Updating: A Grab Bag

    I finally came up with an idea for what to do with potato-kale flatbread. What else? Pizza crust! Turned out, if not great, then at least on the good side of interesting. I cooked it as a crust for 20 minutes at 375. Then I put the tomato sauce and toppings on and cooked it for another 20. At the end, I let it cool for five minutes. The result was not very pizza-like; as Paul pointed out, it was somewhat more shepherd's pie-like. So now it's called shepherd's pizza. Or possibly Po-tay-to po-tah-to to-may-to to-mah-to/ Let's call the whole thing off. OK, maybe not.
    Regardless, cooking it without toppings at 400 rather than 375 might help and probably wouldn't hurt. I also greased the pizza pan somewhat half-heartedly with (extra virgin) olive oil, while mixing more (EV) olive oil with the potato, kale, salt and pepper as before. Didn't put it on aluminum foil, nor did  I flip it this time. It didn't stick down at all, though only one of four slices held together like an actual pizza slice. Apart from shepherd's pie, it reminded me of polenta pizza, which is also delightful, but messy.

    My other update isn't really an update; just a certain amount of angst about the fate of the lost dog. I sure hope the guy with the pickup truck was his owner and they found each other without incident. Or his family came back and found him quickly. Or he lived up the road at the nearest neighborhood, or had come with a fisherman to the somewhat nearer boat landing, and knew his way back. I'm more than a little afraid to go back now; though if I find a scareder, hungrier dog, maybe he'll be more amenable to getting in the car with me. I'll probably go today to see. I just hope he's OK.

    My other other update isn't one at all. For those who have tried and failed to leave comments, Blogger Help (not to be confused with the Will Smith vehicle, The Legend of Blogger Help) says that there's an anonymous option, whereby you can leave a comment without having to have a Google account. So maybe try that, and kick off by saying who you are. First name is sufficient if I know you well or mention your DU or Celiac.com handle if you're from one  of those sites. I should try to comment on my own blog just to find out how the system works, but that would just be too twee. I always preferred the Jack Benny approach anyway: Don't applaud; just throw money.

Sonnets from the Zombie Apocalypse

For the record, Godawful Sonnets would be a kickass name for, well, a record.

1
Apocalyptic zombie days have come
The living dead are always hard to beat
Don't hide downstairs 'cause that would just be dumb
They're walking very slowly up your street
The zombies want your brain so come across
You prob'ly never think much anyway
I think they want to use it for lacrosse
Or maybe they'd prefer cerveau flambe
You only have to shoot them in the head
To send the weasels back to sleep in dirt
It makes no sense since they're already dead
But what's the diff'rence? Who's it really hurt?
The zombies make a comeback now and then
And we just have to kick their butts again

2
The living dead are back again to play
"Hey look! There's Dennis Miller!" "He's not dead!"
Whatever could they want? Now who can say?
They sure do seem to want to grab my head.
The only thing they ever say is "Brain!"
Which rules out Dennis Miller, that's for sure
I think this started out with toxic rain
I wonder if we'll ever find a cure
They move so slow and halting, why not run?
The dead should be an easy bunch to race
It ought to be an awful lot of fun
And if you lose, well, how hard's that to face?
My darling, I'm not after your behind
I'm only here so I can EAT YOUR MIND!

3
The zombies bring apocalypse at last
The angel Gabe is readying his tune
If you're not scared you have to be a loon
Get out of town you idiots and fast!
We need to figure how to fight them soon
Before we're done I think things might get rough
The living dead will want to give some guff
Except for Gabriel they're nobody's boon.
Hey wait! These deadly dead guys aren't so tough
They're slow, they're dumb and all they want is "Brain!"
They ought to be as hard to kill as fluff
Put down that trumpet Gabe, don't be insane.
The living dead don't have to mean the end
By night or dawn against them we can fend

Found: Dog

    Yesterday, I went to Congaree Creek Heritage Preserve to find my next blog entry and, perhaps sadly, I did. I had gone as far as I usually go, which is to say as far as the the trail runs along the creek. I turned around and had come a few minutes worth of the way back when I heard the sound of feet behind me, or rather paws. A largish black dog with white patches on the neck was following me. If I turned around, he barked and feinted, but whenever I resumed walking, he resumed following. He had no collar or tags that I could see, though he didn't let me get close enough for a thorough examination.
    He followed me all the way back to the parking lot. Eventually, he quit barking when I turned around to check on him, but he certainly never drew closer. He stuck to the trail, though, even when it made pointless meanderings through flat land and he could have easily took short cuts. As such, he was a better hiker than most people I know.
    As I got closer to the trailhead, he dropped back a long way, and I thought I'd lost him. But he was just being a dog, investigating a smell or something, and caught me up again. At the parking lot, there was a pickup truck with a small empty flatbed trailer large enough to carry a Bushhog. There was no one there and no logo or anything on the pickup. Hopefully, it was a contractor for DNR (that is, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resource) who had brought his dog and knew how to whistle for him when it was time to go home.
    However, having little confidence in this possibility, I tried to lure the dog into my car with the idea of taking him to a no-kill shelter. He was way too wary for this, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view). So I found a coffee cup on the ground, ripped away enough of the styrofoam to make a vessel a muzzle could fit in, and put most of the rest of my water in it. Hopefully he drank from it in preference to the large mud puddle nearby, but he wouldn't go near it while I was there.
    I had forgotten to bring my cell phone. I tried to find one of the no-kill shelters to ask them how to proceed, but either they had moved or were very well-hidden. So I went home and phoned instead. The person answering the phone indicated that they don't make pickups and if anyone (for instance, DNR) did so, they would scan the dog for a chip and would only bring it to the shelter if the chip said it belonged to them. (In other words, that would be a dead dog, but I thought better of saying so.)
    Regardless, I called and left a message with DNR to let them know that there was a stray dog on their property. As it's a (or an) historical preserve rather than primarily a nature preserve, it's possible that they wouldn't be too interested. It's even more probable that they don't have the resources to chase down a stray dog. Anyway, I'm sad to think that they might take him to the county shelter, where he'd be very unlikely to survive. So on the whole, the idea that they might not bother with him strikes me as an optimistic one.
    I also alerted the other no-kill shelter of his existence through a post on their wall at Facebook. Maybe that will prove another possible route to his rescue.
    I wish I could have persuaded him to come with me, but because of the small size of this apartment and the fact that our fence was knocked down by a falling tree, I couldn't keep him here anyway. I'm hoping against hope that his owners come looking soon and find him. He was an awfully nice fellow.

How I became a PUBLISHED derelict

If you don't know the drill, this is another story from my life told in third-person for practice in that exciting and lucrative method of story-telling. A Drama In Real Life if you (and Reader's Digest's lawyers) will allow. This time the names are changed, though to protect the reader rather than the innocent. As my writing partner for that project was also named John, it would just be too confusing (or too last name heavy) to use our real names. So for the purposes of this story, the feckless, younger John (representing me) is Joel, while the substantial, grownup John is Fred. In real life, my co-author is John F. Clark (though the F. does not in fact stand for Fred) and the book is "Hiking South Carolina" from Falcon Press. We sort of got fired off the 2d edition for, uh, not producing one, but I think our names are still on the book. Whether we still get royalties is another question. That is, from the 2d edition. We still get them from the 1st, though I think I'm now better qualified than either Stephen King or Dave Barry to be in the all-author band, The Rock Bottom Remainders. Not that I'm more of an author, but I'm certainly more of a rock-bottom remainder.

    Joel was a free-lance do-gooder. He volunteered at the Center for Environmental Policy at the sporadically prestigious University of South Carolina in Columbia. Joel specialized in writing articles read by few and spinning off brilliant ideas for saving the world, or at least the Western hemisphere, listened to by even fewer. One of these ideas was to create a new energy conservation plan for South Carolina and this brought him to the attention of Fred.
    Fred could be called a long-time inside agitator for energy and environmental issues within S.C. state government. The particular brilliant idea Joel and Fred worked on met the same fate as most of the others, which was that it couldn't penetrate the University's administration, let alone get a chance to be judged by the foundation at which it was aimed. Too bad so sad, as we said back in the '90s, but Fred had another idea.
    Fred was also a long-time Sierra Club member. As such, he had seen a nature guide to South Georgia (the region of the American state, not the South Atlantic island) produced by the local chapter of a major environmental group, the Nature Conservancy probably. He felt that it would be fun, useful and profitable to do something similar for South Carolina, and Joel agreed.
    They had gotten as far in their How To Be A Writer handbooks to know that that they needed a book proposal, comprised mostly of three sample chapters. They chose three small (i.e., two or three counties each) areas of the state and set to work. They had a hell of a lot of fun. As they had no particular publisher in mind, they had no publisher's guidelines they had to follow, so they put in whatever occurred to them, including favorite restaurants, local history, local color, and directions to Grandma's house. (OK, they didn't really include the latter, but then neither had a living grandma at that point.)
    Eventually (about sixteen years later, I think) they had their package assembled, and sent it out to several regional publishers who seemed like good prospects. The rejection letters came considerably more quickly, and Fred and Joel struck further afield. Eventually, they got down the list to Falcon Press, then of Helena, Montana. Falcon sent an unusually enthusiastic rejection letter. They explained that they couldn't in fact use a nature guide to South Carolina, but what they would really like would be a hiking guide to South Carolina.
    Now Fred and Joel had been outdoors before now and then, and even went hiking from time to time assuming the trail had been cleared of large snakes, small snakes, spiders, alligators and any other wildlife of the biting, itching, man-eating and non-cute classes. But what the hell, they thought, how hard can it be?
    Another sixteen years later, they had a proposal for a hiking book and sent it off to Montana. And waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, as luck would have it, Fred met a Falcon author (an author for Falcon Press, not an avian one) and asked her if she would mind checking on our manuscript. As even better luck would have it, she actually did. It turned out that the editor for the hiking book series had had a rock-climbing accident and fallen on his head and had been laid up for some time. However, he was all better now. Shortly thereafter a contract arrived in the mail and, except for the whole writing-the-book part, Fred and Joel were published authors.
    Thus, Joel and Fred can offer succinct advice to the aspiring young writer: always make sure to submit your manuscript to an editor who falls on his head. Hey, it worked for them.
    The tale of the writing of the book is probably for another day. How St. Fred scared the snakes from South Carolina's trails, mainly by almost stepping on them, was certainly a highlight. How Joel skived his way out of doing any actual writing by claiming terminal writer's block and just drew maps instead is amazing as well. However , after only another eighteen years (they wanted the total to be an even 50), Fred and Joel were able to reap the rewards of being published authors. Whatever those might turn out to be.

Forsaking all others

(Not about what you'd probably think. But I didn't exactly set a difficult puzzle.)
Nothing but socks
in my sock drawer
Nothing under the bed
but a cat
Now that I'm no longer
part of the problem
am I part of the solution?
Or anyway at last
a grownup
decades late?
Can I grow enough
to encompass love?
Well we'll see.

Might as well jump

    Long, long ago, Robert, Mary and I jumped out of an airplane. As we didn't feel like undergoing extensive training, we did tandem jumps. The following is another writing exercise exploring third person narration, so the John in the story is me. As I'm not planning to publish this beyond bloggery, there wasn't any point in changing the names.

    Robert, Mary and John wanted an adventure, but couldn't afford a cruise to the South Seas. In Philadelphia in the late '80s, Alpine mountaineering and deep-sea diving opportunities were limited so they decided to try tandem jump skydiving. It being a time before the Internet, they probably learned about Skydiving Chambersburg through the Yellow Pages, but hell, it was a long time ago. Maybe it was a word of mouth thing.
    Chambersburg, though in Pennsylvania, is really more convenient to Baltimore or DC than to Philly, but it wasn't too long a drive. They enjoyed seeing the Susquehanna and it was a pleasant drive otherwise except that John, who had done a junior year abroad in Canterbury, insisted on pronouncing Carlisle with the emphasis on the second syllable, which Mary could have easily lived without. (But what was she going to say? "Go jump out of a plane"?)
    By the time they arrived at the airport, it had become quite overcast. The staff at Skydiving Chambersburg were not discouraging exactly, but definitely indicated that there would be a wait. The weather forecast, they told the prospective jumpers, said that skies would be clearing within an hour or so. Within that hour or so, the sky had not cleared, but cloud cover had risen to the point that a jump could be done from 10,000 feet, rather than the advertised 13,000. John decided to give it a try.
    John was in a contact-lens-wearing phase at the time, and wasn't sure which would be better: to stick with the contacts and hope that the goggles fit tightly enough to keep out dust, wind and flotsam; or to go with glasses and hope the damned goggles fit over them. He did the former and couldn't see a thing all the way down. But then, when one is approaching the ground at break every bone in your body speed, not seeing well might be a blessing.
    On the slow circling ascent to the jump point, the butterflies in John's stomach were doing rhythmic gymnastics. He was sure he was going to back out; he knew that he could do so up until the last moment with a loss of money but not noticeably of face. To his own surprise, he didn't. John was hooked to the instructor, who climbed out to hang from the wing, and John hung from the instructor. For what seemed like a year but what was actually at most a minute, this was the most alarming moment in John's life. Then the instructor let go.
    This whole skydiving lark, at least for John, sprang from a reverie he had once while trying to fall asleep wherein he was falling gently through clouds towards the Earth. It was lovely; it was peaceful. Skydiving isn't like that. Even without being able to see well, or possibly because of it, John was as adrenalized as it is possible to be. Never having actually grabbed a live wire, he couldn't confidently say that that was what it was like, but it was how he imagined grabbing a live wire would be, only not painful. You probably think you know what the word "hurtling" means; until you've jumped out of a plane, you don't.
    After these seconds of eternity, probably a minute at least, the instructor pulled the release. John had been warned of the jerk that happened at this point, but it wasn't anything he couldn't handle. The ride down under the canopy was comparatively restful, much more like the reverie that had gotten John into this in the first place. The hills of south-central Pennsylvania are lovely in the spring and nice to see from above. If the scenery was flavored with a massive sense of relief, well, that probably helped, too.
    Being an obedient sort of cuss, John balled himself up for the landing like he'd been told to do and let the instructor take the impact. Mary and Robert would go up on a later plane, and get to freefall all the way from 13,000 feet. And maybe that's why their landings were rougher, or looked it. Neither Rob nor Mary were injured, but Mary's landing particularly looked scary. But they agreed that the experience was worth the alarm. It wasn't even as long as six months before Robert's, Mary's and John's eyes quit bugging out and their hair stopped standing on end. But they had learned what "hurtling" means.

    Robert and Mary corrected my memories; I thought they had jumped from 10,000 rather than 13,000 feet. Maybe I was thinking of the length of the freefall. Also I thought they both sustained minor injuries upon landing, but apparently not. Oh, and I guess we didn't really do loop-di-loops all the way down. But it's a good story.

About the cat

    Five years ago about this time of year, then-girlfriend Alice brought home a second cat. I was not overly thrilled about this, as I was already allergic to the first cat. I hid in my room for a week or so in hopes that my eyes would one day stop streaming. Then, not being a complete idiot, I changed the HVAC filter and things gradually got better.
    One week, Alice went out of town, so I was left to be the sole catkeeper. Along with feeding them and seeing to litter boxes, I came out once per evening to give out scritches. And the new cat, Amelia, decided that I was Jesus McAllah O'Buddha. Nothing that has happened since has swayed her from this opinion, for reasons that are completely beyond me.
    Shortly thereafter, I threw open my door and she glommed onto me like a barnacle. I was sleeping on a sofa. (Not that it was all that cold a relationship; it was just that Alice and I both snored.) Whenever I rolled over, Amelia climbed to the new highest point. This went on for months, before she finally became comfortable enough to sleep somewhere not on my actual person. It was extremely endearing.
    Over the years, Amelia has had many names. At Project Pet, she was called Zola. Alice named her Amelia, but I almost immediately tagged her as The Monkey. Since then I've called her Zippy McFlibbet (the morning one), Extreme Closeup the Cat, Sweetie Sweetie Sweet Sweet, Sillyhead, Headbutt, Little Kitty Foo Foo (because once she bopped the older cat on the head) and a few dozen other names.
    Alice was a good sport to let me in her life for seven years and in her house for three but when she got fed up and asked me to leave, she couldn't break up the team, so Amelia came with me. In the two-odd years since, with no need to impress anyone with my creativity, I mainly call her Pooh or Boo, though she'll still come if I look away from her and say, "WHERE'S my monkey?!" I always say that she has more names than God, but is less mysterious.
    She is about seven years old now, which means she should have at least another ten years to run. I am so looking forward to it.