Tweeting can be lonely.

Many of the people in my personal tribe are not what you call “digital natives.” We can’t really help it. We were born before there was anything digital to be native about. We are the people who had to think like application developers to use early word processors. Insert the wrong code and you got 24 pt. ital. bookman rather than 10 pt. roman courier.

So last night, while enjoying some non-digital food, drinks and laughs around a very non-digital table under non-digital stars by a non-digital fire, my tribemates might be forgiven for striking the above pose as I began to evangelize on the virtues of Twitter.

Ah me. How to explain how cool it was on Monday morning to be a digital hanger-on to Mayo Clinic’s Transform, “a collaborative symposium on innovations in health care experience and delivery.” As Clayton Christensen delivered the keynote, tweeters in the room delivered key points from his talk. Tweeters at their desks around the country began a conversation of 140-character posts, many of them containing links to enlightening, related information — all of them representing thinkers and explorers who might be worth following in their own right.  All this by simply monitoring content under Twitter hashtag #txfm09.

If you’ve never tried this, and you’d like to, Mayo’s own social media guru, Lee Aase, explains how to get started at his Social Media University Global. Check out his Twitter curriculum.

But out here, I’m probably preaching to many members of the tweeting choir with much more experience than I. I’ll just have to keep working on the rest.

Lunch break

This could happen to you. A pie. And schmutz on your phone.

The wall between work and home can get pretty thin when you work at home and when your home contains your work.

That wall got squeezed to the limit of “thin” last week, when what you see  above really happened. Keys, notepad, highlighter, cell phone and pen dangerously close to a dusting of flour on the kitchen island.

It all started in July, when Little Fire begged for her favorite pie, the family chocolate cream. This is a pie that’s even a favorite of the seven-year-old in the house, who eats little more than hot dogs, cheesy broccoli and bread. This is the pie that always disappears first no matter how many newfangled recipes show up at the big family Thanksgiving gathering.

So it’s not just pie. It’s a celebration. But July evaporated. August got kind of busy.  School started. And still no chocolate pie. Finally, a window in my schedule. Over the lunch hour on a Monday. All ingredients in the fridge, even the whipping cream (How often do you find whipping cream in your fridge?)

Oops. Free webinar on reaching the small group market at exactly the same time.

Hmmmm. Laptop. High-speed wireless. Let’s make pie and learn about social marketing. A cup of sugar and a couple tablespoons of cornstarch. An occasional note about new segmentation methods. Cook 2 minutes while stirring constantly. Roll eyes wondering how people who know so little get so much exposure.

In the end. A heavenly pie. Even if, due to multi-tasking (which Professor Biker claims does not really exist), I forgot to add extra chocolate. But the egg yolks didn’t curdle. And it set up just right.

All in all, an hour well-spent.

Marilyn’s Chocolate Pie:

Combine in saucepan: (I sometimes sift these together to make extra sure of zero lumps)

1 c. sugar

1/3 c. flour

1/4 t. salt

Stir in:

2 1-oz squares unsweetened chocolate, melted (I often add a half to one square more, and, yes, the mix will seem weird and pasty.)

Add, then bring to boil and cook 2 minutes:

2 c. whole milk (can use lowfat or evap. too)

Remove from heat, then add a little of the heated mix to:

3 slightly beaten egg yolks

Cook mixture 2 minutes longer. Then stir in:

2 T. butter

1 t. vanilla

Let cool with was paper resting on surface of pudding to prevent skin from forming on top. Can refrigerate. Then spoon into baked pie shell. Top with whipped cream.

Eat ice cream. It’s good for you.

What could be better — or worse — than ice cream? It’s cold. It’s sweet. It’s creamy. And it’s deadly. Or so I thought, until running across a new nutritional rating system that actually says honest-to-god, nothing-held-back ice cream is better for you than all the concoctions designed to take the edge off this essential summer experience.

Ice cream better than non-fat sorbet? Better than low-fat frozen yogurt? Better than popsicles? Rejoice. The answer just may be yes. If you subscribe to the wisdom in a new food rating system that takes a broader view of the value of the foods we eat.

The Nuval system looks at more than just whether a food is low-fat. Or whether it’s low-sugar. Or whether it has no “trans fats.” Instead, it provides a score of between 1 (less valuable nutritionally speaking) and 100 (most valuable) based on the food’s overall contribution to the nutrition we need.

How does Breyer’s Extra Creamy Vanilla Ice Cream rate a 45 while the Haagen Dazs Fat-Free Strawberry Sorbet rate a 1? While it’s not exactly a health food, at least the Breyer’s has the benefits of milk: calcium, vitamins and even some fiber. Sorbet, on the other hand, is little more than sugar water.

So, before the snow flies (which won’t be long now), I dedicate myself to an occasional indulgence in REAL ice cream. Like last night’s pure, frozen, sweetened cream kicked around by my kids in our little two-pint “Ice Cream Ball“ last night.

Or the Butter Pecan I had at The Pearl a couple Saturdays ago.

I won’t just order frozen vegetables when the Schwan’s guy comes next Thursday.

And maybe, very soon, we’ll all be reading labels for the “Nuval” score.

Flying children

I wanted to sleep later this morning, but there was this nightmare.

The whole family is departing a jolly party. Professor Biker is carrying out his parting schmoozes. My 11-year-old, a.k.a. Little Fire, and her seven-year-old brother, a.k.a. Sweet Slugger, are vamping in the snow outside.

There’s a sled. Fire decides to slide down a big pile of snow. She’s in a red parka just like the little boy in The Snowy Day. I turn away to check on the goodbyes. When I turn around, my girl has accidentally hooked her sled or her coat onto a passing mobile crane or tow-truck or something doing 40 or 50 MPH. Suddenly, she is flying up the street, arms and legs akimbo, whooping and hollering like she’s actually not terrified. FLYING.

Anyone near my bed would have heard my screams. In my dream, I run frantically down the street, shouting to the driver to stop. There is no catching up. So I stand in the middle of a city block, turning a 360, watching my girl fly up one street, down another, back another and then off toward who-knows-what.

I woke in a cold sweat and made sure Little Fire was still safely tucked into her Saturday morning sleep-in. Still my girl. Not flying away. Not yet.

Have you been bowling lately?

House ball and me: 105 the first time back.

I went last Saturday, and things have changed a lot.

These days, you don’t even have to know how to add. Or to understand nuances like waiting until the first ball of the next frame to score a spare. Now, the magical electronic pin counter does it all for you. Just sit down, check the screen and your score mysteriously appears.

These days, you even have to be careful when approaching the end of the game. The machine is happy to auto-start a new one when you’ve passed the requisite ten frames. Cha-ching. (In relative bowling terms.)

Most shocking of all: You can now choose “bumpers” that rise up out of the gutters to keep your worst balls bouncing back-and-forth across the lane all the way down to the pins. No more poodles! You have to work hard not to hit something with this kind of technology.

But you probably know this already, because from my sister’s laughter as I extolled the wonders of the modern bowling alley, I’m sure I’m the last person on earth who thought bowling scores are still kept on paper.

Oh for the pinpoint of the sharpened pencil on a sheet of neat-and-tidy frames. Oh for smoke-yellowed signs that admonish bowlers: “Please don’t loft the ball” and “Only two practice frames, please.” Now a never-ending display of tacky computer graphics at your seat show your score while overhead wide-screens comment on your performance, shouting, (inexplicably) “Open!!!” after every ball.

On the other hand, it is still bowling. Take a look at “House Ball.” Nothing has changed with that heavy-composite technology. You still have to hold it close as you set your mind against those almost-human-shaped pins. You still have to calculate which mid-lane arrows you want your ball to cross on the way to the sweet spot right between pins one and three.

And, for three sweet pre-teen girls, bowling is still kind of about bowling but really about funky shoes, pitchers of pop and candy machines with handfuls of tootie fruitie candies for a quarter. They don’t miss what they never knew. *Sigh.*

Are you, too, your own custodian?

If so, may I please share my giddiness about some recent cleaning solution discoveries?

Like the rest of the world, I’ve been trying to clean more “green.” So out with the bleach. And in with the vinegar, baking soda, Borax and Bon Ami. (Okay, once in awhile I use a bit of Softscrub on my stainless steel sink.)

It took my inner clean freak awhile to get used to believing something was clean when I didn’t smell the Dow Scrubbing Bubbles. But the vague scent of pickles after a good white vinegar scrub-down has grown on me. This is true especially since I added the confident clean of my secret disinfecting ingredient: Thieves.

Ah, thieves. Now here’s a clean you can sink your teeth into. It’s a heady mix of clove, lemon, cinnamon bark, eucalyptus and rosemary that reportedly protected a notorious band of 15th-century thieves/spice traders from the Black Plague as they robbed the bodies of the dead.

All I know is that about 3/4 c. of vinegar mixed with about 1/2 c. of water and 10 to 12 drops of Thieves in a spray bottle makes everything I clean at least smell pleasantly germ-free. As for true disinfection, I don’t know. But even the placebo effect, wherein I believe my whole house is clean, is worth it.

Try some for yourself. It’s not cheap. But one bottle lasts six months or longer. You can order online at “The Secret of Thieves.”

P.S. For some real heavy-hitting cleaning power, I’m thinking of trying special hydrogen peroxide/vinegar mix promoted by Dr. Mercola.

Happy cleaning.

July is hot. So is borscht.

Making borscht? Put in the greens.

Hot soup in muggy summer. When the beets are ripe and you crave borscht, you sweat it out and make a double batch. I’m just finishing up the end of my almost unnaturally red leftovers. And I’m ready to make more.

This all started because lovely, leafy beets have come to us the last three weeks in our CSA share. If you’ve never subscribed to a “community-supported agriculture” farm, look into it. For $30 a week (give or take) and the effort it takes to drive to the drop-off point, you tap into the fruits of your local portion of earth. Whatever ripens in a given week, you deal with. Even if it means sweating over a pot of soup.

“Dealing” is not always easy when, say, the green onions start arriving in droves. One can only use so many in a given year, and several have faded to brown fronds in my vegetable drawer since the boxes began to arrive in May.

Sometimes the food riches I haven’t planned on make me feel a little like Barbara Kingsolver, the activist-author who spent a whole year eating absolutely nothing but foods available within a certain radius of her home in southwestern Virginia and then wrote about it in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. August of that year, she could hardly turn around in her house with every available table, counter, sink, bucket and floor space covered with the tomatoes from too many vines planted in April.

So back to the borscht and why I don’t mind it when the beets start to arrive. I think it might be the deep, blood-red color. Or maybe the rooty flavor. Or beet chunks you can sink your teeth into. Many epicures prefer to eat it cold. I like the feeling of a good sweat on a hot day.

I make my Borscht fast, light and easy. No mutton. No meat at all, in fact. Just a base of boiled beets, cabbage, onions and broth. And one little personal twist: I chop up and throw in the beet greens too. This not only adds color but a sizable portion of your daily requirement of vitamins A and C not to mention some iron, protein and other nutritional benefits too. Here’s how you can sweat over a steaming pot in July too:

Quick Beet Borscht

Combine and cook in 4 c. of water for 10 min.:

• 2 c. cabbage chopped
• 2 chopped onions

Add and then bring to boil:

• 4 c. veggie stock or any stock you like
• 4 medium beets, cooked and chopped (I cook them with their skins on and then peel. You get a little more dirt in the soup that way but none of us gets enough dirt in our diets the way it is. Find out more about that here.)
• 1 c. of the juice you cooked the beets in
• 1 t. of salt
• dash pepper
• 2 T. lemon juice

Add and then cook a few minutes till greens are just-tender:

• Greens and stems from the beets you just cooked, chopped.

Eat hot with a dollop of sour cream on top.

Goodbye Grace

I'll miss every quirky curve of that old oak buffet.

I had no idea a person could get so attached to a piece of furniture. This week I had to say goodbye to an old oak buffet and ended up, well, a little verklempt. My beloved spouse, Professor Biker, sold it online at that best thing since garage sales: Craig’s List.

I don’t mean to imply that I wasn’t on board with the transaction. But I can take no credit for it. He spent the afternoon taking glamour shots of its tongue-in-groove construction from all angles before moving on to shooting other hardy, mid-century items in our motley furniture collection.

Why I cried, I’m still not sure. The buffet hadn’t been in our family for long. I did get it from my Aunt Grace. But I think she picked it up at a neighborhood estate sale, then enlisted it as her bedroom dresser until she could afford a real suite. All this editing of “stuff” is for a greater purpose; we’re moving it all from our lives to someone else’s so we can make room for something new.

I guess it’s remembering the beverages that buffet served up for chatty college cast parties or imagining all it’s seen and heard of raucous book club gatherings and apres ski brunches with sisters and brothers, aunts, uncles and cousins.

So at the appointed pick-up hour, all I did was stand there, somewhat helpless, as the friendly couple who came to take it rubbed at the water stain on the top and described the new handles that would replace the off-period ones we never got around to change.

“What was your aunt’s name,” the buffet’s new owner asked me. Turns out she gets kind of sentimental with furniture too. She’s going to call it “Grace.”

The company of guinea pigs and blooms

Working at home can be lonely. So lonely that sometimes you find yourself talking to your office-mate, the Guinea Pig, asking Mr. Nibbles whether or not the temperature is working for him or if he’s ready for another hit of vitamin C.

Mr. Nibbles. A fine office companion.

The telecommuter’s state of isolation is an extra challenge for people fed by human interaction — the classic “E’s” on the Myers-Briggs scale. What feeds us is a nodding head, a smile — even an exasperated roll of the eyes. It’s all feedback, and it’s all in real time. The pig’s beady eyes are undoubtedly, unbearably cute. And the sweet tickling whiskers are a great distraction. But he doesn’t say anything.

So there is teleconferencing. On Friday I was a disembodied voice in two phone-based meetings. The first was to pick the brain of a fellow marketer in North Carolina. I have no idea what he looks like, but his voice was all I needed to be impressed by what he’s doing with the purchase of remnant television media. Then there was the three-way call with office-mates gathered in a conference room in St. Paul and an e-publishing vendor somewhere out West. That was a two-hour demo of a tool that will bring even more information to our clients and partners wherever they live and work, day or night. It was entertaining and enlightening, and there were real people on the other end of the line.

But a solid three hours of calls on a gorgeous Friday morning was a little much. Mr. Nibbles chewing on his cardboard hiding-tube kept my visual brain occupied for about 30 minutes. Then I remembered: I’m wireless, the phone’s cordless. The home office can relocate without going more than 30 feet. Outside, in the shade of the patio umbrella, it’s harder to feel lonely. All those trembling new blooms staring at me from their beds. Mama robin zooming in and out of the nest on the neighbor’s downspout. And the pig in, well, pig heaven, eating real grass.

Turned into an excellent Friday. And a little preview of what might be an okay summer for Nibbles and me.

My friends, the sweet Veronicas.

That dependable dianthus.

Star Jasmine smells like heaven but needs to come inside during Wisconsin winters.

The columbine that naturalizes in every nook and cranny of a Wisconsin yard.

Chocolate access

Wilbur, whose buds I love.

Every day, without fail, at around 2 p.m., I crave chocolate. Not just any chocolate. The at-least-65%-and-75%-cocoa-is-better kind of chocolate. The kind you can’t get out of a machine. The kind you don’t buy at the movies. Sometimes it kind of gets in the way of conference calls I’m leading. Or of projects I’m trying to finish. But the cravings call. And I must answer.

Lucky me. Most days, I have free access to my pantry and the supply I spend a fortune on every weekend at People’s Food Coop. When I’m on-site at Cool Company, I can raid the bottom drawer of my friend Peter’s files for a lovely supply of high-quality stuff.

But back to the cravings. I don’t understand them fully. I’ve been told that it’s not just about the pharmacological properties of the chocolate but rather about the “aroma, sweetness, texture and calories.”

I do by now understand what it takes to create a truly satisfying chocolate experience.

1. Is it Fair Trade? As my young friend, Anna, reminds us all in a report she developed for school, free trade chocolate values: the farmers who grow the cocoa beans…those of us who love to consume it in its smooth, flavonoid-rich products…and, of course, mother earth. My two favorites: Dark Chocolate with Pure Cocoa Nibs from Equal Exchange and Maya Gold from Green & Black’s.
2. How does it taste? In the category of chocolate, buying a product that’s good for us all happens also to be just plain good. All the dark-chocolate offerings from Equal Exchange and Green&Black’s excel on this front.
3. Can I afford it? To supplement bars that cost $3-to-$5 dollars for 3 oz., I keep a supply of amazing Wilbur Buds on hand. I can buy these historic little nuggets in bulk at my coop for much less per ounce than my Free Trade brands. Check out the online store for exquisite chocolate currently on sale for $5.56 a pound.

Wilbur Buds may not be free trade, but these 3/4-inch drops of dark chocolate are amazing. (Photo © S. Yoder, 2009.)