Bird retrospective

In 2007, we took a trip to Vancouver Island. While we were waiting for the ferry in Port Angeles, Washington, we admired the huge cormorant statues by Duncan Yves McKiernan, and I wondered if I could make small versions of those elegant forms on the pottery wheel. When we got home, I gave it a try. I was five years into clay, and still pretty new to altering thrown forms. I ended up with a bunch of phallic abstract birds that looked like this:

(This was also before I learned how to photograph my work, and I thought a blue tablecloth would make a satisfactory backdrop for a formal shot. Oof.)

In the intervening years, I have made hundreds of chickens...

...and hundreds of penguins,...

...and learned a ton about clay and design and googly eyes.

Today I recalled those not-so-long-necked wheel-thrown-and-altered cormorants of yore, drew upon everything I've learned in the meantime about making wheel-thrown-and-altered chickens and penguins, and came up with a pair of dinosaurish herons.

These birds are standing on chopstick legs, but I'm thinking once they're fired, I'll make metal legs for them--or bribe my beloved engineer to make metal legs for them--and stick them in the garden.

Pink platypus bike wreck therapy

So about that pink platypus...

Looking back over this blog, I see that I never posted about S's bike wreck last November. The first day of last fall's Durham County Pottery Tour, while I was busy selling pots, S decided to go for a nice long bike ride. About half an hour after he left, he phoned to say "I'm fine, but I got hit by a car and I need a ride home."

Potter P was also showing at my studio, so he held down the fort and I left with E to pick up S. The very apologetic driver who had hit him was there, and the EMTs were there, and S was there still in one piece. "I used the judo moves I learned [38 years ago]," he said, "and curled into a ball, so all the impact went into the [totalled] windshield and I just rolled over the car." The EMTs said "he's refused an ambulance ride to the ER, but you should take him there anyway." E and S spent the next several hours in the ER, while I went back to the pottery sale. S had a shoulder injury that would take a few months to heal. His bike was totaled.

Bent wheels

Cracked carbon frame

Trashed seat

Cracked helmet

Miraculously intact S

This is all to explain that last month, when S phoned about 30 minutes after setting off for a Tuesday evening ride, and he said "I'm fine, but somehow I wrecked my bike and I need a ride home," E and I were pretty sure we'd be heading to the ER with him again, even though S said "nah, I don't need to go."

We knew this not only from November's accident, but also from a wreck S had had in Oregon in 1992. That time, I was waiting for him to pick me up after a rehearsal. He was chronically late, so I wasn't surprised when he didn't show up--until our next door neighbors arrived and said "S had an accident and we're taking you to the ER." They didn't say "S is OK, but he had an accident and we're taking you to the ER," which was a valuable lesson in how not to convey information after an accident. I was deeply relieved, when we arrived, to find him conscious instead of dead. Turns out he had crashed while speeding down a hill outside of town. He hitched a ride home and wanted to take a shower to clean himself up, but he didn't have any Band-Aids, so he went next door to borrow some, and they took one look at him and took him to the ER, where the doctor spent an hour plucking impacted gravel out of his bloody arms and knees and face before sending him into a shower ("you won't be able to move tomorrow, so you should shower now") and bandaging him up. They wouldn't send him home until I promised to wake him up at 4am and check his pupils.

So on that Tuesday evening this past July, it was off to the ER once again.

Here are some things we learned: (1) if you're dehydrated after a bike ride but the ER folks don't want you to eat or drink until the doctor says it's OK, then your blood will be hard to draw, and what they manage to get out of your veins will be gummy and will probably clot before they can run the blood tests, so they'll have to draw blood a second time. You will need to explain to the nurses that bicyclists need to drink and eat after riding. (2) Folks who are in the ER with blood dripping down their legs will stand out to the non-dripping patients, but not to the staff; you have to wait your turn just like everyone else, but at least you'll give the non-dripping folks something to watch and talk about. (3) If the triage nurse is also a biker jock, he might give you different--i.e. less informed--i.e. wrong--advice about treating abrasions than, say, your knowledgeable dermatologist would. Your dermatologist would tell you to cover wounds with petroleum jelly (no need for antibiotics unless the wound is infected) and a bandage; ER biker jock nurses might tell you to keep the wound uncovered so it dries out faster (and the scab cracks every time you bend your knee).

Helmets save lives. Note that S's instinct to smile for a photo was still intact.

Drip drip drip. S wanted us to save his shredded bloody bike gloves, but we threw them out.

On the plus side, S's cat-scan looked great. On the minus side, the reason his arms hurt so much was that he fractured the radial heads of both elbows. The ER doc referred S to an orthopedist and sent us home.

I called Ortho the next day to make an appointment. "Our next available appointment is August 12," said the cheerful Ortho scheduler. "That's not going to work for us," I said. The Ortho scheduler actually sounded surprised and asked why. "Because today is July 18, and he has two broken elbows, and he needs to know what to do" I said. Ortho scheduler said, "Well, you've been referred to Dr. X, and that's the soonest Dr. X is available." "Can we see someone else?" I asked. Really. I had to ask that. And Ortho scheduler had to check with the doctor first and then get back to us. Thus it was that S saw a physician's assistant the next day.

On the plus side, S's fractures were the best of all possible elbow fractures. No surgery, no casts, not even splints. He was to wear his slings in public to deter hugs and handshakes, until he no longer needed to deter them, and beyond that, elbow and arm movement were encouraged.

So you can see why, ten days later, when we arrived in the Truckee Safeway, and S came across the stuffed pink platypus at 50% off, he bought it and spent a few hours every day squeezing it to build his hand strength back up.

And that is the story of how a stuffed pink platypus ended up on a log watching the ocean on Point Reyes.

About that last blog post...

I'm in NC, and S just phoned from Germany to say his mom really liked the idea of that lemon cake we made, so could I give him the recipe; and I told him where to find the recipe and didn't even think to say "WTF dude. PIE. It's called PIE." Sigh.

Coming to terms: Torte, Kuchen, and pie

Big news: after 29 years of loving S and learning about him and Deutsche Kultur, I finally understand the difference between Torte and Kuchen, and why certain Germans insist on calling American pie Kuchen (even though they shouldn't).

The epiphany actually came last July, while we were visiting H in Steinebach. I was too busy hiking to blog then, but we finally had an opportunity to take up the question again this past Sunday, when we hosted Kaffee und Kuchen [und Torte und pie] for the neighbors on our block. Guests arrived at 3:45 p.m. We defined terms at 4:00 p.m., then ate the evidence.

Distinguishing Torte from Kuchen: an introduction

We started baking on Saturday afternoon. I asked S if he had a good recipe for Biskuitteig (no, not biscuit dough--sponge cake). He responded, "What are you making? Kuchenboden oder Tortenboden?"

Kuchenboden is cake base (literally, cake floor); Tortenboden is torte floor. Kuchenboden is often a layer of Murbeteig--shortbread dough--topped with a layer of Biskuitteig--sponge cake batter. In Obstkuchen, that Kuchenboden is topped with delectable fruit, often with pectin or gelatin or melted jam on top of the whole shebang to make it shiny.

Here are two photos of non-shiny Obstkuchen I made last summer in Steinebach. There's a layer of vanilla pudding between the cakes and the fruit, and maybe a thin layer of jam too, but I can't remember. There is not any Murbeteig under either Biskuit, but they're both clearly still Obstkuchen.

Thus our definition of Kuchen begins with Obsthkuchen. You use Kuchenboden for Obstkuchen.

Tortenboden, in contrast, is the Biskuit that you would put at the bottom of a Torte--and in the middle of Torte, as many times as you want, and on the top of Torte, if you want it there too. That is what make Tortenboden fundamentally different from Kuchenboden. (If you are thinking that the big difference is Murbeteig, think again; our Bavarian Kochbuch recommends Murbeteig under both Kuchen and Torten.)

Torte is almost always made with layers of sponge cake, with filling in between and optional stuff on top. Kuchen is just one layer of cake--sponge cake if you want, but any other kind of cake is fine too, including Murbeteig all by itself--with optional stuff on top.

Did you catch that?

Torte: layers of cake with stuff in between and optional stuff on top.
Kuchen: one layer of cake with optional stuff on top. 

In between, Torte. On top, Kuchen.

For Americans, layers of cake with stuff in between is called "layer cake." A layer of cake with stuff on top is also cake. It's all cake. Torte is fancy cake.

So in the context of making Obstkuchen and Torte, the question "Kuchenboden oder Tortenboden" is a weird cultural thing--a sort of cake phoneme--because the cake parts of both Böden are THE SAME THING. Bake a batch of Biskuitteig for Obstkuchen, and voilà (or schau hier): Kuchenboden. Layer those babies, and voilà/schau hier: Tortenboden. Indeed, the recipe we eventually chose for the Kuchen describes the result as Luftigt-leichter Kuchen, perfekt für Torten--"light-as-air cake, perfect for Torte."

I double checked with S. "Did you really say 'Kuchenboden oder Tortenboden'?" "Yes," he said, "because they're different."

Perhaps he was thinking ahead to the Nusstorte (nut torte) I was going to bake. While you probably wouldn't add nuts to Biskuitteig for Obstkuchen, they're certainly fair game in plain ol' non-Obst Kuchen (which remains Kuchen forever and a day unless you layer it--then BAM, Torte).

Here's a photo of a hazelnut-almond Torte I made in Steinebach last summer (and a photo of H helping). The four layers were laced with Kirschwasser and filled with cherry jam, chocolate cream, and sour cherries, then covered with more chocolate cream.

Exceptions to the rules

Rules wouldn't be rules if there weren't exceptions. Here are four:

1. Tiny Obstkuchen are called Obsttörtchen, because why the hell not? The -chen ending is a diminutive suffix--little fruit tortelets--and because adding -chen changes the German o to an ö, let's change the vowel in English too and call them tartlets. This is allowed only because they're cute, and probably necessary because Obstkuchenchen is too hard to say (but Obstkuchlein isn't, and it's not like being difficult to pronounce stops other German words from existing). Note that chen in Kuchen is not diminutive--it's Kuch-en, not Ku-chen. I'm going to take a stab at a pun by observing that a diminutive cow might be a Kuhchen--but no German would ever pronounce Kuchen (coo-hen) and Kuhchen (coo-hyen) the same way, so no German would ever find that pun remotely funny.


2. Linzertorte, already controversial in its own right, is actually Kuchen, according to the in between / on top rule. It's also Kuchen according to the Torte-is-usually-sponge-cake rule. It made me very happy to discover, browsing through the index of our Bavarian Kochbuch, that the Bible of Bavarian cooking calls it Linzerkuchen.


3. Sometimes Kuchen can have an extra layer of Teig on top--e.g. a layer of Murbeteig on the bottom, with apples on top, and then another layer of Murbeteig on top of that. This is called gedeckter Apfelkuchen--covered apple cake--rather than Apfeltorte, because it lacks the sponge cake that is essential for all Torte (except Linzertorte, which is really a gedeckter Kuchen, and Obsttörtchen, which are diminutive.) I hope you are following the logic here.


4. Finally, S says there is Bodenlose Kaesekuchen--bottomless cheesecake--which, as you might guess, has no base layer of cake and is entirely made of the optional stuff on top. To confirm, we looked it up in the Kochbuch, where it is called Quarktorte ohne Boden--cheese TORTE without bottom. S says "this is a dumb cookbook."

Why certain Germans insist on calling pie "Kuchen"

Pie has its very own word in English, because unlike Torte and Kuchen, pie is NOT cake. Even assuming all pies had double crusts--which they don't--pie is NOT gedeckter Kuchen, because pie crust is neither cake nor shortbread.

Pie does consist of a base layer of non-sponge flour-based dough, with stuff on top, so it is more akin to Kuchen than to Torte--but that does not make pie "cake" any more than saying humans are "birds" because humans are more akin to birds than to boulders. If German can borrow words like Spaghetti, Toast, and Computer from other languages, it can borrow Pei.

One more rule

Our Bavarian neighbor F arrived on Sunday eager to talk definitions. He suggested that Torte filling almost always involves cream. This would explain why gedeckte Apfelkuchen can never be Torte, even though it's layered. It might squeak past the "usually sponge cake" rule, but the lack of cream keeps it out of the realm of Torte. This might also explain why bottomless cheesecake might be considered Torte, given the creamy dairy content.

Well, you might think that. But if you Google gedeckte Apfe..., oh dear: the search brings up both Apfelkuchen and Apfeltorte, and the photos look identical. To that, we say, "perhaps it's a regional difference" (which is our way of saying "uncle! We give up!").

Test your understanding

After lengthy discussion and Q&A with our neighbors, we gave them a quiz. Can you tell what's what? Answers and recipes are below.

A (left); B (right)

C

D

E

Answers:
A: Pie. This is pie. It is not cake. It is pie.
B: Obstkuchen.
C: Pie. Why is this so difficult for you?
D: Obstkuchen.
E: Trick question. There's visible cream and there's presumably cake underneath that, but you can't tell if it's Torte or Kuchen without cutting it open. But by process of elimination in this particular context, you know it has to be Torte. (If this question were on the ACT/SAT, the test-writers would call Torte the "best answer," which would annoy teens who understand nuance and complexity.)

The sacrifices we make for the sake of cultural understanding

Another view of the sacrifices we make

Aha! Layers! Torte!

Appendix: Recipes

We had a gluten-intolerant guest, so we made everything gluten-free. We used gluten-free flour for pie A and Obstkuchen; we purchased gluten-free pie crusts for the pies; and we used ground hazelnuts and no flour in the Nusstorte.

A. The recipe for this lemon custard pie is here. Until last year, it was the only lemon custard pie I had ever made (and I had only made it once.) It's silky-creamy and lemony-tart, with a nice lightness.

B and D: Here's the Biskuitteig recipe I used for the Obstkuchen. This recipe is enough for two Obstkuchen: bake all of the batter in one springform pan and then slice it in half to make two discs. The recipe calls for Speisestärke (starch). In Germany, that would be potato starch. We used cornstarch, but next time I'd probably just add a little more flour. We thought the cake was too sweet, so next time we'll reduce the sugar. S and E were in charge of the topping: a thin layer of jam, a layer of vanilla pudding, artfully arranged fruit, and a pectin glaze on top.

C. Oh my. Oh oh my. This is "Shaker Lemon Pie." Images kept popping up when I was trying to locate the recipe for pie A. Shaker Lemon Pie is stunningly beautiful, startlingly delicious, and super tart--but beware the sugar high. I found assorted recipes online and combined them into this: 5 unpeeled organic lemons (recipes ranged from 2 large to 6 small; some specified Meyer lemons, but we used Eurekas), sliced very thinly with a mandoline, and seeds picked out; toss gently with 1.75 c. sugar, and macerate until sugar dissolves (this takes only a few hours--recipes all said 24-hours or overnight). Stir in four beaten eggs and pour into an unbaked pie crust. (A few recipes said pre-baked. We tried pre-baking the gluten-free crust and it cracked, so that the filling oozed under the crust and glued parts of the crust to the pan. We didn't pre-bake the crust for A and it tasted fine, so next time we'll skip the pre-baking.) Bake at 325^oF for 50-60 minutes. (Recipes said 450^oF for 15 minutes and then 375^oF for 20 minutes, but we had another pie to bake at the same time that required gentler heat. Slow baking worked beautifully.)

D. See B.

E. Here's my version of Nusstorte, adapted and honed over several years from a base recipe by H. Despite all the steps, it's easy to make if you have an electric beater.

Expressions of love with a nod to the Woozy Works

At the beginning of December, while S was at work, I hunted down some hazelnuts at the local Fancy Grocery Store. My purpose: to surprise S by baking Zimtsterne (cinnamon stars), the German Christmas cookies that most remind him of home. I toasted the nuts in the oven, then rubbed them between my hands so the bitter husks would drop off. This left my hands delightfully warm and soft, but used up all my baking energy for the day. I swore E to secrecy and hid the toasted hazelnuts in a container in the back of a cabinet. After two weeks, I pulled out the container, thinking I would make the cookies that evening--that rather than the cookies themselves being the surprise, the act of having found and toasted hazelnuts and kept them secret until I could bake the cookies could be the surprise. But S came home before I started baking, our evening turned to other things, and the nuts became snack food rather than cookies.

This morning, I finally pulled out the digital kitchen scale (because Zimtsterne are German cookies and therefore all about mass rather than volume). I supplemented the 239 remaining grams of toasted hazelnuts with 61 grams of raw almonds, weighed out 300 grams of powdered sugar, let four eggs come to room temperature, got sidetracked by a phone call, became further distracted by a text message from E about SAT tests, and took a break to gripe with friends about standardized testing. 

Then I pulverized the nuts in the 20-year-old Cuisinart with the recently recalled defective metal blade, separated the eggs, started whipping the egg whites, and then remembered that the recipe calls for setting aside 2-3 tablespoons of meringue which is NEVER enough. So I added an extra egg white, approximated an appropriate extra amount of powdered sugar, dumped all the sugar into the whipped egg whites WITHOUT sifting and all in one fell swoop rather than ONE f*&%ing TABLESPOON AT A TIME, beat for maybe 5 minutes max instead of 20, added the juice of half a fresh squeezed lemon (the recipe calls for "a few drops"--which, while quaint, are undetectable when facing off with two cups of powdered sugar and five egg whites), beat again, and set aside one cup of meringue.

Then I combined the ground nuts with the meringue and two teaspoons--meh, make that a tablespoon, close enough--of ground cinnamon. The dough was super sticky, as always, with a tendency to spread, as always (even when the recipe is followed to a T), so even though I love my family, I had zero interest in dusting the countertop with ground nuts and/or powdered sugar and pressing out the dough to cut it into stars before gently placing each star on a piece of Back Oblaten (thin flour-starch baking wafers that keep sticky batter from adhering permanently to baking sheets and of which we currently have none). Instead, I tossed a sheet of parchment paper on a baking sheet, spread out the dough, baked it for 20 minutes, took it out of the oven, spread the remaining meringue on top, put it back in the oven, and thought of my great great grandmother Jenny, of whom my grandmother Woozy reminisced fondly:

She analyzed her housework. It was clear that the children had to be fed, even though she was sure that a good and just world would find a more sensible way of doing it. There were some choices. She could mix eggs and flour, salt and water into a dough, hit it firmly on the table a hundred times to develop the gluten, place it in the center of a white tablecloth and gently with the backs of her hands stroking the underside of the dough, run around the table for an hour stretching the most gorgeous strudel dough on the block, and then shell and chop the walnuts, peel and chop the apples, soak seed and chop the raisins, mix in sugar and cinnamon, spread on the dough and dot with butter, roll and bake, but she said it not only killed the whole day but you ended up with a dead head too, so she put a bowl of apples and a bowl of nuts on the table and read Paradise Lost instead.

Pictured below: Zimtsterne 2016, cooling and waiting to be sliced into bars, which rhymes with "stars" and will have to do.

Third generation is the charm: reflections on cherry pie and slide rules

When I was a kid, my siblings and I would ask my mother to tell us bedtime stories about her childhood. "Tell us a story about the Olden Days," we would say, night after night, and she would oblige with sepia-tinted tales about life on the Indiana farm or in Hyde Park, Chicago.

The stories that stuck with me most were wonderful adventures foiled by tragedy, like the time my mom and a friend decided to make a cherry pie, so they picked the cherries from the tree on the farm all by themselves, and they made a pie crust all by themselves, and they filled up that pie crust and baked that cherry pie all by themselves, and then no one in my mom's family would even taste it.

(Years later, when I brought up the story and wondered how her family could have been so callous, she said "oh, didn't I mention that the cherries were full of pits and worms, and I'm sure we didn't add any sugar, and we made the crust from flour and water and it was like grey paste? I didn't even eat any of it." I had somehow deleted all of that in my childhood indignation.)

Then there was the story about when my mother, as a little girl, got her very first helium balloon. This was after World War II, because during the war, all the latex was going to the war effort instead of to wonderful frivolous things like balloons. As she was crossing the street, with the balloon tied safely around her tiny wrist so it wouldn't float away (or so I imagined), that wonderful very first balloon popped. Popped! O cruel fate!

(Years later, after I had a child of my own, my mother observed that unlike my own son, my siblings and I had always cried and cried when balloons popped, and she had never understood what was up with that. I asked how we could not have cried, in light of her poignant story of post-war balloon loss. "It was just a balloon," she said.)

One memorable story was less tragic and less sepia-toned, at least to me if not to my mother. As I remember it, the story went something like this: "once upon a time, long ago in the olden days, when my sweet-sixteen birthday rolled around, I hoped for the usual things a 16-year-old girl wants for a birthday present. A pearl necklace, or a new bicycle, or maybe a pony. Something pretty or fun. But I didn't get a pearl necklace, or a new bicycle, or a pony. Instead, my parents gave me a slide rule."

Perhaps I am mis-remembering, and I didn't hear that story until my own sixteenth birthday was approaching. In any case, because my mother has a sense of humor, I too received a slide rule when I turned sixteen: a six-inch long ca. 1936 Keuffel & Esser Ever-There No. 4097D in a slim leather case. Fifteen months later, when my sister had her sixteenth birthday, she too was gifted with a slide rule ("only because it was tradition," she confirmed last night via email).

My sweet-sixteen Keuffel & Esser Ever-There No. 4097D

I am proud that the coming-of-age slide-rule tradition began with women, passed from my mother, as the first recipient, to her daughters. Family lore does not record whether my mother's brother received a slide rule for his sixteenth birthday, and as far as I know, my older brother's slide rules were not affiliated with his sixteenth. (Yes, "slide rules," plural. He reports, "I think I was given more than one because I think I lost more than one.")

My mother broadened the tradition to include menfolk and rites of passage other than birthdays when I married S. She felt it was important to properly welcome my husband into the family, so she gave him a big, fancy, vintage engineer's slide rule with a sturdy leather holster to call his own: a 14-inch long duplex Engineer's No. 1510 in fashionable plastic-coated bamboo, made in Japan, presumably by Relay/Ricoh, for the US market, no date.

S's hefty Engineer's No. 1510 is more than twice as long and twice as thick as my diminutive Keuffel & Esser Ever-There. Surely there's a Master's thesis waiting to be written about slide rules and gender.

My father was a math professor. He owned a slide rule and knew how to wield it. When I was young, I enjoyed playing with its smoothly gliding bars, but by the time I was old enough that a slide rule could have helped with school math, the world had begun its shift to TI-30s and wasn't looking back.

Neither my sister, my husband, nor I ever learned how to use our slide rules. My sister's probably migrated to my parents' attic decades ago. For the past 20 years, S and I have kept ours in their leather cases, tucked away in a desk drawer (his) and in a box in a closet (mine), unused.

Until last week. My son, just thirteen months shy of his sixteenth birthday, is learning about logarithms at school.

"Logarithms?" I said brightly, when he told me. "Let me show you something."

I opened the top right-hand drawer of our roll-top desk and pulled out his father's marital slide rule. We removed it from its holster, and E and I went online to learn how to use it.

"This is SO COOL," E said, as he figured one square root after another to within two significant digits; "when the power goes out after the Zombie Apocalypse, I can calculate numbers without a calculator! Let's do another!"

He asked why we had such a fascinating object. I told him about his grandmother's sixteenth birthday, how she had wanted a pearl necklace or a new bicycle or a pony, and how she had gotten a slide rule instead, and then I fetched my own sweet-sixteen slide rule.

"That is sooooo cute," he said, picking it up.

"Yeah. It's not as fancy as papa's though," I said.

"But it's really cute. It's so small!," he squeaked in admiration.

I put an arm around my delighted child, pointed to the two slide rules on the table, and quoted from the Woozy Works: "Someday, son," I said, "all this will be yours."

And thus it came to pass that a questionable gift for a bright-eyed girl on the cusp of womanhood almost sixty years ago is finally bearing fruit, two generations later. This metaphorical homemade cherry pie will not just be tasted: to paraphrase Sir Francis Bacon, it will be chewed and digested. And thirteen months from now, my son will receive a slide rule to call his own.

"One day, son, ALL THIS WILL BE YOURS." My grandfather Mitch shows my uncle Bob the splendor of the junk in the barn; from Woozy Works: The Nearly Complete and Mostly Unexpurgated Writings of the Blue Spanch (1996).

Men still in Lederhosen*

Same men in same Lederhosen, 27 months later.

*Note that men have slept, eaten, showered, attended work/school, changed clothes, and otherwise gone on with their lives between photo sessions.

Marital strife

Driving to work this morning, I heard on the radio that money is the number one topic couples argue about. A quick Google search yields assorted articles on the internets that confirm this claim, including some that say fights about money are a decent predictor for divorce. Sitting in my car, I thought: S and I are not a typical couple.

We rarely fight about money. In fact, neither of us can think of a time in the 24 years we've been in love that we've fought about money. We didn't fight about money when we were freshly-married graduate students relatively strapped for funds, nor when we had real grown-up jobs and started making major life-altering decisions about expensive things like raising a baby and buying a house. We've been lucky: our parents and jobs got us through our undergrad degrees, and jobs and assistantships got us through grad school. We've been lucky never to have had to make tough choices about whether to eat or pay bills.

We're also lucky that after 24 years together, we still make each other laugh, we still share fundamental values and goals, and he's still ravishingly gorgeous (his crows feet still make me swoon, and his delicately greying sideburn tips are ooh la la). We've negotiated a reasonably healthy balance between work, family, and household chores. He works a regular 24/7 academic job; I have a flexible mix of part-time and freelance gigs. He covers kidcare when I'm at work evenings and weekends; I cover kidcare during the week. He loads the dishwasher; I unload it. He tunes up my bike once a year and inflates the tires as needed; I organize every aspect of our socials lives. He loves his family by making snazzy breakfasts; I love my family by making snazzy dinners and angel food cake. He takes out the trash; I generate it. He dances with the vacuum cleaner; I take the cats to the vet. We're a Myers-Briggs match made in heaven.

Nonetheless, we do fight. Early on, we had relationship-threatening difficulties with time. Given our backgrounds, that came as a surprise to both of us. He's German, yet he defies all stereotypes about German punctuality. (He might explain that punctuality is a Prussian virtue, and he's not Prussian, he's Bavarian.) I'm U.S. American and grew up with a mathematician dad who back-calculated, based on traffic density and wind speed, precisely when we needed to leave the house in order to reach our destinations on time. My inherited obsession with punctuality and S's lack thereof almost broke us up on multiple occasions, until I realized he was operating on European Metric Time (100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour) and I was operating on American Standard Time (60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour). I put together a conversion table and made copies for both of us, and it's been mostly smooth sailing since then.

Our challenges are different now, so many more years into our lives together. The most frequent cause of our most turbulent arguments these days? Antecedentless pronouns.

S is a wonderful man who comes from a long line of wonderful men who are genetically predisposed to have conversations inside their heads while thinking outsiders can follow along. He knows exactly what he means when he talks about it, them, and that, while I'm usually clueless. I realize I sound like I'm blaming S for our strife, but I have evidence that it's us, not him: our son carries on the patrilineal tradition, and he and S can have five-word conversations consisting almost entirely of antecedentless pronouns, conversations of which I understand virtually nothing, while they clearly understand everything and take action accordingly.

Consequently, S and I often fight about that. Literally, that. Not whatever that refers to, since that as often as not has no clear antecedent, but that itself. Presented with an antecedentless pronoun, I'll bristle and ask, chillingly, "What's that supposed to mean?" And S hears not "beloved, to what antecedent did you intend the pronoun that to refer, and did you perhaps forget to state that word out loud?" but rather "how could you possibly say such a thing?" We're usually well into a heated argument before the lightbulbs go on and we realize we're yet again fighting about a missing antecedent, at which point I usually say something rude like "[S.I.G.H.] If you're going to f*ing use pronouns, you need to give them f*ing antecedents."

To my knowledge, no studies have been conducted that indicate arguments about antecedentless pronouns are predictors for divorce, so I think our relationship will probably survive this (as well as this).

Instruction:

Instruction:: A Found Poem from the Tag of S's New Bike Saddle

Instruction:

The saddle makes different conditions
that depend on the weather and ridders
weight by using

The new saddle will be quite stiff,
after ridding 500-800 kms, it will
become more supple and as like your hip

The leather saddle should be
maintained by leather grease
when it be exposed to the sunshine
and rain

Or it is advised to regular
application leather grease about
once a month after ridding so
that can extend saddle's life

please use a waterproof cover to
protect it when the saddle is not using

Lessons learned

Friends and I are firing pots in the wood kiln at Cedar Creek this weekend, which means I'm up late tonight organizing and prepping pots. Near the end of the firing, we will spray into the kiln a solution of soda ash that has been dissolved in boiling water. The sodium in the soda ash will react with silica in the clay bodies, creating sodium silicate (glass), effectively glazing the pots. Soda ash is a flux, so it will also lower the melting point of any glazes that we might use to decorate the pots, hopefully creating beautiful glaze effects.

To prevent the pots from glass-fusing to the kiln shelves, we will glue little balls of wadding under the pots. Wadding is a mixture of kaolin (clay), alumina hydrate, and grog (ground bisqued clay); it doesn't react to soda ash. We also use wadding to keep lids from fusing to pots--and depending on how we stack things, also to keep pots from fusing to pots.

Enter my four prototype Moebius Diatom Boxes. I can't separate the two Moebius strips with wadding because there's no way to prop either up on wadding without impractical and precarious balancing acts. Moreover, if the two strips end up touching one another, they'll likely fuse together at the contact point.

So I surfed the internets and found a strategy: coat the edges of the two Moebius strips with wax that has alumina hydrate dissolved in it. After the wax burns off, the remaining thin layer of alumina hydrate will protect the clay from the soda ash. I found assorted recipes for this special wax, most of which can be summarized as follows: "use, oh, a spoonful or so alumina hydrate in, oh, half a pint or so of thinned wax."

So I bought a little container of wax and added some red food coloring to distinguish it from my unadultered wax, and then I added two teaspoons of alumina hydrate. Turns out alumina hydrate doesn't dissolve in cold un-thinned wax, so I had to give the container a nice warm bath this evening. Also turns out that pink wax is next to impossible to see on pink bisque ware. I subsequently added some blue food coloring, but it turns out that purple wax is also next to impossible to see. It also turns out that it's next to impossible for one person alone to wax the rims of two clay Moebius strips without the patient assistance of a Moebius-Strip Bearer (a.k.a. S), for if the wet wax on one strip touches the surface of the other strip, it will (in theory) leave a deposit of alumina hydrate on the pot, preventing soda from reacting with the clay in that spot.

Anyway, it was a pain in the patootie to wax the things, which suggests they will remain very rare items indeed. Now I'm going to bed.

Prototype

Announcing another breakthrough from the Non-Orientable Manifold Lab!

I said I was going to call it a "Bagel Box," but that's so 2010. It's a new year, and "Möbius Diatom Box"* has a better ring to it (so to speak).

I took advantage of Saturday's warm weather to throw some tori.


Then it rained for two days, so I moved the tori inside to dry; and then winter returned, so after I trimmed the tori outside in the subfreezing night air (brrr), I moved production into the dining room.

I carefully marked and cut the first torus, going for an angular look.


Silly me. Those 90^o angles locked the two rings together with impressive efficiency. I had to smoosh the clay to get the torus open, and both rings ripped a bit.


Oh well, back to the drawing board.

I carefully marked and cut the second torus. No sharp angles this time.


Incidentally, in preparation for this experiment, this weekend I tried (and failed) to slice four bagels into interlocked halves; the near-lack of bagel holes left no room to maneuver the knife. I can now say it's significantly easier to cut a clay torus this way than a bagel, but the rough edges stand out more in the clay than on the bagel, mainly because a linked-sliced bagel is almost entirely rough edges, whereas a hollow clay torus has the potential to be lovely and smooth all over.

Despite some jagged lines, the slicing achieved the desired outcome.


It turns out that this kind of box is a two-person job. My beloved engineer patiently held each ring in succession while I tidied up the other ring's rough edges.

Of course, no clay math toy is complete without holes.


*George Hart calls the cut surfaces "two-twist Möbius strips." Although that second twist means the cut surface isn't really a Möbius strip, I'm sticking with the name "Möbius diatom box."

Men in Lederhosen

Luminarias

S thought coat hanger wire was too inelegant, so he bought some shiny new copper wire and made candle hangers (thanks for the tip, R!) for two of my impractical hole-filled pots, just in time for the Art Walk tomorrow. Not only do the candle hangers make it much easier to get a lit candle inside the pots, they also make these previously non-functional hole-filled Objets d'Art--poof!--functional. Of course, sitting on a shelf looking interesting while collecting dust is a function of sorts, but there is some urge to "be of use" (as Wilbur Larch would say). I can thus make hole-filled narrow-necked pots to my heart's content, knowing that potential buyers will appreciate them a smidge more because they shine prettily in the dark ("oh, that's what they're for!"). I just have to remember to keep the pot necks wide enough to accommodate a tea light.

My friend Adrian finished taking photos of my pots last week, and he's put together a snazzy slide show. It's a little shocking (in a good way) to see professional photos of my work, since the images I usually see are the cheapo snapshots I take using a piece of white posterboard as a backdrop, which doesn't exactly flatter the pots. Check out Adrian's slide show here.

Fourth of July hybrid cousin cake

Today is the Fourth of July, which of course means we're celebrating S's birthday. Germany doesn't give much attention to the occasion, so S appreciates the effort the U.S. puts forth every year.

No birthday would be complete without birthday cake. For S, I usually make a hybrid of assorted cakes, yielding what you might call a cousin to the Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Cherry Cake). But while the respectably admirable Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte probably gets picked no later than third for the dodgeball team during recess, and usually lands a solid supporting role in the school musical every spring, the handsome Hybrid Cousin Cake is both team captain and the musical's protagonist, and still manages to get straight As and be so wittily gracious about it all that you have to like him even if you're a little jealous.

Today, the Hybrid Cousin is manifested as a four-layer toasted-almond sponge cake, each layer doused in rum, with raspberry jam and rum-soaked Ranier cherries atop the first and third layers, and Helen's whipped chocolate ganache atop the second layer and frosting the whole cake.

Helen is S's mom. I couldn't remember what proportions to use for the ganache, so I thought, "I'll just call Helen and ask." Of course, there's no better way to flatter and please your mother-in-law than to inquire about a recipe you want to replicate for her golden son.

My own mom did the same thing a few decades back, when she called my dad's mom, Zelda, to ask for her recipe for tongue. Personally, I think one reaps more direct benefit asking about chocolate ganache, but dietary habits have changed since the 1960s. Anyway, family lore says Bubbie Zelda's recipe was to "just put it in a pot with the ingredients" and cook it until it was done.

Helen said basically the same thing about the chocolate ganache: you just put the chocolate and the cream in a pot together and--

"How much chocolate?" I interrupted. "One of the big Milka bars, or one of the small ones?"--(the standard units of chocolate measurement in Germany)--"And how much cream?"

"Oh, I don't remember. Half a liter of cream, and then add the chocolate. Don't use chocolate with anything in it," she added, deftly evading the quantity question, "no nuts or anything like that."

So I winged the proportions: a pint and a half of heavy whipping cream from Maple View Farm in Chapel Hill, and one Swiss dark chocolate bar and two Swiss milk chocolate bars from Whole Foods. Melt, chill, whip.

Incidentally, another way to score points with your German mother-in-law is to make an impressively tall sponge torte. "My cakes never rise that much," she said a few years back, when we were visiting and I made three tortes for a party she was hosting. She nodded with approval at my egg-white-whipping-and-subsequent-gentle-folding abilities. Of course, the wise daughter-in-law knows to simply smile politely and not mention the two extra egg whites she snuck in as backup.

S's brain

S had an MRI this morning. His doctor wanted to make sure the ringing S was hearing in his ears last month was due to having slammed into a lake while wind surfing rather than due to anything neurological. The final diagnosis: a damaged (now healing) ear drum.

We're out a few hundred bucks, but we have some swell images of the inside of S's head. I always knew he had a beautiful brain, but it's nice to have some visual proof, since people always tell me I'm biased when I say my husband is gorgeous. There are some pretty creepy images in the mix too. In all, I think it was a wise evolutionary choice to cover all this stuff up with skin and fur.

Wired up and ready to go

When I called the tech guy at L&L and told him what happened that fateful night, he said "that sure sucks" and sent us a free Brick Repair Kit. It took us a few tries, but we finally succeeded in patching the kiln floor. For all of you trying this at home, here are two helpful hints: (1) don't confuse "cement" with "grout," and (2) don't believe the instructions: wait way more than 24 hours for the cement to cure, and help it along with a heat gun.

Being married to an engineer who will spend upwards of two hours lovingly designing, cutting, smoothing, assembling, and mounting an elegant, weather-proof brass bracket outside the kitchen window to hold a cheapo $2 thermometer--the sort of engineer who defines "vacation" as visiting friends and relatives and repairing their broken doors and bathroom fixtures--has its advantages when it comes to making busted kiln floors look as good as new.

With the helpful upper-body strength of a few neighbors, we finally set the kiln walls atop the repaired floor last weekend. Our electrician came this morning to finish the wiring. He started two weeks ago, but was leery of mounting an outlet until we had completely assembled the kiln. His leericism* was well founded. In order to maximize the distance between the kiln (which will get mighty hot) and our combustible porch walls (protected by a free-standing non-combustible cement-board heat shield built by the aforementioned talented engineer), we ended up positioning the kiln too far from the wall for the cable to reach an outlet there. So as of this morning, the kiln plugs into the porch floor.

This weekend we'll assemble the vent system, and then it's just a matter of finding 16-19 hours when I can be constantly present for the initial test firing. For that, I will be vigilantly armed with my spiffy new infrared thermometer (a gift from my beloved engineer), so I can see how hot (or cool) various parts of the combustible porch get when the kiln is running.

*Not a real word, but it should be.