I’m posting this under the “Living” category in honor of the many lives this flawed, compromised, not-as-great-as-we’d like it bill will save. As the vice president so eloquently said: “This is a big fucking deal.” Just this week I got another letter from the collection agency that is still trying to collect money from my mother for an operation she needed while she was uninsured in her early sixties. She thought she had insurance, but her employer had dropped coverage for his employees without telling them. It was a very small company, and the rates went too high (which is…
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Although it’s snowy today, it’s been in the sixties all week, which means I can start drying clothes on the line again. I’ve written before about my clothesline love, and I’m always surprised by the number of people who object to clotheslines on principle. I really don’t get it. When I moved in, my house, like most houses in town, had a huge clothesline made from plumbing pipe that was set into about four feet of concrete below ground. We have famously strong winds here in Livingston, and the legacy clotheslines were built to withstand it. I had that clothesline…
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It’s not quite the lions and the lambs, but pretty close — we’ve had a big breakthrough in the domestic realm this week. The dogs seem to have developed the ability to mingle with the chickens without killing them. It’s a fragile truce, and one that requires close supervision, since the poor bird dogs are fighting generations of breeding that tells them to get the bird, but so far, we’ve had several episodes of domestic harmony. Which makes gardening much easier, as the compost heap is inside the chicken run. At any rate, I’m very proud of my boys. Such…
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So all this talk about cooking, just ordinary cooking, has gotten me thinking about go-to recipes, the ones you rely on and can do without really thinking. For Michael Ruhlman it’s a roast chicken. Which I’ve got to second. I use Marcella Hazan’s “recipe” which is nothing more than a roast chicken with a lemon stuck full of fork holes inside it. The lemon does wonders. I’m having the girls over for Oscar night on Sunday, so I’ve been thinking about what to cook.There’s going to be a bunch of us (the Sweetheart is fleeing to his cabin, not a…
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I’ve read several articles in the last few days that have me all het up about the food thing. There seems to be a new and annoying meme out there, that eating real food will make one a “slave” to one’s kitchen. That somehow, “cooking from scratch” is so difficult and so time-consuming that no one can really do it. It’s just too hard. Well maybe it’s too hard if you’re being an obsessive yuppie about it. People, grow some common sense. Exhibit A is this article in the Sacramento News Review, “Fast vs. Food: How the sustainable-food movement drove…
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There are new calves all up and down the valley — they’ve arrived in the past week or so. Not only are they incredibly cute, but they play — a reminder that even beef cattle once had a wild nature, before we bred it out of them. When I leave the cabin in the mornings they’re down there, nestled in the hay, goofing off, nursing, and one bold boy had a standoff with my Subaru the other morning. Today’s wildlife count also included a juvenile bald eagle on a fence post, a full-grown golden eagle on a roadkill deer carcass,…
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Looks like Robert Hass, a poet I adore, has a new book coming out:The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems The Paris Review has four of them online here. While Poetry Magazine has put up September Notebook: Stories
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what to do with LivingSmall. While the practical posts on cooking, gardening and chickens will, by no means be going away, the focus will be shifting a little bit. There’s been a lot of discussion chez LivingSmall about the recession/depression, and how it’s not going away. Every morning, the newspapers are full of stories about “recovery” and no one seems to be discussing the fact that we can’t go back, we can’t have a recovery that is predicated on the same boom-and-bust cycles fueled by easy credit and that aren’t backed by anything…
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Seems we’re all still reacting to the Flanagan piece slamming school gardens. Here’s a piece from Civil Eats that quotes Booker T. Washington on the value of physical work. The contempt shown by so much of the middle and upper-middle classes for people who work with their hands is, I’m convinced, partly responsible for the devastating loss of manufacturing jobs here in America. When you believe that work is only something other people do, and when you believe that those others, because they work with their hands and bodies must necessarily be inferior to you in your nice clean office,…
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Hmm. I don’t think being green is the problem here — seems like these couples have bigger issues. Another dumb lifestyle article from the NY Times. When Trying to Preserve the Planet Strains the Relationship – NYTimes.com As awareness of environmental concerns has grown, therapists say they are seeing a rise in bickering between couples and family members over the extent to which they should change their lives to save the planet.