Micro seasons, butterfly migration, America's test kitchen,

So we're up to page two, season three, in the microseasons journal.

Just making deliberate observations each day, enough for a few words for the day, is proving to be a great focus, little pressure and a lot of pleasure. This might suit me better than those rambling narrative journals some people love to keep.

So today's observation is of a flurry of activity in the butterfly bush, many small cabbage butterflies, tiny brown ones, several species of bees,  and, spectacularly, two monarchs dancing and feeding all day. 

Since they will be migrating in a few days, I expect they're fuelling up before the thousands of miles they fly south. They fly high up in the air for migrating, like flocks of birds. 

The first time we went to Cape May, in early October about fifteen years ago, we were in a seafront hotel, four floors up, and there were thousands of monarchs flying over the sea,  resting all over the building facades as far as you could see, all over our balcony. It was a rare, unforgettable experience. Total silence, just movement, a moving blanket of orange and cream and black.

Cape May is a good resting place for migratory butterflies and birds, both before they take on the open ocean south and when they return in spring. 

They follow the coastline south for a long way before heading inland toward their south American destination. On the trip north in spring, it's a sheltered and  food rich environment, with both salt and fresh water marshes, plants and insect life.

We don't get the enormous flocks we used to, so we treasure the sightings we get.

Swallows, swifts, hummingbirds, left weeks ago. 

Closer to home, America's test kitchen book is proving to be a mixed blessing. There are some good food ideas and tips, a useful section on equipment, see, someone invented a tea machine!

And sources for tools and foods. Including the notorious cinnamon..

But, big but, it's too big. Very heavy to handle. The type size so tiny I really can't read it, and the printing ink they used, no doubt very ecological, smells so bad I don't want it near the kitchen. 

Open a page and there's a waft of something between rotten eggs and boiled cabbage. It's truly awful. If you owned this book perhaps you'd leave it in sunlight to deodorize.  

I did get a few ideas as you see, then it's back to the libe. A good idea that didn't work for me. I wish it had come in a couple of volumes, to be more manageable and readable, but I expect there were production and shipping considerations in the way of that.

So there's the House of Boud today.

Good day yesterday

What with perfect weather, knitting group with new member Fumiko,  fearless leader Meg with current work, golden soup, skirt going well, what more could a person ask?

And the America's Test kitchen book, which needed its own wheels, arrived. 

Here's the doings.

Gathering the skirt into the waistband. This is a tricky operation, where despite all the pinning prep, you still need to adjust the gathers with the tip of your needle as you go.

I realized that this tiny series of adjustments is something nobody taught me in words, just by  example. I remember my mom and my needlework teacher doing it as she gathered, to preserve the tiny gathers in good order. 

It's the advantage you have of the inadvertent teaching you get in childhood, those subtle skills that make a lot of difference to your results. 

 

Here's a section of the gathering in process

And today I'll finish the waistband, running elastic through the waistband to draw it up snug. After that, deciding on length and hemming and I'm done. Or the skirt is, whichever happens first.

And speaking of skills, here's knitting group leader, reference librarian Meg, holding up her shawl in progress. 

She had great skills demos in childhood, too, with a mother and grandmother who knitted, sewed, gardened, had nursing skills. 

So when she was adult she was able to take up beekeeping, gardening, knitting and really started as more than a beginner. This was alongside a career in the book wholesaling world, marriage and children. 

 Her "beginning" knitting a few years ago, was almost instantly expert. Likewise she tried her hand at small tapestry weaving, and made beautiful works. She just has those latent skills waiting to be used. She's thinking of crocheting next! Maybe embroidery, though her family expertise might be a bit intimidating, what with heirloom pieces.

And while I was at the library, I picked up what turned out to be such a heavy book they'd held it for me at the counter instead of the high shelf my alphabetic place would be, fearing it could flatten whoever lifted it down.

I didn't realize, when I requested it, that it was every recipe for the twenty years of the television show, plus notes and sources and explanations of the chemistry. Mainly I want ideas rather than recipes. 

I'm also starting to keep track, for interest and for avoiding repetition, of the monthly dinners for Handsome Son. The blog came in handy here, memory failing.

And here's the soup for our October dinner, a golden one of butternut squash, red lentils and carrots, with a chicken stock. I'll have the cook's sample today and the rest is in the freezer.

Such a lovely color, great fall produce. Reminded me to get a pumpkin for the front step.

And here's one of my favorite accounts on Twitter, a maker of miniature animals and dioramas. 

Here's one, a still from a brief video, of a tiny animal coming out at night in secret to read. She and Maggie Rudy keep me going.

Here's to another lovely day.