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.