deposition suite are always extremely curious as to what it is I'm doing over there. When judges pompously ask jury pools at the end of their service if they have any questions they can answer about "the judicial system," inevitably the only question people will ask is, "Yeah, what is she doing?  Can I see her machine?  How does that work?  How long does it take to learn? How much do you make?"  Most judges are friends of court reporters, value us as great assets, and are as interested in what we do as everyone else. But many a judge who is expecting to be able to wax eloquent about the judicial system has had his ego deflated by this turn of events. Of course, I rather like it. 

People hear "transcribe" or "transcript" and they think "type from audio tapes."  It's not that way at all.  Many moons ago, when I first started, we did type the transcripts from our paper steno notes. Ohmy, I remember not only typing, but using carbon paper. Yes, I am that old. Sometimes I would have 10 copies in the carbon paper, so if I made a typo, I had to erase each and every copy. Some people dictated their notes so that typists could type them from the taped dictation. Eww. It seems so antique now, but it was only 20-odd years ago.  And the first generation of computer-aided transcription -- Ohmygod, talk about antique.  There were so many steps, and the system took up an entire small room in my house. It cost $20,000, I kid you NOT, and I would put the thing on "translate" at night before I went to bed and the thing might be "translated" in extremely rough draft, by the next morning.  Then I would have to edit the thing and print it....on a dot matrix printer. Whoooooaaaaa, we thought we were state of the ART. Well, we were at the time.

Now I use a different kind of steno machine (although mine is close to 20 years old and they keep trying to sell me a new one for the tiny little sum of $8,400 -- or was it $4,800? I don't know. I didn't pay attention to the frickin' salesman's figures, because both of those figures just piss me off. Why do I need a new one?  Mine works just fine, thank you.  Although my model is no longer made, for a long time now, and therefore the parts for repair and maintenance are no longer made, either. I'm getting a little worried about it, actually. I'm probably inviting disaster by even broaching the subject.  But I digress.  Yes, we own all our own equipment. <----another question that is asked frequently.)

We are wired directly to a notebook computer (yes, our own) at each job, and as I'm writing my steno, it is being translated instantaneously on the computer, before my very eyes. The screen looks like this:

For the court reporters and scopists out there who I know will ask, I use Eclipse software, and I set up the yellow color in the color choices....black on yellow is supposed to be easier on the eyes, much like a legal pad or stenographer's pad of old, eh?

On the right of the screen is a facsimile of the paper notes coming out of the steno machine. That is the steno as it is written by me. On the left is the rough-draft transcript. As you might be able see, not very rough.

(you do know that you should click on my photos to make them bigger, right? I still get questions and emails saying things like, "Can we get a picture showing the pompoms?" when, say, the pompoms are very clear in the photograph, but what is clear is that someone didn't know the photos could be made bigger)

Roughness of the draft depends on the material, the person writing the steno, how tired one is, if one has a headache or another ache or pain, the steno theory one uses and how well one has fine-tuned it, the speed at which people are speaking, whether they are clear-speaking or not, and the dictionary one has built up. So me "doing my transcripts" means reading through the whole thing very carefully looking for mistranslated steno, things misstroked by me, untranslated steno, misspelled names, things I may have misheard and realized my stupid mistake later, and punctuation.  "Typos," per se, don't really happen unless I type something in on the computer keyboard and happen to make a typo.  It does happen, amazingly -- sometimes to my great chagrin, right on the title page. groan. But what used to take me a week to transcribe now takes a day or less. I'm a big fan of the new way of doing things. You'd think this would mean I'm making five times the money, right?  No.  Our expenses are always increasing, our equipment expense is HEEYUGE, our fees have been pretty stagnant for the entire time, we keep giving more things (such as emailed transcripts) for little or no extra money, and the only way one can make more money (at least in Vermont) is to take more, more, and MORE work. And there is only so much work available, and only so much the body can take.  Ask my hands, wrists, forearms, neck, back and shoulders today, after two days of hearing. 

Here is what the final product looks like, after it's printed, collated and bound by me: That's a picture of the big technical case that I was whingeing about last week. Pages = $$$.  Yay.

Thus ends the completely unintended tutorial about court reporting.* Geesh. I wrote the title of this post not expecting to write about that at all. What the hell kind of a derailment is that?

Anyhoo,  I was starting to say, I have nothing to do, and it's raining so my idea of a hike is not a good one (very muddy and slippery up on them thar hills), and although I will make it to a 4:00 yoga class if all goes well, I guess I will have to KNIT! Hells, bells.

I have a pair of socks to show you. Someday soonish, I imagine I'll have another pair just like it.

I have been generously gifted (thank you!) with lots and lots of Lopi in response to my request for it, and I have cast on yet another Dulaan sweater. This time I'm doing a stripey neck-down cardigan, child size 6-8. This is what I plan to work on today. I had to stop taking photos with the camera, because I was on my third warning that the battery was exhausted, so I snapped this photo of the first Lopi sweater I started.

I've decided to put it back on the needles and continue. After letting it percolate for a while, I rather like the stripes, and I'm sure there is a need for size 10-12, too. I feel rather annoyed with myself that I ripped back about four or six inches of it. Ah, well.

And before the camera completely died, I snapped this photo, as I could not find it at the Free Press website. It was on the front page of the Vermont section yesterday.

This is Vermont. Yes, this is news here.  And aren't we glad?

*if you're interested in more info about court reporting or captioning, schools for same, etc., please visit the NCRA website.

Moody

My husband, being unhappy with my mood swings, bought me a mood ring the other day so he would be able to monitor my moods. We've discovered that when I'm in a good mood, it turns green.

When I'm in a bad mood, it leaves a big fucking red mark on his forehead.

*rimshot*

I can't claim this was my joke, damnit.  But it made me and my husband laugh. Laughing is good. Thanks to Allison D. for this.

I'm covering a "petition to partition" case in court right now.

Yeah. *yawn*

It's exactly as exciting as it sounds.  Scintillating, even. At least that's what I told the attorneys. Norma = always good for a laugh. 

Look What The Stork Brought

Baby Betsy, the bay laurel.

Want a better look at her in her crib?

See her cute little diaper on the bottom? (no pun intended) It's made of cotton and wrapped in plastic -- against leaks, of course. But how about the blanket? Wool fiber with the unmistakable fragrance of Kool-Aid.  How adorable is this?

This is from the incomparable Dave. A week or so ago, he posted a photo of his gorgeous bay laurel Betsy (that would be Laurus nobilis for Laurie), and I said in the comments that I wanted a cutting. Little did I know what I was asking. Apparently these buggers are hard to propagate. I have a pretty green thumb, but by the looks of things, not nearly as green as Dave's.  My thumb is, like, faded celadon and his is, like, dark pine. 

Don't get me wrong. Dave did not propagate the mother Betsy.  *cough*  Isn't that just how rumors get started! No, he bought her as a young plant.

Anyway, when I requested a cutting, Dave (clearly a master plantsman in addition to his myriad other talents, which include attracting Russ*ian mail*order b*rides.) wrote me that he had attempted every which way he could think of, "including bottom heat, gelatin immersion, grafting, soft wood cuttings, hard wood cuttings, freezing, heat flash (like for pine cones), air layering and just about everything you can imagine with NO luck" to get this plant to propagate, and he asked what was my "secret." 

The answer:  ignorance = bliss.  I did not know the bays were so resistant to taking root. My research since that time has revealed that these are devilishly hard -- almost impossible -- to propagate. According to one source:

Take cuttings in late summer to early autumn. It is very difficult to be successful with cuttings. Choose ripe shoots between 9 to 15cm (4 to 6in) long using a knife - leave part of the main stem (a heel) on the cutting. Trim so that only three or four leaves remain and place the cutting in a small pot filled with potting compost. Label the plant and place it in a site with no direct sunlight (a cold frame is ideal). One essential is high humidity, so a heated propagator offers the best chance of success. The cutting will have rooted after one year or so.

Another source says it might root "in about nine months, assuming it doesn't rot first." Not terribly encouraging. I could have a BABY by that time. A real baby. A human being.

But Dave trusts me, apparently, and thinks I can do it. Or at least he's willing to let me try.  I have some rooting hormone, but I have never had much luck with that. I have consulted my gardening bible. It is almost always right*, and I will follow its recommendations -- except that it does not say much in this specific instance. (*"always right," except that it relies on chemicals more than I wish it did, and I ignore the chemical-oriented advice in favor of organic methods unless there is no choice.)

We will just hope that Baby Betsy has not been overly shocked by the cold in her travels and that I don't kill her through neglect or ignorance. I'll try my best to take care of her, Dave. I promise.

Dave, click out now.  The post is all done.

.

.

.Pssst! Is he gone? Okay, other readers, come this way.... sssshhhh, quietly, please. Baby's sleeping.

..

.

(I'm leaving now to place an order for a potted one, which I will then tell Dave I rooted from Baby Betsy. He'll never be the wiser. Hmmm. Do you think a plant dad can distinguish his own baby from another????) 

Lost

UPDATE:  Some people have been having difficulty leaving comments.  The message they get is "invalid URL" and the system will not allow them to leave a comment.  Will you please let me know via email if that happens to you?  I've reported the problem to Typepad, but it would be helpful to have the exact URL to report to them.  It's always something, ain't it?

All right, I'll just come out and say it: I'm addicted to Lost.  I got Disc 1 of Season 1 through our Blockbuster online plan and watched it Saturday. When I finished that one, I wanted to immediately go to the local Blockbuster and get the next one, but I waited until yesterday. As soon as that one was finished, I wanted to go get #3.  Holy crap, this is dangerous.  If I start liking TV, who knows what else could happen. Could reality TV be next? Nah.........I don't see it. That would be going too far. That'd be like.....I don't know, a confirmed anti-sock-knitter having four pairs of socks on the needles or something ridiculous like that. *ahem*

TV knitting over the gloriously laid-back weekend included about eight inches on the Lopi Dulaan sweater, but it seemed like it was turning out larger than I anticipated. I measured it and found out it had a 35-inch chest. Not the child's size that I was hoping for.  And I wasn't happy with the way the stripes were coming out.  So I took it off the needles and started ripping it out.  Of course, with all those stripes and yarn ends, I got frustrated, so it's sitting in a half-ripped-out heap in the family room at the moment. Not sure what I'll do with it next. I'm still picking the slivers out of my fingers from the Lopi while I'm deciding.

I also finished one of the tangerine Koigu socks.  It's very ....... orange.  And very pretty.  I should have cast on for the second one right away, but I gotta tell ya, I have owned this skein of blue/green/gold Trekking since last year's Rhinebeck festival. I've been dying of curiosity over how it will knit up, so I decided, life is short, I need to know what it looks like...now. So there it is, at the top of the photo. My reaction?  "Meh."  Not so fond of it. I've taken it off the needles and (is this a trend? a sickness? symbolic of something greater?) starting ripping it back, but something stopped me from continuing. So there it is, partially ripped back, partially knitted, not turning me on. I'd have been happier with the next orange one or picking up the crocodile one.

Truthfully, I don't really care. I just want to see Jack. My husband has a thing for Kate, so it's all cool. 

Google = God

And I said I was an atheist. Not anymore. I worship at the feet of Google. That is some intelligent design, baby.

How else would I have been able to figure out, at 11:16 p.m., that those attorneys and that witness were saying "Cryptosporidium oocysts" and not "Cryptosporidiumosis"?

Were they saying, "Barbara Friend's pulse GV system"?  No, they were saying, "Bob LaFrenz pulsed UV system."

Is it "columnated beam"?  Nope, "collimated beam."

Dussert or Dusaire?  (Dussert. There's that frickin' French again. Reminds me of the Macro Bear birthing position, as pronounced by a local obstetrician who used to live in Canada. He really meant McRoberts. Ugh. Cost me about six hours of research time for one word, right there. May I remind you, I get paid by the page, not the hour or minute or day.)

What the fuck is a millijoule?  (not in my unabridged dictionary, but it's in Google, baby.)

Is it Baccari? Nope. Bukhari. 

AWORF?  A wharf?  Nope.  AwwaRF.  What kind of an acronym for an organization has middle letters in lower case like that?  I ask you.

Fucking hell.  So that is just a little taste of my Neverending Transcript for you.

Sandy says my obit is going to be so sad.  It is going to say:

TOO BUSY TO KNIT

Yes, I really am up this late.  And yes, I do still like my job. Most of the time.

I know: The men in white coats will be arriving soon.

So in honor of the day when everybody's a little Irish (I'm 1/4 Irish meself), here's an Irish proverb for you:

IT’S NO USE BOILING YOUR CABBAGE TWICE

Right, then. Clearly the Irish came up with their proverbs after they'd got a few pints under their belts.

If you've had a few pints, you might like The Cluck of the Irish.

And finally, if you haven't read this yet, go and weigh in on the question, "Is the plural of Jesus 'Jesii'"?

Second Verse, Same As Similar To The First

Just scroll back through the semi-recent archives wherein I bitch and moan about being overworked and sick and overworked and underpaid and overworked.  Take out the "sick" and it's the same story. At least that's more than half the battle, right?  I want to shout out from the rooftops:  I FEEL GOOD!!!! 

I went to yoga class the other night and the heat in the room was extra-high and there was a big crowd.  Do you know when you're not sure if the stink to high heaven is you or the guy next to you? No? Well, truly I couldn't tell. I've been taking lots of funky supplements like aged garlic with brewer's yeast and Icelandic cod liver oil, and we were into heavy-detox sweat mode, so I really do think it was me. But I kept looking at the guy next to me as if to say, "Ewww, you smell awful." 

But with work at the moment it does seem that the harder I work the behinder I get. And we've got a houseguest, as well, so there has to be some socializing (That's something that's not usually on the menu. I don't know how to do it.)

We went out for a nice meal and I felt like I couldn't afford the time away from work. But it was worth it in the end. The glass of shiraz I had seemed to work nicely to make me concentrate, and I got a good number of those nasty, highly technical pages I'm working on completed. Did I say concentrate? Maybe it just helped me NOT GIVE A DAMN. I'm still way behind, but less behind than I was. Well, that is, until today (Thursday). I have two more depositions scheduled. That means I don't get to work on my transcript, and in addition, I will accumulate more pages.

But it's all good:

We got a little letter from the little college preparing us for the little bill they are going to be sending our way shortly. And if that didn't send me into cardiac arrest, I guess nothing will. They could actually probably think of a way to charge me for a cardiac stress test, now that I think about it, because in effect that's what it was.  Hm.  Someone alert the insurance companies, and alert FAHC that they have competition. Let's get them bidding against each other. Everybody wins. 

So, no knitting. But I am writing this at 10:47 59 p.m. 11:15 p.m., and I am about to close it out and go read The Conjurer's Bird 'til midnight. So there.

By the way:  Should I tell you my secrets? It's not such a big secret, but I get loads of comments and emails telling me I shouldn't stay up so late, that that might contribute to my headaches, whatever.  I think the comments are based on the time stamps on my blog posts. I will admit that often I do stay up that late, but I usually write my posts earlier in the day or evening and set them to post just shortly after midnight. It's just the system I have worked out for myself. Also, because I don't have a regular 9 to 5 type of job, I am usually able to sleep in until 8 or 8:30 a.m., so it's not like I have to get up at 6 in order to get to work for 8 or something. There really IS no schedule.  Some days I do have to be somewhere at 8:30, but the majority of them, no. Just call me a lady of leisure. One of those ladies who lunch. Yeah.

Oh, and P.S. I think I'm all set with the Lopi. Several generous souls have me taken care of in that respect. Because everyone has been so generous, I've pledged to make the garment a sweater, and it will be the sweater of all of us for Dulaan.  And I will use the oddballs left over afterwards for smaller items like hats and socks. I'll use every last scrap. It's that Yankee frugality at work again.