…which arrived back-to-back in my RSS this morning –
She does get things wet. The garden and lawn, sure, but also the garage, the neighbour (our fence is not solid), herself…
- More booths every week at the farmer’s market, and more stuff each week. This week: asparagus, strawberries, a few things like early cukes and broccoli. I arrived late, after a meeting, and got the last package of fresh buttertarts.
- A small child totally covered in grunge and bruises from running about, climbing things, and bashing into things.
- Too hot in the house. Open windows. Cold night! Too cold in the house. Hot day. Too hot in the house….
- 5 days left in school. (We are so, so counting down.)
- Solstice! Happy longest day! Now we’re on the downslope, and those of us with Estonian genes can happily turn our minds to making jam and canning things. Because winter is coming, and it is long, dontcha know?
- Barbecue!
Violet mentioned these lullaby versions of rock songs, which made me yelp and leap back in horror. Eeeek! Elevatorized versions of good music! Run away, run away!
I am a huge fan of bizarre cover versions of things — Ozzy Osbourne doing “Staying Alive,” a cabaret version of “Darling Nikki,” Laibach doing “Sympathy for the Devil,” Dread Zeppelin’s entire oeuvre — but somehow to me there’s a difference between taking a different approach to a song (the covers) and trying to make it something it isn’t (lullabies).
As a perpetual insomniac, I can say with authority that there’s lots of good music out there that works to put people both large and small to sleep; there’s no need to mangle Metallica and U2 to do so. As one example here’s the playlist from M’s bedtime CD: Zzz (PDF, 26k). It runs 76 minutes, I think, and I can attest that it is impossible to listen to the whole thing while lying down without falling asleep. The first track is a little more upbeat, to catch the (small) listener’s attention, but after that it’s all zzzzzzzzz.
Animal, vegetable, miracle: a year of food life
by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver.
It’s a simple premise for an experiment: what does it look like to spend a year eating food you’ve either produced yourself or sourced locally? The Kingsolver/Hopp family certainly aren’t the only ones who have attempted this in the past few years; the personal eco-food-adventure is becoming a bit of a genre.
Still, if it is a genre, as long as we’re spending more calories shipping food than the food itself contains (and don’t get me started about bottled water), it’s a worthwhile topic and this book is one of its better examples. Kingsolver (and her husband and oldest child, who also contribute) can write well, and she has managed to write about their experiment without the over-earnest tone common to eco-adventurers, recognizing that fifty or sixty years ago her point would have been moot. She has a sense of humour and — critical to the books success, IMO — while she is thoughtful and articulate, she doesn’t take herself too seriously.
They’re realists: they buy coffee and spices from overseas sources and the odd box of KD for one child’s school friends. They eat out sometimes. They plant too much zucchini (well, any zucchini is too much zucchini in my books). They are not vegetarian; they produce some of their own poultry and buy meat from local farmers. They don’t gloss over the amount of pure work involved in weeding and maintaining a garden large enough to feed four people for a year. However, it is, as she writes late in the book, an experiment that turns out to be about eating well instead of being about deprivation: about enjoying the crunch of spring greens and the sweetness of fresh strawberries and eggs straight from the chicken; of appreciating what is in season and of working within those natural limits.
It is also, inevitably, a book about compromise. She recognizes that it’s easy to contemplate growing your own food when you have forty acres in South Virginia, but that we all make choices in our own contexts. The extensive sidebars, references, and links give people ways to find out more should the urge strike.
Nicely done. Not so much a book to read at breakfast while munching raspberries from California and blueberries from New Jersey, though. At least my yogurt was organic and my honey was local!
1. Cheerful art, like this jaunty, tail-wagging (note the wag-indicating squiggles) kittycat.
2. Overheard song from the bath: “Washing the meaty haunches…. meeeeeeeeaty haaaaauuunches! Meaty haunches! Ya!”
3. “Mama, do you want the inside of this (proffers half-eaten pecan buttertart)? I ate the pastry stuff off the outside but I don’t like the middle.”
Horrid little decals intended for bedroom doors. Found at Toys R Gender Apartheid, naturally.
Who thinks this stuff up?
In the first five minutes of an all-day meeting:
We’ll be doing lots of work with the flipcharts!
says the facilitator.
Who then shows Ford’s vision statement as a shining example of its kind.
To a roomful of health promoters.
And you think, only 415 minutes left to go…
Quotation of the Day for June 4, 2007
“It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking.”
- X. Marcel Boulestin, cook and writer (1878-1943)