Fall Chores Begin - 2019 Edition

All growing season, as far back as Spring, the dreaded time has been looming...

How to deal with all the shiso?  There was just too much to eat through Spring and Summer.  Now, the Fall dilemma: Seek and destroy in advance next year's weedy overabundance, or leave the seed heads to feed the birds?  As soon as the flowers began to appear, my goal had been to go in with scissors and snip the buds before they went to seed.  But between vacation, then getting ready for leave, then recuperation, it got to be too late.  Now there are seeds.

And the seeds brought birdie visitors to stop in and dine - a male house finch, according to Google photos and various sites.

The naturalists say to leave the seed heads.  Sissy agrees; she says this is supposed to be a very harsh Winter, and the birdies will need all the sustenance they can get.  Don't relish the thought of starving birdies.  So, next Spring's weeding and shiso culling and consumption will just have to be particularly aggressive.  Oh well.

Then there was the windblown mess from the recent rainy nor'easter.  One of the gutter planters that had been unused all season came toppling down.  It will stay on the ground until Spring.  Then, hopefully, portulaca or poppies.... to be determined.

"Holiday" Hepburn/Grant Style

Holidays - in classic films, in real life.

Serendipitous Saturday night introductions to classic films like "Holiday," starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, courtesy of PBS, totally count as happening when you're an introvert in mid-life and on mandated medical leave, taking it slow and not going out much.  So, I had an absolutely rockin' Saturday evening!

Apropos of nothing, so did NBC's Harry Smith, although it sounded like he spent Saturday viewing that same broadcast of "Holiday" just a smidge differently - relishing in his alone time to throw open the windows and smoke cigars while viewing....

It was a gem of a film, really resonated.  I recognized both Linda/John and Julia, all duking it out inside my one brain.  One of those films that makes me reconsider my life choices.  And without the distraction of work, there's time, too much time, to ponder and noodle.  BigLaw was always the expected, well-worn path.  And so, to counter that, there is a tremendous magnetism about those who chose differently - the NF's of the world (attended the premier schools, but then chose adventure in the military, that led to life overseas, to NGOs, to work in conflict zones that allows for travel holidays every six weeks - NOT a life compatible with my current stable one)... I want to think I have Linda in me, but fear I am too much Julia.

All this time during my medical "holiday," when not noodling, has afforded space to practice getting back to the routine - i.e., outside and moving - too.  So, step by step, on to adventures farther afield ...

Autumn foliage in Poughkeepsie. 

...but for the first practice run, it was a lunch outing with a law schoolmate, former colleague, friend at BigLaw Firm#2.  Took me back to old stomping grounds, viewed with fresh eyes, revealing new details.

And in the meanwhile, on the home front, there were more well wishes, from a dear longtime high school friend.  Such a great fortune to have longstanding, caring friends.

And also to have family, game for indulging my whims to explore uncharted territory and make the most of this mandatory "holiday" ...

Spirit Store

If consumption is a necessary aspect of modern life, which, of course, it is, then Precycle is where all of my grocery spending dollars would be left, if it were practical and feasible.  A supermarket that eliminates all packaging?  Yes, please!  Totally in line with my philosophy and the direction in which I've been trying to move for two decades.  Now, if only they'd open an outpost on the Upper East Side.

(As an aside, Brooklyn, yet again, seems to be my spirit borough - it being the locale of Precycle.  Sigh.  Still fighting that one.)

In that vein, on the plant front, seeds without packaging ... straight from the source in Carl Schurz Park.  Decided to take a stroll out to forage for some seeds from some of the specimens I've been eyeing.  Double-petaled hibiscus was a successful target.

Double-petaled hibiscus specimen in Carl Schurz Park, against tonight's pretty pink and purple evening sky.

Those seeds will go into the planter that just received the little baby hibiscus plants that sprang from the hedge at the Mother Garden (the best source of no-packaging plantlings if there ever was one).  If they all take and survive the winter, well, we'll deal with culling decisions if they need to be made when that bridge looms - happily too far off at the moment.

Hibiscus seedlings, from the hedge at the Mother Garden, originally from Neighbor Lady's since culled hibiscus.

Seeds from the green shiso formerly in the planter now housing the hibiscus seedlings.  That shiso was the last survivor, all the leaves having been eaten and all its neighbors gone into my belly.  Now, question is whether the shiso seeds can be consumed, whether their omega-3 potential can be tapped.

Also in the Jardin today, dianthus seeds were gathered and cast.  To a more prolific year for the dianthus in 2020!  Tomorrow some will be gathered and kept inside as a hedge.

Dianthus seeds - from an especially productive pod.  The moss cover was pulled back and the seeds scattered beneath onto the soil.  Little plants from seeds planted earlier in the year seem to have taken, and little baby dianthus plants have emerged through the moss; they won't survive the winter, but nice to know the seeds are good and the technique the correct one.

October Restoratives - Anomaly Edition

Sometimes it takes a long while to get spurred into action and make hard life choices.  Some of us contemplate a whole lot more than the average Joes and Janes - more meticulous?  Maybe.  Or maybe just plain scared sh*tless to step off the beaten path.  And then we decide, but the heavens decide a monkey wrench is in order instead.  Nothing like a health curve ball to keep things interesting....

And health is perpetually the squeakiest wheel.  It has to be; everything else is meaningless without life.  And even then, when it came time to scheduling procedures, instinctively my immediate reaction was to see whether everything could fit in around Tax Day client demands - life coach friends would say capitalism and the patriarchy got their claws in and don't let go easily.  And it's true; the nagging guilt only let go when I pried them off.  But waiting till year end wasn't a good alternative.  So the schedule was set on MY timeline for a change.  Once in a while, personal priorities get oiled first.

Yes, this is all very cryptic.  The lawyer in me is skeptical about disclosing personal information on a public blog, even while the whole point of the blog is to be public.  Ah well ... feeling my way through THAT balance.  Suffice it to say a medical issue needed tending, and now disability benefits have kicked in.  A blessing in disguise.  The only other time I have been away from work this long was the last procedure.  An anomaly.

Very kindly, floral well wishes arrived from the Orifice to the Mother Ship, where the post-hospitalization recuperation began...

... all the better to access Mommy comfort food, a necessity for re-establishing the gut microbiome that got decimated by the post-surgical fasting and clear diet...

Brown rice fish congee, and invocation of the social exceptions clause to the vegetarian policy.  There should be a health exception too, so the social exceptions clause needn't be stretched so thin.

... and the boardwalk out at Jones Beach for slow practice walks on unusual 90 degree days in October.  It was a most lovely way to ramp back up gradually to full mobility and get the digestive tract back on track.

Beach goldenrod.

Whale sculpture - a relatively recent addition.

The full picture - hollow inside, save for plastic bottles and debris, to draw attention to the impact of our plastic consumption habit on our wild marine friends.

Blessings disguised around illness and mandated recuperation and disability leave.  Fingers crossed that these disguised blessings pave the way for greater blessings. 

Canary in the Coal Mine

For at least a week, the jardin was left to fend for itself.  And from the looks of it, there was precious little rain in New York City during that time.

The first of the plants to show signs of stress this year has been the Vietnamese balm (kinh gioi), which is a shame, since it adds such a lovely lemony touch to dishes - though it's seen little play time this year with all the shiso (tia to).  But looking past it, the hydrangea was wilty, the Sunpatiens not so sunny, the blackberry was droopy, and the morning glory quite other than glorious... the proverbial canaries

(As contrasted to the literal avian variety. Photo from the New York Times; article link below.)

in the jardin, warning of lack of water, and possible impending doom....

Unlike the Vietnamese balm above that bounced back with a bit of water, the hydrangea, today, still hasn't found its pep.  Hopeful the stress wasn't too much.  It's a survivor, I think.  Meanwhile, the cuttings from the farmer's market rescue hydrangea stems seem to have established; the leaves are growing - unevenly, but growing, so maybe there will be viable backups.

The Sunpatiens (above) also took a deep drink.  But unfair to compare to the blackberry that barely got any water yesterday. 

Less than glorious morning glory.  Also barely got watered - it is a weed, after all - but was shown more mercy today.

... Like the millions of young people who joined Greta Thunberg in her global climate strike yesterday, reminding us that we need to pull our imperiled planet back from the brink.  Also warning us adults (how did that happen so quickly, the forced adulting thing? - the event came up in my feed, so up my alley, but, well, work, recent return from vacation, upcoming extended absence, responsibility) that they will oust us all and perhaps enact dramatic change if our halting and faltering gradual steps don't accelerate soon....

... Like the billions of lost birds - the literal canaries - warning us that we have let it go too far already, and mass mammalian extinction is not impossible.

Grim.  So those canaries, we need to heed and protect those little canaries.

Trying Not to Forget

Not that anyone who lived through that horrible day with any consciousness could forget - no one with any ties to New York City, anyway.

18 years.  The babies who weren't yet born and never got to meet their parents who died that day are about to become legal adults.

View of the Tribute in Light, for the first time from Hudson Yards.

It was soon after that day that BigLaw as a long-term journey for me was scheduled to, and did, begin - in October 2001, the first start date after September 11th.  That had the benefit of offering perspective early on about what is truly important and precious in life.  But also exerted a pressure that for years has kept everything just a little out of whack.

The rubber soled loafers that have been at the office, under the desk, from the beginning, just in case there was a need to run or go down many flights of stairs.  The loafers came in handy during the big 2003 blackout.

A month or so after starting, an essay appeared, probably in the New York Times, on keeping sight of the people and priorities that were true, not succumbing to workaholism, on making time for those precious individuals and activities.  That essay was clipped and went up on the office bulletin board as a reminder. 

By then, after only a month, it was already too late.  That first associate year workdays usually began at 9:30 and wrapped almost every day at 2:30 in the morning.  Diligence and competence paid off in more work; the prize in a pie eating contest is usually more pie.  And with the economy tanking and BigLaw laying off first years for the first time in memory (general wisdom was BigLaw just didn't do that - after all, what skills do first years have to make their way in the world?), it seemed like gratitude and hard work were the right response and approach for all that work.  And then there was a hiring freeze, so for years I was the low associate on the totem pole.  Ever more work, accompanied by fear of losing the job, and not being able to repay student loans, meant gritting teeth, bending my head, and continuing head down on into the storm.

The essay on priorities and balance stayed on the bulletin board.  It just became part of the background.

BigLaw has a way of becoming the biggest tree in the Urban Jungle - casting the biggest, darkest shadow.  But also providing sustenance, even abundance.  Double-edged sword, the cliche golden handcuffs.  And everyone knew this.  The people I loved waited in cars for accumulated hours over the years waiting for me to come down after just one more email or call or document before we could start our family vacations.  Scheduling had to avoid tax filing deadlines.  Birthday and special dinners started later, happened near the office....

Fending off burnout can only continue but for so long.  Through the revolving door of maternity leaves (in an overwhelmingly female practice group) and attrition, coping took the form of joining firm committees and groups - sanctioned work activities.  And that has continued to the present.  Well, there are the principled purposes of these firm groups, but, yes, also a coping strategy.

The terrarium made during a summer event sponsored by the women's affinity group, the setting for the pride flag distributed this past June by the affinity group for LGBTQ attorneys.

Office plant babies.  The jade was inherited twice over from colleagues who went on to greener pastures.  The little cacti in the red bowl were a holiday gift from an assistant.  It's nice to nurture living things in the office.

But at the end of it all, that's just all in-office time.  To balance it all out, there just needs to be time away from the office - to recharge and reconnect.  I KNOW that.  It's still hard to do, still hard to put oneself first, still hard to accept that peak efficiency is not possible every single minute of every single day.  Hard to see that 11 hours in the office somehow doesn't translate into 11 billable hours.

So, back to that essay.  What happens in the office doesn't count.  It's what happens outside of the office that counts.  That was the takeaway from 18 years ago, the guiding principle to keep in focus.  That's what to try not to forget.

Please, Sir, Can I Have Some More?

Tiny Tim may have needed more, nutritionally; the rest of us, probably not so much.  The statistics on societal food waste are pretty astounding, and shameful.  Achieving that delicate balance of just enough, physiologically, nutritionally, and convincing the mind that there is, in fact, abundance, a supply of more, can be tricky.  On the macro level, in developed countries, we've veered too far the other way - creating a classic First World problem in search of a solution - leave it to the more enlightened parts of Europe to start figuring it out.  Although, not to give all credit to the Europeans, there's also Cake Scraps in a Sad Box - the Canadians repping the North American enlightened (wry smile).  Kudos to S-market, Too Good to Go, Loop, and Milk & Cookies Bakeshop for coming up with some solutions!  And in the nonprofit sector, City Harvest, Food Forward, Garden to Table, Fruit for All, among others.

But the relationship with food is complicated.  My experience, growing up poor, is to clean my plate - even to the point of oversatiation.  In middle age, seems it is catching up to me, and now requires some action to bring it all back to balance.

But the flip side is food waste is a no-no in the UTJ household.  Food gets eaten, even if on the cusp.  Cuspy milk has turned into flatbread for pizza.  Mold has gotten scraped off for application of the sniff test to determine meal viability.  Meat in the freezer from pre-vegetarian days has gotten consumed.  At work, there is a drawer of snacks from Firm events.  I am trying to move away from beginning tendencies toward food hoarding.

But in the jardin, gosh darn it, if the herbs can be eaten, they will get eaten - we want them to attain their highest and best purpose to nourish the body if they are going to die anyway.

All season long, it's been all about the shiso.  This past weekend yielded a tasty new salad combo using quick-pickled shiso - a good way to consume a decent quantity.

Raw beets, celery, baby favas beans, and soy sauce, mustard pickle juice, agave, and smoked paprika quick-pickled green shiso, all dressed in a combination of the shiso pickling liquid and tahini.  The subtle sweetness of the raw beets paired well with the salty shiso, and the tahini dressing was overall savory.  The crunch of the beets and celery contrasted nicely with the softer marinated shiso; the baby favas beans rounded out everything and were al dente, filling and fibrous.  Successful vegetarian salad recipe!

Saturday's first salad trial was paired with leftover torta and charred leeks from Friday's dinner with a friend at the restaurant at Little Spain.

Potato torta and charred leeks from Little Spain.

And the tasty shiso-using salad combo came at just the right time, because ... [dum dum dum - cliche suspense/dread musical notes] ... the shiso plants are flowering, so the seeds are not far behind.  Ack!  Help!!!

Shiso in bloom.