Lime Crackles

This morning I tried a magazine recipe called Lime Crackles - so I photographed them.  Used some Green Food Coloring.

Old Beautiful Trees Gone, Many Thoughts

Tree Removal Dec 18, 2015

No, I do not know why it happens that it is not that easy.   I wrote to the Urban Forest at the City of Tacoma,  “…they kept the goodwill of everyone as they built, but their intentions were really something entirely different from what did appear to be a project that was including the large old trees.” Those are my feelings, but there are many feelings. 

A New Sidewalk, Again Broken

About fifteen years ago I fell on my face over a broken sidewalk at that corner and walked in the dark to the Emergency Room at Tacoma General Hospital.  Just then I had a very few hours work at the Tacoma University of Washington Branch Library while I also had a newspaper route.  The following morning I got up and delivered the newspapers.   At one time, one of the newspaper customers lived in that building.  It had not been the fault of the trees that I fell.  I rode my bicycle past the trees many times and their resin stuck slightly to my tires.  But those trees were welcome shade and I felt powerfully good about them. 

Beautiful Trees During Project

This summer fires east of the mountains caused a day of air filled with drifted smoke.  And the building project was a part of the summer.   I did think their plan was to include the old trees.  The trees found their way into a selfie – the project looked good from a heavily traveled corner, and the trees were such a part of the project looking good.

Lovely Appearance

 I do not know why, but it happens.  I had a small tree of my own, this year I transplanted it too late, into a pot it should have had sooner.  It went into shock ,  part of it is dead now.  I am not that successful in the garden.  The fact is, this morning they took the great large trees away, and I have to accept it was the end of their lifespan. 

My tree after and before, with
Photos of Orange Smokey Sun

Childhood Peanut Butter Cookies For Saint Lucia Day

Provenance:  I do not have my mother’s cookbook with the peanut butter cookies.  I found a copy at a hallway table of things building residents were giving away.  Others told me whose it was, and I checked with her to make sure she intended to give it away.  So the previous owner of the copy I have was a lady who had lived at the building.  During a Black History Month project an African-American  librarian told me African-Americans want their presence mentioned.  At four of the six buildings in Tacoma where I have lived, residents have appeared to me to be African-Americans, and among them was the lady who  gave away the cookbook.  After I acquired my copy I saw another copy at the Goodwill or at a yard sale.  A cousin has her mother’s copy of the cookbook. 

The Cookbook, from Martha Meade, is from the Sperry Flour Mill Company.  Marie Malm, who was my grandmother’s sister, worked as a baker at the Sperry Flour Mill Company for years.  They tested the flour and I suppose they tested it with different recipes.   The book had an index based on Types of Recipes and an Index based on Types of Foods. 
  

So Peanut Butter Cookies, here appearing with Cookies in the Types of Recipes Index, also appears with Peanut Butter in the Types of Foods Index.   The publication date is 1939, which was the year my grandmother’s sister died.  She worked as a baker at the Sperry Flour Mill Company for many years, and her first job was at a candy factory.   

Pandering has been a question currently on Facebook.  Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins  wrote in her essay, “On Pandering”.  “Myself, I have been writing to impress old white men. Countless decisions I’ve made about what to write and how to write it have been in acquiescence to the opinions of the white male literati.”  Each Month the Martha Meade cookbook had another beautiful piece of appropriate poetry.  The quote from Shakespeare, according to the internet, is from Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1, Marcellus, to Horatio and Bernardo, after seeing the Ghost.  Horatio prays as light is appearing and day begins. 

The Martha Meade Cookbook had a Menu for a Day on each page, and for the third week of December I find a day when all the recipes appear to be vegetarian.  I have been a vegetarian since 1987.   

Friday at King's Books

Christopher J. Jarmick, Featured

Friday evening December 11th was either the eighth or ninth Open Mike participation I made with the DWS this year, and it was the final Distinguished Writer Series Event for 2015.   With a camera only with me about two and a half weeks, Connie Walle gave me permission to take a few photos.  I include some here.  Christopher J. Jarmick was the featured reader, he also attended the Holiday Party at the home of one of the Open Mike readers afterwards.


Three Open Mike Readers



Reader with Assistance Animal





Atticus (Herbert not shown)

Connie Walle Maskter of Ceremonies

First Job For Marie Malm Was At A Candy Factory

Third From Right, Marie Malm

Yesterday at the candy history display at Tacoma Historical Society downtown (reviewed in Tacoma Weekly, Chocolate City)I admired  hand-managed heavy candy-making machinery.   The climate was right here, and it was close to railroad shipping,  so there were many companies that made candy in Tacoma.   There was a huge copper kettle with a huge spoon from Brown and Haley.  A guide pointed out machines,  among them one that made Ribbon Candy, and I thought about the story of my mother’s Aunt Marie.

Second From Left, Marie Malm

My mother, Linnea Gord Jensen, wrote in a 1930s bio about Marie Malm, her aunt, that Marie’s first job was at a candy factory.  She worked later at Sperry Flour Mill as a baker in the test kitchen,  she was a baker there for many years.  Marie Malm appears in two photos of the Test Kitchen Workers at the Sperry Flour Mill.  The  workers’ names are not listed.  Perhaps others in these photos also worked at Tacoma candy factories at other times.

Reading During November and December --

 At this time there is a sentencing about the terrible Aurora Theater Shootings.  I read The Spiral Notebook, which  is about “the Holmes case, but with an emphasis on the cultural influences that had shaped him and his generation.”  In their book about the Aurora Theater Shootings in July 2012, the authors quote people in their teens and twenties about these influences, as well as specialists.  These two quotes included in the book are about the influence of violent video games:

“There are two major types of memory and learning,” he (Dr. Larry Wahlberg, clinical psychologist) says.  “One type is Deductive Learning that comes from memory:  You  learn that Denver is the capital of Colorado by repeating this again and again.  The second type is called Procedural Learning and it comes from repetitive actions and practice, like shooting a basketball over and over until you become good at it.  One of the problems with video games is that you’re learning to kill repetitively in simulated situations.  You get better at it and you get more desensitized to the process.”

The authors, Stephen and Joyce Singular, refer many times to on-line responses to the violent attacks and to interviews with young people to respond to a stated point of view that older people have not experienced the culture as young people have.

From a twenty-five-year-old male graduate student:

If you don’t have close friends or a good relationship with your parents, what do you have?  Action characters in video games and movies.  The point of these games is violence…

The video games cover all the recent wars: Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  It’s not hard to figure how someone raised on this stuff could act it out in a real way that causes real violence…