Category: Making

Infrastructure

It begins with the best of intentions. You see something – say, a hand-turned wooden bowl, and think how amazing it would be to be able to do that. Or maybe you want to make a coffee table for your living room, a toy truck for your kid, or a ukulele.

Anytime you start a new endeavor, there is a period when you are acquiring the tools – the saws, the chisels, the workbench. This can be a rabbit hole.

As an aside, it’s best to just buy the tools you need for the specific project you want to make, and then buy the tools you don’t have for the next project, and so on. Partly because good tools are expensive, but also because when you just start, you don’t know what you don’t know.

It’s been almost 20 years and I still haven’t used that 3/8-inch mortise chisel.

But the other rabbit hole is infrastructure. The almost irresistible urge to work on projects to make your shop better, rather than to work on the projects you wanted to build in the first place.

You want to make bowls from firewood, so you need a lathe and turning tools and, depending on your skill, a faceplate or a chuck. But then you will be tempted to build a stand for the lathe, and a place to hang your face shield, and a spotlight mount so you can see better, and then a rack to hold the firewood as it dries, and a case for your turning tools, and before you know it you have a year’s worth of projects behind you, but you still haven’t turned a single bowl yet.

This is not just a thing that happens in the workshop. It happens with my writing, too. I want to write, which means I need a computer and a word processor. But then I can tinker with my routine, and of course, I need a good chair to sit in, and a quiet place, so I need an office. In the office, I need to hang up the right art to inspire me, and find a good playlist, and then do I have good enough speakers to make the music sound right?

It’s often hard to know where the balance is, especially for people with brains like mine. I want to do a good job, and I only have so much time, and oh yes, I’m a chaos muppet with ADHD, so things that make it easier for me to focus (like a good chair and art and music) are things worth spending time on. But eventually, you have to write. It’s easy to slip into hyperfocus as you research the “best” text editor to write on, so you have minimal distractions, and three hours later you have written nothing but downloaded 3 free trials of writing software and looked at pictures of meerkats for the last 20 minutes after following an errant link.

All of that to say that right now, I’m spending a lot of time on infrastructure to support my writing. Outfitting the office. Installing speakers and trying out playlists. Building routines. Trying out schedules. Designing workflows.

And then there is the infrastructure to promote and publish my writing. Social media. Email service providers. Website design and hosting and email templates. WordPress updates and figuring out block editing (a WordPress feature from hell) and so on. It’s fun, and it’s necessary. But none of it is writing. It’s easy to work at this gig all day and still not have written an original thought down.

A Room Of One’s Own

When we moved into this house, I was excited to have a room of my own, a place for books, and a writing desk. When we lived in North Carolina, I had an office at work but did my serious writing at home, in the mornings, and often at the kitchen table because we lived in a tiny house but not a Tiny House (TM), and there was no room for me to have a separate office. I would drink coffee and work on my laptop in the quiet house in those still hours when no one was stirring.

But here! Here I would take over what was designed to be the formal living room, fill it with books and a desk, and make it a study of sorts – a place I could be out of the way and write when other people who live with me want to watch TV or cook something or have the audacity to actually live in the house they, you know, live in.

Because I had always had an office elsewhere, my “work from home” space didn’t need to be complicated – it just needed to be out of the traffic pattern. It did not matter that it was by the front door, didn’t have closing doors, and was visible to everyone that visited.

But then COVID happened, and I wasn’t just working from home occasionally, and I wasn’t just writing – now I was doing everything at home – from video production to writing to zoom calls – so many zoom calls! I got a larger monitor, additional hard drives, a docking station, and… I took over my study, and it became an office. But nobody was visiting, so while it was a bother, it wasn’t critical.

This is all just temporary, we told ourselves.

But now, people ARE visiting, and I am now permanently and completely working from home. Our eclectic study at the front of the house has become the office of a caffeine-riddled ADHD-diagnosed madman with object impermanence, who needs everything to be in front of him, or else it does not exist.

Our living room/study is filled with evidence of my creative process. It’s a damn mess, is what it is. I need an office. A room of my own, with doors and walls, lots of electrical outlets, shelves and corkboards. Then I can have the mess I need to be creative, and we can have the eclectic book-lined study at the front of the house back, and harmony (and hopefully productivity) will reign in our house once again.

After an audit of the available spaces in our house, I concluded I would have to build an outbuilding in the backyard for my small office. I don’t need much space – 8×8 would serve fine – but the combination of the time it would take and the cost has had me in a holding pattern for several months.

But the other day, I went to the store room in the back of our carport to get something and realized it was actually larger than the 8×8 shed I had planned to build. And it had a concrete slab foundation, stud-framed walls, and a functional roof over it, so it was as if someone had handed me an 85-square-foot shed on a concrete slab that just needed to be finished inside.

Even better, it has six feet of windows which face east, so there is lots of natural light. The door to it is through our carport, so on rainy days, I won’t have to walk in the weather.

It presents some problems – one of which is where to store the things currently inside of it. But we were already planning on enclosing the carport, and much of it is junk that needs tossing anyway, so that problem would solve itself. Our HVAC unit is slightly oversized, so it can easily handle having an additional 100sf added to it. The room would need more outlets, but it already has power, so adding more outlets is just time and (not much) money. And, of course, it will need insulation and sheetrock, but so would any shed I build in the yard.

In short, what would have been a $5,000 project has now become something like a $1000 project. And instead of a few weeks of work spread out over winter, now it’s only a couple of weekends.

It’s more square footage than an 8×8 shed would be, but not much. The room is about five and a half feet wide and 17 feet long, making it roughly double the size of your average hall bathroom here in the US. I envision half of the space being a built-in desk and shelves, and the other half being storage.

I ordered the materials Sunday – they arrived this morning. So, stay tuned. I’ll keep you posted.

Somewhere along the line, we lost our way.

I feel like writing is magic. It’s the old magic, the original sorcery. Because I can not know what I think, sit down and hit the keys, and suddenly, ideas come up.

Like today, I was unsure what to write about, and all I had was a line that kept turning over in my head. So I sat down to write, stream of consciousness. What follows is what I came up with.

Normally, I wouldn’t stop there, but I wanted to illustrate my point about magic. This is what I think of as a pre-draft. It seems like this idea wants to be several things – maybe a launching point about generosity vs. capitalism. Or about the generosity of the creative act. Or a lament for the early days of the internet. Or a bitch session about my own dissatisfaction with my schedule and routine.

Or maybe it wants to be all of those in a long, wandering essay that I tie up in the last paragraph. But in any event, I got nearly a thousand words of starting points off an 8-word sentence.

See? Magic.

# # #

“Somewhere along the line, we lost our way.”

That line played itself over and over in my head while I was on my walk today. Was it from a poem I read once? From a song buried deep in the lizard part of my brain? Or was it just a truth I felt deep in my bones that I knew in the way one knows one is tired, the way you know that you have missed a turn, the way one knows they have, indeed, lost their way?

It’s like that sometimes. Sometimes I have an idea, a theme if you will, and I want to explore that, and so I work out a narrative around it because I don’t understand things I can’t tell stories about.

Other times I have a story I want to tell, and it works the other way – I tell a story, and a theme presents itself. Sometimes I can tell the same story twice in a row, and a different theme shows up each time. It’s as if I’m not in control at all.

And then other times, it’s like today – I just get a line, and I have to figure out what to do with it.

“Where does this fit?” I ask myself.

What do I do with it? Is it the opening line in a novel? A short story? The apologia by a character for missing their son’s school play? Or is it just a thing I notice about the world around me?

Because it does seem as if, somewhere along the line, we have lost our way. I think Merlin Mann was onto the same sort of thing when he said that it seems like we have lost the recipe for America. But it isn’t just politically – it is pervasive. We all seem to be lost, wandering in the wilderness. A bit dazed, a little confused, somewhat weary, but cautiously hopeful that, around the bend, just over the hill, it will all be back to right again.

At least, that’s how it’s been for me. I was talking to an elementary school principal the other day, and she told me that the last “normal” school year was the one that started in the fall of 2018. Of course, I knew that, but hearing it in that context was staggering.

But I think we lost our way a long time before that.

I was thinking about Instagram this morning. It was once a cool way to show your friends a picture you had taken.

“Here, look at this cat I saw lying in the sunlight. Here is a cool sign I saw in a shop window. Check out the way the light refracts in this pool of water in the parking lot.”

It was generosity. Sharing. It was hopeful.

“Here is a thing I made. It’s for you.”

That was before it was bought by Facebook. Before the rise of the influencers, and back before Facebook sought to extract every possible click and pageview, sought to own every second of your attention. And way before Stories and Reels and who knows what all.

Back then, it was just generosity.

But we seem to have lost our way.

It shouldn’t surprise me. The same thing happened to us bloggers.

Around the turn of the century, blogging took effort. You had to find a host. And you needed a CMS, or you had to know how to write HTML, or you needed an HTML publisher. There was friction.

So those of us who did it did it because we had things we wanted to share.

Here are my thoughts about this thing I’m excited about. Here is a cool thing I found. Check out this article – I think the author is a moron.

There was no real way to monetize in those days. Some people were trying banner ads but losing their asses at it. The blogs were acts of love.

But in 2003, Google developed Adsense, where anyone with a website could put a bit of code on their site and get paid when people clicked their ads. Now, the goalpost changed. It wasn’t about love anymore – it was now about getting clicks. Attention. Views.

It was a short jump from there to corporations developing walled gardens where we still wrote for love, but they made money from the advertisers. I’m looking at you, Social Media.

It seems we have lost our way.

Or maybe it was my anger at how the comments on a cooking forum I belong to have suddenly turned political, with commentators managing to find grist for political jabs in posts about fruitcakes and cranberries. I sometimes think that even Gandhi would despair for humanity if he had spent time in the comment section of Facebook.

It’s also probably that I personally feel adrift as well. I have not had a full weekend at home since August sometime. My life feels chaotic, adrift, and unmoored. This time last year, I was writing an 800-word post every day on my blog. These days I count it a success if I get a post a week up, all the while recognizing it would be easier to not. Since starting the new job, my schedule has been off, and my routine has not yet settled. This frustrates me.

I don’t know what the line means, in other words. I just know that I know it, deep down, in my bones.

“Somewhere along the line, we lost our way.”

The Hughniverse

Let me tell you the backstory behind this post.

A few months back, I was holding office hours for people on the membership team. I mentioned the wide-ranging projects I am working on that they are supporting, and I jokingly called it my empire. He laughed and said I was creating a Hughniverse.

I am a sucker for puns on my name.

Then, a few weeks ago a close friend made something pretty amazing, and I mentioned it in The Hughsletter. Later, when I was talking to her, I mentioned I had shared it in my newsletter, and she said she hadn’t seen it. It turns out she hadn’t seen it because she didn’t even know I have a second newsletter called The Hughsletter (again, I love puns on my name).

I am the worst promoter of my work, but even I recognize that of the literally billions of people on the planet who did not read anything I wrote last year, the most common reason they didn’t wasn’t that they don’t like my style, or they disagree with me politically or any other logical reason, but because they simply do not know I exist.

So, here is an up-to-date list of the projects I am currently working on. At least this way, I can say that I told you.

The Membership Team

The more than 120 folks who pay contribute between $5 and $25 a month to keep the bills paid around here. Literally, everything springs from this – they pay the hosting and the internet domains and the subscriptions for the software and, not incidentally, for my time when I am writing jibber jabber on the internet instead of doing something else.

They also serve as an advisory board of sorts – they know about projects before anyone else, and I seek their input on directions I am considering. They get the satisfaction of knowing that because of their support, I get to keep making cool stuff.

Food is Love

This is the narrative cookbook I am writing in partnership with the membership team. They are getting a chapter a week delivered to their inbox as I write this, and then I take their input and feedback and will edit it down and publish a physical book this winter.

We are a ⅓ of the way through this project. So far, members have gotten the stories (and recipes) behind such things as fancy rice, Salisbury steak, pulled pork, and Aunt Louise’s chicken soup. And this winter, when I do get the physical book made, they will all get free copies.

Membership has its privileges. If you aren’t a member, you can buy it when it comes out.

My Blog

I continue to post on my blog two to three days a week at Humidity and Hope. My most read post over the last 30 days or so was my story of our ragtag rescue cat Pepe.

Links to the new posts are posted in several places: My Facebook page, Twitter, and Tumblr. I also publish a full RSS feed if that is your jam (it is mine!). If you don’t know what RSS is, here you go.

And I publish the entirety of the text of most blog posts on my Facebook profile page as a public post. I want everyone to have the opportunity to read my stuff, despite the fact that it probably costs me subscribers by not forcing Facebook readers to click through.

The Hughsletter

This is the accidental newsletter. Back in August of last year, when I began blogging regularly again, I set it up so people could get an email whenever I wrote a post. So far, so good. But then I began publishing multiple times a week, and people freaked out a little and asked if they could just get one email a week from me with links to everything I wrote that week.

So, I did. Then I would think of other things I had seen or liked that didn’t really merit their own blog post but that I thought would appeal to people who like my blogging style, so I added those links. Or I would mention a follow-up to a previous post I knew they had read. Before long, it was its own thing.

This is my most personal publishing venture. It’s the smallest audience, so it feels like talking to people I know rather than the internet at large. You can sign up or peruse the archives here.

Life is So Beautiful

Every Monday morning, I wake up, make coffee, and then sit down and write an email to several thousand folks in at least five different countries. I write a blog-length reflection on where I see beauty in the world right then, and then I share links to five things I had seen that week that struck me as beautiful. Because the world is beautiful, but sometimes it’s hard to notice it.

And I’ve been doing it for seven years. It’s my biggest project, in terms of readers, and my longest-running one. You can sign up or peruse the archives here.

Whew.

That’s a lot. There is talk of other things in the works. I’m working on an idea for the next book I will serially write like I am this one. There is talk of a podcast. I want to set up a live streaming cam on my birdfeeder and pond. I will get to it eventually. Or not. But I am having a blast, regardless.

Thanks for reading my stuff. It means more than you know.

Food is love.

If I were to make a list of the things I know for sure, that food is love would be one of them.

I have known that since I was old enough to know anything. That the secret ingredient in the biscuits Aunt Monty stood in front of the counter and rolled out every day of her life was pure love. That the tender pot roast after church on Sunday was as sincere a sign of my mother’s affection as she was capable of making. That I have never felt as at home in the world as I did all those years ago, in the fellowship hall of Emory Methodist Church, eating Miss VanHook’s chicken and dumplings.

I come from working-class stock. We did not have money for vacations or new cars or even health insurance, but by God, we could have green beans seasoned right and biscuits fit for gods and jelly that came from the efforts of women who loved you sweating over a kettle in the heat of summer.

It was the way people who loved me but didn’t have a lot of tools to express that love, showed it.

I don’t believe I am alone in that. I have polled large groups of people, and always end up with the same results: If I were to ask you your favorite memories of people you loved who are now gone, most of the time, those memories involve food.

Because food is love. It is the product of love, and it’s how we show love, and it’s how we feel love.

So, I’m writing a book about that. It’s a cookbook, in the sense that it will have recipes, but it’s also a book of stories because the stories give meaning and context to the food. Think of it as a narrative cookbook, organized around 18 meals and 40 recipes.

This has no commercial potential. Rachael Ray will not have some dude from MS on her show to talk about sausage gravy and the way it felt when his family had driven 8 hours through the night to get to his grandparent’s house and the weary travelers were groggy and sleepy but a hot breakfast was waiting on them.

But because I have members who support my work, I don’t have to worry about that. So I’m gonna publish it myself, with the financial support and encouragement of my members.

Here’s the plan: Beginning Friday, July 1, members of the Membership Team will get an email with a link to download a PDF of a chapter of the book, and will then get a chapter in their inbox every Friday until Friday before Thanksgiving.

Then, on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the finished book will be available for purchase on the major platforms (print and ebook) but everyone on the Membership Team in November will get a free print copy in the mail as my way of saying thanks for their support.

So, if you are not part of the Membership Team, you can buy my narrative cookbook Food Is Love on Black Friday. But Members will get Chapter One in their inbox on July the 1st.

You can learn more about how to be part of the Membership Team and support my work (and get a free copy of Food Is Love in the process) for as little as $5 a month here.

Membership Month

Sunday, June 5th, is my birthday. I will be 50 years old. Yes, I know, I seem young and sprightly, but trust me, that is just the Tylenol talking. In any event, the last year has been my most creative year ever.

Over the last year, I launched a new blog, Humidity and Hope, on which I have published 186 articles just since October, consisting of more than 152,000 words. I published my weekly newsletter, Life is So Beautiful, where every Monday morning I send a short (previously unpublished) essay and five links to beautiful things to thousands of subscribers. And I launched The Hughsletter, my personal newsletter, where I share what I’ve written that week and links to cool things I’ve found.

And now I’m launching something new: A membership program to support my work.

Figuring out how to monetize this sort of work is hard, especially if you have scruples. I don’t want ads everywhere, scraping your privacy. I don’t want to limit access to only people who can afford it, like a paid newsletter. And all of this *waves hands* costs a lot of money to do – my email service alone is hundreds of dollars a month, whether I send anything or not.

I’ve had a Patreon account for years, but we are transitioning from it to a simple membership program: People who want to support my work, who want to keep my public work free and ad-free, and who want more of my work in the world can contribute as little as $5 a month and help make that happen by clicking here.

One more thing, related to this: Just like there is Pledge Week at NPR, June is “Membership Month”, because of my birthday. I will be making a big announcement next week about a secret project that is for members-only, for example. And I will each week, highlight more of the creative work I do, made possible by the members who support this work.

And to the existing members who all kick in to keep this train going: Thank you. Seriously. I could not do this work without you.

In progress

I hate to share in-progress pictures. Partly that’s because many of my projects are done in budget-sized increments, and how do I decide when I’m really “done”? But I also recognize that sharing progress pictures makes things seem more doable. And I tend to think most things are doable. Or at least, more things than most people think are.

So here is what’s been occupying my time after work for the last few weeks. It’s a picture of the back of our house, as seen from the new birdfeeder I installed in the backyard (more about that in a sec). The deck I built in 2020 with The Boy, but the stairs by the chimney and the short walkway I just added last week.

The reason for adding them was that below the chimney, I am putting in a water feature – a shallow pond (from 4-16 inches deep) for the wildlife and birds, with a small bubble fountain in it to make the birds happy. There are wetland plants that will go there as well, and to the right of the chimney, out of the shot, will be a small sitting area, where the red chairs that are currently on the deck will go, so I can sit in the shade of the afternoon and watch the fountain.

Ok, so that’s out of the way – let’s see what is blooming this week:

I love common yarrow. It’s evergreen (here, anyway – your mileage may vary), the pollinators love it, and the ferny texture fills in well. Every garden I have will have some yarrow in it.

And coneflowers! A native (well, this yellow variety is a nativar – don’t @ me, people), also beloved by pollinators, and nearly bulletproof. I just loved the juxtaposition of the yellow with the purple verbena – also a native plant, also bulletproof and beloved by pollinators.

The magnolia is still blooming, proof that God loves me and wants me to be happy.

This is the native “species” purple coneflower – lovely as can be. Surprisingly hard to find in nurseries, as people live the colored nativars. But I like this one best.

This is elderberry. Also native, it’s an aggressive bush here. I understand people pay for elderberry plants, but there’s no need. If you cut a branch off around the size of a pencil and then stick it in the ground, it will root. It fills in quickly and spreads, so it’s ideal in a place where you need quick screening. But the birds love the cover AND the berries, and the butterflies love the flowers. A great wildlife plant.

I wanted a bird feeder out in the yard, away from the house. The feeder by the house – really just a saucer on the deck rail – you can see it on the far left of the deck in the back of the house picture – is really only drawing Cardinals and Thrashers. I figured a feeder further from the house might draw more.

And it’s working – here are some Chickadees and a Tufted Titmouse that came to visit.

So Thursday evening I builta quick and dirty platform feeder: It’s just a 10-foot piece of ¾ inch EMT conduit driven in the ground as a post, then I drilled a 15/16 hole in a 2×2 for the crosspiece. It’s held in place by a 10d nail that goes through both the crosspiece and the 2×2, so it makes it easy to remove if needed. The platform feeder itself is just some 1×2 from which I made an overlapping double frame that sandwiches a piece of 2×4 fencing for support and a piece of window screen for drainage. On the right, you see the Blink camera. I hung the hanging feeder under it to balance out the weight, else it tends to lean a bit. Were I to do this over, I would use a piece of 1-inch EMT instead of the 3/4.

The squirrel baffle is just a piece of 4-inch PVC that is 2 feet long. I put the top of it six feet off the ground, and then drilled a hole through both it and the EMT and ran a piece of coathanger wire through it to hold it in place. Thus far, no squirrels have attempted it. We will see how it works.

Building a Birdcam

Over the last few weeks, I have been pretty focused on building a camera set up so I can monitor the wildlife that visits my yard.

I have a pretty exacting set of criteria.

It needs to be affordable. I know affordable is a squishy term because what may be affordable to me may not be to you. But I really wanted this to be a less than $100 project, at least to start out. I am a big believer in starting a new project with the minimum viable setup, and then, if we decide it’s worth pursuing further, then I can spend some money. But to start, less than $100.

Then it needs to be simple. I didn’t want to run wires, set up networks, or learn new technologies to set this up. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is that just like I didn’t want a large upfront investment of cash, neither did I want a large upfront investment of time. I was willing to spend an afternoon setting this up, at least to get started.

And then, what result did I desire? I wanted to be able to have videos of the animals that visited my yard that I could download and share on social media. A bonus would be still photos, but if I had video, I could always capture stills from that. I knew these wouldn’t be award-winning photos, but I wanted to have proof of concept before I figured out something better.

And I wanted to not have to go out to the camera and retrieve an SD card from the camera like I would if I used a trail cam. I should be able to do this over the internet.

I could do almost all of this with a simple trail cam, like this one. The two big things I didn’t like about the trail cam idea is that I had no idea what I had taken pictures of until I pulled the SD card and took it inside to my computer. The other is that the video quality wasn’t all that great. (I’m aware that higher dollar cameras have solutions to both of those issues, but not under $100.)

In the end, I bought a Blink outdoor security camera. With the required sync module included, I paid around $75, but the price fluctuates on this all the time between $50 and $125. They go on a huge sale on Amazon Prime days as well. The camera is small – about 3×3 inches. It’s battery-powered and uses wifi, so no cables are needed.

The Blink outdoor camera is designed to be a security camera, so it’s motion-activated. I have it clamped to a board in front of a saucer of sunflower seeds, and so when a bird (or lizard or squirrel) gets in the saucer, it automatically records up to 60 seconds of HD video and then uploads it to the cloud. From there I can review it when I want, download it to edit elsewhere, or share it on social media directly from the app.

Each day it syncs with the sync module and downloads the day’s history, so I also have a local copy of all the videos recorded that day.

It’s not a perfect system. I almost went nuts until I figured out how to urn off the notifications. It says you will get 2 years of use from a pair of AA lithium batteries, but by the 3rd day, I got a warning that I was using it more than planned and my battery life would be shorter. The stills are not as good as I would like, and the framerate is a little slow for my purposes.

But overall, I’m really happy. I have begun to upload some of the more interesting ones to YouTube. I’m investigating feeder types, to attract even more birds. I’m putting in a water feature over the next few weeks, because birds love moving water, especially in our heat. I’m going to set up a solar collector, to get around the battery life issue.

And, God help me, I’m looking into setting up an always-on livestream on YouTube. Which does involve cables and money and new technologies.

But wherever this ends up, it all started with $75 and an afternoon.

Firehouse Soup

While I went to college, I worked a few years as a firefighter for the City of Memphis. I learned many things there, but the biggest impact it had on me long-term was how it taught me to think about food.

The deal was that you worked every other day for three days, and then you were off for four days. So, for example, you may work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and then you would be off until the following Wednesday, when the cycle started all over again. And each shift was 24 hours long and began at 7 AM. Depending on what fire-fighting equipment was housed at your station, you could have anywhere from four to 12 people on each shift, and you always worked with the same people.

It was like a second family you lived with 1/3rd of your life. We had laundry and showers and we cut the grass and, of course, ate together. And while there was a kitchen and equipment such as pans and knives provided, the actual food was not, and was up to you. Some people brought their own food, but you didn’t if you wanted to be trusted by the others on your shift. To be trusted, you needed to belong to the syndicate.

I worked at several different houses during the years I was on the job, and the syndicate always worked the same way. There was one member of the shift who kept track of a pool of money, and that was used to buy groceries for your shift. Each shift had its own refrigerator and cupboard, which were kept locked. At each meal, you were either “in” or “out” for the meal, meaning you intended to eat the food bought from the pool of money, and you were “charged” your pro-rata share of the groceries that went into that meal. And on payday, you settled up your bill, which replenished the pool of money, and it started all over again.

So, every day you worked, you had to figure out who was cooking three meals for your shift. Some shifts had 1 person who just loved cooking, and they took it on as their responsibility, but most times we would ask who wanted to cook each meal, with the others doing cleanup. Breakfast was usually fixed – eggs, bacon, biscuits were common, most often with gravy – and lunch was often caught as catch can, but the big show was supper.

A cool thing about this system is that you had a diversity of cooks, with each bringing their favorites to the table. Tom was in his 20s and could run the grill, but not much else. Curtis loved to make spaghetti. Stan made round steak and gravy, with mashed potatoes and English peas so good that my mouth waters just thinking about it.

And John always made soup.

John was nearing retirement after nearly 30 years on the job. He had been divorced for nearly 20 of those years and most of his off-work meals were either sandwiches or dinner fare. But his one claim to culinary fame was his soup.

I probably ate it two dozen times and watched him make it half of those times, and it was never done exactly the same way twice. It was more of a technique rather than a recipe, but what it always was, was good.

As an example, I will share how I made it last week, but everything in this recipe is up for negotiation.

Dice a small onion into small pieces, and dice two cloves of garlic while you are at it. In a large pot, crumble a pound of ground beef, add your diced onions, and sprinkle some salt on top of it all, and then, over medium heat, begin to brown the ground beef. Stir it all around until the meat is no longer pink and the onions are translucent, then add the garlic and let it sweat a bit, but don’t, for the love of God, let it burn or you just ruined the whole thing. The garlic will be flavorful and ready in about a minute.

Pour in three and a half cups of beef broth (or water plus an appropriate amount of beef paste) and a 12-ounce can of V8 juice. Using a spoon or something, scrape the bottom of the pan to make sure all the bits are off the bottom of the pan and it’s all mixed well.

To this, add a 15-ounce can of diced tomatoes (Rotel is another option here, but it obviously changes the flavor), a couple of tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce (easy for you to say), and 2 teaspoons of Italian seasoning. We only had a few spice jars at the fire station, but Italian seasoning went into everything. Let it come to a boil.

While you are waiting on that, peel and dice 2 potatoes of whatever kind you have around – I had Yukon Golds. Add it to the pot, along with a pound of frozen mixed vegetables. (I know that sounds vague, but that’s what they are always called at the grocery. It’s generally green beans, carrots, and English peas.) Let it boil, then bring it down to a simmer for 15 minutes.

NOW. You can let it simmer for another 15 minutes and have a perfectly acceptable soup to serve with your dinner. Or, you can do what I did and add a cup and a half of elbow macaroni and another half cup of beef broth and THEN let it simmer for another 15 minutes and have a hearty, filling soup you can eat for diner all by itself.

Beef or shredded chicken. V8 or Tomato sauce. Beef broth or chicken. Macaroni or spaghetti or even instant grits (trust me on this). Tomatoes or Rotel. White potatoes or sweet potatoes (What? Yes.)

It’s all up in the air. Mix and match. Live a little.

You deserve it.

The Bird Project

Mr. Doc died when I was 10, and it was way before that. I was probably six or so when I first learned about birdwatching.

Mr. Doc was my elderly neighbor, the retired farmer who, along with his wife Monty, acted as my surrogate grandparents when I was growing up, and who often kept me after school. She was, without question, the best cook in the world – or at least, in my world, but he was the lord of all other domains.

When the clock on the table in the living room hit three, he and I would go outside to sit in the shade on the north side of the house, where it was far cooler than it was in their un-airconditioned small farmhouse. He wore a battered straw hat when we would go outside, to keep the sun out of his watery eyes, and he and I would sit in metal yard chairs that were old then, and the cool kids would powder coat and sell them on eBay as “retro” now.

The fencerow on that side of the house – the one that separated their lot from the 3 acre field that was always strawberries in the spring and then black eyed peas in the late summer – had a hedge made of wild plums, from which Monty made jelly each summer, and overhead, a power line that ran along it to the yard light that illuminated their backyard. And nearly every day of my life, on that power line, sat mockingbirds.

We would sit out there in the shade of the late afternoon, him and I, and watch the mockingbirds and listen to their songs. Sometimes the blackbirds or the blue jays would come and try to chase them off, but the mockingbirds would not have it – no sir.

When I told my Aunt Louise about the mockingbirds, she told me there were people called birdwatchers, who went to faraway places to look at birds through binoculars and write it down in their notebooks. Wasn’t I lucky, she said, that I didn’t have to go anywhere at all but the north side of Mr. Doc’s house.

We didn’t have any binoculars, but she did have an old pair of opera glasses she let me borrow, and I would take them to Doc and Monty’s and sit in that yard chair and look at the different birds, giving them names and making up stories about them. Mr. Doc would show me how to bust up dried corn on a flat rock with a claw hammer, and then I would make piles of it on the ground, far enough away for the birds to feel safe from me, and they would fly down, skittish and fearful, and eat.

We were rich as lords.

I haven’t done any birdwatching in at least 40 years. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love birds, and I plant my yard heavily in their favor. Sometimes we will sit on the yard swing and watch the cardinals in the magnolia tree, and the deck I built in 2020 is always a haven for grackles and cedar waxwings, and we get hummingbirds in the salvia I planted just for them. But I don’t go looking for them. They are something like happy accidents I sorta planned for.

But last week I came across a German woman who lives in Michigan and who takes pictures of the birds that show up at her birdfeeder. It’s pretty stunning. And faster than you can say hyperfocus, I have spent literally every spare hour researching how to do this.

I mean, it ties in with a lot of my existing projects, like building a yard that supports wildlife, and I figure I can share the pictures on my sadly neglected Instagram account, which I think a subset of you would also appreciate, and then maybe periodically give updates on the project itself, which gives me things to talk about on my blog, and plus, I know the names of like six different kinds of birds. It would be a chance to learn new things.

I like learning new things.

So, stand by for bird updates. This is how ADHD works, y’all. Despite the fact that 7 days ago I had zero interest in birds in any specific way, I spent the afternoon today researching feeding setups and action cameras. I don’t make the rules – it’s just how my brain works. You can fight it, but 49 years of owning this brain have taught me to hang on and see where it shakes out.