Justification

I am a total homebody and have been for years. I just love being at home, relaxing and puttering about, with my books, husband and cats. I don't get to spend a whole lot of time doing this during the week, due to full time employment and various other week night commitments. When the weekends roll around though, I do my best to minimize my plans to be out in the world. It's just so busy here, literally and figuratively, and it wears me out! Vegas is just overstimulating at times with all the colors and lights and enormity of it all. Plus I find that my downtime goes way too quickly when I'm out and about, whereas when I'm at home the time tends to pass at a more leisurely pace. Though it really doesn't, obviously, it just feels that way. Ah, perception. Anyway, I think this is one of the reasons I've always liked dreary days, I consider myself a rainy day girl at heart. When it's overcast, there's no feeling of "must get out to take advantage of the nice weather" though in Vegas, with +/- 350 sunny days a year, I don't feel this pressure the way I did when I lived in Boston. So today's DailyOM horoscope really spoke to me, I love it when I find more justification for being a homebody! I think perhaps this could have also been the world's way of reminding me that even though I'm busy right now, I need to make sure to spend some restorative time at home, the place I feel most comfortable, relaxed and at peace.

July 31, 2008 The Comforts of Home Taurus Daily Horoscope You may feel increasingly fatigued as you address your worldly affairs today and thus grow more and more reserved as the day wears on. Pleasant thoughts of home, family, and good friends can divert your attention away from your duties, preventing you from fulfilling the outer-world goals you had hoped to accomplish on this day. Making the most of this low-key mood can be as simple as putting aside those obligations that are not vital in order to retreat into the refuge of your personal space. Whether you immerse yourself in meditative activities that require freedom from distractions or take care of domestic chores today, you will likely feel a potent and satisfying sense of serenity. The many comforts of home become overtly apparent to us only when we make an effort to seek them out through our choice to indulge our craving for quietude in our own private spaces. Our houses, apartments, and rooms can often seem like nothing more than a place to meet our basic survival needs unimpeded by worldly distractions. However, hidden in our homes are pleasures we ourselves have integrated into our lives based on our individual value systems. To enjoy them, we must only commit to using our personal spaces as more than simply way stations between worldly obligations, and then begin exploring the numerous ways we can pamper ourselves in the relaxing atmosphere of these most personal refuges. You will feel utterly rested and renewed today after rediscovering all the comforts your home has to offer.

Quote of the Day

"First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others."

-Thomas à Kempis, German mystic and religious author (1380-1471)

Maybe that is why there's so much turmoil in this world, people don't have much peace within.  I know there are days when all I do is struggle with myself internally.  Hence my drowning-out-the-annoying-people-at-work choice for today: Mindfulness for Beginners by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Something that does bring me some peace is the thought of a pea tendril.  I have heard of them before, but encountered them sometime over the weekend, I think in the recipe for a salad.  It is the end of a pea plant that coils around some sort of support structure (in my parents' garden, a length of wire fencing), but apparently brings a wonderful fresh, subtle flavor to dishes, both raw and cooked.

Here are a couple photos I tracked down on the web.

I just love the thought of these things, bursting into life with energy and purpose.  I think it is a beautiful name, just saying it in my head calms me.  Maybe I've found my mantra? 

What sort of things bring you a bit of peace?

A study in contrasts

Barack Obama speaking to 200,000+ people in Berlin, Germany yesterday (AP Photo):

John McCain speaking at...a Pennsylvania grocery store in the dairy aisle? (AP Photo)

 

Yep, that's what he's doing. Who do YOU think is more likely to change the world?

(Disclaimer: I was already planning on posting the Berlin picture and had seen the dairy aisle picture, but took the contrast idea from last night's Letterman show. I just couldn't resist.)

Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver has been one of my mother’s favorite authors for as long as I can remember. I have always kept my eyes peeled for any new books she may be putting out because I know they would make a great gift for Mom. Early last year, I happened upon her newest book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. She is known for her novels, but this is more of a “year in the life” type nonfiction book chronicling her family’s attempts at eating locally and living sustainably for an entire year. Their first step was to move from the desert of Tucson, Arizona to a farm they’d maintained as a summer residence in the lush green farm country of Virginia. A good first step, as I know from experience that there’s not much that grows in the desert!

This book was just wonderful, I enjoyed it from start to finish. There was so much interesting and practical information inside, from how to start plants for your garden indoors in late winter, to a step by step guide to making cheese at home (apparently it is very easy!), to seasonal menus and recipe guides, to resources for heirloom seeds, to short informational essays by her husband and college age daughter. There’s information on growing your own alfalfa and bean sprouts in a jar on your windowsill. They grow so many exciting varieties of vegetables, fruit and flowers. They raise chickens and turkeys. They support other farmers in their community and learn from Amish friends. I laughed out loud more than once (turkey sex, anyone?) and found it just so inspiring. The one glaring omission was pest control…I am 99% sure that their garden is totally organic, yet she doesn’t really mention the gross bugs the flock to gardens! I got so excited about potatoes, they grew several different varieties in the book, and I asked my dad why he never grew potatoes in his garden and he said it was because potatoes are very buggy plants and that potato bugs are gross! I imagine she didn’t do it intentionally, but the thought crossed my mind that maybe she wanted to inspire people so much, that perhaps she glazed over the nitty gritty grossness that bugs bring to an organic garden. Or maybe they’ve just figured out how to manage pests in an organic manner, but she definitely didn’t share the details!

A big part of this experience for them was that they had to learn to live without, something most Americans (myself included) have long since forgotten was even an option. I think they each got one special item that they could continue to buy, for example her husband chose coffee, but it was fair trade/shade grown of course. And there were a couple staples that they stocked up on such as olive oil, but they really did it, they ate things that either they grew, or was grown/produced within an hour of them for an entire year. She talks a lot about how disconnected we have all come from the sources of our food and what produce is in season at what time of year. This really hit home for me, as I tend to eat whatever produce I like all year round just because it is available in the stores! Well, maybe I don’t eat berries in the winter, but that’s just because they’re too expensive, not because I am consciously avoiding that which is not in season and therefore has likely been trucked in from thousands of miles away utilizing precious fossil fuels and adding carbon emissions to our atmosphere.

My parents have had a garden since before I was born. My dad designed and built a greenhouse that is attached to our house when I was really young so that even in the harsh New England winters, we could still have fresh greens and cherry tomatoes and so he could get a jumpstart on his sprouts for the garden. To me, garden fresh produce was the always the norm and the canned, salty, gray green beans and peas served in the school cafeterias made me gag. At this point though, I can’t say that I truly remember the taste of a tomato fresh out of the garden, still warm from the sun. My dad swears that garden fresh celery actually tastes like something, instead of just water and crunch. So I am lucky to be more familiar than most with these concepts and yet I still feel so far away from it all.

It doesn’t help that I live in the desert and could not do all that much at this point since there’s not a whole lot grown locally. I have always felt lucky that we live so close to California, but honestly I felt lucky because in my mind it resulted in cheaper produce, not the fact that it was probably much fresher having traveled a shorter distance or the fact that the overall environmental impact was lower since the truck emissions were lower for the same reason. It’s a bit overwhelming to think how far away from it all we’ve gotten as a society not to mention how much it would take us to relearn how to appreciate and make this stuff a priority again, to re-establish that connection between that which nourishes and sustains us and our responsibility to tread lightly as human beings…to “live simply so that others may simply live” ~ Mahatma Ghandi

So you can probably tell just how inspired I was by this book. I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone, particularly those who don’t know where to start when it comes to some of this stuff and those who maybe have a tomato plant or two, but feel too overwhelmed to try much more. There’s a lot of work involved, but the payoff is just so enormous. There’s a lot to know about this and a lot to learn and this is a great place to start. I’ll finish with saying that your motivations don’t have to be to save the planet to learn more about sustainable living. They can be as simple as wanting to save a few bucks, and in this economy, I imagine we all do. A packet of tomato seeds costs a dollar or two and one plant may produce dozens of tomatoes during its lifespan. (Unless of course, it is my dad’s 13 year old cherry tomato plant in the greenhouse in which case it probably produced thousands). I hope you’ll consider picking up this book, you won’t be sorry.

They also started a website, which can be found here.

Next up for me, in terms of food books at least: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

Train of thought

"Remember that combination box of Popsicles that has the banana, blue raspberry and root beer flavors?  I remember always having that one growing up, yet I hated all of those flavors," I say to my husband this evening after we finished watching the movie Friends With Money (which by the way, was very good).  He thought that was an incredibly random thing to have remembered in that moment, so I traced my train of thought and here it is:

1. I'd really like a Popsicle right now.


2. I know we still have dozens of them from when there was a good sale 2 summers ago (or was it 3?).


3. I wonder what flavor I would grab out of the freezer (we took them all out of boxes to save space).


4. What I'd really like is one of those twin pops that you break apart in the middle and have 2 separate ones, cherry would be nice.


5. I remember having those growing up, it was hard to break them evenly.


6. I also remember that gross combination box that had the weirdest 3 flavors in it, banana, blue raspberry and root beer!  I wonder why my Mom always got that box?

The End.

(PS.  In searching for an image of the box on Google Images, the one that came up had lemon-lime instead of blue raspberry, but I swear I remember it right.  Anyone else remember?)

Wall-E

So I am not usually one for animated films, they just don't usually appeal to me.  I don't go to a lot of movies anyway, so when I do I choose wisely and knowing me that often includes the latest indie film, long anticipated book adaptation, foreign film or must-see blockbuster like the upcoming Dark Knight.  However when I started seeing trailers for Disney/Pixar's latest project Wall-E, I knew I'd end up going to see it, which I did, by myself, on the 4th of July while my husband played video poker.  It was just wonderful, I really enjoyed it.  First off, Wall-E has to be the most endearingly quirky animated character of my lifetime.  He is the last robot on Earth and goes about his job of trash compacting while collecting odds and ends that he thinks look interesting or useful.  He has a pet cockroach and watches the movie Hello Dolly regularly.  He eventually comes across a live plant, some sort of sprout, and dutifully puts it in an old workboot and takes it back to his home for safekeeping.  This turns out to be the key to re-establishing human life on Earth, as a female droid named Eve (he calls her Eeeeeeva) discovers and reports back to the spaceship/cruiseship that has been home to all the humans for the past 700 years.  You see, humankind had created so much garbage that the planet could no longer sustain life and so they set off for space while the robots went about cleaning up our mess.  700 years later, Wall-E was the only one left and it looked like humans would never return home.  Lots of other stuff happened but I don't want to spoil the entire movie because I think everyone should just go see it!  The animation was incredible, just so realistic.  Even though animated movies are usually marketed as children's movies, this one had some very grown up messages.  We have to take care of our planet, or we might just lose it and be destined to spend our lives obese and oblivious on a spaceship not knowing the joy of summertime watermelon or the smell of leaves in the fall.  Oh, didn't I mention that this was the fate the humans in the movie had ended up with, prior to Wall-E's discovery of the plant?  Realistically speaking, we may actually be headed for a human-created Ice Age which could wipe out life as we know it.  But that's a post for another day.

Happy Birthday Monkus!

Today is my husband's birthday, which he happens to share with our cat Lily. He hates birthdays so I am going to focus this post on the cat's birthday instead. Her given name is Lily but she has a whole host of nicknames which are all variations of her *real* name which is Monkus. If you met her, you'd know that this just fits her. She is kind of skulky and snarly but can be the sweetest cat in the world too, at least to me and my husband. If she doesn't know you, all bets are off. She turns 9 years old today, I can hardly believe it. I got her when she was a tiny 8-week old kitten from my best friend's grandmother whose outdoor cat had a litter. They were outdoors in a rabbit cage and I walked over not knowing how on Earth I'd ever choose, but she just stood up and walked over to the edge of the cage and meowed at me and made it an easy decision. I love cats, I always have, and have had several over the course of my life. She is special though, she is so full of personality and my husband and I have invented quite the life for her. She's in a jug band, drives a Dodge Neon, has a pet hamster named Bunt Single who travels the world, thinks some weirdos named Larry and Willy are out to get her and was the inspiration for a new word: skronky. My husband and I are the only people who truly know what that means, but it's a combination of skulky, snarly, edgy and slightly neurotic. She is a terribly messy eater, she takes big mouthfuls of food and dumps them on the floor and eats about half the pieces before going back for another mouthful. She loves to curl up next to my hip in bed and is the best player on the face of the planet. I can get her leaping 2 feet in the air chasing after a toy on a string, it's hilarious. She loves popcorn and tuna water and knows the smell of yogurt and the sound of a piece string cheese being opened from anywhere in the apartment and comes running. And she HATES our other cats. I know she misses the days when she was our one and only. She is truly the best and so I hate it when her birthday rolls around because that means she does, in fact, age. And not totally gracefully either, I've noticed that she seems to eat a little less and wind up a bit longer to jump on things. But she's only 9 and always has been and always will be an indoor cat, so I expect her to be around for many years to come.

Here are a few pictures of her through the years:

As a tiny kitten

"Monkus: The Early Years" in Brighton, MA

I call this one "Organic Monk"

With "Pop-up Beano" in the background. (More on Beano in another post).

Monkus as mountain goat

~Just the two of us~

Lounging

And last but not least, my all time favorite. "Say Cheese Monkus!"