The Fourth of July is a three-day-event here in Livingston, although this year things kicked off a day early with the unbelievably great concert called “A Song Runs Through It”. It was worth the three hours in the blazing sun to see my beloved Rosanne Cash sing four songs off Black Cadillac“, acoustic, backed up by her friends JD Souther, Victoria Shaw (who was *so* much fun) and Jim Photoglo, friends she then backed up on a selection of their songs. I really love listening to these songwriters talk about their work — there was a lot of talk about…
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Sam over at Becks and Posh did a little comparison shopping, and discovered to her surprise that by shopping at the Farmer’s Market last weekend, she saved 29% over what it would have cost her to buy the same items at the supermarket. Considering that she was shopping at Ferry Plaza Market, what’s so exciting about this is that Sam’s also been keeping track of her food expenditures all year — and what she’s finding is that for ordinary produce shopping she’s ahead by going to the market. I’ve shopped Farmer’s Markets for 20 years (scary, that thought — I’m…
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My next door neighbor and I have not always gotten along very well. We both have dogs, and her George and my Raymond play a particularly annoying game of barking-along-the-fenceline. It’s been a source of some tension, but the last few months at least, thing settled into just cool instead of our previous state of low-level hostility. Saturday, I was walking back from the hardware store when I ran into Mike, who lives on the far side of S.’s house. Turns out that part of the reason S. has been so cranky lately is that her mother is dying and…
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I’ve been seeing reviews all over the place of Barbara Kingsolver’s new book about eating locally — she’s not necessarily one of my favorite writers, but between this interview over at Salon, and this piece she wrote for Mother Jones I might just have to go get a copy. Here’s a quote from the Mother Jones article: Supermarkets only accept properly packaged, coded, and labeled produce that conforms to certain standards of color, size, and shape. Melons can have no stem attached; cucumbers must be no less than six inches long, no more than eight. Crooked eggplants need not apply.…
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The MH called this morning to tell me there was a bear in his neighbor’s yard last night. Looks like it came up the creek from the river, and took out the neighbor’s birdfeeder. He said there wasn’t too much damage, but the sliding glass door is covered in big bear paw prints. We discussed whether I should take my feeder down — I’ve really come to love my little birdfeeder. It’s right outside the kitchen window and watching the birds is such a pleasure when I’m doing dishes. They’re just ordinary little birds: sparrows and finches and chickadees with…
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The seductive thing about Theory is that once you get a meme like hyperreality in your head, you can spend days (weeks, years, academic careers) viewing various unrelated bits of news through the filter of that particular theory. For example, writing the headline … is it because I spent so many years in academia, or because I am submerged in the welter of culture that the phrase “creeps in” is automatically followed in my head by “on little cat feet.” I have to go look up that it’s Carl Sandburg, but it’s stuck there, just like so many other bits…
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I watched a lot of high school basketball this winter — the MH’s son plays varsity and while sadly, the boys’ team didn’t do so well, the girls won their division and they’re going to State. If you’d told me a year ago that one of the highlights of my winter would be high school basketball, I’d have scoffed like the hipster I thought I was — high school basketball? I didn’t even like high school sports when I was in high school. But the MH wanted to go watch his boy, and I figured if I can get through…
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I’ve been sort of following this story for the last couple of weeks, and today comes the sad news that they found Charlie Fowler’s body on a peak in China. I didn’t know Charlie well, but for a couple of years, he was my next door neighbor in Telluride. He was a kind, softspoken guy who was a little older than we were and who had climbed a whole bunch of impressive peaks in Asia and South America. I lived next to this big blue house full of climber guys — it was an ever-changing group. This was before Telluride…
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The holidays are bearing down on LivingSmall like a freight train of fun — unfortunately, not only was I travelling last week (the storm in Denver today makes my 7 hour layover there last week look like a bargain this morning) and not only do I have to work this week for the Big Corporation — I have a whole lot of stuff to get done. And I’m taking next week off then going to California in early January to train my group in the stuff I’ve learned in these seminars I’ve been travelling for, so there’s that low-level anxiety…
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We got a little snow last night, and as I opened the door this morning to let the dogs out and get the paper, a very cheerful-looking man zipped past my house. I’ve never seen him before, but there he was on his 4-wheeler equipped with a snowplow. He plowed my whole side of the block. The dogs barked, the man grinned, happy to be zipping around the neighborhood like some early-morning sidewalk elf. And then he was gone. It was a strange and fleeting little small-town moment, and it’s kept a smile on my face all day long.