One good moment

[greenstorm]

I've been looking backwards a lot lately. It's funny, I have almost never spent a ton of time reading back through old journals, but this last few weeks I seem to have been doing a lot. In some ways I'm the only person who can give myself good advice, though that was back at the breakup with Angus where we had just started, then had this breakup, then decided the breakup sucked and we'd just change our relationship to suit ourselves instead.

So much looking back and I'm searching maybe for a sense of perspective on my life. I've gone from one extreme to another, from no space for my hobbies and no privacy or ownership over space around me but a ton of people around who loved me all the time to, well, the opposite. It's almost like going back further, into my early-mid teens where I lived out in the middle of nowhere and connected to people only via the internet, but I had 5 acres to play on.

Even in those old writings I could plot you my hormonal cycle based on how I feel about things. The cycle seems to be exacerbated by a lack of touch and closeness maybe? But also by a lack of stability or certainty.

Just now, though, I'm appreciating sitting here with my nail-holed foot up on the couch. I got three hours of corn planting and tilling in this morning, if I can do another three today I suppose that's ok? I was hoping for more, but that was before I had a hole in my foot.

Gardening is one thing but making lunch really hurt. I got through it. I had a nice doctored ramen with egg and cabbage and I'm drinking my favourite wine and talking to Josh about corn shellers. He's telling me that the Lehman one catches the cob at the end of its run by magic, which appears to be true in videos of its use. Hopefully someone I know will find one for me at a thrift store in those piles of unknown cast iron objects, I bet there's one in Clinton.

Now I can nap and go back into the garden with my foot hopefully a tiny bit healed up and listen to the truly wonderful Future Ecologies podcast while planting and anticipate Tucker's arrival in not so long at all: less than two weeks.

Plus, imagine, if this all works out I'll be able to add corncakes or Jonnycakes or tortillas to my food rotation.

Sometimes things don't go, after all, from bad to worse.

Comments

[greenstorm]

It's the magic flock of the cob at the end that's so so amazing.

Honestly I have so much respect and love for simple machines.

Did you look up corn shelling stools? The ones that look like torture devices?

[squirrelitude]

Yeah, just the way it's curved to press the cob into the wheel at the very end and shoot it up over the side... how long did it take someone to fiddle with the shape to get it to do that? Did they have to work it in metal or did they use some other material for a prototype?

I looked up the corn shelling stool. Is this it? <https://www.etsy.com/listing/1114805036/antique-corn-sheller-stool-primitive>. It does look nasty! Do you use it by holding the ear horizontal and scraping it up and down the plane?

This handheld version is what I grew up with: https://www.southernexposure.com/products/sheller-for-corn/ -- I vaguely recall that this might be modeled after an indigenous American tool? Maybe a hollow chunk of wood with spikes driven into it? Maybe I'm thinking of something else though. Anyway, probably designed for smaller volumes of corn!

[greenstorm]

Right? Or did it kind of accidentally start doing something a little like that and someone saw the potential? How well does it really work across different cob sizes/rows numbers and what was it originally sized to?

That is the corn shelling stool. I have no idea how to use it but I bet it has the same issues as a mandoline but magnified for pressure. The whole thing just scares me.

I've seen bamboo with screws driven through it for spikes, but given how splintery bamboo is, and that the thing is handheld, that seems scary. Honestly any of the handheld ones seem like they should have a handle to increase torque or some stops so you can leanit on a table when putting the corn through? Otherwise why not just do it by hand? And what happens when the corn is mostly through, you grab the stripped cob out of th eother side to pull/turn?

[squirrelitude]

My limited experience using the aluminum handheld thingy was that it worked astonishingly well -- you stick the corn in at an angle and twist, and the kernels just pop off. I don't remember if you pass the corn through to finish it, or turn it around. Turning it around seems slower, but might be a good idea due to the torque required -- I feel like you'd get blisters if you tried to work too fast or too long with it, no matter how well it works. It seems best suited for a "large home garden" size crop.

[greenstorm]

Clearly I need to grow more corn so I can play with shelling it.

Guess I'm on that. :)

I would be astonished, to be honest. How big is a large home garden crop of dry corn?

[squirrelitude]

Not sure! Just a gut sense that it would top out in usefulness in a plot size somewhere in between "a small plot of sweet corn for one family" and "a small-farm-sized field". I haven't even used one in the past 15 years, so I wouldn't put much weight on what I have to say about it anyhow.

[greenstorm]

You've used one more than me! I was just thinking that it's not common for folks to grow their own grain corn, and sweet corn wouldn't use the thinger.