Winter bites leaving its prickly white teeth everywhere. Step outdoors on a frosty morning, and winter bites your cheeks and nips at your nose. You know you’re alive on a morning so cold.
Category: Happiness
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Winter Bites
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Way Off Topic – a Long Way from Here
Having grown up in Japan and having hitchhiked, biked, and ridden trains all over the country as a boy, literally, at eleven years old I took to the roads hitchhiking for days at a time, traveling over a thousand miles, giving my parents much to worry about, I’ve always had an interest in the trains and roads of Japan. At fourteen I went on an expedition from the far south where we lived to the northern tip of Japan, traveling alone for three weeks, incommunicado, riding trains, hitchhiking, sleeping in telephone booths, having the time of my life. I think fourteen year old boys need to do that. Explore the world on their own. My parents had no idea where I was. This was in the day before mobile phones and even long distance telephoning wasn’t easy. And when you are having fun, what fourteen year old boy is going to call home?
Deciding what trains and roads to try out on future trips is easier now. Train buffs and highway aficionados film their journeys and post them on YouTube. You can search any train line or highway and find videos of them to help decide which new route to take. Which led me to discovering some eye-opening facts about the Tokai-Hokuriki Motorway 東海北陸自動車道. It runs south to north from the Pacific side of Japan to the Sea of Japan side, connecting Nagoya and Toyama. It is 115 miles (185 kilometers) long and has 55 tunnels. 44 miles (70 kilometers) of the highway are tunnels, with the longest one 6.6 miles long. Eleven of the tunnels are more than a mile long.
I patched together a map of the highway. It is the purple line going from the top to the bottom of the image below. Where the purple highway is white indicates a tunnel. There are long stretches where the highway pops out of a tunnel only to pop into one a short time later.
I don’t think a road like this would ever be built in the US. The toll to drive the distance of this highway is a little over $40. If you plan on driving in Japan, take into mind that the average toll on motorways is about 25¢ per mile, which comes to $25 for every hundred miles.
Below is a recent two hour video posted on YouTube which starts at the northern end of the highway and goes all the way to the southern end.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SeI2oYsOGU&w=560&h=315] -
Fall is for Pastels, Spicy Greens, and Pie
Leaves aren’t the only things that change color in the fall. Flowers, like hydrangeas, change too. Their vibrant blues age into subdued, leathery hues.
Maples are past their peak, but they are still beautiful, and in a way even more so.
It’s the season of spicy greens. Arugula and ruby streaks have a bite. When you sink your teeth into them, you know you’re still alive.
Fall is made for making pies. This is homegrown pumpkin and squash pie, made with cream and tofu. Puree roasted pumpkin and squash with tofu, milk, and cream, and you get a satiny filling. The good thing about making your own pie is that you get to decide everything that goes into it.
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Skagit’s Freshest Tofu
It’s official. You can get Skagit county’s freshest tofu at Belfast Feed Store. Starting today, I’m delivering fresh tofu to them on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which means the tofu you buy there will never be more than three days old. If in doubt, look at the label. The date I make the tofu will be on it.
Belfast Feed store is at 6200 North Green Road, Burlington, Washington. They are just off of Old Highway 99, south of the Bow Hill and Prairie Road intersection. We’re giving this a test run through November.
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Planting Time Again
To be honest, there is rarely a time when planting ceases. There are just heavy planting times and light planting times. Upcoming October and November are heavy planting times so I might as well get a start on it. Which is why having blossoms in the garden is indispensable. If I’m on my knees planting, I want to be able to look up and see something beautiful, like these lovely artichoke blossoms.
Today, it’s a basket of elephant garlic that is going into the ground. This spring I saved plenty of elephant garlic so that I wouldn’t need to buy any to plant this fall. Self-replication is a feat of nature that is woefully under appreciated. What if you could buy shoes that were self-replicating? You’d only have to buy one or two pair, ever. When one got old, you’d set it aside and wait for it to grow two or three new pairs of shoes. Such shoes would be called magical. Why don’t we call our crops magical? They self-replicate year after year after year.
Deep in the garden, a Costata romanesco zucchini has grown to the size of a beached whale. Come next spring, the seeds of this fruit will self-replicate and take over the world if I let it. The gigantic leaves of the zucchini are on their way to becoming soil. Tired from soaking in sunlight all summer long, they are turning white with powdery mildew. Milk is effective at treating powdery mildew. Diluted ten to one with water, milk is as good as conventional fungicides and better than benomyl and fenarimol at treating powdery mildew. But, as it is time for these leaves to return to the earth, there is no point in prolonging their lifespan.
The rewards of planting are finding things to eat. Today there is corn, shoots of napa cabbage, tomato and basil to take into the kitchen for an early autumn feast. I’m sitting in the garden, soaking in the autumn sun, and listening to the buzzing of bees as I write. The tragedy of industrial food is how it has divorced us from nature. When you wander the vast aisles in the box stores picking out your food products, you hear no buzzing of bees, the whisper of the wind in the trees doesn’t tickle your years, the autumn sun doesn’t warm your cheeks, nor can you feel the verdant earth between your toes.