Battery time, soup, Frederica and Pepys

The car died again, we jumped it again, I decided I needed a new battery.  Gary may help with that this week. Meanwhile the car's down the street out of the way of the truck coming to pick up the pod from his house.

Handsome Son tells me AAA might be able to replace the battery on the spot, so that might be worth investigating. I must admit to feeling a bit defeated at the moment, just not enough energy, emotional or physical, to deal with the cold weather and attendant issues. 

In my seventies this would have been very manageable, but once you get past eighty, things are very different, including the energy available to cope. I do continue with what exercise I can manage, to try to maintain strength.

One really useful one is getting out of a chair without using your hands,  then lowering yourself veeeeery slowly back down to a sitting position. It's like squats, and is vital to keep your legs working if they currently do. 

I do about ten of these in a set, and various stretches and balancing things at odd times. Usually waiting for the microwave is a good moment for a tree pose and other moves, with counters handy just in case.

Meanwhile, spinach, cilantro and potato soup, yogurt stirred in for a lovely tangy flavor. Toasted multigrain on top.

And I realized I've had Pepys' Diary on my Kindle since December 2020, probably a plan to do some serious winter reading which didn't get very far. Giving it another push now.

He mentions a lot of names, which are instantly explained in brackets, and hold up the narrative flow to a trickle. This part is happening during the upheavals of the Rump Parliament, around the restoration of the monarchy, and his undramatic recital covers a very dangerous and dramatic time to be living in London.

He still makes a point of describing his outfits and meals, though, and continues to enjoy his life despite all. So I'll push on a bit.

and for comic relief there's Frederica, with some of the funniest scenes ever, the best being the passage where someone actually does object to a marriage, cries out for video!

Happy day, everyone!

My salute to Ukraine today is to its fiber arts, here the exquisite white work

Not reducing the size here. This is from the blog Fils et Aiguilles

From walking to pomegranates with tangents thrown in

 I've been walking outdoors most days as usual, but I haven't been doing much other exercise. Walking's fine, but it's just one form of movement, and it's good to have more.  I was getting bored with the Hasfit series, good as it is, and tried a couple of yoga ones, which were good, too, but today I thought I should do something involving not being in a chair.

So I found this mother and daughter channel.  Really good stuff.  And, instead of a young athletic person instructing older people how to go on, she has her mother working out alongside no, great illustration of what to look out for, how to pace it. I don't know the age of the mother -- often people are presented as seniors and turn out to be my son's age, but never mind.

I just did the ten minute walking workout this morning and I'll do more of these.  It's walking types of movement, but sideways, backwards, using arms, lifting alternate knees to touch, a variety of movements, punctuated by marching in place.  I think this is a great one for people who don't walk outside, too, especially when the weather gets a bit trickier, and there's ice.  And it exercises your thinking, too, to keep doing the actions without mixing yourself up.  At least for me it does.  Not gifted physically.

And then I needed some good music going while I was dressing and generally getting ready for the day.  This is Pinchas Zuckerman with a Korean prodigy, SoHyun Ko, when she was 12, playing Bach's Concerto in D minor, in Korea.  He's conducting baroque style, from his own instrument.   He's a great promoter of young musicians, offering opportunities, founding programs to help them get established.

He recorded this same piece with Midori when she was about ten.  When she was an adult, she performed locally and I got to see and hear her in person, unforgettable.

And while I was in search of more information, I came across a great don't miss it opportunity to add Samuel Pepys to my emergency Kindle reading.  He lived through the Great Plague, and the Fire of London, and various other disasters, and still kept on writing his diary.  Not the nicest of chaps, but an interesting writer to dip into. I doubt if he'd been happy at the price I paid, though.

Then, since food inevitably makes its way into everyday life at regular intervals, I thought I'd do something with the pomegranates from yesterday's Misfits box.  I looked at a few ideas online, found them way too elaborate for what I was looking for, and decided just to juice them.  

Way back in history, I made a peach curry, using canned peaches, and drained the syrup off the peaches thinking I could freeze that and use it one day.  Today turned out to be the day.  And I bust up the pomegranates and separated out the seeds, like little rubies, from the pith and the rind

and blended them briefly with the peach syrup.  I didn't want to blend too long, because each little ruby has a seed, which I didn't want to crush, probably bitter, just blend enough to get the jelly like part off the seeds. 

Then I strained it, with a lot of help from a spoon to push the material through leaving behind the seeds

Here's the debris from that operation, except there wasn't much waste, since the rinds on the plate are now in the freezer for future natural dyeing experiments.

And here's the result, two cups of the most wonderful juice, nothing better than fresh. Worth all the fiddling about that preceded it.  Not that I'm rushing to do it again very soon, I must admit.

But, having done all that prep, I can see why pomegranate juice is expensive, since I doubt whether there's a machine that can do all those stages without ruining something. It's very fiddly getting all the little bits of membrane separated after you remove the rind.

Like asparagus, which grows like a weed around here, but there's no machine that can harvest it successfully, since it has to be cut stem by stem at just the right place.  So the labor adds up and it sells as a luxury item.  I see the local farm family in spring patiently harvesting their field by hand.  It used to grow wild around here before development happened.  And I had a huge unruly bed of it in my backyard at the first house we had, used to invite neighbors to come and pick, since they were countryfolk and knew how to pick without damaging the plants.

Walking, to Bach, to Pepys, to pomegranates, to asparagus.  You can't say I stay too long on one topic!