Summer

OK. I'm 6 months late on this one. But better late than never right?

So here goes.

After my conference in Chicago I headed down to visit my Mom for a week or so. At least that is what I thought I was going to do when I climbed on the bus and headed south.

The reality was different.

I wound up spending the next three months hanging out with my Mom. But it wasn't all fun and games: I put her to work. Or she put me to work. I'm not sure which. We sorted through the entire house! Pulling things out of closets and drawers and boxes that hadn't been opened for Years(!) and dumping them into the middle of the room and looking at them and then either pitching them or putting them away again. We found several family treasures in with the trash and future re-sale items -- like the record book of how much it cost to build the house in the mid 1960s, and Grandpa's old work records, and a couple of beautiful glass pitchers (made from old soda bottles) that Mom had seen being blown 40 years ago in Japan. But my favorite was the two rolls of slide film, in their original packaging, un-opened(!) that had printed on them "best if developed before October 12, 1964."

We also, I'm afraid, contributed a bit to Global Dimming (a very frightening phenomenon where particulate pollutants create a haze around the planet, counteracting global warming, but causing equally horrible changes in climate) by burning a bunch of old papers!

Another of the projects I took on was helping my Mom with her genealogy research. Not doing the actual research, but doing the (to my mind) fun and fluffy stuff -- "added value" they called it at the consulting firm where I worked. We have a bunch of old photos floating around, as do many of my relatives. Slowly bleaching out; fading away to sepia colored pieces of paper. So it was only logical that we start digitizing them, label them while there is still a chance that someone knows who they are, and (best of all) connect the electronic photo with the records Mom's compiled. My contribution to the family genealogy project involved scanning the photos and then "photoshoping" the images so that they looked crisp and new. Sort of. Some of the image "tweaking" went really well and a bright, clear face appeared out of the dim old photos. (which inspires an Amazingly triumphant feeling!) But some of the faces are nearly lost to time. And no matter how much I manipulated the image, any suggestion of a face was mostly imaginary. (By the way, no one seems to know who these people are. So this is not one that I tweaked at all, even though I love the photo (especially the tall, dark man -- I can't figure out why he is so dark and everyone else has faded away -- and the girl looking up at him. He looks so confident and she looks a bit uncertain about him, like she can't quite believe that he is there).)

While I was down in Tennessee, I was also semi-adopted by my "cousins." I say cousins in quotes because I think they are actually my second cousins, once removed and third cousins. (I looked up the definition on Wickapedia or Encyclopedia Britannica or some such on-line "source of all knowledge" and "cousins" used to refer to all kin-folk, and even good friends, so I'm sticking with "cousins" to describe them).

One of the highlights of being semi-adopted by them was being taken under their wing and taught the old, traditional skills. Farming skills. As much as they could teach a "city girl" like me anyway. We canned soup (this is a very useful skill and one I plan to use, even in the big city) and I sewed (I made my first pair of pants and they looked great!). We went on a tour of some neighbors' farms so I could see the cows getting milked (Holsteins are SLOBBERY! worse than the worst dog you could imagine) and have my finger sucked on by a calf (they have a powerful suck!). We even visited an auction (which brought back memories of college when I worked as a proxy-bidder for the local auction house -- great fun!). The best of the best, though, were a visit to the junk yard (actually a salvage yard) and making sausage.

I have always loved junk yards. There are always all kinds of cool things lying around. When I was a kid my grandfather would take us to the dump. Near the entrance was all the stuff that people didn't want, but somebody else might. While the adults did what ever they did (I honestly have no idea), I got to prowl around and scavenge for stuff. I got some of the best toys there -- a big plastic dump truck we played with for years, a yarn doll that started a trend that lasted for years (I think I even still have the doll somewhere). Even my first bicycle came from the trash (though that was from an alley, not the dump).

My cousin Bryan works for a metal salvage yard. And, knowing my interest in stuff like that, we got to take a tour. We showed up on a very hot day in August -- not as hot as Thailand, but close. We spent about an hour wandering around, looking at old stuff -- I can't remember it all, and even if I could, there were things there I couldn't even begin to describe. Like the junk yards of my childhood there is an area full of stuff that people might want (office furniture, drinking fountains, nuts and bolts, etc). And then there is the area where all the metal parts, that aren't much good for anything but scrap, are gathered before being sold or shipped off to be recycled somewhere else. Being a salvage yard, one of the biggest sources of metal are used cars. Some of them still work, but most are just scrap. But cars can't be shipped "as is" to a recycling plant. They take up too much space. So the cars destined for the melting pot are taken apart -- by which I mean the gas tank taken off, and some of the other more valuable parts removed. Then the cars are lined up, and taken, one by one, to the car crusher. The crusher is Very Cool! I mean who doesn't like heavy machinery -- especially one that can take a car or mini-van or truck and squish it down so its two feet tall! Bryan let me ride with him as he picked up a car with a fork-lift (skewering it if he couldn't get it from underneath) and loaded it into the crusher! Squished it (by remote control, no less!), and then repeating the process again and again, until there were 8 (count them eight!) cars in a pile like a stack of pancakes! Awesome!

After we'd squished the cars he took me over to the crane -- the one with the four claws and the electromagnet, and the cab that was a good 20 feet up in the air!

"Do you want to drive?" he asked. Did I! To tell the truth, it was a bit intimidating to be sitting way up in the sky pushing the levers forward or backward or sideways a fraction of an inch and having this huge, jerky thing respond to my every whim! But once I got the hang of it, it was great! It was just like riding the toy cranes they had in the playgrounds when I was a kid, only a hundred times better! One hand moves the claws and two joints of the crane's arm. The other moves the other joints, the cab and turns the magnet on and off. And there I was, up in the air, moving claws full of scrap from one pile to another! Until Bryan decided to have a little fun and sent us spinning around, at top speed, in a circle with the arm of the crane swinging along behind! Everyone down on the ground -- Mom, Dale and Betty, the guys who's job it was to cut up the scrap (blow torches going full blast) -- ducked. Bryan says they could (and have?) picked up a car and flung it across the yard (80 to 100 feet!). WOW! Can you imagine?!

Makes me want to go "Grrrah!" in a very tough, macho way.

On a completely different note, the other adventure was making sausage. I feel the need to issue a "spoiler" warning for those of you who are veggie, or have sensitive stomachs. Don't look at the following photos if you can't handle dead meat (as opposed to "live meat?").

My cousins are farmers. Part time now, though when I was a kid they had cows and pigs and chickens and horses, etc. I remember the stuffy feeling of the chicken coop, and the very strange taste of warm, unpasteurized milk fresh from the cow. Most of the animals are gone now, except for the pigs. And the pigs get eaten. My mom has helped them make sausage (and other cuts of meat) for a couple of years now. And so, to take advantage of my presence, and to teach me about farm life, they killed a pig so I could help, too.

My feelings about eating meat are these -- if I am going to eat meat, I think it is appropriate that I also know where the meat comes from. And most of us who get our meat from the grocery store, or in a restaurant, don't know where if comes from. Or don't think about it. I haven't quite been able to bring my self to killing my meat (though working in a lab I have killed other animals), but I have, now, participated in butchering it.

I'm not sure quite what to say about it, really. It was a long and tiring process. The pig it self was quite large (at least as far as I can tell) and produced over 300 lbs of meat. We turned 140 lbs of that into sausage! The sausage making was a two day process. Day one was entirely spent cutting up the meat into roughly one-inch chunks. Day two we added the spices and ground up all the chunks to make the sausage and put it into 1-lb and 5-lb bags! I can see why it isn't done all that often. It is exhausting and somewhat disgusting work. But I'll end by saying, fresh meat, un-preserved, is so much better tasting than anything you can buy in the store!

And that is what I did on my summer vacation.