I sometimes go on jags where I’ll find a new writer and read three or four books in a row, and Sebastian Barry has been one of those writers for me this winter. Irish literature was my undergraduate specialization — I went to Dublin for a semester my senior year to study Joyce (and lucked out and also got to work with Eavan Boland before she became famous). So it’s been a delight these past couple of years to discover Anne Enright’s work, and now, Sebastian Barry. Barry is an interesting figure — his mother was the Irish actress Joan…
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My dear friend Nina, she of the miracle-twins who restored our collective belief that things might work out in this world, has had her fifth baby this afternoon. The first boy! He’s a big beautiful healthy boy, and she’s just fine, and now I’m slightly crazed to be here in Montana while they’re all in LA. Yargh. And I have to say, as much as I love her four girls, my “fake children” as I like to call them — it’s a very girly house over there. I’m sort of psyched to have a boy to play with — I’m…
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We are flying the flag today for Barack Obama, for the restoration of the Constitution of the United States of America, for the revival of the American Dream. I hate crowds, but there’s part of me that now wishes I’d somehow managed to go to DC. What a day. What a miraculous day. I have a staff meeting that starts just when he’s supposed to take the oath and I think that I’m just going to have to call in late. I can watch the speech on TiVo, but I need to see, in real time, that this actually happens.…
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Sorry all of you who are trapped in the cold, but it’s 53 degrees in my backyard and I’m writing this blog post from the patio furniture, in the sun. And I’m just beside myself with happiness about tomorrow’s inauguration. A new day dawning. Oh happy happy day.
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I’m on a very old version of WordPress, mostly because I haven’t had the time to upgrade, and while it used to email me when there were comments, so I could moderate or respond right away, it seems to have stopped doing that. Hmm. Don’t know what that’s about. At any rate, it was only this afternoon that I realized all of you have been leaving great comments, and chatting amongst yourselves, which is fabulous. I’m just chagrined for being a little late to my own party. Perhaps another resolution — upgrade soon.
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One of my projects for 2009 is to take up Bob del Grosso’s challenge — the Fanatic’s Proposal. I’m going to see how little food I can buy, how much of that food I can buy locally, and how much I can live out of my own garden, pantry, and freezers. So here’s the roundup of what I bought and ate this first week of the project. Bought: 1 3lb. bag navel oranges 1 doz farm eggs 8 lbs organic potatoes (trade for 2 gal. milk paid for but not received) 4 bottles cheap red wine (>6 bucks each), 1…
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Part of my decision to get rid of most of my cable service grew out of my resolution these past few months to turn the TV off in the evening. I spend my working days plugged into two different computer screens, where I’m working, emailing, IMing and generally being bombarded by electronic communications. It’s insane. Last summer was the beginning of my escape from the TV — I spent most evenings outside, in the backyard, with a fire in the firepit reading a book by the light of the Coleman lantern hanging from the apple tree. It was bliss. Now…
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My lovely friends Chris and Debi Lorenc have gone off on an adventure worth reading about. Chris and I met in a workshop during the very first year of the Art of the Wild workshop at Squaw Valley. I was workshopping the very first chapter of Place Last Seen, and Chris was working on a luminous manuscript about the Santa Cruz mountains as an ancient spiritual site. He’s a beautiful writer, and he and his wife Debi are spiritual people in the deepest, sweetest sense — true seekers. I love them dearly and their dispatches make me kvell on a…
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Over at Grist, Tom Philpott has a fascinating proposal for how to use the stimulus money to stimulate the local food movement. Among his proposals: reinvest in local food infrastructures: slaughterhouses, meat lockers, and school kitchens cook real food in schools again — he proposes a Cook for America program for culinary school grads mired in debt. Based on the Teach for America program, it would get real food, cooked on site, back into our schools. The comments are also worth reading because Grist’s readers have some terrific ideas. I know that I would not be able to eat as…
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It’s a recessionary January, and I came into this new year wondering how on earth my credit card balances has mushroomed like they have? With the state of the economy being what it is, and layoffs happening right and left, I find myself in a bad position. A position that all this LivingSmall stuff was supposed to protect me from. So I’ve been drawing up budgets, and it’s a good thing I have full freezers and pantries and a garden that will eventually thaw out and come back to life, because if I’m to get out from under this terrifying…