1. Boil jars & lids.

2. Wash strawberries.

3. put on an apron.

4. combine equal parts strawberries and sugar.

put it in a big pot, let sit 15 – 30 minutes to dissolve.

Turn on the heat. Boil; evaporate the water; stir; reduce; stir; it thickens; stir. Stir some more.

When the mixture drips slowly from a metal spoon in a non-watery fashion, pour into jars using a wide mouth funnel. Put a lid on it. Hope for the best. What you want is something not too thin, not too thick. I always go too far & end up with too-thick jam. Better too thin than too thick. You can always boil it a little longer, but it’s much harder to go back in time.

Don’t worry about the mess. It’s just sugar.

Enjoy.

I translated this book, and am quite fond of it. The cover might make it look like a rollicking story of adventurous girlhood, fun days at the lake, or something like that. It actually deals with rather dire and serious issues, and there are no scenes of summer at the lake. More of a frozen and flooding rivers kind of story. But it does have a warm heart. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, The Limit is “a quiet, mature novel” that “explores the limits of people’s control over their own actions and circumstances, and the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.”

More PES videos on the PES youtube channel. Western Spaghetti, made in a style similar to this film, is particularly good.

A coworker was cleaning out his office a bit, said he was trying to make it look less like a dorm room.  “Do you want this?”

“Rather!”

I nearly missed National Poetry Month.

I’ve heard that April was chosen to celebrate poetry because of T.S. Eliot’s beginning for The Wasteland:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But even if there were no such Eliot poem I think April would seem the logical choice of a month to celebrate poetry, at least here in Western Washington. Except for those freak Aprils when the weather is nothing but freezing sleet from beginning to end, April is usually that time of year when it feels as if there may be such a thing as paradise.

Every April when poetry month comes around Eliot’s lines come to mind, and that always makes me think of the Michael Franks song Coming to Life.

(There’s no actual video here – it’s just for listening)

Happy Spring!

I’ve said it before: when he’s at his best, there is no one with a voice as subtle and masterful as George Jones. Gives me the shivers.

I heard about the song’s inclusion in the National Recording Registry from Studio 360, which has a great series about audio recordings chosen for the registry.

Here are some advance reviews:

“In Tuomainen’s first appearance in English translation, a long-unpublished poet takes to the streets of a grimly dystopian Helsinki in search of his vanished wife… Tapani’s search, which will lead him through an appalling series of cityscapes to some shattering discoveries about the wife he thought he knew so well, is the stuff of authentic nightmares.” – Kirkus

“It’s no accident that Antti Tuomainen’s protagonist is a poet. As rendered in this sensitive translation from the Finnish by Lola Rogers, the book’s language is as important as the tension generated by the narrative.” – Barry Forshaw, The Independent

“The murders and their culprit take a backseat in this fraught thriller as Tuomainen conjures up in spare, softly poetic prose the collapse of social order and human decency in the face of environmental havoc.” – Metro UK

“The Healer is a fantastic introduction to a promising new name in Scandinavian Crime.” Kate Wilson, Booktrust

I found filling out my complicated self-employment tax forms extra irksome this year after learning that a plan to make taxes easier to pay has been in the works for years, but software companies have successfully lobbied to keep it from being adopted.

But you’ve already done your taxes (right?), so it’s safe for you to learn about it. The anger will fade by the time you have to fill out the unnecessarily and purposely difficult forms our crappy tax system insists that we provide.

Here’s a song to remind us of the smug feeling of virtuousness that is our reward.

Keep on smiling!