Here are some roses. Sorry no red one, but my camera is challenged by deep, velvety red. The yellow rose is actually sort of cafe au lait color, or maybe the color of a brown paper market bag. They look like some kind of home decor from a 1979 Ladies' Home Journal. Much improved by the lying camera! It is rose time here, and they are absolutely running rampant. As the sun gets hotter they will bloom and die in a couple of hours. After getting some trees cut down I now have a little sunlight in my yard so I am planting tomatoes, peppers etc along little channels off the ditch in the hopes that the biweekly flood irrigation will keep them going as I plan to be gone from here when the weather gets really hot. I am also planting more trees. Today the pomegranate arrived. It looks like a dead twig. I planted it in a sunny corner so lets hope. I have been looking for bees. I dont see many. My neighbor had the fire truck come and drown a whole lot of bees who had congregated in her shed. Perhaps they were lost. I read that they can't find their way home. I hate this. Bees and other natural phenomena are like good parents -- always there and pretty much taken for granted. Seeing their vulnerability is sobering indeed. Today I found bees wandering about in the peat moss in the plant pots at K Mart.
On a more cheery note, today I solved the Tres Leches problem. I often see the sign outside the Mexican bakery, 'Tres Leches Cake Today!' but I have never gone in there to ask them what it is. Today they had Tres Leches cake at the grocery store. It looked sort of ordinary. No one at the store knew what it was. They thought it might have dulce de leche in it. When I got home I Googled and found a bunch of recipes. Well. It is wicked rich. Nine or ten eggs, and tons of heavy cream, sweetened condensed milk and evaporated milk and variations thereof poured all over the baked cake, then the whole thing covered in sweetened whipped cream. There seems to be a version that includes merangue, but I couldn't find it. Not your everyday treat. I am not nuts about Mexican food, but as I searched out Tres Leches, I stumbled upon a pretty sophisticated Mexican food website and found some hopeful recipes, like chili rellenos not dipped in horrible soggy batter. They still stuffed them with a ton of cheese then paved over the whole thing with more. I hate cheese the consistency of road tar or so denatured that it turns to rubber bands in my mouth when I chew it. I thought I might try roasted Poblana chilis stuffed with dried apricot and pecans and forget the cheese. Stay tuned.
I went to a lovely wedding in the Guadelupe Mountains last weekend. On the way back I saw a dead tree with about a dozen large white birds sitting in it. They were all in profile and they did not look real. They had huge crests, no discernible neck, enormous orange beaks and a little peach color on their heads and chests. Their legs appeared to be attached way too far back on their bodies, and they were too vertical. I researched and researched and could find nothing that matched this creature so I sent my out of focus picture to a Texas Ornithological Society person who kindly informed me that the birds were Cattle Egrets (common as dirt) in full mating regalia. They were a very fine sight for all that.
Because our Zendo is temporarily (I hope) not meeting I have been going to the Tibetan Buddhist weekly ceremony. Very pleasant touchy feely middle class lady liberals in floaty clothes. Also tons of endlessly repetetive chanting and actual praying to saint like beings that I just cant take. All I want is the beautiful silence of group meditation and the Heart Sutra and a nice cup of tea and gentle talk. Today the Holy Man has arrived from California and is conducting special ceremonies that sound to me like animistic pre Buddhist Tibetan stuff that I personally feel should have been left behind thousands of years ago. My other option for getting together with Zen Buddhists is to drive nearly two hundred miles round trip. I guess I'll just be a lone Buddhist unless the few of us from our Zendo can manage to get together once in a while without the Rochis who have aged parent problems to deal with in Nebraska.
Labels: cattle egrets, lost bees, roses, Tres Leches, types of Buddhism.
