My Very Old Man has died. It was in the paper yesterday. His name was Harold Busby and he was 88 years old. I haven’t seen him in about a week — I pass his house while walking the dogs and I usually stop to pet his Very Sweet Brown Dog and to wave at him behind his picture window. I don’t know what’s happened to the dog — I’ll have to ask his neighbor Lynn, who has been taking care of Harold for the past couple of months. I’m sad about my Old Man — I liked seeing him…
-
-
Funny the way synchronicity works — I’ve been thinking a lot about how skills like learning to knit, or sew, or garden, or cook — skills some of our mothers (or in my case, my grandmother) discounted as being the kinds of skills that keep a girl tied to a domestic existence that stifles other opportunity — are for me a fulfilling way of refusing to cede control of my basic lifeskills to the corporate behemoths that seem to have taken over our lives. If I can sew a skirt, I’m not entirely beholden to clothes made in factories. If…
-
I could see the early parts of the eclipse from my living room window, and so I watched it for a while while I sewed my sweater together (not a Franken-sweater although somehow the two front panels of the cardigan are about an inch longer than the back panel. Luckily, this one calls for a decorative crocheted edge which I’m relying on to hide such things). When it was nearly at full eclipse, I stepped outside to watch. All up and down my street there were people standing in their yards watching the eclipse. A couple of high school kids…
-
My milk delivery came yesterday. The thing with buying milk from a real cow is that it’s not always the same. This week I pulled nearly a quart of cream off the top of my gallon, and the cream is thicker than it’s been before. Almost like English cream — slightly lumpy. This might be alarming except that I know my cows (well, I know my cow-lady). I took the leftover cream from last week and mixed it in with the creme fraiche I already had going (I bought a tub at the local gourmet store to use for starter).…
-
Inspired by this article in the Times of London, I holed up and took a lovely, restorative vacation at home after Christmas. Christmas was lovely — we all had a great time. There was lots of food and wine and by ten that night we had six kids under five doing the Toddler Disco in the middle of the living room floor. Perfect. Look into Alpenglow rentals if you are planning a relaxing vacation. I woke up on the 26th a tiny bit hung over, and decided the tree was coming down. It was a pretty tree and we had…
-
I managed to get the last packaged in the mail this afternoon and I’m swamped putting out some last-minute fires at my Corporate Job. In the meantime — check out this five-part investigative piece on the Ameya Preserve that New West is publishing. I’ve only read part one thus far, but seems like a cogent discussion of the issues.
-
There was a terrific little piece on Zen Habits last week, Faith in Humanity: How to Bring People Closer, and Restore Kindness. I read it right after I’d come back from paying my local utilities bill — there never seems any point to paying that bill by mail since the office is just down on the other side of town. So, once a month, I drive down, hand my check through the drive up window, chat with the lady who always puts dog cookies in with my receipt, and drive off with a little smile and with two dogs happily…
-
Bonnie over at Ethicurean picked up this correction that the WSJ ran this morning on the money that Wade Dokken has paid Alice Waters to endorse his Ameya Preserve. I don’t have much more to add to the several items I’ve already written about Alice Waters and the Ameya Preserve. Ameya’s advertising and marketing claims to be green are entirely unsupported. That Alice Waters is drinking Wade Dokken’s koolaid is disappointing, but at this point, not a surprise. In addition, business owners who are struggling and looking to improve their marketing and customer support may consider checking out here how…
-
I’ve got a post up at Ethicurean. Looks like Alice Waters had an answer to why she’s involved with the Ameya Preserve. You can read all about it here.
-
The MH called yesterday afternoon to see if I wanted to come over and hang out while he butchered for me, my job was to wrap meat. It was fun, we hung out in the garage as he dismembered my antelope and separated it into steaks, loin, stew meat and then everything else went into the burger pile. The cuts don’t really resemble steaks you’d buy in the store — essentially the MH dissembled the antelope muscle by muscle, and carefully removed the silverskin for me. The other nice thing about being there while it was butchered was that he…