Thursday, October 15, 2009
This summer I spent a lonely week with a terrible cold. I passed the time watching the first three seasons of Bewitched, the old sixties sitcom. I got through so many episodes because, as the show progressed, I felt like I was getting a different impression of Samantha Stevens than I had ever before (since [...]
Friday, September 11, 2009
We were on foot for four weeks. We never stayed in one place longer than an overnight. Staying around would have meant less time on foot and more time in a hitched ride or bus as we only had the four weeks to get from San Francisco to Portland. The 27 nights went by like [...]
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Challenges make a thing use its greatest capacity to complete a task or, even, to fulfill its purpose. Lacking a challenge, the thing might change its function or go away entirely, leading me to suspect that challenge is crucial to purpose.
Humans’ inclination to displace life’s challenges off of the body and onto a tool has [...]
For the last five days I have been traveling up the California coast with my partner, soon to be hubby, mostly by foot. We have met some wonderfully friendly people who helped us out when they didn’t need to. The air has been fresh and we are getting stronger everyday. The trip has made me [...]
I have spent only a limited time of my life living alone. I moved from the family house to communal housing then to life as part of a couple. Occasional travel or other changes have required me to be by myself for extended periods. The last three weeks was one such occasion and I realized [...]
I have various stashes of jarred food-stuffs (a term my grandad uses and I adore it, reminds me of a Oregon Trail trading post or something) that every once in a while I have to take some time to replenish. These are things I use throughout the week and have come to need in my [...]
I’ve now made my third multi-grain sourdough bread, from here. For those adventurous souls who plan to embark on this three-day bread I have some thoughts. My amateur advice may not be worth much, but something I always find frustrating about recipes is that they don’t tell you about the mistakes. ( Though Breadtopia has [...]
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
One big rolling hill feeds woolly-but shedding- goats, cows, and pigs all at once. Chickens run about picking at dung and laying eggs in a house under the shadow of a giant oak. The breeds of all the animals are old (less domesticated) enough so that the cows (females) still have horns and the wild [...]
This year was big for me in that I had a piece of writing published in print for the first time. Because so much of what I write about here on this blog concerns letting go of a lot of the consumer culture around food, I haven’t been super comfortable with putting up ads, which [...]
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Last week I found myself in a strange rut of trying new things. That is I couldn’t be satisfied with an easy dinner standby and over and over kept trying new dishes that ended up not working out very well and taking a ton of time. I tried a slow roasted salmon which I don’t [...]
