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Erica, kale will grow very nicely in a container. It likes the cold, as you know. I don’t have personal experience with deer (rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, birds and lately a raccoon!). But I have heard of some things that can help if you don’t have a tall fence.
Fragrant bars of soap hung from branches or a bamboo stick, etc., about 30 inches from the ground. Think Irish Spring. Or human hair (ask a barber for trimmings) in mesh bags three feet off the ground. Plant spray made of three raw eggs in a gallon of water. Supposedly deer hate that. Also, row covers can help for a while, anyway.
I’ve also had success with mirror mobiles. I had one that was just a long fishing-wire string with small round mirrors attached. I laced it from a piece of wire protruding from a fence and nothing bothered my garden for ages. It would swing around in the sun and wind and it must have freaked out the varmints. Then the Iowan managed to knock it off onto the brick walk and broke a lot of it.
So I bought some very thin fishing wire and a bunch of little mirrors from a craft store. One mirror, glue, attached to the back of an identical mirror. Either one string or attach multiple strings to, say, a wire hanger, which is not pretty but will do the job. Speaking of, you also might string fishing wire between posts in the garden because supposedly that confuses deer.
Good luck!
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The fish lawyers can fuck themselves.
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It’s not possible to duplicate hush puppies that had been deep fried in an iron kettle perched on a wood fire outdoors. With the hand-cranked ice cream under a tree, still in freezers covered by newspapers. The freezers had to be repacked in fresh ice and salt and covered with newspapers and towels, left alone for a while. This “ripened” the ice cream, or hardened it. Absolute ambrosia.
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Miss Nell would start her cooking shows with, “Now as everyone knows I hate to cook so let’s get started and get out of this kitchen.”
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When I was a little kid and we lived in South Haven, Michigan for a while, the house my family rented had one of those old electric ranges with the built-in deep fat fryer. Please remember this was back before unhealthy fried food was invented.
My mom would buy pre-made doughnut dough, the kind in a tube (like biscuits or crescent rolls). She’d pop ‘em open and separate the flat die-cut doughnut parts and fry them. The doughnut holes, fresh out and almost too hot to eat, were golden heaven. We’d sprinkle powdered sugar on them sometimes. Is there anything better than fresh, homemade doughnuts? No.
I don’t remember what we did with the doughnut parts outside the cut circles. Maybe we cooked and ate those too, never speaking about it or looking at each other.
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Michael: As with many academic pursuits, we must restrict our purview to that tiny segment of the field which contains the subject of our discussion, ignoring and sometimes completely forgetting about practical applications of our study within the field and in the world at large.
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I’m also picturing one of those pet-toys where the big, battery-driven head rolls erratically over the floor with the little, empty skin of a body flipping and flapping around, following along behind it.
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I thought this was really sad at first, but in thinking it through, it also makes sense. In a country that no longer makes things, I suppose one of our last commodities that can be bought and sold is our attention.
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All our accents derive from Britain.
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Growing up, Ovid was a sometimes competitor in high school athletics. In retrospect it makes me think of extremely pregnant birds and may explain my distinct indifference toward Latin narrative poetry.
Repost of a Post Past
Going down the rabbit-hole of Cece’s post. Great rememberies here, following “flockers.”
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I bet if we had a Promethean category we’d use the fuck out of it.
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I know a guy from Ohio who worked as a long-haul trucker for a good while after high school. Then he did other things and we wound up working at a library together and after a time he became a big wheel at the MacArthur Foundation.
He claims to have met Patty Hearst when she was on the lam, and he told me that she stole his drugs, but I know he was just spoofing me.
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I think Paula Deen has Dianetics.
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Best Pickup Line Ever.
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Amanda Mae, I’m going to tape your thoughtful comment to the back of my clenched fist for a while, and see if I can slowly release.
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People are always nicer someplace else. The rotten little shits.
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My brother was four years older but still I fought with him, physically, like an idiot. I took quite a bit of punishment before I learned to fight dirty and run, climb a tree where he couldn’t follow, barricade myself somewhere. Sometimes I had to wait for a while but I didn’t care. He knew I would die of thirst, starve to death, if I had to. So he would give up and go away.
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Also, I learned a very important lesson: no beard jokes at web conferences. It’s like prodding at a shibboleth.
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We are all mise en abyme.
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There was a lemon cologne I used when I was a teenage clerk behind the cosmetics counter of a fancy department store. I can’t remember the name. We had dozens of high-end perfume samples available to use. But I spritzed myself with lemon brightness every single time.
I also had a tendency to borrow a sultry red wig from the wig department. But that’s another story.
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Whenever I squeeze lemon or lime onto/into some food/beverage, I dab behind my ears with my citrus-y fingers.
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I’d like to open a couple of bars: one nautically-themed and called “The Octopus,” the other would be a sleazy 70s place called “The Magic Titty.” Both would feature aquariums, small framed images of Demi Moore’s bush, and bootlegs of Deron’s techno joints.
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Listen, who the fuck are you to say whether or not that can do that. I’ve worked with things you cannot comprehend for over 85 years and four lives (one was exceedingly short) and I tell you today as certain as I stand here today that that can most certainly do that.
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A ground crewman who worked on my father’s WWII plane told me their B-26 Marauder was known as the “whore of the skies.” I feel like I can’t say the rest of his quote on this family wire. It crashed a lot. So use your imagination. This was about 15 years ago, during a ceremony for a large marker with the names of the men associated with Flak Bait when it was displayed at Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. This old fella said this to me right in front of Miss Nell, who smiled politely and said, “Okay, well now…” and took my arm and hustled ME off.
