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Backyard Habitat

Yesterday, I decided to venture forth into the jungle that is my garden to see what kind of damage the weeds have wrought, unchecked as they have been, lo these past three months.  My herbs have managed to hold their own against the weeds (some of them being weeds themselves), and I’ve been helping them along by “pruning” (okay, eating) them occasionally.

A friend had given me some of her extra tomato plants back in April, and they have been thriving, thanks to the red mulch and tomato ladders (oh yeah, and that super something in the NJ soil).

They’re almost ready to eat, but not quite yet.  As I was tying back some unruly branches, some green tomatoes fell to the ground, so I decided to have fried green tomatoes for dinner.  I cooked up some dandelion greens to go with them and topped it off with some fresh purslane, which is an absolutely delicious weed growing in our lawn.  Mmm. The only thing that would have made the dinner better might have been a little chèvre.

On my way back to the house, I passed the pond, which has COMPLETELY overgrown.  Last year I had planted some Anacharis to help filter out some of the decomposing material in the pond.  It’s cheap and apparently a very efficient oxygenator, and I figured if my one frog was still alive, he’d want some oxygen in the pond, no?  One of the common names for Anacharis is “waterweed,” and now I know why!  This stuff has taken over!  The good news is that it’s highly nutrient-rich, so all I have to do is harvest it and throw it on the compost pile for some bangin’ compost…if only I can GET to my compost pile through all the weeds.

I had given up on my one little froggy, since I hadn’t seen him all spring.  I figure he had lived in that pond for well nigh five years, and that’s pretty long for a frog.  But as I passed the pond, instead of hearing the huge croak-SPLASH I’ve gotten so used to hearing when my frog jumps into the pond, I heard eep!-splish! splish!

TWO frogs!  Two little frogs!  So the big frog has gone to the great pond in the sky, but left behind his/her(?) spawn.  I’m surprised there aren’t more frogs (maybe there are, and I just didn’t see them), but I guess my pond is kinda small…plus it’s sort of crowded, what with all the Anacharis about.

I managed to capture one of them with my camera (although in this shot, you can barely see him).  You can see my floating frog house on the left-hand side, which I’ve kept in the pond since winter.  The Anacharis is everywhere!

This shot is a little better.  He actually stood still, eyeing me while I took multiple pictures with my camera, trying not to fall into the pond.  When I got too close, he slipped gracefully into the water.

I know the cats enjoy catching and eating frogs; when I originally bought a bag full of tadpoles back in 2003, I was horrified to find vivisected frog carcasses every so often littering the pathways of the garden.  But perhaps that’s because there were too many frogs for one pond, and they were leaving the safety of the water.

Perhaps it was just nature correcting the balance.  Because recently, the cats haven’t seemed too interested in the pond, other than as a place to snooze.  I sure hope they leave the frogs alone right now, because they’re doing their bit to remove mosquitoes from the environment, and I’m all for that.

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So, What’s This Recording Thing I’ve Been Doing?

So for the last month I’ve been working on a project with The Crossing: the first recording for this fledgling group, and hopefully a sign of things to come.

The piece is Kile Smith’s Vespers, written for The Crossing (a new music choir) and Piffaro (a Renaissance wind band), and I can’t wait until the CD is out in stores.

And, of course, because I seem to be one of those people who takes on WAAAY too much at once, I was not simply learning my music (including a newly rewritten movement Kile threw at us at the last minute!!), I was helping to organize flights from folks coming in from out of town, making sure everyone had the music, and even making available transposed versions for those of us with perfect or even good relative pitch.

(Piffaro’s instruments are all tuned to A=463 rather than the standard 440, which means that all the notes on the page really sound a half step higher than they look on the page, which can drive folks like me nuts.  As Adrian Monk says, “It’s a blessing and a curse.”)

At the same time, I was trying to fulfill my AGMA duties, which have seemed to multiply, Hydra-like, exponentially (and more viciously) the more tasks I complete (since the stress level for this volunteer job had started to affect me physically, I said enough was enough, and I stepped down as delegate).  Oh yeah, and never mind the fact that I had my day job, too, working at the transcription place, which I’m leaving at the end of the month (more on that later).

Since all work and no play make Maren very grumpy, Ray bought Grand Theft Auto IV for me to release some of my frustrations on.  Yeah, I know.  I don’t seem like the GTA4 type, but I’m really liking it.

Anyway, the recording was intense, but I think it went well.  And I really think the final product will be fantastic.  I posted a story that David Patrick Stearns did for WRTI on the piece.  I think it definitely sums up what the process was about…oh yeah, and you get to see me in my pigtails, which I sported every day that week because it was so hot and muggy.

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He’s the Sheik of Araby (without no pants on!)

My father has finally finished his two-month, four-continent adventure he has termed his “victory lap around the world.”  He retired from his job of drudgery as a database programmer at a California hospital back in April, and has since been traveling to various states and countries to visit family and old friends before settling for good in Bangkok , Thailand.

I have been in contact with him on and off for much of his travels,  but I couldn’t be able to do justice to the many stories he has from his trip.  He was thinking about starting a blog (yes, I told him, blogs are awesome!), but I think he was so busy experiencing these crazy things that he didn’t really have time to document it.  Most likely he’ll have something to show soon, maybe on his site .

In the meantime, I know that some of you are actually following my blog, not because you know me at all, but because you’re friends with my dad, so I’ll fill you in with some (highly abbreviated!) stories that he told me along the way.

His trip across America was quite tiring:  a lot of driving, which he wasn’t so thrilled with.  He called me from New Orleans, where it was raining and the Jazz Festival was going on.  He turned out to have a pretty good time there, although when he talked to me on the phone, he was pretty disappointed with the Jazz Festival in general.

When he arrived in NJ to visit me, we had a pretty nice time together, if I don’t say so myself.  He dropped off a truckload of boxes (mostly old books that he didn’t need in Thailand), and we drove to Long Island to visit the Long Island Montalbanos.  My brother joined us for that leg of the journey.  Then he stayed in NY at my brother’s house for a week, visiting friends in the city.

He next called me from Oslo at the house of a guy for which I have very fond memories.  Drew had rented a room in our house in San Francisco when I was very young (I must have been 4?  Maybe 5?).  He and I used to play pretend all the time (this made a big impact, because my dad never liked to play pretend), and I have so many great memories of climbing into the recliner and pretending to blast off into space.  Anyway, he teaches in Norway now, and the last time I saw him, I was 9 years old, the summer that I spent with my dad on the Norwegian Star .  Drew had picked me up from the airport in Oslo (I was an unaccompanied minor) and let me stay in his guest bedroom until my dad’s ship docked.

I say all this because it was such a thrill to actually see Drew for the first time in way too many years.  My father’s laptop had a webcam attached to it, and since I called on Skype , the webcam automatically let me see both my dad and Drew as I talked to them.  Alas, my computer does not have a webcam, so they couldn’t see me…I may just have to remedy that soon.

The next call I got was from my dad in Nice .  He was bummed because his laptop had been stolen a few days prior at a busy train station in Barcelona .  So, not only did he no longer have his fancy (relatively new!) laptop with all his information and documents, but he also lost all the pictures that he had taken up until that moment!  Of course, if he had been writing a blog this whole time, he would have had the pictures somewhere in the blogosphere…but I digress…

After Nice, he had traveled to Sicily to jam with Giuseppe Montalbano (no close relation, that we know of anyway…) and his band .  Then it was on to Egypt , where he stayed with an old Peace Corps friend and her husband.  On his way to Cairo, Egypt Air lost his luggage, so he had to delve into his friend’s husband’s closet.  He sent me this picture, with the following caption:

“Ever since I arrived in Egypt , I’ve realized I have always had a mission in life, and it must be to struggle for the One True Way, and the One True God. I know you will follow me in this quest. Meet me at the second pyramid on the left. The Sphynx has a riddle for you.”

Those of you who know my father will appreciate the humor.

I just heard from him yesterday, and he told me that he was safely ensconced in his new home in Thailand.  If you wish to contact him, send him an email (no, I’m not going to broadcast his email on this blog!  What kind of a dope do you think I am?) or give him a call…his old cell phone should forward to his new international phone.

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What’s In A Name?

Even before I got married, people had issues with my name. I’ve had folks misspell, mispronounce, and just plain misunderstand my name, and over the years, I’ve been pretty tolerant about the whole thing. After all, I figure, “Maren” is not exactly a common name, and neither is “Montalbano.” So I give folks a break and patiently wait for them to figure it out. But now that I’ve gotten married and changed my name, it’s gotten even worse, and I’m starting to get a little mad.

Before I get into this diatribe, I do want you to know that I thought long and hard about changing my name. After all, Maren Montalbano is a brand, and I’ve spent many years making sure people remember that name and associate it with me and my face. But, on the other hand, I wanted to make sure the world knew that I was someone’s wife now. I’m a Mrs., not a Ms. or a Miss, and after having addressed multiple invitations for the wedding, I realize that it’s always easier when you can write “Mr. & Mrs. So-and-So” rather than “Mr. So-and-So & Ms. Such-and-Such.”

So I hit on a compromise that MANY women take. I would keep my maiden name, but move it over to my middle name, so that I would now, legally, become Maren Montalbano Brehm. My professional name, my “stage name,” if you want to call it that, is still Maren Montalbano, and always will be. That way, if I get a check written out to Maren Montalbano, the bank won’t have too hard a time guessing that it’s really me, since both my middle and last names will be on the account. Sounds simple enough, right? Plus, it’s what the majority of women do when they change their names.

The trouble started when I went to Italy last year, and the travel agency who was arranging the tour messed up my name on the plane tickets, putting “Montalbano-Brehm, Maren” down as my name on the ticket, when my passport, which was correct, said “Brehm, Maren Montalbano.” You’d think that would be an easy enough error to correct, but I was held up at every single airport I went through on that trip because my ticket didn’t match my passport. When I tried to correct it through the airline, they said they would make a note on the passenger list, but I STILL got held up at the airport. The fine people at TSA (and the French equivalent) clearly thought that I was trying to pull a fast one on them by adding a hyphen to my name.

Once home, it actually took several tries to change my bank accounts and credit cards. One credit card couldn’t be bothered to change my name even after I sent them a copy of my marriage certificate, a letter signed by me, and a copy of my driver’s license to prove it was me, so I have since canceled the card.

The township where I live has such bad record-keeping that they not only have my name wrong, but our address wrong as well! We found out last year that the township had been sending property tax bills for years to Ray’s previous address. When we received a zoning permit for replacement of an AC unit that we didn’t ask for, I wrote the township a very detailed letter, returning the zoning permit, along with a copy of the deed to the house, our marriage certificate, my driver’s license, and asked very politely for them to change their records. This year a similar thing happened again, so I went down to the municipal offices and made sure their databases were changed (clearly they don’t share data between departments).

Earlier this year, when it came time for us to give our receipts and reports to our tax accountant, I included a copy of our marriage certificate (which states very clearly what my new name is!) so that he could file our taxes with the correct name. Our taxes came back, and every single page said “Montalbano, Maren W.” We pointed out the problem to the accountant, who said, “Just get some white-out and change the name on the papers yourself.” So I did.

Now we’re getting our tax refunds, and if that isn’t a botched up mess, too! NY State sent me a check for “MAREN MONTALBANOBREHM,” which is a new variation — pretty creative, if you ask me. NJ State sent a check made out to “Montalbano Brehm” with no reference to “Maren” at all. Now, I’m not concerned that I won’t be able to deposit these checks, but how difficult is it for people to figure this out? Haven’t women been doing this for centuries?

On the other side of the spectrum, I am singing in a concert at my church this weekend, and all the posters and flyers have been printed with my name listed as “Maren Brehm.” I know I had been a little flexible with the posting of my name in the church bulletins, since I figured this group of people, since they knew I had just been married, would expect my name to change. And my choir director even asked me how to list my name, and I had told him, “Either ‘Maren Montalbano’ or ‘Maren Montalbano Brehm.’” I think he took this to mean I didn’t mind being listed as “Maren Brehm,” and, it turns out, I do. Professionally, at least.

I do realize I’ve made it a little bit difficult by insisting on keeping my maiden name as my professional name. So, mea culpa , mea culpa , and maybe I deserve a little bit of the grief I’m getting. But there are only three names to deal with, people. Don’t hyphenate it, ask me before you put my name on an advertisement, and you’ll be fine. It’s not like I’ve got a name like Tarquin Fintimlinbinwhinbimlim Bus Stop F’tang F’tang Ole Biscuit-Barrel. Then, I think, I would be in a lot more trouble.

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Random Thoughts

I sang at a wedding today…it was a beautiful ceremony, lovely couple, gorgeous day. But after having gone through my own wedding so recently, I now notice all the things that could have gone better had the bride & groom (or maybe the wedding planner?) thought the details through just a little bit more.

The ceremony took place outside, and the bridesmaids and brides had to traverse a very long lawn to get to the site. They did so in 4-inch stiletto heels, all of them. I almost wanted to say kudos to them, but I was too busy laughing (on the inside, of course!) as their heels accumulated rose petals like those pointy canes that pick up trash while they marched down the rose-carpeted aisle. The bride had to be held up by her parents as she walked because she kept falling into the soft ground. NOTE TO ALL FUTURE BRIDES: if you are going to get married outside, make sure you (and your bridesmaids) choose appropriate footwear.

The ceremony music was untraditional, for sure, which made me happy, because I got to sing something other than Schubert’s Ave Maria . Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for a bride who knows what she wants with regard to music, rather than the standard, “What do you suggest?” Because that’s when I end up with Ave Maria or Panis Angelicus or one of the oldies but goodies. I do like a little change now and again, just to spice things up. But whoever picked the music didn’t really think of the timing or the appropriateness of some of the selections. The groomsmen entered to a somewhat menacing Janá?ek piece played by the string quartet, and they were lined up at the front and ready to go before the piece was even halfway over. And my solo, “Ich habe genug” (Bach Cantata, BWV 82), would have been 8 minutes long before we cut it down to a mere 3′50″ during the rehearsal immediately prior to the ceremony. SECOND NOTE TO FUTURE BRIDES: make sure you know what all your music selections sound like and how long everything is going to take.

Other than that, everything else went pretty smoothly. There were some problems with the wireless microphones, but I didn’t need a mic in that intimate setting, so I personally didn’t care one way or the other.

In other news, I’ve actually had enough time on my hands that I’ve been surfing around Digg.com (dangerous, I know) and came across this picture , which had the title “Never piss off an engineer.” Priceless.

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Aha!

I just knew it was the Ground Chuck! I caught him snacking on leftovers over in the compost pile. Hey, that’s my compost pile! Oh, wait, I’m not going to eat it anyway.

And so I decided to take a video of his dastardly doings:

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The Case of the Missing Lettuce

I’ve been fortunate enough these past few days to have a little more time on my hands than usual…so much so that I can actually spend time puttering about in the garden, as you can see from my previous post.

A friend started too many tomato plants from seed (despite my warnings that there was something about NJ that makes tomatoes thrive!), and now she’s been giving away her surplus plants. Good news for me, since I’ve been spending all my money at the nursery buying sweet woodruff and tansy and pennyroyal because I’m a big herb geek. As a result, my herb collection is growing nicely, but my vegetable garden is somewhat lacking. These new tomato plants make up for that.

You may be wondering about the red stuff under the plants: that’s red mulch, and it’s supposed to reflect red light back to the plants, which apparently makes the plant produce more tomatoes. I’ve never used the stuff before, so we’ll see…I did need some mulch, though, because weeds in my garden are vicious! And while I was buying tomato ladders, I figured I’d try some of this stuff and see how it works out.

I haven’t been completely negligent with the vegetables; I did buy some Boston lettuce to fill out my little kitchen herb garden outside the back door. I figured that was a good place to put it because if I ever felt the hankering for a salad, all I’d have to do was walk five steps out the door and satisfy my urge for roughage. However, as I was tending to my plants this morning, I noticed that someone…or something…had pilfered my lettuce!

At first, I thought it might have been another mistake by the overzealous weed-wacking lawn guy who destroyed my herb garden last year, but he’s the whole reason I put the little white fence up. Surely, I thought, even he would think twice before going inside a clearly designated growing area before laying waste to all things leafy and green.

And then I took a closer look. This looked to be the work of a smaller animal, perhaps one with a certain amount of intelligence and strength, but not a very good capacity for jumping over fences, because as you can see from the picture (if you click on the pic, you can get a closer view), the fence has been pulled out of the ground, and clearly with a certain amount of force, since Ray and I made sure those things were good and stuck in the ground.


Could it be one of the cats? Somehow I highly doubt it. Squirrels? They are pests, and omnivores to boot, but why wouldn’t they just jump over the fence instead of picking it up? An opossum? They, too, are pests, but I think they would rather just root through garbage or eat leftover cat food rather than go through the trouble of pulling up the fence. Besides, I’m not sure they’re smart enough or strong enough to pull up the fence.

My guess? A groundhog. We do have a resident groundhog in our neighborhood; Ray and I call it the “ground chuck” because I keep confusing the name groundhog with woodchuck (they both refer to the same animal, by the way, and yes, I realize that ground chuck is something one usually finds at the supermarket). Our Ground Chuck has been known to munch on the dandelions in our yard, which certainly has endeared him (or her?) to us. I know they do eat snails and grubs and insects, too, though, so they’re still beneficial animals to my garden, and I’m not inclined to go on the offensive with this guy.

I guess my only option is to either plant a whole lot of lettuce and hope there will be some left for me (doubtful) or just not plant lettuce and let Ground Chuck feast on the dandelions. We have plenty of those, for sure.

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Feeding the Compost Monster

In our household, we have all sorts of characters doing domestic chores: our dish fairy will miraculously do the dishes overnight; the laundry fairy will take the dirty clothes downstairs and put them in the washing machine; and our trash goblin makes sure the trash gets taken out to the curb.

And we seem to have a gnome infestation as well.

Today, though, I spent a good amount of time in the garden talking to all the feral fairyfolk outside, including the compost monster, which is a friendly sort of beast that I feed kitchen scraps to. Some of them didn’t mind being photographed, so I thought I’d share my garden bounty with you.

Sage in foreground; behind that: lavender; in the very background, dill.

I also had some time to (finally) plant my herb garden, replacing the one I had cultivated two years ago, but which had been blithely mowed over by an overzealous yard worker last year while Ray and I were on our honeymoon. I didn’t have the heart to start over when we returned, but now I feel it’s time to turn over a new leaf (so to speak) with a new spot for my kitchen herbs.

My poor pond has been neglected for quite some time, and although the frog has lasted so far for about 4 years, I have not seen him this season, despite the fact that I had a little floating froggy home for him in the pond. It may be past time to clean the pond and populate it with new fish and tadpoles.

Oh, the pond needs to be mucked out, big time!!

Now that I am done with three months of nonstop singing, I can actually relax with a bit of pond-mucking. There’s nothing like getting in waist-deep into a pond full of partially-decomposed plant matter. Mmm.

Oh, yes, and Itchy was hanging out in his favorite catnap spot while I was puttering away.  He, too, allowed me to take pictures, but only because he knew I was getting his good side.

Itchy was taking a nap before I started bothering him.
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Slow Fast Food

At the end of the day on Friday, Ray called me up and said he was in the mood for greasy chicken for dinner, and that he wanted to stop at KFC on the way home. Since I don’t eat chicken, he wanted to know which of the various carb-tastic sides I wanted him to bring me. I personally was in the mood for some greasy fish, so he decided to swing by home and take me to the combination KFC/Long John Silver’s down the road from our house. (He’s so romantic, isn’t he?)

When we got to the restaurant (and I use that term loosely, of course), and we were surprised to see the place was packed, with at least eight people waiting for their food. Since there was nobody in the cashier line, however, we decided to order. After about five minutes, a skinny, vacant-eyed teenager sporting a name tag saying “Hello my name is Ibn” (real name or typo? Who knows?) showed up at the cash register, stared at me while I ordered an L1 combo and an eight-piece crispy bucket (all chicken, specified Ray), then slowly poked a few buttons on his screen and absent-mindedly handed the receipt to me, at which point we joined the throngs by the pick-up counter.

After a few minutes, I looked at the receipt to double-check our number and where we were in line, when I noticed that while Ibn the Cashier Wonder had entered Ray’s order in, my L1 combo was nowhere on the ticket. I made my way back to the now abandoned cash register (Ibn was now wandering aimlessly through the kitchen with a pair of tongs in his hand) to correct the mistake, when a woman over at the pick-up counter says loudly, “Excuse me, we’ve been waiting for our food for a half hour. Can you tell me what the hold-up is?”

A half hour? I looked again at the workers in that kitchen, where the mean age was probably 16.5. Ibn was still wandering around with his tongs like a lost child, there was a guy on the chicken detail who didn’t seem to be really paying attention to the orders coming in. There was another guy way at the back pushing a broom around, but he didn’t really seem to be accomplishing the whole cleaning part of the job. There was a girl running the fry station, but when the alarm kept going off, she simply shut it off without taking anything out of the fryer. The girl at the drive-through window looked like she was actually doing her job, as was the manager (who was probably all of 22 years old).

Ibn clearly saw me waiting at the cash register, and he studiously avoided me. I gave up and figured I didn’t want to confuse them any more than they were already confused, and resigned myself to just eating something else when we got home.

After a few minutes, Half Hour Complaining Woman and her son got their food, and the rest of the crowd around the pick-up counter started to get antsy. The kids in the kitchen started moving a little faster, but their movements were still incredibly inefficient, so nothing was still getting done.

While we waited, two guys came in, waited at the cash register for about ten minutes without anyone acknowledging them, and finally left. Another gentleman showed up and put his order in, but he had obviously been there before, because he brought a book to read while he waited.

Ray remarked that he’d never had any problems with this place, but now that it changed from just a KFC to a KFC/Long John Silver’s, they now had two menus to deal with, and that must just be too much for them to handle.

Finally, the manager gave up trying to follow the orders on the screen and just started asking people what they had ordered so that she could fill them. Ibn chose this point to get helpful and asked Ray what he had ordered. “Eight piece,” Ray shouted over the din. Ibn blinked and turned away. I tried to get Ray to go up to the counter and show the manager his ticket, but Ray wouldn’t budge.

Another eternity later, the manager yelled, “Did somebody order a 12 piece crispy?”
Ray raised his hand and said, “Well, eight piece, but yeah.” The manager, clearly frazzled at this point, slapped a top on the bucket and handed the whole thing to him. We got out of there in a hurry.

I took another look at our receipt and realized that we, too, had been there for a half hour. That’s not fast food; that’s slow food.

Ray felt really bad that I never got to have my greasy fish, so he took me to Taco Bell (okay, there’s no greasy fish there, but it’s still junk food, and that’s kind of what we were both craving). We still had to wait a little bit for our food (10 minutes instead of 30 minutes), but the kitchen did seem much more organized. Unfortunately, my food was pretty inedible…I mean, more so than regular fast food…but at least we got it in less time.

When we got home to eat our food, Ray took a look inside the bucket of chicken and realized there were only 7 pieces of chicken in his 8-piece order. We chalked it up to the level of education these kids had been getting. Willingboro Township (where the KFC is) has the worst public schools in the state of NJ…so bad, apparently, that the students can’t even count pieces of chicken, much less function well in a minimum wage job that a monkey could do. Thanks a lot, New Jersey.