November 2004 Archives

I set about engineering the perfect birthday this year.

I'm the first one to admit that I'm spoiled, as far as birthdays go. The 29th never falls on Thanksgiving, thanks to tricks of leap years and dates, but it generally falls very near that day -- sometimes the day after, sometimes during the weekend following. More often than not, I have the day off for my birthday. My family traditionally celebrates my birthday in Corpus Christi, either the Friday or Saturday following Thanksgiving, so I'm lucky enough to have the whole family in attendance. It's a great deal, if you can get it.

In recent years, my birthdays haven't all been ideal. Last year was pretty uneventful -- a nice day overall, but year before last, when the 29th fell the day after Thanksgiving, the toilets backed up in my mom's house, and we had to call a plumber. Great times, oh yes. The year before that, I finished training and demoed on my birthday. It went well enough, and they didn't fire me or anything, but it was stressful until it was over with.

This year, my birthday fell on a work day once again -- a Monday at that. The thought of spending my birthday at work just seemed so very... distasteful, so I asked for the day off.

I went for a hike at McKinney Falls State Park, which is where I took my best picture ever, a snowy egret standing in a shallow pool at the top of the falls, back in September. After all the rains we've had in central Texas recently, there's no way I could've gotten to the place I took that picture. The falls which were a comparative trickle in September rushed today. It was beautiful and violent, and I took lots of pictures, naturally. I spent most of the time there bird watching. I found a little picnic table to sit at and set up my tripod, and the birds just started showing up. It was incredible. My roster for the day includes: great blue herons, snowy egrets, double-crested cormorants, eastern bluebirds, yellow-throated vireos, a cardinal, titmice, chickadees, and a red-bellied woodpecker. Artless bird pictures are, naturally, forthcoming.

A front blew through as I was standing creekside, trying to photograph some egrets and cormorants perched at the top of a tree. The birds were sharing the tree with turkey vultures, but when the chilly wind blew through, all the birds took off in unison. It was an awesome sight.

As I was preparing to leave, I passed by the upper falls again and noticed an artist painting them. I took a few pictures of the artist and the falls. It was a beautiful, picturesque scene, and I felt lucky to have captured it.

I'm 28 years old today.

The phone kept ringing yesterday, right around lunchtime. First, it was distant relations, calling for my cousins. Then it was my cousins, calling to wish us a happy Thanksgiving. Then it was my uncle, calling to do the same. My family was acting a bit strangely, but I didn't really think anything of it -- they can be that way sometimes. I was minding my own business, taking pictures in my grandmother's back yard as people talked, and it wasn't until she handed me the phone that I realized something was up.

"Hello?"
"Hello?"
"Is this Rachel?"
"...Yes?"
"Do you know who this is?"
"...No?"
"You don't know who this is?!"

"...oh my God."

It was Claudia. It was around 12:30 our time when she called, so in Romania, it was 7:30pm, well after dark. She was standing in the main square of the citadel in Sighisoara, one of the places we went last summer, talking to me on a public phone. I haven't heard her voice since May, and I certainly wasn't expecting to hear it now.

She's doing well. I think she's doing well. We talked for a long time about nothing in particular. It was 70 degrees in Corpus Christi, and a few degrees below freezing in Sighisoara. It was so, so good to hear her voice.

The weather has been crazy in Austin lately. Cold, then hot again, back and forth, and lots and lots of rain. As best I can tell, we're up to about twenty-five inches above normal for the year; even today, we had a huge thunderstorm, and the rain was falling sideways.

The good news is that the plants are taking care of themselves with all the rain, which saves me from having to do it, as long as they aren't swept away in the flooding. The bad news is that I haven't had a whole lot of time to do outdoor photography in between rainstorms and after work, especially since it gets dark around 5:30 lately. Last week, I took Tuesday off work, intending to go out to Lost Maples, one of the few local areas where you can see fall foliage, while there were still leaves on the trees, but the weather was so bad that I stayed home instead and didn't do anything.

The rain has brought with it all sorts of weirdness, though. Our front yard has a drain to the sewer that we use to keep it from flooding in the wet weather, and that's been open more often than it's been closed lately. I'm not much of a fan of the drain, but I have to say it's a fulfilling feeling to open it up and watch the water drain out of the yard like some giant bathtub. It improves my mood immensely somehow.

The rain brought these crazy mushrooms, as well -- not in my yard, but at work, across the street from my building. I'm no mushroom identifier, but these are impressive indeed -- each clump the size of a small tree trunk.

In an interesting bit of coincidence, I cooked mushroom soup last night, the way Claudia and I always used to make it, though without the creme fraiche that we usually include. It wasn't quite from scratch, but it was very, very good.

Mushroom Soup

• 1 yellow onion, chopped (I usually get bored with the chopping and crying about 2/3rds of the way through the onion and say 'to hell with it' and stop there.
• 1 pound of mushrooms, sliced (I usually add more. Mmm, mushroomy.)
• 1 32 oz. box of creamy portobello mushroom soup

Sautee onions until they're glassy. Add mushrooms and sautee those until they're reduced in size and have absorbed all the oniony and mushroomy goodness. Add box of soup and bring to a boil. (If you're using creme fraiche, you add it in when the soup has come to a boil and allow it to melt down nicely. It's incredibly rich and fattening, but without the creme fraiche, it's vegan, which is a nice bonus.)

And then it's done. Very easy -- I was even able to remember how to do it without pleading for directions from Claudia.

As I was cooking the soup last night, I did some quick Google research on mushrooms and discovered that the cultivated ones double in size every 24 hours. Fascinating, but if that's true of the crazy mutant mushrooms that live outside my office, I may not have a place to work in a few days.