Eastern Market Fire

When Eik and I lived in D.C. one of our favorite typical saturday morning outings was to the Eastern Market on Capitol Hill. We loved the festive atmosphere, the flee market, the latino tortilla place, and especially the cheese shop in the market itself, and the soap lady, did I mention the soap lady.

Anyway, a fire ripped through the building causing 20 million dollars worth of damage.

This is such a beautiful place to spend a Saturday morning and we're deeply saddened by it's destruction. Maybe by the time we end up back in d.c. it will be all fixed up and pretty. :-)

JM

Reciped for paper writing: nuts diet root beer. eat as mindlessly as possible

Dog Saliva Saves!

Someone mentioned at the dog park that dog saliva has healing properties. I decided to look this up. Sure enough, I found a website that seems to agree with the claim.

Flopper painting

I came from work at 2 am to find this lovely gift from Flopper. Sunflowers and poppies are near to my heart. I bought him a number of canvases as a gift and this is his first painting in more than a year.

I have such a sweet man.

~Eikon

Dear God,

Dear God,
Why do you sully my life with conservative a$$es. Hmm. . .

I'm not readx to come in yet

My student.s are badly forging georgia okeefe flowers

Bibliophilia

Now on the way to school I bike by the used bookstore in town. A gem of a little store that is only slightly over priced in the arena of hard covers I avoided going in on the way to school but succumbed to temptation on the way back.

I went in to get this book; an old favorite. I'm a dork.

Then I saw this on the clearance rack and really just had to have it in hard cover for 2 dollars. I'm a historical Dork

Then I turned around and the God of Books Smiled On me.
There was this title in the mythology section.
I pulled it off the shelf and saw this cover.
Opened it and saw this table of contents and info page.


And shouted "YES!" in the very quiet bookstore.

That was before I saw the plates.

I have problems , book problems.

~Eikon

More scary wall poetry in my class room

This has been a You are Dated Moment

So the common ground that I have with my guy students lies in video games. One of the my students asked me what my favourite system was.

I said "Old school nintendo."

He said "Oh yeah 64 is great."

I said "No; NES"

He looked at me like I was a dinosaur reconstituted from DNA trapped in amber.

He's less than a decade younger than me.

~Eikon

Is it really morning?

Since Eik works nights, I often get up, and a certain puppy takes my place in beed. I was amused by this particular posture. Eli is making an "eli-ball" with his hind leg over his nose. Strange little beast.

bike!

Ah yes, It's my new bike. At the risk of sounding like a vain teenager, I wasn't going to post this picture because I look so fat in it. But then I thought, now you can all see me lose weight.

I was as trim as I had ever been, when I met Eikon, and it went all downhill from there, althought it got significantly better once he got me on a bike. We biked EVERYWHERE in d.c. and I absolutely loved it, and it kept me in pretty good shape. Just before we left the city, my Bianchi had decided that it's life was over. I rode it to death. Thus I haven't biked for about a year now.

I'm so happy to have my Janus coda, I bike almost everywhere (OK, school is a little to far).

Here's my mileage for the week.

Saturday
Lake Wobegon Trail Ride - 12 miles
Trip to downtown- 1 Mile
Trip to downtown again - 1 mile

Sunday
no time for biking

Monday
Lake Wobegon trial ride -10 miles
Trip to the YMCA - 1 mile

Tuesday
To work 6miles

Wednesday
To work 6 miles

Thursday
To work 6 miles
To downtown 1 mile

Friday
To YMCA 1 mile

Total 45! I think! Yay biking.

Baby Blankey

For my niece Kira. Only a year late :)






Its made from ten balls of a cotton crocheted yarn whose name I forget. I tried to make it gender non specific. Poor child is going to have enough pink as it is.

~Eikon

Paschal Pictures

Courtesy of RedWing (pictured above with Eli)who offered up his kitchen to my cooking here are some pictures of our Easter dinner.

I made the usual Easter goodies and there were a number ok kind gentlemen in attendance.
Here I am being grumpy and tired of cooking while Flopper looks ? quizical? or alluring? (I'm not sure what that expression is.

Here's Redwing peering between my dark chocolate raspberry crepe cake and the pascha.

My Pysanky were the center piece for the dinner table and were flanked by apricot preserves for the pascha and horseraddish for the hrutka.

After dinner we had a pysanky workshop that David, Timothy, Tallgrass, Twilight, and another David? (I'm terrible at names) participated in and created some lovely eggs.

Finally Flopper , Eli, ad myself had a cuddle session that redwing was compelled to photograph.
(Again I am not certain what Flopper is doing)

It was a lovely evening.

~Eikon

warm spring days

Warm spring days
and bicycle rides
keep me alive.

My mother used to bike a lot,
she got hit once,
on a highway by an old man.
She was hurt.

It was in the county paper the next week.
"Cow, woman hit on 25,"
It said.
There was another accident too,
I think the cow took priority.
(because it died)

In the class room

Profanity count

Today in the course of two hours I preemptively stopped 6 fucks, 3 shits, and one bitch (pronounce biatchh.)

I love education.

~Eikon

High School Math

So I forget much of my high school math. My memory stops at geometry and mid level algebra. I realized this when I tried to help someone do triginometry and drew a very big blank. It's one of the instances where it is hard to tell students "you'll need this" so I qualify the statement ; "you could use this".

~Eikon

Back in a Classroom

So as part of my convoluted path to being an educator I am required to do a number of field experiences. A 20 hour, a 120 hour, and finally a full semester full time. I am in the midst of the 20 hour experience today at an ALC here in Saint Closet. An ALC for those of you not familiar with educationese is an Alternative Learning Center. It is where they send discipline cases without learning disabilities , though generally there are learning disabilities involved they just haven't been diagnosed.

I am in the ALC of the ALC. The program is called PLATO (I have no idea what the acronym stands for) and consists of coming into class for two hours a dasy and very slowly finishing yiur requirements for a GED. To get here you have to be kicked out of the regular school and then kicked out of the ALC.

This is the most unstructured education imaginable outside of existentialist self guided camps of thought that scare my little teaching soul. The students come in for two hous. During those two hours they do as much work as they want; genrally they work for an hour and then go play basketball. the work is given a credit equivalency and peple graduate when they accumulate a certain number of credits.

I wander about attempting to not step on my students pride and have them do their work.

Interesting times; it is good to be back in a class room.

~Eikon

The Coffee Shop in MSP

Sorry Dan, the name is taken!

JM

Sound the trumpet of salvation!

Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God's throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation! - Exsultet

This evening Catholics around the world sang the Exsultet, a hymn of light that celebrates our Christ's resurrection for the dead. This is my favorite part of the whole church year. My Triduum liturgies have gone really well. My choir has been really amazing, and I'm learning to really appreciate every last one of them - even the annoying ones. There are always bad days working in the church world, especially the RC, but on evenings like tonight it is most rewarding!

Christ is Risen!

Happy Holy Thursday!

Tonight we celebrate Christ, the good shepherd, washing the feet of his disciples and comissioning them to serve the world.
To celebrate, we did a photo shoot with eik in good shepherd pose.

Happy Triduum!

Hrutka! Say it with me HHrrruuuTka ( roll that rrruuu)

Well While Flopper was endorsing political candidates I was in the kitchen preparing the paschal meal.

Today I made the Hrutka. There is nothing that makes me think of Pascha (Easter) than Hrutka. Hrutka is a sort of custard made of eggs and milk that is hung in a cheese cloth after being heated. Most people make the equivalent of a scrambled egg ball. My family makes it sweet with vanilla and cinnamon. This year on a whim I added raisins.

First you need 2 dozen eggs and 2 cups of milk. Blend those together and add an amout of vanilla, cinnamon , and nutmeg that makes you happy.

Toss that on the oven at a medium low heat stirring constantly slowly raise the temperature over the course of twenty minutes to a bit higher than medium. You need to scrape the bottom of the pot as you stir to prevent the eggs from sticking

Eventually , thirty minutes maybe, Your stirring will produce this. When the eggs start to thicken you must be extremely vigilant about keeping thins off the bottom of the pan; burnt eggs will ruin the whole things flavor. Vigilance For the HRUTKA! Sounds like a Soviet campaign slogan.


Any way in less than Five minutes after the initial thickening the mixture looks like this. Add any nut or fruit you want here.

You then dump it into a cloth lined colander in a big bowl.


Grab that burning hot mound of eggs and twist the cloth ringing out the whey and making a ball. You need to squeeze it out for at least eight minutes until there you can squeeze no more liquid out of it. At this point Flopper decided I needed to channel my Slavic ancestresses and had me don a schmata.


:)

After you squeeze out your hrutka and pay homage to your feminine forbears (with candles and statue might I add; silly Flopper) . Hang up the Hrutka for an hour or so until it is cool.

Take it down and cream some butter and brown sugar. You'll need to cut off a piece at the bottom to keep it flat on the pan.

Rub the butter all over the hrutka and toss it in the oven for 45 minutes at 350 adding more butter occasionally to the top. This forms a rind that lets the Hrutka keep for about a week in a cool environment (40 degrees or thereabouts). My dad never bothered with much squeezing and just hung it outside to drip overnight. 2 - 3 hours later you have this brown ball of cholesterol filled goodness; it ends up being somewhat shiny. We tended to slice it at about the thickness of easter ham and eat it as a side. I'm very fond of it on a sandwich with a hot mustard .


With Slavic Lovin,

~Eikon