Haiku Retrospective

In celebration of my 50th birthday, I'll be posting a selection of haiku that I've written over the last 15 years.

The earliest haiku were 5-7-5 ditties without juxtaposition, seasonal references, or any of the things that I've come to believe make haiku haiku.

salsa-stained jammies.

dirty spoon, empty teacup.

morning's work untouched.

chi fountain flowing.

wooden cutlass abandoned

in brick block debris.

garlic and basil

linger from last night's party.

memories of friends.

small boy on keyboard

sister's voices rise to meet

exuberant sound.

clearing chi spaces.
in her joy, she is divine --

burning girlhood flame.

real life in action --

family on Sunday morning.

love builds and love grows.

the moment's enough.

beauty enough in each hour

to last a lifetime.

25 August 1996

the candy diet

I was resigned to either staying the same over the holidaze or even gaining a few pounds. I've kind of been watching my calories, but also nibbling frequently on fudge, sesame snaps, and pine nut brittle.

So it's been amusing/the flip side of frustrating to watch the scale in the mornings and watch the pounds peel off. About 4 of them in the past 10 days. The only time I've lost weight faster is when I've been seriously ill.

It must be the candy. :)

Seriously, though, maybe it is the candy. A serving of hard candy probably has fewer calories than cookies or bread, with a satisfyingly sweet taste that doesn't leave me craving more. Unlike, say, french fries, which keep poking me until I eat another one.

In all honesty, it might simply be that I've been running at top speed most of these ten days. Perhaps I've been burning more calories than usual and perhaps I've simply been too busy to eat.

Pine Nut Brittle

This is my invented recipe of the year.

This Pine Nut Brittle was a big hit at our Quaker Meeting Christmas Eve gathering.

Preliminary (heretical) thoughts about candy-making:

Ditch the thermometer. Any candy syrup goes through predictable stages: thread, soft ball (fudge), firm ball (caramel), hard ball (nougat), soft crack (taffy), hard crack (hard candies), and burnt. These stages are best evaluated by dripping a small amount of the syrup in ice water, gathering the syrup into a ball, and then testing/tasting the ball.

Start the testing process a little before you think the syrup is ready and continue at frequent intervals until the candy is just right. When it's just right, turn the heat off immediately (candy syrup seems to go through actual phase changes, and the next one can be lightning quick) and do the follow-up processing right then.

For this reason, it's good to have everything set for candy-making before you start. Get your ice water ready, have a set of clean spoons for testing, have the pan the candy will set up in prepared, and have any last minute ingredients measured and ready to pour in.

Once you get the hang of the syrup stages, candy-making is really really easy.


Pine Nut Brittle

1/4 cup honey
2 cups sugar
1/3 cup water
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice

sprinkle of sea salt
1 1/3 cup pine nuts
2 teaspoons basil

Roast pine nuts and chop fine, until they're about the size of sesame seeds. When cool, toss with the basil and sea salt.

Line a jelly roll pan with foil and spray lightly with vegetable oil.

Fill a 2-cup pitcher with ice and add water to fill. Get out a small bowl and set next to the pitcher.

Combine first four ingredients in a saucepan. Heat to dissolve sugar and then bring to a boil. Cook 15-20 minutes until mixture is at hard crack stage. To test for doneness, pour ice water into the small bowl and drop in a small bit of the syrup. When done, syrup will crackle on hitting the water, and the candy will be crisp and crunchy, no longer chewy at all but not yet burnt.

Mix in pine nut mixture and spread immediately in jelly roll pan, smoothing to edges of pan.

Allow to cool slightly (very slightly) and score into small pieces (less than an inch on a side) with a greased knife or pizza cutter. Allow to cool completely and break pieces apart with your hands. Store in an airtight container.

Garry and I were shopping in downtown Santa Cruz today. I was feeling Christmassy, so I put on a green mini-dress, red tights, and some long black socks with cherries on them. Also a red-and-blue scarf, green jingle bell earrings, and a red coat with a hood.

So we shopped for a while and then split up to do some private shopping. As I was coming back to meet Garry, a scruffy bearded guy stopped me to tell me I'd won the Best-Dressed Award, and he really digs leg warmers.

Only in Santa Cruz can a woman win a best-dressed award from a homeless guy.

Small Miracles

15 years ago last November, I was feeling good, fooling around on rollerblades, showing off my newfound ability to skate backwards. I stumbled, fell, and dislocated my femur.

I walked around with my leg out of my hip joint for about three days before visiting my chiropractor and asking her to pop it back in place for me.

For the next 10 years, my hip didn't heal. The leg felt loose in the joint and the center of the joint felt spongy and inflamed. I walked with a limp. The instability in the hip joint spread to the tailbone and lower back. I was able to manage the pain and disability, but not to recover from it.

I had two sons during those 10 years. In 2005, my then-almost-6-year-old accepted my disability as a fact of life. He'd never known me when I wasn't careful of my body. He'd never seen me run or rollerblade or do any of the physically active things that I still felt were a part of me.

I tried all sorts of things to heal my body during those 10 years. I exercised as I could, exercises to strengthen the muscles and realign the hip area. The pain waxed and waned but never really left me.

Finally, I ended up in the office of a naturopath, Bobbi Spurr. After our intake interview, she said that my body was constantly fighting a losing battle. She recommended that I go through extensive testing for food allergies.

$1200 dollars later, I was presented with a list of the foods I was allergic to. The list was extensive: all dairy, eggs, most beans (including green beans), corn, almonds, soy. I cut the problem foods from my diet.

Within two weeks, my health changed dramatically. The pain in my hip left me, the rash on my face went away. I felt decades younger. I had energy and felt really good for the first time in 10 years.

It's been 5 years since Bobbi Spurr gave me that list of my food allergies. In that time, I've reclaimed my healthy body. I've worked off 80 pounds. I've lifted weights and danced myself to close to the best condition I've ever been in. I look and feel great.

It's a small miracle, the transformation of Heather Madrone from a disabled, obese woman to the springy, energetic, toned person I am today. A small miracle, taken one bite at a time.

Food runs my life. Every day, I need to avoid even trace amounts of the foods I am allergic to. When I don't successfully manage to avoid them, my symptoms return for a few weeks. I also have to manage my calories closely to keep my weight in line. It's a job every single day.

An ongoing miracle. A work in progress.

People tell me they could never change their diets as radically as I did. It is a nuisance, but I am grateful every day that I know enough to have the choice. I can eat right for my body and be well or I can eat carelessly and live with chronic pain and disability.

It doesn't feel like a choice to me. It's a blessing to know at last what I need to do to keep my body well. I'm grateful every time I can dance. I'm grateful every time I move without pain. I'm grateful when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I'm grateful when I look down at my body while I'm sunbathing. I'm grateful when my husband holds me in his arms.

I'm Just Here for the Sho-oes

From Splintered Sunshine

These shoes went dancing last night.

They took me with them.

They dance divinely -- really smooth action on the dance floor.

They're Latin dance heels with suede soles. They hold my heel firmly in place and both grip and glide beautifully across the dance floor.

I tried some moves. The shoes handled them so gracefully that I tried some more moves.

I saw eyes on me, and the words of Paula Abdul's song Here for the Music came to mind:

A bit modified:

I'm just here for my sho-oes

I really didn't mean to turn you on

And though I kinda like the way you move it

I've already got someone

Here to take me home.

From Splintered Sunshine

Roll-Your-Own Technology

I've been reading about the Apple iPad with the mix of skepticism and interest that is my usual response to hot new technologies. Time, not I, will tell how this one pans out.

I'm a reluctant Apple fan girl. Back in the early days of the Mac, I hated its closed architecture and expensive, exclusive hardware. The PC seemed a much more open, flexible platform at the time. If I had to pick a monopoly wannabe to back, I wanted to back the one that gave me more freedom.

As Microsoft tightened its stranglehold on Windows systems (and also totally failed to get the whole Internet thing), I got more uneasy. I jumped to the Mac with 10.2, largely because of the BSD Unix under the hood of OSX.

By and large, I love the Mac. It's stable and easy to use and lets me tinker in the shell when I want to.

I'm not so thrilled with the iPod and the iPhone, however. They signal a return to the old closed-architecture, vertical-monopoly game that I so distrusted in the initial run of the Mac. I don't want to be locked into a gadget that I can't use as I like. I don't want to have to ask permission from the manufacturer to use my gadgets as I please. That just rubs me the wrong way.

I still don't own a cell phone. In January, I decided that I needed a mobile communications device of some sort. After some research, I decided to get an ASUS EeePC. It came with Windows 7, but I soon replaced that with the netbook remix of Ubuntu.

Linux has come a long way, babies.

I am positively delighted with the netbook. I named it ipso-facto because it is ipso-facto a computer, I call it by any of a number of diminutives including ipsy, cutie, and ipsy-doodle. It does most things well, and, to my astonishment, ipsy combined with Python have made programming fun for me again.

When the iPad splash started, I wondered if I'd jumped too soon. Early hype suggested that the iPad would prove to be a netbook-killer, that the masses would go for touch screens over keyboards and a closed architecture over open source that really works.

In my mind, the battle lines were drawn: ipsy-doodle or the iPad? Squinting down the line, the sides look familiar. On one side, I see content providers, copyright holders, broadcast media, centralization, homogenization, industrialization, passive consumption, and captive eyes for advertisements and propaganda. On the other side I see content creators, communicators, amateurs, many-to-many communication, decentralization, diversity, do-it-yourselfness, active participation, new ideas, and personal responsibility.

What are computers for? What is the Internet for?

Since very early days, this technology I love so much, that I have spent so much of my life working on and using, has meant very different things to different people. It's both the latest opiate of the masses and also the key to unlock the chains that bind us.

The iPad is another seductive move by the Powers-that-Would-Drug-Us-Into-Senseless-Consumption. The purpose of the Internet is to sit back, relax, let them do the driving for us, and buy more. Those of us who like to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps will find precious little to hang onto in the iPad.

My children spend a lot of time online. I was listening to another talk about how she doesn't like her children to spend much time online. I wondered why it doesn't bother me that my children are online so much. As she outlined the things that her children do online, I realized the essential difference in what our children were doing. Her children are gaming and clicking on links. My children do that, too, but they also use do a fair amount of content creation. They're writing, drawing, editing photos, communicating with people, designing games, and working on collaborative projects.

The free Internet is an idea that has never really existed in the virtual world, but a lot of us found freedom in the cracks around the online frontier. A small, dedicated band of pioneers has always tried to widen those cracks, to turn this space created by the US military into a global commons where ideas can flow freely. We emerged from the halls of academia and the military and high tech, blinked at this new world around us, and claimed it in the name of freedom.

What a strange alchemy that was and is, and how amazing when it actually works.

So the iPad comes out, makes a strong move for the buttoned-down, proprietary, broadcast side of the equation. It has apps you can buy and content you can rent, and no way to open the thing and get at its guts. Someone will jailbreak it, and soon. Apple will either relax its strictures and make it more open or fight to expand its control over the device and the lives of those who use it.

Meanwhile, I will be typing on my little EeePC, trying to make the world a little more free, a little less controlled, a little more open. One keystroke at a time.