Dawn’s Thoughts

Last weekend (4/18-4/19), I went to the Tulare Tractor Show with Mom and Dad. Pushed Mom around the dust in the wheelchair, which was difficult to get rolled but not bad at all after that, except for the metal-wheeled tractors, who drove about in the dirt making crop circles and causing the wheelchair no end of trouble. Of course, I explored the swap meet, and went to the tractor parade first off, when we got there. This was as usual a wonderful event, minus the balky donkeys and blaring national anthem of our first visit. This was entertaining because it drove the police horse absolutely nuts, and the donkeys went crazy entirely. So they didn’t do that this year. They did, however, have the same announcer, who, because of the size of the parade route is forever describing something just around or behind of what you are currently seeing. Makes things interesting.

At the swap meet, Mom missed a Singer Featherweight Firearm, and I missed out ofn a book of shop notes, including blacksmithing drawings, but as I inquired about the price, and then laid the item down waiting for the price, as the person I asked didn’t know it, despite best efforts, I can’t complain too much. The price was probably out of my range anyway. Mom found a small, excellent, aluminum fruit press for me for an wonderful price, though I had to poke about it until its owner explained that the plate was put on upside down. Right side up, it works very well, although different from the press I currently have, in that the handle detaches from the plate and is driven down by having a full press of fruit instead. Mom says maybe we can press cheese in it, which would be great, as our last actual cheese press, although reputable, was a Rube Goldberg contraption of wood and bricks for the weight, which was sooner of later going to land on someone’s foot. This press might work better. When I read about modern alumninum presses, one web page says that the small holes in the press means you don’t need to line the press with a pillow case in cheese cloth

In the tractor parade, the finish this time was long lines of older semi trucks, most painted robin blue and most from the Hays Truck Musuem (truckmuseum.org) which we have visited in the past. It was fascinating to see how stylish some of the older truck hoods were and how comparitively short their trailers were to modern semis.
On Sunday, the fair was much less — many vendors had left. We finished the last of the swap meet and saw the engines and as much of the tractors as possible. The man from Quartzite was there with his hit and miss pipe cutter, and I got into a few conversations with some folks about where their engines

Now keeping in mind that I still need to play catch up with this blog and should right now be searching for jobs (which I will do when I finish this blog), a hodgepodge of medical theories has been wandering about in my head for the past few days, so I thought I would write about them here.

I watched the movie Mockingbird Don’t Sing the other day, based on the story of Genie, a 13 year old girl isolated from most human contact in a back bedroom, and who did not have exposure to language. I knew of the case before, but have obviously missed some details, as I wasn’t aware there was another child, then nearly an adult in the house, or that there were twists and turns in the story such as scheming scientists. Some years ago I looked up the Wild Boy of Averyon (probably spelled wrong, I’ll have to look it up), and that book stated that the boy was insensitive to heat or cold, did not relate to people, and was in most respects comparable to an autistic person today.

That still interests me. But, in this case, this was a child found in the woods, who behaved like an animal as far as crouching places, eating raw meat with his hands, but significantly, I believe he was found in the 1700-early 1800’s, if I remember correctly. Science wasn’t as advanced. The crouching is interesting because a number of special ed children also perch on things, such as chairs.

But the child was also found in the woods…so was the insensitivity to temperature a result of more fat cells in the blood, or whatever happens to people who are exposed more often to extreme weather, or was this is an internal sensory processing difficulty, like a brain which scrambles pain messages?

I watched a program on modern feral children recently…would have loved to tape it, but anyway a boy in it as old as 4 was abandoned by his parents in the city and began to run about with the town’s dog population. Even at that age, he still reverted to dog habits on occasion with a foster family (growling etc). Now I’m assuming, because the program didn’t go into details, but this was a child with an apartment-dwelling life, and early exposure to social skills, language, affection, who did not begin to display these characteristics until later, hanging around dogs. Now the neighbors knew he was doing this.

This is not to advocate the “refrigator mother” theory about autistics, or to state that they were deprived as Genie was. The theory about rhesus monkeys and touch is interesting here as well…it was supposed that monkeys were attached to their mothers because of feeding and milk, but it was discovered that baby monkeys gravited toward soft towel-covered fake mothers more than the ones who only fed them. They wanted touch. This is why children in orphanages had high mortality rates early in the century, because they were fed but not touched, and they wasted away. (Which was, at least according to Popenoe, a “scientist” writing about eugenics, a good thing…less people with bad genes).

Of course, remember that eugenics was considered a science during a very particular time period, at least until after Nazi concentration camps, where it became a source of embarrassment and its name was quickly changed. Popenoe also does not consider in his book Applied Eugenics that factors such as high tubercolis rates and lack of seperation of sick people…oh, let’s see, might actually have contributed to the high mortality rates.

When I watched The Boy in the Bubble documentary, I wondered whether touching him through thick gloves would qualify as touching a la rhesus monkeys. Of course, he grew but the bubble provided another kind of isolation, despite doctors, parents and nurses giving interaction and affection. I suppose because he couldn’t interact directly or leave the bubble except in a space suit.

In the movie about Genie, if she actually did some of the things portrayed, it’s very interesting. For example, a foster sister complains in the film that Genie has taken her brush. Now what does Genie do with it? She strokes her face. That’s tactile stimulation. If an MRI had existed at the time, a particular part of her brain probably would have lit up. I wonder if particular brain waves can tell your brain to wake up or go to sleep (neurofeedback) and particular sounds such as shaman drumming, digeridoos, humming, rocking, etc. can take away pain, do they all stimulate the same portion of the brain? In Anthropology I found it fascinating that the drumming, digeridoo etc made the same noise as the humming Mom does when her hand hurts.

People stimulate by fidgeting, tapping pens, during meetings. Which part of the brain does this stimulate? Also, figure that Genie in this case, was tied to a chair without proper motion of her hands and feet and without much verbal interaction. So, if you look at the cases of isolated prisoners or people that have been suspended in water, with gloves over their hands and feet, it takes a few days and then their brain starts finding things to stimulate itself. It goes haywire with hallunications etc. And in the case of people who have…a highly medical term will follow… scrambled wiring in their brain, or poor processing of stimulation such as touch, sounds, etc., they can over- or under- reaction to stimulation. Screaming at car backfires, or knocking people aside when tapped on the shoulder. Think about autistic people here, but also folks who might have it to a lesser degree such as from a head injury. (I read the book Too Tight, Too Fast, Too Bright by …INSERT CITATION)
In this sense, scientists said Genie walked and moved as though blind, as though her brain didn’t trust her eyes. Now that’s fascinating for me. Were her senses damaged from isolation? If people couldn’t take complete sensory deprivation for a few days, similar deprivation for years must do awful things. The kid must have been bright to be able to maintain a ability to learn. Did the Wild Boy have insentivity to temperature like Genie because of exposure to these extremes, or because lack of stimulation scrambled the ability to feel them? Did Genie’s stimming with the brush “correct” her body’s need for some brain waves? In the book Too Loud, Too Bright…by …… a sensory diet is recommended that claims to stimulate particular regions of the brain and help with sensitivities to sounds, etc.

In the Extras of Mockingbird Don’t Sing, Susan Curiss says that Genie would take Curtiss’ hand and point to what she wanted to know. That she lacked confidence in her own hand. That seems like a form of faciltacted communication that would become popular a few years later. In faciltated communication, a teacher holds the arm while the student points to objects. This is not to start a disruption about whether or not faciltated communication works or doesn’t, I’m only stating what I’m thinking. At the time, word boards would have been in existance, but word boards would have been much slower than signing, which is what the Genie Team introduced her to. But in today’s technological world, computers are used instead of word boards for communication like this, and some autistic people have shown that while their verbal speech is not at age level, their written ability is much better.

A boy from India writes every day and a girl with a small verbal vocabulary can attend college course with a computer to speak for her. (Sorry, I saw them on TV but will have to look up the names). This raises the questions would Genie’s inability to construct grammatical sentences, even though she could communicate what she wanted, have improved if the technology of computers had been as advanced as it is today? It’s an interesting idea for me. Now people can also have difficulty processing verbal language but be able to use ASL, so an appropriate technology was used for the time period, but it intrigues me that langauge can be entirely different written than it is coming out your mouth

Also interesting that Genie collected pails, plastic being one of the things she was exposed to as toys during isolation and abuse. She didn’t play with them but just had them. They would provide the same tactile stimulation. Autistic children are also known for collecting groups of objects, whatever connection that might be.
Anyway, that’s  my hodgepodge of scientic theories for the day. Might be an entertaining paper, if I could communicate it well enough in future.

[The part about rhesus monkeys, cloth mothers, and touch came from reading Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers [An Updated Guide…]  by Robert M. Sapolsky, pg. 90, 98-100.
For the sensory deprivation study, see Human Motivation, 5th edition, by Bernard Weiner.

For sensory overload, see Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight: What to Do If You Are Sensory Defensive in an Overstimulating World by Sharon Heller

The documentary about modern wild children is a TLC film called “Wild Child: The Story of Feral Children.”

Information about Genie is in Russ Rhymer’s book Genie: A Scientific Tragedy, NOVA’s documentary “Secret of the Wild Child,” and Susan Curtiss’ thesis, as well as Mockingbird Don’t Sing (2001) film.

Information about David Vetter is from the NOVA documentary The Boy in the Bubble. It’s an excellent film.

Yesterday, Tuesday (4/7), I spent a large portion of my day at job club. First off I set out at 8 AM, as usual, took the train, got there a little early and read the paper, which is always there on the table. I used the computers a bit to look for jobs as well. I had cover letters to work on, but didn’t want to put the wrong flash drive into the computer, as one of them can only be used at the SJSU career center and home.

As it was, I succeeded in accidently saving a blank document to their computer rather than my flash drive.

What can I do? Even if I know where it went, and I had a pretty good idea of where and the name of the document, they have rules posted, and I’m pretty sure roaming about the innards of their computers and deleting documents is not something they’d be pleased about.
Went to job club itself, which was very good, about cover letters and resumes and things not to do in an interview, then used the resource center for 2 hours looking at jobs in the Bay Area. More specifically, I spent some time looking for freelance local columnist jobs, as a friend suggested the other day.

“A intermittant column,” she said. “Disabled people finding jobs. It’d be funny. You could write it.”

So, what the hell. I browsed jobs for that. Sounds good to me, if I can get back in the habit of having writing ideas every day. That’s getting better.

With the rain, it was a full house for orientation…me and another lady and the instructor.

I’m pleased with their new changes in the job programs…training in computers in the office itself, phone calls to see how job searches are going, etc. Very good. Happy to hear it.

Anyway, I’m still blessed by the rain gods, who still send down rain only when I’m somewhere inside, apparently, as I come out to find signs of rain all over, but never have any when I’m going from one place to another.

A fact that is sincerely appreciated and which I don’t want to jinx. Pulling a cart and swinging a cane in the rain is always a pleasure, as I get to decide who gets the umbrella…the cart or me?

Guess who wins?

The cart. There’s stuff in there that can’t get wet.

Then, too, I can’t very well hold an umbrella, swing a cane, and wrangle the cart at the same time

Believe me, I’ve tried it. It’s a hazard for everyone involved. Not only do I swerve while hauling the cart and shifting umbrella, but people duck and run as if it’s a war zone. You know it’s the umbrella’s fault. The little things that hold the umbrella together have come loose so I swerve about manhandling a cart and periodically making what must only appear to be homicidal lunges toward folks, with spears sticking out in all directions.
If I could attach the umbrella to the cart, that might be something.

I actually have an umbrella hat, the kind with a vise that clamps to your head, is too small to cover the rest of you, and looks as though it’s meant to channel television directly into your head.

I tried a poncho before, but found if you shove it into a backpack without letting it dry, it has a marvelous ability to breed mold like a petri dish. Instead of pencillin, you get a stink that can clear a hallway of all inhabitants in 5 seconds.

Ask me how I know. At least, all four of my classmates were standing by exit doors at the time.

Today Wednesday (4/8), I went early to internship, sat outside under storm clouds with a notebook and wrote the beginning of a story. I went in when the rain made my pen bleed.

My supervisor was in the lunch room, I was told, but I hated to interuppt, so I went past and continued writing until internship actually started at 1 PM. My supervisor poked her head around the cubicle when she returned and I told her what I was doing.

Well, on last Sunday (4/5), I’ll assume I worked on an application for a San Francisco job, because what was I doing on Monday (4/6), around 2 PM, but hauling myself and my cane to 4 Post Offices.

I would have said I was hauling something else but you get the idea.

The documents were due as an application the next day.
I finished up getting documents ready at home by 2 PM, took them to FedEx, where there was a lot of paying going on. I paid to copy portfolio documents, paid to use the computer, and paid to print from the computer, which is somewhat of a contradiction if you ask me.

Oh, and the copier decided it was going to mess with me by printing alternately legal sized or yellow paper, despite what I told it to do. After concluding it was a possible victim of mechanical possesion, I consulted the local FedEx person, who showed me that the copier automatically saw the clear covering over my documents and that some fool had left yellow paper in the white 8 1/2 by 11 bin. I might have figured this out for myself, except that various copy places, except those that know me, and schools, tend to become wildly agitated if they spot filling paper trays etc. So I fetched the FedEx people themselves who were kind enough to have a look and explain things.

This meant that I took quite a lot of portfolio documents out of their covers, until I gave up somewhere near the end and just flipped the document upside down, as I do at home, so that I can hide the holes in the cover.
Then I took a seat and began sorting documents, at which point I realized that half of them do not have my name printed on them.

This means I had to sign my name — neatly — about 20 or 30 times in the left hand upper corner, which Dad suggested, but which requires a great deal of patience for me. The more I concentrate on it, the more it looks like a drunk five year old stole my paperwork.

Once I got done with that, I ignored the several cents I might have gotten back in reject copy money and fled to SJSU’s post office. I learned at FedEx that they really do only send FedEX, had no idea what postage I needed. At SJSU, I learned that I should have been there at 1 PM to get the overnight postage, as the woman who takes their mail had already been in. They sealed and gave my package certified mail postage, which I paid for, and gave me instructions to the St. James post office, which stayed open later and might still have overnight.

Hearing this, I snatched my package back from them, leaving them rather confused, as I had only just finished paying the certified mail, typed post office in the GPS and found the only ones it recognized were 3-6 miles away. I called Mom, who reminded me of the Post Office in Paseo de San Antonio.

They were still open, just not manned. They had closed at 5:00 PM. It was now around 5:30, and their sign gave better directions to the St. James post office, but cautioned that it closed at 6 PM.

I’m lucky to get across campus in 30 minutes. Holding GPS in one hand and my cane in the other, I hauled myself, literally, along the street toward 1st street.

Here’s a tip. If you want people to part before you, haul one leg, swing the other arm in contortions, pant, look at GPS, and swing a rather large stick.

Needless to say, people kept out of my way almost entirely.

Meanwhile, along with almost running as fast as most people can in a good stroll, I was hoping that I would not catch hold of a crack in the sidewalk with my cane.

Imagine Goofy in the 1940’s being slung into the horizon by a tree, and you get a better good idea of what a fast moving cane will do to you.
I made it to St. James almost with 10 minutes to spare before closing, hurried myself up the steps, and damn near committed hari-kari with my cane.

Actually, I think I must have stepped on the cane, which I’ve never actually done before, and which did a spendid job of accordianing my big toe on the right foot. I hopped up the steps and went in.

I don’t remember being in the St. James Post Office before, but it’s a wonderful building. It’s kept the floors and round ceilings and even the teller windows from an earlier time period. Rather like entering a proper movie theater. Luckily, there were only 2 people in line, which has never happened to me at the post office, and I soon found myself explaining that I wanted to send a package certified mail, return reciept, overnight.

Turns out there is no such thing. They are two separate styles of mail. So I chose overnight.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that if I have to write my address and someone else’s in the tiny boxes on those little forms the post office provides, I will gladly sling them at somebody’s head.

That would make me better. Maybe I can get a mail stamp for it instead.

As it was, I wrote the more important parts of the very long address and stated that my handwriting could not fit in their small boxes.

Well, that’s what we use.

Now, granted, the post office man was nice to point out the various other places on the sticker I could write things such as Attn: Human Resources and the room number, but I’ll be lucky if the package gets there. The only good thing was that this sticker covered my previous address, done in a hurry in pencil. Now the package was covered with so many stamps and stickers from 2 post offices, that I would’ve assumed I was sending it to a foriegn country instead of 40 miles.

I might have said I was disabled and needed assistance, but I felt lucky enough to get out of the place five or so minutes before closing.

I called Mom and told her I was having either ice cream or a beer when I got home.

“Have both,” she suggested, “a beer float.”

So I did. I went to Ben & Jerry’s, which I hardly do, got a very nice coconut chocolate chip ice cream, then went home and had a beer. Since I drank the whole thing, there wasn’t much sense in trying to do work, or getting up after that, so I sat and watched comedy and enjoyed myself for the evening instead.

On Saturday (4/4), I went with the history club to the Steinbeck Center in Salinas.

Very good. We were there briefly earlier this year, on a mistaken assumption that the Steinbeck library is the same building. Although I did want to explore it, and had for some time, we only dashed in and out for a pit stop. Turns out they do have a place to eat at a restaurant a few buildings away.

I wanted the biscuits and gravy, but got a salmon sandwich instead. Definitely a place to go to again. I’m glad I didn’t get the biscuits, because they’d probably have been as large as the ones at Milt’s. Rather like a tuna fish sandwich, except in a large roll and seasoned well.
Onion rings came with it — ate half those, then of course, everyone else couldn’t handle that I left them, and had to try some.
Very good museum displays. Not much historical information behind the books that I saw though. That was a bit of a shame…I was curious for example about what it would have been like to be a bindle stiff in Mice and Men, or the fact that disabled and respite did not exist as we know them in the 1920-1930’s. It was well lit. There were various objects like hats and coats to lift, Steinbeck’s car with a camper stove, which was very interesting because it resembled closely the round handmade early RVs I’ve seen at shows. Very brown inside from the wood. I assume the table made down into a bed, a technology I didn’t think existed until modern RVs. Our VW, for example, had a bed that made into a couch, but the table was seperate.

You couldn’t get lost in the museum due to how it was set up, with each book being a section that wound around each other. A Model T Ford and a Okie shack mockup were also part of the props. The Okie shack was a mockup to cover a wall — there was nothing to go into and no metal beds, as there are in the Dust Bowl Festival. The outside of the “building” was rather neat for a shack. You pull back a curtain and there’s a drawing of Okies and a recording from the book.

A lot of different methods were in this museum. Printed sections of books, old pictures of time periods and a little historical information about the Dust Bowl, tape recordings from books and video readings as well. We sat in a video about Steinbeck himself. A touchy feely corner also exists.

In the Mice and Men section there was a nice looking wooden bunk bed. A common idea in this museum was to print quotes on things such as pillows, jackets and quilts. Something I haven’t seen before and interesting to look at.
Good gift shop. I saw a Grapes of Wrath Viking Critical edition with historical info in the back — Bakersfield’s Hooverville and flood — but no addresses again, darn it.I’d like the Hooverville address or section to see how it compares with the modern area — particularly some similar housing on the outskirts of town. For instance, does ditch bank camping usually occur by rivers? Probably so, as it is a source of water. But has modernism made that different? Anyway, if it is the same region, it’s highly unlikely that Okies, farm workers, or their descendents would be in the same place. That said, it would be something extremely interesting to research.
I got the books I saw at the Okie Festival on sale. They are Ron Hughart’s books The Place Beyond the Dust Bowl and its sequel, which I’ve been wanting to read. About Dust Bowl migrants and their children following crops in the 1950’s and 1960’s much the same as in the Dust Bowl.

Then we went to the Presidio in Monterey which I haven’t been to. It had some displays. First off we got instructed on where in the base you can’t go because of unexploded things and what-all will happen if you do. (And I got a military map of the area for free). Rather odd, since all we came for was the museum itself. We also learned of military strategy with tanks and how the horses were Morgan horses and something else, so that they were very strong and capable. They were trained to not react to noise, which was done by firing guns by their ears. I asked why they didn’t end up with a lot of deaf horses, but the docent said that they were in fact quite well cared for. Your butt would be a sling if your horse got hurt, because then you’d have no calvary. I believe he said that horses were trained for war right up through WWII. When I asked when the last actual calavery was, he said the Spanish American War. I can understand the point though, about tanks. Horses you have to feed and water, but tanks have to be maintained to operate. The docent said that the tanks had be chased constantly by supply trucks with gasoline, water, food, etc. If this was the case, it seems somewhat counterproductive. For one thing, the supply truck are also using gasoline, and what’s to keep the enemy from cutting supply lines by taking out the supply source? I’m sure this was done in WWII — it would be like the old “starve them out” policy for warfare in the middle ages, but it’s interesting to learn about it.
We walked up the hill, avoiding the cement gully to water horses that used to live there and walked up to the monument. We looked out over the valley, which had a wonderful clear view that allowed you to see ocean and hills at the same time. I speculated as to how theyshot cannons off from the mountain and how far the cannon balls went. To reach the ocean, you’d have to shoot over the Presidio’s own horse stables and what’s now the Visitor’s Center. It seems to me like you’d have a bunch of scared-shitless horses all the time, or holes in the roof.

Except, of course, that those were apparently horses incapable of being scared shitless in the first place.
Another club member said that well, of course, it got cold up there on the hill nights, and maybe you’d get to drinking and friendly fire the stables, but no one really how far the cannons could reach.

Then we went to the Monterey jail and looked at that.Over at the courthouse [?}, up a high staircase, was a bunch of chairs in one room that were displays with copies of writing from I believe the Consitution of California, if I remember right. On the other was chairs for actually sitting in, and we were told the difference between them. At one point the building was a normal school and among the older books under glass, there was a wooden pencil box. It intrigued me because besides having marbles in it, it had chalk and small metal tools. I asked about the tools and was told they were files for sharpening the chalk.

Now isn’t that clever? Never seen such a thing. I take they weren’t original to the building but examples, but I commented on how neat it was to store marbles in your pencil box.

“I had a pencil box when I went to school,” said the woman in charge.

I wanted to tell her I had my grandfather’s marble collection, but I didn’t.
After this we went to the jail itself. For all the talk about it in the group, I expected a hole in the ground place, but the cells were roughly the size of those in Alcatraz. The deal being that on one side they were lit so you could see them, and on the other they were naturally lit from the small holes in the metal windows. This meant that anyone in them got hardly any sun and spent days in the dark. It’s a wonder anyone got out with their wits about them at all.
and came home. I got dropped off at home. Less people than usual today.
I practiced my conversation skills a bit. Mostly didn’t work as people were talking about current concerts, music, etc. They talked a little about jobs. Mostly I interuppted, sat there, read, or was talked over. A few times I had good conversations such as about rites of passage.

I asked questions about written Norcal instructions again, at lunch, and there aren’t any, but did get some ideas.
I got done with dinner at 6:45, hardly time to start work, so I’ll work tomorrow. Sadly, no oatmeal on weekends…I’ll be forced to eat at the Garage tomorrow if they’re open. What a shame!

On Thursday (4/2) I returned to Palo Alto. I talked with the parrot on Castro street, and with his owner. Sounds like it’s good I have conversations with him as she says he’s lonely and doesn’t have a mate. I learned his name is Skipper.

Still, rather odd that I can have a better time in conversation with an animal than I can with members of my own species. Skipper’s owner says he can say a lot of words but doesn’t have them in order. I said Goodbye last week, but when I said Bye this time, he did repeat it.

Good Lord. Speech therapy training for parrots.

I swear, it’s like the cat lady in The Simpsons.

I got in around 6 PM and decided I wanted to make the pumpkin date pie in my pie book. Because of what we had it ended up being a fig-squash-honey-ginger pie. Very good. Had that for dinner.
For some reason, even though I checked the doors, stove, oven etc. last night before going to bed, I didn’t actually notice the milk on the counter until this morning when I went and said crap, the milk. Never noticed it when I checked last night.
I think I’m going to stop cooking for awhile until I stop forgetting stuff like that.
I emailed a number of professors and job counselors about the best way to include Anthropology in a resume.
I also emailed one of the museum job sites with a job agent, but unfortunately you have to be currently associated with a museum to get a job agent.
Hmm…if you were currently associated, would you need to have a job agent?
I have Thursday and Friday to work and then Friday I have to go down to SJ so I can be at SJSU on Saturday morning for the Salinas trip with the history club.
I went down to the Common Ground today after GPS stopped running me in circles.The Common Ground is a wonderful local seed supply place, with seeds in Mason jars, and plants alongside.
I bought a tomato hanger thing at Fry’s.

However, I still need to find something to hang it from.Details, details…
I got some bird mesh to keep the squirrels off the garden (hopefully). Either my tomato plants have gone into hibernation over the weekend or they’ve been plowed under by squirrels. I’d have thought squirrels wouldn’t eat the tomato foliage, as human can’t because of the poison in it, but then, squirrels crack walnuts with their teeth. When was the last time you saw a human doing that?
I got 1 tomato plant which is in the back room at the moment. I can plant it outside later, hopefully in the new hanger, but if not in with the beans in the garden. I browsed at the garden section and books. They have a huge seed index book — very interesting. One for vegetables and one for fruit from the Seed Savers Exchange. It has a price on it, so maybe I should get one sometime. I should go back and have a look at seeds.

Came home around 3 PM and went over to the Russian market. They have something that looks like tongue in their freezer, and I need to ask about it. I got some grain and 1 pound of ham.They had some rugalach’s — those cookies with cream cheese, but theirs doesn’t have cream cheese in it. Still good though. I made a garlic ham sandwich for dinner, then threw out the bread as it’s about 2 weeks old. (I would have kept it, but it’s rye. The rest is frozen).

I had the ham and garlic instead. I had blintzes for lunch. Very good.
I watched some TV and am fiddling around with relevant coursework phrasing. I was listening to the internet radio, but thankfully it’s gone off. It had a “skipped record” on the Oldies station. Made it sound as though the Chipmunks were singing. That was kind of funny.

I watered the garden and berries today and poured water back in the little fountain. It was off again yesterday so I just unplugged it. I plugged it back in today. I think it’s water level gets too low, but unless I’m just filling it to working level and its evaporating, I’m not sure what’s going on with it.
So far the only thing surviving in the garden seems to be either cucumber or squash. Probably squash, because of the round green leaves.