My husband's grandparents came to live with us this past spring. We bought the house planning to have them with us a few years ago, but they resisted leaving familiar surroundings (they've lived in the same part of NJ since they came to the US as refugees after WWII). When Grandpa started to seriously decline, we built an apartment onto the house, and they moved in this spring. And now, Grandpa, whose 94th birthday is coming up on December 12, seems to be coming to the end of his life. It is so terribly hard to watch.
I've worked in hospices and nursing homes, and done EMS for years, so I'm intimately familiar with the details death in a professional sense, but I had forgotten, somehow, how badly one longs for the mercy of death at the end. I am normally (more than normally?) afraid of dying - much more so since I had children who need me so desperately. I do not look on death as a friend or ally for myself. And yet I did not remember how I used to pray, really and truly beg God with all my heart, that a particular patient, reduced to suffering and endurance, would die, and be granted a little peace. I had forgotten how angry I used to get at the universe for allowing this kind of pointless misery. I am reminded.
And here I am again. Grandpa is in a moderate amount of pain, which no medication seems to relieve. He cannot enjoy his great-grandchildren, food, music or companionship. Life has been reduced to the hideous misery of having to move from one place to another, to endure another bathing, another meal, another toileting. Grandma, who is 14 years younger, is no longer his companion or friend, just his increasingly overwhelmed and exhausted nurse while Eric and I try to take what of the burden we can from her.
Suffering does not always, or even usually, have a purpose. I've seen little children, parents of small ones, people desperately loved and needed dying slowly and agonizingly sufficient times that I have long since made myself recognize that there is no meaning in pain. And yet I cannot reconcile myself to that absence of meaning. I still want God to relieve him of his suffering, to end 94 good - at times even heroic- years with dignity and peace. I find it nearly unbearable to watch him, confused, hurting and querelous, attempting to understand why it is that we are hurting him by forcing him to move, or eat again. And he tries desperately to be kind and dignified, thanking us for our kindness even when we are making things worse.
This is not a life tragically cut short - he had a good run. And while we will be sorry to see him go, that's not the point. The point is that we have no right or way to make his end anything other than a misery and a kind of tiny, personal tragedy, when it might have had grace.
I don't know if he'll live days or weeks or a couple of months. I doubt longer. I know I will pray (pointlessly, I suspect) as hard as I can that tonight, or tomorrow, or soon he sleeps and doesn't wake up. If God is real, he doesn't take requests. But I will keep praying, because it is better than any alternative that accepts this misery and indignity as inevitable or meaningful.
Shalom,
Sharon
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Thanksgiving and Seed Saving
At the moment I'm baking a gigantic Hubbard Squash that began its live in a paper cup in my garden. I'm more than a little ambivalent about Thanksgiving, given the Native thing, but I admit, I like it because I love to cook, love to feed people, and believe with all my heart that festivals are going to be more, not less important in the future. To fully appreciate the value of a meal like Thanksgiving, with its many dishes, emphasis on the sweet, meaty and rich, you have to imagine yourself as an ordinary person in a pre-industrial world (or an ordinary person in much of the world right now).
You work hard all day. You never, ever get enough to eat. Oh, you get enough to get along, but you would always eat more if you could, and hunger is a constant companion. There is very little sweetness in your life (we eat 20 times the sugar of most pre-industrial peoples), and never enough protein or fat. Your meals are mostly monotonous - you eat cornbread and beans, biscuits and gravy, potatoes and eggs, rice and tofu every single day, for several meals, and only at the peak of the growing season do you eat much fresh food.
So now, imagine yourself celebrating. There are many, many dishes. Many of them are meaty or sweet, and involve special flavors and foods you miss the rest of the year. You are encouraged not only to eat as much as you like, but more, until you feel completely full. Then, instead of returning to your work, you sing, and talk and play with the children, before eating a bit more again.
That's what Thanksgiving (or any other feast day) is supposed to be - not a gorge of salt and sweet and fat on top of our daily gorge of those things. It is also, to me, special because it is one of the rare times when others eat the foods that I eat during the cold weather. The traditional foods of the holiday make sense - they are the foods that can be produced in cold climate New England or the northeast, and are widely available. They are what you produced in the garden all summer and fall, and what you have in your cellar. They are what I eat most of the winter - squash, potatoes, beets, carrots, parnsips, onions, apples, cranberries - and what most of the population only tastes at Thanksgiving time.
If we return to eating seasonally and sustainably, we're all going to eat a whole lot more of those foods - and they are so delicious I can't imagine why anyone would eat butternut squash soup or pumpkin pie or brussels sprouts or creamed onions only at Thanksgiving - but they do. 80% of all the parsnips eaten in the US are eaten in New England, in the months of November and December - despite the fact that parsnips are nutritious, sustainable, reasonably easy to grow, and delicious. They are also at their best in January and February, when comparatively little other food is - but no one eats them but me. Too bad - glazed with maple in march, or with celery root in soup in February, they are wonderful. (Is anyone reading this? Should I post recipes? I will if anyone is interested.)
The production of those foods begins in our gardens. And if we're concerned about the long term future and sustainability, it has to start with the sustainability of our gardens - with seed saving, growing our own fertility, choosing varieties that suit our climate, storage needs and that produce a whole lot of food.
Mostly growing open pollinated vegetables is no big deal - just choose the right varieties (ie,non-hybrids) from a catalog that has plenty, and grow them. Growing out seed is not that hard either, although it takes some practice. I'd strongly recommend reading Suzanne Ashworth's _Seed to Seed_if you are planning on living on food from your saved seed garden, and if you want to expand your knowledge into backyard breeding, definitely read and acquire Carolyn Depp's _Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties_ - which is surprisingly fun to read, btw.
Some plants have issues, of course. In my cold climate (borderline zone 4/5, fairly high up), it has been hard to find an entirely satisfactory sweet pepper that ripens to color in time. Since I'm fond of sun-dried peppers, that's a pain, although I've had some luck with _King of the North_ and _Staddon's Select_ both from Fedco, and _Albino Bullnose_ from Baker Creek. They can't match the hybrids, sadly. But since peppers are not a major crop (major in the sense of lasting through much of the year and providing a lot of basic food value), I take what I can get gratefully. Hot peppers, which *are* a major part of our diet, we do much better with. You can still grow hybrids, as long as you use reasonable care seperating the varieties - you don't have to choose between them right now. But if you are planning on sustainability, they should be a supplement, not a priority.
Sweet corn is always a problem. For those of you in hot climates, apparently there's such a thing as an OP supersweet (pretty amazing) offered by someone in Hawaii through seed saver's exchange (you have to be a member, but you should be anyway - they are noble. www.seedsavers.org). For the rest of us, "Howling Mob" (Shumways) and "Ashworth's" (Fedco) are very nice, although without the sweetness and holding power of the hybrids. But again, sweet corn is a nice touch in our diet (we dry it for succotash, corn chowder and adding to chili), but dry and pop are much more important to a sustainable diet, and there are a number of dent and flour corns that seem to do well here. My favorite, although not a high yielder, is "Northstine Dent"
Corn is a seed saving problem for people with small gardens (which does not include me) or people with field corn down the road (me). We've had pretty good luck saving seed from our early sweets, but the fields have tended to hybridize on at least the outside rows. I gave up altogether this year when our neighbor planted a whole cornfield worth across the road. Remember, you need at least 200 plants and seed from 100 ears to have reasonable genetic diversity.
I still haven't worked out the squash thing to my satisfaction. There are four families of squash, and you can have one of each, if you don't want to hand pollinate. For me, the pepos are the problem - acorns, pumpkins and summer squash are all pepos. I think I'm just going to give up zucchini in favor of pumpkins, but I haven't decided yet. So far I've had pollinated, but I don't want to count on that. The maximas are also a bit sad - they are the best tasting, and I can never decide between them, but I can rotate - butternut this year, pink banana the next. The only mixta I've ever grown that I liked and got to maturity was Tennessee sweet potato.
I'm a huge fan of West India Gherkins, which are not quite cucumbers, but almost indistinguishable. They are wonderful picklers, very crisp and tasty, and allow me to grow both gherkins and a slicer or pickler and have a bit more variety.
Saving seeds from biennials varies from easy to hard. Kale and leeks reliably overwinter here, as do parsnips (important, since you need fresh seed every year). Cabbages do ok packed in the garage over the winter. Potatoes are not a problem most years, but I doubt that with the flooding we had any of our sad little potato crop is going to make it to seed - which is why I keep a supply of potato seed, harvested both from my own and bought from pinetree garden seeds (Gilroy - discontinued after this year, and the only "true from seed" variety I know of, so buy lots for your storage). Potatoes don't come true from seed, but some potatoes are better than none, and you can store seed for some years, but not potatoes. Since they are such a staple crop, definitely store the seed.
Beets do fine for me, and I just keep the parsley in a sunny window, but I have much less luck with brussels sprouts and other brassicas. I just keep trying to winter them over. Sometimes I've had luck persuading them to go to seed the first year by starting them very early. It works well with parsley and kale as well.
Start thinking about next year's festival meals. Even if you can't grow all your own food, you can grow the food for your feasts, and harvest the next year's seed to practice for the day when you may need to, and long for the change from your corn and beans.
A Happy Thanksgiving and a peaceful Day of Mourning to you all.
Shalom,
Sharon
You work hard all day. You never, ever get enough to eat. Oh, you get enough to get along, but you would always eat more if you could, and hunger is a constant companion. There is very little sweetness in your life (we eat 20 times the sugar of most pre-industrial peoples), and never enough protein or fat. Your meals are mostly monotonous - you eat cornbread and beans, biscuits and gravy, potatoes and eggs, rice and tofu every single day, for several meals, and only at the peak of the growing season do you eat much fresh food.
So now, imagine yourself celebrating. There are many, many dishes. Many of them are meaty or sweet, and involve special flavors and foods you miss the rest of the year. You are encouraged not only to eat as much as you like, but more, until you feel completely full. Then, instead of returning to your work, you sing, and talk and play with the children, before eating a bit more again.
That's what Thanksgiving (or any other feast day) is supposed to be - not a gorge of salt and sweet and fat on top of our daily gorge of those things. It is also, to me, special because it is one of the rare times when others eat the foods that I eat during the cold weather. The traditional foods of the holiday make sense - they are the foods that can be produced in cold climate New England or the northeast, and are widely available. They are what you produced in the garden all summer and fall, and what you have in your cellar. They are what I eat most of the winter - squash, potatoes, beets, carrots, parnsips, onions, apples, cranberries - and what most of the population only tastes at Thanksgiving time.
If we return to eating seasonally and sustainably, we're all going to eat a whole lot more of those foods - and they are so delicious I can't imagine why anyone would eat butternut squash soup or pumpkin pie or brussels sprouts or creamed onions only at Thanksgiving - but they do. 80% of all the parsnips eaten in the US are eaten in New England, in the months of November and December - despite the fact that parsnips are nutritious, sustainable, reasonably easy to grow, and delicious. They are also at their best in January and February, when comparatively little other food is - but no one eats them but me. Too bad - glazed with maple in march, or with celery root in soup in February, they are wonderful. (Is anyone reading this? Should I post recipes? I will if anyone is interested.)
The production of those foods begins in our gardens. And if we're concerned about the long term future and sustainability, it has to start with the sustainability of our gardens - with seed saving, growing our own fertility, choosing varieties that suit our climate, storage needs and that produce a whole lot of food.
Mostly growing open pollinated vegetables is no big deal - just choose the right varieties (ie,non-hybrids) from a catalog that has plenty, and grow them. Growing out seed is not that hard either, although it takes some practice. I'd strongly recommend reading Suzanne Ashworth's _Seed to Seed_if you are planning on living on food from your saved seed garden, and if you want to expand your knowledge into backyard breeding, definitely read and acquire Carolyn Depp's _Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties_ - which is surprisingly fun to read, btw.
Some plants have issues, of course. In my cold climate (borderline zone 4/5, fairly high up), it has been hard to find an entirely satisfactory sweet pepper that ripens to color in time. Since I'm fond of sun-dried peppers, that's a pain, although I've had some luck with _King of the North_ and _Staddon's Select_ both from Fedco, and _Albino Bullnose_ from Baker Creek. They can't match the hybrids, sadly. But since peppers are not a major crop (major in the sense of lasting through much of the year and providing a lot of basic food value), I take what I can get gratefully. Hot peppers, which *are* a major part of our diet, we do much better with. You can still grow hybrids, as long as you use reasonable care seperating the varieties - you don't have to choose between them right now. But if you are planning on sustainability, they should be a supplement, not a priority.
Sweet corn is always a problem. For those of you in hot climates, apparently there's such a thing as an OP supersweet (pretty amazing) offered by someone in Hawaii through seed saver's exchange (you have to be a member, but you should be anyway - they are noble. www.seedsavers.org). For the rest of us, "Howling Mob" (Shumways) and "Ashworth's" (Fedco) are very nice, although without the sweetness and holding power of the hybrids. But again, sweet corn is a nice touch in our diet (we dry it for succotash, corn chowder and adding to chili), but dry and pop are much more important to a sustainable diet, and there are a number of dent and flour corns that seem to do well here. My favorite, although not a high yielder, is "Northstine Dent"
Corn is a seed saving problem for people with small gardens (which does not include me) or people with field corn down the road (me). We've had pretty good luck saving seed from our early sweets, but the fields have tended to hybridize on at least the outside rows. I gave up altogether this year when our neighbor planted a whole cornfield worth across the road. Remember, you need at least 200 plants and seed from 100 ears to have reasonable genetic diversity.
I still haven't worked out the squash thing to my satisfaction. There are four families of squash, and you can have one of each, if you don't want to hand pollinate. For me, the pepos are the problem - acorns, pumpkins and summer squash are all pepos. I think I'm just going to give up zucchini in favor of pumpkins, but I haven't decided yet. So far I've had pollinated, but I don't want to count on that. The maximas are also a bit sad - they are the best tasting, and I can never decide between them, but I can rotate - butternut this year, pink banana the next. The only mixta I've ever grown that I liked and got to maturity was Tennessee sweet potato.
I'm a huge fan of West India Gherkins, which are not quite cucumbers, but almost indistinguishable. They are wonderful picklers, very crisp and tasty, and allow me to grow both gherkins and a slicer or pickler and have a bit more variety.
Saving seeds from biennials varies from easy to hard. Kale and leeks reliably overwinter here, as do parsnips (important, since you need fresh seed every year). Cabbages do ok packed in the garage over the winter. Potatoes are not a problem most years, but I doubt that with the flooding we had any of our sad little potato crop is going to make it to seed - which is why I keep a supply of potato seed, harvested both from my own and bought from pinetree garden seeds (Gilroy - discontinued after this year, and the only "true from seed" variety I know of, so buy lots for your storage). Potatoes don't come true from seed, but some potatoes are better than none, and you can store seed for some years, but not potatoes. Since they are such a staple crop, definitely store the seed.
Beets do fine for me, and I just keep the parsley in a sunny window, but I have much less luck with brussels sprouts and other brassicas. I just keep trying to winter them over. Sometimes I've had luck persuading them to go to seed the first year by starting them very early. It works well with parsley and kale as well.
Start thinking about next year's festival meals. Even if you can't grow all your own food, you can grow the food for your feasts, and harvest the next year's seed to practice for the day when you may need to, and long for the change from your corn and beans.
A Happy Thanksgiving and a peaceful Day of Mourning to you all.
Shalom,
Sharon
Monday, November 22, 2004
Its been way too long...
What Am I reading? _This Organic Life_ Joan Dye Gussow - for the third time. Fabulous read! _Plague_ Edward Marriot - a bit NY Times best sellerish, but a good history. And Phillip Roth's new futuristic opus, which is ok, but overblown.
What Am I Listening To? Schoolhouse Rock - Gen X nostalgia, nominally purchased for Simon's birthday. Most of it ages pretty well, but the song "Elbow Room" on the _America Rock_ CD is a hideous monstrosity, which actually sings happily about manifest destiny...ugh.
What are we eating, and where did it come from? Baked Potatoes (local, our potato crop drowned), with broccoli (ours, pretty much done for the season) and horseradish (ours) cheese sauce (NY cheddar, local organic milk, home grown, locally ground wheat flour, salt from who knows where). Salad (our lettuce, our carrots, local tomatoes!!!! (amazing in November, but cool) and the leftovers of the chocolate banana bread pudding (homemade challah, our eggs, local honey, local wheat home ground, tropical vanilla, bananas, sugar, and chocolate). Sounds fairly ethical at the moment, but don't ask me about the way less local menu for Simon's birthday party. Just don't.
What are we picking? Cabbage, kale, chinese broccoli, mizuna, lettuce, leeks, brussels sprouts, napa, parsnips, spinach, mint, parsley. Mmmmmm.
Can it have been two weeks? We were felled by the one-two punch of a miserable, long virus (made longer by everyone getting it in sequence) and the descent of the relatives for Simon's third birthday. Sorry I haven't posted. I've decided to list off the above info at each post, since I'm not up to posting everything in my library. Still, I've got some more book recommendations.
First, the birthday summary. Many, many, many presents. Overwhelmed three year old. Chaos. We try so hard to keep my kids from having an insane amount of stuff, and try equally hard to keep what they do have appropriate. We have rules - no battery operated things (there are a few exceptions here, but very few). Nothing that sings and dances (for Mommy and Daddy's sanity). Nothing that can only be played with one way. Wood over plastic, high quality over low. Books whenever possible. But we still get dozens of gifts, some of them junk, many of wonderful quality, but total excess. I can't tell the aunts and uncles, grandparents (my kids have *8* grandparents) and etc... not to give them gifts. We re-gift the least appropriate, but with 3 kids, times 1 birthday each, times 1 Chanukah, times... excess.
Now, we prepare for Turkey Day (The "Manifest Destiny" song playing cheerfully in the background - did I mention I'm 1/3 Cherokee?). Local, organic kosher turkey is coming - rather less local and organic peking duck (our buddy Joe is Chinese Jewish and hates turkey) is coming. Our Israeli buddies will bring booze. No one will watch football. We will sing the brucha over the cornbread. The mashed potatoes will have horseradish, the sweet potatoes will only have little marshmallows on them over my dead body. They will be carribbean style with lime juice. It will be good, if historically troubling, and pleasantly multi-ethnic.
Wanna eat greens all winter? Make absolutely sure you read the following:
_Solviva_ (can't remember her name - Anna something) and _The Four Season Harvest_ by Eliot Coleman.
Shalom and Happy Thanksgiving, Folks.
Sharon
What Am I Listening To? Schoolhouse Rock - Gen X nostalgia, nominally purchased for Simon's birthday. Most of it ages pretty well, but the song "Elbow Room" on the _America Rock_ CD is a hideous monstrosity, which actually sings happily about manifest destiny...ugh.
What are we eating, and where did it come from? Baked Potatoes (local, our potato crop drowned), with broccoli (ours, pretty much done for the season) and horseradish (ours) cheese sauce (NY cheddar, local organic milk, home grown, locally ground wheat flour, salt from who knows where). Salad (our lettuce, our carrots, local tomatoes!!!! (amazing in November, but cool) and the leftovers of the chocolate banana bread pudding (homemade challah, our eggs, local honey, local wheat home ground, tropical vanilla, bananas, sugar, and chocolate). Sounds fairly ethical at the moment, but don't ask me about the way less local menu for Simon's birthday party. Just don't.
What are we picking? Cabbage, kale, chinese broccoli, mizuna, lettuce, leeks, brussels sprouts, napa, parsnips, spinach, mint, parsley. Mmmmmm.
Can it have been two weeks? We were felled by the one-two punch of a miserable, long virus (made longer by everyone getting it in sequence) and the descent of the relatives for Simon's third birthday. Sorry I haven't posted. I've decided to list off the above info at each post, since I'm not up to posting everything in my library. Still, I've got some more book recommendations.
First, the birthday summary. Many, many, many presents. Overwhelmed three year old. Chaos. We try so hard to keep my kids from having an insane amount of stuff, and try equally hard to keep what they do have appropriate. We have rules - no battery operated things (there are a few exceptions here, but very few). Nothing that sings and dances (for Mommy and Daddy's sanity). Nothing that can only be played with one way. Wood over plastic, high quality over low. Books whenever possible. But we still get dozens of gifts, some of them junk, many of wonderful quality, but total excess. I can't tell the aunts and uncles, grandparents (my kids have *8* grandparents) and etc... not to give them gifts. We re-gift the least appropriate, but with 3 kids, times 1 birthday each, times 1 Chanukah, times... excess.
Now, we prepare for Turkey Day (The "Manifest Destiny" song playing cheerfully in the background - did I mention I'm 1/3 Cherokee?). Local, organic kosher turkey is coming - rather less local and organic peking duck (our buddy Joe is Chinese Jewish and hates turkey) is coming. Our Israeli buddies will bring booze. No one will watch football. We will sing the brucha over the cornbread. The mashed potatoes will have horseradish, the sweet potatoes will only have little marshmallows on them over my dead body. They will be carribbean style with lime juice. It will be good, if historically troubling, and pleasantly multi-ethnic.
Wanna eat greens all winter? Make absolutely sure you read the following:
_Solviva_ (can't remember her name - Anna something) and _The Four Season Harvest_ by Eliot Coleman.
Shalom and Happy Thanksgiving, Folks.
Sharon
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Hallelujah and The book list
Thank you, G-d! I don't have to make the afghans - John Ashcroft has resigned. I do not necessarily believe his replacement will be a vast improvement, but still, we all need good news now and then. Let us all say schecheyanu!!
Deb asked me to list what's on my homesteading/self-sufficiency/gardening/etc...bookcase, lest anyone else wants to make the transition from academic urbanite to rural farmer (ie, in case some of the rest of you are totally nuts). Since I'm always grateful for any excuse to skip out on my current dissertation chapter (Donne and Shakespeare aren't getting along, and they are drawing me into it. Oh, and its just possible I've written something stupid - like 80 pages or so), here I go.
Basic Homesteading Books: My top six, the ones I couldn't go on without, complement each other nicely.
1. The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery. Its huge. Its comprehensive. She's wonderful (I did some editing for her, and she's been to my house). If you could only have one book, this would be the one. That said, it has flaws (some of which I have helped fix for the tenth edition, coming out one of these years), and in some places insufficient depth. But the breadth is astounding. Wanna grow spelt? Melons? Butcher a turkey? Milk a cow? Can sauerkraut? And the book is full of recipes, some terrific some flawed, but designed to be made by people who are really and truly producing their own food. Don't live without it. And consider buying it directly from her website www.carlaemery.com - she's a sweet lady and can use the money.
2.Permaculture: A Design Manual, by Bill Mollison. Mollison is a genius - he created something genuinely different and brilliant when he invented permaculture. It will change your way of thinking about homesteading design, energy usage, sustainability and everything else. There are cheaper books, but if you are going to buy one, spend the money and get this - its too good to miss, too smart, too creative. I'm not a permaculturist per se, but he's influenced my thinking a lot, and discovering Mollison was definitely one of those "oh, wow!" moments.
3. Another such moment was reading Nathan Griffith's _Husbandry_ - precisely because while I suspect he never read Mollison, he seems to have created his own local variety of sustainability that uses some similar techniques and ways of thinking - but also some very different stuff. His politics are appalling to me, but he's very smart, and fun to read. He also writes articles in Countryside Magazine.
4. 50 years ago, the Robinsons' _Have More Plan_ was on the cutting edge of homestead design - it still is. You should definitely ignore the gender roles, the suggestions that you spray with DDT, etc... but that doesn't invalidate its essential wisdom. If I were building a house (and G-d willing, I never will), I'd use their homestead plan, at least in part. And when I finally have the money to renovate the kitchen, I *will* use their homestead plan.
5. I'm going to pick _The Contrary Farmer_ as the best basic book by Gene Logsdon, although that's tough - his old _Homesteading_ book, and his _Two Acre Eden_ (Deb, make sure you look at that last one - it would be really relevant to small scale homesteading) are so terrific - he can really write. He's creative, and funny and smart. You should read everything he writes, and I'll probably recommend some more books by him later in this process.
6. Finally, The first 10 Backwoods Home Anthologies. Ok, their politics are even more appalling, and their taste for lots and lots of guns sucks. But there is lots of information here duplicated no where else. They are worth the money, and the older ones spend less time on ways of passing concealed weapons and more on homesteading techniques. Jackie Clay alone is worth her weight in gold. Try www.backwoodshome.com and search for "Hardcore Homesteading" - its the perfect post peak oil article.
Ok, much more on this topic, but I'm too tired to stay conscious, and I've got some serious thanksgiving to do.
Cheers,
Sharon
Deb asked me to list what's on my homesteading/self-sufficiency/gardening/etc...bookcase, lest anyone else wants to make the transition from academic urbanite to rural farmer (ie, in case some of the rest of you are totally nuts). Since I'm always grateful for any excuse to skip out on my current dissertation chapter (Donne and Shakespeare aren't getting along, and they are drawing me into it. Oh, and its just possible I've written something stupid - like 80 pages or so), here I go.
Basic Homesteading Books: My top six, the ones I couldn't go on without, complement each other nicely.
1. The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery. Its huge. Its comprehensive. She's wonderful (I did some editing for her, and she's been to my house). If you could only have one book, this would be the one. That said, it has flaws (some of which I have helped fix for the tenth edition, coming out one of these years), and in some places insufficient depth. But the breadth is astounding. Wanna grow spelt? Melons? Butcher a turkey? Milk a cow? Can sauerkraut? And the book is full of recipes, some terrific some flawed, but designed to be made by people who are really and truly producing their own food. Don't live without it. And consider buying it directly from her website www.carlaemery.com - she's a sweet lady and can use the money.
2.Permaculture: A Design Manual, by Bill Mollison. Mollison is a genius - he created something genuinely different and brilliant when he invented permaculture. It will change your way of thinking about homesteading design, energy usage, sustainability and everything else. There are cheaper books, but if you are going to buy one, spend the money and get this - its too good to miss, too smart, too creative. I'm not a permaculturist per se, but he's influenced my thinking a lot, and discovering Mollison was definitely one of those "oh, wow!" moments.
3. Another such moment was reading Nathan Griffith's _Husbandry_ - precisely because while I suspect he never read Mollison, he seems to have created his own local variety of sustainability that uses some similar techniques and ways of thinking - but also some very different stuff. His politics are appalling to me, but he's very smart, and fun to read. He also writes articles in Countryside Magazine.
4. 50 years ago, the Robinsons' _Have More Plan_ was on the cutting edge of homestead design - it still is. You should definitely ignore the gender roles, the suggestions that you spray with DDT, etc... but that doesn't invalidate its essential wisdom. If I were building a house (and G-d willing, I never will), I'd use their homestead plan, at least in part. And when I finally have the money to renovate the kitchen, I *will* use their homestead plan.
5. I'm going to pick _The Contrary Farmer_ as the best basic book by Gene Logsdon, although that's tough - his old _Homesteading_ book, and his _Two Acre Eden_ (Deb, make sure you look at that last one - it would be really relevant to small scale homesteading) are so terrific - he can really write. He's creative, and funny and smart. You should read everything he writes, and I'll probably recommend some more books by him later in this process.
6. Finally, The first 10 Backwoods Home Anthologies. Ok, their politics are even more appalling, and their taste for lots and lots of guns sucks. But there is lots of information here duplicated no where else. They are worth the money, and the older ones spend less time on ways of passing concealed weapons and more on homesteading techniques. Jackie Clay alone is worth her weight in gold. Try www.backwoodshome.com and search for "Hardcore Homesteading" - its the perfect post peak oil article.
Ok, much more on this topic, but I'm too tired to stay conscious, and I've got some serious thanksgiving to do.
Cheers,
Sharon
Monday, November 08, 2004
I'm over it...really
Yup, I'm completely ok with the fact that Chippy the Wonder Chipmunk and My Lord Vader from Wyoming are in charge again - and that the fucking morons of our nation clearly wanted them. Its all good - I'm hoping we invade Australia this time. I'm pretty sure they have WMDs.
Ok, I have to sublimate somehow, and so I'm back to talking about knitting. I'm starting a shawl made out of this really, really pretty, very soft, totally inorganic fuzzy stuff that looks like mohair, only much snugglier. If you know anything about my taste in knitting, you know this is not my usual wont - I am pretty much entirely a natural fiber woman. Oh, I've crocheted a few afghans in the nicer artificials, mostly for my Mom, who is allergic to nearly all natural fibers, but for the most part I like my yarn to come from an animal or vegetable, rather than an oil well.
But this stuff was really, really soft. And so pretty - a slightly variegated burgundy. It won't keep me warm the way wool or alpaca will - and in fact, I swear my next shawl is going to be the aran pocketed one (I am not generally a cable person, but I like this one) from _Folk Shawls_ (amazing book, btw) in Artful Yarns's Jazz, which is a wool/alpaca mix. It will keep me terrifically warm, I suspect, and very happy. The current shawl project, umm, will probably not warm me too much.
I knit for many reasons (to keep from eating too much, to do something productive while I watch tv, because I like to spin and you have to do *something* with the yarn, because I'm in preparation for full-time sheep ownership), but mostly because I like people to be warm even in the cold, and because I believe in using as little heating energy as possible. Thus, warm sweaters, socks, hats, blankets, shawls, made of natural fibers that are warm, water resistant, and snuggly, so that you want to wear them. I am not the person to make a fun-fur scarf, or a metallic-polyester poncho. My philosophy of knitting is that the garments should be simple, serve their purpose (to cover one's back or ass or whatever, and to keep it comfortable in whatever temperature it is designed for), and show off the beauty of the yarn and simple stitch work - period. That's all there is to knitting.
Which is why I don't do artificial yarns, picture knitting (except for small kids - although I admit I have considered making political afghans. Do you think people would pay me to knit blankets that say, "Kiss my ass John Ashcroft?"), or anything remotely fashionable (see all previous comments on ponchos). Except that I'm knitting this shawl, which will not be warm, is not made of natural fibers, and which I'm doing entirely because it is pretty, at a time when I have dozens of holiday gifts to knit.
I can't be sure, but I blame this on the Bush presidency. I believe that not only have the Republicans done near infinite damage to people (like 100,000 Iraqi civilians, not to mention our own soldiers - check out www.fromthewilderness.com), governance, freedom, the environment, the national discourse and my children's future (not to mention a whole lot of children's present), but they have also started to ooze into our collective consciousness and destroy useful brain cells. I'm pretty sure had Kerry been elected (no great joy to me, truly, but at least a relief from the pure hell of this administration), I'd be spinning organically raised yarn dyed with natural goldenrod to make my shawl. Instead, I'm making this oil based monstrosity.
It is soft, though. And really pretty. Is this how it starts?
Ok, I have to sublimate somehow, and so I'm back to talking about knitting. I'm starting a shawl made out of this really, really pretty, very soft, totally inorganic fuzzy stuff that looks like mohair, only much snugglier. If you know anything about my taste in knitting, you know this is not my usual wont - I am pretty much entirely a natural fiber woman. Oh, I've crocheted a few afghans in the nicer artificials, mostly for my Mom, who is allergic to nearly all natural fibers, but for the most part I like my yarn to come from an animal or vegetable, rather than an oil well.
But this stuff was really, really soft. And so pretty - a slightly variegated burgundy. It won't keep me warm the way wool or alpaca will - and in fact, I swear my next shawl is going to be the aran pocketed one (I am not generally a cable person, but I like this one) from _Folk Shawls_ (amazing book, btw) in Artful Yarns's Jazz, which is a wool/alpaca mix. It will keep me terrifically warm, I suspect, and very happy. The current shawl project, umm, will probably not warm me too much.
I knit for many reasons (to keep from eating too much, to do something productive while I watch tv, because I like to spin and you have to do *something* with the yarn, because I'm in preparation for full-time sheep ownership), but mostly because I like people to be warm even in the cold, and because I believe in using as little heating energy as possible. Thus, warm sweaters, socks, hats, blankets, shawls, made of natural fibers that are warm, water resistant, and snuggly, so that you want to wear them. I am not the person to make a fun-fur scarf, or a metallic-polyester poncho. My philosophy of knitting is that the garments should be simple, serve their purpose (to cover one's back or ass or whatever, and to keep it comfortable in whatever temperature it is designed for), and show off the beauty of the yarn and simple stitch work - period. That's all there is to knitting.
Which is why I don't do artificial yarns, picture knitting (except for small kids - although I admit I have considered making political afghans. Do you think people would pay me to knit blankets that say, "Kiss my ass John Ashcroft?"), or anything remotely fashionable (see all previous comments on ponchos). Except that I'm knitting this shawl, which will not be warm, is not made of natural fibers, and which I'm doing entirely because it is pretty, at a time when I have dozens of holiday gifts to knit.
I can't be sure, but I blame this on the Bush presidency. I believe that not only have the Republicans done near infinite damage to people (like 100,000 Iraqi civilians, not to mention our own soldiers - check out www.fromthewilderness.com), governance, freedom, the environment, the national discourse and my children's future (not to mention a whole lot of children's present), but they have also started to ooze into our collective consciousness and destroy useful brain cells. I'm pretty sure had Kerry been elected (no great joy to me, truly, but at least a relief from the pure hell of this administration), I'd be spinning organically raised yarn dyed with natural goldenrod to make my shawl. Instead, I'm making this oil based monstrosity.
It is soft, though. And really pretty. Is this how it starts?
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
The Day After...my children and their futures
It wasn't like I haven't been predicting it, or that I'd allowed my hopes to rise, but... well, I had the faint hope that the lesser of two evils (which is looking pretty good right now) might have won. It does not look that way. I know that the blogosphere is filled by thousands of people writing their opinion on this. Let me just say... I don't want to talk about it.
Eli went horseback riding again today - he is the simple embodiment of joy on a horse. Although kind people have told me how to post pictures, I haven't yet done so. So I doubt you will believe me when I say that my oldest child is transcendently beautiful. But so many people have told me so spontaneously that I almost believe my own natural inclination to think this. It helps that I do not believe that of my other two children, who are very cute (yea, I know, I'm their Mom - I would say that). Simon looks *exactly* like is Dad, who I happen to think is very handsome, and Isaiah is very round and Gerber babyish. But Eli is luminous - huge brown eyes, long lashes, the sweetest smile, tousled hair, very tall and lanky.
And he's a luminous personality as well - that doesn't mean he's not an ordinary child - he misbehaves, he pushes and hits, he complains when he doesn't get his way. But when is happy, it is whole body happiness. His sorrow is total as well. He loves completely, no matter how you behave (he forgives me my quick temper and failures instantly, to my shame), and wants nothing more than to play, cuddle, tickle, laugh, be with you. He has a sense of humor, and a devilish one, and a boundless capacity for fun. He is the most physically affectionate and loving child you can imagine. Eric and I have often felt that if someone came to us and told us that Eli was the reincarnation of some Lama or other great soul (even though we don't believe in reincarnation particularly) we'd be inclined to accept it. A number of people who had heard about Eli and pitied us, on meeting him, tell us how wonderful he is, and that they wouldn't necessarily want him to change. I feel precisely that way sometimes - although I want for my son all the ordinary joys of life that are not necessarily compatible with autism (I hope I'm wrong about that last), and particularly so today.
So watching Eli on a horse, his total delight and pleasure, has a way of moving me from the uglier thoughts in my head about this election. I will say, I believe with all my heart that we are laying the ground now for a longer term war, potentially a world war, in the middle east. I won't be surprised at all if my sons grow to manhood in an era of drafts and wars. Although daughters don't necessarily spare you the draft these days, I admit, today I feel particularly vulnerable because I have sons that I love so dearly, and history has not always been gentle to those sons. It is perhaps stupid, and predicated on way too many anticipations and guesses, but this morning I found myself feeling dually grateful to have Eli - because he is such a wonderful child in himself, and because his condition means that I will never have to send him to war.
I wish the same was true of Isaiah and Simon. I think I talk more about Eli than the other two boys, and thus give the impression that Eli's needs are at the center of our world. But that's not the case at all. Simon is sweet, sensitive, gentle, very, very high strung (everything is a crisis), hyperverbal and imaginative. We spend a lot of time making up stories with him, and he always (at not quite 3) knows exactly how they should go. Right at the moment, he's being eaten by a stuffed shark (for the fourth or fifth time this morning), and he wants to know if winnie the pooh is a mammal.
Isaiah is a baby, and it is always hard to tell what of his character will last. He definitely has a prediliction for doing things the hard way - if he can insert an obstacle in his way, he does. If he can climb over something, or hurl himself off a piece of furniture, well, all to the better. I spend much of my day trying to mitigate the damage to a child with excellent gross motor skills, absolutely no fear of anything, and a tendency to greet the world face-first.
I'm rambling a bit, but all I can say is that I'm grateful as hell to have my perfect boys, and it scares the heck out of me that what we do now will shape their futures in ways I cannot control.
Sharon
Eli went horseback riding again today - he is the simple embodiment of joy on a horse. Although kind people have told me how to post pictures, I haven't yet done so. So I doubt you will believe me when I say that my oldest child is transcendently beautiful. But so many people have told me so spontaneously that I almost believe my own natural inclination to think this. It helps that I do not believe that of my other two children, who are very cute (yea, I know, I'm their Mom - I would say that). Simon looks *exactly* like is Dad, who I happen to think is very handsome, and Isaiah is very round and Gerber babyish. But Eli is luminous - huge brown eyes, long lashes, the sweetest smile, tousled hair, very tall and lanky.
And he's a luminous personality as well - that doesn't mean he's not an ordinary child - he misbehaves, he pushes and hits, he complains when he doesn't get his way. But when is happy, it is whole body happiness. His sorrow is total as well. He loves completely, no matter how you behave (he forgives me my quick temper and failures instantly, to my shame), and wants nothing more than to play, cuddle, tickle, laugh, be with you. He has a sense of humor, and a devilish one, and a boundless capacity for fun. He is the most physically affectionate and loving child you can imagine. Eric and I have often felt that if someone came to us and told us that Eli was the reincarnation of some Lama or other great soul (even though we don't believe in reincarnation particularly) we'd be inclined to accept it. A number of people who had heard about Eli and pitied us, on meeting him, tell us how wonderful he is, and that they wouldn't necessarily want him to change. I feel precisely that way sometimes - although I want for my son all the ordinary joys of life that are not necessarily compatible with autism (I hope I'm wrong about that last), and particularly so today.
So watching Eli on a horse, his total delight and pleasure, has a way of moving me from the uglier thoughts in my head about this election. I will say, I believe with all my heart that we are laying the ground now for a longer term war, potentially a world war, in the middle east. I won't be surprised at all if my sons grow to manhood in an era of drafts and wars. Although daughters don't necessarily spare you the draft these days, I admit, today I feel particularly vulnerable because I have sons that I love so dearly, and history has not always been gentle to those sons. It is perhaps stupid, and predicated on way too many anticipations and guesses, but this morning I found myself feeling dually grateful to have Eli - because he is such a wonderful child in himself, and because his condition means that I will never have to send him to war.
I wish the same was true of Isaiah and Simon. I think I talk more about Eli than the other two boys, and thus give the impression that Eli's needs are at the center of our world. But that's not the case at all. Simon is sweet, sensitive, gentle, very, very high strung (everything is a crisis), hyperverbal and imaginative. We spend a lot of time making up stories with him, and he always (at not quite 3) knows exactly how they should go. Right at the moment, he's being eaten by a stuffed shark (for the fourth or fifth time this morning), and he wants to know if winnie the pooh is a mammal.
Isaiah is a baby, and it is always hard to tell what of his character will last. He definitely has a prediliction for doing things the hard way - if he can insert an obstacle in his way, he does. If he can climb over something, or hurl himself off a piece of furniture, well, all to the better. I spend much of my day trying to mitigate the damage to a child with excellent gross motor skills, absolutely no fear of anything, and a tendency to greet the world face-first.
I'm rambling a bit, but all I can say is that I'm grateful as hell to have my perfect boys, and it scares the heck out of me that what we do now will shape their futures in ways I cannot control.
Sharon
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Assorted Rants:Politics, Derrida,
Did you see the hideous obit of Jacques Derrida in the NY Times? Check it out here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10B11FB385F0C738DDDA90994DC404482
What idiot wrote this? (I don't expect anyone to actually pay them for this crap, and indeed, I discourage you from doing so!) I discovered deconstruction late, and it never resonated for me as I suspect it must have for those who found it as it was developing, but Derrida is not the caricature that he has been reduced to, nor is his thought the dim account that we get. You'd think that you could count on one single popular media to get Derrida, at least enough to write a half-decent bio. Further proof that the world is going to hell. (Did I mention that ponchos are back in fashion? If I were a Christian I'd say it was a sign of the end times. Instead, I'm guessing it means that
God, if real, has gotten bored with making fun of the upright monkeys and departed for warmer (or smarter) climes )
All of this is simply a deferral of the thing that is making me craziest of all - the election. I still believe we are going to lose, although Pat Robinson (someone who has not been notable for bringing me joy in the past) did please me. But I don't dare allow the flare of hope - because I know we're going to lose, and lose for the simple reason that people want their president to speak the language of right and wrong, moral and amoral. We on the left used to know how to do that, now we don't seem to. And so we allow the deeply amoral to take the language of faith, and right and truth away from us, and without a fight. There is no reason for that - in fact, there is every reason to believe that we have the right to the language of principle. But that battle is lost, and I think it would take a more eloquent man than Kerry (tell me there aren't more eloquent men, for cripes sake - the only duller guy is Holy Joe) to take it back now. We'll see.
Final proof that God may have taken a little break from us? My cousin is joining the army, so that he can go to college. Is it not possible in this world that one could get a decent education without having a limb blown off in Iraq? Can you imagine a more bleak trade off?
What idiot wrote this? (I don't expect anyone to actually pay them for this crap, and indeed, I discourage you from doing so!) I discovered deconstruction late, and it never resonated for me as I suspect it must have for those who found it as it was developing, but Derrida is not the caricature that he has been reduced to, nor is his thought the dim account that we get. You'd think that you could count on one single popular media to get Derrida, at least enough to write a half-decent bio. Further proof that the world is going to hell. (Did I mention that ponchos are back in fashion? If I were a Christian I'd say it was a sign of the end times. Instead, I'm guessing it means that
God, if real, has gotten bored with making fun of the upright monkeys and departed for warmer (or smarter) climes )
All of this is simply a deferral of the thing that is making me craziest of all - the election. I still believe we are going to lose, although Pat Robinson (someone who has not been notable for bringing me joy in the past) did please me. But I don't dare allow the flare of hope - because I know we're going to lose, and lose for the simple reason that people want their president to speak the language of right and wrong, moral and amoral. We on the left used to know how to do that, now we don't seem to. And so we allow the deeply amoral to take the language of faith, and right and truth away from us, and without a fight. There is no reason for that - in fact, there is every reason to believe that we have the right to the language of principle. But that battle is lost, and I think it would take a more eloquent man than Kerry (tell me there aren't more eloquent men, for cripes sake - the only duller guy is Holy Joe) to take it back now. We'll see.
Final proof that God may have taken a little break from us? My cousin is joining the army, so that he can go to college. Is it not possible in this world that one could get a decent education without having a limb blown off in Iraq? Can you imagine a more bleak trade off?
Friday, October 22, 2004
Update and food storage tour
I know, I know, it has been a long time since I posted. Things have been much as usual, except that I had three days of food poisoning (ugh). Eric thankfully saved me by taking care of the kids, the house, the skunked dog (ugh), the disabled grandparents and his job with a grace that is completely normal to him and unbelievably admirable to me. I don't want to sound like the post-feminist wife here, but *no one* can run our life alone - *NO ONE* - it is simply too complex. And he did - beautifully. I love him so much.
This is proof positive that academic life unfits women for domestic work - literally. I got food poisoning at a talk I attended on Macbeth, one of my rare forays back into the world of scholarship from the world of motherhood/farming/writing/etc... I spend an evening thinking of high minded things and neglecting my other work, and then spend three miserable days heaving, neglecting my life as vague commercial jingles and ugly images of childhood screw ups floated through my nauseated and exhausted brain.
In other news, Eli is horseback riding!!! Isn't that the coolest thing (if I ever learn to post pics, I will - he is so cute). A program for autistic children to ride has accepted him in late, and he was so excited. He's very good with animals (he and Rufus, our collie, have a special bond, and even the chickens like him), and he was so relaxed, comfortable and happy up there on a horse - no fear or anxiety at all. Even the helmet didn't bother him.
Anyway, here's part one of an ongoing (ie, when I get around to it) tour of my home food storage.
Cheers!
I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but I recently had occasion to start writing up a description of the ways we're preparing for Peak Oil, and I thought I'd post it. I'd love to hear comments/suggestions/critiques, and I thought this might be useful to those who are just starting to acquire materials or store items. I'm including the ways that we've found to pay for these thing/make them cheaper, since for us, at least, money is the biggest obstacle to preparation.
I'd like to emphasize that there are two layers to our preps, and both of them are equally important. First, there are stored items designed to ease a difficult transitional period, but that are unsustainable in the longer term. Then, there are the preps that are designed to allow us to replace lost items, to be fundamentally sustainable. We make choices between the two regularly, and some of the choices weve made might not work for someone else.
I also think it is worth noting that not everything we do has a dire inevitability around it - most of my preps work great even if nothing bad ever happens. My food storage cuts down the number of trips to the store, my yarn and fabric stash drops gift and clothing costs, the grain grinder means we eat healthier, etc... The thing is that none of this should be perceived as a miserable necessity, but as a useful plan with positive immediate consequences. And lord knows, don't go into debt for it.
Finally, ours is a particular family in a particular situation. We are 7 people, 3 small children, 2 elders, 2 healthy adults. We have a large amount of land (27 acres) and a large house (4000 square foot farmhouse) and a number of outbuildings. The size of our house, for example, shapes our preps in several ways - we certainly have the luxury of storage space, but we also are not trying to heat the whole house, so warm blankets and winter clothes figure more than in a much smaller space. Because we have children and elders, some of our preps are specific to them.
Ok, caveats done. I'll start with food/toiletries, since that's one of the most urgent things.
Our food storage covers several rooms in our house. First, is the kitchen. We have an old, ratty kitchen, and we havent done much to make it decorative - but we've enhanced its usefulness by putting in a wood cookstove, and filling the (fairly large) room with cheap metal shop shelving - the kind you buy for $20 at home depot. We have four of them. We also have made additional counter space by building into the walls (we are bad carpenters, so this is not an aesthetic enhancement, although my step-mom did a nice job with some counters), and we have some cabinets as well. We store beans, some grains, whole spices, etc... in the canning jars and storage containers that are not suitable for actual canning. The grains we use a lot of - brown and white rice, whole wheat, rolled oats, are stored in those decorative metal popcorn tins. One will hold 25 lbs, and they cost less than 50 cents. The kitchen is where we keep all the food ready for immanent use. There is somewhere between two weeks and a month worth of food there at any given time, along with the same amount of food for dog and cats. In addition, we store some of our food preservation equipment there - the pressure and water bath canners, the food mill, dehydrator, etc...
We also have our grain grinder there - there's no piece of equipment I'd recommend buying more. Whole wheat stores forever, is cheap and bread is infinitely various. I actually have several - I picked up a couple of cheap corona mills (the cheapest model, mostly made for grinding corn) one of which I use for rice dehulling, another for grinding nut butters and coarse cornmeal. But the one we use every day is Lehman's Best, and is terrific. I've never seen one at a yard sale, although occasionally a good deal shows up on ebay. But they are worth paying full ($150-200) price for, or asking for it for a gift (very kind MIL gave it to me for my 30th birthday, although I don't think she quite appreciated how glad I was to have it - she thinks we're nuts.) We grind wheat for our bread, and for the bread of our 20 customer families by hand. It is great exercise, and the bread tastes so good. We also malt barley and grind that, which adds a sweetness and lightness. If you haven't read Sally Fallons Nourishing Traditions definitely do so - sprouted grain breads, lactofermentation, etc... are a big part of our diet.
We try very hard to eat from our storage - in part because I believe it is a healthy way to eat, in part because we like it, in part because it is cheaper, and also because it will make the transition less painful. Thats not to say that we don't eat citrus and spices, etc... but we do try to mostly eat locally and a sustainable diet. So the food in our storage is only slightly different than the food in our kitchen for dinner. We eat a lot of beans, a little home-raised meat (mostly chicken, although we trade eggs for milk and beef as well), sweeten mostly with honey, make grains primary in our diet, and eat a lot of meals in the asian style. So we have on our shelves lots of grains, lots of beans, lots of sauces and spices, very little meat and fish, and lots of vegetables. If that doesn't sound appetizing, all I can say is that no one every turns down an invitation to dinner at my house.
The next part of our food storage is the downstairs guest room closet. Grandma is none to pleased with this, since she thinks guests should have more than 6 inches of room to hang their clothes, but she deals. That closet is devoted to storing two categories of things - diapering materials and canning materials. My extra canners (I have two pressure and two water bath - all acquired at yard sales for less than $5), canning jars (I have about 600 - and I never pay more than $3 per box), along with lots of lids, parafin (yeah, I know it isnt recommended), rings, and pickling salt. Canning isn't necessarily the least energy intensive or most sustainable method, but it is an essential element of our food storage now and through the transitional period, when having complete foods with all their water intact may be essential if we ever have a real emergency. The investment in canning materials has been small, compared to the return - I'm not sure I'd recommend it if you had to buy everything new, but if you check out yard sales, canners and canning jars are generally in good supply. This means that most of the canned soups, broths, pickles, jams. vegetables, beans, etc... come from our garden, without pesticides, and are processed fresh.
Also in that closet are diapers. My oldest son is autistic, and at 4 1/2 not entirely potty trained. My middle son, at 2 1/2 is also not fully trained, and my youngest is only 10 months old. We cloth diaper, but we make a point of storing several hundred plastic diapers for each child, in case we are unable to wash, or have water restrictions. Since our well is electrically powered, although we have non-electric backups, we'll probably begrudge every drop of water we have to haul - so they'll be well worth the landfill costs.
Under the guest room bed (thankfully Grandma hasn't noticed yet) is space for 14 5 gallon buckets of beans and grains. We have the same under our bed. All told (in various locations), we have at present 500lbs of wheat, 500 lbs whole rice, 200lbs white rice, 50lbs brown rice, 500 lbs beans of various sort (we grew about 1/2 of them), 100lbs lentils, 200 lbs soybeans, 150 lbs barley, 600 lbs oatmeal, and various smaller amounts of grains and beans. We buy them cheaply in bulk from a food coop, and move them into containers in the kitchen as needed. All are stored with easy removal lids and oxygen removers. Fortunately our house has strong floors. The nice thing is that it keeps mess out from under the beds - theres no room.
Going upstairs, we've converted one of the closets in our bedroom to food storage. In there are most of the canned goods, tinned and home-canned meats and soups, the pasta, extra beans and rice, sauces and seasonings (I buy spices in bulk from penzeys.com), 150 lbs of sugar (should be more), 100 lbs of salt (ibid) (all bought in bulk), as well as things we just happen to like. We store vegetarian oyster sauce, sambal olek, korean pepper paste, hot bean paste, etc... for asian cooking. We store Tang and Vit. C koolaid for vitamin C for the kids, pickles (for appetite enhancement), shortening (disgusting, but lasts forever), Canned and dehydrated tomatoes (from our garden), hot sauce (by the gallon), and lots more, which I'll pick up next time.
This is proof positive that academic life unfits women for domestic work - literally. I got food poisoning at a talk I attended on Macbeth, one of my rare forays back into the world of scholarship from the world of motherhood/farming/writing/etc... I spend an evening thinking of high minded things and neglecting my other work, and then spend three miserable days heaving, neglecting my life as vague commercial jingles and ugly images of childhood screw ups floated through my nauseated and exhausted brain.
In other news, Eli is horseback riding!!! Isn't that the coolest thing (if I ever learn to post pics, I will - he is so cute). A program for autistic children to ride has accepted him in late, and he was so excited. He's very good with animals (he and Rufus, our collie, have a special bond, and even the chickens like him), and he was so relaxed, comfortable and happy up there on a horse - no fear or anxiety at all. Even the helmet didn't bother him.
Anyway, here's part one of an ongoing (ie, when I get around to it) tour of my home food storage.
Cheers!
I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but I recently had occasion to start writing up a description of the ways we're preparing for Peak Oil, and I thought I'd post it. I'd love to hear comments/suggestions/critiques, and I thought this might be useful to those who are just starting to acquire materials or store items. I'm including the ways that we've found to pay for these thing/make them cheaper, since for us, at least, money is the biggest obstacle to preparation.
I'd like to emphasize that there are two layers to our preps, and both of them are equally important. First, there are stored items designed to ease a difficult transitional period, but that are unsustainable in the longer term. Then, there are the preps that are designed to allow us to replace lost items, to be fundamentally sustainable. We make choices between the two regularly, and some of the choices weve made might not work for someone else.
I also think it is worth noting that not everything we do has a dire inevitability around it - most of my preps work great even if nothing bad ever happens. My food storage cuts down the number of trips to the store, my yarn and fabric stash drops gift and clothing costs, the grain grinder means we eat healthier, etc... The thing is that none of this should be perceived as a miserable necessity, but as a useful plan with positive immediate consequences. And lord knows, don't go into debt for it.
Finally, ours is a particular family in a particular situation. We are 7 people, 3 small children, 2 elders, 2 healthy adults. We have a large amount of land (27 acres) and a large house (4000 square foot farmhouse) and a number of outbuildings. The size of our house, for example, shapes our preps in several ways - we certainly have the luxury of storage space, but we also are not trying to heat the whole house, so warm blankets and winter clothes figure more than in a much smaller space. Because we have children and elders, some of our preps are specific to them.
Ok, caveats done. I'll start with food/toiletries, since that's one of the most urgent things.
Our food storage covers several rooms in our house. First, is the kitchen. We have an old, ratty kitchen, and we havent done much to make it decorative - but we've enhanced its usefulness by putting in a wood cookstove, and filling the (fairly large) room with cheap metal shop shelving - the kind you buy for $20 at home depot. We have four of them. We also have made additional counter space by building into the walls (we are bad carpenters, so this is not an aesthetic enhancement, although my step-mom did a nice job with some counters), and we have some cabinets as well. We store beans, some grains, whole spices, etc... in the canning jars and storage containers that are not suitable for actual canning. The grains we use a lot of - brown and white rice, whole wheat, rolled oats, are stored in those decorative metal popcorn tins. One will hold 25 lbs, and they cost less than 50 cents. The kitchen is where we keep all the food ready for immanent use. There is somewhere between two weeks and a month worth of food there at any given time, along with the same amount of food for dog and cats. In addition, we store some of our food preservation equipment there - the pressure and water bath canners, the food mill, dehydrator, etc...
We also have our grain grinder there - there's no piece of equipment I'd recommend buying more. Whole wheat stores forever, is cheap and bread is infinitely various. I actually have several - I picked up a couple of cheap corona mills (the cheapest model, mostly made for grinding corn) one of which I use for rice dehulling, another for grinding nut butters and coarse cornmeal. But the one we use every day is Lehman's Best, and is terrific. I've never seen one at a yard sale, although occasionally a good deal shows up on ebay. But they are worth paying full ($150-200) price for, or asking for it for a gift (very kind MIL gave it to me for my 30th birthday, although I don't think she quite appreciated how glad I was to have it - she thinks we're nuts.) We grind wheat for our bread, and for the bread of our 20 customer families by hand. It is great exercise, and the bread tastes so good. We also malt barley and grind that, which adds a sweetness and lightness. If you haven't read Sally Fallons Nourishing Traditions definitely do so - sprouted grain breads, lactofermentation, etc... are a big part of our diet.
We try very hard to eat from our storage - in part because I believe it is a healthy way to eat, in part because we like it, in part because it is cheaper, and also because it will make the transition less painful. Thats not to say that we don't eat citrus and spices, etc... but we do try to mostly eat locally and a sustainable diet. So the food in our storage is only slightly different than the food in our kitchen for dinner. We eat a lot of beans, a little home-raised meat (mostly chicken, although we trade eggs for milk and beef as well), sweeten mostly with honey, make grains primary in our diet, and eat a lot of meals in the asian style. So we have on our shelves lots of grains, lots of beans, lots of sauces and spices, very little meat and fish, and lots of vegetables. If that doesn't sound appetizing, all I can say is that no one every turns down an invitation to dinner at my house.
The next part of our food storage is the downstairs guest room closet. Grandma is none to pleased with this, since she thinks guests should have more than 6 inches of room to hang their clothes, but she deals. That closet is devoted to storing two categories of things - diapering materials and canning materials. My extra canners (I have two pressure and two water bath - all acquired at yard sales for less than $5), canning jars (I have about 600 - and I never pay more than $3 per box), along with lots of lids, parafin (yeah, I know it isnt recommended), rings, and pickling salt. Canning isn't necessarily the least energy intensive or most sustainable method, but it is an essential element of our food storage now and through the transitional period, when having complete foods with all their water intact may be essential if we ever have a real emergency. The investment in canning materials has been small, compared to the return - I'm not sure I'd recommend it if you had to buy everything new, but if you check out yard sales, canners and canning jars are generally in good supply. This means that most of the canned soups, broths, pickles, jams. vegetables, beans, etc... come from our garden, without pesticides, and are processed fresh.
Also in that closet are diapers. My oldest son is autistic, and at 4 1/2 not entirely potty trained. My middle son, at 2 1/2 is also not fully trained, and my youngest is only 10 months old. We cloth diaper, but we make a point of storing several hundred plastic diapers for each child, in case we are unable to wash, or have water restrictions. Since our well is electrically powered, although we have non-electric backups, we'll probably begrudge every drop of water we have to haul - so they'll be well worth the landfill costs.
Under the guest room bed (thankfully Grandma hasn't noticed yet) is space for 14 5 gallon buckets of beans and grains. We have the same under our bed. All told (in various locations), we have at present 500lbs of wheat, 500 lbs whole rice, 200lbs white rice, 50lbs brown rice, 500 lbs beans of various sort (we grew about 1/2 of them), 100lbs lentils, 200 lbs soybeans, 150 lbs barley, 600 lbs oatmeal, and various smaller amounts of grains and beans. We buy them cheaply in bulk from a food coop, and move them into containers in the kitchen as needed. All are stored with easy removal lids and oxygen removers. Fortunately our house has strong floors. The nice thing is that it keeps mess out from under the beds - theres no room.
Going upstairs, we've converted one of the closets in our bedroom to food storage. In there are most of the canned goods, tinned and home-canned meats and soups, the pasta, extra beans and rice, sauces and seasonings (I buy spices in bulk from penzeys.com), 150 lbs of sugar (should be more), 100 lbs of salt (ibid) (all bought in bulk), as well as things we just happen to like. We store vegetarian oyster sauce, sambal olek, korean pepper paste, hot bean paste, etc... for asian cooking. We store Tang and Vit. C koolaid for vitamin C for the kids, pickles (for appetite enhancement), shortening (disgusting, but lasts forever), Canned and dehydrated tomatoes (from our garden), hot sauce (by the gallon), and lots more, which I'll pick up next time.
Skepticism..what I'm thinking about.
In the modern age, skepticism begins with doubt as to the existence of God. It is hard to underestimate the difficulty, then, of wrapping one's contemporary imagination around a skepticism that retains complete and implicit belief in the divine, but doubts the reality of the person standing next to oneself. And yet, in its most literal sense, that is the character of Renaissance skepticism - a world peopled by God but not by other humans.
My doctoral dissertation is about the intersection between Renaissance demographics and skepticism. Oddly, skepticism in the 17th century didn't mean anything like what it means today - depending on whose version you follow (Katherine Maus or Stanley Cavell - I think they aren't incompatible), what people doubted then was not what they doubt now. When we think of skepticism in a modern sense, we think about doubt about the existence of God, or of other transcendent things, or about science vs. religion. But both versions of Renaissance skepticism accept the existence of God as foregone, and neither see a contradiction between science and faith (there wasn't one at the time). Instead, skeptics doubt either the existence of other people (ie, Cartesian skepticism, which says that you can prove that you exist and God exists, but not that everyone around you isn't a figment) or what you can know about other people (ie, what they are thinking).
I've been writing about this for several years, but it only recently has occurred to me that the Biblical story of Sarah (the forgotten part of the binding of Isaac) is as much the pre-narrative of this model of skepticism as the Oedipus story is for well, the
Oedipal complex.
If Renaissance skepticism as we have discussed it can be said to have an originating myth, we might find it in the Biblical story of Sarah, for whom the otherness of G-d and the question of the (m)aternity of her children are inextricably linked. Doubt, counting, reproduction, skepticism, all are linked across time and narrative. Stanley Cavell is right to tie skepticism to the questions raised by the paternity of children, but I would suggest that he refers only to a species of skepticism, that ultimately the act of reproduction itself is perennially tied to the question of whether the others one creates are truly real, and, perhaps, whether the act of generation, which mimics God's, is perhaps a kind of proof that we are real.
Sarah (then Sarai) is, described as barren when she is first named, and thus her infertility is tied to her identity. Sarah herself insists that G-d is at fault for her sterility, that YHWH has closed her womb. Her certainty on this point is startling Unconvinced, as she ages, that God will keep his promise to give Abraham descendents as "numerous as the stars," Sarah imagines as means of providing a child to both of them, by requiring her handmaiden to sleep with her husband, and thus get Sarah and Abraham a child. It defies imagination, given her machinations at reproduction, that Sarah could participate in the act of faith later demanded of Abraham - to which her husband is strangely quiescient.
I've always wanted to write a version of the Binding of Isaac in which God asks Sarah to sacrifice Isaac - how much fun would it be to write her reply? Abraham's gesture of complete faith could have been matched by another gesture of complete faith, for Sarah never, ever doubts the existence of God. Oh, she doubts his power - doubts that even God could open her womb in her 90s, and perhaps that God can tell whether she's lying, but she knows God is real. And she thinks God is wrong - and has the courage to say so.
Sarah doubts, as Satan in Paradise Lost does, the degree of God's power. She doubts that God is right. And she is not a wholly positive figure (her treatment of Hagar is hideous). But she is also the mother of a kind of doubt that achieves both faith and courage - one that says, "I believe that God is real, but I do not fully trust God to be always Godly?"
And can you blame her? Not only does this act of Yahweh's evoke the old Pagan Gods they attempt to differentiate themselves from, but it is done in the face of proof that this God is rather new to the divinity business, and makes errors, is subject to human persuasion (a tactic Abraham refuses to use here) and chooses unwisely. What mother, what person, what skeptic could not fail to doubt. Sadly, all the role of Sarah in this that we have is her death - the Talmud says she dies when Abraham takes her son to the mountain.
In a personal sense, I wonder, did God grow up? I speak as a person who believes in God out of a kind of visceral sense of immanence. I have always felt that there was God, since earliest childhood, known it as fact much as I know I have a tongue hair, or any other part of myself I cannot always feel. You would think that this certainty would be useful, but I haven't found it especially so. Instead, it raises more questions. Is God subject to human persuasion? Does God show interest? Are God's agendas always the right ones? Should I be a subject, or trust my own wits and will and argue? Do I emulate Abraham or Sarah when tragedy strikes, when costs are tallied?
I don't think it is any accident that I stumbled into the study of skepticism, do you?
My doctoral dissertation is about the intersection between Renaissance demographics and skepticism. Oddly, skepticism in the 17th century didn't mean anything like what it means today - depending on whose version you follow (Katherine Maus or Stanley Cavell - I think they aren't incompatible), what people doubted then was not what they doubt now. When we think of skepticism in a modern sense, we think about doubt about the existence of God, or of other transcendent things, or about science vs. religion. But both versions of Renaissance skepticism accept the existence of God as foregone, and neither see a contradiction between science and faith (there wasn't one at the time). Instead, skeptics doubt either the existence of other people (ie, Cartesian skepticism, which says that you can prove that you exist and God exists, but not that everyone around you isn't a figment) or what you can know about other people (ie, what they are thinking).
I've been writing about this for several years, but it only recently has occurred to me that the Biblical story of Sarah (the forgotten part of the binding of Isaac) is as much the pre-narrative of this model of skepticism as the Oedipus story is for well, the
Oedipal complex.
If Renaissance skepticism as we have discussed it can be said to have an originating myth, we might find it in the Biblical story of Sarah, for whom the otherness of G-d and the question of the (m)aternity of her children are inextricably linked. Doubt, counting, reproduction, skepticism, all are linked across time and narrative. Stanley Cavell is right to tie skepticism to the questions raised by the paternity of children, but I would suggest that he refers only to a species of skepticism, that ultimately the act of reproduction itself is perennially tied to the question of whether the others one creates are truly real, and, perhaps, whether the act of generation, which mimics God's, is perhaps a kind of proof that we are real.
Sarah (then Sarai) is, described as barren when she is first named, and thus her infertility is tied to her identity. Sarah herself insists that G-d is at fault for her sterility, that YHWH has closed her womb. Her certainty on this point is startling Unconvinced, as she ages, that God will keep his promise to give Abraham descendents as "numerous as the stars," Sarah imagines as means of providing a child to both of them, by requiring her handmaiden to sleep with her husband, and thus get Sarah and Abraham a child. It defies imagination, given her machinations at reproduction, that Sarah could participate in the act of faith later demanded of Abraham - to which her husband is strangely quiescient.
I've always wanted to write a version of the Binding of Isaac in which God asks Sarah to sacrifice Isaac - how much fun would it be to write her reply? Abraham's gesture of complete faith could have been matched by another gesture of complete faith, for Sarah never, ever doubts the existence of God. Oh, she doubts his power - doubts that even God could open her womb in her 90s, and perhaps that God can tell whether she's lying, but she knows God is real. And she thinks God is wrong - and has the courage to say so.
Sarah doubts, as Satan in Paradise Lost does, the degree of God's power. She doubts that God is right. And she is not a wholly positive figure (her treatment of Hagar is hideous). But she is also the mother of a kind of doubt that achieves both faith and courage - one that says, "I believe that God is real, but I do not fully trust God to be always Godly?"
And can you blame her? Not only does this act of Yahweh's evoke the old Pagan Gods they attempt to differentiate themselves from, but it is done in the face of proof that this God is rather new to the divinity business, and makes errors, is subject to human persuasion (a tactic Abraham refuses to use here) and chooses unwisely. What mother, what person, what skeptic could not fail to doubt. Sadly, all the role of Sarah in this that we have is her death - the Talmud says she dies when Abraham takes her son to the mountain.
In a personal sense, I wonder, did God grow up? I speak as a person who believes in God out of a kind of visceral sense of immanence. I have always felt that there was God, since earliest childhood, known it as fact much as I know I have a tongue hair, or any other part of myself I cannot always feel. You would think that this certainty would be useful, but I haven't found it especially so. Instead, it raises more questions. Is God subject to human persuasion? Does God show interest? Are God's agendas always the right ones? Should I be a subject, or trust my own wits and will and argue? Do I emulate Abraham or Sarah when tragedy strikes, when costs are tallied?
I don't think it is any accident that I stumbled into the study of skepticism, do you?
Monday, October 11, 2004
I want to knit a shawl
Ok, I admit to thinking that there was something to 19th century dress. It was warmer. It was comfortable. For all that the corset gets a bad rap if you pull it really tight (I shudder to think how tight mine would have to be to give me any kind of a figure), a reasonably arranged corset is a wonderful antidote to back problems. Skirts are in many ways quite easy to manage - you can always hike them up. And they looked nice. Similarly, the male working equivalent was a lot nicer than the daily uniform my husband wears.
But I still don't quite understand why I want a shawl so badly. I don't do victorian dress, much as I admire it (today's outfit - ripped jeans, slip on shoes, long sleeved t shirt that says, "Picky Eaters Garden," with assorted places where the baby wiped his nose on me.) I have sweaters. But I really, really want to knit a shawl. Just a simple one, maybe a nice black one in Cashmerino. I don't need it, but my desire is approaching a need.
Part of the problem is that holiday knitting has taken over and I just want to make something for me. I've got two afghans, am about to have a third, four scarves and 6 pairs of socks in progress to finish between now and January. Clearly, I need to make myself a shawl too ;-P.
But part of it is the kind of person I'd be if I had a shawl. I'd be prettier. All the nineteenth century tasks I'm learning (badly) to do would come easily to me. I'd be a neater spinner, shear sheep in minutes, weave baskets, keep an elegant home. I'd be Tasha Tudor, only younger and edgier. I'm pretty sure a shawl can do all that.
Do you think I'm putting too much pressure on the shawl?
Sharon
But I still don't quite understand why I want a shawl so badly. I don't do victorian dress, much as I admire it (today's outfit - ripped jeans, slip on shoes, long sleeved t shirt that says, "Picky Eaters Garden," with assorted places where the baby wiped his nose on me.) I have sweaters. But I really, really want to knit a shawl. Just a simple one, maybe a nice black one in Cashmerino. I don't need it, but my desire is approaching a need.
Part of the problem is that holiday knitting has taken over and I just want to make something for me. I've got two afghans, am about to have a third, four scarves and 6 pairs of socks in progress to finish between now and January. Clearly, I need to make myself a shawl too ;-P.
But part of it is the kind of person I'd be if I had a shawl. I'd be prettier. All the nineteenth century tasks I'm learning (badly) to do would come easily to me. I'd be a neater spinner, shear sheep in minutes, weave baskets, keep an elegant home. I'd be Tasha Tudor, only younger and edgier. I'm pretty sure a shawl can do all that.
Do you think I'm putting too much pressure on the shawl?
Sharon
Monday, October 04, 2004
Diets
Anyone who has ever met me knows that I am no sylph - I'm 6', and while I have no intention of posting my weight, I am not skinny. That said, however, I have no intention whatsoever of going onto the Atkins diet. Why not, you ask?
Well, besides the fact that I find it totally grotesque to imagine that those of us who are so rich that we are obese should respond to our obesity by consuming *more* resources. We get fat because we consume a ridiculous amount of everything, and we're going to lose weight by eating a whole lot of high-on-the-food-chain butter, meat and oil. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for weight loss, and I certainly could stand to do some, but given that I got fat on the backs of the poor, I'm certainly not going to diet in such a way as to raise their kids' infant mortality a little higher.
The other observation I've made is that everyone who loses weight on Atkins gains it back the minute they stop. What's the point? Are you really going to eat a bowl of bacon grease every morning for breakfast until you're 90? Yoyo dieting is not notably good for you - maybe worse than keeping the weight, unless you are radically overweight. Realistically, unless you want to eat a bunless whopper for lunch every day for the rest of your life, you are going to gain the weight back - there is *0* chance you will stay thin.
Understand me, I am not mocking the fat. I am one of them. But I can't think of anything more stupid and less moral than the current Atkins craze. And the whole "carbohydrates make you fat" idea is errant nonsense - not burning as many calories as you take in makes you fat. Have you ever seen a really fat Amish guy? Do eight hours of hard physical labor all day, and I promise, you can eat all the noodles, crumb cakes and mashed potatoes you want, and not worry about your blood sugar in the slightest.
Now that stated, there is a useful distinction between the denatured crap that passes for starch around us and actual whole grains. Wanna lose some weight? Eat all whole grains. Seriously, there is a limit to how much brown rice anyone can consume. Eat a small amount of everything else and a whole lot of whole grains. Wanna lose even more? Grind your own grains in a manual grinder. It burns calories. Want to lose just tons of weight? Raise all your own grains by hand - till, plant, cut, bind, thresh and winnow them by hand. You will be full all the time and you will weigh 20lbs less.
I was never a dessert person until I met my husband, who believes that meals require a sweet. Marriage has not been good for my weight - and I wasn't skinny to begin with. But at least I used to eat a bowl of cheerios with skim milk for dinner a couple of times a night. My perennially skinny husband does not consider that adequate to his metabolism, to my detriment. But one way that we did keep the dessert consumption (and the consumption of any other kind of junk) to a minimum was this - we made the rule that if we want something, we actually have to make it. That is, I can eat all the brownies I want, but I have to get up, and melt the chocolate and bake the brownies. It worked well when we had a bit more time.
I would like to propose a new diet - the "you have to make it" diet. It is time consuming, but less so than recovery from stomach stapling. It is far healthier than Atkins, and quite cheap. Instead of blowing a lot of money to lose weight, you will save a ton, and can donate it to the Heifer fund or some other good cause so that some poor folks in other nations can get up to a minimally healthy weight.
So here it is - you can eat anything you want, but you have to produce it. Otherwise, you get a few bags of whole grains, some dried milk powder, fresh fruits and vegetables, a few eggs, spices, and herbal tea. Want honey in your tea? All you have to do is order a package of bees, build a hive, install them and work them for year and half, and you are totally set. Want cookies? Butter is yours for the asking, as long as you are willing to pitch hay to the cows, get up at 5 am to milk them, churn the butter (manually) and shovel the manure. Want roast chicken? No problem, just grow their feed, deliver the food, and butcher your chicken. Otherwise, its brown rice and squash for you.
I promise, you'll lose a lot of weight, no matter what you choose to eat. You are never deprived of anything, no one will ever tell you know, and you will be healthy and thin. You can donate the cost of your gym membership to the poor, plus your food budget will shrink, and you can donate that too.
Sharon
Well, besides the fact that I find it totally grotesque to imagine that those of us who are so rich that we are obese should respond to our obesity by consuming *more* resources. We get fat because we consume a ridiculous amount of everything, and we're going to lose weight by eating a whole lot of high-on-the-food-chain butter, meat and oil. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for weight loss, and I certainly could stand to do some, but given that I got fat on the backs of the poor, I'm certainly not going to diet in such a way as to raise their kids' infant mortality a little higher.
The other observation I've made is that everyone who loses weight on Atkins gains it back the minute they stop. What's the point? Are you really going to eat a bowl of bacon grease every morning for breakfast until you're 90? Yoyo dieting is not notably good for you - maybe worse than keeping the weight, unless you are radically overweight. Realistically, unless you want to eat a bunless whopper for lunch every day for the rest of your life, you are going to gain the weight back - there is *0* chance you will stay thin.
Understand me, I am not mocking the fat. I am one of them. But I can't think of anything more stupid and less moral than the current Atkins craze. And the whole "carbohydrates make you fat" idea is errant nonsense - not burning as many calories as you take in makes you fat. Have you ever seen a really fat Amish guy? Do eight hours of hard physical labor all day, and I promise, you can eat all the noodles, crumb cakes and mashed potatoes you want, and not worry about your blood sugar in the slightest.
Now that stated, there is a useful distinction between the denatured crap that passes for starch around us and actual whole grains. Wanna lose some weight? Eat all whole grains. Seriously, there is a limit to how much brown rice anyone can consume. Eat a small amount of everything else and a whole lot of whole grains. Wanna lose even more? Grind your own grains in a manual grinder. It burns calories. Want to lose just tons of weight? Raise all your own grains by hand - till, plant, cut, bind, thresh and winnow them by hand. You will be full all the time and you will weigh 20lbs less.
I was never a dessert person until I met my husband, who believes that meals require a sweet. Marriage has not been good for my weight - and I wasn't skinny to begin with. But at least I used to eat a bowl of cheerios with skim milk for dinner a couple of times a night. My perennially skinny husband does not consider that adequate to his metabolism, to my detriment. But one way that we did keep the dessert consumption (and the consumption of any other kind of junk) to a minimum was this - we made the rule that if we want something, we actually have to make it. That is, I can eat all the brownies I want, but I have to get up, and melt the chocolate and bake the brownies. It worked well when we had a bit more time.
I would like to propose a new diet - the "you have to make it" diet. It is time consuming, but less so than recovery from stomach stapling. It is far healthier than Atkins, and quite cheap. Instead of blowing a lot of money to lose weight, you will save a ton, and can donate it to the Heifer fund or some other good cause so that some poor folks in other nations can get up to a minimally healthy weight.
So here it is - you can eat anything you want, but you have to produce it. Otherwise, you get a few bags of whole grains, some dried milk powder, fresh fruits and vegetables, a few eggs, spices, and herbal tea. Want honey in your tea? All you have to do is order a package of bees, build a hive, install them and work them for year and half, and you are totally set. Want cookies? Butter is yours for the asking, as long as you are willing to pitch hay to the cows, get up at 5 am to milk them, churn the butter (manually) and shovel the manure. Want roast chicken? No problem, just grow their feed, deliver the food, and butcher your chicken. Otherwise, its brown rice and squash for you.
I promise, you'll lose a lot of weight, no matter what you choose to eat. You are never deprived of anything, no one will ever tell you know, and you will be healthy and thin. You can donate the cost of your gym membership to the poor, plus your food budget will shrink, and you can donate that too.
Sharon
Saturday, October 02, 2004
Movies (continued from last post)
On movies. Several people have emailed me (believe it or not, there are actually people reading this!!! Stunning, isnt it? This claim would be more credible if I had the faintest idea how to download a hit counter, wouldn't it? Anyone know how?) and asked me if I really hate all movies, as my profile claims. Of course I don't, but there's some truth to the statement. If you are movie buff, I am not a good person to go out with (as poor Eric has found to his grief). I have a semi-hostile relationship to the movies. First of all, on the rare occasions on which I actually get to leave my house, I have no profound wish to spend the time sitting in a darkened room. Much of the time in the last few years, doing so would be a recipe for unconsciousness, since neither of my first two kids slept through the night before they were a year, and Isaiah seems to share his brother's timetable (yup, out of the last five years, I've been sleep deprived for more than 3 of them!)
I also resent paying $10 for anything that is of lower quality than what I get for free on television. And that isnt saying a great deal. If it is less good than a West Wing episode, I'm not going. I don't think I'm setting the bar too high.
I also have a particular distaste for pretentious movies that pretend to plumb the psychological depths of anyone. _American Beauty_ is the perfect example of a movie most people liked that made me want to throw up. Yeah, yeah, Kevin Spacey, whatever - I liked _The Usual Suspects_ too. But long angsty movies about how alienating suburbia or the 1970s or motherhood or jet lag, etc... really annoy me. The Victorian period piece equivalent pisses me off even more. The simplistic nature of the way psychology is used in literature and film makes me nuts - the "cause - effect" theories of the human mind. You'd think I like that stuff, since I'm a lit geek and in many ways a Freudian, but what interests me about psychoanalysis is its precise failure to choose the stupid, linear way of thinking.
Some movies everyone else liked that I hated:
1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - I know it was beautiful and poetic (and tedious), and the culmination of the martial arts drama (a genre I actually kind of like), but it rather went on a bit, didn't it. Admit it, it would have been better at 45 minutes.
2. Lost in Translation - I love Bill Murray. Bill Murray is a brilliant actor. He could stand buck naked in front of a white wall and masturbate for 2 hours, and he'd be wonderful. This movie was almost as good as that. Please, someone, put Scarlett Johanson back in her bottle!
3. That stupid movie about migrating birds, set to music. Dear G-d, is there no level we won't sink to?
I can list more, but you get the point. I'm no fun at all to go to the movies with, not least because everyone who goes with me eventually ends up agreeing with me.
But I do like some movies - movies that don't try to be more than they can, truly good movies, movies that are generous rather than petty in spirit (they don't take the cheap jokes, the cheap shots, the cheap sex scenes, the cheap dialogue or the obvious plot points), the occasional weird thing that I like despite the fact that it breaks all my rules. Here are some movies I like:
1. Anything by Robert Altman, except Pret A Porter. Just finally saw Gosford Park, and it was glorious. Weirdly, Popeye is a favorite movie of mine - weird and wonderful.
2. Danny Devito movies. I love how deeply he mocks the urge to moralize or psychologize. Drowning Mona was flawed, but a wonderful antidote to the tripe done in good movies. Matilda was everything Roald Dahl should be. The War of the Roses is still a favorite.
3. Farenheight 9/11. Yeah, it was filled with cheap shots, overblown and tacky. It was also strangely moving, and better than I expected it to be. Moreover, I genuinely admire Michael Moore, not something I can say about many people.
4. Chicago. Yeah, that one. Sure, it is a musical (modern musicals are generally loathsome) and has the inevitably tedious Renee Zellweger(sp?) in it, but how can you not love a movie whose essential message is, "you'll regret heterosexual sex - go lesbian!" and still gets an Oscar? Plus, Queen Latifah is hot (Catherine Zeta-Jones doesn't really do it for me, although I can see her appeal) and Richard Gere can both dance and sing (I had been resolutely hostile to Gere, who has never appealed to me, but I was impressed despite myself).
Mostly, I like old movies. I just watched _The Magnificent Seven_ for the thousandth time (Eric had never seen it) and I kept thinking, "Why is it we needed _Unforgiven_ again? I tend to think that the majority of films are simply pointless redundancies. And I think that about books, too. Yeah, I know that retelling stories can be cool, but it often is merely annoying.
Ok, I'll get to books next, but I'm tired and cranky now ;-).
Sharon
I also resent paying $10 for anything that is of lower quality than what I get for free on television. And that isnt saying a great deal. If it is less good than a West Wing episode, I'm not going. I don't think I'm setting the bar too high.
I also have a particular distaste for pretentious movies that pretend to plumb the psychological depths of anyone. _American Beauty_ is the perfect example of a movie most people liked that made me want to throw up. Yeah, yeah, Kevin Spacey, whatever - I liked _The Usual Suspects_ too. But long angsty movies about how alienating suburbia or the 1970s or motherhood or jet lag, etc... really annoy me. The Victorian period piece equivalent pisses me off even more. The simplistic nature of the way psychology is used in literature and film makes me nuts - the "cause - effect" theories of the human mind. You'd think I like that stuff, since I'm a lit geek and in many ways a Freudian, but what interests me about psychoanalysis is its precise failure to choose the stupid, linear way of thinking.
Some movies everyone else liked that I hated:
1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - I know it was beautiful and poetic (and tedious), and the culmination of the martial arts drama (a genre I actually kind of like), but it rather went on a bit, didn't it. Admit it, it would have been better at 45 minutes.
2. Lost in Translation - I love Bill Murray. Bill Murray is a brilliant actor. He could stand buck naked in front of a white wall and masturbate for 2 hours, and he'd be wonderful. This movie was almost as good as that. Please, someone, put Scarlett Johanson back in her bottle!
3. That stupid movie about migrating birds, set to music. Dear G-d, is there no level we won't sink to?
I can list more, but you get the point. I'm no fun at all to go to the movies with, not least because everyone who goes with me eventually ends up agreeing with me.
But I do like some movies - movies that don't try to be more than they can, truly good movies, movies that are generous rather than petty in spirit (they don't take the cheap jokes, the cheap shots, the cheap sex scenes, the cheap dialogue or the obvious plot points), the occasional weird thing that I like despite the fact that it breaks all my rules. Here are some movies I like:
1. Anything by Robert Altman, except Pret A Porter. Just finally saw Gosford Park, and it was glorious. Weirdly, Popeye is a favorite movie of mine - weird and wonderful.
2. Danny Devito movies. I love how deeply he mocks the urge to moralize or psychologize. Drowning Mona was flawed, but a wonderful antidote to the tripe done in good movies. Matilda was everything Roald Dahl should be. The War of the Roses is still a favorite.
3. Farenheight 9/11. Yeah, it was filled with cheap shots, overblown and tacky. It was also strangely moving, and better than I expected it to be. Moreover, I genuinely admire Michael Moore, not something I can say about many people.
4. Chicago. Yeah, that one. Sure, it is a musical (modern musicals are generally loathsome) and has the inevitably tedious Renee Zellweger(sp?) in it, but how can you not love a movie whose essential message is, "you'll regret heterosexual sex - go lesbian!" and still gets an Oscar? Plus, Queen Latifah is hot (Catherine Zeta-Jones doesn't really do it for me, although I can see her appeal) and Richard Gere can both dance and sing (I had been resolutely hostile to Gere, who has never appealed to me, but I was impressed despite myself).
Mostly, I like old movies. I just watched _The Magnificent Seven_ for the thousandth time (Eric had never seen it) and I kept thinking, "Why is it we needed _Unforgiven_ again? I tend to think that the majority of films are simply pointless redundancies. And I think that about books, too. Yeah, I know that retelling stories can be cool, but it often is merely annoying.
Ok, I'll get to books next, but I'm tired and cranky now ;-).
Sharon
Socks, Books, Movies
So I actually figured out how to knit socks today! I've avoided socks because I am possibly the least coordinated person on earth, *and* I have no sense of spatial relations (literally true - a friend gave me an IQ test some years ago, and I think I tested out as mildly retarded in the part where you have to put the little blocks together). In case you don't know, socks are knitted on four or five teeny tiny needles held carefully together, while you slide stitches from one to another. This, for me, is a recipe for disaster.
And yet, I like warm feet, I like wool socks, and socks are cool. So I knew I wanted to knit socks. And foolishly, when nephew Jake (4 1/2) was visiting last week, and asked me to knit him rainbow colored socks, I agreed. So it was determined I had to learn.
Unsurprisingly, I cannot, in fact, manage to knit with teeny tiny yarn (I am not a delicate person - in appearance, in taste, in personality) on teeny tiny needles that have to be held carefully together. But I was frustrated, and convinced myself that there must be some way to knit socks on circular needles. I sort of figured out what that would look like, and then searched the web to find out if anyone had figured it out better than I could. And lo, and behold, the angel of the web spoke, and there it was - a way to knit socks on either one or two circular needles at http://www.az.com/~andrade/knit/twocirculars.html. How cool is that? I practice knitted four inches of a pair of thick socks for my Dad (who likes to wear birks in January - which isn't quite as crazy in Bellinham WA as it would be here, but still), and they looked cool. And I started socks for Jake (or maybe some other child, if my gauge turns out to be off, as it faintly appears)! I can do it. And not only can I do it, but I sort of even figured out the general gist of how to do it without help. Given that I visualize only slightly less well than I tap dance, I'm pleased with myself. Next stop, mittens!!
And yet, I like warm feet, I like wool socks, and socks are cool. So I knew I wanted to knit socks. And foolishly, when nephew Jake (4 1/2) was visiting last week, and asked me to knit him rainbow colored socks, I agreed. So it was determined I had to learn.
Unsurprisingly, I cannot, in fact, manage to knit with teeny tiny yarn (I am not a delicate person - in appearance, in taste, in personality) on teeny tiny needles that have to be held carefully together. But I was frustrated, and convinced myself that there must be some way to knit socks on circular needles. I sort of figured out what that would look like, and then searched the web to find out if anyone had figured it out better than I could. And lo, and behold, the angel of the web spoke, and there it was - a way to knit socks on either one or two circular needles at http://www.az.com/~andrade/knit/twocirculars.html. How cool is that? I practice knitted four inches of a pair of thick socks for my Dad (who likes to wear birks in January - which isn't quite as crazy in Bellinham WA as it would be here, but still), and they looked cool. And I started socks for Jake (or maybe some other child, if my gauge turns out to be off, as it faintly appears)! I can do it. And not only can I do it, but I sort of even figured out the general gist of how to do it without help. Given that I visualize only slightly less well than I tap dance, I'm pleased with myself. Next stop, mittens!!
Friday, October 01, 2004
The Next 25 Things you can do to get ready for Peak Oil
The next 25 out of 100 things you can do to prepare for peak oil.
1. Acquire Countryside Magazine issues that cover late 1997 - 2000. Those issues, JD Belanger's last, were focused heavily on Y2K and sustainability, and contain tons of useful information. Definitely worth every penny of the money - they covered things like making pectin, making lye, feeding your animals without the feed store, food storage, etc... I got them kind of by accident, and they are wonderful, well worth whatever the cost.
2. Make a pair of socks. Knit them. Crochet them. Felt them. Sew them. I don't care. But cold feet really suck, and working outside in cold weather means that your socks are the primary barrier between you and frostbite. Make warm ones, ideally out of wool, and make lots of them - they wear out when you really work in them.
3. Build a root cellar, and store some garden produce. If you didn't grow any, buy it from a local farm. Storing a couple hundred lbs of potatoes, onions, carrots and beets will a. make you more food secure and b. give you practice at the storing, use and care of root vegetables. For anyone in a cold climate, they are going to be your staples.
4. Offer to do a presentation on peak oil at your local synagogue/college/church/community center.
5. Teach a neighbor child to garden.
6. Dehydrate some food, and actually use it. Dehydration is energy efficient, the food stores well, and it retains a decent amount of nutrition, and you can do it after peak oil.
7. Plant garlic - now is the time, and garlic is so good, so tasty, so healthy.
8. Dig up a few biennials (parsnips, parsley, carrots, cabbage, kale) from your garden and put them in either a sunny spot or a cool dark one. Try and winter them over, and grow out seed. You'll need to find space for them.
9. Look over your food storage, and try to imagine that the grocery stores close tomorrow. What will you eat? For how long? What do you need? Try and fill some gaps.
10. Buy shoes and boots on sale in adult sizes and in larger childrens sizes (if you have kids) and store them.
11. Learn to hunt - there probably won't be much game out there after peak oil, but it is a useful skill, and an excellent way of making friends with the neighboring men.
12. Get a dog - a good one. Get a dog who can be trained to work your animals (and your children), to protect your property (not aggressively - that's a recipe for lawsuits) and run critters out of your garden. Plan ways to feed him without the grocery stores.
13. Learn to ride and drive a horse.
14. Develop a repetoir of recipes that use only local produce, herbs and ingredients
15. Make a compost pile. Right now thousands of suburbanites are throwing away leaves - collect them, pile them and use them to fertilize your garden.
16. Build something - a toy train, a shed, a bookcase, whatever, using hand tools.
17. Pick up used down clothing at your local thift shop - you can turn those used vests into blankets and pillows.
18. Read Keeping Food Fresh and try some of the methods of food preservation.
19. Join a local food coop for bulk buying.
20. Consider volunteering to work on "Preparedness" for your county, your town or your state. No one has enough money to hire people, and every kind of general preparation applies to peak oil.
21. Whenever you buy something that will be in short supply after the peak, pick up a second one for your storage - an extra pair of sneakers, another box of nails, an extra pack of pencils, a second pair of sheets. It all adds up.
22. Send a letter to disbelieving relatives informing them of your preparations and giving them your ideas for handling the coming crisis. Ask them to save the letter, even if they think you are nuts. That way, when your Mom and sister are bugging out to your place, they'll know you want them to pack all of the blankets, canned goods and garden tools.
23. Try and keep up important religious and family rituals even in hard times. Don't give up the bedtime story by candlelight. Make gifts. Store the ingredients of favorite holiday foods. Your family will remember, and it will make things better.
24. Study herbal medicine, homeopathy and anything else you can think of. It is worth a shot.
25. Learn about breastfeeding, so that you or your children can do so. Consider extended breastfeeding or volunteer feeding the children of friends and relatives, to keep your lactation going after you are done childbearing. The more women who can nurse in a given community, the lower the infant mortality rate
1. Acquire Countryside Magazine issues that cover late 1997 - 2000. Those issues, JD Belanger's last, were focused heavily on Y2K and sustainability, and contain tons of useful information. Definitely worth every penny of the money - they covered things like making pectin, making lye, feeding your animals without the feed store, food storage, etc... I got them kind of by accident, and they are wonderful, well worth whatever the cost.
2. Make a pair of socks. Knit them. Crochet them. Felt them. Sew them. I don't care. But cold feet really suck, and working outside in cold weather means that your socks are the primary barrier between you and frostbite. Make warm ones, ideally out of wool, and make lots of them - they wear out when you really work in them.
3. Build a root cellar, and store some garden produce. If you didn't grow any, buy it from a local farm. Storing a couple hundred lbs of potatoes, onions, carrots and beets will a. make you more food secure and b. give you practice at the storing, use and care of root vegetables. For anyone in a cold climate, they are going to be your staples.
4. Offer to do a presentation on peak oil at your local synagogue/college/church/community center.
5. Teach a neighbor child to garden.
6. Dehydrate some food, and actually use it. Dehydration is energy efficient, the food stores well, and it retains a decent amount of nutrition, and you can do it after peak oil.
7. Plant garlic - now is the time, and garlic is so good, so tasty, so healthy.
8. Dig up a few biennials (parsnips, parsley, carrots, cabbage, kale) from your garden and put them in either a sunny spot or a cool dark one. Try and winter them over, and grow out seed. You'll need to find space for them.
9. Look over your food storage, and try to imagine that the grocery stores close tomorrow. What will you eat? For how long? What do you need? Try and fill some gaps.
10. Buy shoes and boots on sale in adult sizes and in larger childrens sizes (if you have kids) and store them.
11. Learn to hunt - there probably won't be much game out there after peak oil, but it is a useful skill, and an excellent way of making friends with the neighboring men.
12. Get a dog - a good one. Get a dog who can be trained to work your animals (and your children), to protect your property (not aggressively - that's a recipe for lawsuits) and run critters out of your garden. Plan ways to feed him without the grocery stores.
13. Learn to ride and drive a horse.
14. Develop a repetoir of recipes that use only local produce, herbs and ingredients
15. Make a compost pile. Right now thousands of suburbanites are throwing away leaves - collect them, pile them and use them to fertilize your garden.
16. Build something - a toy train, a shed, a bookcase, whatever, using hand tools.
17. Pick up used down clothing at your local thift shop - you can turn those used vests into blankets and pillows.
18. Read Keeping Food Fresh and try some of the methods of food preservation.
19. Join a local food coop for bulk buying.
20. Consider volunteering to work on "Preparedness" for your county, your town or your state. No one has enough money to hire people, and every kind of general preparation applies to peak oil.
21. Whenever you buy something that will be in short supply after the peak, pick up a second one for your storage - an extra pair of sneakers, another box of nails, an extra pack of pencils, a second pair of sheets. It all adds up.
22. Send a letter to disbelieving relatives informing them of your preparations and giving them your ideas for handling the coming crisis. Ask them to save the letter, even if they think you are nuts. That way, when your Mom and sister are bugging out to your place, they'll know you want them to pack all of the blankets, canned goods and garden tools.
23. Try and keep up important religious and family rituals even in hard times. Don't give up the bedtime story by candlelight. Make gifts. Store the ingredients of favorite holiday foods. Your family will remember, and it will make things better.
24. Study herbal medicine, homeopathy and anything else you can think of. It is worth a shot.
25. Learn about breastfeeding, so that you or your children can do so. Consider extended breastfeeding or volunteer feeding the children of friends and relatives, to keep your lactation going after you are done childbearing. The more women who can nurse in a given community, the lower the infant mortality rate
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
50 dollars a barrel, folks
Ok, does anyone out there really believe that we aren't on the precipice of peak oil? My economist buddy, Steve, told me last spring that there was no way that oil was going to keep rising to $50 per barrel. Not a chance.
Guess what, we're here. There is already evidence that the poorest people in the US
(G-d help the poorest people in the rest of the world) are going to have to start choosing between heat and food. How long before the rest of us feel the cold?
We've built an economy on oil. Not only do we need oil for nearly everything, but we need it to be cheap. We need oil to pump our water and remove our wastes, to warm our houses and cook our dinners, to get us to our jobs and to visit our parents in the Home. We need oil to grow our food and transport our starlink corn to the feedlots.
And when the oil prices start to rise, the turtle tower (think Yertle) starts to rock. What happens when we have to choose - food or gas, heat or sewage disposal? What happens when all those jobs supported by suburban sprawl can't heat those buildings or get their employees to work? What happens when the economy teeters and crashes, and there is no more cheap oil to raise it up again?
I don't think we really can fix this one anymore. Not by electing the right president, not by conservation (although it would certainly help), not by invading more countries. All we can do is be the youngest, weakest fairy godmother at the baptism, softening the curse a little. We can soften it for our children and hopefully our grandchildren by personal preparation. We can soften it for our communities with planning, for our nation by conservation, but we cannot fix it, and every minute we let slip by, every day we waste because we don't want to change our lives, every act of education we (I) forgo, we make the curse a little darker, longer and deeper.
Damnit, get cracking folks!!! Don't wait for Colin Campbell's $286 per barrel.
Sharon
Guess what, we're here. There is already evidence that the poorest people in the US
(G-d help the poorest people in the rest of the world) are going to have to start choosing between heat and food. How long before the rest of us feel the cold?
We've built an economy on oil. Not only do we need oil for nearly everything, but we need it to be cheap. We need oil to pump our water and remove our wastes, to warm our houses and cook our dinners, to get us to our jobs and to visit our parents in the Home. We need oil to grow our food and transport our starlink corn to the feedlots.
And when the oil prices start to rise, the turtle tower (think Yertle) starts to rock. What happens when we have to choose - food or gas, heat or sewage disposal? What happens when all those jobs supported by suburban sprawl can't heat those buildings or get their employees to work? What happens when the economy teeters and crashes, and there is no more cheap oil to raise it up again?
I don't think we really can fix this one anymore. Not by electing the right president, not by conservation (although it would certainly help), not by invading more countries. All we can do is be the youngest, weakest fairy godmother at the baptism, softening the curse a little. We can soften it for our children and hopefully our grandchildren by personal preparation. We can soften it for our communities with planning, for our nation by conservation, but we cannot fix it, and every minute we let slip by, every day we waste because we don't want to change our lives, every act of education we (I) forgo, we make the curse a little darker, longer and deeper.
Damnit, get cracking folks!!! Don't wait for Colin Campbell's $286 per barrel.
Sharon
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
On learning to knit again
Gram was a nasty old woman, and Great-aunt Helen was worse. They'd lived together for thirty years by the time I knew them, since Gram divorced my grandfather in the 1950s, and spent much of that time subtly manipulating my father and his brother into hostilities. Once grandchildren came along, did much the same for my sister and me. Oh, they loved us, indulged us, entertained us, adored us. It took a while before we noticed how much pleasure they took in playing my sister and I against each other. I was the favorite, so smart, so talented, of course not too much to look at, but that's all right. Rachael was the pretty one, such a lovely blond, and if she was a bit dumb and overly-theatrical, well, that's nothing. Our father was wonderful, but our mother... Uncle Rick was perfect, but his wife (who my sister and I worshipped), well, there were terrible things there. There were nasty suggestions and bitter comments about everyone, and each of us wondered what they were saying to other people about us.
With our visits came subtle (and at times not so subtle) diminishment, mild cruelty, the simple certainty that I was ugly and Rachael was stupid and that we were (and should be) in competition with one another. They told stories of Rachael's errors and small sins to me, and vice versa, making us into conspirators against each other. We came for a week each summer and left angry and confused and hurt in ways we could not articulate, but took out against each other and our parents.
At the same time, however, those weeks were magic. Whatever we wanted, we had. Our mother, who disapproved of junk food, was appalled when we told her what we ate. There were cookies - peanut butter and chocolate chunk. Favorite foods were cooked, and they rose early to make popovers. There was candy in the glass dish, and we could watch as much television as we wanted. Little statues of animals and other decorative items inhabited the massive hutch in the dark front room, and we were permitted to take them out and play with them. The garden was filled with flowers, and we picked them and thrust them into the endless supply of glass jars under the cabinet. They were admired as much as if we'd grown them ourselves. More jars were taken outside to collect fireflies, toads and crickets, also deeply admired. In the huge backyard one year, Uncle Rick set off illegal fireworks to our amazed eyes.
We took the fat, elderly dogs for dozens of walks each day, visiting the drugstore and the hot dog stand where everyone knew we were Barbara and Helen's grandchildren. We rode the horses and played Atari and Uncle Rick and Aunt Karen's house, and we raced around Aunt Edith's farm, chasing the barn cats, playing with the chickens and proving how much we could lift with the cousins. At night, we tried on the perfume and jewelry in Aunt Helen's boxes, at whatever we desired for dinner, and watched tv drowsily as Gram and Auntie knit sweaters for us in our favorite colors.
Oh, could they knit. My father still wears the Aran fisherman's sweater they knit for him 20 years ago, and it looks nearly new. Not only were there sweaters and mittens and scarves for us, but crib mobiles for my baby sister, halloween decorations, blankets, everything you could imagine, in vibrant colors and patterns that I now know must have consumed them. I liked to play with the yarn when I was young, pulling it out of the knitting closet, and tying things together with it. How much did I waste, and they never said a word, just pulled out a skein of another vibrant color for me to make spiderwebs of. It was always this way - they were wonderful and terrible, generous and petty, loving and cruel, and even now, I cannot divide the dualities that shape my memories.
We wanted to learn, of course, and they wanted us to learn. Even in the early 1980s, they felt that they were losing us to a different kind of girlhood. The lamented my short hair, predicted dire things for girls who played too much basketball, and tried to make us into ladies, without much success. They tried hard to teach us to knit. I was too clumsy. I learned to crochet, but showed little interest, and a few granny squares later, gave it up. I never did master the rhythym of two needles. My sister was a bit better than I, but the magic of their hands never appeared in ours. The knitting lost out to the horse, and to our resistance of anything that smacked of ladyhood.
As my sister and I became teenagers, some of the magic faded. The dogs of our childhood died. The multicolored sweaters we had been so proud of became less cool. And we began to associate some of the anger we came home from our visits with with Gram and Aunnie. The final year came when Aunnie read my diary aloud to Aunt Karen, with, I gather, snide commentary. After that, the visits were shorter, and never happy. When we became teenagers, we stopped making the four hour drive altogether. We visited only rarely. And they got older.
By the time I went to college I was truly angry at them for the things they had done to me. Aunt Helen would call sometimes in my dorm room, but I rarely returned her calls, although she begged me to. One day, in my sophomore year, I found a package waiting for me. It was a baby blanket. I was horrified that she would send this thing to me at college, so totally alien, so like them to inflict upon me expectations that I had not interest in meeting. When I called her late, Aunnie said that she didn't think she'd live long enough to see my babies. So she made the blanket for me and sent it, and I stuffed it in a box and rolled my eyes at how little they understood me. Trying to hurt her, I told her I'd probably never have any. She didn't believe me.
Aunt Helen lived to meet my future husband, lived to express horror that he was Jewish, to complain to my face that I never came to visit any more. She did not survive to see the babies. I had not visited in many years when guilt drew me there, and I saw how near to death she was, still bitter, still snide, but on the edge of total failure. Still, I went once (in many years) before she died. My sisters did not, and paid the price in my grandmother's anger.
Gram managed to survive on her own just a few months before she went to the nursing home. There was no more knitting there. She faded, stopped walking with her walker, stopped reading, settled for complaining and watching television. I visited her more then, coming a few times a year, first with one son, then two. She died shortly after I let her know that her third great-grandson was on the way. She never knew that the fourth, my youngest sister's child, followed shortly after.
When I was young, Gram and Aunnie made elaborate lists of who would inherit what after they died. In fact, my aunt and uncle took what they wanted (not much), and then my father and sisters and I came and took what we wanted - that was all. Mostly, there was garbage. I took some strange things. This was before I had children, but I felt compelled to salvage the period clothing - the hats with elaborate feathers, the fur stoles, the sparkly shoes and other things that we had been permitted to dress up in when we were children. I am not sure why they mattered to me. I took Gram's cedar chest, and left Aunnie's for my cousin Cody. I took books my father had read as a boy for my future children. I took some of the dishes that stood in the hutch. I took the knitting needles with the cloisson ends. I had no children, and I did not knit, but I took them. Somehow Aunnie's anticipation of my future had begun to change me. It changed my sister too. She took the unfinished Aran blanket, with the hope of someday finishing it.
There was no funeral for my grandmother. My uncle Rick decided against it, I think perhaps in part to hurt my father, but also because there was almost no one left to come. Her sisters were dead. Her friends, the ladies who knit from the DAR and Eastern Star and the church committees were dead. The younger women in those groups, even the neighbors no longer visited, except to ask if she wanted to renew her memberships to things. We never convened to say goodbye to Gram, and I think only my father was much troubled by it. I was relieved, more than anything, not to have to travel while pregnant, with two young children, not to have to watch my father and his brother fight out the battles of their childhood again.
Right before my first son was born, I dug out the blanket. It was white, with pink and blue stripes delicately across the middle. Like everything they tried to give me, it was not a perfect fit. The yarn was cheap acrylic, I loathe pink and baby blue. But I felt then a twinge of sentiment, that Aunnie, whatever her flaws, had believed in and loved my children before I ever knew them. I threw away a lot of things they gave me, but not that. My son slept beneath it, some of the time.
And then, not long ago, I was seized with the desire to knit. My sister had her first child, the one that Gram never knew, a little girl. And the desire to knit her a blanket was nearly intolerable. Knitting blankets is what aunts do for their baby nieces. And so I did. I learned to knit from a series of books. I am not a coordinated woman, and it finally took a book about knitting for small children to bang the basic motions into me. But once I began, I could not stop. And I thought of them every moment. Of how much I wish I'd listened to some of what they knew. Of how badly I wish I'd been able to distinguish between their desire to make me in their image and their desire to simply teach me what I knew. Of how much easier this would have been if they could have showed me, hand over paper-thin hand.
I am still not sure how much nostalgia for them I have. I find them easier to live with as anxious memories, for it is easier to distinguish between sorrow and pleasure, to sort out the things I liked best, and try and leave the others behind. And all I can do to assuage the memory (the ghost) of my failures to understand, and theirs as well, is to knit for the great-grandchildren they did not live to see, but believed in so fervently.
With our visits came subtle (and at times not so subtle) diminishment, mild cruelty, the simple certainty that I was ugly and Rachael was stupid and that we were (and should be) in competition with one another. They told stories of Rachael's errors and small sins to me, and vice versa, making us into conspirators against each other. We came for a week each summer and left angry and confused and hurt in ways we could not articulate, but took out against each other and our parents.
At the same time, however, those weeks were magic. Whatever we wanted, we had. Our mother, who disapproved of junk food, was appalled when we told her what we ate. There were cookies - peanut butter and chocolate chunk. Favorite foods were cooked, and they rose early to make popovers. There was candy in the glass dish, and we could watch as much television as we wanted. Little statues of animals and other decorative items inhabited the massive hutch in the dark front room, and we were permitted to take them out and play with them. The garden was filled with flowers, and we picked them and thrust them into the endless supply of glass jars under the cabinet. They were admired as much as if we'd grown them ourselves. More jars were taken outside to collect fireflies, toads and crickets, also deeply admired. In the huge backyard one year, Uncle Rick set off illegal fireworks to our amazed eyes.
We took the fat, elderly dogs for dozens of walks each day, visiting the drugstore and the hot dog stand where everyone knew we were Barbara and Helen's grandchildren. We rode the horses and played Atari and Uncle Rick and Aunt Karen's house, and we raced around Aunt Edith's farm, chasing the barn cats, playing with the chickens and proving how much we could lift with the cousins. At night, we tried on the perfume and jewelry in Aunt Helen's boxes, at whatever we desired for dinner, and watched tv drowsily as Gram and Auntie knit sweaters for us in our favorite colors.
Oh, could they knit. My father still wears the Aran fisherman's sweater they knit for him 20 years ago, and it looks nearly new. Not only were there sweaters and mittens and scarves for us, but crib mobiles for my baby sister, halloween decorations, blankets, everything you could imagine, in vibrant colors and patterns that I now know must have consumed them. I liked to play with the yarn when I was young, pulling it out of the knitting closet, and tying things together with it. How much did I waste, and they never said a word, just pulled out a skein of another vibrant color for me to make spiderwebs of. It was always this way - they were wonderful and terrible, generous and petty, loving and cruel, and even now, I cannot divide the dualities that shape my memories.
We wanted to learn, of course, and they wanted us to learn. Even in the early 1980s, they felt that they were losing us to a different kind of girlhood. The lamented my short hair, predicted dire things for girls who played too much basketball, and tried to make us into ladies, without much success. They tried hard to teach us to knit. I was too clumsy. I learned to crochet, but showed little interest, and a few granny squares later, gave it up. I never did master the rhythym of two needles. My sister was a bit better than I, but the magic of their hands never appeared in ours. The knitting lost out to the horse, and to our resistance of anything that smacked of ladyhood.
As my sister and I became teenagers, some of the magic faded. The dogs of our childhood died. The multicolored sweaters we had been so proud of became less cool. And we began to associate some of the anger we came home from our visits with with Gram and Aunnie. The final year came when Aunnie read my diary aloud to Aunt Karen, with, I gather, snide commentary. After that, the visits were shorter, and never happy. When we became teenagers, we stopped making the four hour drive altogether. We visited only rarely. And they got older.
By the time I went to college I was truly angry at them for the things they had done to me. Aunt Helen would call sometimes in my dorm room, but I rarely returned her calls, although she begged me to. One day, in my sophomore year, I found a package waiting for me. It was a baby blanket. I was horrified that she would send this thing to me at college, so totally alien, so like them to inflict upon me expectations that I had not interest in meeting. When I called her late, Aunnie said that she didn't think she'd live long enough to see my babies. So she made the blanket for me and sent it, and I stuffed it in a box and rolled my eyes at how little they understood me. Trying to hurt her, I told her I'd probably never have any. She didn't believe me.
Aunt Helen lived to meet my future husband, lived to express horror that he was Jewish, to complain to my face that I never came to visit any more. She did not survive to see the babies. I had not visited in many years when guilt drew me there, and I saw how near to death she was, still bitter, still snide, but on the edge of total failure. Still, I went once (in many years) before she died. My sisters did not, and paid the price in my grandmother's anger.
Gram managed to survive on her own just a few months before she went to the nursing home. There was no more knitting there. She faded, stopped walking with her walker, stopped reading, settled for complaining and watching television. I visited her more then, coming a few times a year, first with one son, then two. She died shortly after I let her know that her third great-grandson was on the way. She never knew that the fourth, my youngest sister's child, followed shortly after.
When I was young, Gram and Aunnie made elaborate lists of who would inherit what after they died. In fact, my aunt and uncle took what they wanted (not much), and then my father and sisters and I came and took what we wanted - that was all. Mostly, there was garbage. I took some strange things. This was before I had children, but I felt compelled to salvage the period clothing - the hats with elaborate feathers, the fur stoles, the sparkly shoes and other things that we had been permitted to dress up in when we were children. I am not sure why they mattered to me. I took Gram's cedar chest, and left Aunnie's for my cousin Cody. I took books my father had read as a boy for my future children. I took some of the dishes that stood in the hutch. I took the knitting needles with the cloisson ends. I had no children, and I did not knit, but I took them. Somehow Aunnie's anticipation of my future had begun to change me. It changed my sister too. She took the unfinished Aran blanket, with the hope of someday finishing it.
There was no funeral for my grandmother. My uncle Rick decided against it, I think perhaps in part to hurt my father, but also because there was almost no one left to come. Her sisters were dead. Her friends, the ladies who knit from the DAR and Eastern Star and the church committees were dead. The younger women in those groups, even the neighbors no longer visited, except to ask if she wanted to renew her memberships to things. We never convened to say goodbye to Gram, and I think only my father was much troubled by it. I was relieved, more than anything, not to have to travel while pregnant, with two young children, not to have to watch my father and his brother fight out the battles of their childhood again.
Right before my first son was born, I dug out the blanket. It was white, with pink and blue stripes delicately across the middle. Like everything they tried to give me, it was not a perfect fit. The yarn was cheap acrylic, I loathe pink and baby blue. But I felt then a twinge of sentiment, that Aunnie, whatever her flaws, had believed in and loved my children before I ever knew them. I threw away a lot of things they gave me, but not that. My son slept beneath it, some of the time.
And then, not long ago, I was seized with the desire to knit. My sister had her first child, the one that Gram never knew, a little girl. And the desire to knit her a blanket was nearly intolerable. Knitting blankets is what aunts do for their baby nieces. And so I did. I learned to knit from a series of books. I am not a coordinated woman, and it finally took a book about knitting for small children to bang the basic motions into me. But once I began, I could not stop. And I thought of them every moment. Of how much I wish I'd listened to some of what they knew. Of how badly I wish I'd been able to distinguish between their desire to make me in their image and their desire to simply teach me what I knew. Of how much easier this would have been if they could have showed me, hand over paper-thin hand.
I am still not sure how much nostalgia for them I have. I find them easier to live with as anxious memories, for it is easier to distinguish between sorrow and pleasure, to sort out the things I liked best, and try and leave the others behind. And all I can do to assuage the memory (the ghost) of my failures to understand, and theirs as well, is to knit for the great-grandchildren they did not live to see, but believed in so fervently.
Monday, September 27, 2004
Accomplishments...sigh
Looking at my blog from this morning, I'm struck by how bitter and incoherent it is. Let me assure you all of several things. 1. When my infant allows me more than 8 hours sleep (over three nights ;-P) I can write a simple declarative sentence. 2. I am not (quite) as petty as I seem here - my irritation was not at political bloggers themselves, but at the Times article attempting (badly) to evaluate their impact. 3. Yes, I really am this cranky.
Today has been more or less a total loss. Eli was off to school (hallelujah, school!), but Simon (irritable and sick), Isaiah (a little sick, not too irritable) and Mommy (sick, exhausted and really, really irritable) were trapped in the house together for 8 hours, after five days of totally disrupted routines. It was not a recipe for joy, particularly if you are the kind of horrible, evil Mommy who does not want to perform Bob-the-Builder related acts of love all day long. If I were a good Mommy, I would:
1. Let Simon watch Bob the builder videos until his brains started to leak out his ears.
2. Play Bob the builder colorforms for hours on end.
3. Carry the garage, giant scoop, and 680 seperate pieces of Bob the Builder paraphenalia up and down stairs every half hour.
4. Hold Simon in my arms and lovingly tell him stories about how his best friends came over and they played Bob the Builder games, and helped Lofty rescue Pilchard from Scoop's bucket, while Spud did obscene things to Muck and Bob behind Farmer Pickles's barn (ok, I swear, I didn't say that. I was just tempted to.)
Instead, what we did today was - whine. All three of us whined, except when we yelled. Isaiah whined because he did not take a sufficient nap. I whined because I just wanted to be left alone, and I really hate Bob. Simon whined because I hate Bob, which apparently means I don't love him, and because I did not fill his world with non-stop Bob. Then I yelled at Simon for whining. Then I gave in and played with the fucking colorforms, while removing them from Isaiah's mouth at various intervals. And I let the kids watch a truly grotesque amount of television, so that I could blog, among other things. This seems appropriate, doesn't it?
Grand total accomplishments for the day - hideous neglect of my children, 1 load of laundry, two blog entries. Yep, I can see why I started doing this...
Cheers,
Sharon
Today has been more or less a total loss. Eli was off to school (hallelujah, school!), but Simon (irritable and sick), Isaiah (a little sick, not too irritable) and Mommy (sick, exhausted and really, really irritable) were trapped in the house together for 8 hours, after five days of totally disrupted routines. It was not a recipe for joy, particularly if you are the kind of horrible, evil Mommy who does not want to perform Bob-the-Builder related acts of love all day long. If I were a good Mommy, I would:
1. Let Simon watch Bob the builder videos until his brains started to leak out his ears.
2. Play Bob the builder colorforms for hours on end.
3. Carry the garage, giant scoop, and 680 seperate pieces of Bob the Builder paraphenalia up and down stairs every half hour.
4. Hold Simon in my arms and lovingly tell him stories about how his best friends came over and they played Bob the Builder games, and helped Lofty rescue Pilchard from Scoop's bucket, while Spud did obscene things to Muck and Bob behind Farmer Pickles's barn (ok, I swear, I didn't say that. I was just tempted to.)
Instead, what we did today was - whine. All three of us whined, except when we yelled. Isaiah whined because he did not take a sufficient nap. I whined because I just wanted to be left alone, and I really hate Bob. Simon whined because I hate Bob, which apparently means I don't love him, and because I did not fill his world with non-stop Bob. Then I yelled at Simon for whining. Then I gave in and played with the fucking colorforms, while removing them from Isaiah's mouth at various intervals. And I let the kids watch a truly grotesque amount of television, so that I could blog, among other things. This seems appropriate, doesn't it?
Grand total accomplishments for the day - hideous neglect of my children, 1 load of laundry, two blog entries. Yep, I can see why I started doing this...
Cheers,
Sharon
Why I should not be allowed to read the Times Magazine
Ugh. Long week - 12 for dinner every night, Grandma's 80th birthday, descent of relatives from CA, baby sick and not sleeping, yom kippur, sukkah to put up, deliveries to do, cranky children, nowhere near enough sleep.
This morning I finally got to yesterday's Times Magazine, and besides the hideous article in defense of cars and sprawl, which contained a level of coherency and reason only occasionally matched by some of my densest undergraduates in their first drafts (anti-sprawl activists are elitists, and those who advocate higher gas taxes and tolls (regressive taxes that injure the poor the most) are good Americans, intolerable misuse of both Plato and Aristotle, not to mention poor sentence construction); there was the cover article attempting to gauge the importance of blogs on the current political campaign.
Ok, let me be clear. I have no idea how many hits this site gets per day, since I haven't the faintest idea how to download a hit counter, but I'm guessing maybe...2, one accidentally through the "next blog function" and one that plugged "Shakespeare and farming" in for reasons that escape me. I am giving no one any kind of run for their money as a political blogger - I am so deeply nauseated by the present political process on every side and so short of time to attend to the news that I am reading yesterdays Times. So I should be clear that I am the wrong person to gauge the impact of anything on anything. And yet, I still think we probably shouldn't care.
The thing is, as many hits as political bloggers get, do we really imagine that Wonkette is being googled by the last undecided voter in Ohio (I know her, actually - she's the moderator of a list I belong to, very sweet, very wise in her own way - I promise, I'm doing my best to swing her towards the left!!!)? Oh, maybe she is and they all are - maybe they are changing the landscape with younger, angrier voters (Dear G-d - are there really people angrier than me? I know they are younger, but if they are angrier, I pity them and hope the medications help!) - they are certainly raising new money, and I'm grateful for that. But I suspect we're going to lose this election by a considerably larger margin than we did the last one (ie, we're going to actually lose it, instead of having it stolen), and I don't think any amount of money could make a difference.
John Kerry is a mediocrity - he has been forever. Bloggers are giving a direction to the disaffected left, but the disaffected left (which includes me, and has since I worked on my first campaign at 12, and was deeply disillusioned - oh, and for the record, I worked for two of Kerry's campaigns, once in high school and once in college) has damned little power right now. But the Bush-loathers (of which I am one most passionately) aren't going to swing this election. And the shame of it is, yet again, we'll have thrown away an election we could have won, with a passionate, charismatic candidate. Democrats are cowards, and I'm frankly ashamed to be one, but I'm not sure what else to be if I want even the remotest access to change.
I do not aspire to blogger fame - well, ok, just a tiny bit, in the sense of wishing for influence. But the people who I want to influence don't read blogs - or at least not mine. I don't know how to reach them, and I wouldnt know how to move them, given the hand we have been dealt. And it appears no one else does either.
This morning I finally got to yesterday's Times Magazine, and besides the hideous article in defense of cars and sprawl, which contained a level of coherency and reason only occasionally matched by some of my densest undergraduates in their first drafts (anti-sprawl activists are elitists, and those who advocate higher gas taxes and tolls (regressive taxes that injure the poor the most) are good Americans, intolerable misuse of both Plato and Aristotle, not to mention poor sentence construction); there was the cover article attempting to gauge the importance of blogs on the current political campaign.
Ok, let me be clear. I have no idea how many hits this site gets per day, since I haven't the faintest idea how to download a hit counter, but I'm guessing maybe...2, one accidentally through the "next blog function" and one that plugged "Shakespeare and farming" in for reasons that escape me. I am giving no one any kind of run for their money as a political blogger - I am so deeply nauseated by the present political process on every side and so short of time to attend to the news that I am reading yesterdays Times. So I should be clear that I am the wrong person to gauge the impact of anything on anything. And yet, I still think we probably shouldn't care.
The thing is, as many hits as political bloggers get, do we really imagine that Wonkette is being googled by the last undecided voter in Ohio (I know her, actually - she's the moderator of a list I belong to, very sweet, very wise in her own way - I promise, I'm doing my best to swing her towards the left!!!)? Oh, maybe she is and they all are - maybe they are changing the landscape with younger, angrier voters (Dear G-d - are there really people angrier than me? I know they are younger, but if they are angrier, I pity them and hope the medications help!) - they are certainly raising new money, and I'm grateful for that. But I suspect we're going to lose this election by a considerably larger margin than we did the last one (ie, we're going to actually lose it, instead of having it stolen), and I don't think any amount of money could make a difference.
John Kerry is a mediocrity - he has been forever. Bloggers are giving a direction to the disaffected left, but the disaffected left (which includes me, and has since I worked on my first campaign at 12, and was deeply disillusioned - oh, and for the record, I worked for two of Kerry's campaigns, once in high school and once in college) has damned little power right now. But the Bush-loathers (of which I am one most passionately) aren't going to swing this election. And the shame of it is, yet again, we'll have thrown away an election we could have won, with a passionate, charismatic candidate. Democrats are cowards, and I'm frankly ashamed to be one, but I'm not sure what else to be if I want even the remotest access to change.
I do not aspire to blogger fame - well, ok, just a tiny bit, in the sense of wishing for influence. But the people who I want to influence don't read blogs - or at least not mine. I don't know how to reach them, and I wouldnt know how to move them, given the hand we have been dealt. And it appears no one else does either.
Monday, September 20, 2004
We're going to lose
The reason I'm writing about knitting today is because the world is damned depressing. I am nearly certain that the democrats (who I hate with a passion for selling their fucking souls), ie John Kerry (who I hate for being John Kerry) are going to lose to My lord Vader & Chippy, the wonder chipmunk, also known as the current administration. Please understand that I would have cheerfully given a limb to help the dems, deeply as I have come to loathe them, because I'm downright terrified about what's coming - the world that my kids are going to grow up in. But I don't think I can fix it - we're going to lose (and I'm not sure we don't deserve to), but I can wind yarn and knit.
On a list I'm on, someone rather cynically suggested he would vote for Bush (he lives in Florida, natch) because he needs more time to make his peak oil preparations - ie, he wants us to continue conquering the earth and claiming the oil for our own. And the horrible thing is that I can't find much flawed in his logic (which I am not representing fairly here - it was pretty good).
Grandma and Grandpa absolutely refuse to move to Canada here, and our great neighbor to the north has made no move annex the northern states (please, please, please - we'll cheerfully come!), so I guess I'm stuck here, taking bets one whether we'll blow up Iran or N.Korea next, and whether the draft will be in effect for the World War we're building for ourselves when my boys turn 18. Flat feet and heart murmurs...sigh.
This is just depressing. Really, really depressing. Noticing ponchos are back depressing. I should eat pringles or buy yarn or get drunk or something. But breastfeeding mommies can't get drunk, I don't really like the aftertaste of sour cream and onions, and I've busted my yarn budget for the month. And so I blog. Someone please tell me its going to be ok?
Sharon
On a list I'm on, someone rather cynically suggested he would vote for Bush (he lives in Florida, natch) because he needs more time to make his peak oil preparations - ie, he wants us to continue conquering the earth and claiming the oil for our own. And the horrible thing is that I can't find much flawed in his logic (which I am not representing fairly here - it was pretty good).
Grandma and Grandpa absolutely refuse to move to Canada here, and our great neighbor to the north has made no move annex the northern states (please, please, please - we'll cheerfully come!), so I guess I'm stuck here, taking bets one whether we'll blow up Iran or N.Korea next, and whether the draft will be in effect for the World War we're building for ourselves when my boys turn 18. Flat feet and heart murmurs...sigh.
This is just depressing. Really, really depressing. Noticing ponchos are back depressing. I should eat pringles or buy yarn or get drunk or something. But breastfeeding mommies can't get drunk, I don't really like the aftertaste of sour cream and onions, and I've busted my yarn budget for the month. And so I blog. Someone please tell me its going to be ok?
Sharon
Knitting and Crocheting
I like to tell myself that knitting and crocheting will be useful in a post-carbon era, and that we will need lots of warm garments - scarves, mittens, sweaters, hats, blankets. In fact, I think I'm just a little bit obsessed. I really love to knit, and I like crocheting even better, because it is so much easier, and thus I can even watch movies with subtitles while doing it. If I do that when I'm knitting hideous things happen.
I also like to tell myself that my little yarn addiction is good for us, that it means we'll all be warm after the peak ;-), but its really just a bad habit. But I really, really like running my fingers through yarn, winding it, knitting and crocheting with it. My current favorite yarn is a beautiful bulky merino from www.handpaintedyarn.com. They are an uruguayan collective, and they spin the softest, most beautiful stuff I've ever come in contact with, in the most astounding colors. I'm currently knitting an afghan with their yarn in shades of dark green, chocolate, cream and peach.
My other project include a couple of ribbed scarves for my Dad and his partner Anna (made with another favorite yarn, Brown Sheep's bulky wool - have you noticed I like bulky yarn?), a striped blanket for Isaiah (who sadly was born before my fiber resurgance, and got no homemade blankie from mommy), a sweater for Eli made from a beautiful blue and purple ribbon merino (did you notice I like soft yarns?), a handspun afghan of wine, blue, purple and brown for my dissertation advisor (I swear I'm going to finish, so I have to make him a thank you gift - then I can claim that I didn't write the diss because the blanket wasn't ready), an afghan for us in blues and creams, light blue cotton slippers for Grandma (Brown sheep cotton fleece yarn - another favorite), an afghan for new niece Abby (she also missed out), chenille scarf for Mom, scarves for my sister and her boyfriend (Soon to be fiance, I hope, they are at present on their way to Italy where she expects to be proposed to - although she's been expecting for a while, without results), socks for Susie (my step-mom), a blanket for Grandma and Grandpa, and a baby blanket for pregnant friend Bess, who I think is having a girl (they don't want to know the sex, but I'm good at guessing them - one of my few talents).
Do I have a few too many works in progress? Knitting is kind of like my life - I think my theory if that if I keep up the WIPs, I can't ever die.
Talk about weird and obsessive - I'm so into knitting that I have purchased the yarn for the *next* baby's blanket - a baby I don't intend to conceive for a good 5 or 6 months. I'm sure this is bad luck. But I really, really liked the yarn, and this one will probably be the last, and it takes me so long to finish anything that I wanted to plan ahead....sigh.
I also like to tell myself that my little yarn addiction is good for us, that it means we'll all be warm after the peak ;-), but its really just a bad habit. But I really, really like running my fingers through yarn, winding it, knitting and crocheting with it. My current favorite yarn is a beautiful bulky merino from www.handpaintedyarn.com. They are an uruguayan collective, and they spin the softest, most beautiful stuff I've ever come in contact with, in the most astounding colors. I'm currently knitting an afghan with their yarn in shades of dark green, chocolate, cream and peach.
My other project include a couple of ribbed scarves for my Dad and his partner Anna (made with another favorite yarn, Brown Sheep's bulky wool - have you noticed I like bulky yarn?), a striped blanket for Isaiah (who sadly was born before my fiber resurgance, and got no homemade blankie from mommy), a sweater for Eli made from a beautiful blue and purple ribbon merino (did you notice I like soft yarns?), a handspun afghan of wine, blue, purple and brown for my dissertation advisor (I swear I'm going to finish, so I have to make him a thank you gift - then I can claim that I didn't write the diss because the blanket wasn't ready), an afghan for us in blues and creams, light blue cotton slippers for Grandma (Brown sheep cotton fleece yarn - another favorite), an afghan for new niece Abby (she also missed out), chenille scarf for Mom, scarves for my sister and her boyfriend (Soon to be fiance, I hope, they are at present on their way to Italy where she expects to be proposed to - although she's been expecting for a while, without results), socks for Susie (my step-mom), a blanket for Grandma and Grandpa, and a baby blanket for pregnant friend Bess, who I think is having a girl (they don't want to know the sex, but I'm good at guessing them - one of my few talents).
Do I have a few too many works in progress? Knitting is kind of like my life - I think my theory if that if I keep up the WIPs, I can't ever die.
Talk about weird and obsessive - I'm so into knitting that I have purchased the yarn for the *next* baby's blanket - a baby I don't intend to conceive for a good 5 or 6 months. I'm sure this is bad luck. But I really, really liked the yarn, and this one will probably be the last, and it takes me so long to finish anything that I wanted to plan ahead....sigh.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)