Straight Outta Stone Ridge: The Moles of Summer

A quick review of the past six months …

Goodbye to Winter

I’ve always enjoyed snow. But mostly I’ve been a city boy, which means snow as an enjoyable phenomenon has a very short half-life: Clean the first day/night, but then increasingly gray/dirty as the soot and the traffic turn it to ugly slush that gets piled onto your sidewalk again and again by the plows, then rots.

Up here it just stays white until it melts, at least around our house and along our private road. Lovely and hushing. Heavy, steady wet snow coming straight down on a windless day. The world outside almost monochrome. Trees swaying in the wind …

We had an unusually warm winter, so we never actually got snowed in. But we also survived two record cold spells in the new house, which kept us reasonably comfortable even as the thermometer dropped way below freezing.

The availability of a working fireplace helped, at least psychologically. Like most fireplaces, it very efficiently draws in cold air, heats it, and sends it up the chimney, providing little actual warmth. However, the mere visibility of real fire close to hand has a definite effect on the experience of room temperature. We burned wood from downed dead and live trees grown on our own property — an oddly satisfying experience.

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Because I didn’t go out much between Thanksgiving and New Year’s — just to my local hardware store, post office, library, bank, and supermarket — I actually got through the entire holiday season without hearing more than a faint one-time strain of the dreaded Xmas music. A blessing in itself.

For the first time we celebrated all of the holidays — starting with Thanksgiving — here in Stone Ridge, en famille. On Turkey Day we substituted air-fried chicken wings. For my birthday, December 19, Anna baked a lovely sheet-pan chocolate cake with mocha icing and fruit topping that we shared with our neighbors on both sides.

Allan’s birthday cake, December 19, 2023

For our dinner she put together a delicious Mongolian hot pot. We make this using an electric wok instead of the traditional charcoal-burning tabletop pot, but the principle is the same: bring a broth to boiling and then quick-cook your preferred ingredients. We used thin-sliced beef, shrimp, napa cabbage, mushrooms, carrots, onions, sliced radishes and radish greens. Which I washed down with a Guinness. Yum.

Anna’s hot pot for my birthday, December 19, 2022

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I spent that day lazing around the place, periodically playing with the newest member of the household, a then-four-month-old tabby kitten named Alina (Lena for short), rehomed to us by a local nurse whose other older cats rejected her playful advances. She started her life as part of a rescued litter of seven plus mom, so by the time she got to us she’d already lived in three different places with two different configurations of humans and animals. Now she has her permanent home, where she’s learned to relax. No doubt she’ll make periodic appearances in future posts.

Here she is now:

Lena on my rolltop desk, May 2023

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For Chinese New Year’s Eve (January 21) Anna made fresh wontons in soup, a traditional meal. Since neither Anna nor Jacky drink alcohol, we shared a bottle of sparkling cider. On New Year’s Day I made us a brunch of pancakes, bacon, and fried apple slices. We finished off the cider and followed that with coffee.

How Much Wood?

For the first time in over half a century I have (a) my very own resident groundhog but (b) no designated local season prognosticator of the woodchuck persuasion. Hence a dilemma I faced: Who to believe about the advent of spring?

Punxsutawney Phil, the senior marmot weatherbeing in the U.S., predicted six more weeks of winter for early 2023. However, he’s from Philadelphia, considerably south of us now. Staten Island Chuck, our hometown boy (until we moved last June), forecasted an early spring.

Neither Ulster County (where we now reside) nor any city or town therein has an official groundhog, leaving us free to select our own prophet. Last year we rarely sighted our homegrown critter, who we think has his burrow in the woods between our parcel and the neighbor’s just to the north, but this year he’s putting in regular appearances, sometimes in the company of what we assume is his missus.

Stone Ridge Chuck, May 2023

This makes us feel familiar enough to give him a nickname: Stone Ridge Chuck. We’d trust his judgment over any competitor’s, simply on the basis of direct experience of the surroundings and home-field advantage, but it was below freezing here on Groundhog Day, too cold to try to track him down and ask.

So, for old times’ sake, I went with Staten Island Chuck. He’s 70 miles closer to us than Phil, he’s got a solid track record, and we could have used an early spring this year. Lost that bet.

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Then we celebrated Presidents’ Day, with Pres. Joe “Dark Brandon” Biden in Kiev, to show our solidarity with Ukraine in its fight for democracy in Europe.

U.S. Pres. Joe Biden and Ukraine Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Kiev, 2/21/23. Official White House photo.

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Soon thereafter we finally closed on the sale of the Staten Island house — a 9-month process that turned into an ordeal, thanks to Staten Island’s Department of Buildings, apparently a law (and fiefdom) unto itself. When the weather warmed up we bought a car, a 2016 Subaru Outback SUV. Which makes us mobile again.

The Moles of Summer

So 2023 is off and running. Everything we transplanted from our Staten Island house survived its relocation: one of our fig trees, and several cuttings from another; several cuttings from an illegally imported Polish blackcurrant bush (gift from a Stapleton neighbor); mint that Arthur Rothstein gave me from his garden circa 1975; and more. We have successfully rooted cuttings from several local ginkgo trees, both male and female, so in a few years we’ll have out own supply of seeds. Anna has started to plant our veggie garden, which we prepped with mucho mulch last fall. We expect a bigger and more diverse harvest this year. The moles of summer are on spring’s traces. More on that to come.

New Kit in Town

Lena, our newly adopted tabby cat, has adapted well to her new surroundings. Full of kitten energy and boundless curiosity, she races around the main floor — which means she often traverses five rooms, running from one end to the other. Mini, her much older fur sibling, can’t match her for sheer stamina, but they do chase each other around, with occasional swatting and hissing but no yowling or serious fights. They have yet to cuddle, but share our spaces in relatively peaceful coexistence.

Lena in cone, 4-8-23

For several weeks last month we had to dress Lena in a onesie, while she recovered from her neutering. (On the very first night she somehow “disappeared” the standard cone in which the vet sent her home. We still haven’t found it.) The operation itself went well, but her body rejected at least some of the suture material, which normally gets absorbed. The onesie kept her from worrying it while she finished healing. It also made her walk a bit funny, and look ridiculously cute, like a toddler with a cat’s head and limbs (and a tail). I decided not to embarrass her by making and posting any pix of this.

We had to keep her separated from Mini during that period, so they wouldn’t get into any tussles. Now they both have the full run of the place again. Their absolute favorite daytime spot is a cardboard scratching box Anna made for Mini that sits right up against a French door leading to the small deck outside my office, facing south. A daily scoop of mixed seed draws birds, along with a pair of chipmunks and gray and red squirrels, plus the occasional emboldened field mouse. Now and then our local herd of deer pass through, but as there’s nothing here to eat right now they don’t linger as they do in the warmer weather.

Lena (l) and Mini (r) watching twilight catavision, 5-15-23

Regardless of the fauna action or lack of same, both cats happily spend hours there looking out at the world. By contrast, we set up a large-screen TV in the living room at the north end of the house, and after breakfast I sometimes activate a YouTube playlist of wildlife and marine/aquarium videos. Neither cat pays any attention to these. Perhaps they never will.

Which leads me to …

Thoughts on Schrödinger’s Cat

Putting a cat in a box with poison is animal abuse.

Putting a cat in a sealed box without food is animal abuse.

Putting a cat in a sealed box without a litter tray is animal abuse. It also invites trouble; someone will have to clean up the inevitable mess.

Who did this guy Schrödinger expect to feed the cat and clean out its poop? As for that radioactive Rube Goldberg device, Schrödinger damn well better hope the cat is dead, because if it’s alive I guarantee you that as soon as it gets out of that box it’s going to piss on his bed.

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