Back to the 50's!

There it is folks, the image you've been waiting for. The one that's going to change the world, free up the landfills and rock your fridge.

In case you're rubbing your head, wondering what in tarnations I'm talking about, this is a picture of a bowl of leftover macaroni and cheese that's about to go in the fridge. But what the heck is on top of it?

That's right. A saucer. An ordinary, garden variety saucer. Not plastic wrap. The saucer is--get this--like a LID for the bowl. No plastic involved. No matching lids. Nothing along those lines. A reusable saucer and a reusable bowl. Wow.

In case you wondered, that's what people used to do when they had leftovers, before the plastic era came along. If there was no handy crock or jar, they just topped a bowl with a plate or saucer and considered that food covered.

Rock on, housewives of yore!

I was sniffed by a ostospermophilus beechiyi!

And he sniffed John's camera, too! I'm not really into taming wild animals, but this little Californian ground squirrel was so darn cute! He had no fear of people whatsoever and happily scrounged for food in the parking lot. Unsurprisingly, he was at least three times bigger than the other ground squirrels. I had never seen an animal with fat rolls on its arms before--he doesn't look that fat in this picture, but he had double chins AND little pudge-rolls on each limb. Poor guy. I see a short life for him. I thought about bringing him home, but once again, the no-pets rule trumps all.

I am a bad reader

I will be the first to admit that I am a terrible, uncritical reader. Unless I run across a major typographical or grammatical error, my first reading of a text is basically thoughtless. I just read a friend's critique of HPatDH, and I noticed none of the problems she noticed. Plot holes? What? My total experience was this: adrenaline, tears, adrenaline , tears. Giggle. Tears, tears, tears. And that was it.

These things continue even in the world of nonfiction (philosophy and music excepted). Right now I'm reading an amazing and terribly amusing book called The God Delusion, by Dawkins. It's a hard-core denouncement of religion and an appeal to atheism, and I'm eating it up. Six months ago, I was reading The Soul's Religion, by Thomas Moore (the contemporary Christian writer, not the 19th century one) and eating it up.

That's not to say that I never read critically. I practically lived and breathed critical analysis in college, and when I pick up anything on philosophy of mind, the derisive comments are scathing. When I read my own writing or those of people I'm editing, I can be downright brutal (in a warm and considerate way, of course). Some might even use the word 'nit-picky.'

But I guess when it comes to escapist literature, I box up my brain and let it snooze. It's pretty pathetic, and it's a bad habit. A habit I think I should break now, before it causes me permanent damage.

Kt, you've inspired me! From now on, I shall try to be a better reader!

There's no place like home

Sometimes I become overwhelmed by a vast sense of loneliness. It invades me at times I least expect it or at times when I'm feeling a little weak to begin with. It's not a loneliness for any person I know--it's a loneliness for small living things and for tall trees and the sound of rain hitting the ferns. I suppose it's homesickness.

I love living in Portland. It's a charming city, full of all the things that are good about a larger community. There's a great library system, fantastic restaurants, art, music and, most important of all, a good coffee shop on every corner. But it's not home.

Home gets a little mixed up in my head. Mostly, it's Ash Valley, with its narrow canyons and second-growth trees. I spent most of my childhood exploring a space the size of three city blocks: a wonderful expanse of swamp, stream and forest. I can remember a few hikes with Jan Tetrault, who took us kids out of our backyards and up into the hills (they'd be mountains in Pennsylvania). She told us the names of plants. What a gift.

Sometimes, home is the even smaller stretch of Gardiner that I walked with Fiona in her baby pouch. Throughout the cemetery were old garden classics like grape hyacinth and hydrangea and plum trees that were the children of the pioneers' orchards. Then there were the tenacious weed-fields that were slowly taking back the old mills.

Further afield but equally loved was the beach and the spruce forests abutting the shore. I can think of no place more enchanted than the woods behind Haceta Head. The forest spans no fewer than 4 microclimates with varying guilds of plants and lichens, and the duff is so thick that your feet spring up on every step.

And of course home has never been home without the animals. My first real memories include the lambs, butting up against smell and all milky-smelling. After that, there were the cats, so many I can hardly count. Squirrels and deer and rescued baby bats and ducks and snakes and horses. And chickens. And donkeys. The city can feel a little lonely with all the pets just hidden away.

That loneliness is always there. Most of the time, it slumbers, held under the surface by the distractions of city life. But sometimes, when things get quiet, it wakes up. And I am homesick again.

Guerrilla gardens update!

Sorry for all the delays on guerrilla gardening at its finest! But I've gotten things up and running and should have more regular fantastic posts on everybody's favorite topic: the shady side of plants!

So check out what's new on http://guerrillagardenspdx.blogspot.com/!

Survivalist

It's hard to believe, but I think deep down I want to be a survivalist. You know Bert from Tremors? I want to be him.

A lot of that has to do with my childhood out in the Oregon woods (when you put it like that, it sounds sooo rustic). My parents weren't really the back-to-the-land types--mostly because they'd never left it. I mean, right now they live in a house my dad built himself, and he only added a bathroom last summer. His designs for an outdoor shower with a homemade flash water heater were pretty cool, too. And my mom? Well, she grew up without electricity.

Needless to say, childhood memories of helping in the garden and licking jam out of pots aren't all idyllic, but as I get older, I find myself drawn more and more strongly to that life. It's not just nostalgia. Exposure to "The Morning After" and "Max Max & The Thunderdome" at an early age seems to have triggered a profound paranoia about the end of civilization as we know it. Deep down, I'm just waiting for the petroleum to run out and my knowledge of hand-sewing to come into play.

Anyway, if you get a chance, I recommend the book that I'm reading: The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, by Albert Bates. It's like a summary of all the stuff I'm obssessed with, give or take a few pointers on loom construction and operation of your own printing press.

Oh yeah. I'm getting more Bert every day.

White trash vegan

Tonight I had to dip down into the bottom of my recipe cheats and make something tasty and easy to go with macaroni salad. I was feeling mighty lazy, so here's what I came up with:

Po' White Beets
1 bunch baby beets and greens
1/2 Tb olive oil
1/2 C lemonade
1 tsp white wine vinegar
salt & pepper to taste.

Scrub beets and remove all but 2-3 inches of stems. Heat oil in pan on med. high heat; when warm, toss beets around for about 2 minutes. Add lemonade. Cover, reduce heat to low and simmer until beets are fork-tender (about 4 minutes if very small). Add beet greens, vinegar, salt and pepper. Cover and simmer an additional minute until everything is soft.

Lazy Kidneys
1 can kidney beans
1 Tb ketchup
1 tsp onion powder
2 dashes hot sauce

Stir to combine and heat in the microwave.

The creepy thing about these foods is that they turned out the same color. Still, they tasted mighty tasty and took less than 10 minutes to prepare; they were low-fat and healthy. It almost made up for the Safeway macaroni salad. Yummmmmmm.

Best of Opera Buffo

Man, I was doing some maintenance on the site and started reading old posts from my first year as a blogger. What great memories! Some of the stuff Fiona used to do just cracked me up. I might have to repost some of the better entries, because they are worth reading again.

Oh, and if anybody misses the scintillating conversation about water conservation, I'm sorry, but said site maintenance may have eaten it. Oops. Just remember to take shorter showers, and if it's yellow, let it mellow!

Wasting away

John and Fiona spent yesterday in the basement, staying cool. John also tackled an experiment. He decided to see how much water a load of laundry uses.

He recently picked up some fifteen-gallon drums from work, so he brought some down to the basement and placed the outlet hose inside one. When it got full, he moved it to a second drum, which fortunately, was just big enough. A full load of laundry takes about thirty gallons of water to wash and rinse.

Thirty gallons.

A camel will go four months without water and then drink thirty gallons without stopping. It may go another four months without needing to drink again.

According to Missippi State, a productive, full-grown apple tree needs about 30 gallons a day to live and make apples.

According to the Afghanistan Human Develpment Report, 20 liters of water a day is a basic human right. One load of laundry = water for about 5 people for one day.

Thirty gallons, so I can smell good.

Recycling for chimps!

Today's big excitement: I made arrangements to collect the museum's toner & ink cartridges and donate them to Chimps Inc! Chimps Inc is a chimp sanctuary in Bend. I just read about them in the Oregonian today (they are embroiled in a lawsuit to keep two of their ape charges, who may or may not 'belong' to another chimp sanctuary in Texas), and I was so excited to learn that there was a sanctuary HERE, in Oregon! For about twenty minutes, I was all set to move to Bend so I could become a volunteer.

It's funny. Growing up, I was always afraid of chimpanzees. (This might be because of a horror movie with a murderous chimp.) My mother always disliked them, too. But lately, I have become very drawn to chimpanzees. For some reason, of all the creatures who have suffered at the hands of humans, chimpanzees now touch me the most deeply. In some ways, I feel so strongly about them that I really would pack up and move to Bend if I thought that was the best way I could help them. And I don't know. Maybe it would.

Why can't they live in Corvallis? Or someplace that's not the desert?

I'm gonna have the greenest lawn in town!

No, aliens have not confiscated mybrain cells and replaced them with a suburbanite's. See, our landlord included a "you must water your lawn" clause in our rental agreement. He spent about 15 minutes going over it. (You should have been there for the section about signage--political signs are okay, business signs, no. That took at least half an hour.)

Anyway, John has turned into a super water-recycler. He decided he would empty out our baths and put the water on the lawn. That was only a couple of days ago, and already, the lawn in front of our half of the duplex is three shades darker than the anemic stuff by the neighbor's.

I don't know Steve would feel about our littl graywater processing system, but I hope he appreciates that this summer his water bill ought to be a little lower--and his lawn a little greener.

Putting a face on my veggies

At first the subject was "Food With A Face," but since I don't eat foods that actually have faces (i.e. critters), it didn't make sense. What I meant is that I finally got my first box of CSA produce and I got to meet our farmer.

Now, Lyle is not the lovable hippy who first turned me into a CSA nut, back when I was living in Minnesota with my sister. I think he is a recovering New Yorker, and he treats his subscribers with the brusque attitude you imagine when you think "New Yorker." The attitude is essentially "you'll get your vegetables when and where I tell you to get your vegetables, and you'd better like it." I want to take umbrage, but it's pretty hard to complain when you're holding the most beautiful bok choy you've ever touched and the man's giving you instructions on the preparation of Indian Mustard. Which, by the way, is at least as spicy raw as horseradish.

And he stuffed a giant bunch of hot pink wild roses into our produce box just because I said they were pretty.

Yesterday, leaving the farmers' market, my head was spinning. I really wasn't sure what to think about our new grocery set-up. But this afternoon, with the roses on the table and a single purple bloom nodding above the a bunch of chives on the kitchen counter, I feel so smitten I have no room for complaints. And the perfect kale I stirred into our curried vegetables was so tender and tasty, I knew there was no turning back.

My kind of W

I have a confession. I read Vogue. And W. And Teen Vogue. Okay, those are just the fashion magazines that I have subscriptions to. You can put Lucky in my hands, and I’m salivating. Even Town and Country makes me grin.

What is it about me and these magazines? After all, they stand for everything I’m against: consumerism, selfishness, fur. They trade on the frailty of young women’s body images. They substitute journalism for advertising, and worst of all, they are loaded with perfume samples!

But I can’t get enough of them. I can’t get enough of Stella McCartney. Dolce and Gabbana. Alexander McQueen. I can not tear my eyes away from a photograph of Coco Rocha, and if it includes Agyness Deyn, so much the better. (So, so much better.)

On a good day, I like to chalk it up to a love of beauty, art, design. On a bad day—the kind of day I catch myself waxing nostalgic for "America’s Next Top Model," Season 3—I wonder if I’m really the person I think I am.

Then I reach for The Vegetarian Times with a shrug. Everybody’s got their weaknesses. Mine are just a little glossier than I’d like them to be.

Curse of the blogging 'meme'

So Kt got hit with a blogging "meme," which I personally think is a bastardization of the word. The idea was coined by Richard Dawkins and used a lot by one of my favorite philosophers of mind, Daniel Dennett, and really has been used mostly to discuss the parasitical function of religion (i.e., how many religions contain ideas that are actually harmful to the individual organism, but spur along the religion itself--hey, I'm just quoting D.D. from his last visit to Portland, folks). Anyway, I digress. It sounds like I'm supposed to answer the following question:

Why do you blog? Give five answers.

1. Because I am narcissistic and love to subject others to my own rambling thoughts.
2. Because I can vent philosophal thoughts with facing other philosophers--or go back to school.
3. Because it keeps my writing muscles sharp.
4. To share my real thoughts with friends that, because of distance, would probably only get a shallow Christmas-card-level of communication any other way.
5. Because my own handwriting is fairly terrible and I have gotten too lazy to use a paper journal (and hey, it saves paper!).

That's what it's all about

At the museum, there is an area for children to use a computer to take their picture and type a little caption, then print out their document. Today my coworker found one a girl had printed and lost. It said: I am 6 years old. I love my mommy very much. I wish she would come down from heaven so I could see her again.

My little girl is sick and miserable today. I hugged her extra, extra tightly.

Mother's Day!

So today is my *4th* Mother's Day. Whoah.

It's so mind-boggling, I'm still kind of reeling from it. Being a mom is so great! Yes, there are all those tantrums and whiney moments, but 9 times out of 10, it's good stuff. It is just a treat to watch the formation of this special little creature.

If you're not a Mom today, why don't you take the chance to reach out to the kids in this world? It might be a pain in the butt to add a volunteering gig to your schedule, but even a one-time stint at your local children's museum or hospital can put a little spark in your life.

Kanzi

I am reading an amazing book: "Apes, Language, & the Human Mind," by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, et al. It is the story of Sues' work with a bonobo named Kanzi. Kanzi's mother was in a language study at a Language Research Center in Atlanta, and because of Kanzi's early exposure to humans and the English language, Kanzi has picked up an amazing ability to communicate. He has a grasp of complex grammatical structures that is superior to many 2-year-olds, and his abilities keep growing. He does not have the brain power of a human adult--for one, he doesn't have a strong short-term memory (at least linguistically). But he can communicate and interact with humans as well as a young child.

Kanzi is more able than most bonobos because of his early-childhood experiences. He was raised in a very rich environment where he was given a lot of language stimuli & great impetus to use it. Reading about his life, I can not help thinking of the chimpanzees at our zoo, who live in a concrete bunker and whose "enrichment activities" are mostly about finding food that's been strung from the ceilings or placed in a box. Of course, it's better than the old way of just locking the poor creatures in a spartan cage. But it's a far cry from the kind of place that could really stimulate them.

What if all the zoo monkeys got to live in a space like Kanzi's? What if, instead of being on display for our entertainment, the apes were allowed--in some safe, appropriate way--to interract with humans? What if they were given a chance to learn English? What could possibly be so wrong about allowing animals to be ambassadors and not statuary?

Blogging to blog

Most of the times I only put an entry on this blog when I have some deep thought or opinion that I want to express clearly and somewhere others can comment upon. That's why there aren't nearly as many blog entries as I wish there were! Of course, the kinds of opinions I have are usually sappy leftish mish-mash, so that might actually be a blessing to anybody who ever reads this.

But today I was reading Snarpinions, the reviewing arm of Snarke.net, and just felt so ... lame. I mean, I always think I'm going to do some writing. I have lots of swell ideas. But then I don't. I have turned into a writing blob. Okay, I do have some notes for the mind-body-yoga project, so I don't suck that badly. I've just been slacking a little the last three weeks. Or four.

Maybe I do suck!

People suck

So Kate, my niece, went into a pet store that focuses on reptiles and fish. And they were selling rats--for reptile chow. Now that's something Kate can live with, even though she's a rat maniac, but when she needed to wash her hands after a close encounter with rat pee, she saw in the back room something sad: clear plastic under-the-bed storage tubs crammed full of rats. That's right: plastic tubs full of miserable, sickly rodents. Is that any life for any creature--no matter what its fate will be?

The pet industry is cruel to animals. Do your research before you give your money to people who sell animals and who sell animal products. Don't allow businesses who perpetuate cruelty to make money!

On that note: Don't shop at the Tropical Hut!

The Scent of Luxury

Luxury smells like an herb from Madagascar. It is a light fruity scent, not cloying at all, and according to the Dior company, that aroma plus a Nobel prize will combat 11 of the 20 signs of aging. The other 9 are battled by a combination of other extracts and acids, also available from the brilliant minds back in France.

Luxury feels like a trip to fairy land. It is the gentle brush of kitten fur against your cheek. It is the soft tap of butterfly toes on your eye lids. It is the soft exhalation of a pretty girl looking over her work, and the little burst of giggle bubbles in your mouth as you take the gold-rimmed mirror and see yourself as you have never seen yourself before, as beautiful as an elf-queen.

Luxury is pretty damn great.

But be prepared for luxury's fall-out when you come back from fairy land. Be prepared for the one-eyed beggar girl and her sweet smile. Be prepared for the wave of overwhelming guilt. Luxury is not for the weak. The faint of heart will succumb to luxury's power or cower away from its persuasive touch.

The better option is to hold it quietly in your heart, a secret treasure. A source of knowing you never guessed at before. Luxury transcendant.

And as you give the girl your last fifty cents, she looks beyond the shopping bags and says: "You have a beautiful smile."