Cranky Girls' Farm

The Table of Learning

2011-09-07T00:19:00.000-05:00

Cranky fortune, August 2011.

Herr Cranky regularly brings home library books for the diversion of Crankies large and small. Most recently, he returned with a memoir of the foul-mouthed chef who operates Prune, a wildly popular East Village restaurant. Let's call her Eff Yu. Meta Cranky's virtual ears perked up at Eff Yu's description of her harrowing adolescence. EY's fascinating, colorful parents effectively lost track of their five children during the turmoil of their divorce. As a result, Eff Yu spent her 12th summer smoking cigarette butts found on the curb, stealing pawn-able valuables from neighbors' houses, and polishing her extensive swear vocabulary. The family blossomed under this not-quite-actionable neglect: one sister became a writer for Saveur. A brother became a Goldman Sachs billionaire-with-a-B. Eff Yu? She lied about her age and got the dishwashing job the led her to destiny. Upon reading Herr Cranky's library book, MC realized that 1979 was truly the golden age of sucky parenting. A time when parental units were completely down with the possibility that "Not all the baby turtles make it to the ocean," as Renaissance Mom has succinctly observed. What a glorious time to be alive.

Sadly, expectations for parents and children are different in the 21st century. By the time MC has returned home from a dental appointment with Cranky #1, she has received email, voice mail, and text notification that her child has missed part of a school day from Purplish High. Really? Could administration officials not read the form where MC signed her out after showing a photo ID? Inventory control isn't MC's strong suit, so she appreciates that other want to keep count of their units. Still. Imagine this attention to detail applied to homework. Which brings MC to the mythical Table of Learning.

In MC's rich fantasy life, small children gather around the Table of Learning, beckoned by a homey lamp purchased from the Vermont Country Store, and then quietly, earnestly complete their daily studies using parchment and quills. In her dreams, MC plays Marmee, while the smaller Crankies take turns portraying the various March sisters. No wait, let's just go with Meg, the industrious Little Women character who doesn't bother being colorful. In actual practice, Cranky #1 heroically plows through her mountain of work, stopping occasionally to emit factoids about insulin resistance or to produce reams of papers to be signed, notarized, and monetized. Cranky #2 produces equally complicated paperwork, as well as spelling word lists and math problems graded by an inscrutable four-point system. When MC's dinner prep requires engagement with gelatinous meat products or complicated measurements, C2 emits a piteous plea for help, followed by a wracking sob of frustration. Not until MC puts down the task at hand will C2's message morph into: "Nevermind!" Every. Single. Time.

The Crankies' Table of Learning regularly sports a German dictionary and innumerable variations of number sentences. Eff Yu's table holds braised lamb shanks and grilled branzino. We're all getting an education.
--MC

Red State, Big Box Holiday

2011-01-04T09:01:00.000-06:00

Cranky Girls' Farm, Dec. 26, 2010. Photo by Cranky #1. Temp: 15 degrees F.

The Crankies launched their own war on Christmas in 2010. Meta Cranky flogged her deadline until the last possible hour, then flung socks in a suitcase and conveyed small Crankies to CG Farm. Within two hours of arrival, Cranky #1 manifested her regular asthmatic symptoms, this time with a championship-quality cough for extra excitement. The Crankies visited Dr. Charlie's seriously terrific new office in Cranky Hometown to wheeze upon request (Cranky #1) and check out his selection of Barbies (Cranky #2). Charlie's dad is a veterinarian, and the Crankies have spent some time in that office, too. (Remember the dogs and the porcupine quills?) We've gotten sterling service at both establishments, but we have to say that Dr. Charlie's office smells much less like pink-eye dope and milk replacer. Extra points for the fireplace, Dr. C; if Dr. Ed had a fireplace, he'd just clutter it up with branding irons.

So now it's Dec. 21, and the Crankies' lack of holiday prep is beginning to show. Only a smattering of presents have been laid in. Exactly none of them are wrapped. And the C's haven't recollected where they put that wee fake-o tree that the contractor left for them a couple of holidays ago before he disappeared (apparently) into a witness-protection program. With four shopping days left until Christmas, the Crankies do not despair, because they can access two major shopping venues that would make urban shoppers weep if they could fathom their wonderfulness.

The real ace in the hole is a local farm equipment chain called Atwoods. The Crankies would like to vacation at Atwoods. They would admire the bunnies and the small multicolored chickens at their leisure. They would wear t-shirts with emblazoned with pictures of green tractors. They would ride green pedal tractors and relax on truck-a-saurus sized lawnmowers. But since they had serious work to do, they quickly found their favorites: Anti-Monkey Butt Powder for Uncle M. John Wayne movies from the Conservative Movie Department for Youngest Older Brother. And shirts without welding burns for Second Older Brother. It's so easy. And, because Atwoods also appeals to Red State chicks, some polka dot Wellies for the girls in our family.

Loading bales of hay, Dec. 22. Note the insulated coveralls.

However, do not underestimate the appeal of the 24/7 Walmart Super Store. Go ahead and scoff at the political incorrectness of the nation's largest retailer. So what if they've been sued by those women they forgot to promote. And that Walmart employees are more likely to win the Mega Millions lottery than to get health insurance. Whatever. But where else in Cranky Hometown are you going to get a teenager sweat pants that don't have a green tractor on the ass? You'll get them at Walmart unless you drive 90 minutes to the closest tasteful mall. So while Cranky #1 snuggled up on the sofa with her selection of inhalers, MC and C2 navigated the local Super Walmart. The results were surprisingly efficient and strangely satisfying. C2 agreed that picking out her own present was exactly what she wanted, so she made her selection, guided by MC's prejudice against toys with itty-bitty pieces. Christmas came early for MC when C2 picked out a paint-it-yourself flowerpot with this evaluation: "It's hard for me to shop at this store. It's got too much stuff." Since MC sucks so much at shopping, she was heartened to be in the company of another failed capitalist.

UM's calf, Dec. 5, 2010

With all this good mojo going, MC shouldn't have been surprised to find Christmas Eve grace in this very same Walmart. Have we mentioned that you can do just about everything at Walmart except perhaps listen to a reading by Noam Chomsky? One can order X-mas-y pictures online for the delight and amusement of one's family members. Which MC did, thrilled at the prospect of driving only 18 miles to pick them up the next day.

In the Walmart parking lot on Christmas Eve, MC was met by throngs of other losers and sucky shoppers. No surprise there. What she hadn't taken into account, however, was that people living on other continents had stopped shopping and had gone on to other pursuits. Ten a.m. Cranky Time is 3 p.m. Western European Time, and the Kings' College Choir was getting ready hold forth on the NPR station that locals think of as Music for Socialists. In their urban habitat, the Crankies attend the Church of Extremely Ambitious Music, and they annually hear performances of a program called Lessons and Carols. What the local folks lack, however, are the acoustics of a 500-year-old chapel in Cambridge and a boy tenor who has made some deal with a higher power. Who knows what extravagant promises this limey kid made to the great "I AM"--celibacy, poverty, a vow to shun the Arctic Monkeys. But there in the Walmart parking lot rang an impossibly clear voice, the fulfillment of Walmart's call to "Spend Less. Live Better."

Even after boy singer ended his carol, Walmart continued to demonstrate the true meaning of Christmas. At the checkout line, MC met perhaps the only living Walmart employee conversant in the Four Noble Truths, specifically, #2: "suffering is caused by craving." The previous customer had somehow failed in his transaction, leaving unhappy karma in MC's particular line. This wise clerk, however, began her own kind of protective chanting to ward off harm: "No one should be here. We should all be at home. It would be better if we were asleep." MC expressed her most sincere hope that Buddhist Walmart Associate would be able to go home soon, and exited the epicenter of American capitalism.

Cranky Girls' house, from the pasture. Cranky #1 photo.

Back in the parking lot, on the socialist radio station, the limeys had made it to the eighth lesson, and MC thought it was a nice touch to give the business about the wise men to someone with an Indian accent. The translation of lesson number nine, John's description of the incarnation, seemed to play to the Monty Python school of religious instruction:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made."

Repetitious much? Indulgently, MC was willing to grant them their slightly pompous King James version in consideration of that righteous boy singer. Then the Brits said their goodbyes, mentioning in passing that King's College had performed this baroque program annually since 1918. For MC, that little factoid was more breath-taking than the spectacular tenor. Insert every horrific statistic you know about the slaughter of World War I here. Now imagine an Edwardian boy singer performing, a mere month after Armistice Day, to the decimated class of 1918 and assorted grieving sweethearts.

MC surveyed the Walmart parking lot and considered how very zen her Walmart holiday had become. The buying power of a multinational, union-busting mega retailer, juxtaposed with the achingly wistful carols of a bygone empire. Spend less. Live Better. God help us.
--MC

Day Off

2010-10-24T11:08:00.001-05:00

sorbet tubular hangers

The Crankies experienced a regularly scheduled school holiday on Monday. Sadly, Meta Cranky's clutter meter simultaneously pegged into red zone.

MC's clutter meter is an unscheduled annoyance with an inconsistent trigger. Does it scream abuse at unattractive piles of work-related papers and mismatched socks? Frequently, no. Yet on this day, it howled like a air-raid siren at the sight of a few half-finished art projects lounging on the stair landing. The clutter meter lacks a breaker box; neither can you whack out its batteries with a broom handle as you can with the smoke alarm. There was no recourse for small Crankies except to perform compulsory acts of housework. Startled and unnerved by the meter's intensity, they peeled back layers of effluvia from flat surfaces until readings retreated to safe levels.

tubular hangers, primary colors

The Crankies' clutter meter functions a bit like a high colonic: after purging their collective toxins, the refreshed and clutter-diminished household sailed off to find amusing pursuits. Cranky #1 and her pal visited the local mega-plex for the latest installment of Goofy High School Comedy starring Talent-Challenged Cute Boy. Meanwhile, MC and Cranky #2 took a victory lap at OCD Gadget Store to get just one more clutter-fighting tool.

tubular hangers, ocean

C2 would happily acquire the store's entire obsessive inventory of keychains with light-up dolphins and pink magazine organizers with kitties on the top. Also the non-functional telephone and computer from the modular desk section. MC struck a compromise: pick six brightly colored tubular hangers from the Unnaturally Organized closet section. Don't sniff, skeptical readers: these are 52-gram plastic hangers, much sturdier and satisfying than the usual 34-gram numbers. While C2 made her color choices, a fellow organizer stopped to offer the benefit of his organizing experience. He gave high praise to the OCD tubular hangers, noting that he dedicates the orange sherbet-colored ones to his dress shirts. MC nodded in admiration. But there was more. Hanger Guy had developed an entire closet system built around color-coded tubular hangers: royal blue hangers for jeans; yellow ones for t-shirts with paint splatters. MC was walking slowly backward and didn't catch what he does with the frosty greens or neon pinks

C2 has installed her cheerful hangers in a tidy yet casual way. C1 continues to enjoy seeing most of her bedroom floor. MC has seen household surfaces reappear, like the terrain left by a melting glacier. The household has been temporarily recalibrated.
--MC

No Satisfaction

2010-10-09T22:44:00.000-05:00

Some months back, Meta Cranky learned that an ancient essay of hers had been plagiarized. More specifically, someone named Dr. Shyam Prasad Swain lifted her essay from Studies in the Novel, twiddled with some prepositions, and republished it under his own name in a collection of essays. MC's stony heart was warmed watching placid English major types turn apoplectic on the subject of plagiarism, and she was heartily gratified by the expressions of concern and outrage that came her way.

Apparently, friends' heart-warming concern is the only satisfaction that MC can hope to receive from this theft of her intellectual property. MC is informed that the statute of limitations for prosecuting copyright infringement is three years; that deadline expired back in the George W. Bush administration. So the legal team representing the journal where her essay appeared will send a letter to the fraudulent book's publisher requesting that it cease publishing this particular title. The salient verb would be request, since the journal concedes, "we have no legal recourse at this stage."

MC has sighed heavily. Then she recollected that she was in good company: Stanley Fish was ripped off, too, and his legal satisfaction was as thin as hers. Professor Fish, though, got to air his grievance in the New York Times and proclaim that "the two scholars who began their concluding chapter by reproducing two of my pages are professionally culpable. They took something from me without asking and without acknowledgment, and they profited — if only in the currency of academic reputation — from work that I had done and signed."

Here, here. But there's also a question of degree. Professor Fish's plagiarists are into him for two pages. Dr. Shyam Prasad Swain lifted MC's entire essay. So, short of naming the offender in the pages of the New York Times, what satisfaction can MC manufacture for herself? She recalls a successful campaign waged by her Youngest Older Brother that he called Feed the Bitch. A co-worker got the best of him in office politics; however, her sweet tooth left her utterly vulnerable to the two pounds of M&Ms (plain and peanut) that he purchased each day for office consumption. As Bitchy Co-worker's ass grew, so did Youngest Older Brother's satisfaction.

MC is confident that her friends and acquaintances possess the creative genius to effectively modify Feed the Bitch for her purposes. Let's work the problem, people.
--MC

The Shallow End

2010-10-05T22:53:00.002-05:00

Years ago, a place called Atomic City sold MC the perfect t-shirt for Herr Cranky. On the front was a bare-chested man with the words "Victor Mature lives" written across his pecs and abs. The anguished dude's thought bubble read: "I wish I was deep instead of just macho." The Crankies were never quite sure why deep and macho were mutually exclusive, but ambiguity about Victor Mature's character didn't get in the way of their sartorial pleasure.

So now MC's enjoyment of contemporary memoirs has left her feeling that her own character is about an inch deep. David Sedaris and Rhoda Janzen's rip-roaring tales of substance abuse, emotional apocalypse, and entertainingly wacko relatives didn't encourage self-doubt. Anne Lamott's essays, however, always leave MC scuffling her shoes in the dirt thinking, I could be a better person if I just meditated more. I should ask my neighbors to share their reflective personal insights. I should swim with seals more often.

Extra helpings of meditation could only improve MC's operating system, true enough. But her neighbors are already sufficiently sage. And on the whole, she doesn't see herself snorkeling with seals. Aquatic mammals can be plenty profound, but MC, sadly, is much too distracted to appreciate their offerings unless they come with English subtitles. Compared to Lamott's thoughtful spirituality, MC is decidedly swimming in the shallow end.

People who make their living writing sensitively about single motherhood really should have zen-master-type moments in the middle of traffic. The rest of us, however, show our breeding and character by not bringing firearms to the pediatrician's waiting room. Cranky 2 recently reactivated her strep throat, and MC repeated the familiar routine of doctor's office, pharmacy, and frozen fruit bars. In a waiting room of children dripping with viruses and bacteria, the selection of pregnant-mommy magazines and Fox News broadcasts creates an atmosphere that the CIA could productively use to extract information from suspected terrorists. And yet the parental units of these little petri dishes purposefully douse themselves with hand sanitizer and exit with scripts for Amoxicillin. MC thinks that germ-encrusted politeness is perhaps the height of civil discourse.

There's a time and a place for depth of character. The Richard Nixon impeachment hearings, for example. And happily, Barbara Jordan knew just what to say:

My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.

MC wishes she could manufacture pithy, quotable verbage like that on demand. Delivering stirring oratory is probably not in the cards for MC; however, a recently installed statue of Representative Jordan at Big State University invites one to reflect on depth of character, statesmanship, and why flawless enunciation and a baritone register sounds so, well, deep. C2 demonstrates what you can do after all that thoughtful reflection.
--MC

Greenish

2010-09-20T21:54:00.000-05:00

Locally famous for being green, Cranky Elementary School showcases shiny awards it has received for recycling. And composting. And installing a rainwater harvesting system in the backyard. Cranky Elementary has been recognized, repeatedly, for its environmental mojo. Last Tuesday, you could have seen Cranky Elementary sixth graders on a local television station demonstrating their classroom worm composting and the playground's vegetable gardens. Name a product produced in China, and Cranky kindergarteners are recycling it. Styrofoam? Check. Capri Sun pouches? They get paid for it. Sneakers? Well, doesn't everybody? Batteries, computer parts, used plastic gift cards. It's kind of a competitive green vibe they've got going on.

So it was completely not weird that Meta Cranky spent multiple e-mails and phone calls today discussing some serious Cranky Elementary business: the 2010 Halloween pumpkin composting situation. Halloween 2009's composting was fabulous, if a little frightening. MC herself had never seen that many dead pumpkins in one place. But there they were, piled in front of Cranky Elementary. Approximately the mass of a VW. Meta Cranky was sustained by the confidence and enthusiasm of Our Al Gore, the resident composting guru, who could compost anything that had ever formed carbohydrates from CO2 and water. Our Al enthusiastically guided MC and Herr Cranky to whack up hundreds of pounds of pumpkins with axes and machetes. Then, he provided instruction as the Crankies helped layer Dead Pumpkins with bags of leaves, like a massive jello salad. Sprinkle with a little rainwater from your rainwater collection system, and presto! One ginormous mass of carbon and nitrogen. Our Al was an animal when it came to decomposition.

Meta Cranky will never be as talented, compost-wise, as Our Al, whose child has happily moved on to middle school. So Cranky Elementary is leaving Dead Pumpkin 2010 to the professionals. No, seriously. The professional compost company that services Cranky Elementary's lunches will send a special truck for its post- Halloween offerings. This landfill diversion is all as it should be, and Meta Cranky can't believe that any thinking person would let a pumpkin get oozy and smelly in his/her garbage can. Please. But she understands the folks in Cranky Home Town might be scratching their heads over Dead Pumpkin 2010 as part of somebody's business plan. That's because it's much simpler in Cranky Hometown. You start with a pumpkin, like the one pictured above. From Cranky Girls' Farm, 2008 vintage. Thanks for asking. Then you add a varmint. Raccoon. Possum. Skunk? Ok, that'll work.

After that, it's pretty much low impact. No signage. No organized collection system. No whacking with machetes. In Cranky Hometown, Compost Happens, just like the bumper sticker says. Cranky Hometown may be in a red state, but don't say it's not green.--MC

*photo credits to Oldest Older Brother

Urban Tranquility

2010-09-18T07:41:00.000-05:00

Meta Cranky's unplanned hiatus from her blogging duties has left several of the Crankies' narrative threads awkwardly dangling. So, let's review, shall we?

The Crankies migrated back to their not-farm space and Crankies 1 and 2 have been begun receiving state-sponsored educations at their respective schools. C1 can now hold forth on the difference between specific heat and latent heat. C2 has helped make a city out of popsicle sticks, toilet paper tubes, and oatmeal boxes. Herr Cranky has attended a very great many committee meetings while retaining his good humor. Meta Cranky has begun a textbook project that requires rifling through reams of paper and seemingly limitless files from ftp sites. In the scrum of back-to-school hoo-haw, the Crankies have remained as serene and graceful as the Yellow Show, pictured at left, that is determined to bloom despite our city's ungodly heat. Pretty much, anyway.

Cranky Girls' Farm continues to put forth an exuberant crop of alfalfa and angus cattle in the Crankies' absence. Second Older Brother, the keeper of this alfalfa and livestock, has introduced a glitch by, uncharacteristically, requiring maintenance of his physical person. He has educated the entire Cranky extended family with his tales of the Medical Industrial Complex, which apparently demands $23,000 of people who are careless enough to develop kidney stones.

Second Brother's discomfort is not to be made light of, and the Crankies have every expectation that medical science will bring him relief. The Crankies have, however, watched with appreciation as the Medical Industrial Complex entered Second Brother's "I Can't Believe You're So Effing Stupid" Zone. Meta Cranky first learned of the Zone when Oldest Brother reported on Second Brother's hospital admission process: "I think the hospital is calling security to deal with Second Brother." The hospital that services Cranky Girls' Farm apparently requires full payment in advance of services rendered. Second Brother, who seriously wanted to say farewell to his kidney stones, habitually sees itemized invoices for his major purchases. Second Brother has never had a problem being billed by his tractor guy, his air conditioner guy, or his diesel mechanic, but Idiocracy General was unable to produce a document that told him what his first $11,000 payment was, um, paying for. Hence the specter for hospital security. The Crankies can't wait to see how he deals with his insurance company.

Long story short: The Crankies are city girls again. They appreciate the patience of their Cranky Readers and will be more timely in their updates. No need to call security.

--MC

High Functioning

2010-08-04T07:17:00.000-05:00

For weeks, guests have entered Chez Cranky by stepping over a rivulet of water and asking, "Do you know your dishwasher leaks?" Then, usually, they serve themselves a glass of water and observe, "Ice maker not working yet, huh." Alright, already. The Crankies' appliances were put to rights today by Mr. Ice-T, a man with a tres exciting skill set. As he totted up his bill, Mr. Ice-T observed the quart of apple butter resting on the Crankies' counter. Turns out that Son of Mr. Ice-T just loves the stuff. "He's got Asperger's; he's high functioning, but he can't stand to waste food." Ice-T pere and fils have jammed, relished, and jellied their way through a bountiful summer, and father Ice-T proudly recited their production in quarts, pints, and pounds.

Meta Cranky sent fix-it savant out the door with a small offering of apple product. Only upon reflection did she observe that Son of Ice-T might not care about the Crankies' product; he would be more obsessed about preserving the food coming out of his own garden patch. Then it dawned on MC that Ice-T and his son might be the only people who could bring order to Cranky Farm in its present state.

There's the apple tree. The Crankies have been slogging through their apple inventory for days. Not complaining! Apple butter is infinitely more forgiving than those hellish peaches, and producing apple smoosh with the smoosh gadget sends C1 and C2 to their happy place. MC was strategizing about what to do with Gardening Friend's gift of some groovy Armenian cucumbers when she noticed the squash bed. Jesus Mary and Joseph. A girl takes a day off to file her nails and look what happens.

MC is a little sketchy about what she planted back in June, but she's confident that her concept included pumpkins and three kinds of squash. But for all she knows, Jimmy Hoffa could be in the patch now. It's feral. The Shepherd's Seed envelope showed darling watercolors that made these squash look like epicurean dainties. Wrong-O. They're botanical sumo wrestlers. Shoppers never see these mega vegetables in the grocery store for a very good reason: they're freaking scary.

It's a small step from one zucchini-on-steroids to a full-blown food storage and distribution obsession. Why can't the Cranky Hometown gardeners bear to waste any of this bounty? Because if you anger the zucchini gods, next summer's garden might squeeze out only three worm-eaten tomatoes and two cups of shriveled okra. Meta Cranky's neighbors aren't going to risk it.
--MC

Unbidden

2010-07-29T05:54:00.001-05:00

Perfect gifts come in different flavors. There's the gift that's perfect because the recipient laid in the specs to remove all doubt. Herr Cranky's gift of a phone with a map program fits this category; this phone gave the Crankies the logistical umph they needed to navigate unfamiliar cities on their recent roadtrip. In addition, it sent Crankies 1 and 2 into paroxysms of joy as they discovered apps, games, and wallpaper-selection opportunities. C2 found a notes function in which she writes diary entries such as, "I went to the plum patch. We picked a lot of good plums." In her euphoria, C2 raised up an encomium of praise for technology:

I just love this phone.
WHO KNEW that a phone could give you a map?
WHO KNEW that a phone would let you write notes?
WHO KNEW that a phone had games on it?
WHO KNEW that a phone could still let you talk on the phone, like la, la, la.

Steve Jobs, want some PR to provide a diversion from that iPhone 4 kerfluffle? The Crankies are available.

The other perfect gift is the one you didn't know you needed. When friend Zia pressed a thumb drive upon the not-techie Meta Cranky, it was as if the angel choirs were singing. How long had this technological miracle been available to the rest of the planet? That long, really?

Comes now Mr. High Security, who not only studies antique hardware but also can identify individuals who are least likely to accomplish simple tasks on their own. As a result, the talented Mr. High Security not only fixed the beloved, broken, ancient hardware at Cranky Farm, he also installed it. Can we mention that he lives in another state? Sure, Meta Cranky put the repaired lock back in the door, but did she notice that door frame had no hole for the deadbolt? Um. Rather no. The Crankies now enjoy fully operational 90-year-old locks and more working keys than your average janitor--the impressive, skeleton-type keys you'd use to lock Mr. Rochester's crazy wife in the attic. And MC gets to savor the perfect gift of unforeseen, unbounded generosity.

MC's chi is running particularly strong this week, because she also received a unexpected gift for someone else's birthday. Paying her respects on the natal day of friend I'm Adorable, but Don't Piss Me Off, she received a perfectly pressed set of tea towels embroidered by I'm Adorable's mother. Meta Cranky remembers Mother of Adorable's house as cool island of domesticity in a dusty, sandburr-filled sea. Small MC would tumble out of Major Cranky's Chevy pickup, in which the day's only refreshment would have been a bag of Red Man chewing tobacco. Stopping to see Mother of Adorable, with her hospitality, air conditioning, and cold water, always gave MC hope that Major Cranky was going to evoke closure and eventually head home to lunch. I'm Adorable's perfect gift reminds MC that small gestures can bring moments of glad grace yea even into a hot Chevy. Why embroider seven tea towels with days of the week and amusing animal figures? Because looking at them might make you smile when you otherwise wouldn't. Perfect.
--MC

(Photo to come)

Travesty

2010-07-26T01:12:00.001-05:00

Meta Cranky has perpetrated a crime against botany. She has transformed the peach, one of nature's most beautiful creations, into something resembling the color and consistency of Oliver Twist's gruel.

The problem arises from inventory control. The ridiculous windfall of native plums has transformed the celebration of Seasonal Fruit into something approaching a work-release sentence. After the fruits of the Crankies' plum excursion were processed, MC was ready for a respite, but Seasonal Fruit was only tuning up. Second Brother's peach tree needed attention, and a half-hour's picking produced enough for a perfectly lovely cobbler and several happy bowls of jewel-tone slices at the breakfast table. MC estimated that she would get her groove back while the apples ripened. Then, foolishly, she left the house. When she returned, there were five (5) gallons of peaches on her porch, lovingly picked by Second Brother.

D(elivery)-Day Plus One: Texas Friend arrives and peels for an hour, producing another bowl of peachy perfection. What remains, however, is approximately 4.5 gallons of Second Brother's peaches. This particular product is in all ways delicious, but also labor intensive; the fruit is small, and most of the little darlings contain a worm or two. The Crankies are no closer to containment than BP after its first lame attempt at capping the Deepwater Horizon.
D-Day Plus 2: MC manages to blanche a dishpan full of peaches during C2's playdate and produce an Incredibly Forgiving Peach Cake. Tres bon! And yet quel dommage! because those peaches are getting surly. Their worms are growing. Their bruises are blooming. MC thinks that the balance of power has subtly shifted in her relationship with Seasonal Fruit. Second Brother stops by and asks, "Shouldn't you be grinding up those peaches or something?" MC offloads fruit to Mother of Playdate.
D-Day Plus 3: As Seasonal Fruit becomes increasingly demanding, MC no longer has time for that blanching business. She slices up what she's got, produces another Incredibly Forgiving Peach Cake, covers the remaining peaches with sugar, and slams them in the fridge. What could possibly go wrong? Two waves of visitors arrive and the conversation happily takes another turn.
D-Day Plus 4: C1 and C2 look quizzically at the browned mass their mother has placed on the breakfast table. "Did you get the wrong bowl?" asks C1, diplomatically.
Evening of D-Day Plus 4: MC attempts peach remediation. Surely some jamming action will revive those underperforming peaches, she thinks: Pectin, a few square yards of sugar, and presto! However, MC's relationship with these particular peaches had gone to a place where no food stylist can salvage it. C1 walks into the kitchen during the botched attempt and looks on with unfeigned admiration at the effort. "The peach smoosh!" she exclaims. Then, realistically, she asks, "Have you tried it?" No, MC admits, she's rather busy with the draconian Sure Jell instructions. C1 dubiously tries a spoonful of jam and offers this searing assessment: "It looks nasty, but it tastes OK."

In her final review, C1 couldn't decide if whether the peach jam looked more like haggis or head cheese. Either one is so far removed from the original blushing globules as to be almost a different species of flora or fauna. A generous person might call the product a golden brown. But residents of the reality-based community could never call it peachy.
--MC

A Good Year for Plums

2010-07-21T07:25:00.000-05:00

How can the Crankies tell that the local sandplums are maybe over-performing? Could it be the hordes of people they've never seen before standing across the fence from Uncle Michael's cattle, plinking globular fruit into plastic buckets? Maybe because there's no Sure-Jell to be found in two counties. Sorry, but if you want it, you've got to be on site when the One Thing Needful comes off the truck at Walmart. Consider this phenomenon: even the Crankies' friend I'm Adorable, But Don't Piss Me Off was drawn out of jam retirement when her offspring gifted her with produce she couldn't ignore. The Crankies know this because her jam jars had been in their basement for two years, and she needed to borrow some back. This is a legendary epoch in the annals of Cranky Homeland sandplums.

And none too soon. Prunus angustifolia has taken on the chin for the last two seasons. Alternating drought, flood, and late frost effectively obliterated them from the landscape. Sure, the thickets were still there, thorny and full of chiggers, just like normal. But they were completely naked, like the shelves of a Soviet-era grocery store. The sandplums of Cranky Homeland are now redeeming themselves and, in appreciation, the locals are submitting to all measure of discomfort (heat, bugs, dirt, dangerously friendly Angus cows) to gather them up. People who live where streets are paved may be muttering, oh jeez, how hard could it be? It's just fruit, for the love of Mike. Tell that to the Crankies' Cousin Winogene. When presented with a pint of plum jam as a hostess gift years ago, Winogene began manifesting PTSD symptoms, twitching slightly as she flashed back to the hot, itchy thickets of her youth. Meta Cranky palmed the jar, and Winogene's heart rate returned to normal.

With family, friends, and liberal application of insecticide, the Crankies revelled in a Hallmark-card-quality fruit-gathering expedition. They attribute the success of their grand day out to the local knowledge and strong chi of their fellow fruit-gatherers, who not only identified the perfect spot, but thoughtfully laid in the correct degree of cloud cover. The Crankies' expedition had more plums and fewer mosquitoes per square foot than any plum-related outing in Meta Cranky's plumming career. Did anyone crawl over a fence and rip her pants? Nope. Fall off the back of the truck into sandburrs? Again, nope. Step in cow plop and subject the party to reeking automobile all the way home? Not this time. Cranky 2 photographed the cow product to remind her friends not to step in it; write this technique into the protocols, because apparently, it works.

Friends and neighbors are busily inserting plum smoosh into little jars and storing the product in the back of their pantries, a huge additional outlay of time and energy. Why all this industry for jam? How much toast can they eat in Cranky Hometown, anyway? Meta Cranky thinks that it's not just about the toast; it's about being in the presence of generosity and bounty. With nothing to work with but sand, sun, and water, Prunus angustifolia has produced an extravagant crop. Confidently, it put out its inventory in the face of searing temperatures, a nasty Gulf oil spill, and an underperforming economy. In a rather mean summer, the sandplums are doing something confident and impressive. Who doesn't want a piece of that action?
--MC

Inbound

2010-07-12T07:56:00.000-05:00

Dateline: EFFINGHAM, IL
The Crankies are returning to Cranky Girl Farm from their glorious trip to the nation's capitol. They easily could have stopped in Terre Haute, Indiana, but they're getting a cheap thrill from saying "Effingham" at the slightest provocation. C1 smiled immoderately at the sight of the Effingham water tower, which bore the city's name, proudly writ large. Uncle Michael obliged Meta Cranky by asking whether she was going to the Effing swimming pool. Effingham may become the Cs' expletive of choice; they certainly will get their money's worth out of this stop on Interstate 70.

Almost heaven, I-70. Roads are flat there, flatter than the Walmart parking lots. Meta Cranky will take it any day over I-68. Who knew that Maryland had mountains? Meta Cranky never saw a single one at Camden Yards. Not that it isn't heartwarming to see a billboard for God's Anchor of Safety church on a hill with a 6-degree grade. Still, the Crankies would again slog over mountains, or even across the Tappen Zee Bridge (no small feat for the gephyrophobic Meta Cranky) to see their dear DC pals, let's call them Lillian and Dashiell. Wherever they are posted, be it Lodge Pole, Nebraska, or the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, the Cs will follow the Hellman/Hammetts (and their lovely thespian daughter) for their extensive board game collection, their exemplary grilling skills, and their fathomless knowledge of things historical, architectural, or simply fun. They had C2 at "hello," but their understanding of the Sponge Bob oeuvre deepened an already vigorous relationship.

The Crankies' DC tour is the longest road trip of their collective career, and the experience has left them pondering the mysteries of enduring friendships and sisterhood in confined spaces. In addition, the Crankies will be processing the random information they have gleaned along the highway. For example, Indiana appears to be the high fructose corn syrup capital of the planet. Mile after mile of corn, taller than your minivan. Drive a few miles further, and Indiana's roadside advertising features an individual who successfully lost 200 pounds via surgery and, apparently, wants to help you do the same. Hmmm. Corn. Morbid obesity. Could there be a connection? Corn probably is not an issue in another Indiana observation: Signage indicates that Eastern Indiana citizens want desperately to see you in church. Any church. In the western part of the state? Bleh. Western Indiana appears not give a damn about your immortal soul. The Crankies are curious about why Indiana is running hot and cold on this one.

MC suspects that children of a certain age may not remember the lovely reflection of the Washington Monument on a glassy smooth Potomac, or the uplifting words of FDR carved in stone. They will, however, remember playing pickup-sticks at a certain national park and seeing a sleeping panda. MC herself will remember the Air and Space Museum for its space shuttle-shaped gummies, which C1 thoughtfully selected for C2; C1's satisfaction in conquering the Metro on her second trip is also a keeper. The complete Cranky party will remember C2's appreciation of Walmart's advertising in Wheeling, West Virginia: Reading the phrase in the store's parking lot, she began vigorously chanting, "We sell for less!" Her interpretative recitation wasn't completely squelched until the group reached the produce section.

MC recognized many years ago that final results excited her more than a discussion of their means of production. However, life with C1 and C2 on I-70 (and I-68!) reminds her that it's not just the destination; it's the journey. Now that she has evoked closure with a metaphor, she can get back on the highway.
--MC

**Regarding photo, which features a favored koala and a doll named Isabel that plays "Send in the Clowns" when you wind up her bottom: C2 requests that readers observe how neatly she has arranged her friends in the back seat.

Travel is Broadening

2010-07-05T01:12:00.000-05:00

The Crankies are taking their mid-America tour, a trip ripe with opportunities for cultural enrichment and self-exploration. However, Meta Cranky is proving the theory opined in Repo Man: "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are." She thinks that chicken products sold along interstate highways must suck IQ points out of your gray matter and leave them in the detritus on the minivan floorboard. Even C2 has noticed something going on and asked, "Please can we not go to Wendy's any more?" She offered this devastating review of The Ultimate Chicken Grill: "Not Yummy."

In one alarming vignette in downstate Illinois, the Crankies wandered into a McDonald's full of the patrons who looked like the rotund, sedentary humanoids in WALL-E. It was perhaps the palest, plumpest, chain restaurant in the Crankies' experience, and they know every Braum's ice cream store in I-35. The U.S. President seems to be a notable exception to the Illinois' paradigm of pinkness and chub.

In Indiana, the Crankies explored the hometown of the famed Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley. Never heard of him? That's because you're not from Indiana, loser. The Crankies' Quaker ancestor recited Riley from memory, passing down certain euphonious phrases about grandpappies and punkins to his heirs. Riley's hometown of Greenfield, with its meticulously restored courthouse, appears to be auditioning for the role in a The Music Man; all it needs is Robert Preston skipping past the adorable gazebo on the courthouse lawn. Greenfield residents seem oblivious to all the ambient Victorian cuteness and are undistracted by acres of polished brass and burnished grillwork. The museum guide clearly had dealt with crankier customers than The Crankies and effortlessly reduced C2 to compliant, raised-hand docility. Don't even think about playing with those historical dollies. All that rapt attention assured that the Crankies were ringers at their next Indiana museum, a house on the Underground Railroad. Anybody know what this t-shaped wooden gizmo does? Yes sir, said C1 politely; it tightens the rope supports under the bed. After the guide demonstrated and replaced the gizmo on the bedspread, C2 observed that the other museum kept it on acid-free paper so the wood wouldn't stain the cloth. Just a suggestion.

C1 observes that the midwest is full of corn, and she requests stops to photograph vistas and native flora. C2 has made the acquaintance of midwestern small people, sharing her Skittles with random children of America's heartland. Meta Cranky is thrilled to find clean towels and liberal hours for motel pools, and she highly recommends the produce department at the Zanesville, Ohio, Pick-N-Pay. The Crankies expect to recover from recent infusions of Interstate Highway Dreck and subsequently report on their arrival Inside the Beltway.
--MC
*flora photo credits go to C1

Blood Will Tell

2010-06-28T17:39:00.002-05:00

The Crankies' Girl Cousins came to visit this weekend, leaving Meta Cranky slack-jawed at the brains, talent, and chutzpah packed into her maternal line's DNA. Griot-quality historical memories. Swear vocabularies eloquent enough to make the Big Lebowski weep. Plus, they speak math, giving rise to conversations rarely heard in Chez Cranky: "I told her, it's the Pythagorean theorem, for god's sake. You just plug in the numbers!"

In their wee days, Girl Cousins spent untold hours at the farm of maternal grandmother, whom we'll call Molly Bloom. In barns with sheer drops of 20 feet from hay mow to floor. In pickup trucks with minimal safety features, driven by 12-year-olds. In watering tanks surrounded by cow plop and covered in mossy ooze. Girl Cousins brought along archival pictures, including one of small children entertaining themselves in dirt road in front of the grandmother's home. Those children might have been sitting there for five hours, since Molly Bloom's house was not about childhood enrichment; small children were not provided with craft activities to help them with summer reading lists or foreign language acquisition. Instead, they were locked outside until mealtime. The hours that yawned between lunch and dinner provided Girl Cousins life lessons in patience and tenacity: Smart girls can go to school and buy their own houses, and they go in any time they want.

Girl Cousins all bear a family resemblance to Meta Cranky's mother, sharing either Cranky Sergeant's features, height-challenged stature, or no-nonsense attitude. Watching in appreciation, MC thinks she identified the Crankies' Maternal Line Organizing Principle (MLOP), and it has something to do with resiliency. All the Girl Cousins have coped with a grief or disappointment not with navel-gazing, but with a particularly vigorous grace and lack of self-pity. As Cranky #2 learned, their focus on action and results creates a No Whining Zone in which even the youngest are expected to plumb their depths and to figure out what they're made of. And guess what? Pouring your own milk can be a thrill. What the MLOP seems to favor is patience to teach those who can learn, gratitude for those who have taught them, and an utter ferocity with assholes.

Molly Bloom, for all her failings, may be the fountainhead of the MLOP. In her heyday, she was enormous, domineering, and profane, and yet the neighborhood beat a path to her door because she was so much fun. She was all about yes I said yes I will Yes and not so much about maternal support or unmitigated love. Girl Cousins have taken her best, improving ribaldry with kindness, and made it even better.
--MC
*MC thinks the photo credits go to Girl Engineer Cousin and Cranky Cousin.

Normalcy

2010-06-20T22:07:00.000-05:00

The inevitable round of summer farmhouse fix-its has begun, and it's not pretty. A trip through the basement revealed that the submersible pump could no longer be coaxed into removing air conditioner condensation from the property. Take a look: clearly, this sump pump has lost its will to live. Our new best friend, Service Call Ed, did some forensics on this former pump to determine the cause of death. "These look like mineral deposits. Do you drain the hot water heater into this pump?" he asked skeptically. Um. Well. Meta Cranky shuffled her feet. "How often do you do this?" Really, Ed. Isn't that a little personal? "About three times a year," Meta Cranky admitted, unable to make eye contact. Ed certified that the Crankies' hot water heater had killed their sump pump, and he swathed the new pump in protective mesh to prevent further carnage.

In light of this basement drama, MC reflected that residents of most households don't drain their hot water heater more often than they change the oil in their car or have their teeth cleaned. Yet the yuck-factor of the Crankies' water well means that it's completely normal to drain the heater, repeatedly; otherwise, the water smells disgusting. What passes for Normal Maintenance at Cranky Girls Farm would be Inexplicably Revolting for the people of the metroplex.

Want more examples? Cranky #2 points out a hole in the circa-1924 concrete watering tank. It's been drained to reveal the source of its leaks, and Second Brother mucked out most of the whiffy, primordial goo on its bottom. Two fiberglass patches later, and we're good to go. Wading up to your knees in La Brea tar pit-quality goo? Again, completely normal. Just hope you don't slip and fall in the ick. That's a gross-out even for the locals.

Some fix-it projects are heroic and deeply satisfying. A paint job, for example, is eye candy. Maybe some new landscaping? Cute! Love what you've done with those bedding plants! Sump pumps and patched tanks, however, are nearly so not sexy. MC will not be inviting friends over for high balls and a tour of CGF's new fiberglass installations. Sadly, this is the manner of most of the CG farm fix-its.

When the Almost 100-Year-Old Homes Tour swings by and asks what the Crankies have done to maintain their historic home, they can report improvements such as:
1)Notice how the house hasn't burned down from an electrical fire? When one too many white-faced electricians asked, "Lady, do you know you've got knob and tube wiring in your attic?" the Crankies came across with an upgrade.
2)Notice how the air conditioning works, even when it's really hot? Not so long ago, the AC tripped itself off when cooling the house was just too much trouble. Commonly, on a 100-degree-plus day, Meta Cranky would notice that, as the afternoon stretched out, she'd become even more irritable than usual. Then it would dawn on her that it's freaking hot in here. At this point, she'd walk out into the blazing heat to flip her breaker. An observant maintenance person asked, "Lady, do you know your air conditioner is 40 years old?" Really? You mean they aren't collectible, like a '67 Belvedere? Again, the Crankies dipped into their Deferred Maintenance account.

An old house sincerely wants to fall down. Making it stand upright, with working plumbing, sewerage, and electricity is the unnatural act. The long-ago person who poured our ancient concrete tank took the time to scratch the date into the top. Fiberglass is a tricky medium, and the Crankies can't make an addendum to note our own fix-it. They'll just observe: Repaired 2010.
--MC

Glee

2010-06-14T12:05:00.000-05:00

Fox's Glee has shown audiences how to find self-expression through old Journey and Madonna standards. Those passionate, emotional choir students do a fab job with top-of-the-lung Queen covers. But imagine them in your kitchen, belting out "Don't Stop Believin'," before you've had your first cup of coffee. Still charmed?

In the Cranky household, there's no mute button for the household soundtrack. Cranky #2 has a song in her heart, and she almost never keeps it to herself. She's got songs that tell you how to spell "and," "me," and "is." Songs that tell you the days of the week and months of the year. Most of Dolly Parton's greatest hits. Partisan songs that are inappropriate in particular venues: for example, "The Eyes of Texas" in the Oklahoma City Stockyards. Now-sophisticated Cranky #1 at times weeps in frustration at the background music in Chez Cranky; however, MC remembers C1 vocalizing the theme from Oklahoma, amplified by the excellent restroom acoustics in the Bob Bullock Museum in the capital of Texas.

Cranky Methodist Church only encourages this tunefest. MC thought that that only a few people could hear C1 singing along with the choir's anthem on Sunday. She thought wrong since, even without a microphone, C1 has excellent diaphragm support and projects for the farthest balcony. Truth be told, there's historical precedent for inappropriate Cranky family singing at Cranky Methodist. A twisted nursery worker named Pam taught wee Meta Cranky all the verses to a schoolyard ditty called "Gang Bang Lulu," which MC lustily repeated to all within earshot. Hey, life is a cabaret, old chum.

The Music Man's Harold Hill says that "singing is sustained talking." Sustained talking is one thing: C2 appears to be channeling Ethel Merman.

The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the clerk

Are secretly unhappy men because

The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the clerk

Get paid for what they do but no applause.

They'd gladly bid their dreary jobs goodbye for anything theatrical and why?

There's no people like show people, they smile when they are low

Angels come from everywhere with lots of jack, and when you lose it, there's no attack

Where could you get money that you don't give back? Let's go on with the show!

--MC

The Crankies' Red State Tour

2010-06-10T15:44:00.000-05:00

The Crankies have been treated to some impressive sights while in the country. A hip-high stand of Tripsacum dactyloides (eastern gamma grass) with those dramatic red tassels. Ruminants love the delectable Tripsacum dactyloides; the Crankies respect the venerable genealogy of this early ancestor of corn.

The gamma grass was in the same pasture as Mrs. W.'s rose installation. Is it too much, really? The Crankies might fill out one of those "how are we doing" cards to let the management know that all these roses are really over the top. Kind of like '80s big hair and shoulder pads. And what variety of cattle would you stock in this pasture to avoid clashing with that shade of pink? Luckily, Angus goes with everything.

Finally, a whimsical neighbor is doing his own interpretation of Cadillac Ranch; he has buried three fire engines in his field, leaving the front ends to point merrily to the sky. Second Brother has pointed out that the fire engines were working when they were planted in the dirt and sacrificed for art. Pictures are forthcoming.

Living and working amidst all this rural charm gives Meta Cranky some insight into Tea Party politics. Her understanding is that Tea Partiers (Tea Baggers? Tea Steepers? Lapsang Souchangers?) is that they want smaller government, and they are very irritated about government interference in their daily lives. MC thinks that she is ready to pull down some major political consultant money, because she has identified the source of this irritation: Tea Partiers are crabby as hell because their Internet service sucks.

Connect these dots, if you will: Tea Partiers live in Red States. Red States are predominantly rural. Rural states have sucky Internet. Think about it. Tea Partiers listen to Rush Limbaugh because he's on the freaking radio. Every Dodge pickup in every Red State driveway can access a radio station that carries Rush Limbaugh! If Tea Parties wanted to read The Huffington Post, they would have to drive 30 miles to use the Internet service at Starbucks! MC can hardly believe that she is the first to identify this phenomenon.

In her time at Cranky Girls' Farm, MC has acquired an intimate knowledge of the DSL help line of her local telephone/Internet co-op. All the DSL troubleshooters are drop-dead adorable, but MC suspects that they are working with some limited resources. MC is casting a rather jaded eye on those people who complain that Time Warner is rather too casual about their Road Runner cable. Casual, to MC, is 22 instances (by actual count at the telephone co-op) of dropped service in one day. MC lights the lucky candle and hopes that a new modem does the trick; otherwise, she'll be even more in evidence at Cranky Hometown library. Their air conditioning and WiFi are an unbeatable combination.

MC hasn't yet devised her new political consulting career, but she would advise candidates to exploit these two facts: 1) Red Staters would consider voting for the dead corpse of Ted Kennedy if he replaced their dial-up service with DSL and 2) Red Staters are soothed and sustained by the satisfaction they get from mowing their lawns. The immediate gratification of seeing a lawn mowed provides some chemical rush that must be comparable to methamphetamines, which also are tres popular in rural environments. Construct a campaign that combines Internet service with a 60-inch, 25 hp zero-turn lawnmower, and you could get some attention. We're just saying.
--MC

Accentuate the Positive

2010-06-07T08:43:00.001-05:00

The Crankies know that you can seriously mess up your karma by gloating about a successful (or not awful) farming endeavor. Casually mention at the coffee shop that you sold your wheat at $5, and you've won the instant loathing of the folks at the other table who sold at $2.45 and paid major storage fees. Acknowledging the need for tact and delicacy, Meta Cranky will casually mention, then, that the wheat harvest at Cranky Girls' Farm was completed yesterday. That small miracle was followed by another: the hay baler fairy worked all night to turn rows of swathed hay into tidy bales of alfalfa. Wait for it: and then it rained this morning.

There's plenty more grain to cut at Uncle Sid's and Uncle Michael's. But still, it's satisfying to have one item marked off the list without an asterisk that means a field of grain has been *flooded, *set on fire by welding torch, *damaged by late frost so the yield is cut in half, or *pounded into the ground by hail. Think these are hypothetical examples? Think again.

So, before the inevitable screwup happens, MC chooses to accentuate the positive. Let's talk about roses, shall we? These roses came from Mrs. Wymore's house, which is in the general neighborhood of Hazel's place. MC never saw Mrs. Wymore's house when it wasn't a ruin, but it was a destination in the mid-1930s. Hot, hot. People went there to dance and to buy drink-ables that were friendly and not especially legal. Mrs. W. seems to have been a very busy woman. Friend Marvin, Major Cranky's friend, recalls having Mrs. W. flag him down as he walked home from school to call out, "Tell your mother I weaned Baby W. today!" Mrs. W. was not slowed down by lactation.

But the roses. One spring about a dozen years ago, MC and Uncle M came upon the remains of Mrs. W's house and found it surrounded by rose bush. This was not just exuberant growth. We're talking an acre or two of prickly pink shrubbery. It doesn't get more heritage rose than Mrs. W.'s forgotten roses, which had been making a living all by themselves for 60 years or so. MC dug up a sample, took it home, and planted it in the wrong spot. Mrs. W.'s roses had put up with drought, flood, grasshoppers, and straying cattle, but they had no experience with shade. Year after year, they languished by the fence under an oak tree, until Uncle Sid decided to replace the corral. MC had to move the rose bush, and about damn time. That's all they were waiting for.

William Wordsworth came upon a field of daffodils and described them as such: "Ten thousand saw I at a glance / Tossing their heads in sprightly dance." The sandhills are much less forgiving than the Lake Country; if that Romantic poet had wandered upon Mrs. W.'s rosebush, he would have had to pick stickers out of his shoelaces. Still, the Romantics understood prickly charm, and the Poet Laureate certainly would have appreciated Mrs. W's illegal intoxicants. MC's heart with pleasure fills.
--MC

Re-entry @ Cranky Girls' Farm

2010-06-06T08:55:00.001-05:00

Meta Cranky and C2 have landed. MC got the distinct impression that fingers were drumming impatiently as the Crankies drove up the driveway: Combine and two grain trucks parked in the driveway. Field of dead-ripe wheat on the left side of the road. Rows of swathed alfalfa, ready to bale, on the right. A turkey added to the sense of frantic activity, flapping and squawking over the car and into the walnut tree. There was a general impression of where have you been already? In the time it took C2 to get on her hat and sunscreen, Uncles Sid and Michael cut a wheat sample and took it to the elevator (57 pounds/bushel; that's grade 2; not bad). The Crankies were good to go.

It was a perfect day to cut wheat: a steadily blowing wind and a temp of 102. Miserable for anything except drying grain and getting it into a bin. C2 rode on the combine until its bin filled for the first time and it stopped to empty into a truck. Then she took a Fancy Nancy approach to wheat harvest, setting herself a schedule of bath, nap, and tea party for the rest of the afternoon. C2 figured the combine would still be going when the sun went down, and she was right. She got a second trip around the field in the cool of the evening, wearing a tea party dress never before seen in an Allis Chambers Gleaner. Tres fancy!

Uncles Sidney and Michael were decidedly less fancy, since they had to crawl under combines when wheat straw got stuck, and shlep the wheat to the elevator in the large, reliable, but not-air conditioned truck. At the end of the day, though, their Significant Others had a lovely dinner waiting for them; we think the combination of successfully cut wheat, air conditioning, and grilled meat products was a satisfying one.

MC's Ancient O'Hern great-grandfather famously went berserk at harvest time; apparently the variables of machinery, weather, and human error were too much for him to synthesize as he watched his grain (read: money) being gathered into piles. One of his 10 sons apparently threatened to hit him with a shovel during a grain harvest if he didn't back off. MC is a little fuzzy on this story. She's not sure 1)which of the 10 sons made this threat or 2)If the shovel actually connected with the Ancient O'Hern. Contrast this with the Crankies' harvest experience, where Gardening Friend makes margaritas in fancy glasses, which Significant Others sip as they watch a combine move in smooth circles around a field. MC is thinking that estrogen improves the wheat harvest experience. Not that she can set the header on a combine, operate the dumping mechanism on a truck, or perform any useful labor. But as C2 slathered the assembled females with her Mary Kay perfume samples, MC couldn't help but observe that a Fancy Nancy wheat harvest has a certain je ne sais quoi.
--MC

No Place for the Squeamish

2010-05-31T07:31:00.003-05:00

Meta Cranky has been in stricken with a GI ailment. Two days of the usual misery, interrupted only by Cranky #2's recitations from Fancy Nancy Tea Party. Just when MC was lulled to sleep by directions for making Raspberry Swirls, she'd be elbowed in the ribs to decipher some of Nancy's fancier creations ("How do you say "s-i-l-v-o-u-s-p-l-a-i-t?" "What does a-l-f-r-e-s-c-o spell?"). Take it from the Crankies: Fancy Nancy is a regular Florence Nightingale.

Enforced bedrest gives MC the opportunity to reflect on similar visitations, some self-inflicted, some not. A vicious bacteria in Cranky Sergeant's kitchen once took MC down for a solid three days. The unkindest hangovers, MC realized, pale in comparison to food poisoning served to you by your own mother. After days of being able to communicate only by blinking her eyelids, MC heard Second Older Brother enter Cranky Sergeant's house. "I came to view the body," he boomed, sympathetically. MC, busy battling with toxins, was unmoved. Then older brother weighed in with a diagnosis: "This might be morning sickness--maybe she's pregnant!" Brother's hilarity was lost on the Sergeant, who could tell the diff between preggers and Staphylococcus. Before she lost consciousness, MC heard the Sergeant giving the orders: "OUT! Get OUT of the house." Second Brother, and his very sincere interest in MC's welfare, was summarily removed from the sickroom.

All GI dramas have their own narrative arc and particular plot complications. C2 had a five-day flu when she was still in diapers. Small Cranky's illness would have been worrisome since she was so small; it was amplified by her disinterest in the water substitute that would reliably stay on her stomach. Consequently, she pleaded for water like one of the dusty minions in Lawrence of Arabia. MC, lying in bed with small C2, watched these events unfold one thirsty morning like one of those rolling marble games where the ball gains momentum and, with increasing speed and precision, drops through holes and traps to reach its destination. The chronology was approximately this:

1) MC, in bed with C2, hears the phone ring and Herr Cranky answer it.

2) C2 wakes up and begs for a drink of water.

3) Sympathetic C1 fills a glass for C2.

4) Herr Cranky, unaware of other events, hands MC the phone.

5) C1 gives her sister a glass of water.

6) C2 throws up on MC.

7) MC looks at the wreckage and speaks her first words of the day: "I'll have to call you back."

There are a surprising number of similarities between having a two-day intestinal bug and going to a weekend spa. There's the whole cleansing purge thing. There's the "Mommy's Day Out" element: by being in bed for two days: no housework! no laundry! On the whole, then, it was like a Stay-cation, except for the being miserable part.

--MC

Locavores

2010-05-24T16:04:00.000-05:00

For the past few weeks, people entering the Cranky front door have stepped inside and looked quizzically at the bottoms of their shoes. It's not dog poo, but something equally disgusting: a plum that's seen better days. Squirrels in the Cranky neighborhood have been working overtime for a month to frantically gnaw on the fruits of the Crankies' plum tree and then hurl the remainders down to the sidewalk. Where the ants and flies take over. House Beautiful, this is not.

Back in March, this tree gave little evidence that it would create oozing, buzzing Superfund-type sludge. But that blossoming harbinger of spring has been transformed into a source of fruity, fermenting plum smoosh.

Meta Cranky imagines a perfect world in which tender plum trees would sport warning labels that say: "Hey dummy! Don't plant this by your sidewalk! Only a complete moron would make the mailman walk through plum goo for month and still expect to get the New Yorker on time." Call it a failure of imagination, but she never envisioned that the wee sapling in the back of her car could block the front of the house and create what Herr Cranky now calls "a jungle vibe."

Since this tree is all about fecundity, a fraction of its seed-bearing fruits remain in the tree, where Cranky #2 and her BFF tirelessly arrange ladders to remove as many as possible. Cranky #1 led a party of teenagers into the tree, where even more were secured. Since a truly ripe, mouth-ready plum would either have been 1)gummed by a squirrel or 2)pulverized upon impact with sidewalk, the Crankies are picking their plums al dente, letting them ripen, and then turning them into jam.

Meta Cranky's compulsion to preserve fruity bits in teeny jars is a product of her Red State upbringing. The thickets of ripening sand plums near Cranky Girls' Farm move the locals to stand in sandburrs, among throngs of snakes and clouds of mosquitoes, to fill feed sacks with very small, very local, produce. The locals take these sacks to granny ladies who then make a tart, red jam. People in Philadelphia eat scrapple, which MC can tell you is big mistake. Those crazy Canadians eat cheese curds and gravy, which might be OK if you're trying to pack on blubber like a penguin. In the whole universe of local cuisine, you could do a lot worse than plum jam. It's rather a point of local pride: since this product is not available in stores or on QVC, you're not going to get any unless you make it yourself. Or someone likes you.

The Crankies' very urban plum tree stands in for a thicket of Red State sand plums. What we lack in snakes and sandburrs, we make up for with plummy spots on our living room carpet. Cranky #1 declares that the act of jamming satisfies her itch to hoard food. Apparently, children exposed to the Little House books at an early age will expect to hang onions from their rafters and cram their cellars full of potatoes. If they have neither rafters or cellars, they'll settle for putting plums into mismatched mayo jars.

In 1957, the Cimarron River flooded at Hazel's house, marooning a few dozen aunts, uncles, and babies for several days. Meta Cranky asked Friendly Cousin about this years afterward, wondering what all those people found to eat. Food wasn't a problem, Friendly Cousin reported. Before the cellar filled with water, they brought up all Hazel's canning jars, full of local produce.
--MC

Who Do You Think You Are: The Quaker

2010-05-21T00:06:00.001-05:00

The Crankies are taking a road trip this summer and will stop to view their ancestral homeland. Major Cranky's Quaker family hailed from eastern Indiana, where Quakers still abound and will let you go to their fabulous liberal arts college for $44,000/year. Just because they're pacifists doesn't mean they're not capitalists.

DAR Matron and Cranky Oil Baron, Meta Cranky's genealogic-obsessive relatives, have mapped
The Quaker's DNA, so there's very little new ground to be covered in the who-begat-whom department. But smaller Crankies might be interested in info that isn't included in the Indiana Dead Quaker People records.

In every picture MC has seen of The Quaker, he looks like he's already been dead for three days. We recognize that he might be shown to better advantage in pictures prior to 1949. However, the photo of him with his son, grandson, and great-grandson indicates that they're all working from the same basic pattern; he might very well have been Quaker eye candy in the 19th century.

The Quaker left Indiana when his widowed father remarried; his difficult new stepmother helped him light out for the territories to score free real estate in the Oklahoma land run. Late in his life, he spent a weekdays at his son's ranch. His daughter-in-law Hazel recalled him fondly and respectfully, but her details never offered much personality. The most revealing nugget Hazel shared was his habit of reciting the Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley. Riley delighted in homey country rhymes with lots of dropped g's. She heard The Quaker's rendition of "How Did You Rest, Last Night?" each morning before breakfast. If she harbored homicidal thoughts about the Hoosier Poet or her father-in-law, she kept them to herself:

"How did you rest, last night?"--
I've heard my gran'pap say
Them words a thousand times--that's right--
Jes them words thataway!

Riley is credited with establishing the Midwest's cultural identity; he's got a lot to answer for.

Major Cranky's stories about his grandfather had more narrative arc. For example, good guys caught some bank robbers in the Kansas flint hills while The Quaker was waiting for the land run to start. The good guys applied frontier justice, and the bank robbers were quickly dispatched, with one exception: the 13-year-old robber. The women of the group, including Mrs. Quaker, demanded that the boy be released, and eventually, he was. When Major Cranky first heard this story, he was horrified: "Grandad, I'm only 13. Would you have wanted to hang me?" His grandfather, whose Quaker theology opposed war, slavery, and capital punishment, told him: "Don't. Rob. A bank."

The Quaker adopted new folkways, and even a new religion, in his new venue. He sang in the choir with the Methodists, and even prayed in public when he was asked to say grace over meals. In the 21st century, his notable feature seems to be his even, balanced sensibility: for fun, he and Mrs. Quaker read the Congressional Record of an evening. Sometimes, maybe, No Drama can be a good thing. Sure, Grace Kelly shoots the bad guy to save Gary Cooper. But she only played a Quaker in the movies.
--MC

BFF

2010-05-13T21:52:00.018-05:00

There's a special category of really good friend you make before you're six. Cranky #1 discovered her BFF at kindergarten meet-the-teacher and hasn't looked back. Similarly, Cranky #2 picked out her BFF by end-of-business on kindergarten opening day. "She just looked like a really good friend for me," C2 explained. At the end of her first playdate at BFF's house, she announced: "I want to be part of BFF's family." And to their everlasting credit, best friend's family didn't smile tightly and reflexively recoil.

Recently, BFF walked home from school with the Crankies, and en route she reflected on the responsibility of best-friendness. "It's not easy being Cranky #2's best friend," BFF observed seriously. "She hugs me really hard." Even if your politics and taste in significant others diverge wildly, your pre-6 BFF will remember that your panties had big picture of Cinderella on the butt, and that you used to hug really hard.

If MC's best-friend-since-we-were-four ever decides to write a tell-all, then MC is in big trouble. People who know the color of the shag carpet in your childhood bedroom are bound to have other intimate details in their files. Happily, the benevolent BFX4 publicly remembers only the least-embarrassing anecdotes. Since her knowledge of Cranky Farm lore is infinite, she is a fabulous reference for C1 and C2. Ask her about testing Cranky Sergeant's reflexes by putting a rubber snake in the garden: MC collapsed into the strawberry bed while watching her mother chop BFX4's rubber snake into tiny bits with a hoe. The snake was sliced like a loaf of French bread, Cranky Sergeant was triumphantly flustered, but MC and her BFX4 were transcendentally thrilled with the success of their joke.

The all-day breakfast joint with the gingerbread pancakes and Zen vibe features quotes on the back page of its menu. The one that resonates for Meta Cranky reads something like: "a good friend will visit you in prison. A really good friend will come to your lecture." Since she read that menu years ago, MC has developed her own list of what a really good friend will do: Be charming to your geezer relatives. Check your head for lice. Help you retrieve an impounded car and keep it a secret for 20 years. These are the friends, as an adult, you are drawn to because of their wit, their braininess, or their selfless generosity. Yet there are other friends who met you when you were just an illiterate mass of narcissistic id, and they loved you anyway.
--MC

Tales from the Crypt

2010-05-11T19:33:00.025-05:00

How does Meta Cranky know that she's become a crone? Let's count the ways. Could it be that she's the only mommy in the kindergarten hallway gallery whose hair is colored with a gray crayon? Perhaps the most recent Mother's Day card: "My mommy's name is Meta Cranky. She is 78 years old." Then there's that Wheatsville checker who looked at Herr (and Meta) Cranky's membership card and announced, with anthropologist-like fascination, that he was born after they joined the co-op. We could have told them that humans mated with Neanderthals! Heck--we lived down the street from Flying Aardvark and Runs Like a Girl!

Yet leave it to a faceless institution to deliver the unkindest cut. Here's the latest indignity: MC has contacted her alma mater to see whether it would like to charge her outrageous tuition to take a few classes. Since MC's path is generally the complicated one, she asked for, and received, especially helpful instructions from the helpful admissions office. In the process of dredging up MC's historic academic information, Ms. Helpful promised to call if her transcripts were no longer legible. "Come again?' asked MC. "The microfiche deteriorates over time. But that's OK. You'll have time to order a copy from the originals." The microfiche deteriorates over time? To paraphrase Ms. Helpful: MC has generated documents so old that they require special conservation techniques. Like an original reel of Birth of a Nation. Or a lovely French cave painting.

Wait, there's more: "That would include your transcript from A&M." Now this bit of information was fascinating, since MC never attended A&M, although she was once provisionally admitted to library school at UCLA (without applying!). The answer to that puzzler is that MC took a class at a school so long ago that the school's name has changed. Happens all the time. The creepiest part, however, is that MC has no memory of taking any class at that university. Herr Cranky still owns a working cerebral cortex, and he declares it was a Spanish class. If that's the case, then why doesn't MC speak Spanish?

MC chooses to see this loss of memory as an opportunity to create her own reality. Of course she took a summer Spanish class in 1984! If she digs around in the bottom of her purse, she'll find her diploma from the NASA cooking school and a pay stub from her part-time brain surgery gig. The one at the drive-thru clinic. You think she doesn't have a license to practice law? She'd show it to you, but the records burned up in that fire they had in San Francisco. You know, the one after the earthquake?
--MC

Roundup

2010-05-06T10:01:00.013-05:00

The school year is drawing to a close, and Meta Cranky has proof. She visited the Kindergarten Roundup for the '10-'11 crop of small people and recognizes that Cranky #2 soon will be displaced by someone younger and cuter. At Kinder Roundup, MC watched impossibly young parents copying wee children's passports and presenting a very great number of immunization forms from California. The Crankies' school is, apparently, very popular with people born in California five years ago. The school professionals inspired friendly confidence in anxious parental units; no child is, as of yet, being left behind.

Meta Cranky felt a twinge as she watched these parents sitting in uncomfortable folding chairs. They're still thinking it's about their children, she observed. From her eight years of elementary mommy experience, MC can report: yes, but. If MC ran the public school system, there would be an open bar at Kindergarten Roundup and the principal would share the following info:

Moms and dads. Look around the room. You will be seeing one another quite a bit for the next little while. Unless you come across with $15K/year for private school, win the lottery at the Ann Richards leadership academy (girls only!), bail early to go to a middle school magnet program, or the economy recovers and you get your old job back in California, you will know these faces in exquisite detail by the end of 2017. That's seven years. About a hundred birthday parties. Want to do girl scouts/boys scouts? That's 2 meetings/month X 9 months X 7 years. Not counting campouts. Do the math. Now guestimate how many hours you could share with these people doing playground duty, Spring Fling silent auction, or Carnival food booths. I think you see where I'm going here.

Some of these people will be within your comfort zone for friendliness/snarkiness/perkiness/ sincerity/absent-mindedness. Some of them will not. You will do yourselves an enormous favor if you can, at your earliest convenience, recognize your tolerance for these qualities and migrate toward your tribe. Some of these people will laugh at your jokes. Others will ask you, sincerely, if you think the principal can get the janitor to address his butt crack issue.

MC once sold baked goods for an entire evening with two other Veteran Mommies. During their Carnival stint, they were confronted by New Mommy, who had a serious problem with a confetti egg that had been broken inside the building. "I'll clean it up," offered MC. "The children should know not to bring them in the building!" steamed New Mommy. "Maybe you should put up a sign if that's the policy," suggested MC, helpfully, "Besides, I'll clean it up." "The janitors will be SO angry," New Mommy tossed over her shoulder as she stomped off. Veteran Mommies looked at each other thoughtfully. Then one VM offered kindly, "She's a Kindergarten Mom. When she's a Fifth Grade Mom, she'll know." The other VM observed: "We will crush her."

Some kindergarteners are heartbreakingly sweet. Others will be sent to the principal's office after they squeeze the hamster. You will learn to tell the difference. Similarly, you will learn that you can have a grand time slinging lasagna in the school cafeteria if only you get the right shift.

In summary, Kinder parents: Be smart. Use the buddy system. Be kind to one another. Or it will be a very long seven years.
--MC

Cakes We Have Known

2010-04-30T20:37:00.029-05:00

After weeks of school deadlines, work deadlines, and time out for strep throat, the Crankies found themselves on a Friday afternoon with time on their hands. The day cried out for recreational baking, and the Crankies answered the call. Gardener Friend had turned them on to the recipe on the back of the German Chocolate box; the Crankies consider her a reliable source, and not just because of that thing she does with her blender and the margarita mix. Faced with the empirical data, however, Meta Cranky quailed. She cannot serve a cake involving eight eggs and 3.5 cups of butter unless someone significant is certifiably dead or recently born. The Crankies found a slightly less caloric alternative, and no one has asked for three cups of butter on the side.

MC has told small Crankies that their lives would be different if she could make piecrust; she sincerely believes that piecrust is a quality of life issue. A house with an efficiently working rolling pin operates on a rareified plane, like a household where people casually lapse into Latin. MC can produce a pie, but the crust is an awkward exercise rather than a joyous, confident celebration of sugar and fat. The undertaking is not unlike P.G. Wodehouse's description of the "furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French." It can be done, certainly, but at what cost.

Still, cakes require no apology. MC's menu rotates around a half dozen or so that are forgiving and have ingredients generally found in the pantry. Back in the day, she thought highly of Mrs. Melton's Pear Cake, which always arrived from Denton in a paper sack. Not until she read the instructions did MC glean that the paper sack was part of the recipe. Take Mrs. Melton's cake out of the oven and put it in a paper sack for some completely arbitrary amount of time. Let's say 2.25 minutes. And then you're done. MC has absolutely no excuse for not asking Mrs. Melton, Hey, what's the deal with that paper bag? when she had a chance. Now it's lapsed into the fog of mystery like Piltdown Man, or what John Edwards ever saw in Rielle Hunter.

Mrs. Melton's Pear Cake requires pears, and that means planning and organization. Yet even a person on deadline who has been eating Ramen noodles for a week can make Chocolate Oatmeal Cake out of available materials. Jacki and Hadacol gave MC this nicely typed recipe card back in Age of Metternich. Jacki said, essentially, Take this, you won't be sorry. When MC pulled out a pencil to copy it down, Jackie graciously offered the very same card, saying she'd long since memorized it. With this baby, you get your yin (the thrill of chocolate and coffee) along with your yang (good-for-you oatmeal). It's like putting Metamucil (or Colon Blow, as Hazzir calls it) in your milkshake. Two great tastes that, when combined, will stave off intestinal cancer.

Perhaps someday MC will wield a pastry bag with enough flair to wildly misspell in icing something worthy of Cakewrecks (Thanks for being our "Dad" remains a fav). Or finally become proficient in parchment paper and produce those multi-layered beauties that get served up on Aunt Minnie's Fostoria cake plate. Until then, we'll rely on an enthusiastic audience to move our product.
--MC

Update on My Secret Sharer

2010-04-24T22:42:00.019-05:00

As previously reported, Meta Cranky has been robbed. Specifically, an Indian academic in Orissa put his name on an essay MC published very long ago. Since then, MC has been gratified to watch red-faced, apoplectic professor-types hold forth on the topic of on plagiarism. Her favorite, thus far, is a professor who, when presented with plagiarism, has re-instated students who dropped her class in order to fail them. Insert Clint Eastwood in "To Sir With Love" and you get the picture. Buy an essay from Questia and make her day, sucker.

MC contacted the journal that published her long-ago essay. Its lawyers asked how much of MC's essay was republished under Secret Sharer's name. Percentage-wise. Well, SS left off the epigram and inserted some British-isms. That should knock off a percent or two. In fairness, Secret Sharer appears to have read MC's entire essay before he truncated it. Still, she was there first.

Now that she knows her Secret Sharer's name, MC's curiosity has gotten the best of her. SS's vita is online, as is the website of his current university. She wants to know why a person from a 3,000 year-old culture, who speaks Hindi and Oriya, bothers with the topic of her essay. MC's plagiarist is from the ancient Kalinga nation, readers; the author of the Mahabarata was born in the city where Secret Sharer teaches. Its residents are rightly proud of their 72-foot statue of Lord Hanuman. They would be within their rights to sniff at a potboiler by 19th-century British girl who kind of complicated Percy Shelley's first marriage.

MC thinks the principal of Secret Sharer's school offers a clue. The principal's message on the school website notes that: "The rationate of education can only be realised when the drive to a mindless competition for jobs is stopped. In its place we will try for holistic assemblage of mind and body. Our goals is to reorient education in this direction." A climate of "mindless competition for jobs" could move a faculty member of a small college to think he needed to steal my essay. Let's remember, though, Lord Hanuman's curse. Hanuman, you will recall from the nine-hour Broadway production of the Mahabarata, cannot remember his powers unless someone else tells him what they are:

You are as powerful as the wind (Hanumanji was the son of Pawan, God of wind);

You are intelligent, illustrious & an inventor.

There is nothing in this world that’s too difficult for you;

Whenever stuck, you are the one who can help.

Mary Shelley seems a little pedestrian compared to all that.
--MC

Burn This Book

2010-04-17T15:54:00.010-05:00

Sometime back in the Plestiscene Epoch, Meta Cranky took an exacting class on Feminism and Romanticism at the New Jersey School for the Impoverished. What MC mostly remembers is revision upon revision of her essay on Frankenstein and hysteria. Exacting Professor has now moved down the turnpike to the New Jersey School for Hedge Fund Managers; there, her web page states, "I care about literary aesthetics and remain a `close reader' of its complex forms." We were all about complex forms at the School for the Impoverished, and MC was slightly hysterical herself by the time the essay was completed and, eventually, published.

MC was successfully repressing this part of her sordid past until she received a phone call from Righteously Indignant California Co-ed. "Are you the Meta Cranky who wrote an essay on Frankenstein?" she asked. MC went by "Cranky Graduate Student" then, but on the whole, yes. If you thought that people of California were Righteously Indignant about property taxes, being defrauded by Enron, or having a $20 billion budget deficit, you have yet to hear them on the topic of plagiarism. California Co-ed found MC's essay reprinted in the book pictured above. Except that it is no longer attributed to MC. Instead, it's written by a scholar called Dr. S.P. Swain, Head of the Department of English, Rourkela Municipal College, Rourkela, India. On her end of the phone, MC heard California Co-ed doing a very good imitation of Nora Charles as she forwarded correspondence from Indian publishers and the U.S. copyright office. Clearly, she had sleuthed this matter for days and was aghast that this book, now selling for $45 in its second printing, was apparently being sold to Indian undergraduates. Just for fun, compare MC's 1993 version with the Indian essay, copyright 2002. What a coincidence!

MC doubts that she's missing out on a financial windfall here. But she is bitter that S.P. Swain, comfortably ensconced on the Indian subcontinent, merrily puts his name on her work without ever having set foot in the Exacting Professor's class at the School for the Impoverished. If names like Learned Hand, Sonia Sotomayor, or Judge Judy count for anything, then justice will be exacted from Dr. S.P. Swain, Head of the Department of English, Rourkela Municipal College. If MC gets to choose the manner of her vindication, it will be this: Dr. Swain will need to become a close reader of the complex forms of literary aesthetics. And MC knows just where he can take lessons.
--MC

Literacy is Complicated

2010-04-11T23:24:00.023-05:00

With her advanced age working against her, MC remembers only vaguely the days before Cranky #1 could read. Now that she's mastered literacy, the task is to persuade her to put down the book in order to bathe, dress, or eat. When C1 seemed dangerously late arriving home from school last week, she was discovered reading on the front porch. Clearly, MC is going to have that GPS chip implanted in children who can't turn their phones on.

With Cranky #2, however, literacy is bright and new. How thrilling to listen to C1 spell out b-l-a-c-k, and know what she doesn't want you to know! Literacy, however, means that the days of abbreviating, skimming, or bowdlerizing bedtime stories are over. Try to shorten a tedious Magic Bus yawner, and you'll get, "Where does it say that?" And then MC is so busted.

Most recently, C2 has revved up her Disney Chinese Princess-wanna-be fetish to explore The Middle Kingdom. MC thinks this latest trip to the library is timely and perhaps even prescient; since the Chinese appear to be holding the entire planet's debt, the Crankies ought to show a little interest. C2's books on Chinese history, however, are not for the kindergarten set, even if they did come from the children's shelves. MC was with these educational books as far as the Shang king's burial, with its accompanying ritual slaughter. The things some people will do to get their property declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. Turn some pages and the Huns arrive; MC started skimming at the Mongol conquest of A.D. 1215, where Zhongdu takes it on the chin.

MC drew the line, however, at the fall of the Ming in 1644, with its accompanying picture of a sweet girl being restrained by brutish louts. We'll just skip that one, thought MC. C2 mightily resisted this censoring. This young woman might be a princess--she might even be Mulan! When C2 pointed at the picture and repeated her request, MC attempted evasion: "The emperor's daughter didn't want to leave the city, so the emperor took her by the arm," she said authoritatively. Jeez, it fits with the picture. "That doesn't start with the," protested C2. She then started to sound out emperor's complicated name. Alright, let's try this one, "When the rebel army came, they captured the girl." "But girl starts with g," said C2, "guh-irl." OK, ok, ok. "When Chongzhen's daughter refuses to end her life, the furious emperor orders her arm to be cut off." There. MC read it. The Crankies spent the next five minutes talking about why people would be so mean. Then they finished up by looking at pictures of Pu Yi being evicted from the Forbidden City in 1924.
Perhaps there are countries that have more violent histories than China, but there are few that have longer ones. With a working knowledge of phonics, silent-e, and what two vowels do when they go out walking, the Crankies took a spin through some major Asian carnage. Thanks for all the fun, Disney. Since we're reading and all, maybe we could move on to our other favorite animated princess, Pocahontas, and see how it works out for those Powhatan folks.
--MC

Why We Walk

2010-04-11T06:21:00.031-05:00

Crankies #1 and #2 have been able to receive state-funded educations only because they can walk to school. It's not like it's the Long March or anything--it's only four blocks. They have been driven on occasions that involve driving rain or science projects. Yet in the main, they walk. With umbrellas, with puffy coats, with hurriedly collected gloves, with bare feet on the way home.
C2 required some encouragement as she began her commute to kindergarten. In fairness, she started in a merciless August. The outbound trip at 7:30 a.m. generally was fine, but the inbound trip, in the heat of the afternoon, was not. She would say, in so many words, "It's too freaking hot," and then sit down on the curb. Soon she began trolling the parking lot for friendly faces behind the wheel. When she saw friends in the back seat, often she'd just open their doors and climb in. More than once, we received travelers' aid after being able to complete only 2.5 blocks of our journey.

Spring, however, is a different story. If you didn't feel like skipping when you left the house, the spirit probably will move you when you see the neighbors' iris bed--an impressive swath across the entire front of their lot. The climbing roses on the fence in Block 3 also merit significant attention and tend to pick up the pace. Kitties, sidewalk construction crews, men with interesting ties. It's all good.

Many of the Crankies' classmates walk to school, and they are passed by a fair number of small people on bicycles. The cul-de-sac beyond the Crankies' domicile, however, seems to be a bridge too far. Four blocks, apparently, is the outer limit of walkability, since the neighbors two doors down have learned to read only with the help of fossil fuels. One kind neighbor recently helped out with transportation issues when a family needed a hand. And, being the altruistic type, she kindly offered Meta Cranky a ride home after children were deposited. Sinking into the depths of some fine GM upholstery, MC heard her neighbor ask, "Do you walk because you want to?" MC tried out several answers in her head. No, I walk because I've turned the two Toyotas in my driveway into planters. No, I walk so I can smell my neighbors' tailpipe emissions. MC finally came up with something like, "I'd rather not deal with the traffic at the school. That's why I walk."

Herr Cranky, of course, formulated the diplomatic-yet-honest answer. Next time, he suggested, MC could say, "I walk so I can meet my neighbors." Of course he's right. Would the Crankies have had first dibs at the take-it-it's-free buffet in Block 2 if they had driven a Buick to school? Nope. Instead, they scored a dozen bottles of Opi nail polish in some rather metabolic colors. From her carseat, would C2 have chatted up the guy standing next to the excavated water pipe in Block 3 to suss out his wife's name? It's the same as C2's! What a coincidence!

On one trip home, the Crankies chatted with a neighbor on the not-sidewalk side of the street. Since the house stands up the side of a hill, with no sidewalk in front, C2 had not previously lingered in this neighbor's yard, climbed her steps, or complimented her flowers. As C2 explored this new territory, this neighbor shared her knowledge of long-ago Austin, which she had observed from her perch in Block 2 for 70 years. During the chat, Block 2 Neighbor started making connections: "Your husband walked your other daughter to school, didn't he?" Yes, until C1 moved on to middle school, the outbound trip had belonged exclusively to Herr Cranky. Block 2 Neighbor had, apparently, watched C1 grow up during these daily walks, and mused about her own walks with her own father. MC briefly flashed on Boo Radley's intimate observations of neighborhood children, but Block 2 Neighbor wasn't creepy, and she didn't look at all like Robert Duvall. B2N's observation just emphasized: the Crankies have been walking to school since the first George W. Bush administration. They're practically an institution.

Spring weather means that outbound morning walks can be nippy, while inbound afternoon walks are, like Mary Poppins, Practically Perfect in Every Way. With weather like this, the Crankies expect fabulous things, and often they get them. Here are the results of one walk home:

Block 1: Help a neighbor's son wash a car. Squirt water on your feet.
Block 2: Run to catch up with Walking Mom and ask her why she's not walking her dogs. Check on rose bushes.
Block 3: Move the ducks at the dog-watering station. Then run to get to the swing in Block 4.
C2 rounds a corner and is no longer in MC's line of vision. MC enters Moderate State of Alert.
Block 4: Block 2 Neighbor rounds corner and, looking back at C2 on swing, says to MC, "Oh, there you are."

After walking to school for almost an entire school year, C2 is something of an expert on how it's done. Her considered analysis is this: "Sometimes when it's winter and fall, you go slow. And sometimes when it's spring and summer, you go a little fast."
--MC

The Club

2010-04-07T20:23:00.032-05:00

Some time back, Meta Cranky spent a few weeks trying to identify pictures in Hazel's photo album. She had this one pegged as a school get-together, since the back of the image looks to be a country-school stage. Check out Hazel, third from the right in back, and then tell me that you wouldn't photograph better if you wore that hat. That lipstick also shows up well in b&w.

MC started sleuthing after she recognized Minnie, sitting to the left of her young granddaughter in the front row. Minnie's daughter directed MC to Margaret, the little girl's mother, sitting to the little girl's right. This group, Margaret reported, was the Federated Farm Women, a social group for country ladies. Margaret said, "I always just called it `The Club.'" The Club gave these women an excuse to get out of the house and chat with their neighbors, and Margaret said she missed it when she moved to town.

This cold winter, Margaret passed away, and those at her funeral viewed vintage pictures of the person she had been before she arrived at Cranky Home Town. Margaret was a British war bride who arrived with a college degree and a clipped accent. She also arrived pregnant, rather more so than her marriage license would have indicated, and her mother-in-law couldn't forgive her for it. Minnie made it her life's work to make Margaret feel unwelcome, since, by her calculations, her daughter-in-law had set a trap for an American serviceman and his generous benefit package.

MC's father, Major Cranky, once regaled her with a story of a predatory British nurse seeking American citizenship. While in a London hospital, Major Cranky became a particular nurse's object of desire. Since he didn't return her interest, he introduced her to a friend. Major Cranky's friend had a date with the nurse before he returned to North Africa with his battalion. Now comes that clincher for Major Cranky: His friend didn't begin to manifest symptoms of V.D. until after he was back in a war zone. That mean that he immediately was hospitalized and drew combat pay. In summary, MC's father said, "It worked out well for everybody."

But Margaret was not the predator type. She married her G.I. and never looked back; apparently she never returned to Britain, and her relatives never came to her. She and her G.I. remained married until death did them part. Margaret joined her club, and she stuck with it. Thinking of Margaret, an English island in the sea of Cranky Hometown, MC thinks of the Han princess who was stolen away by the Huns in the second century C.E. Living among the Tartars, she wrote

Earth was pitiless.
It brought me to birth in such a time.
War was everywhere. Every road was dangerous.
Soldiers and civilians everywhere
Fleeing death and suffering.
. . . I can never learn the ways of the barbarians.

Because Margaret learned our ways, we never entirely learned hers. But in her graciousness, she never made us feel like barbarians.
--MC

*fact-check update: Margaret's baby was six months old when she arrived in Cranky Hometown. She and baby came through Ellis Island and then made a week-long train trip from New York.

Vinyl

2010-04-06T21:22:00.035-05:00

photo credit to The Costumes Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Long ago, in a basement far, far away, teenaged MC put on an ancient LP to make her conscripted labor pass more quickly. She made a random choice from a pile and was pleasantly surprised to hear perky, big-band saxophones. Imagine her surprise, then, as she watched her mother, the Cranky Sergeant, gasp and drop onto a seat with her hands folded over her bosom. MC looked at Cranky Sergeant expectantly and got this response: "String of Pearls." OK, now we're getting somewhere, thought MC, and she ventured, "Benny Goodman?" Almost disdainful, CS whispered, "Glenn Miller."

In addition to all the other Greatest Generation accomplishments (saving the world, inventing plastic), the taste-makers of the 1940s made some pop-culture choices that have withstood the ravages of time. A torch singer, a good clarinet player, and there you go. It matters somewhat whether Ilsa stays with Rick, but the crucial info is where did Ingrid Bergman get that A-line dress?

In contrast, the taste-makers of MC's glory days have a lot of explaining to do. MC is nudged toward judgments about 70s music because Renaissance Mom is having Vintage Vinyl for her birthday party, and she encourages guests to bring their most meaningful long-playing treasures. In preparation for this geezer-fest, MC hosted a Youtube viewing of "Boogie Wonderland" for C1 and C2. C1 watched with horror as Maurice White gleefully gyrated across the stage in white jumpsuit with a keyhole cutout down to his bellybutton. She answered his grin with a curled lip. C2, however, was smitten by the Emotions' fluttery rainbow capes: she recognized kindred spirits when she saw them. By her second viewing, C1 gave herself over to the kitsch and allowed that, yes, there were some fashion advantages to wearing jeweled belts the size of area rugs.

The morning after, C2 asked if she could hear, again, the music from "the guy who shows his chest." So we did. Again, Maurice gamboled on stage with an entire village of people: an acre of brass players. Another acre of the Emotions and their swoopy capes. People strolling through the frame dressed like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, if Charlton Heston were African American and his costume were made from gold lame. The effects of high fructose corn syrup were not yet in evidence: these people were skinny, and fashion did not yet require that they be pumped up on steroids. Mostly, though, they were happy. They were not singing an angst-ridden '60s ballad or an angry rap song. They were so happy they twirled their trumpets on their index fingers. So happy they sang the chorus to one another and laughed. So happy they could unselfconsciously sing lyrics like:

Sound fly through the night
I chase my vinyl dreams to boogie wonderland.

What does that mean, really? Obviously, close reading is not the point. Cranky #2 was perhaps the best audience for Earth, Wind, and Fire at 6:30 a.m. Her review? "I like the way they shake their hair. I like them so much that if I listened to them all day I think I would go crazy in my head." She meant crazy in a good way.

MC is confident that she once owned a copy of the 1977 Earth, Wind, and Fire masterpiece All 'N All. If she gains access to the liner notes, she'll give you her thoughts on "Serpentine Fire."
--MC

Pagans, Again

2010-04-05T12:49:00.035-05:00

MC accepts that the high holidays are built on rank commercialism and hyper-caloric intake. In her wee cranky days, Easter was all about a godzilla-sized ham and the white shoes (unscuffed!) that arrived just in time to go with a poofy home-made dress. For C1 and C2, this year's holiday included a Hello Kitty purse (pictured) and newly pierced ears. Not to mention two fabulous arrivals from the USPS Easter Bunny. Pez tastes even better when it comes in the mail.

Try as we might to wallow in sugar and pink froth, weightier events intrude. Walking to school this morning, C2 ran to reach the house whose owner kindly puts out water for neighborhood dogs and reliably places exciting plastic toys to be admired. In her kindergarten career, C2 has played with a duck family, identified animals of the African savannah, and recently gasped over giant bugs in this neighbor's front yard. When she hurried to view the bugs today, she was instead met with a sign: "Someone took the water bowl and the bugs on Easter night." MC and C2 were shocked. Animals would be thirsty. Feelings must have been hurt. Then C2 remembered that she adopted several ducks from this house when their owner offered them with a sign that said "Free!" Surely we could return those to fill up the lonely spaces.

Pondering this vandalism, MC recalled an earlier weekend encounter with urban grittiness. She helped bus the tables at Big University Church, which feeds Saturday breakfast and lunch to about 400 homeless people. In this scrum of unwashed bedrolls, the striking element of its demographic was courtesy. "Coming here in hard times is humbling," one man said. "Please tell the people here thank you for me." When MC hauled a compost bucket out to the alley, she found a knot of men smoking cigarettes around the dumpster. One took her bucket and emptied it for her. "If I hadn't been here, these guys would have mugged you," he said. MC and the guys in the alley laughed.

The smokers in the alley wouldn't have mugged MC; they respect the place that gives them weekly breakfast and lunch. Further evidence of their regard: Big University Church is remarkably graffiti-free, because the homeless men prove security 24/7. Without lapsing into sentiment, MC would like to recognize good manners when she sees them. In contrast, MC watched in frank admiration as a neighbor used Dog the Bounty Hunter techniques to retrieve her front-porch rockers from a fraternity house. Nailing the perps required this neighbor, a woman of a certain age, to attend numerous West Campus theme parties. She wouldn't tell how much beer she consumed, but she got her rockers back, and, after a talk with the house mother, a weekend of yard work from the pledge class. MC's neighborhood seems to attract chair thieves. Across the street, another neighbor recently received a bouquet rather on the large side of tasteful from the counsel of a fraternity that, um, borrowed her Adirondacks. We're good now.

Courtesy, MC observes, is a relative thing. In the alley behind Big University Church, people with no homes will sleep on private property and use the dumpster as a toilet. They might ask you for money, but they won't break into your car. In MC's neighborhood, where property values are stable and kids' test scores are high, pissing on the side of someone's trash can is pretty much beyond the pale. Fraternity boys on their way to law school, however, will steal your rocking chairs. And people with the brains and money to know better will steal cheap plastic bugs just for fun.

In summary, then, the Crankies' spent their high holiday flouncing in pink dresses, smashing a gazillion confetti eggs, repatriating some plastic ducks, and pondering the wisdom of some guys who don't know where there next meal is coming from.
--MC

Pagan Rituals

2010-04-02T21:43:00.027-05:00

Many years ago, MC's ancient neighbor, Mrs. L., took her aside to impose order on what she saw as MC's haphazard observance of holidays. "Look," said Mrs. L. "You've got to pick a Christmas gift food. Like these cream cheese pecan tarts. You have to do the same thing every year." Then I'm sure we smoked menthol cigarettes while she showed me the recipe. It pains MC to report that, fresh out of graduate school, she mentally shuddered at the folksiness of Christmas gift foods (delivered while wearing a tacky holiday sweater, she was sure), and consequently did not file the pecan tart recipe. She's still doing her holidays free-form, and she's paying for it. Mrs. L knew, for example, that a sane person takes down her Christmas lights on Epiphany, and that she drinks gin and tonic when she hands out Halloween candy. Where some might see rigidity, others might find comfort and consistency. Do the Jews reinvent how to sit shiva every time someone dies? Doh.

Significant and insignificant rituals exist for a reason. If MC had developed a functional Easter ritual, she would know how to boil eggs without cracking five per dozen. Instead, her seat-of-the-pants troubleshooting plan is to construct egg salad out of the ruins. With a working knowledge of PAAS products and eye-dying mechanics, she could have foreseen that Cranky #2 would pluck eggs out of dye cups with her fingers and might have a clue about the staying power of egg dye. Instead, the Crankies have a household full of egg salad; how long C2 will have purple cuticles is anybody's guess.

In the cruel month of April, Eliot claims, memory mixes with desire. Heretofore, the Crankies have emphasized the desire part of the equation. C2, channeling the organized German side of her DNA, may push the needle in the other direction. A tremendous memory and a drive for uniformity may be the one thing needful for successful egg boiling. By Easter 2011, C2 ought to be able to read eHow.com and the instructions on the back of the PAAS box. If that's the case, you can bet we'll get a set of protocols.
--MC

Six Degrees of My Box Lock

2010-03-31T21:21:00.024-05:00

As promised, MC determined to do something about home security, specifically the lock that stubbornly refused to let the Crankies inside, or outside, their own house during a blizzard. With her rogue box lock in hand, she set out to meet Mr. High Security, a highly recommended fixer of creaky old hardware.

One look at Mr. High Security's shop and MC recognized that her lock could be restored to a readiness level of DEFCON 1. Think of all the ways you could illustrate "encyclopedic knowledge," and MC will raise you another one, courtesy of Mr. High Security. Choosing a favorite lock set from among so many beauties would be a struggle, but the sleek barrel key to Hitler's bunker and the over-the-top door handle from the Cadillac Hotel, created during Detroit's glory days, are among her favorites. It turns out that the mechanism from CGF is a respectable Penn product with a two-key "night-lock" arrangement that you don't see every day. MC has now shared all the technical jargon she retained from Mr. HS; henceforth, lock mechanisms will be referred to as "thingies."

MC's chi was particularly strong on this day, and as Mr. HS described an upcoming trip to the Cranky State, she processed his reference to a revered teacher, now deceased, that he called "Dora Cranky." But wait, MC thought. MY name is Cranky. How many "Dora Crankies" could exist that aren't members of the Cranky Family? Turns out, there aren't any at all, since Dora Cranky was the first wife of a Cranky cousin. But wait, there's more: her daughter was previously pictured here: the little girl with the pigtails in the front row. Cranky ex-husband is seventh from the right.

A respectable lock, MC has learned, will provide reliable security and peace of mind for longer than a human lifetime. Pay a little extra, though, and you could get a lock that makes connections in the space-time continuum.
--MC

Weakest Links

2010-03-29T21:41:00.030-05:00

Cranky #2 spent a particularly chilly holiday at CGF because of the window pictured here. Single-paned, northern exposure, with a storm window that's not trying very hard. C1 and C2 each received two snuggies for Christmas, and they wore both of them to keep warm in this north bedroom. A tribute to early 20th century style and engineering, this window is impossibly tall and impossibly drafty.
All this elongated draftiness was amplified during by the Great Christmas Eve Blizzard and Door Failure of Ought Nine. On an evening when the wind was up, the mercury was down, and the snow falling at a steady pace, the lock on the entry door went on vacation, and no one in the Cranky household could get it to return our calls. We coaxed, reasoned, and pleaded, but all we got in return was the box-lock answering machine: "Leave a message if you want, but you're hosed. Losers."

MC found the possibility of being house-bound on Christmas Eve kind of charming. The Cranky family huddles around a propane heater and eats microwave popcorn with fake butter flavoring, just like in the olden Cranky days. But the house party voted down cozy romanticism. Instead, Cranky men applied hammers and screwdrivers, and removed the offending door from its hinges. The Cranky men are a hearty bunch; a thermometer reading 19 degrees was in plain sight, yet entrance and egress was their goal. With the door removed, we enjoyed complete access to both house and farm. If the cattle had heard about our open door policy, we're sure they would have stopped by for some hospitality. Our scores for accessibility were perfect, but our energy efficiency suffered.

MC is confident that Teenaged Nephew will grow up to accomplish many good and great things, but to her mind, his greatness was fortold by his heroism during the Great Ought Nine Blizzard and Door Failure. With only a screwdriver and a can of WD-40, Teenaged Nephew repaired the Cranky box lock and brought beauty and body heat back into our holiday. We think there's a MacArthur genius grant in his future.

President Obama has observed that "insulation is sexy stuff"; MC may be impossibly naive, but she doesn't see that claim as a part of a dangerous Marxist environmental initiative to divert our tax dollars to Home Depot. Based on her recent Christmas Eve adventure, she can state from empirical experience that not freezing in a blizzard is, in fact, a turn-on. Having a front door in place when it's snowing outside is practically pornographic. Her task before the next snowfall is to upgrade the leaky window and restore credibility to the unreliable lock. Because higher R-values are the new sexy.
--MC

The Really Good Stuff

2010-03-27T23:33:00.046-05:00

Comes now a reality program called Hoarders, designed, apparently, to let the untidy desktop crowd feel superior about the untouchables with living room collections of 30,000 beer cans. MC's favorite bit of television analysis is the revelation that attention deficit disorder prevented one featured subject from tidying up her overstuffed residence.

ADD explains so much about the garage at CG Farm. But more about that later. First, MC would like to take issue with Hoarders' these-people-are-deeply-troubled premise to speak in defense of Those Who Gather. What the untrained eye might see as a weirdo's collection of empty prescription bottles, she would argue, is another person's embarrassment of wealth.

What if the Hoarders gurus brought their de-cluttering techniques this scenario? Well,
they'd lose their chance at ever restoring their Robbins & Meyers H-model ceiling fan. The Fan Man, located in Dallas, apparently
gets inspiration by keeping his inventory within arms' reach. We're saving up for a restoration of a glorious H-model, rescued from the Cranky Hometown Bijou Theatre by UM. Fan Man can be as eccentric as he wants to be as long as he can rewind the coil and find us some replacement blade hardware. When you're looking for 90-year-old hardware, Those Who Gather are savants, not bipolar clutterers who need their Xanax refilled.
(Fan Man shop from UM; Robbs & Myers image from vintagefans.com)

Did MC get the fender part for her '67 Plymouth Belvedere from Ebay? Please. That vital piece of Mopar engineering was collected from a pasture, where it was lovingly conserved with very many of its high-performance friends and watched over by attentive goats that kept weeds at bay. We understand that Cousin Tom's wife had a yard sale a while back, so some of those car bodies may now be lost to history. See what we mean about the dangers of de-cluttering?

MC once scored some terrific glass drawer pulls from the house next door to El Azteca. There were bathtubs out in the yard; it looked like an antique shop. OK, a really low-budget antique shop. So when she asked for cabinet knobs, she had no idea she would be led into the house, through a labyrinth of boxes, to inspect the merchandise. There, hanging on a nail beside a bed, were the perfect drawer pulls. Yea! When a person rolled over, MC realized that she was standing in someone's bedroom. Which just happened to be a hardware showroom. But still. Bathtub/drawer-pull guy was a serious member of the Those Who Gather society.

Back in the day, MC's father expressed his gathering tendencies in his office/garage. When it fell to MC to conserve these treasures, she mentally grouped them into categories: Stuff that Won't Burn and Stuff that Will Burn. The "Won't Burn" category was by far the largest. What do you do with half a dozen broken oil-well drill bits? MC's father picked them up because they were trash in his field, yet now they're 40-pound garage objet d'arts. Each time she found an object that seemed perfect for the scrap pile, members of her tribe would tell her something like: "That's the PTO shaft for the Allis tractor," or "That's the jet rod for the xyz windmill." Useful stuff, lovingly gathered and faithfully conserved, in the middle of the garage bay.

MC has since added a fabulous broken floor lamp to the garage mix. She's sure she can find a craftsman who can display its '30s wonderfulness in an appropriate fashion. It's not like she's on a deadline or anything. It's been gathered, and that's the fun part.
--MC

Not-Spring Break Wrap-Up

2010-03-25T21:25:00.018-05:00

The Crankies collected several images during their Not-Spring Break that deserve consideration and analysis. So here they are, with thoughtful, incisive annotations.

Here is our Well Guru, checking out our problematic water well. Please observe the stick in guru's left hand. This is a water witching stick; guru used this stick to find a new source of water on CGF, where we can drill another well when the time comes. That's one powerful stick.

This image would fall in the "adding insult to injury" category. It's a deer product. First the deer eat CGs' trees. Then they defecate beside the trees. A way to autograph your work, if you don't have opposable thumbs.

Cranky #2 likes to arrange and photograph other people's pretties; these fruity coasters are from Gardener Friends' collection. After sharing chicken pot pie with the Cranky family, Gardener Friend let us memorialize the event.

And finally, here's this spring's installment of calf-crop cuteness. Say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud.

--MC

Who Do You Think You Are? Ancient O'Herns Edition

2010-03-24T21:17:00.027-05:00

Consider the Irish. They've got that Celtic mysticism thing going on. Joyce and Yeats give them plenty of literary firepower. There are those haunting songs and a certain (albeit disputed) charm that allows the Vice President to say the f-word on national television and not appear to be a lout. Their national holiday gives the world annual license to get knee-walking drunk. What's not to love about them, I wonder? Maybe a few of MC's relatives.

MC thinks that perhaps her great-grandfather took the whole potato famine business too personally. In any event, the lore that has come down to her about P.S. O'Hern has not described him as a harp-playing lad with a sweet tenor voice telling droll stories over a pint. The Patrick Stephen stories tend to be about land acquisition and the complicated division of his assets among his 12 surviving children.

In the bottom left photo, there's a house behind the zeppelin-sized pig. The pig, relative to the house, must be about the size of the the living room, if the house has a living room. P.S. O'Hern and his wife Mary Jane raised 13 children in that house. According to lore, when one of his 10 sons received his acceptance letter to West Point, the son threw down his shovel and declared he was finished, forever, with farm work. P.S. seemed to have had that effect on children.

P.S. O'Hern's last living son died recently at the age of 101, after being profiled by every major news outlet in the state. After you hit 100, folksy geezerdom becomes irresistible, and Charlie acquired a stack of press clippings. His attentive caretaker also shared and archived many of the documents in his house, including the images shown here. In these photos, Uncle Chuck and a horse are standing in the bed of a pickup, a fairly low-security arrangement for the horse, and not so great for Charlie either.

The stories that persist about Uncle C indicate more than a passing resemblance to his father. For example, when one of his nephews served on a submarine, he was asked to fill out a questionnaire and explain, "Why did you join the Navy?" Morris Dale wrote, "Uncle Charlie." When his officers asked for clarification, the nephew said, "If you ever worked for Uncle Charlie, you'd know why I joined the Navy." The people who worked for Uncle Charlie drove pickups without heat, used machinery long after it had completed its depreciation schedule, and received only modest compensation. A pair of them were changing a flat on a dilapidated trailer filled with cattle when Uncle C came upon them and made inquiries. Uncle's hired hands didn't lack for snap. They told him, "You didn't give us enough to do, Charlie, so we're rotating the tires on this trailer."

The axiom about age having its privileges is true in Uncle C's case, particularly since he outlived the folks who could contradict his version of family history. His very presence, in a house that made P.S's look like a McMansion, seemed the essence of his father's ideology about getting money and keeping it. Perhaps the ancient Celtic charm in MC's family was snuffed out by nasty English landlords. Maybe MC's relations were profoundly moved by the rich brother in The Quiet Man. But somehow "Danny Boy" morphed into Gordon Gekko with an 8th grade education.

Cranky #2 met Uncle C when she was about 3; by that time she had considerably more teeth than he had. Herr Cranky made the introductions, saying, "Here's another red-headed O'Hern for you." Uncle C observed: "There's a lot of us." Maybe that's the ultimate prize of these generations of tight-fisted tenacity: we endured.
--MC

Confidence Booster

2010-03-23T22:06:00.025-05:00

After kvetching about inclement weather, broken appliances, and a gimpy water system, MC would like to raise up a positive event that transpired during the Cranky Girls' trip to the farm: preparing the garden. In fairness, this chore took place efficiently and productively because MC had very little to do with it. In the picture above, 1)Cousin Tom is driving 2)another neighbor's tractor and pulling 3)Uncle M's cultivator. This neighborhood cooperation looks suspiciously like socialism, which we all know from the health care reform discussions is a dangerous threat to our freedoms. But this particular sharing of community resources must be OK because Cousin Tom has more guns than any self-respecting socialist could own outright. MC will be on the lookout for vegetables with bolshevik tendencies.

Cranky #1 ramrodded the decorative portion of the garden, clearing out roots and weeds to make room for the morning glories and other flowery additions that we will encourage to climb up the new corrals. Cranky #2 was concerned about what these vine-y plants will do when they reach the top of the corral and have no place left to go. MC would deem the effort a success if the flowers--or Cranky #2-- grew taller than the pigweed does this summer.

Burning grass in the yard might seem like a page from the "we must destroy this village to save it" school of horticulture. But MC is following best practices here. She planted a patch of lovegrass the size of a baby wading pool in pile of construction dirt. It grew into tall, plume-y clumps, just like the real deal. Real lovegrass farmers burn off their dead clumps to let the new grass grow in faster. MC is a real farmer, by damn, and she had the lighter in her pocket to prove it.
Lovegrass burning shows a bit of gardening savvy; dirt on the face, however, is the hallmark of quality gardening. Those children that Mrs. Obama invites to work in the White House garden don't look nearly dirty enough when they're done, but maybe their sisters don't throw clods at them. In any event, blowing bubbles reflects the satisfaction of a job well done.
--MC

Baby It's Cold Outside

2010-03-22T21:41:00.016-05:00

This portrait of UM's fine Angus girls was taken the day after CGs refugeed back to warmer climes. Fleeing south just a few hours ahead of blizzard like migrating birds on methamphetamines, the CGs missed the high drama of this weather event. But the Angus girls are doing a fine job of color commentary: "Spring? We rather think not."

The CGs heard a great deal of mewling and puking about how this cold snap manifested itself in the People's Republic of Austin. It was miserable! exclaimed the Longhorns baseball fan. Not to diminish the discomfort of those Disch-Falk bleachers, but we think the cows' game was more likely to have been called on account of weather.

Cold at CGF can be a merciless affair, since the wind chill factor amplifies even a modest temperature change. Step outside and get a greater appreciation for Robert Scott and his stiff-upper lip pals at the South Pole. MC's favorite cold weather story involves a frozen water line at Uncle Sid's house. Pipeline was excavated; pipeline broke; pipeline had to be replaced, all in meat-locker conditions. It was a day-long affair. When Uncle Michael limped back to CGF, his concerned mother asked about the everyone's well-being. "It's so cold the snot's frozen on Sid's face," was the reply.

MC is thinking that maybe it was Not-Spring at CGF, what with the snow and all. Upon reflection, the cranky water system added up to a sort of Not-Break. In total, then, the CGs enjoyed a Not-Spring, Not-Break. Whatever. We'd do it again in a heartbeat.
--MC

Beulah Land

2010-03-20T20:07:00.045-05:00

Meta Cranky's hometown is the source of a number of guilty pleasures. Sopapilla Cheesecake, as noted previously, is just one example. Without the good example of Herr Cranky, the CGs stay up too late watching movies, practice driving cars and pickups in the deserted driveway, and observe a shoes-optional policy, regardless of the weather.

In some circles, top-of-the-lung Methodist hymn singing is a guilty pleasure. In Cranky Hometown, there are particular summer services where the hometown congregation dusts off its Cokesbury hymnals and cuts loose with the rip-snorting early 20th-century classics that are redolent of brush arbors, IOOF halls, and WPA projects. These hymns may be the Cheese Doodles of music world: musical gourmets may sniff, but if they ever get a taste ("Wonderful Grace of Jesus," anyone?), they'll be licking the fako-food coloring off their fingers and binging in dark closets.

Let's clarify: We're not talking about the three-hanky sob-fests that Drama Queen trenchantly calls "Wurlitzer Schmaltz." I respect your right to adore those Victorian snoozers like "In the Garden," but please understand that because MC has the attention span of a gnat, these classics are wasted on her. MC's guilty pleasures are the ones with the jingly Rudyard-Kiplingesque rhythms and the friendly toggling between a thrumming, repetitious bass line (think come, come, come, come, Come to the Church in the Wildwood!) and soprano riffs that approach Queen-of-the-Night elevations. MC feels rather self-conscious about revealing that she is fascinated by retro Protestant musical arrangements, but she remembers that she saw Joe King Carrasco at Club Foot, Warren Zevon at the Stone Pony, and Lucinda Williams at the Electric Lounge; she doesn't need to prove her hipness cred to anybody.

This week, a beloved hymn-singing member of the Cranky Methodist Church passed away. Aged Alto Friend never learned to read music, but her uncanny ear unerringly found the harmonic thirds, fifths, and sevenths that give depth and feeling to a melody line. Because Alto Friend was all about those retro hymns, the choir offered up a medley of her favorites at her funeral, and MC, on the ground at CGF, got to participate. As the choir loft Magnified the Precious Name of Jesus, MC watched the we-get-it grins form on the faces of her friends and neighbors, the grins that people of a certain age usually produce when they hear ABBA on the grocery store muzak.

In the homestretch, the upper voices stretched out a chord describing the mansions bright and blessed. The men's voices stalwartly answered with with equal horsepower from the back pew. Then as the choir was bringing it in for a landing, MC's spotted Alto Friend's daughter, a school classmate. Alto Daughter was weeping, as daughters will do at their mothers' funerals, but she also was singing along. MC hadn't considered this series of events, and she almost had to sit down to think about it. She hasn't yet figured out why the image of singing grief was so moving, but it has something to do with incongruity. "When We All Get to Heaven" is an irrepressibly happy song about the Big Chill. For MC, it's an adorable, slightly kooky period piece, like a Chambers stove with a ThermoWell. But when it's your mother's favorite, it's kooky and beloved and powerful all at the same time.
--MCG

Bloodlines

2010-03-18T21:39:00.035-05:00

MC touched base with her cranky roots today as two delightful cousins came to visit with their charming children and grandchildren. C2 couldn't keep the news to herself and called Herr Cranky to announce how many new friends she had made. C1 met a boy cousin her very own age, and she laughed at a number of age-inappropriate jokes. MC smiled at the way this branch of her tribe tells stories with a particular rhythm and pacing. One story has MC's uncle enlisting a wee small cousin to back a car out of a driveway. When tiny tot backs the colossal '65 Chrysler 300 into an impediment, Uncle reproaches her, saying sadly, "Goddamn, baby, I thought you said you could drive."

Happy Grandmother cousin arrived bearing multiple gifts. One was powerful and dangerous, and right-thinking families wouldn't allow their children around it without supervision. Happy G calls it Sopapilla Cheesecake, and Paula Deen must be weeping hot, bitter tears that she didn't think of it first.

The other gift was a friendship quilt dating from the mid-1930s. The character of individual signatures implies that family members and friends embroidered their names on the blocks, while MC's grandmother, she conjectures, combined them into a small artifact of remembrance. There's hardly a name on the quilt that MC can't associate with a farm, a house, or a face.

The blue "Mrs. Melendy" block with the dramatic green capitals in satin stitch was made by the grandmother of a MC's Best Friend Since We Were Four. "Nevada Duncan" is by the sister of MC's great-grandmother, profiled previously, while "Flossie G" is her grandmother's sister. MC can't help but notice that her own family's blocks are tidy and neat, but without the flourishes of, say, Mrs. Melendy, or Lucy Ellis, whose block has swoopy capitals that would look at home in an illuminated manuscript.

MC's own mother, then a girl, makes an appearance in this quilt, performing respectable work in a block that does not yet connect her cursive-style letters.

*All photos courtesy of Cranky #1

Happy Grandmother cousin's generosity gives MC a small window into the dynamics of a long-ago neighborhood, where flamboyance and personality could be expressed with a needle and thread. MC knows that searchable genealogical databases are invaluable for finding out information such as Obama's Irish heritage or whether you're related to the bastard son of the Duke of Gloucester. However, Nevada Duncan, Flossie G., and Kathleen are warm and snuggly, while Mormon geneology records and the baronetage are not.
--MCG

Just Call Me Sisyphus

2010-03-17T22:45:00.008-05:00

Today, Meta Cranky will rationalize undone farm projects by imagining that she's living in a Before Picture, which ultimately will be upgraded to an After Picture. For example, Uncle Sid and Cousin Tom built this shiny corral last spring. It's sturdy, ingeniously designed, and it lets you load your cattle without being kicked or trampled. However, those master welders didn't budget for landscaping. So the CGs spent a sunny afternoon putting in climb-y type seeds that C2 picked out at the Big Box store. We can hope that the After Pictures, taken mid-summer, will feature shiny corrals covered in blue morning glories that set off the our cow friends' brown eyes.

Our Yorkshire friend, whom we'll call John of Beverly, worked his usual alchemy and convinced our front doors to latch properly. In the After Picture, however, these doors not only will close but will have working locks, courtesy of the Highly Recommended Locksmith. Apparently, you've got to service your locks every 90 years or so, or home security will suffer.

All too frequently, MC is presented with a troubleshooting issue that makes her think: Geez, didn't we just fix that? Upon reflection, however, the problematic item was just fixed about 30 years before. In the interim, stuff happens. The map of Europe has changed, but the air compressor and the Toro mower in the garage remain the same.

--MCG

To-Do List

2010-03-16T22:04:00.017-05:00

Gardener Friend has a Things To Do notepad that fascinates Cranky #2. At 8 a.m., C2 labored to write her name at the top and, if time had permitted, would have included "Woke Up" and "Ate Breakfast" to mark those accomplishments off in an orderly fashion. C2's approach to lists reminds Meta Cranky of the way her former employer's New York office handled production deadlines. The deadlines for Texas editors were always the ones posted on the schedule. The New Yorkers' deadlines were generally the day they emptied their ashtrays and finally finished their manuscripts.

While there's a great deal of satisfaction in marking off The Things I Do Anyway on one's Things To Do list, the Crankies had to blaze a new path today and buy a washing machine. MC lowered her expectations to the "Hopeless Losers" setting and made for the big box store. There, she found not just her heart's desire, the plainest of top-loaders, but also surprising moments of glad grace.

In MC's experience, finding customer service at a big box store is like looking for the elusive Ivory Billed Woodpecker in the wilds of darkest Arkansas. You can hear it calling from afar, and experts declare its existence, but there haven't been any confirmed sightings in 60 years. Cynics, take note: First, a Guy with Clues located our a wierdo light bulb. Then he observed to C2, pleasantly and confidently, that playing with the broken sample bulb we brought wasn't an option. No hard feelings. She surrendered the broken bulb to MC's new BF, the Guy with Clues.

Now, gentle readers, hold onto your mousepads: there were TWO Guys with Clues in the same big box store. This one not only found our modest appliance, he devised a diversion strategy to keep C2 from playing PBS Kids on his computer. Can you run two aisles over and find the blue washer for me? How about the red washer? Bet you can't lie down in the bath tub. Bet she fell for it like a jive sucka. I heard the angel choirs singing. No eye-rolling while C2 sat on a lawn mower or tried to flush the demo toilets. I light a candle for Guys with Clues at the Customer Service Altar. Simultaneously, I weep for the legions of Big Box customers who are wandering, zombie-like, in warehouses nationwide, unable to drive home until they find an associate to get a toilet flapper thingy from the back for them. America's DIY-ers are doomed to wander around like the Ancient Mariner because I bagged the last Guys with Clues.

On the car ride home, the Crankies orally listed the things they had accomplished in their outing: Swam at the Y. Ate Gardener Friend's oatmeal. Bought a light bulb. Had a tea party with a cousin. Got flower seeds for a garden. Climbed a rock wall. Ate a noteworthy navel orange. But which of those things made their "Best Of" list, Meta Cranky wanted to know. C2 refused to prioritize; every item on her list was her favorite. C1, nursing sore fingers from her rock climbing, was of the same mind. But, with its smell still wafting through the car, the navel orange had the inside track.
--MCG

Things Fall Apart

2010-03-15T22:22:00.010-05:00

Before the Cranky Girls reached the farm on this trip, they ate supper with US and AG at the Chinese buffet. Meta Cranky's fortune cookie read: "You will visit exotic lands." I can't make this stuff up.

Re-entry at CG's Farm always involves a shakedown, and this trip is no exception. The water system required tinkering, and happily the service person arrived this afternoon. Until then, the water pressure was iffy enough that Cranky #2 would make excited announcements when water was forthcoming: "The water's coming out in the bathtub AND the sink!" In urban lands, people see faucets and make wild assumptions about the availability of water. CGs know better. Check your filters, your bladder pressures, your resin beds (Yay UM for putting those new points in the well house!), but the gods will laugh if you start assuming you can fill the bathtub while you run the washing machine.

The washer, aging but functional, is another sore point. Judging when to pull the plug on this washer is a bit like diagnosing when to move a beloved aging parent to an Alzheimer's unit. Just when I've concluded that I'll have to bail the water from the tub and drag my sodden laundry out to the clothesline in 39 degree weather, Washer With Dementia remembers how to spin dry. You can hear it mutter, "I don't want to be a burden. I used to have a warranty from Sears." Yes, sweetie, but we think you may be ready for specialized care.

MC's full-blown visit to Appliance Hell was brought on by her misreading of the settings on her otherwise friendly refrigerator. The freezer settings read something like "Colder" and "Warmer." For absolute truth and accuracy, however, the settings should be labeled "your ice cubes will clump together" and "your freezer items will be covered in black mold." Upon arrival, MC discovered the latter. Luckily, she gave up being squeamish for Lent, so leaky chuck roast package affected her only slightly. She predicts that the coyotes will be waddling around holding their bellies after eating the repast of Freezer Thaw that she laid out for them by the creek.

Cranky #1 is the most ticklish part of the shakedown, since we can never predict when her allergies will kick in. The cool, damp weather means that farmers are beginning to burn off their dry winter grasses. Some smoke, somewhere, has Cranky #1's number, and she's been reaching for her inhaler. Not the terrific purple steroid inhaler she scored last spring break. Just the plain Jane inhaler that lets you breathe all you want if you don't get too greedy. One of the wonders of farm life, however, is that resources rarely go to waste, and that includes expensive pharmacuticals. Meta Cranky once got a viewing of a closet holding the meds of a family friend who recently died of cancer. A veritable pharmacy of anti-nausea prescriptions, neatly stored away in case someone might need them. Cranky #1 will get her very own meds tomorrow, but a purple inhaler has been located whose previous owner has joined the Choir Invisible.

MC is confident that her oldest, smartest brother will tell her the whole story on this crumpled Dempster windmill, which she suspects he photographed while trolling for parts. Crumpled windmills may look like they're begging to be be carted off and turned into a Chinese automobile, but do not be deceived. Collect enough rusty windmill parts and eventually you'll have enough to put your windmill back together. MC feels a metaphor coming on, but she suspects that Clever Readers saw it already. Let's just say that, appearances to the contrary, MC is getting in touch with her inner engineer. CG Farm only looks like mere anarchy. We've got it. Really.
--MCG

Don't Hate Us Because We Were More Beautiful than You Are

2010-03-12T20:53:00.022-06:00

Tomorrow morning, the Cranky Girls will take off their city-girl hats and put on their farm-girl ones. Changing venues has a time-warp element at times, since the CGs stay in a house furnished by a person who graduated from high school in 1938. We have brought some modern touches, such as wiring without frayed insulation, but we'd like to think that these changes are in keeping with sensibility of Meta Cranky's mother. Kap would have been pleased to serve Norm Abrams a piece of her pie, but, for reasons of economy and aesthetics, she wouldn't have let the This Old House guy touch her knob-and-tube wiring or her '70s Formica kitchen counter.

The Crankies' home place is a venue where, as in Faulkner, the past is not only not dead, it's not even past. In preparation for another exercise in time-travel, Meta Cranky would like to consider some vintage elements of style and engineering that perhaps work better--or at least look better--than their modern-day equivalents.

MC's auntie's piano teacher and her students are pictured above. MC has been to her share of piano recitals over the last few years, and children have become more casual and squirmy than the ones pictured here. Is it the ladies' hats that give this group its air of confidence and savoir faire? The groovy bamboo frame around the picture certainly adds a jaunty touch. You might be able to take this picture with your iPhone and send it to a gazillion of your Facebook friends, but would it be as charming without the bamboo frame? MC thinks not.

Here's another one that kills in the style department. The exposed stairs from the tarmac to the airplane. Would Dad's Cousin Margaret have had a lovely honeymoon if she boarded her United flight on a Jetway? Undoubtedly. But would she have looked as good or made such a dramatic entrance? Not even close.

Extra points for the shawl collar, and for marrying Lan, who did very well for himself in the Southern California car-storage business.

Next: No thinking person would trade a keyboard for a fountain pen. MC has done a few transcriptions of 19th century documents, and the act made her want to impale herself on her British Museum library card. But think of how your handwriting looks on the average sticky note, then look at the back of this photograph:

Readers, are we weeping in shame over our undistinguished penmanship? Hazel had an 8th grade education (OK, there was that incomplete post-grad nurse's training) but her handwriting kicks your doors in.

And finally. MC has always admired this picture of her granddad, which has many stylistic fillips to recommend it.
Students of vintage automobiles, like MC's brothers, would provide the years and models of the vehicle with the googley headlights and the truck with the roundy window. For MC, however, the What-Have-They-Got-That-I-Ain't-Got elements are fenders and running boards. Watch and learn: fenders and running boards turn your vehicle into a conversation pit. True, they don't have cup holders, but could you look this good in a recliner or a lawn chair? Maybe, if you adjust your hat, tie, and cigar just so. On second thought, nah. Are you listening, GM? I'm giving you free advice here: the American public might buy more American cars if the product made drivers look like Grownups with Brains, not like teenagers with 12-packs in the trunk.

Excuse me while I go pack my spectator pumps.
--MC

Eat More Venison

2010-03-11T20:31:00.020-06:00

Twenty-four hours after seeing these pictures, Meta Cranky thinks she can write about them in language fit for a family blog. The trees that the Crankies coaxed through a summer-long drought have been abused by Bambi and the rest of his sorry extended family. This one might be the Princeton Elm that Jamie got at the fancy native tree nursery in Clinton:

Uncle M sent more evidence, but I can't post another one. They're like tree snuff pictures.

We screwed up. We trusted them. They're have those big eyes and tails that bounce on their asses when they jump. Their babies are all spotted and Disney-licious, and we really didn't need all those peas they ate on the hill summer before last.

Those days are so over. The Crankies are unleashing Shiva, the God of Death. They will be asking Cousin Tom if he would like to come over to hunt. Here's a tasty idea: Venison Chops with Blackberry Compote. Yum. Can't wait.

When MC thinks about Cousin Tom's love of hunting, she harkens back to Vera Carp, the gun-shop owner in the play Greater Tuna whose motto is, "If we can't kill it, it's immortal." Tom's welding shop serves as a deer check-in station and during hunting season, the place looks like a white-tailed apocalypse. That's the feel MC would like to have at Cranky Girls' Farm this fall: Apocalypse Now for Bambi.

Hmm. This one sounds hearty and satifying: Venison Chili with Snowcap Beans. Just what I'd like to tuck into after bringing down my 10-point buck and his extended family. Au revoir, les enfants! Looking toward the high holidays, would Medallions of Venison with Port and Cranberries be too fussy? We think not.

The deer are in league with another thuggy vandal species: their friends the armadillos. Here, they've comprehensively churned the area around the compost pile:

The phrase "fine armadillo dining" might seem like a contradiction in terms to some, but consider that Anthony Bourdain made a television career out of eating dishes like unwashed warthog rectum in Namibia and sheep testicles in Morocco. Anyone for Cajun Armadillo in Mustard Sauce?

It's not as if the two-legged carnivores should have to be eating all this deer flesh. In the recent past, MC has seen a coyote and a bobcat within shouting distance of the front porch. And then last summer, a Yorkshire visitor sighted a cat-like animal with a very long tail by our bridge. We're thinking mountain lion. These animals are predators, right? So WTF? I'm thinking that maybe, for Mrs. Bobcat, Cranky Girls' Farm is like the buffet at Golden Corral, with its overwhelming display of questionable food choices. The coyotes are trying, but there's only so much venison they can fit on their plates.

So where do I get my membership for the Powder and String Club?
--MCG

Don't Fence Them In

2010-03-10T20:51:00.015-06:00

Writer Calvin Trillin describes raising his daughters in Greenwich Village according to his Midwest values and folkways. The family's narrative, he said, was that "despite all evidence to the contrary, you’re being raised in Kansas City.” After Texas secedes from the Union under the encouragement of Gov. Perry, Crankies #1 and #2 can seek dual citizenship in the Republic of Texas and the remaining upper 49 since, despite all evidence, they're really farm girls who just happen to be enrolled in the Austin Independent School District.

Cranky #2 has her bag packed for spring break and is counting on her fingers and toes the number of calves she will see at the farm. These Angus calves obligingly are born in January and February so they will reach peak cuteness just at spring break. Midwinter birthdays mean that some babies are born when the thermometer registers 9 degrees Fahrenheit. This lovely girl, nearly a year old now, was found on a hay pile doing quite nicely despite the arctic conditions. On that cold day, Uncle M didn't have his breed registry book handy to record her official number, so her ear tag is more personal than most: Brr.

Smaller crankies will check on the girls they know: friendly Brr, zaftig Brutus, and alarmingly aggressive Pet, who behaves like a 1500-pound lap dog. The girls will meet the newest babies in the nursery, sit on laps to steer the pickups, and merrily offer alfalfa cubes to cows with slobbery black tongues.

Multicultural crankies #1 and #2 can operate comfortably in both the land of bale stabbers and the land where a choreographer stages a dance for trash trucks. In three more days, we'll pick up our cultural exchange where we left off.
--MCG

The Way We Live Now

2010-03-09T20:26:00.016-06:00

The Times reports that baby-boomers are changing the complexion of health clubs. An aging demographic means that exercise facilities are now gearing their offerings toward people who don't want to break hips when they step off the curb, rather than people who take steroids to get disturbingly plump pectorals. Meta Cranky went to the Y after reading this report and what she saw there was chilling. What she did not see in the mid-morning slot were the boring wage-earners who are dutifully socking away money for MC's Social Security account. What she did see in the Y coffee room were geezers sitting beside their electric scooters, reading their Wall Street Journals, and picking out ear wax out with their pinkies, just as MC's dad once did. These are now her people.

It wasn't always so. When MC joined her first health club in Fort Worth, she danced rhythmically next to Miss Texas. She doesn't remember Ms. T's name because this particular beauty queen did not become the Phyllis George of the '80s. Nevertheless, she wore spandex and leg warmers and was adorably anorexic.

While in New Jersey, MC and a pal she'll call Drama Queen were regular customers at Jack LaLanne's health club. The take-away from JL's was that '80s styling products allowed Jersey-girl big hair to defy withering humidity. At this co-ed facility, a dreamy aerobics instructor named Mel packed a studio full of writhing men and women and led them to perform acts that in MC's home town were considered rather personal. After 90 minutes, the studio's glass walls were streaming with condensation, but the hair? Still upright. Only later was Jack LaLanne's revealed to be next to a Super-Fund site.

More recently, MC began to notice that time was taking its toll. A snappish Australian step aerobics instructor seemed to have settled into a mid-life metabolism that discouraged significant weight loss. When MC returned from maternity leave, anxious to step off a few chocolate milkshakes, she found the instructor had taken a short cut; liposuction was faster, certainly, than plodding up and down on a plastic Reebok step. After Cranky #2 was born, MC was happy enough to pedal a bicycle and lift weights at a club that offered children's gymnastics and rehab for adults. Then she discovered that re-habbers require physical therapy accompanied by Fox News. In vain MC changed the channel to CNN, only to watch men wearing black socks and sneakers change it back.

MC swims laps in hopes of convincing her lumbar spine to stay in place for more than 36 hours. Meanwhile, her pal Renaissance Mom finds excitement and celebrity at her neighborhood pools. A Texas Monthly writer! A nationally noted political guru! The mother of an Olympic medalist! MC is so nearsighted that she wouldn't notice Johnny Weismuller in the next lane. The thrill now is bringing organization to her L-5 vertebra.
--MCG

The Household Searchlight

2010-03-08T11:32:00.009-06:00

Because of the events of another tumultuous weekend, Meta Cranky's clutter meter sounded this morning as clearly and insistently as the smoke alarm does when she attempts to fry fish. MC began the day with Cranky Family's effluvia waving from every flat surface.

She made incremental progress until she was distracted by The Household Searchlight. This ancient cookbook originated with her maternal grandmother. Cranky's own mother cooked from this book extensively, but because MC herself never developed a need to make Fanwood Chow-Chow or Oatmeal Gruel, this much-admired 1938 edition has served a reference function. What a revelation, then, to read the Foreword and discover the bohemian vibe of the Household Searchlight:

"The Household Searchlight is a service station conducted for the readers of The Household Magazine. In this seven-room house lives a family of specialists whose entire time is spent working out the problems of homemaking common to every woman who finds herself responsible for the management of a home and the care of children."

MC considers this information to be rather a bombshell. The tasteful house featured on the cookbook's cover was apparently the set for a Depression-Era reality show. Who knew that there was communal living going on in Topeka, Kansas? How are we defining "family of specialists" anyway: Was this Jersey Shore with bacon drippings and rendered lard? MC has a new-found respect for the the Kansas avant-garde.

A font of insight, the Household Searchlight (HS) also sheds light on MC's clutter issue. Open up the cover and what do you see?

Stuff. Two 1978 receipts for replacing the brushes in a Sunbeam mixer. The operating instructions for the wall heater. An onion-skin-carbon copy of the recipe for Berta's Fan Fan Rolls (hey, I've been looking for that one!). A cake recipe written on the back of a flier for the 1993 Azalea festival in Muskogee, complete with a tour of the Five Civilized Tribes Museum.

Meta-Cranky's HS is the Grey Gardens of the cookbook world. Clearly, MC's mother had a pressing need for all this data, and MC is grateful that her mother did not feed feral cats. But wait, there's more. Only when the oddments are removed do you see how MC's mother customized her personal copy of HS. Apparently, the Topeka family of specialists didn't provide an acceptable recipe for fudge pie. What's wrong with kids today is that they don't ingest enough Milnot:
There's also a pie crust recipe, because you can never have enough.

All this before you get to the title page. Each of the book's 25 sections is larded with loose papers; endpapers and margins are comprehensively covered with recipes that begin "1 yellow cake mix."

Today, MC's house is The Household Searchlight writ large. Perhaps a scientific scan could identify the clutter gene on her DNA, but she needs look no further than HS to see that she is predisposed to hoard small pieces of paper. She senses a potential research topic for a family of specialists.
--MC

Complacencies of a Sunday Evening

2010-03-07T20:31:00.021-06:00

Full disclosure: Meta Cranky has taken an oath with a friend we'll call Renaissance Mom to write something on a regular basis. This semi-solemn vow means that while the rest of the world is watching Christopher Waltz win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, MC is maintaining her credibility. Truth be told, MC is so far removed from popular culture that she wouldn't recognize Christopher Waltz if he sacked her groceries at Wheatsville, and she wonders why Quentin Tarantino gets to misspell both Inglourious and Basterds and apparently be rewarded for it. Wait, she does know a smidge about popular culture: A mom friend who is a faithful Vulcan Video customer reports that Quentin Tarantino's assistant tried to check out a DVD with the Famous Director's card. The clerks at Vulcan, exponentially hipper than Tarantino's assistant, were so unimpressed. Mom friend rented a DVD despite a contested fine; Inglourious Tarantino assistant did not.

MC recognizes that Oscar night is about rewarding cinematic excellence, but it's also about the ritual, elements that have been in place since the time of the flood: red carpet, Harry Winston jewelry, Joan Rivers' surgically enhanced face. She adores the morning-after fashionista comments and wishes she could authoritatively opine like Salon's Cintra Wilson, that Devil Wears Prada-era Anne Hathaway wore "a Valentino gown made of unborn ballerina fur." But when does a self-congratulatory film makers' award program become a ritual that people schedule elective surgeries around? One minute you're hoisting a sidecar with Bob Hope in the Roosevelt Hotel, and the next thing you know you're participating in a full-blown pagan-fertility-Fisher-King-type cult with Meryl Streep.

Late-winter Cranky rituals are conducted without the bling of heavily insured jewelry. Cranky #1 will wince operatically when Cranky #2 does a top-of-the-lung "Jolene" cover. Oldest Cranky consistently will dress for weather 15 degrees warmer than the current temperature, then will scramble to adjust before the 7 a.m. carpool. Youngest Cranky habitually will exit the bath to converse starkers with guests. MC finds comfort and assurance in the regularity of such behaviors. Perhaps this comportment doesn't yet approach the complexity of a pagan winter solstice, but like those other cold-weather observances, these ritual practices give hope that spring, or at least Spring Break, will arrive soon.
--MC

Who Do You Think You Are? An Occasional Series

2010-03-04T15:08:00.013-06:00

OK, so Lisa Kudrow apparently has this great new geneaology program on NBC called "Who Do You Think You Are?" I have never seen an episode of Friends, but I respect Lisa Kudrow's integrity if only for this exchange from Romy and Michele's High School Reunion:

Michele: I'm the Mary, and you're the Rhoda.
Romy: YOU'RE the Rhoda, you're the Jewish one.

But I digress. If the people in my family were this program's executive producers, this show would be titled "Who the Hell Are You?" The blessing or curse of growing up in my small town in the 1970s was that if you didn't know who you were, someone would tell you in exquisite, tortured detail. Since the griots of my home town no longer stride the earth, Meta Cranky feels obliged to provide Crankies #1 and #2 with a genealogical primer. Let's begin with granny ladies, shall we?
Hazel was always the Mary, never the Rhoda. Here, she's standing in front of her cellar door in celebration of her flower garden, although b&w pics don't do her zinnias justice. Here are some random factoids for Crankies 1 & 2 to know about their great-grandmother:

She had that braided hair thing going long before Yulia Tymoshenko wowed the Ukrainians with her traditional up-do. I don't know how the prime minister keeps her hair in place, but my granny used armies of hair pins. Here's a bit of Amusing Family Lore that requires you to know: 1) Granny had braids, she was short, and she could talk until the earth was flat and; 2) My cousin Tim was 6 feet tall and change. When my granny began a story that promised to be the length of Paradise Lost, Tim would look down on her braided crown and begin plucking out hairpins. Her fierce concentration allowed her to hold forth until all the pins were gone and the braids hung, unfettered, down her back.
Since her ears weren't pierced, she wore devices she called "ear screws" that probably are banned in Scandinavian countries. She never left the house without them. She always looked really good, which was a testimony to genetic material that gave her The Good Hair and some serious bone structure. She also looked good, though, because she decided it was important, and she went to the trouble to apply lipstick and abuse her ears to make it happen. Not to bore small crankies with tales of economic hardship or anything, but let's just say that Hazel didn't always have a lot to work with.

The photo at the top of this entry was taken when Meta Cranky's dad returned from the war in about 1944, and it's always, for her, been a Dad picture. There's a different story going on, though, when you look at the faces of his nuclear family.

OK, you're loving it that Cranky Girl's dad, granddad, and auntie all have identical dimples in their chins, right? Is that a great trick or what? But now look at Hazel. Her face says pretty much, "they haven't licked us yet."

By the time I knew her, Hazel had settled into a matronly comfort that allowed her to monopolize conversations and confidently tell people how to breathe in and out. She could effortlessly deflate egos with this killer phrase: "pretty is as pretty does." Yet her face in this homecoming picture is all about adversity and endurance: there in those contracted eyebrows you can see her uncertain finances and the worry of a double blue star mother. She was opinionated and prejudiced, utterly competent, and tireless in accomplishing the hard physical labor that kept a poor family from being a trashy family. She cried only on Mondays, wash day, because she could weep while she wrung out laundry alone in a wash house.

She earned the right to be the Mary.
--MCG

Queer Eye for the Seventh Grade Research Paper

2010-03-03T20:42:00.014-06:00

Cranky #1's latest English class assignment is to interview people involved in U.S. civil rights issues. So she's reading about the Stonewall riots to prepare for interviews with gay rights activists.

Her choice of topics serves the dual purpose of 1)making me feel ancient and crone-like, and 2)allowing me to reflect on my red-state upbringing, with its wealth of homophobia and sheer ignorance about The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name.

I was over 30 before I connected the dots about Alex, the navigator on my dad's B-24. Alex, a Republican bachelor, exchanged countless letters with my mother, faithfully sent my granny cards on Mother's Day, and presented thoughtful graduation gifts to my brothers. The salient biographical details for me were that he bought me the most gorgeous Easter dress I will ever own (dropped waist, covered buttons down the front, crinkly skirt, be still my heart), and that my dad always disappeared when he came to visit. Alex and my mother would chatter for hours, Alex would rise to depart, and magically my father would reappear to say farewell. "Where did Charles go?" my mother would ask. Somewhere where his gaydar signal wasn't picking up, I'm guessing.

My Greatest Generation dad had no useful models for how to behave around a person of a different sexual orientation. Alex's presence signified Too Much Information, and in the face of this knotty social and sexual puzzlement, my dad headed for the certainty and security of his pickup.

Virginia Woolf claimed that human nature changed on or about December 10, 1910. I can't put that fine a point on it, but blessedly, humanity found a few clues about gay civil rights somewhere between my Easter dress and Cranky #1's research paper. Cranky #2 may very well fit into my frothy yellow confection this season, and I would be pleased to tell her about its provenance: It came from Alex, a dear family friend who had a queer eye for fashion.
--MCG

Paperback Wing Nuts

2010-03-02T20:35:00.004-06:00

Since the Lyndon Johnson administration, Meta Cranky has had a torch burning for Shadow Castle, a 45-cent book that her youngest older brother (YOB) brought home from a Scholastic book fair. Look at the cover and you're smitten: there's princess Gloria's flaxen hair flowing well past her ass, and a dreamy Disney-quality castle in the background. Prince Mika is practically drooling on himself, he's so overcome by her fabulousness. Bluebell, the princess of the Blue Fairies, gets a similar over-the-top treatment inside the covers, except that she's a brunette with a curly do. Elves, goblins, swamp fairies, a vegetarian dragon. It's Middle Earth with better illustrations.

A cursory check at Amazon shows that Meta Cranky is among a legion of wing nuts who are unable to be ironic, or even objective, about Shadow Castle. Amazon reviewers confess to stealing these books from libraries and loathing former friends who borrowed, then lost, their personal copies. The book you discover when you're 9 is apparently the book you carry with you, intact and beloved, into geezerhood. Those of us who drank the SC Kool Aid are not going to get all lit crit-y and describe the revealing contrast of fairy and mortal, or analyze the dangerous goblin/swamp fairy alliance. Instead, like YOB, we'll tell you where we were when we first read it (top of a long-gone mimosa tree) and declare, with fervor and sincerity, "It's just that good."

Because of ridiculous sentimentalists like Meta Cranky and her YOB, used paperback copies of SC sell for $28. Someone who is not a liberal arts major, do the math and figure out where your portfolio would be now if you'd invested in 45-cent paperbacks instead of those lousy 401Ks. Even in these difficult economic times, however, Meta Cranky will tighten her belt to obtain the new EXPANDED edition of SC with previously unpublished material. More fairies! Creepier goblins! Those poor slobs reading the books on the Times best-seller list don't know what they're missing.
--MCG

Post Party

2010-03-01T20:49:00.005-06:00

Back in the day, Meta Cranky delighted in Bad Parties. Giving them, attending them, watching people fall in the pool at them. Scott Fitzgerald articulated the essence of the bad party in Tender Is the Night, and my undergraduate journalism pals aspired to host parties that met these standards:

I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it.
I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.

Truth be told, most Daily Texan parties I attended in the mid-eighties didn't miss this mark by much. I have rosy memory of a full day spent inert on the sofa after a glorious multi-birthday soiree in my condo's party room. Through slit eyes, I watched a dozen post-partiers shuffle through my condo collecting lost shoes and empty pony kegs. Some poor soul hobbled by on a foot that had been impaled by a woman's stiletto. From my mostly horizontal position, I pointed toward missing articles of clothing and equipment, and listened to descriptions of epic, irresponsible binge drinking. I realized at day's end that the Mexican fat dress I was wearing was inside out.

Time and space don't much change the parameters of the Bad Party. We celebrated Grace Five Point Five recently, and I'm pleased to report that while it differed in specifics from the Daily Texan model, it still followed classic Bad Party form. Girls in outrageous outfits? Check. Girls jumping on sofas in the name of self-expression? Natch. Painfully loud music to fuel interpretive dance? You betcha. Then: "Caca de Vaca." Now? "Barbie Girl."

I began post-party cleanup by strategizing about the PlayDoh ground into the carpet. As I studied the wreckage, I begin to identify items left by members of Not My Tribe. Gigi's camera. Helena's sweater. Addie's purse. Ellie's jacket. KK's jacket, plus her headband. And I smiled in recognition.
--MCG

Cranky Girl #1 Considers the Diesel Engine

2010-02-02T16:17:00.007-06:00

*photo credit to Glenda.

Cranky Girl #1 fulfilled a 7th grade English assignment by reflecting on her summertime rides in pickups. Here's her product.

I Didn’t Go to Schlitterbahn on My Summer Vacation

When I’m asked the question, “What did you do over summer vacation,” I usually answer, “I rode around in a pickup truck.” People tend to say, “Oh, that’s, uh cool,” and then rush on to tell me about their trip to Schlitterbahn. All I’m asking is that you consider that my vacation could be as fascinating and exciting as yours. Then I will be happy to hear about Schlitterbahn.

If you say you live on a farm, people think you wear overalls and share your breakfast with Wilbur the pig. In my experience, farms aren’t inhabited by shy old men who raise adorable, spotless animals. Cow are just not that clean, and pigs don’t get buttermilk baths. Sure, I can tell you inspiring stories about calves being born, but honestly, calving is a big, bloody show with a wet, wobbly finale. Real farmers watch through the pickup window, while they thaw out their fingers from the February frost.

Some people’s summers have one big, memorable event. My summers are a lot of little good, funny, silly, serious events that I bundle up and call summer. For example, one night we got a flat tire on our Mazda Navaho. It was late, I was 6 and cranky, and Mom was in no mood to crawl under the car. Someone passed us and stopped to help. In making introductions my mom said, “You don’t know me but I’m Colleen Hobbs,” to which he replied, “O yeah, I know you. I went to school with your brother Sid.” How’s that for knowing your community?

For some people, the highlight of the summer is the most exciting thing that happened, like seeing a Broadway show or going to the Grand Canyon. The highlights of my summers, or at least the things I remember most clearly, are incidents like this: walking out across the field, inhaler in hand, to bring water to my uncle, who was disking a field. By the time I reach the tractor, the ice has melted. Another high point: being interrupted mid-pie one evening by an urgent call. We all dropped our forks, grabbed our shoes, jumped in a truck (I rode on the back) and went down three miles of red dirt road. The cows were out.

A visitor once asked me, “Aren’t you glad I saved you from that boring farm?” I couldn’t reply. Apparently my idea of a fun vacation isn’t the same as other seventh graders’. We may not have Wilbur, or Babe, but my family’s farm is a working farm where each day’s labor brings a chance to learn and grow. To me, riding in pickups is Schlitterbahn. The details of my summer add up to a larger lesson. You might learn about a person’s character, or how to test the strength of a flooding creek’s current. But every ordinary conversation or posthole can help you learn if you pay attention.

2009-11-27T20:24:00.003-06:00

Bounty

The shopping, cleaning, and cooking that go along with our national holiday might, perhaps, take the shine off the genuine feelings of gratitude that we cranky girls harbor in our flinty little hearts. But this artifact from a cousin makes me feel serious-as-a-heart attack thankful for all those post-war miracles: antibiotics, fluoridated water, free school lunches, GI Bill, the U.S. highway system, and the like. These are the O'Hern children at their mother Jane's funeral in 1933. My grandmother Nora is the fourth from the left in the back row.

Jane O'Hern was married at 16 and died before she was 60. She had 13 children; Jeez, the hamster in Grace's bedtime book only had 11.

Jane's obituary described her as quiet and unassuming. If you live with someone as tightfisted as her husband, Pat O'Hern, and produce 13 children, you probably LOOK like you're unassuming. But I think she must have been tough as a boot. Her 13 children all lived to adulthood; the only one missing from the funeral picture died at 18 in a farming accident. In other branches of my family, unattended children died from drinking kerosene or stepping on rusty nails. But not Jane's. She didn't leave any at the gas station, or let any drown in a creek. She must have been paying attention and not just phoning it in.

If Jane O'Hern, with no education, running water, or even a whiff of useful medical care can do all that, I think I can manage to unload the dishwasher one more time.

--mcg

Domestic Science

2009-09-05T14:28:00.003-05:00

A note to those of you who have graciously inquired whether we are back in our kitchen. The short answer is yes. Don't ask me to find the spoons, lightbulbs, or can openers that I used back in May. But we have made reasonable substitutions. Homework has been done on the counter. The mixer has been unpacked, and it still produces cookies. The only difference is that the mixing bowl now goes in the dishwasher after being comprehensively licked.

Much of the old is still there, and old. This is the same fixture that has hung above the dining table since I first saw it in the mid-1980s. My suspicion is that it is original to the house.

OK, well now it's red, instead of dirty beige. The globes came from the farm. I've seen them in a cabinet above the sink since about 1974. Recycle, reuse, etc.

When workers tore out the rotted kitchen cabinet, the name of the original owner was still clearly displayed. Mr. K. had the huevos to build a house in the last Depression. When our house gets turned into condos, or a University of Texas parking lot, or an expansion of Seton Hospital in the twenty-second century, maybe the subcontractors will smile at the Corvette-red light fixture that was installed in the Great Recession of Ought Nine.

--MCG

Tomstock

2009-08-19T06:06:00.006-05:00

Cousin Tom didn't plan a fish fry just to observe our last night at the farm, but it worked out that way. His fish fries, held in his welding shop, are the stuff of local legend. You get the parking gridlock of Woodstock, but the food is much better. And instead of Jimi Hendrix, you get our Uncle Charlie. The guy in the red hat is about to turn 101.

Tomstock features an all-you-can-eat buffet, where the main draw is the fish. Tom and Cousin Jack are noodlers, which means they think it's fun to catch fish with their hands. It works for them, and we get to eat it. Whatever. The buffet is filled out with the neighbors' pot-luck offerings, which means lots of sinful desserts. Grace ate the icing off the red velvet cake, so I had to eat the rest. Darn. Also, UM pointed out a roaster filled with meat that looked like chicken, except that it wasn't. I have a suspicion that I knew the guys in the roaster back when they could croak.

In addition to all its other fine qualities, Tomstock is a kid's paradise. Tom has tricked out his place with all the usual grandkid-friendly gizmos. In addition, though, you get the playground equipment from the country school that was near his childhood home. So you get a terrific slide and jungle gym that no school would dare put in its playground for fear of litigation. The merry-go-round is particularly terrific.

Poor Cranky Girl #2 got grief from Meta Cranky Girl for leaving her shoes at home. Attending Tomstock is a bit like exotic overseas travel in that you really want your tetanus shot up to date. Upon reflection, I find that the glory of Tomstock is that it requires you to improve your game, or else. Do you want to jump on that trampoline with five other kids and not break your cervical vertebrae when you're bounced off? Great, then let's see some agility and problem-solving skills. Do you really want to crawl to the top of Tom's archway to see what's there? That's fine, but just don't whine when it's time to come down.

And you really do want to crawl to the top, because then you get to see the summer's last sunset.

--MCG

Dirt Work

2009-08-17T05:51:00.006-05:00

The Cranky Girls have returned to their Not Farm space to prepare for Kindergarten and Middle School. Meta Cranky is preparing to have someone else take her trash away each Friday. But on our way out of town, CGs managed to collect several adventures and a photo backlog that we will process urban tranquility.

Here's what we saw on our last day at the farm:

What we didn't see was the road, our mailbox, and our house. Our vision was obstructed by our neighbor's farm, which was vigorously blowing north. Here's what it looked like from our house, moving in from the south:

Turns out that what you really want on a hot windy day is a luscious alfalfa field. Not just because your legumes are fixing nitrogen in your soil. No, it's because those 15-foot roots are holding your dirt down.

This has been a sorry summer for farmers. After the harvest, we got a drought and weeks of merciless heat. Last summer, we could plant field peas after harvest, a fine way to get a summer crop while scoring more of those nitrogen-fixing legumes. But without a rain, field peas were pretty much out of the picture. So we waited, and waited, to prep the field for a fall crop. Our field has been plowed once, with great trouble and expense, and more broken plow shears than we care to count.

Look closely and you'll see the light brown wheat stubble in our lumpy field. Turns out that lumpy and stubbly is terrific on a day like this. The dust you see wafting above our field isn't ours: our lumpy field stayed put while south wind picked up the smooth, twice-cultivated field nearby.

Make all the Dust Bowl comparisons you like, but a perfect storm of high wind and dry conditions can make any farmer look like an idiot. On our farm, we clearly remember when our sandy hill began to blow in the '60s. The Cranky Family unrolled bale after bale of hay on the sandy spots to keep the dirt where it belonged. Now we've planted the hill (which is classified as "Highly Erodible Land" by Feds That Give Us Money) into permanent grasses, so we won't have to go there again.

Erosion on a this scale is tragic, of course. But can we take a moment to say that it's also a big pain in the tush? The Crankies' front porch has drifts that would be at home in Lawrence of Arabia. We left open a south basement window: the beds downstairs were covered with a layer of sand that brought to mind the snow drifts of Dr. Zhivago. Those aren't the film references that we're going for. Babe or Chicken Run we can handle. But you can keep Ralph Fiennes, his swishy khakis, the Libyan desert, and The English Patient.

--MCG

A Real Operator

2009-08-12T23:03:00.004-05:00

*photo credit to Lydia

Today, MGC became a real operator by signing paperwork at the U.S. Department of Agriculture office at the county seat. I signed on the line that clearly said Operator, so it must be true. You may be interested in knowing that your tax $$ will be going to make sure that MCG's '09 wheat crop is more lucrative than an uninsured, drought-stricken, and frost-bitten 20 bushel/acre crop otherwise would be.

Some federal offices are comforting and sustaining. Post offices, for example, smell familiar and have employees who seem genuinely interested in helping me process my mail. The Ag Department, however, makes me feel like I've walked into the wrong seminar room. Like my poor professor who walked in ready to talk about Middlemarch when the rest of us were primed for Mill on the Floss.

Things I have learned from the Department of Agriculture:

1)If you want $$ from a government program, buying local is counterproductive. Our lovegrass project was complicated by buying seed from a neighbor rather than from a dealer who would have all the handy paperwork. For the USDA, locavores kind of suck.

2)It's really just easier to do it the way the the feds do it. Case in point: Our soil test indicated that our lovegrass needed 32 pounds of nitrogen/acre to meet the standards for a program that establishes grasses in erodible land. So, like a wierdo urban cranky girl who doesn't put Sevin dust in my tomatoes, I asked about alternatives to commercial, petroleum-based fertilizer. The answer: it costs more to apply feedlot manure, and the feds are not going to cover it. Oh, and we used to have a program to fertilize with chicken poop from eastern Oklahoma. We know that all the crap from factory chicken farms is screwing up the watershed over there. But the program expired, so never mind.

MCG was doing her own translation from the original government-speak, so the nuances may have been lost on her. Also, she is distracted by the voice of her deceased step-mother-in-law, the opinionated organic gardener. From Organic Gardener Heaven, she is communicating that commercial fertilizer is a great deal for Monsanto, but not so good for her grandchildren's health. Clearly, MCG is out of her league and should go back to picking tomato worms off her Jersey Girls.

--MCG

Bespoke Birthday Cake

2009-08-10T11:07:00.003-05:00

Grace ate cake at an early-summer birthday and declared, "She can make this cake for my birthday." "She" was Wanda, and when Grace's birthday rolled around, she did. It's a glorious angel food confection, delivered on Aunt Minnie's Fosteria cake plate. Talk about eye candy. Perhaps my favorite part was the Alma Cronin icing, a seven-minute creation that pre-dates marshmallow stuff from a jar. I like this icing on lots of levels, and not just because of the way it sticks to my fingers. In my apprentice cranky days, I spent a lot of time watching elderly women (crones over 40) making funeral dinners in the church basement, and Alma had an engaging prickliness that spoke to the cockles of my cranky little heart.

The Alma icing makes me mentally review the recipes I refer to by a proper name. My mother's recipe box is lousy with them: Berta's Fan Fan rolls. Ruth Ann's White Mountain Ice Cream. My system is less colorful, but mentally, I insert the name of the person who introduced me to something fabulous: (Mark's) Hummus with Pomegranate Seeds on Top. (Laura's) Carrot Soup. (Liz's) Soup with Spinach that Small Children Eat. Recipes come with baggage, not to mention responsibility. Let's just hope that I'm not remembered by posterity with (Toxic Mom's) Scorched Broccoli.

--MCG

Evoking Closure

2009-08-08T11:21:00.006-05:00

At the farm, crankiness is a form of self expression, and this has not been a subdued summer. MCG has loudly uttered Mother-of-the-Year-type statements, such as If you two want to turn me into a drooling idiot, just keep it up. Some of us have proclaimed that the world will end if others of us touch particular CG property. MCG has declared she will not listen to any sentences beginning Sister said. Then came the day that cranky words were said over two boxes of mac and cheese. One exuberantly cranky outburst followed another, a door was slammed, and a window was sacrificed on the altar of crankiness.

At this point, MCG entered the category that Uncle Michael calls "Toxic Mom." Crankies 1 and 2 have made reparations in the form of extra acts of housework. And after two tries, we finally received a tempered-glass window of the correct size. Lydia held the glass while UM nailed in the trim.

Apparently there's a special tool called a nail set to help install finish nails with small heads. Do we have this tool? Take a big guess. But we do have a metal file. You put it over the nail and then whack. Extra points for adapting available tools to do the job.

We spent a month with this empty space between the laundry room and the kitchen, and it afforded us opportunities to perform clever tricks and Marx Brothers-type pantomimes. But now the window is replaced and the cranky incident that broke it has become Amusing Family Lore. MCG could get all literary and talk about literal and metaphorical closure, but she's sure you appreciate her walking away from that temptation.

--MCG

Dog Update

2009-08-05T14:25:00.004-05:00

I was going to post a picture of this goofy bird dog and report that she was settling in nicely. Still chewing a bit, not so much jumping, putting on a few pounds. Everything on track to take her to Texas, where a new family is waiting to see whether she's a good fit.

And then, the dogs had a news flash this morning:

Apparently, there's a porcupine in these parts. Both dogs ended up with lips full of quills. Coco didn't look so great, either.

A morning's visit to the vet and all's well again. Both dogs appear slightly chastened, but I'm sure that will pass. The vet assures me that if the porcupine is still there, the dogs will do it again.

--MCG

The Choir Invisible

2009-08-04T22:20:00.006-05:00

My mother used to have a pile of cards and programs collected from the funerals she attended. They were almost all conducted by the same undertaker, with the same illustration on the front and the same Victorian-sounding poem on the back. Only the names and dates were different. I'd find these tucked into her top dresser drawer when I looked for a handkerchief and wonder how a person would collect so many. Now I find these cards in the pocket of the black dress I leave at CGF to wear to funerals. Every summer, there's at least one funeral.

You would expect the actuarial charts to catch up with farmers, who are an aging demographic, despite what the Times says about those hip, young organic farmers with Political Science degrees. But the black dress and I are going to other services, too, each with its own set of grieving family members and, often, awkward family psycho-dynamics. The service for a heartbreakingly young man that had the Lynyrd Skynyrd soundtrack. The banker's funeral that I watched on TV in the overflow room. Mass for the mother of a high-school boyfriend. Cancer victims, suicides, traffic fatalities.

It would seem be a grim litany, this forced march to the services of friends and neighbors. And yet the generosity of spirit I see at each of these events is invariably heartening. It's not just about the predictable Protestant casserole; I think it's about time.

Ponder this: I went to a beautiful funeral at a historic Episcopalian church in Austin with the burial following at the lovely state cemetery. Afterward, most friends and associates expressed their sincere and heartfelt condolences before time constraints required them to return to their law firms. This urban tribe is no less thoughtful or considerate than my rural one, but home visitation and church dinner are not part of its folkways. In contrast, about 40 friends and family members stayed at my grandparents house for three days after my uncle's funeral in 1957--it took that long for the floodwaters to recede. My mother was one of the first to leave, and she flew out in a crop-duster's airplane. I still hear stories about that post-funeral camp-out from the people who were there, and none of them indicate that those three days in a house full of damp, grieving people was a waste of their time.

Tomorrow, Michael and Jamie will sing Amazing Grace at the service of a a long-time civic leader. The black dress and I will, once again, watch and learn.

--MCG

*key to obscure literary reference: I know this George Eliot poem because it's from the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch:

O may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence

Axis of Evil

2009-08-04T13:59:00.005-05:00

The Cranky Girls have been merrily visiting with their Urban Company for the past few days. Lots of fun with visitors, their lovely daughter, and their alarmingly intelligent dog. After our very happy visit, we return to the garden to find that CGF is under attack.

The edible plants that began their career in March have prevailed against the heat, the wind, and the drought. However, they have met their Waterloo, their Dunkirk, and their Dien Bien Phu in the form of bugs. Here's what a squash bug can do to a zucchini. Avert your eyes if you're squeamish.

And there are the tomato worms, which I think of as the al-Qaeda of the bug world. If I were the size of a tomato, I'd be really scared. When the business end of the worm points my way, it's kind of scary despite my size advantage.

I fondly remember when my granny had a generous container of Sevin dust in the garage that would take these suckers out. My granny didn't spend much time worrying about what toxins were collecting in her tissues. After reading too many books about the dangers of ingesting scary chemicals, we choose to just remove the worms by hand. It's an art, not a science.

Lucky for us there's not so much that wants to eat the eggplant.

--MCG

Windmill Pumps

2009-07-29T20:18:00.006-05:00

The other day, Michael decided that I needed to learn about windmills. So here I am blogging about them. Here's what I learned about them.

Parts of a windmill pump, from the top:

Name to Use What I Call It

1. cylinder= case red thing

2. plunger= water puller metal stick

3. bottom check= holding water still valve

4. top and bottom check= holding water still bigger valve

5. leather= sealing water brown circle

The assembled pump in action:

We tried out the pump in a bucket of water. Ta da! It worked!

--cg

The Model Farm

2009-07-27T21:53:00.006-05:00

*photo credit goes to Grace on this one

If you ever need a good laugh, it's quite the panic to read those old publications put out by the county extension services that tell you how to have a model farm. They helpfully tell you when to plant your cow peas, how many jars of pickles you should be canning, what to do when your chickens have chest colds, etc. Let's just be clear about this: the cranky girls are not running the model farm.

This building is a case in point. It used to be a brooder house. We figured we could do plenty of brooding without devoting an entire building to it, so we made it a playhouse. We gave it some flourishes like windows and a working door. And what do we get for our efforts? Termites.

*this photo from Michael--see his truck reflected in the window!

It's not that we three crankies aspire to be Lisa Douglas from Green Acres. OK, truthfully, Grace could really get into watching someone else "farm" while wearing pearls and kitten- heeled mules with a poof of maribou feathers. The rest of us crankies, however, are stuck being Marthas to her Mary.

Running water, for example, is one of those things that can be a non-event or a big pain in the tush. Sunday, I trekked to the well at 6 a.m. to whack the points on the motor; apparently there was enough moisture to foul up the connection. So you jiggle the housing and voila! (or Viola!, as Uncle Sid says) you have running water again. It's so easy. You can figure out how to make your points work, or you can listen to your children complain that the toilet won't flush. It's completely up to you.

CGF has the whole yin with the yang thing going. You get the stuff that looks like it's interviewing for Field and Stream:

*look, it's a ring-tailed pheasant!

The stuff that says, yes, Michael Pollan, I have embraced the locavore movement and can grow my own vegetables:

*pumpkin from last fall

And just when you're about to get all high-minded and Wendell Berry about it, reality comes calling in the way of tomato worms, withering heat, and infrastructural challenges:

* These photos from Michael. Can't remember if this is the hole from his barn or from CGs' barn. Sieger Construction can vouch for the holes in CGs' barn.

Maybe CGF really is in Hooterville, and my part is Ralph, the lady carpenter.

--MCG

That Evening Sun

2009-07-22T22:26:00.004-05:00

My youngest older brother came to visit me once in New Jersey. He and his friend slept in the back of their pickup in our driveway in Highland Park. On the way, he visited friends in D.C., probably sleeping in the back of his pickup there, too. A friend of his friend confirmed all the regional prejudices of my youngest older brother when he observed, "You're from Oklahoma? I went there once. There's not anything there." "That's why we like it," retorted YOB. The "asshole" part was understood.

Because there's not anything here to get in the way, we get to study the sun when it goes down. It's impressive enough to make you put down your garden hose, or your fork, or whatever conversational thread you're working on. Grace wanted to take these pictures, and it's always easier when, as she says, we do teamwork.

Here, she helpfully points out That Evening Sun so you won't miss it when it goes down.

--MCG

Frog Prince

2009-07-21T14:18:00.013-05:00

A trip to Cousin Tom and Cousin Jack's (Tom is below) always involves a lot of wildlife.

This trip featured a big Tiffany-blue frog.

Ask Jack the Game Ranger about the genus and species. Ask Tom, the welder and Renaissance man, how to cook it.

A few moments ago, this frog was a princess. However, stuff happens:

Here's a shop dog. We don't know its name, but it has a brother named Tank. This dog has adapted well to life in Tom's welding shop.

Characteristics: friendly, elderly, itchy, puts up with small children.

Batch o' kittens. Third batch of the summer. Five survivors from and original batch of 7, born during a heat wave. Mother lives at Tom's. Father lives . . . oh, never mind. In this picture, they are two days old; eyes not yet open.

*Photo credits go to Lydia, who can take pictures of things that are squirmy.

Not pictured are Tom's goats, chickens, and several more dogs. All with loads of personality, just like Cousin Tom.

It's worthwhile to note that there are lots more animals at Tom and Jack's that no longer have a pulse. He and Jack are expert hunters, fishers, and fish-fryers, and you're never sure what you might find in the freezer (hmm, crane? bobcat maybe? is that an owl in there?). They are past masters at noodling (catching catfish with your hands); our cousin could have been featured in the documentary Okie Noodling, but he wasn't about to have his best fishing holes revealed to the wider world.

Tom and Jack hold fish fries that bring friends and relatives from around the county. Jack's dad used to say that he might eat the chili at Tom's, but only if he saw what went in it first. Who knew squirrel (or turtle) could taste so good?

sorry for the loss of appetite--mcg&cg

Farmers' Market

2009-07-16T22:21:00.000-05:00

Saturday morning I woke up (quite crankily) at 6. In the AM! Why? (It's summer for cryin' out loud!) Because of the Farmers' Market. The market is in Enid, about 1/2 an hour away from the farm. So, with Gardening Friend, I set out at 6:30 to sell squash. Lots of squash. TOO EARLY!!!

Here's what I can report about the wonderful, early, early morning Farmer's Market:

Amazing Fact: All the farmers were cheerful, even though they had gotten up earlier than I had.

Another Amazing Fact: All the farmers were helpful. Really helpful lady selling yummy handmade pecan crunch swapped an $8 bag of candy for 3 pounds of squash. (the squash was worth $4.50, but it's really good squash)

Let's Hear It for Locavores!: Lots of shoppers came out early, early in the morning to support these farmers. Sure they could have gone to the grocery store at a decent hour, but instead they came out in the hot and wind (some days in the rain) to buy things not "Made in China." So, is it surprising that not all of them can think clearly at 8 a.m.? Which leads us to:

THE CUSTOMERS

Annoying Customer (AC) Habit: Asking for produce clearly not available or in season. The sign says "squash." We've got "squash." Gardener Friend waters faithfully, but the tomatoes, eggplant, and corn just aren't ready yet! The Most Annoying of Customers for this habit asked for apricots. Apricots! (We're pretty sure it's too late, although somewhere in the world I'm sure it is March.)

Winner of the AC Prize: The guy who, when offered squash, said "Na, squash is what you serve with roadkill."
I take great personal offense to that comment. Roadkill! Roadkill is the dead armadillo by the side of the road. Roadkill is buzzard food. Squash is not eaten with buzzard food. Although our Cousin Tom (more on him later) might disagree; he's been known to eat fried squirrel. Hey! It's local!

Here ends my report of the fabulous Farmers' Market and its ACs.

enjoy--cg

Code of the West

2009-07-16T10:28:00.007-05:00

There are rules about watching your back in the country. If you, for example, happen to leave your, um, Puplin unattended, things can happen.

Beloved Puplin, purchased at Garden's Edge many years ago, has a history of straying. He has, for example, been left in a hotel in Springfield, MO. Most recently, Puplin was left in Austin, where Dad kindly mailed him back. But if someone opens the mail while you're not home, liberties can be taken.

Here's Puplin at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball:
Very nice. Looks better than Katherine Graham did, don't you think?

Now here's Puplin being eaten by a unicorn. Ouch!

Here's Puplin, getting ready to go to therapy before Lydia comes home.
The Code of the West requires that people occasionally will tease and be teased back. If you are teased too intensively, the correct response is, "You're an Eskimo Pie-head, Uncle Michael."
There you go, partner.
--MCG

Trashy Addendum

2009-07-14T00:00:00.008-05:00

Previously, MCG noted Uncle Michael's agitation upon finding a refrigerator at CGF that, he surmised, did not belong to us. Clever Uncle Michael apparently photographed this discovery. So here's his visual record of refrigerator discovery and removal. First, keen eyes spot the appliance in the ditch at the end of our driveway. "Thunder!" says UM:

But not to worry. It's a simple matter to load the fridge onto your bale stabber, secure it with chains, and pay $3 to offload at the dump. Ta-da! Bagged it!

A misplaced refrigerator is no match for UM's mighty bale stabber. Only wish we could deliver it to the person who lost it.
--MCG

Another One Such

2009-07-13T20:42:00.005-05:00

This happens every summer. It's as regular as the 4th of July fireworks or the running of the bulls in Pamplona. A castoff pet finds us and presents us with an ethical dilemma. This year's installment is a bird dog.

Sometimes these castoffs make us feel like matchmakers. Our hound friend Muzzy was delivered into the arms of a friend who remains smitten by the leggy pooch's charms. You can find out much more about Muzzy at her person's blog. We also learned that a fluffy 10-pound puppy will bowl over all the customers at the lumber yard, who will pore over their address books to find it a home. The puppy grew into a 100 pound bruiser named Samson, so we really dodged a bullet on that one.

And our cat, previously profiled with her rat, was another tourist at CGF who never checked out of the kitty hostel.

Animals gravitate to CGF, perhaps because we're on a creek, or perhaps because our phone number is written on some bathroom wall. My parents were, if possible, even easier marks than we cranky girls are. Dogs with names like Queenie and Ladybird became recipients of hot oatmeal on cold days and table scraps on balmy days; one notably followed Dad to town and waited in his truck while he ate breakfast at the cafe. The only dog ever ejected from CGF was a purebred boxer. When he pulled the laundry off the line one too many times, my mother took him into the vet clinic and asked that he be euthanized. The vet intern was horrified that she would want to destroy such a valuable animal. Kap told him: "He's yours, buddy." Maybe his new owner used a drier.

This female dog looks like a German shorthaired pointer. She walks with a limp and has the patience of a saint. She has been intensively yammered at, pulled on, and shampooed with dish soap, all without protest. She still chooses to sleep in the yard. If you have any birdhunting needs, please let us know and she's yours, buddy. Otherwise, we'll get back to you on how we resolve this summer's ethical dilemma.

--MCG

Trashiness

2009-07-12T00:15:00.014-05:00

The wind let up Saturday morning for the first time in days. So I burned the trash. We've got a terrific burn-barrel that Jamie graciously shared and Michael kindly delivered. Grace held a match to help.

I'm guessing that the local burn-ban has been lifted, because farmers have been torching their wheat stubble for days. If not, then paint me a scoff-law. There are both trash-burners and haul-to-the dumpers in my family. We do this because, unlike pampered urbanites, we don't have solid waste disposal services.

Here's the thing: My collection represented a week's trash for three cranky girls, the leavings of a dinner party for 10, and some trim pieces from a construction project. Any organic matter was composted, and we're not strict constructionists about meat and dairy. What do we care if the skunks pull an uneaten piece of cheese from the heap? Any recyclables have been removed to be meditated over, because I dare anyone to make sense of the recycling system around here. Paper and aluminum? Great, drop it off in town 24/7. Cardboard, plastic, steel cans? You can drop those off in Air Force Base Town between 10 and 2. Batteries and glass? You're hosed, unless you want to schlep them to Oklahoma City during business hours. Many is the time that we've thrown up our hands and just sent them back to Austin in a southward-bound vehicle. And how nuts is that?

So is it any wonder that only a few stalwart souls try to work with this system? And is it any wonder that the bridge by our house is the defacto staging area for the county dump? We can take any manner of trash (except tires) to the dump between 9 and 5 on days that aren't Wednesday and Sunday. Unless it's now Monday and Sunday. The dump is a bargain when it's open--only $3 for all the trashiness you can fit into the bed of a pickup. But alas, many rural people generate trash after closing time. We know this because we find their above-ground-pool installation debris, their outgrown baby layettes, and their dead goats by our bridge. Our cousin Paul and pal Jeremy once pulled an exceptional number of lawn mowers out from under the bridge (I think it was 4). Brother Michael has called in a fit of righteous indignation to report that a full-sized refrigerator blossomed at the end of our driveway.

The county workers and the church's youth group have been pressed into service to haul away other people's stuff (Thanks guys! There are more kolaches where those came from!). But mostly it's Uncle Sid and Uncle Michael, who have the pickups and trailers that you really want in the trash-removal biz. Jamie's pickup was just the thing for that elliptical exercise machine that didn't quite make it into the ditch. These people's time, gas, and equipment wear-and-tear are the effective Other People's Crap Tax that we pay for living in the country.

So urbanites: Celebrate Big Trash Day! Lift a glass to Single Stream Recycling! And be content in the knowledge that any day you wake up without someone else's pool skirting on your property is probably going to be a good day.

--mcg

Lawn Culture

2009-07-11T22:36:00.012-05:00

Weeks of 100-plus temperatures mean that the bermuda grass around the house and outbuildings has long since gone brown and dormant. The weeds, however, are loving it. These guys must have made some deal with the evolutionary gods, because they are thriving in the face of climate conditions that are more like Dubai than the USDA Hardiness Zone 7. Yesterday's high was 114 degrees; the top leaves of my well-watered corn plants went from green to crinkly brown in one afternoon. But do you see any stress in this vegetation? It's the epitome of verdant:

Here is a particularly exuberant example of pig weed. I swear it wasn't there two days ago:

Which brings us to the subject of lawn care in this part of the world. I won't indulge in King of the Hill comparisons because they're just too easy. More revealing might be the inventory of the garage where our lawn care tools are stored: three riding lawnmowers and a push mower. Two of the riding mowers are well-loved tractor mowers that are used only in a pinch. The other is a twirly, zero-turn mower that came to us when a cousin upgraded. Here's the thing: In this lawn care tribe, owning four lawn mowers is considered completely normal. Our cousin who upgraded has an immaculate garage bay that looks like the lawnmower lot outside Lowe's. Weird, in this lawn culture, would be my Austin yard, where all the Saint Augustine has been replaced with gravel, vegetable garden, and xeriscaping.

I once asked our friend Jamie, a native Texan, to shed some light on a diagonal mowing pattern we saw in Brother Sid's beautiful yard. She only shrugged and observed that "mowing is a religion in Oklahoma. That's just another sect." I have been pushing my tribe's boundaries of lawn etiquette; I'm not elderly or incapacitated, so I don't qualify for a mowing waiver. Excuses like, "but jeez, it's 114 outside!" just don't cut it with this crowd. If I waited much longer, I could expect concerned looks and an Intervention Mowing. Therefore, the Cranky and Reluctant Mower sect held services Saturday at 8 a.m. And it was good.

--mcg

Ancient History

2009-07-08T10:56:00.000-05:00

There's a lot of old stuff at CGsF. Like the Romans, we have some really old infrastructure that you might find in a museum. Until recently, we boasted of knob-and-tube wiring, a 40-year-old AC, and a fabulously rusty cast iron pipe that took (most) of the water from the washing machine. Some old stuff is hip and groovy, for example a stove that has a griddle and a Thermo-well. Other old stuff is just old. Like Meta Cranky Girl.

Then there's the category of Educational Old Stuff. Cranky Girls 1 and 2 are seated on a thingy that allows you to actually SIT behind your plow, rather than have to walk behind it. I'm sure it was the IPod Touch or the IPhone 3G of its day. This implement lives at the Chisholm Trail Museum in Kingfisher with very many of its farm implement friends.

One of the very cool things about this museum, besides its three dozen flavors of candy sticks, is that it not only has Educational Old Stuff. It also has a whole block of Educational Old Buildings. A school. A bank. A jail. A church (more on this later). A blacksmith shop. And two log cabins. The log cabin pictured below is of particular interest to Cranky Girls because it was owned by the Cole family. Meta Cranky is sure she will be corrected if she gets this wrong, but she thinks that it was the home of her mother's great-grandmother. That would be the 3rd-great grandmother of Crankies 1 and 2. That's a lot of history, and quite a bit of crankiness.

Lydia sat on an iron bed in this small cabin and thought about being in a place where her long-ago grandmother had lived.

Harmony Church was our family's church for many years, until it closed in the 1970s. If you get us going, we can tell you stories about Uncle Michael singing Silent Night there as a wee tot, or about Dora, a notable minister who served the church during WW2.

It looks like an Educational Old Building, but we still know lots of people who think of it as part of their family, too.

--MCG

Thorny Bastards

2009-07-08T00:18:00.003-05:00

Attention readers: This post is being written by the mother of all Cranky Girls. The previous writer emphasized to me that I needed to make this distinction. Perhaps I'm the Meta Cranky Girl. I'll consider how to classify myself when I'm not so cranky.

Today's post is about cirsium undalatum. I was ready to call this a musk thistle, but our friend Chuck, who knows more Latin names than Charles Darwin, thinks it's a wavy-leaf thistle. Wavy-leaf thistle is apparently a native plant, as opposed to a myriad of other invasive thistles with purple tops. Whether its a native or an uninvited guest, it's prickly, and I will always think of it (affectionately) as The Thorny Bastard.

It's got an attractive purple bloom. I'm quite certain that our friends at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center cultivate them and celebrate their place in the circle of life.

We don't celebrate them quite so much; they only pop up when fields are stressed or overgrazed, or when the seeds are imported in hay bales. So with the encouragement of Uncle Michael (profiled previously), we have spent two mornings digging them up and carrying them off to burn. Check out the payload of these seed pods, and it's apparent how quickly these thistles can spread.

These thistles were removed from a farm my uncles own. I'm sure they'll be glad to know that there's an Oklahoma law on the books requiring property owners to remove invasive species. We're apparently saving these guys from a fine of $1000/day. Wow, are we generous or what? Here's Lydia, making her contribution to range management:

The Thorny Bastards and I go way back; I've seen these lovely purple blossoms pulled, mowed, and burned since my days as a wee cranky girl, often at the instigation of my granny. If she could see these from the window of her Impala as she drove around her ranch, someone would be instructed to remove them. Upon reflection, perhaps my granny is the Meta Cranky Girl, and the rest of us are just pale imitations.

--mcg

Meet Shamoo

2009-07-06T00:18:00.002-05:00

This is Shamoo with Uncle Sid.

Breed: Black Baldie

Weight: about 70 lbs

Age in this picture: under 2 weeks (Now he's about a month.)

Favorite food: Powdered milk

Favorite actions: Head-butting; opening his mouth and rubbing his drool against your legs; jumping and kicking in the air after he eats

Unique features: Pointy hooves that really hurt when he steps on you

thanks for reading--cg

Aerial View of the Farm

2009-07-05T00:00:00.001-05:00

This is an aerial view of the farm taken from an airplane. Uncle Michael did not ride in the airplane, but he did arrange for the picture to be taken. It's one of my favorite pictures of the farm because you can see the whole farm and the pecan, oak, and sycamore trees, to name a few.

Enjoy!

-cg

Kitty and "Friend"

2009-07-04T00:00:00.000-05:00

This is Kitty

Nickname: Fat Cat

History: Rescued from the creek that runs through the farm (just like Muzzy and Bob) (For a view of the farm, click here. For stories about Muzzy, click here.) Like the other Cranky Girls, Kitty divides her time between the country and the city.

Hobbies: Chasing Coco, sleeping, eating, thinking about food, begging for food

Habits: Lolling, sleeping, biting people who pet her stomach (She's kind of sensitive about her girth!) Below is an illustration of another habit--

--killing ratses.

Favorite food: Anything edible

Favorite flavor: Rat (Runner-up: Tuna)

Favorite spot in the house: Anything soft

Favorite family member: Coco Dog and any human who feeds her and doesn't carry her by her tail (That would be Grace)

Opinion of Grace: Not repeatable or translatable

Favorite time of day: When the ratses come out to play

Enjoy!

-cg

Get to Know Sid!

2009-07-03T00:27:00.001-05:00

This is Sid.

Occupation: Unlicensed welder, cow birther, fluent cusser (see below)

Age: Too many digits

Favorite animals: Beef, pork

Favorite foods: See above.

Favorite cuss word: Holy Sheepsh--

Favorite brother: He has brothers?

Favorite pair of overalls: The ones that Mama didn't sew the crotch shut on

Favorite piece of machinery: Any that still work

Hobby: Eating dinner while it's cooking

Habits: Cooking barbecue in his bedroom in his underwear

Favorite movies: Fractured Fairytales and Idiocracy

What he calls his nieces: Lydia = Short Stuff; Grace = Eek!

What he does to Grace: Ticky-ticky (makes her squeal)

What makes him a good uncle: He is so considerate to others.

Ha, ha. --cg

Get to Know Michael!

2009-07-02T00:00:00.001-05:00

My uncle Michael

Occupation: Rancher, Farmer, Fix-it Man, Occasional Coot

Age: Classified

Nicknames: Not quite repeatable

Favorite Cuss Word: Thunder!

Favorite Sound: A working motor (He hears so few of them.)

Favorite Hat: Purple tassled hat with pink heart jewels (courtesy of Mama; cute!)

Favorite Animal: Beef

Favorite Mantra: "Thunderthunderthunderthunder"

Favorite Food: Cucumbers (They give him "whimsy")

Favorite Niece: Depends on Whether he values his life or his ears

Most Famous for: His Fire Containment Skills

Famous Person He's Been Compared to: Orville Redenbacher

Ha, ha! -cg

Country Skyline

2009-07-01T11:07:00.001-05:00

A northern view of a few buildings on our acreage.

A lovely shot of our driveway in the crisp spring sweatshirt weather (all photos on this post are in such weather--it's usually greener).

The lush green field, full to bursting with alfalfa, dew, and ticks.

The buildings. Starting on the left there is the main house (dubbed the Oklahoma green-house, by my younger sister (age 4) for its green trim (not viewable from here)). The tall, white building with the red door is the water tower, which we use for holding garden tools, kites, a slip n' slide, and other oddities.

The building on the far right is what we call the "office." Though now used as a guest room/apartment, it was once used as grandfather Charles' veterinary office.

enjoy! -cg

The Cranky Girl Farm

2009-07-01T02:00:00.000-05:00

This is what the farm house looks like.