106 posts from 2008

Show us an awesome mustache.
Submitted by Soup.

Alright, Soup, I will.

 

 

  Granted, this is not a mere mustache, and the overall look is quite dependent on the beret, I think.  Still, you have to admire this.  I think this takes a certain amount of huevos, a definite inner confidence.

 

 

 

Although, perhaps not as much as this facial hair/headgear combination.  It's not a mustache, so it doesn't qualify, but you still have to admire the balls.

The other day we were watching an interview with the singer Jewel about her life growing up in Alaska, and she said that basically up there you spend all summer getting ready for winter. 

We don't live in Alaska anymore, but Idaho is close enough (actually, according to the USDA Zone Map, many places in Alaska, including where Jewel lived and where we used to live, do not get as cold as it gets here, and considering they actually have humidity up there, the weather in general up there is less harsh than it is here), and we know exactly what she means.

Today my husband and stepdad went out to cut wood and spent all day (well, 7 hours) doing it.  We now have a giant pile (about a cord and a half) of wood scattered about our backyard; my son has already built a fort out of some of it.  That wood needs to be split and stacked, and we still need to get about 4 more cords.  It's work--muscle-straining, backache-inducing work.

And today I spent about 4 hours working on cherries.  I had bought about 10 or 12 pounds yesterday at the farmer's market.  These are locally grown (more or less) Bing cherries, picked absolutely ripe and indescribably delicious, the kind of cherry that turns you off supermarket fruit.  I washed them all and pitted them.  The slightly overripe ones will go into jam (make that tomorrow) as cherry jam is one of my all-time favorite yogurt toppings, and we need a lot of it.  The perfectly ripe ones are being individually frozen.  I put them on cookie sheets to freeze, so that once they are bagged I can just pull out however many cherries I want at a time instead of having to defrost the whole bag. 

All the peas are harvested and stored now.  We have about 10 quarts of snow and snap peas in the freezer, along with 2 gallons of shelled peas.  We also dried enough peas to total about a pound of dry peas for soup.  We dried all the peas on a homemade screen rack outside in the sun.  We will plant peas again soon, for a second harvest in the fall.

Chamomile and other herbs for medicine and tea have to be harvested almost daily in this weather, because they're growing so fast.  We dry them on the same screen rack outside, using nothing but solar energy.  We're going to have a bounteous supply of chamomile tea, although I'm also mixing it with pineapple weed flowers.  Pineapple weed is, yes, a weed, but it's closely related to chamomile (the Matricaria chamomile, anyway), and it tastes really good as tea and offers some of the same benefits (being soothing, etc.).  We also have calendula flowers to dry and yarrow.  Indeed, I am utterly in love with yarrow.  I have never tested its supposed fever-curing properties, but if it's good enough for Achilles, it's damn sure good enough for us.  We also picked about a pound of wild mint leaves, and we are drying them and intend to mix them with our garden-grown mint (we have three varieties, currently) to make a mint tea for winter.  I'm letting the cilantro do as it wants to do and make coriander for me.  The poppies are also doing what they want and making seeds, later to make lemon poppyseed muffins with.  Lillies, sunflowers, nasturtiums, and cornflowers (aka bachelor's buttons) are all blooming to great effect and pleasing me mightily.

Oh, right, y'all wanted pictures.  After work finishes up, OK?

Also at the farmer's market yesterday, I bought 20 pounds of local apricots.  Yum.  I hope to get another box next week.  Of course, we are eating them, letting the bright-orange juice get all over our faces and forearms, but we will also make jam (we eat a fair quantity of jam, mostly because we only buy plain yogurt, and we put jam on top of the plain yogurt--we also use it on biscuits and pancakes and so forth, of course, but the yogurt habit is what really affects our jam consumption), and then--THEN!--I ordered a new food dehydrator, a 9-rack commercial type unit, and we will make dried apricots.  Oh, super yum.  I bought the big dehydrator because we intend to do a lot of drying this year, especially once my husband gets a deer (jerky!--fingers crossed, as getting a deer is by no means a foregone conclusion), and things like apricots and cherries take a long time to sun-dry here.  I think we're going to do the tomatoes out in the sun, though.  Oh, right, I also intend to make zucchini chips this year.  I read about it this winter, and I'm always looking for new ways to sock zucchini away for the winter since it produces so abundantly, and apparently dehydrated zucchini slices make a delicious chip, that you can just eat straight out of the bag like a potato chip.  You could also rehydrate them, of course, and use them in soup or whatever.  Whatever.  It's chips I want.  I figure once the zucchini gets going it shouldn't be too hard to fill that 9-rack dehydrator.  Fortunately, I have a mandoline for easy uniform slicing.

Oh, we also found a big patch of wild raspberries the other day while we were fishing/harvesting mint.  They're in flower now.  Can't wait...can't wait.   

I only have one week of work left for the summer, and it's good, because August is too full of getting ready for winter to hold down an actual job.  Once the tomatoes and zucchini start in earnest (all our tomatoes are still green right now--we should start having cherry tomatoes soon), dealing with them is a full-time job. 

People ask me all the time if I don't get tired of it.  The truth is that we get very tired of it about the end of August or middle of September, but the rest of the year makes up for it.  Well, not only that, but to be honest, I think for us there is great satisfaction in doing this kind of work.  There is satisfaction in using your hands and your back to do real hard work, in getting sweaty and dirty from mixing about with earth.  All three of us (because my son helps, sort of--as best as a 3-year-old can) sit back in October and look at our carefully split-and-stacked wood, our pantry full of dried and canned foods, our freezer stocked with both vegetables by themselves and some ready-to-eat convenience foods that I make (stuffed zucchini, soup concentrates, zucchini fritters, etc.), and we take pride and comfort from it.  It will mean lower grocery bills for us, of course, and it will mean fewer trips to the grocery store, more selection when decent produce is hard to get in winter, and higher quality food.  It also means that a significant portion of the work we do in our lives is not work where we trade our time for money, but where we work directly for whatever it is that we need, cutting out the money part of the deal.  It means that that work that we did was work we did as a family; it was time spent together, working towards a common goal, laughing, bickering, cooperating, trying not to cut each other's fingers off with the axe.

I don't mean to get too sentimental about it--it is hard work, and as I said, we do get tired of it.  And I don't want to sound preachy, but sometimes I wonder if more people tried it out, if they wouldn't also find it more rewarding than they imagined.  I wonder, too, if people would appreciate the energy (in the form of electricity, oil, or food) they consume more when they knew what that consumption meant in real physical terms.  Maybe we wouldn't be so wasteful as a society, and maybe we wouldn't abuse food the way we do.  Maybe being outdoors and working and finding yourself reaching for apricots and peas for snacks would give us better health.  Maybe the time spent working with their families would be good for kids and adults alike.  Oh, I don't know...but maybe.

I know, I know--I'm a dreamer and an idealist, but when you spend 4 hours pitting cherries, you have a lot of time to daydream.  Trust me.

What's the closest thing you have to a time machine?
Submitted by Verisimilitude.

I'm not sure if I understand the question correctly, but I guess my son, since he has reintroduced me to the wonders the world holds when your mind has youthful curiosity.  I mean, to take an example, I learned why the sky is blue way back in elementary school, right?  And at the time, I found it wonderful, that little molecules could conspire so to produce something that we can see and call beautiful--not just the blue, but also the rainbows and the sunsets and clouds and all of it.  Somewhere along the way, though, I started taking it for granted.  I guess I can only marvel at molecules for so long.

Now, I get to teach him about it, and I am once again finding myself smitten with awe and wonder at the careless, incessant beauty of the world.  I say "careless" because it's not as if the molecules of the world have really set out to make beauty, though perhaps we are made in some way to see the things they make as beautiful.

Seeing things with him again and watching him thrill at the deliciousness of the world especially as he comes to understand reminds me of a time when I had just explained--oh, I don't know, let's say I had just explained why the sky is blue to a friend.  And she asked if it didn't seem less beautiful and romantic or something once you understood.  I told her I thought it was more gorgeous because it wasn't intentional.  If we assume a god to be omnipotent and intentional, then it's not a miracle that beauty exists; it would be simple enough to just make a rainbow if you were God.  If, on the other hand, it's just a fortuitous alignment of raindrops and sunlight that are acting with no intent to create something at all, that's a fucking miracle.  That's something worth celebrating.

And, thanks to my son, I'm remembering how much I loved it all the first time around.  I can't wait to build a mock volcano with, like, dry ice and shit.  Woo!

Sometimes, you love something, and you really don't know why.  You can't explain it to anyone.  People ridicule you, and still you love it. 

I'm like this with The Monkees.  Yeah, I love them.  I can regale you with all sorts of obscure facts about them, such is my fandom, if you want me to (e.g., The Monkees spotted a virtual unknown playing at the Monterey Pop Festival and invited him to open for them on their upcoming tour, and that virtual unknown was Jimi Hendrix.  And, no, your typical Monkees fan who was at the concert did not enjoy the sonic stylings of the Hendrix.  I believe there was much booing and chanting, which makes one want to find those girls, and you know they were girls, who booed Jimi Hendrix in favor of the Monkees and shake the daylights out of them.  Anyway.)

And now, there are a couple of commercials that I just totally love and can't stop myself from loving, despite the ridicule I must suffer from friends and family.   Behold:

 

What is that gesture that the mustache man near the end is doing to "cheddarwurst?"  And while we're on the subject, and because over on the Book of the Face I've been involved recently in a very long discussion about "Americanisms" that are sniper-attacking the lovely and completely correct forms of English spoken in other nations--is "cheddarwurst" a real word? 

Also, these commercials bewitch and entrance me:

 

I don't know why I love this goofy band of guys who really need to get a handle on their credit histories, but I do.  If they're a real band, I'd totally buy their album.  Album?  Nobody buys albums anymore.  Whatever.

 

And in the next one, there are specifically two things I love (beyond the fact that he would "be a happy bachelor with a dog and a yard"):  1. If you look close at the beginning, you can totally see the pirate hat!!!  I wish they had the junky car from the other commercial, too.  2.  I love it when the drummer has to open the door after cranky Dream Girl shuts it on him.  Oh, I'm not blaming Dream Girl for being cranky.  I mean--she has a husband who works as a pirate at a restaurant and always has his friends over hanging out and drinking all the beer while she stomps around picking up laundry that is apparently scattered everywhere.  Then he's ready to ditch her just because she has bad credit.  Seems kinda harsh.  Anyway:

 

Heh.  Well, the Intarwebz have demonstrated to me that the cutie lead singer is one Eric Violette who apparently only speaks English during Free Credit Report.com commercials.  I guess he's Quebecois, which is good to know because I thought my French was just getting really, really bad--it's not me, it's him!  Or, rather, it's that the French that I learned isn't the French he speaks.  Whatever.  I officially love him now.  I wonder if he will bring me some poutine.  Or...something.

 

I don't think the other commercials I love are quite so embarrassing:

And, finally, our favorite commercial of all time.  While it is cute and huggable when my toddler shouts, "Go Meat!" at the dinner table, this is the commercial that has stolen the hearts of everyone in our family (it has also taught my son the two crucial words 'arachnid' and 'magma' thus launching a recurring debate about what is really at the center of the earth and how it might have got there--he does not believe this 'magma' business for one minute).  I could listen to either Bear Grylls or my son declaim his love of arachnids all day long. 

(Admittedly, my son has also developed a habit of attempting to trap and eat animals that are not normally considered food here in the US, and when we question his behavior, he shouts, "It's survival!  That's what Bear Grylls does!"  I think it's maybe a good thing we're going to homeschool him.)

What is the big news story in your area today and how does this news impact your life?

Not a lot of news happens around here.  There is the weather, an eternal source of wonderment and consternation.  The big story is that it's dry--DAMN dry--and warm-to-hot.  This leads to the related story that the Forest Service is about two steps away from closing the forests.  You know why they have to close the forests when it's this dry?  Because idiots go to dry forests and start fires, fires that can rage on for days or even weeks, consuming thousands and thousands of acres.  Sure, fire is a natural and rejuvenating phenomenon for the forest.  And when the fire mows down people's homes, the Forest Service could just sit back and let the "natural" fire started by some dickweed with a can of Sterno burn, baby, burn.  Except that then they would get sued.  Because this is America.  In consequence, everyone is now racing to get in their winter's supply of firewood.  This flurry of wood-cutting could actually be helpful if a fire should start, because you take the dead wood that's lying around as firewood, not the living trees.  Dead wood is just fuel for those fires, although in this kind of dryness, the living trees won't fare much better. 

Anyway, getting extremely local, the big news is that this community is finally starting its own farmer's market and community store (separate entities, but related).  Woo!  The Economic Development Committee has shown some progress at last! 

And, um.  That's about all the news around here.  It's either boring or great, depending on how you look at it.

Oh, but a while back we did have a big story.  A letter went out to everyone in town claiming that one of the county commissioners had done things the cemetery that would shock us!  Naturally, my curiosity was piqued.  I thought for sure we had caught a necrophiliac, or at the very least a graverobber, in our midst.  No.  It was all very anticlimactic:  He was putting gravel in the graves instead of soil or some damn fool thing.  So, like grass and flowers wouldn't grow on the graves.  Still, while we were all less than shocked, at least it gave us something to make chit-chat about.

Must...keep...making...chit-chat.

Show us a music video that tells a great story.
Submitted by notreallylois.

 

Well, this one is the nouveau classique:

 

 

This one amuses me:

 

Blake does a lot of these, some of which are arguably better songs.  Fer instance:

 

Or this one, a song I like a lot (though I find the video mediocre):

 

Then again, country music is kind of full of story songs, and it makes sense that a lot of the videos are also stories. 

I have just had a dictation from a doctor whose name is "Electra Fox."  Electra Fox, MD.

That is the awesomest name I have ever heard.  If I was a PI or a spy or a superhero or something, that would totally be my name. 

It seems a little dramatic, though, for my actual occupations which are teacher and stay-at-home mom.  Stay-at-home mom by day; Electra Fox by night! 

If you could leave notes for the future, what message would you have left in the past for today?
Submitted by Nameless.

Right now, you have a fun and active social life.  Right now, you think nothing of spending 10,000 yen on a night at your favorite izakaya or flying off to Malaysia.  Right now, you have no responsbilities or real worries.  Back here in the past, you are having a lot of fun and living big. 

And the future/present me would write back:  Yep, I remember.  And I still wouldn't go back to that if it meant losing this.

I need to get a few things off my chest, without going into whole big long spiels about any of them.

1.  I'm sick of hearing people under the guise of environmentalism claim that no one "needs" to have children or "needs" to have more than one or two children.  There are a lot of things wrong with this, but the most glaring is that we do and own a lot of shit that we don't "need."  Ninety percent of people who own and use a cell phone have no actual need for it, yet they expend great deals of energy charging them and replacing them when new, cooler models come out.  We don't "need" golf courses, yet we expend great amounts of water and energy maintaining them, including in the Sonoran desert.  We don't "need" clothes dryers, or at least most of us do not.  We don't "need" makeup or beauty salons or 10 pairs of shoes.  We have all those things, none of them contribute measurably to the health and well-being of society, yet we have them and more.  So, fuck off about whether or not we "need" children, eh.

2.  Bourdain, you fucker.  I used to like you, but your hypocritical anti-hunting stance is getting to be too much.  On the one hand, you eat meat, which means you have no principled anti-killing belief.  You also regularly chide vegetarians, vegans, raw foodies, and other people for being ungracious and elitist as regards other cultures and their culinary heritages.  I believe you gave it to Woody Harrelson pretty good for refusing a meal in Thailand, right?  So, you support the killing of animals for food and respect for cultural heritage as it appears at the dinner table.  Great.  But then you think hunting is immoral?  Um.  It's OK to depend on the death of animals for sustenance, as long as the blood is literally on someone else's hands, is that it?  Is hunting acceptable to you when it's done by the Bushmen of the Kalahari but not when it's done by an American, because you have some notion that the Bushmen need to hunt but Americans don't, since we can get nice, sanitized and irradiated, shrink-wrapped shit at the grocery store 24/7?  Is that your thinking?  You don't think that maybe for some Americans, the inhumanely raised, antibiotic laced freakshow meat that we could get at the supermarket is unacceptable?  You don't think maybe hunting is part of the cultural heritage of some Americans (distantly, it is the cultural heritage of nearly every people on earth; more distantly, it is everyone's cultural heritage, but for some of us, the ties to that culture still exist, yes, even in fucking America) and therefore is as worthy of respect as Thai food?  What the fuck are you thinking?  I can understand when vegans and vegetarians are anti-hunting because, although I disagree with them, they have a consistent and principled stand against the use of animals for food.  But not this, Bourdain.  No, this I cannot abide.

3.  Dude, no.  For one thing, this whole "Europeans are so much more evolved than Americans are..." shit is getting old.  YOU think Europeans are "more evolved" because whatever it is that they do is what you want to do, but that does not provide anything substantial.  So, Europeans are more tolerant of adultery?  Why is that morally superior to not tolerating adultery?  I think if you really took a hard look at some of what you're talking about, you would find that actually a lot of women in cultures that "tolerate" cheating are not that happy about it; they just tolerate it, no more.  I think you would also find that more Americans tolerate it than you currently think. 

Also, just because you have a poorly controlled desire to sleep around on your wife, that does not itself invalidate the principles of monogamous marriage.  That men, overall, have a more polyamorous libido than women has become a sort of stock reason why men should be forgiven their inability or unwillingness to remain faithful.  However, most men do, in fact, remain faithful, as do most women.  Most marriages do not end in divorce, and most married people would prefer to maintain their marriage even at the cost of unfettered sex.  In other words, while there may well be problems with monogamy and marriage, in this case, the problem is YOU, not the system.

4.  I have also become very tired of people talking about marriage, either hetero or homo, as being primarily about "love."  Love is nice, of course.  Who doesn't like love?  But the government doesn't give you tax breaks because you're in love.  The reason we sanction marriage--not just America, but human societies in general, across time and space, although certainly the forms marriage takes are not uniform across cultures and history--has nothing to do with being in love.  The way we think about the love aspect of marriage is new-ish and culturally bound.  The reasons human societies have usually sanctioned some type of marriage (and not others) is because of the good those relationships are thought to bring to society.  Marriage exists because more than one person sharing a single household conserves resources.  It exists because a stable two- or multiple-parent home is safer, more economically secure and viable, and more emotionally secure for the raising of children.  It exists because of the very human emotion of jealousy.  It is notable in the piece mentioned in #3, when his wife finally says, "OK, we'll have an open marriage.  And I will be spending the night elsewhere on Wednesday," he's all "nooooo!."  (The general distaste for adultery and polyamory also probably stems from the fact that, let's face it, even men who think they are only after casual sex sometimes end up getting emotionally attached to the sex partner, and those emotions can destabilize the marriage and home.)  Listen, it's fine, it's great, it's wonderful that you love your spouse, but if you don't couple with a sense of duty and commitment, it's not worth much.  We sanction marriage as a matter of public policy because of the duty and commitment part.  This is why I think liberals' standard arguments about gay marriage are stupid and less than compelling.  Conservatives are not won over by the appeal to love.  On the other hand, there is no compelling evidence that TEH GAYZ are unsuitable as parents or more likely to dissolve their marriages than heterosexuals (the evidence currently suggests that gay marriages are more likely to last than straight ones, but my suspicion is that this is because of the small sample pool; I am going to guess that once gay marriage is legal in all 54 states and gays start marrying at similar rates as heterosexuals and start making the fool mistakes heteros make by marrying at 19 or whatever, the divorce rates will be similar).  Since homosexual marriage can provide a stable and secure home for children, can conserve resources by joining two people under one roof, and so forth, I see no compelling reason to limit it.  I just want to make it clear to homos and heteros alike:  No one cares about the love part.  That's between you and the spouse, and not really a matter for the government to intervene in.

5.  Yes, 54 states.  I am ready for Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the Virgin Islands to become states.  I don't understand the current arrangement.  It vexes me.  So, make them states.

6.  The humidity in our house was 2% today.  That's not a typo.  I am shriveling up like a raising as I write this.  What the fucking fuck, weather?  Weather:  You are on notice.

7.  John--I would gladly trade one of my unnecessary organs to have had the pleasure of speaking with you today.  Would you prefer a spleen or an appendix?  As I understand you no longer have an appendix of your own, perhaps the appendix?  Goddamn.  I am so sorry I missed your call.

That is all.  Thanks for listening.  Good night.

I've documented my issues with Jezebel in the past, at some length and with a great deal of spastic vitriol if memory serves. 

I want to take this opportunity and provide this link to say:  Jezebel, I am so glad I had already stopped taking you seriously, because otherwise I think this would have really bothered me.

Oh, it doesn't bother me that she's a slut or that both of the Jezebels are drunk.  And I might have been able to see past the fact that they're making jokes about rape and date-rape, although if you keep telling the same joke over and over, then people will start to think that you actually believe that, for example, only stupid girls get raped.  Because of course smart girls would never let it happen to them!

But here is the thing that would have upset me if I still found Jezebel to be relevant and interesting:  The sycophantic commenters lined up to support Moe and Tracie by attacking the moderator, Lizz Winstead.  Instead of questioning the wisdom of telling girls who've been raped that they could have avoided it by being more clever and witty, the commenters appear to care solely about the fact that when Moe confesses that she couldn't be bothered by the process of turning in her date-rapist (um, because she needed to "drink more") and confesses that she actually even still trusted her date rapist and felt safe with him and whatever else, Lizz said that you aren't safe with someone who has raped you.  And then she goes on to say that you can't tell that this guy over here will be a rapist, but this guy who seems so hip and totally listens to all the sensitive music, he's not a rapist, even if he raped me once. 

Lizz was trying to get at a conversation about how girls and women can have sexual freedom and still protect themselves and still be responsible about not contracting diseases or becoming pregnant when they don't want children and so forth.  How do women balance these two things?  And all the Jezebel can offer up is...nothing. 

A few thoughts:  Tracie aka Slut Machine is not the person to talk to about this because she has herpes, has admitted it, and has written about it like, "herpes--what is everyone so worried about?  It's no big deal!"  And it is at least somewhat likely that the reason she has "never met a rapist" is because she is not a girl who says no.  If you always consent, then you don't get raped. 

Final thoughts:  I was raped.  It was not a date, but he wasn't quite a stranger, either.  I didn't report it, and if I had to go back and do it over again, I can't say that I would report it.  I was 17, and like a lot of girls, I didn't feel very sure that what happened to me was rape.  It's not always very clear, whatever some people say; "no means no!" is a nice enough slogan, simple and catchy, but I think we all know that it's not absolutely true in the real world.  Sometimes "no" means "persuade me" or "maybe after South Park."  I went on, later, to develop, um, what's the word? A robust and confident sexuality?  Something like that, although that sounds creepy.  And when you do, as a very independent, intelligent, and even liberated woman, the issue comes up:  How do you do the things you want to do while making sure that you're safe and that you don't get herpes or pregnant or killed by some psycho you met online?

I want to be clear that I think women have a responsibility to take reasonable measures to protect themselves from all unintended consequences of their behavior.  I did.  In my case, I can see exactly what I could have done and should have done to protect myself.  He committed a wrong, but I was also like a tourist walking down Bourbon Street with a giant wad of cash sticking out of my back pocket saying, "Hey, take it!"  No, I wasn't dressed provcatively, since I almost never am (seriously--I was wearing blue jeans, sneakers, and a Denver Broncos T-shirt, no makeup, hair in a ponytail that was probably held back with the incredibly uncool "scrunchie" device), but I took no measures to protect myself.  And I should have.  No, I'm not "blaming" myself.  I'm taking responsibility for my actions and decisions. 

I wish the Jezebelles would as well.  I wish they would step up and treat the question of how young women ought to navigate the sexual waters of our time as a serious question, because it is. 

But, "I don't get raped because I live in Williamsburg, and all the guys there are pussies" is, wow, funny stuff.  Party on, Jezebel.