Pork center cuts, French fries

The French fries are excellent. The best that I've made here the last dozen or so years. They were boiled first then frozen. 

I've had regular thin pork chops more tender than these. I'll have to do something different with the three remaining pieces. I'll probably make stew out of them with dry chiles. I don't know. 

Wrist. 

Hand, wrist and arm.

The whole thing is getting better. Slowly. I keep testing to see what I can get away with and without receiving a shot of pain so I am actually rather careful with testing. I still cannot set my hand flat on a surface and use it by adding weight. I still can only touch and that touch is utterly necessary so I go around being a bit ridiculous.

Yesterday there was a knock on the door. I yelled, "Coming!" Then got up and answered the door. It took me an incredibly long time. Like grandfather clock on Captain Kangaroo waking up. As a kid that took f-o-r-e-v-e-r and I'd yell at the t.v., "Hurry up!" That's me now. I take incredibly long to stand up then even longer to get going forward, touching things with each step, finally the door, and there stands Elizabeth waiting patiently, not tapping twice, not getting me to go faster. She just waited. Patiently. 

"Apologies for taking so long to answer the door."

     "That's okay."

Then today the UPS driver did the same thing. Sometimes he leaves and sometimes he waits, sometimes he needs a signature. This time I was surprised that he waited. A very long time. I do take ridiculously long to answer the door. There was no other sound besides the initial soft knock. 

"Apologies for taking so long to answer the door." 

     "That's okay."

Okay, now two times in a row and we got a pattern. This pattern tells me that they talked about me downstairs and they agreed not to make a fuss about it taking me so long. They must think ... that I am dying! 

I'll have to live just to mess with their minds. 

They will think it's a miracle because they watched me go down.

Then their faith will be reaffirmed. 

And so will mine.

I made great progress on five separate projects today but without finishing anything so it looks no better than yesterday, but believe me, I inched forward along five separate lines. 

My favorite thing was mixing soil for cactus and citrus. 

I have watched hundreds of videos about dirt. 

Literally hundreds of videos. 

I watched gardener videos, full libraries of them, I watched bonsai videos, organic garden videos, homesteading videos, organic gardening, conventional gardening, home gardening, and scores and scores of videos on commercial gardening, very many mushroom videos, dozens of composting videos, scores of worm casting videos, dozens and dozens of videos on specific organic supplements, organic fertilizers. I consider myself expert on dirt. Yet I almost never actually get my hands dirty.

I decided for the cactus and the citrus that I will need 50% sphagnum moss, 25% orchid bark and 25% sand.

Now, just try to find this combination premixed. They always use some weird thing like perlite. I don't want all those white dots floating around. I must buy the elements and mix them myself. 

Then I planted peppers in it. Not cactus. And not citrus. It's an experiment! And those two things are nearly completed, mixing the soil and planting the peppers. 

I watched this guy's entire YouTube library which is vast. You see this sometimes, the man is giving himself fully to the world, he is not holding back any trade secrets. He is leaving his mark through YouTube. It is quite extraordinary. He is telling us everything that he knows. 

I guess this guy is Chinese but I was wrong then I guessed he is Japanese but that is wrong too so I gave up guessing. He said in a video while wearing a Japanese work jacket, "This jacket is Japanese. I am not Japanese but sometimes I like to feel that way." 

Is that cool or what?

Here he is talking about dirt. If you choose to watch this then you will be expert on bonsai substrate too.

My hand/wrist/arm limitations are stupid. 

I discovered how stupid last night. 

As you know Johnny Nash, the singer of I Can See Clearly Now has died. I did not realize until now that Nash originated the song while Jimmy Cliff made the song as famous. 

I have used the song to practice ASL since it came out at my age of seventeen. This entire time, exactly fifty years, I had the lyrics wrong all along. I thought the lyrics, "Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind" were "dark clouds that pass me by." 

My mondegreen makes better lovelier sense than the real lyrics in this language. "pass me by" works very well at the end of rain, the whole thing gets pushed aside, while "had me blind" makes me sort of poke my eyes out with two crooked fingers. I am clumsy. That is a dangerous sign. No me gusta. Me no likey. I like my misreading better and now I am tormented with actual lyrics that are worse. GAWL! Can't I just be wrong? 

Fifty years of being wrong. And nobody knew. Nobody cared.

I do very well with this busted wrist. I keep the whole thing contained. I make no artistic demands on the injured wrist and the whole thing goes very well until I hit the word "sky." 

It is a flat opened hand. A karate chop hand. You indicate the entire sky with a royal arc of the hand and arm. It can be two-handed or one-handed. The two-handed version works as scissors to sweep an arc that tops the head in front of the face. That simple sign f'k'n hurts!

The one most simple sign of all, the one word that is sustained. And not just regular sustained, no, this word is super-sustained. Nash sings the shit out of this song on the Midnight Special sustaining the word "sky" far longer and differently than any of the other versions I've heard. 

I see this song is interpreted many times on YouTube. It is universally beautiful. It is perfect for interpretation but nobody sustains the word and nobody works the inflection of the word, no interpreter sits on this word and runs through the scales on a single word for as long and as beautifully as Johnathan Nash does. It is operatic. Nobody shows what he is doing with that word, with those notes. Every interpreter just sort of falls apart. None show what the singer is doing. They each act a bit bored. They all miss the boat. And I cannot sustain "sky" either because my hand hurts. 

I look ridiculous trying to do what Nash does, sustain the word and run the scale, and expand forever without deflating, to get lost in the sky without losing power, simply stopping on beat. "Sky" would look great, "sky" would look very musical if it didn't hurt so much to say. That is one measure I have to know how I've healed; how much it hurts to say, "sky."