Cooking, etc.

So I built and lit a fire, etc. I'd forgotten a long time ago how much work it is to wake up, bundle up, get a fire built and breakfast cooking, and all that. (I think even my more recent camping trips were of the granola-bar-for-breakfast kind, and it may well be that I haven't cooked breakfast over a fire since I was in the Brownies and my dad came along on a father-daughter campout.) Regardless, after some initial false starts we got a fire a'cooking, and the eggs weren't far behind.

My worries about the previous day's snow were largely unfounded, though I hadn't anticipated one technological problem: the Morningstar veggie bacon does not want to get cooked over a fire. Or cooked over any kind of heat. I'm a faux-bacon enthusiast (really), and the difference between the Smart Bacon I usually use and this stuff is the difference between night and a disgusting, awful day made out of charred, oddly colored cardboard. Really, it was pretty gross. This is the kind of problem them Handbook didn't really set out to address, of course (there is no provision for making mock bacon instead of the real stuff), so I'm still going to say it counts. Besides, it looks pretty, right?

(PS: I'm a big wimp, so given the fact that THERE WAS SNOW ON THE GROUND, OKAY GUYS?, I ate my tasty tasty breakfast indoors. I am so not Eagle Scout material.)

I apologize for the delay in posting, by the way. It's been a busy few days, returning to New York and heading to relatives' for the Seder. Additionally, I've just started reading David Grann's "The Lost City of Z," which is pretty much an H. Rider Haggard book in real life, and it is all I want to think about. Tomorrow, partially inspired by that, I have a field trip planned to investigate a very particular type of field surgery. Be prepared.

To build a fire . . .

I remember reading "To Build a Fire" in 7th grade English. Well, sort of in 7th grade English. I sat next to the window, and there was a big stack of books on the windowsill. I think we were actually doing some kind of vocabulary exercises, and I read a lot of short stories under my desk.

(Sorry, Mrs. Nogami.)

Regardless. I'm in Vermont, and tomorrow morning I'm going to be doing part 1 of the Cooking badge -- preparing bacon and eggs, in the open and without a standard kitchen. (I will assume this means I can still use things like knives, plates, etc., because otherwise things seem kind of absurd, and because the Handbook makes reference to cooking over a griddle as an acceptable practice.) For the record, I'll be making veggie bacon.

It's probably in the 30s or 40s here today, so maybe the picture makes things look a little snowier than they actually are. Still, there was a certain amount of brushing snow off of things, and tomorrow I have a certain amount of (probably groundless) concern about snowmelt extinguishing my fire. I've got a lot of dry twigs set up there, though, and a few handfulls of pine needles, so it shoudl all work out. I'll let you know tomorrow, after my delicious breakfast.

(PS: the Handbook also offers me the option to make hunter's stew (what on Earth is this? Must I actually be a hunter? I can't tell), fish, fowl, or game, as well as hoe-cakes, pancakes, or hard tack. I am passing on these, both as a vegetarian and, in the case specifically of the hard tack, as someone with no aspirations of being a quartermaster for a 19th-century whaler.)

There is no better day for this post

Before I begin, I have to say that the House's health care vote could hardly have made me happier. Having spent a large portion of childhood and adolescence on the wrong side of hard-to-insure, and having parents who've been self-employed in some capacity for the majority of their working lives, I've taken great umbrage throughout the debate at the idea that lack of health care is only an issue for the lazy and for mythical welfare queens (haven't we been done with that stereotype since like 1994?). Finally. While I know the new plan isn't perfect (what is?), the acknowledgment that 1) the protection of the people should be a primary role of government and 2) hardworking people can still be screwed over by the insurance system gives me the happiest grin this side of a icanhascheezburger. And believe me, I love a lolcat.

Now. I spent yesterday completing a major badge requirement for first aid. See? See? The promise of cheaper, more accessible health care is not making me abandon my commitment to being able to actually respond to a medical emergency. So there. (Sorry. I shouldn't check in with comments at the NY Times website while writing this.) Anyhow. As I was saying. I spent yesterday obtaining my Red Cross first aid certification.

In general, I was surprised with the brevity of the training program, though of course something is better than nothing. The real problem for me, at the training, is that I'm a wimp. I had a hard time looking at the images of amputations, objects embedded in eyeballs, that kind of thing, in the training manuals. For me, all this is straight-up nightmare fuel, though of course there's the (valid) argument that it's better to experience seeing pictures of it before I find myself walking down the street and coming upon someone whose internal organs have become external. (Despite Good Samaritan laws, I'm still not sure if I'd be able to handle that. Honestly, though, could you?) I know that this isn't a big deal for a lot of people -- at least, popular movies (of the sort I don't watch) would suggest it isn't. But still, I had a real problem with it.

There were thirteen of us in the class, and Antoine, our chipper instructor, walked us through bandaging each others' arms and legs with the least possible thought of actual gore. We spent a large portion of the morning improvising splints and making slings out of strips of gauze which, despite the certain Civil War field hospital air to it, I really enjoyed and was actually quite good at. (Witness John's bandaged arm for the show-and-tell portion of our program. They -- justifiably -- wouldn't let me take pictures at the actual training. Please note, I did not actually injure John's arm in order to wrap this bandage. I'm willing to sacrifice a certain amount of verisimilitude.)

My partner, an older gentleman taking the class in order to become a Red Cross instructor, supplied a counterpoint to Antoine's good nature. He'd done all the classes before, but he had no interest in any amount of sugar-coating. When the first-aid handbook suggested calling for EMT services, each time he'd lean over and ask me "what if we have a 9-11 situation and the infrastructure collapses?" I didn't have an answer. For a minute, I thought he was just paranoid. On the way home on the train, though, a tourist couple asked for directions to the World Trade Center site. Maybe he had a point.

One final thought, and this has more to do with my adjustment to New York than with anything actually first aid based. I'm interested, more and more, with the notion of "the country" here. I still get confused when I hear "the country" applied to places like Long Island, northern New Jersey, and all of Westchester, and a woman in my class made me think about this time and again. She explained that she was taking the class because she has a country house and, when she's there, she's scared to be so far from the hospital. How far, someone asked? Fifteen minutes by car.

I'll leave you with that one.

Just in case you know . . .

Last summer, I was pursuing the bee farming badge when I learned that honey can (allegedly) help combat seasonal allergies. As someone with dramatically (and occasionally hilariously) bad seasonal allergies -- like, I got sent home from school all the time as a kid -- I was pretty psyched. But as someone who prefers to use medical strategies that are actually proven to work, I was doubtful.

Nevertheless, I am also a person who likes to eat things that are delicious. Who isn't? So last night, I went out and bought myself some local honey (I've used up my stuff from last summer already!). On the train home, I noticed something, though. My new 1 lb jar of honey had broken inside my purse. The bee farming badge not only did not prepare me for this, not even a little.

Anyone got any tips for cleaning a pound of honey off of a very lovely camel colored leather purse?

Watch me go from "irritating" to "intolerable"

I read my first-ever anything by Proust this weekend.

Holy crap.

On the off-chance y'all can help me, does anyone have a preferred translator for "Swann's Way?"

Sylvester

I did nothing this weekend. So, so much nothing. It's in preparation for spring break, see. I need to relax in order to be able to actually, thoroughly relax. My doing nothing consisted of making two more batches of hummus, which means I am, at this point, made of nearly 75% chick pea, and of reading a whole hell of a lot of books I don't like much, then posting vitriolic reviews of them over at goodreads. Everyone needs a hobby.

Actually, I did one thing: practiced a new lifesaving technique. For the First aid badge, I need to know not only the Schaefer method of resuscitation (with which, if you'll remember, I nearly killed John in October), but also the Sylvester method. Which does not involve being an animated cat, so you know.

Sylvester's method, it seems, has a lot in common with the version you see a lot in cartoons -- setting up the victim, then working his arms like a pump while he spits out water. In this case, of course, the patient needs to be flat on his back, and some materials instruct you to bind his tongue with elastic to keep him from swallowing it. (I tried this. It hurt more than I expected and got me all spitty, plus looked creepy. Based on all three of these criteria, I would advise you not to bother with the tongue-binding portion.)

Anyway. Once your victim (well, the victim. Presumably, you are not the one who got him there) is sprawled flat-out, there's a certain amount of flipping his arms above his head to make him inhale, followed by flopping them back down for an exhalation. It sort of works, though John (who is, once again, an extraordinarily good sport) found it vastly inferior to the flat-out chest-thumping of Schaefer. It appears that Sylvester (sometimes spelled Silvester, in case you wondered) is a less-vigorous (well, yes) lifesaving method, for when you need less total resuscitation power. Maybe your victim is less-dead, or maybe he's more fragile, I'm not sure.

One week to my first aid class!

Danger!

As you guys know (I think), I'm a teacher. And while I'm justifiably coy about the name and location of my school, I take it enormously seriously. Not humorlessly. Just seriously.

This is what's pushed me towards my next badge: first aid. Once again, I'll be coy, but the subject I teach occasionally requires using sharp or hot tools and there's the potential for injury, no matter how careful I am (or how careful my students are). This isn't an issue of negligence, or of lack of safety precautions, anything like that. We wear gloves, goggles, masks, whatever's necessary. I've never had a serious injury in my classes, though at some of the schools I've taught in, I've broken up some fights. But you never know what's going to happen, and that's why I think it's time for me to, um, be prepared.

The more I've thought about it, the more convinced I've become that my next project ought to be the first aid badge. I just signed up for a Red Cross course, and in 2 weeks I will be first aid trained. Who thought the Handbook project would make me better at my job?

(Incidentally. Are other people as troubled as I am by the arrival of a movie starring the guy from Twilight that uses Sept. 11 as a twist ending? It probably says more about the age of the movie's likely audience -- for them, the WTC hardly existed except as something fated to fall -- but still.)