Mary Soderstrom's Blog, page 108

Let's hear it for the Centre du rasoir and Sunbeam/Osterizer.  In these days of instant obsalesence how heartening it is to be able to replace a part for an appliance that is nearly 40 years old!

[image error] I bought a Sunbeam blender sometime in the early 1970s which has worked wonderfully ever since.  For a time, however, it was hard to get the little rubber gaskets that go in the bottom of the mixing container, but then I discoverd that the shop on Phillips Square in downtown Montreal always had them, as well as many other small appliances and accessories.  Because of the store personnel's courtesy and the efforts made to find what I wanted, I've gone back frequently and was pleased to see that the enterprise has expanded into a small chain. (It's called Personal Edge in Ontario.)

Last week I dropped a heavy glass on the blender's mixing container and cracked ia big chip out of the top.  Not expecting too much since the blender is so old, I went to the Centre du rasoir in the Montreal Trust shops to see if they could order a replacement for me.  No, they had nothing in stock, but, yes, they could get one.  Might take two or three weeks, the clerk said: "they might have to order from China, you never know"

But last night the clerk called.  The part was in, and I'm back in business thanks to this small business that should be encouraged, I think.

Even Google got in the act this morning with a cartoon of our Julia, cooking away.  It would be  Julia Child's 100 birthday today, and the cooking and eating world are celebrating this wonderfully eccentric American French chef.  Sometime in the 1960s I acquired Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1, and I suspect that not a week has gone by that I haven't used one of its recipes.

Note that I say, that I don't use the book, because many of its recipes are engrained in my brain I made them so often.  Last week it was her bouillabaise, this week I suspect it will be her mayonnaise.  Probably it's a good thing that I don't have to haul the book out everytime because it is falling apart:  after the fire when our books were returned cleaned and dustered, the insurance company obviously bowed to the inevitable and put it in a large plastic Ziplock bag to keep it together.

But while we're talking cooking I'd like to mention two other early food writers:  the Ameican M.F.K. Fisher and the Brit Elizabeth David.  The former was four years older than Julia, the latter a year younger (her centenary comes next year.)  Both of them introduced the best of European cuisine to their compatriots: David wrote about olive oil when it was impossible to find in most of the UK except in pharmacies. 

Food pleases throughout life, no matter what the status of one's sentimental or economic situation.  Preparing food is creative: there were years when, struggling to write, the only completed creation I accomplished was a good meal.  Offering food is the quintessentially human gift too.   

Even Google got in the act this morning with a cartoon of our Julia, cooking away.  It would be  Julia Child's 100 birthday today, and the cooking and eating world are celebrating this wonderfully eccentric American French chef.  Sometime in the 1960s I acquired Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1, and I suspect that not a week has gone by that I haven't used one of its recipes.

Note that I say, that I don't use the book, because many of its recipes are engrained in my brain I made them so often.  Last week it was her bouillabaise, this week I suspect it will be her mayonnaise.  Probably it's a good thing that I don't have to haul the book out everytime because it is falling apart:  after the fire when our books were returned cleaned and dustered, the insurance company obviously bowed to the inevitable and put it in a large plastic Ziplock bag to keep it together.

But while we're talking cooking I'd like to mention two other early food writers:  the Ameican M.F.K. Fisher and the Brit Elizabeth David.  The former was four years older than Julia, the latter a year younger (her centenary comes next year.)  Both of them introduced the best of European cuisine to their compatriots: David wrote about olive oil when it was impossible to find in most of the UK except in pharmacies. 

Food pleases throughout life, no matter what the status of one's sentimental or economic situation.  Preparing food is creative: there were years when, struggling to write, the only completed creation I accomplished was a good meal.  Offering food is the quintessentially human gift too.   

One of the greatest songs of the 20th century turns 50 right about now. Given that Rio will host the 2014 World Cup of Soccer and the 2016 Olympics, it's a good time to revisit the song about the tall, tan and lovely girl on the famous Rio beach. This version was recorded 20 years ago, when the song turned 30.

"Wanted Dead or Alive: Used Books" was the headline in The New York Times   story about a huge auction of some 300,000 books.  Larry McMurtry, the best selling novelist of stories set in the Southwest, had started a used book business in 1988 in Archer City, Texas, his hometown.  The story had grown to four buildings, and he, at 76, had decided to  get rid of a part of the stock in order to make it manageable for his heirs. 

The Times interviewed a number of the used book lovers and -store owners who'd come to the auction, some of them with the back seats stripped out of their cars so they could carry back their stock.  There is a future in used books, they proclaimed, even in this day of the e-book.

Certainly, on-line used book sellers (I particularly like Abebooks.com) have made finding used books much easier: I use them frequently to ferret out stuff I need for my various projects and which libraries around here don't have.  But also if printed books become rarer, their value is likely to increase.  Maybe our kids and grandkids will thank us for hanging on to them.

Or that's a good excuse for doing so, anyway....

In the picture in the New York Times today, the couple are taking a turn around the ballroom as their wedding.  They look a little worn, but obviously happy.  Good for them, you might say, until she see that the man is trailing around an oxygen canister.

The story is about Michael Olexa and Angela Sclafani who were married Aug. 2 just before he was rushed back to the hospital as his terminal cancer bit again.  Apparently he's still there, hooked up to a ventilator.

Nice story, eh?  But the real kicker is the fact that the couple couldn't afford a wedding party because all theri money was going to pay his medical bills.  Both working class, they didn'tt have much health insurance, and now he's unemployed and she's been forced to take a step-down job.    The wedding was financed by some foundation that pays for parties for terminally ill lovers.

In Canada, it's quite possible that a couple in similar circumstances wouldn't have the cash to get married in style but at least they wouldn't have to worry about medical bills.  Our single payer system is precious and supports all parts of our lives, including our love lifes.

Congratulations to Juan of San Diego, Sarah of Colorado Springs CO and Vicki of El Dorado, KS who were picked by Goodreads from the 558 entries to receive copies of my novel After Surfing Ocean Beach (Dundurn Press.) The books will go in the mail on Monday.

And I think we'll do another Goodreads Giveaway soon, this one of my most recent book Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure (Véhicule Press). Até logo!

After weeks of hot, clear weather, we've had a few days of rain.  This weekend, in fact, is the first this summer to be wet.  Heaven knows we need it!

There are many good things about this kind of weather.  One of them is the chance for reflections that double to glory of green.

Great story today in Le Devoir about voting intention surveys by internet.  I've spent more time than I would like to admit calling voters during elections, and I know that the universe of people who have land lines is shrinking.  What effect that has on reaching voters and guaging their voting intentions is something I've been musing about.

So have survey companies, with more and more of them going to internet surveys.  Isn't it harder to get a good sample that way?  Not really, it seems.  The most accurate  survey prediction during the 2011 federal election came from Léger Marketing who used panels of Internet respondants, supplemented by telephone calls.  It currently has a panel of 400,000 Internet users across Canada who are panelists, of which 185,000 are in Quebec. 

President Jean-Marc Léger notes that as many people are hooked up to the Internet as have land lines (85 per cent.)  He asserts that it is easier to reach the young, elderly and poor by Internet than it is to do so by telephone.

This doesn't mean that a high speed connection is what is going to make the difference in future elections, but it does mean that there are ways of finding out what people think, in the aggregate, besides the telephone.

One of my prouder moments came during my trip to Africa in 2001 when I was out walking on morning in the West Usambara mountains.  I'd left the lodge where I was staying armed with maps and a general idea of just looking around.  There was a school and a maternity hospital two small valleys away, I was told, and so I thought, great!  I'll see kids on their way to class and I'll get an idea of what health care in rural Tanzania is like.

The youngsters had a lot of questions for this  white face, the mzungu, and collaborated to come up with the right way to ask a question in English: where was I from? did I have children? would I give them 100,000 shillings (this last to peals of laughter at the absurdity of the request, which wasn't begging but sheer cheekiness.)

I expected that sort of thing because kids elsewhere had asked me similar questions.  What did give me pause was the man I encountered a little past the turn off to the school.  "Jambo, Sister," he said with a big smile.

"Jambo" is a greeting, I knew.  But the "Sister" business puzzled me until I made it to the hospital.  There I discovered neat and tidy buildings and a couple of signs indicating that Irish nuns were in charge her.  Since one glance at me suggested that I was from the same gene pool as they were--blues eyes, red hair, fair and freckled skin--the most reasonable thing to assume ws that I too was a nursing sister.

Tanzania at that time had relatively good maternal and infant mortality rates, in part because of these nuns and others who worked hard off the beaten path to provide safe deliveries for thousands of women.  Tough ladies, doing good work.

I've been thinking of them in the last few weeks as Pope Benedict XVI tries to clamp down on North American nuns and their strong, principled positions on a number of issues.  The discussions they are in the midst of is as important to the future of religion, feminism and social service as was the great opening of Catholicism after Vatican II to the modernization of the Church..

You go, Sisters!

Photo: the West Usambara Mountains of Tanzania. That's not fog you see but smoke from fires set to clear land.