Twice-Baked Pie

This weekend a bunch of us got together on the island in the St. Joseph River to celebrate the 100th year of Frank Herlihy, but we didn't end up talking much about FWH (or "Herlihy, you old stink," as Bob Ardrey called him in a letter I brought along, but did not read.) Instead the formal portion of the event was made up of Sam Lipson, Mimi Lipson, and Sonia Lipson (respectively) leading praise of (Uncle) Terry Herlihy, Susanna, and Joanna Herlihy. Those three children of FWH seemed to be just fine with this.

We then attended 12 minutes of fireworks in St. Joseph, and were dumbfounded by the hour-long traffic jam getting out of town. We found that the police had closed off one lane of highway 63, for apparently no reason. Perhaps they needed the overtime. Afterward we spent many hours talking around a campfire. Twenty of us stayed the night in the two river cottages.

We celebrated Kellee's birthday on Sunday, with a twice-baked pie. Or perhaps we'll call it a pie casserole. Here's the recipe. One person accidentally baked a sour cherry pie without sugar. So we took that pie, tipped it upside down in a pan and broke it up until the (delicious homemade butter-based) crust was broken into bite sized pieces. Added some sugar, some sour cherry juice, and some very soft cream cheese and swirled it around a bit. Then we baked the mess until it was good and hot, until some crustiness formed on the crust-bits that were on the top. We cooled it, and then we striped it generously with an icing made of cream cheese, butter, half and half and confectioners sugar. It was a hit all around, especially with vanilla ice cream.

As I write this, many Lipsons & assorted others are traveling across the eastern U.S. on an Amtrak train that will go from Chicago (where Sonia, Felix & Lucy board the train) to South Bend, Indiana (where Mimi, Sam, Luc, Joanna and Ava get on), to Albany (where Mimi and Luc get off), and switching to Boston, final destination. Imagine it, a train full of Lipsons!

The above photo features Ben, Susanna and Terry; the picture below is Kellee & self with twice-baked pie.

Farm Auction

Thousands and thousands of items. Nine by fourteen foot fiberglass pre-formed greenhouse, cider press, brush hog to pull behind the Ford 8N tractor are all things we could use. The auctioneer at the back was selling tap extractors, trouble lights, a meat scale, machine gauges, mostly to men in baseball caps and flannel shirts. Piles of C-clamps, rooms full of well oiled machines that weigh tons, little wooden boxes of drill bits and taps, box of army gloves, cigar boxes full of screws. The auctioneer said, “Tube bender and tube cutter, who will give me five?” He said, “The knives and the traps together. Who will give me three?” He holds up some rusty old leg traps. Yow. Two compasses, who will give him two? He asked. He held up some sort of metal bits in metal boxes, and says, “Call ‘em what you want when you get ‘em home, when they belong to you.” I asked a guy in a Nascar cap, what was that tool you just bought for three dollars that looks like the capital letter F with a few extra horizontals? He said it was a “tool for breaking flat chains on elevators.” Another man wore a cap that said “Global warming is Bull Crap,” and he bought some odd lengths of tow chain. Over in the tent, the other auctioneer asked for bids for “anything in the box under the table.” An Amish man bought all the pickle crocks and twenty-seven five-gallon glass bottles. The auctioneer was pushing a thousand fishing lures. “Shakespeare Mouse, and another one that wants to be a Shakespeare mouse,” he said. The “tiger” variety of the Shakespeare Mouse went for eight dollars; everything else went for less. All the while, one black-haired woman was standing there knitting a Christmas baby blanket in red and green and white, watching the auctioneer intently, maybe waiting for the cider press to come up. I waited a long time to go use the Porta-potty, and then when I finally went in, it wasn't so bad, except that the door didn't shut and the toilet lid kept closing on my back. Forty eight fishing poles, piles of timing gears, ball peen hammers, metal files, a book "The Machinist’s Practical Book." Box of snap rings. “Ain’t no friends at an auction,” the auctioneer said. Chris bid to sixty dollars on the cider press; the Amish man wanted us to sell him the brass sausage stuffing attachment inside, but we figured we’d better keep our options open; maybe one day we will want to stuff sausage skins with our cider press. The greenhouse went for $290, too rich for our blood, seeing how hard it was going to be to get the thing home. A woman set up a tent and sold brats and chips and soda pop. The man in charge was a grandson of the owner of the stuff; the grandmother was still alive, he said, but she didn't want to come. The atmosphere was not festive, exactly, but it was not so dreary either. The grandson was about forty years old and chatty. He told us stories. He said, "Lord, we just want to get rid of this stuff."

Would You Take Fashion Advice from These Folks?

I know what to wear at the dojo: my gi with black belt and no shoes. In the garden and barnyard I wear jeans, T-shirt and cheap canvas tennies or workboots. I have difficulty dressing for any other environment. Teaching is a great challenge, because I have to try not to wear the same outfit every class. I'm trying to get some shoes or sandals to wear for teaching in June; I thought I'd found a pair: black, rubbery, comfy. I put them on after kobudo class and Kristina (who has just returned from France) said, "no." Josh, who has a special room in his house just for his shoes said, "are they comfortable?" Eric says, "They can't decide what kind of shoes they want to be. Sporty or elegant or summery. But I like them," he said. I will return the shoes to Meijers and try to formulate a new plan.

At the bar after working out, I pitched around the table for general fashion advice. Kristina advises wearing "anything leopard print." She was wearing a knee-length tight-bodice sleeveless leopard-print dress, leopard-print earrings and barrettes, and a pair of medium-heel, pointy-toed leopard-print pumps. Her sister Tori Grace said, "Filipinas are shoe whores." (The sisters have that in common with Imelda Marcos.) Jamie Blake suggested, "Short people should wear pointy-toed shoes." Tori Grace suggests that bandanas are always a good fashion accessory, but you need to research gang signs before you get too creative. Most days, Tori says she wears a long tank top, a short tank top and two belts. Eric, who is talking about buying knee-high converse tennis shoes, says, "T-shirts and jeans work for every occasion. For formal wear, add a denim jacket." Phil, who is holding hands with Kristina says, "Black. Everything goes with black, especially black." Shihan Wayne Kroll says he just tries to remember to put on his pants.

Meet My Brother George

I recall from my youth a cartoon in which Bugs Bunny was was playing the piano, and he turns to face the "camera" and says, "I wish my brother George were here." Christopher says this is a reference to Liberace, who had a brother George, and who wished that brother was there. To me it had seemed profound, because I, in fact, had a little brother George, six years younger than me. I used to make him pancakes in the shapes of rabbits, snakes, and other animals. Recently George, nicknamed Geo, needed me to write a biography for him to put on the Geek Group website (http://www.thegeekgroup.org/). It was fun; this (below) is what I came up with, though George didn't want to mention his middle name, which is Timothy. The rumor is that Timothy Leary came to Kalamazoo and gave my dad acid, and hence the middle name. Pasted in is an old photo of Geo.



George (T.) Campbell

George Campbell was born in 1968, and grew up on a small farm in Comstock, Michigan, where he learned to fix machines, find lost objects, load trucks with hay or anything, herd critters back into their pens and generally work hard. At a young age he was able to look at a machine or a system and figure out how it worked. He is resourceful and quite famous among his family and friends for being able to fix anything with baling wire and duct tape.

George is the person to call if there is water spurting from burst pipes in the ceiling or if a furnace seems to have exploded, or if your horses and donkeys have gotten loose and are running through the neighborhood. George can set posts and fence a pasture with the best of them. He is always generous with his time and talents, though his wife wishes he would spend more time fixing up things around the house, maybe remodeling the bathroom. In a difficult situation, George never loses his cool; he looks at every situation calmly and with a sense of humor.

On George’s sixth birthday, he received his first tool, a small adjustable crescent wrench, and he has been collecting tools ever since, retrieving them from the weeds sometimes when his brother got mad and threw them. When George was twelve he rebuilt the power take off clutch on the family’s farm tractor. When he was sixteen, George got tired of listening to his siblings fight and so lived in his van for a while. Later, he lived with his friend Ed in a house with three snakes (two pythons and a boa constrictor) that roamed around loose and preferred George’s waterbed to any other sleeping spot.

George worked for eighteen years for Comstock Public Schools, until the school system recently privatized their custodial and maintenance staff. He had worked his way up from general cleaning to building and grounds maintenance. He currently is employed as “the outside guy” at Loy Norrix High School in Kalamazoo, taking care of the sports fields and lawns. His previous jobs included roofing, brick tending and greenhouse work.

George’s background is mechanical rather than scientific, and his knowledge base is practical rather than theoretical. He passed he G.E.D. with scores than put him in the top 3% of high school graduates. George is also known as a person who can get along well with all sorts of different people and can make good use of the skills of others to get work done.

George regularly operates a forklift, a Case 731 diesel tractor with Rotovator, and a Ford 8-N with a Wagner Loader. He and his wife Darcy have three wild children (Krystal, Kayla, and Matthew) and one grandchild, Julianna. When he has spare time, he fishes for blue gills at Three Lakes, and he plays World of Warcraft.

Pin the Tail on This

Christopher had the two useless 275-gallon oil tanks in the back yard, and so he got out his torch and cut a nearly life sized donkey form out of one of them, so that we can play pin the tail on the donkey at Bell's Brewery during the book release party party, May 24. (Of course blindfolded people with stick pins was out of the question, so we will use tails connected to magnets.) Also, I just got this bright idea of taking the giant ball of string to the brewery, in order to give it away to someone as a prize. I'm going to call it "Kalamazoo's Biggest Ball of String," and see if anybody can prove me wrong. I love the giant ball of string, that my nice Kellee got from her friend Matt, and I love it when the cat sits on top of it, but Chris is tired of the hundred pound eyesore. Kellee thinks we should keep it. But she doesn't think I should keep the dried marshmallow that I have been saving. "You can't save everything," she said. But this marshmallow is special: when I visited the Geek Group Headquarters out on North Burdick Street, the leader, Chris "Duck" Boden put this marshmallow on top of the seven-foot-high Tesla coil and shot purple lightning through it. Then he stuck it to a pop can that he exploded with a giant pulse of electricity. It's a marshmallow with stories to tell. She confesses she once saved heart-shaped sugar-coated gum drops for a long time for sentimental reasons. She said she tried spraying some kind of clear coating on them, but it didn't work. I don't want to save everything, not really. I mean, I'm willing to give up my great great aunt Marie's silver coffee percolator set with tray, sugar bowl and creamer, so long as it went to someone with some sentimentality. But we're definitely keeping the porcelain rabbit head lamp with the glowing red eyes that Chris just made. We hung it up on the porch, and now when we're drinking out there, we can call our establishment "The White Rabbit." Cheers!

Furnace Adventures

A couple of years ago, our oil burner died. Most people, faced with this situation would have paid the gas company to lay another hundred twenty feet of gas line and switch to gas, but we decided to stick with fuel oil. Our furnace man convinced us to buy a Thermopride furnace (he said it was the only kind he would install), made right down in Indiana, life-time warranty on the fire box. All in all, we got us a solid piece of American machinery. And it even looks good, a porcelain enamel surface in a mauve color.

http://www.thermopride.com/

So when we saw an exact copy of our $2000 furnace at the Re-Store second hand building supply store for $100, we couldn't resist buying it, so Chris could heat his pole barn, to more comfortably work on my car. Some guys at the Re-Store helped us load it in the truck, but Chris unloaded it all by himself. Here is a picture of him doing it with the use of his Ford 8N.

Well, it turned out that was the easy part, getting the furnace. Now he needed an oil tank. His friend Jonas, who lives downtown, has been wanting to get an old 275-gallon tank out of his basement for years, and so Chris spent a good part of a day extracting this steel tank from Jonas's basement, again, by himself (though I helped load it on the truck.) He got this all the way home before realizing the bottom of the tank was covered with pinhole leaks.

So now my brother George gave Chris another 275-gallon tank, the better of the two he had lying in his side yard. We got it on the truck and home before Chris discovered pin hole leaks around the intake valve. Shoot. Does anybody have a mint condition oil tank (without leaks) to donate? I'll help put it on the truck.

Surviving 4th Grade

My mother's been cleaning her desk, and when I stopped over there today to feed the donkeys, she handed me my fourth grade "progress report." My most impressive attribute was my perfect attendance. The areas in which I was evaluated included "work habits" "social development" "health and safety." Apparently I listened attentively, followed directions and worked without disturbing others, but my social development was lacking. Especially low were my "self confidence" and "takes care of personal belongings." The academic areas were also evaluated. My strongest area was mathematics, and my weakest was handwriting. Also I was weak in music and physical education. My language skills were adequate, but I had low marks in "writes creatively" and "exhibits interest in creative writing." My 4th grade teacher, Mrs. G, had also been my second grade teacher. The greatest burden in being in Mrs. G's class was that she picked her nose and then ate it. This habit of hers saddened me so profoundly I could not look her in the eye. Some of her written comments on this report seem cryptic. For example, she wrote, "Bonnie does seem to be trying to be more original in her writing. Bonnie has made many adjustments this year and I feel has come to appreciate them. She is accepting new situations with more enthusiasm." I can't help but feel touched, however, that she finished with, "I'll certainly miss having her around."