Suckage

So I seriously suck on blog updating. Um, yup, that's about it. My ability to spin fun words about my life is cramping. Maybe I need some word yoga to get back in the saddle again.

On the plus side, I've really been getting a lot of mileage out of my birthday sketchbook.

Suckage

So I seriously suck on blog updating. Um, yup, that's about it. My ability to spin fun words about my life is cramping. Maybe I need some word yoga to get back in the saddle again.

On the plus side, I've really been getting a lot of mileage out of my birthday sketchbook.

double-plus ungood day

Today was not a good day. Today was a bad day. Today was my worst idea EVER.

Do not take Trimet to the most distant, most enormous fabric store in town and then expect to get any shopping done. Expect to waste 4.5 hours of time, spend $4 in bus fare, $6 on lunch, get totally pissed off at everyone who lives east of 52nd Ave, nearly get hit by an SUV (causing you to scream expletives so loudly your nearly lose your voice), make your kid cry AND NOT BUY A SINGLE PIECE OF FABRIC OR ANY KIND OF CRAFT SUPPLY.

Then you will have to eat two pieces of fudge to recover from the entire experience.

Blind as a bat

In the weakest move of the weakest of administration that has ever set foot in Washington, DC, the Bush administration today did its darndest to keep money out of the hands of blind people. They are appealing the court mandated redesign of US dollars so paper bills would be usable by the visually impaired--and they actually argued that the blind didn't need to use paper currency, because they could just use credit cards!!!

Wow. That's just . . . amazing.

On a separate note, I watched two great movies on Saturday! Now, I don't usually watch 2 movies in one day, but I was sick, so I made an exception. And both of these films are worth making exceptions for! 1) Because of Winn-Dixie--this is just cute and precious enough without being so cute and precious you want to throw up. Plus Dave Matthews works in the coolest pet store in the whole world. 2) Bad(der) Santa--okay, this movie is brilliant. It was so awful and cringe-inducing that it turned out wonderful. And the kid who plays Therman Merman is AMAZING.

Pop ups

So I'm trying to get used this new computer, and I'm telling you, sometimes it's nuts. I mean, pop-up blocker is built-in to this edition of Explorer, which sounds great, but really it turns out that 9 times out of 10, I want pop-ups! I mean, I wouldn't click the Barney's button if I didn't really want it to pop up!

Hot dog, I love style.com.

Brain fluff

I feel like such a feather head. I honestly have not read a novel in close to 3 weeks. First October W came. Then September and October Vogue came. Then November W came. Then November Vogue came. Somewhere in there November Martha arrived.

I am a bubble brain.

Okay, I guess I did read Vibrational Healing by Joy Gardner. That has to count for something.

And now I'm back ...

... from outer space, or at least the OHSU Richmond Clinic. I can breathe sort of clearly now, the snot is mostly gone. Gonna be a bright, bright, breathing day!

And now I'm back ...

... from outer space, or at least the OHSU Richmond Clinic. I can breathe sort of clearly now, the snot is mostly gone. Gonna be a bright, bright, breathing day!

End is near

So in the rush to finish ten zillion things, of course we all have colds. So now my costume will be Princess Leah/Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Grrr.


The biscotti I made for the party taste super tasty when dipped in coffee.

On animals and why I don't partake

So my friends have been chatting a bit about the ills of non-organic eggs and dairy, and then I had to butt in my head about how badly the animals live, and I realized I had to clarify something. It is easy to overstate the suffering of farm animals, and it is easy to overstate the health benefits of a vegetarian/vegan diet. It is easy to twist and rationalize both of these claims and make them trivial. So I want to point out that the reasons I decided to stop eating animal foods have to do only with myself.

Since I had Fiona, I have been trying to accept myself fully and live the fullest life I can create for myself. For years I have struggled with parts of my personality that weren't acceptable: I have always been told that I am too sensitive and too emotional. I have always felt that I was too weak and too silly to really get along in the world. But I decided that attitude wasn't helping me, and was only crippling my abilities. I found that being a little extra sensitive was actually useful when I became a mother, and that gave me the extra confidence to start exploring my weenier side.

One thing that has always been difficult was my tenderness toward any kind of pain and suffering. Just thinking about an injured child makes me want to cry (and horror stories about child abuse have been known to keep me from sleeping for days). When it came to thinking about killing and injuring animals, I have always been upset, but I felt like if it was for food production, I was expressing illogical thoughts, weak, stupid thoughts. My father (and Fiona's father, too, now that I think about it) made it a particular point of harassment. He taught me to feel stupid and inferior for questioning the massive consumption of meat, and we ate it every night.

Finally, after years of being interested in a vegetarian diet without any serious action, and during a period of serious spiritual activity (meditating, reading, stuff like that), this May I decided that I couldn't keep pushing those feelings under the rug when it was so much easier to just stop eating meat. John was very supportive. I couldn't have broken out of that horrible mold without him.

Also during this extra spiritual period, I realized that I wanted my lifestyle to better match my values and my goals. I want to live a life based upon kindness, and I want to be a kind person. Is killing an animal just for human usage kind? Is it kind to reduce a life, human or animal, to only its economic value? No matter how I look at it, it doesn't look kind to me. It is particularly unkind to do so when there are so many easy vegetable protein sources for me to choose from.

Since I made this decision, I have not experienced the crippling bouts of emotional pain I used to deal with weekly (or more often). I haven't felt the deadening of depression that used to grip me so firmly. I don't feel worthless. I feel like me. I feel ... okay.

I also feel ten pounds skinnier. That's okay, too.

Really good book!

So I just started "The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community," and boy howdy is it a nice book. I feel very hopeful.

Got nothing

Okay, so today's post doesn't really have any kind of topic. Yesterday I was full of brilliant blog posts, but today, nothing. It's like an echoing cavern up there in my head.

I am feeling tremendously vain, however. I am wearing my cool $1 vintage dress and have gotten lots of compliments from folks here at work. I've probably checked myself out ten times today.

Tiny slacking moment

So I'm taking a moment to slack and post on this blog. I should be scrubbing screens to get them ready for some serious screenprinting--after all, I have 75-120 horses to print before Halloween. But dude, the Internet is so much more fun!

Anyway, this Friday, I had a wonderful pie moment. Pie is my favorite food. Scratch that. Pie is the single greatest food stuff ever created by man. It is a magical gateway to a world of gustatory oneness. When it touches my tongue, I can hear the OMM of the universe gently humming in my ears, translated from the gentle pulses of my happy cheeks and gums and tastebuds into sound by some miracle. Yes, a miracle. Pie is truly, blissfully miraculous.

Good pie, that is. Bad pie is like cardboard left out in the rain, topped with malingering fruit or an evil lunchlady's idea of pudding.

But this Friday, I had wonderful pie. Crisp, crumbling crust, gently salted, with the mellow flavor of fresh fat--perhaps part butter, but mainly shortening. The crust of my childhood. Not fancy, but right. The custard, soft and lusciously brown with dark corn syrup, cradled the perfectly salted and crunchy pecan topping. I closed my eyes and ate slowly.

Screw yoga. This is my gateway to the spirit.

Apologia

I love Blogger; Blogger is not evil; I retract all cruel statements regarding Blogger and its eating habits.

Things and Stuff

First off--an apology for last week's absolute blather. It was unusually lame. But here's a good quote on a similar subject, from a book I am reading:
"The current trajectory of globalization contains at least one very grave threat to the future of local community stability--namely, reduced legal capacity of localities to shape their own economic destinies." (27, _Making A Place For Community_, Williamson, Imbroscio & Alperovitz--emphasis mine.)

I don't know why, but I just love that expression: shaping their own economic destinies. It's succinct, it's beautiful, and it captures that sense of empowerment so many communities are starting to lose. Look at my hometown, Reedsport, Oregon. The entire town is fading away into despair, because the economic glue of the community--a lumber mill and a paper mill--bit it in the 90s. The town lost many of its most active townspeople (and towns need those busybodies and do-gooders!) and it still hasn't found another major employer. It's heartbreaking.

The junk dress is coming along. I hoped I'd have all the back issues worked out today, but I don't. I think I have a good idea to shape it so it's more flattering (i.e., less like a hospital gown) without using yawn-ish old darts, but I will need John's help. Speaking of John, he had a brilliant notion about our merry-go-round lamp, and I am super excited. It's going to rock.

Speaking of rocking, chicken-fried seitan rocks. It is sensational. I will recommend it to every single person I know--unless they have a gluten sensitivity. Other than that--yummm.

The Anti-Federalist

Okay, so I was reading the paper today and heard about a bill up in the senate (S 3128) which would "prohibit states or local governments from enacting any food-safety law that differs in any way from federal law, including setting more stringent limits on toxic substances.... the FDA would be the sole arbiter of permissible levels of toxics in foods, overriding hundreds of existing state and local food-safety laws," (Wolke, LA Times-Washington Post Service).

It's tempting to like the idea because then all the food safety issues in this motley nation of ours will be codified and made uniform. But I hate it. I hate the idea that my health and safety is even more dominated by the power of the FDA, an organization so heavily controlled by the chemical industry and the corporate food giants that we already can't trust them. I hate the idea that my state government, which shows a stronger connection to its constituents, will no longer be able to protect me from the FDA's blind and greedy grasp.

This law represents everything I hate about the United States and its current state of government. Lately, I've been thinking that we should de-federate our nation a little. Put more power in the hands of the states--localize it. Pull the teeth of big corporations by establishing tougher trade barriers between states and regions (not to mention nations).

Only by refocusing money and power to a regional level will we see greater citizen involvement and government that reflects HUMAN values, not corporate. Only by making the federal government accountable to local governments will we see the kind of development that we, individuals, desire.

Amen.

Reviewing the fridge

So it's fall now. We had our first big September rainstorm, and yep, it's fall. So what do I want--desperately, earnestly, painfully want? Pork, of course. Nothing says fall like bacon, pork chops, pork loin, pork ribs, pork fat in all its glorious, sticky-greasy-irridescent chip wonder. It hit me today, and I wasn't prepared for it. I mean, I nearly my footing in the kitchen.

I should have seen it coming. The last few days have been rough. I was reading a great book by Ruth Reichl (former NYTimes restaurant critic) called "Garlic and Sapphires: the secret life of a critic in disguise," and it was like 400 pages of the most beautiful food writing you could expose yourself too. At least ten meals included foie gras. And reading it was great, but also really horrible, because I had to remind myself that I have given all that up. I am no longer a gourmet eater. I am a conscientious eater, a healthy eater. I am an eater who weighs *70* pounds less I did when I was a serious gourmet eater-- and 15 less than when I was an amateur gourmet eater.

I have to bring an image of a long-lashed sweet-faced piglet into my mind to shake off the painful need for bacon.

Sometimes being a near-vegan is really hard. There is a certain lack of variety in my food world, because I'm still developing my recipe repertoire. And there is a difference in tastes. I made krautranzas the other day, and they were not the same delicious as the sausage-kraut wonders I created in my previous food life. Tempeh can do wonderful things, but when you are reaching out for the flavors of your childhood, there is so only so far you can go. I try to appreciate these foods as new foods, not replacements, but sometimes, it's hard. Lately, I've cheated a lot. Fiona and I had a milkshake yesterday. It tasted wonderful, with that salty, creamy, sweetness that only cow milk can provide. The most gifted blend of soymilk lacks that quality. Usually, I don't want the high sodium funk of cowmilk. Usually, I prefer rice or soy. But right now, I miss dairy. I miss the splendor of egg whites (although I don't miss the weird dry skin they give me). I miss the easy flexibility of baked goods with eggs. I miss the salty intensity that urea and hormones and enzymes give animal foods. Vegetables are just too damn nice tasting. I want to eat raunchy, damn it!

Is being a vegetarian with vegan intentions worth it? Of course. I feel so much better these days. I don't feel a secret well of guilt boarded up within me any longer. I have more energy. I am more in touch with my spirituality. I can taste and smell things with a newfound clarity. I can pet a cat, and not be completely creeped out by the similarity between a cat's thigh muscles and a chicken's.

I love animals and I love myself. If being a real foodie means giving up those things, then I'm glad I've put that behind me. Best of all, I know I'll never have to look a plate of foie gras and try to forget how it was made.

And now I'm back

... from September closure, if not outer space. It feels weird to be normal work after all the fun of cleaning and painting. But all the staff is more friendly and fun now. I am actually feeling like I love my job and my coworkers. Sniff. Sniff

John, however, does not feel the same about his workplace:
http://slvk.blogspot.com/

Computer talk

WoW! It's been forever since I posted an update on this baby. See, I dowloaded an update for McAfee, and since then, our computer crashes when we start up the internet. Oops. Also, I got a new boss at work, so I've been slacking much, much less.

Not that I slack at work. I am an excellent employee and constantly search for new projects and ways to maximize our visitors' museum experience.

August already?

Whoah. It's August. Where did June go?

So I finally met Elias, my sister's 2-month old baby. (See what I mean about 'where'd June go'?) He's cute. But just as importantly--drumroll, please--John met my dad!

See, my dad was spending the night at Kristina's, and she had us over for dinner. It was much fun. John and Kristina entertained my dad while Bert & I cooked and drank pina coladas. Yum, yum, yummmm. Then, after dinner, we all joined in a rousing game of chickenfoot! What a hoot.

Anyway, John said Dad was cool; Fiona and Amelia played dress-up; and Isaac pestered "Uncle John" non-stop. Good times.