Essential Dog

My daughter's dog, better known as the Lesser Weevil, lives for walkies every day . . . and for a special treat, a trip to the McAlister Park Dog Park. She's a social creature, and rather outgoing; every human she has ever met has been instantly and utterly her bestest BFF. I do so hope that I would never have to depend upon the Weevil for personal protection in the case of a dangerous psychopath breaking into our house . . . since the Weevil will probably be cowering behind me. With other dogs, it's a matter of all things being more or less equal. A friendly and playful romp with a dog or dogs more or less of her same size and degree of playfulness; too much larger than her and a bit too aggressive with the sniffing brings on pretty much the same reaction as an encounter with a very much smaller dog afflicted with the canine version of a Napoleon complex. Why, why, why are the smallest dogs always the most combative, more prone to biting, more given - in vulgar vernacular - to write checks with their mouths that their posteriors can't possibly cash? I noticed this with a number of smaller dogs in the neighborhood, some of whom persist in getting stroppy with the Weevil, usually from behind a tall fence or at the end of a leash: it's as if they feel they have something to prove.

But none of this happens at San Antonio dog park; sometimes it seems that the more dogs are there, the better they are behaved, although sometimes I do worry about the smaller ones. Not because they are unleashing their inner urge to conquer Europe and invade Russia in winter . . . but because they run a distinct hazard of being knocked flying in a collision with a larger dog, intent on galloping across the dog park. Perhaps there might be some kind of justification for a "tiny dog" section of the park set aside, rather like a shallow "toddler pool" - for those that are under so many inches in height. For now, they all get along together . . . although when our pint-sized Shi-Tzu was still alive and accompanying us to the dog park, she didn't really seem interested in mixing it up with the other canines. She was pretty well glued to my ankles, tiny dog section or not.

A visit to the park is always reassuring to us for another reason - there are always dogs that are larger than the Weevil. People whom we meet in our neighborhood often go on about her as if she is a large dog - when in actual comparison to really, really large dogs - she is really quite dainty. And when I say ‘large dog', I mean about the size of an Irish wolfhound, or a Great Dane, or even just the gangly young Doberman who was there last weekend - all legs and enormous feet and that brown-and-black shark-head which looks so terribly dangerous, until you realize that the dog is nothing but a great friendly doofus and the only danger that he poses is that of knocking you down, sitting on your chest and licking your face. Which happened to me with a young stray Rottweiler once, but that is another story.

Another good thing about the dog park in McAlister Park is that the area around it has just been renovated and landscaped: a double row of sapling trees has just been planted on either side of the path from the parking lot (or is it really a ‘barking lot'?) and another double row of trees on either side of a new paved trail. The new trail leads down towards Salado Creek - a neighbor of ours went on a run a couple of months ago, and she says it is wonderful. When the trees are full-grown, it will be even more so.

Dog lovers may be interested to learn that dog loving organizations esists that are all about getting out and getting moving- for our dogs sakes as well as our own. San Antonio Nature Hounds is just one of many organizations that sponsors events such as training, hiking, camping, tubing, outdoors, picnic, patio dining, group walks or dog pack walks, nearly any day of the week at different locations. (All with their dogs.) Daily exercise is essential for dogs. A tired dog is a well behaved dog and well behaved dogs have happy owners.

Venturing Out to the Rim

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Having a weekend day free - and feeling a touch of cabin fever after four days of ice-cold-oh-my-heck-I-think-I'm-gonna-freeze-winter-weather (San Antonio style), the Daughter Unit and I felt a deep need to get up and get out someplace. Like to a movie - and what about (suggested the Daughter Unit, with a calculating look) seeing a movie at the Palladium! Yes, indeed - said the Daughter Unit with that expression of calculated pleading that she has perfected since she was about four years old - let's go see . . . The King's Speech at the Palladium! Eh - me, I'd have held out for the remake of True Grit, but seeing that practically everyone who had watched The Kings' Speech was singing hosannas of jubilant praise . . . why the heck not?

So we hastened hither, intending to catch a mid-afternoon matinee - it's been out for simply weeks, who the heck could have anticipated that the showing was sold out? Well, anyone cognizant of the size of the theater, and the relatively few yet luxuriously sumptuous seats within, might have foretold this. We bought tickets for a late afternoon show, and went to wander around the Rim . . . starting with the Bass Pro Shop, which we have observed from IH-10 at 60 MPH for many months as we high-tailed it up to the Hill Country for book events. Oh, my: Picture a retail outdoor sporting goods venue blown up to the size of an aircraft hangar and styled like a mad collision between an Adirondack lodge and a natural history museum featuring natural dioramas stocked with taxidermic examples of every kind of game animal, fish or bird native to the North American continent - all that and a two-story tall waterfall, which fell into an indoor pond stocked with real (and quite sizable) samples of game fish.

Occasionally being possessed of a mad impulse to commune with the great outdoors on a 24-7 basis, we wandered upstairs to the camp equipment and housewares department - heavy on stuff to be taken to a hunt camp to prepare food with, either for consumption or for storage. In the case of Lodge brand cast iron cookware, heavy indeed. We admired a very clever little camp oven, to be mounted on top of a standard Coleman camp stove, although the Daughter Unit insisted that the vintage Kangaroo Kitchen camp cooking unit that she found at a garage sale (propane burner, griddle, grilling rack and stove, packed neatly into a little aluminum case the size of a briefcase) was a much more convenient and transportable gadget. And then we were diverted into the aisle of materials and spices for jerky and sausage preparation.

The Daughter Unit loves home-cured sausage and smoked jerky - and since I already have a small dehydrator unit - and the sausage-stuffing attachment for my Kitchenaid, she promptly became enamored of the possibilities for home-made jerky. And all that it took from that point on was the helpful advice of the salesman on duty in that department. His name is Albert, by the way - and he has learned everything about everything in his department. He only works on weekends, though. The Daughter Unit came away with a single packet for making beef jerky and Albert's advice for buying cuts of beef Milanese in bulk . . . I'll have a report by next weekend, on how it all works out.

Oh, and The King's Speech was very good - although I am wondering if much of the happy praise for it isn't just a reaction - so many of the other current movies currently available suck worse than a Hoover factory.

C-c-c-c-cold!

Oh, my - cold, cold, cold, cold! Like into the teens for three days straight at my San Antonio home . . . which wouldn't have been totally out of line for winters in a couple of places that I have lived in. Sondrestrom AB, Greenland, was located thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle and of which it was said that although it wasn't the end of the earth, one had a fairly good view of it from there. Seoul, ROK also suffered from near-arctically cold winters, notably winds that came blasting straight from Siberia . . . and Ogden, Utah, may not have been quite as bitterly cold and wind-chilled during the winter season - but it was quite generous with the snow. It even had snow pictured on the license plates and the admonition to ‘ski Utah'. Personally, I liked the look of snow - especially at Christmas - but shoveling it out of the driveway on a Monday morning so that I could get my car out of the garage and get to work . . . no, not such an aesthetically pleasing experience. Say what you will about days of dreary rain and the resulting street flooding, at least you don't have to shovel rain out of your driveway.

A winter in South Texas usually means a couple of freezing mornings, maybe a rim of ice around puddles and a haze of frost on the grass, and then the thermometer gets right back to the forties and fifties. A whole wardrobe of winter gear - parka, muffler, warm cap, thick gloves and boots, long winter underwear - isn't required. In fact, the winter clothes that I brought from Utah will probably last the rest of my life, at the rate of current use - maybe three or four days a year. Around my San Antonio home or anywhere around South Texas, a warm winter jacket around here is a windbreaker with a flannel lining, and who the heck wears a sissy thing like a muffler? Of course, we pay for mild winters by having brutally hot summers - but today, that hot summer seems like a dream of another age. Now it's a week of piling heavy quilts onto the bed, and hanging up a heavy blanket over the inside of the front door; the wind is blowing straight against that door, and the chill simply radiates from it, halfway into the room. It's a day for staying home, baking bread and having a kettle of hearty stew simmering on the stove - or in the crockpot, like this excellent and hearty stew from Sunset's Crockery Cookbook: Snowy Day Beef Stew.

In a 3 ½ quart crockpot, combine 1 medium-sized chopped onion, 2 medium-sized carrot, cut into ½ inch slanting slices, 1 lb small, thin-skinned potatoes, scrubbed and cut into quarters, 8 ounces fresh mushrooms, sliced, and 2-2 ¼ lbs lean boneless beef round, trimmed and cut into one-inch cubes and tossed lightly in flour.

Add: 2 tsp dried thyme, 1 14-oz can stewed tomatoes and ¼ cup dry red wine.

Cover and cook at low setting, until beef is tender, about 8-10 hours. Skim and discard fat, if any, and add 1 10-oz package frozen peas. Cook on high setting until peas are just heated through. Serve with a salad, and chunks of good stout sourdough bread. And stay warm!

Sidewalk Scrounging

Yeah, I know - embarrassing to admit: we're scroungers and scavengers. We're not quite up there with the junkers in pick-up trucks who circulate in ours and other neighborhoods during that week when householders are putting out items for bulk trash pickup, but heaven knows, my daughter and I have staggered home of a morning, burdened with discarded but perfectly good pottery pots, with revivable plants, garden knick-knacks, a twelve pack of brand-new canning jars (as if someone got the urge to make jam or something, and thought better of it), and a chaise-lounge made of two-by-fours which may have had a leeetle bit of wood-rot on one leg . . . oh, the list is endless.

I suppose I hit some kind height - or nadir - when I was surveying one large curbside mound outside a home from which someone had evidently just moved and had hit that ‘oh, s**w it, I'm gonna throw it away rather than pack another thing!' wall. There actually was one of the professional scroungers with his junk-laden van parked by the curb, industriously rummaging through the pile - a lot of cheap knock-down furniture and faintly dingy electronics, IIRC - and I very politely asked him to hold the dog's leashes, so that I could retrieve a large and slightly wilted Brugmansia (Angel Trumpet) from a position on the very top of the pile. He did - apparently having no interest in slightly past their-best-if-used-by-this-date garden plants. (The Brugmansia has done pretty well, by the way - a little nipped by frost now and again, but it always comes back.

The trick to making them thrive, by the way, is using plenty of the fertilizer designed for hibiscus.) And then there was a pile of discards by a house undergoing renovation . . . we scored a replacement sliding screen door out of that. A pair of dogs that my daughter had decided to shelter in a fit of noble high-mindedness had thoroughly shredded the previously existing screen and bent the heck out of the metal frame. What does it say that a construction discard was a step up, quality-wise? At least, the price was right.

Plants and pots - especially pots: those are the most excellent finds in my neighborhood. Not quite sure about why that should be so, except that the turnover during the PCS season in our neighborhood is pretty brisk. Heavy pottery pots just don't transport well . . . not to mention the plants in them. In a military move, that tends to be the kind of thing given away or discarded, right off the bat . . . so they wind up on the curb, in spite of being in perfectly good shape and even rather expensive to start with. So - when they finish up in my garden, it's just karmic payback for all the plants and their pots that I gave away, upon departing assignments in Greece, Spain and Utah.

I do wonder now and again, what the pickings would be like in other neighborhoods - those which reflect a higher socio-economic level than mine. That is to say, the rich ones. Probably some very nice things, if the experience of one of my mothers' neighbors in California is anything to go by. He's a building contractor, who does very high-end renovations, and his own house and garden is almost entirely fitted out with materials that were excess to the needs of various projects, or perfectly good and salvaged from them - even the tiles on his roof were from a job.

On the day when someone in my neighborhood replaces a granite countertop - I will be so there.

Tales of the Brass Monkey

By Julia Hayden

Or - why having home insurance and careful - even pictorial documentation of the stuff inside your personal space is an excellent idea. The stuff in your house, the pictures on the wall, the clothes and kitchen things are just background; most of the time you only really notice them when they are missing.

But when everything goes missing - lock, stock and barrel - all at once in a massive disaster, as happened to my parents in the 2003 Paradise Fire, in northern San Diego County - replacing it all is a bigger chore than most people would think. It took my parents months and months, making lists of what they had in the house, and calculating what they would cost to replace with something approximate. Those few things which were spared or survived the fire become even more precious. The fire had been burning for days, by the time it roared up the hill below my parents' house - the house they had designed and built almost entirely by themselves in the 1980s.

My parents had always lived in the back-country; they had a plan in place, in case of a brush fire like this one turned out to be. Sometimes, even just accepting the possibility of an event like this is halfway to having a viable plan. As it turned out, they had about twenty minutes warning - long enough for my father to snap some pictures of the fire as it approached, and to take more pictures of the inside of the house. My mother had time enough to load her car with a few bits of china, the strongbox with all their necessary documentation, her jewelry box and their pets.

She and my father also filled up the bathtub with water, and put some more china into it. Unfortunately, they didn't realize that when the roof beams burned, and the concrete tiles covering it came crashing down - much of what was in the bathtub would be damaged. The fire reduced the balloon-frame garage to not much more than a small pile of ashes and cinders: the outside house walls were of conblock, and remained standing after the fire raged through

They came back as soon as residents were allowed back into the area: they came with a borrowed RV camper, and set to work rebuilding. A work party of their friends from church very carefully began sifting the ashes for things that had survived. One of the first things they found was a tiny brass monkey that my father had bought, years ago. Some brass and concrete garden ornaments, which stood in various places on the verandah or in the garden plantings close by also survived unscathed. There was a collection of demitasse cups and saucers which had been wrapped in paper towels and stored in a dresser drawer; the fire had darkened the colors of some of the glazed they were decorated with.

Other items did not escape so easily: my mothers' collection of Irish lead crystal had melted and run down over the stacks of china plates, cementing them all together. Three tempered glass measuring cups, sitting on a kitchen shelf softened enough to melt into each other. A shelf of pewter tankards also melted together, forming a puddle of metal embedded with shards of tile and charcoal. Dad hung it from one of the rebuilt house walls, as a kind of free-form sculpture. But the antique Edwardian ornamental tea tin was relatively undamaged, and many of the items retrieved from the bathtub were repairable, also.

Still, Mom and Dad were glad to have had insurance. It didn't replace what they lost, exactly - but it meant they could replace it with something close enough.

Comfort Food

Comfort food - it's just what it sounds like: something that your mother or grandmother used to fix, something plain and good, easy to prepare. It varies from country to country, and even from region to region, but ultimately, it would never be mistaken for haute cuisine. It's what we fix now for ourselves when we are feeling blue, there is nothing much in the refrigerator, and you just don't feel up to cooking or eating something complicated. My maternal grandmother's ultimate comfort food was rice pudding. No, there's no use in putting up a recipe for it, for although the ingredients were simple enough -  white rice, milk, raisins, sugar and vanilla - the exact proportions of those ingredients remain a mystery, and any attempt to duplicate it in the decades since have met with abject failure. I have had better luck with my own particular favorite: macaroni and cheese, which is nearly foolproof as far as proportions go; however it comes out, it's always good, even the time when I put in a pinch of cayenne pepper instead of paprika. Hey, it just had a little extra bite.

Make a béchamel sauce by combining in a small saucepan a couple of tablespoons of butter and the same of flour. Add a teaspoon or so of whole-grain mustard and a pinch of paprika. You want only a little, put in a little. You want a lot, put in a lot. Wisk in a cup or two of milk, and while the béchamel sauce thickens, boil a quart of water in another pot, and simmer a cup or a two of macaroni shells, or tubes or even cavatappi until almost al dente. That means, just about done but not mushy. Grate half a pound of sharp cheddar cheese, and whisk into the thickened béchamel. It doesn't matter if the sauce is a little runny - in fact, it is better that way. The slightly underdone pasta will absorb the sauce and it will all be very nice. Drain the pasta and put into a casserole dish - if you like, add and mix in about half a pound of cut-up kielbasa. Pour the cheese béchamel sauce over it, sprinkle some bread crumbs and a little grated parmesan cheese over the top, bake at about 350° for about forty minutes to an hour - and there you go. Perfectly comforting mac and cheese.

My daughter's cheesy comfort food favorite is Greek cheese pie, which is a little more complicated, but still very satisfactory: I began making it when we lived in Greece, and it was a staple of her childhood.  Crumble ½ pound feta cheese to the consistency of coarse cornmeal. Make a béchamel sauce of ¼ c. butter, 3 Tbs. flour, and 1-cup milk, and allow to cool slightly. Mix the sauce with the crumbled cheese and add 3 eggs and ½ tsp dill. Allow half a package of Athenos phyllo dough to thaw thoroughly. (they package it with two individual rolls of phyllo dough) Unroll, and cover with a slightly damp towel. Melt ½ cup butter, and use a little to grease the bottom of a small, square baking dish. Layer sheets of phyllo in the dish staggering the layers, draping the half of each sheet over the side if the dish. Brush melted butter after every two layers, in the dish. When all the sheets are used, pour the cheese/béchamel sauce into the center, and begin laying the layers over the cheese mixture, buttering every two layers. Sprinkle a little water on the top of the final layer of phyllo, and bake in a 350 deg. oven for 45 minutes. Perfectly comforting cheese pie - bon appetite.

The Bad Neighbor Policy

By Julia Hayen

For many years, I've kept in touch with some friends - a retired couple who live in ... well, let's just say it's a semi-rural, and congenial neighborhood in a western state blessed with rather nice hills and mildish winters. They have a near neighbor whose antics over the last twenty years have enlivened the occasional communications that I have with these friends ... because this individual has the opposite of the golden touch. Everything he touches invariably turns to the stuff that is swept up from the street after the horses have gone by. It's been an unfailing gift; in the words of the demotivational poster, his purpose in life is to serve as a bad example.

If he were just feckless and congenial, that would be one thing: My friends say their other neighbors all are nice people; they would work hard to rescue such a person from various disastrous consequences. Alas, he is not. Besides the leaden touch, he is also self-regarding, confrontational and a bully. My friends and their neighbors have all learned cynicism, and to sit back and await the inevitable spectacular pratfall. Every neighborhood has one of these people; there was a resident of my parent's old neighborhood in Sunland-Tujunga who earned an official injunction against ever dialing 9-1-1.

My friends bad-example neighbor got off on the wrong foot, yea these many years ago in buying at the peak of the local real estate bubble. The property was a goodish size, planted with a thriving fruit orchard, mature trees, a lath-house and a beautiful garden planted with many exotic specimens. There was a well-kept double-wide trailer -many residents in this neighborhood lived in trailers or RVs while building a permanent house. The bad-example neighbor moved in with his spouse and children, telling everyone that he had bought this hilltop property as an investment. The bursting of the real estate bubble and a subsequent drought put an end to that plan; the bad-example neighbor pinched pennies by not watering the orchard - the fruit-trees all died. The garden also died, although the specimen plants could have been sold to local plantsmen and nurseries for a tidy sum ... if the bad-example neighbor had only known. Bad-example neighbor turned out to be slightly delusional about where his property-lines ran, and engaged in a bitter conflict with the owners of two adjacent properties when they put up fence-lines.

Maintenance on the double-wide was deferred, and deferred again: The electrical system was outright dangerous and the roof leaked. Bad-example neighbor did not really have any construction or technical skills, as many of the other neighbors did, and his spouse was, charitably, not the best housekeeper in the world. To save money on getting the septic tank pumped, bad-example neighbor insisted that his family not flush the toilet until they had been used three times. At that point, my friends and the other neighbors agreed that the place had become unspeakably squalid. Bad example-neighbor and his spouse divorced; most everyone agreed his spouse was struck with a moment of clarity. He kept custody of their children; she engaged in professional training and eventually got a good job.

Around that point, a wild-fire swept through the area, and bad-example neighbor's double-wide and the remaining outbuildings were casualties ... which did solve the problem of deferred maintenance, although several neighbors were appalled to discover that when bad-example neighbor evacuated ahead of the fire, he left two dogs behind. The neighbors fed and tended the dogs, one of which was slightly burned.

Bad-example neighbor lives in town, now - usually coming out to the property on weekends. He keeps a small tractor, in a storage shed. He has delusions about sub-dividing the land, and to that end has constructed a dirt road along the property-line, which has had the effect of shifting a seasonal watercourse to now drain directly into one neighbor's driveway and another's horse corral. There will be the inevitable repercussions from those neighbors about this. My friends sigh, with exasperation, now and again, wondering just how it could be worse. That it could be worse is not much comfort.

On the Edge of the Wilderness

Well, it's not the wilderness, actually - but it would certainly look so to someone more used to living in the city. No streetlights, and the houses are set back from the roads - which are unpaved - and so a possessing good stock of flashlights and fresh batteries are something that every household out here needs, especially if planning to go somewhere and return after dark. I had to work the combination to the front gate by the light of my cell phone last week, so no - I won't forget a flashlight again. There may be starlight and moonlight on occasion, but underneath the trees, it's as black as the inside of a cow.

Which some of the neighbors have, by the way. A cow. And some goats. At least half of them have horses, too, all winter-shaggy and bored, mooching around in their corrals, next to the road. At once place, the horses have managed to chew away a lot of the three-rail wooden fence. The previous owners used to keep it all in good repair and painstakingly painted white. The new owner doesn't seem to care quite so much. Everyone has dogs in their yards. One can track a pedestrian around the neighborhood by following the sounds of sequential dogs barking. There are also coyotes on the prowl, especially at night. This does not make it healthy for outdoor cats; my parents and most of their neighbors have lost cats to coyotes and other predators, in spite of taking every care. It seems that the only way to keep cats entirely safe is to keep them indoors.

There was a lot of heavy rain over Christmas - which of course did a number on the dirt roads. For some strange, atavistic reason, my parents have always loved living on a dirt road, out in the hills. Possibly this cuts down the numbers of door-to-door evangelists and vacuum cleaner salespeople, but it's heck on automobile suspensions ... especially when a heavy rain has gouged huge gullies across the roadway, and what would have been the gutters on either side have become canyons capable of swallowing up Mini-Coopers.

Or they would, if anyone was demented enough to drive a Mini-Cooper along some of these roads. A couple of neighbors are contractors, with small businesses and earth-moving equipment. They have a lot of fun playing around, re-grading the road, although one of them has not helped much, by trying to fill the ruts with adobe, scraped up from his property. Alas, wet adobe turns into slippery mud; in the next heavy rain, one particular spot will be a kind of automobile slip-n-slide for an unwary driver traveling at more than 20 miles an hour. The water and power authorities offer more useful assistance by dumping concrete and asphalt rubble into the deepest of the gullies.

The rain has made everything most beautifully green, though. The big fire seven years ago cleared away a lot of undergrowth, and of course, the various fire departments since then have cleared even more. The familiar mark of an old brush-fire is evident everywhere: the parti-colored dead branches of a tree or a shrub, bleached white in some places, soot-blackened in others, sticking up out of the middle of a lush thicket of new green growth.

Birds are everywhere - humming-birds squeaking like rusty hinges, and quail rustling through the undergrowth. I see rabbits in the morning, when I walk down the hill for the newspapers: tan-colored, with a little white-cotton powderpuff for a tail. They lollop lazily out of the way, as if humans didn't frighten them very much at all. Probably they don't: dogs and coyotes must be more of a real danger to the rabbits.

And that's what it's like, back in the hills. Given a choice, I'd have my own country retreat ... but I think I'd skip the unpaved road part of it. Asphalt paving is a wondrous invention.

Woven in the Past

In a town near my parent's house there is a museum specializing in industrial and mechanical items, all housed in a range of barns and sheds. They have a huge collection of steam and gas-powered tractors and engines made to power threshers and harvesters ... all of those ingenious inventions which came about towards the end of the 19th century as an improvement on the brute muscle-power of horses or oxen or even humans. In a good many ways, we have become so accustomed to things powered by electricity, or various fuels that we take them for granted. Only when the power goes out, or when it becomes necessary to dig a hole with a shovel, do we have any clue about how much sheer physical labor it took to do things in the old way.

I wasn't at the museum to look at the antique, steam-powered tractors, though - I was looking at the vast collection of working looms, the oldest of them going on two centuries and the process of working them even older than that. I had a chance to do some last-minute authentication for my next book. This book features the minor character of a woman who brings a loom with her to Texas in the 1820s, and thereafter weaves much of her families' clothing and household fabrics herself. So - I wanted to get a better notion of what that would have involved: what would her loom looked like, sounded like in use? What would her homespun cloth looked like, how fine or coarse, how would she have set up her loom to weave a length of cloth; how wide and long would her fabric would have been? All different from today in what I have in my San Antonio home.

So - when internet searches have only taken me so far, what better way than to consult with experts, re-enactors and hobbyists, those hands-on amateur scholars who explore such matters out of sheer love - and are most pleased to share their expertise. Like most things pre-industrial, transforming plant or animal fiber into garments turns out to have been labor intensive. Leaving alone the process of harvesting cotton or sheering sheep -and let's not even get into processing flax - it starts with combing or carding the cleaned fiber. That is done with a pair of square paddles set with short wire bristles, which straighten the fibers, pull them all into one direction, and remove some of the debris.

That process is followed by spinning it into thread, which pulls out the fibers and twists them together; this can be done with either a drop-spindle, which spins as it falls, or by a spinning wheel. There are two kinds of spinning wheels; one is worked by a foot-lever - which turns a wheel, which turns the spindle which draws out and twists the thread. The other, the older kind and larger kind, is a walking-wheel: the spinner turns the wheel and takes a few steps to be in position to draw out and twist the thread upon the spindle, and then steps back to turn the wheel again. In any case, it generally took about five spinners to keep one weaver at work - or five hours of spinning thread to one hour of weaving it into cloth.

The actual weaving goes very fast, so the hobby weavers told me, especially if it is plain weaving. The tedious part is setting up the warp threads in the loom; threading them individually through the batten - which packs the woof threads together as they are woven back and forth - and the heddles, which raise and lower the warp threads as the weaver sends the shuttle back and forth, from left hand to right, then right to left, between the raised and lowered threads; pulling the batten forward at every pass. It all gets to be pretty hypnotic. One can sit there, for hours and hours, in a kind of zombie-zone, thinking of all kinds of things, while the inches of woven fabric grow.

Many households went on home-weaving for decades after machine-woven cloth was available: store-bought fabric cost money, and home-spun cost nothing but time.

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TEXAS LEADS THE WAY IN RECOVERY

COLLEGE STATION (Real Estate Center) - The Texas economy continues to outperform the U.S. economy in the current recovery, according to the Real Estate Center's latest monthly economic review.

The state's economy gained 194,400 jobs from November 2009 to November 2010, an annual growth rate of 1.9 percent, compared with the nation's 842,000 jobs, an annual growth rate of 0.6 percent.

Texas' private sector continues to play a key role in job creation. The state's private sector posted an annual employment growth rate of 2.2 percent compared with 1 percent for the U.S. private sector from November 2009 to November 2010.

The state's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 8.2 percent in November 2010, the same as in November 2009, while the nation's rate decreased from 10.0 to 9.3 percent over the same period.

All Texas industries except the trade and information industries had more jobs in November 2010 than in November 2009. The state's mining and logging industry ranked first in job creation followed by professional and business services, education and health services and manufacturing.

All Texas metro areas had more jobs in November 2010 than in November 2009. McAllen-Edinburg-Mission ranked first in job creation followed by Brownsville-Harlingen and Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos.

The state's actual unemployment rate in November 2010 was 8.3 percent. Midland had the lowest unemployment rate followed by Amarillo, Lubbock, College Station-Bryan and Abilene.