Too Old

Every person I befriended in school and college has now died of assorted things from suicides to accidents to age-related diseases. I no longer have any friends close to my own age.  The ones still alive are approximately 20 years younger than me or younger.

I never thought I’d outlive my oldest friends, the ones who’ve been there for me since I was a stupid and awkward pre-teen or teen, or emergent young adult.  I never expected to die young, either, given my genetic make-up, but I did truly expect to grow old with these people – to have at least another decade or three with them.

The last of my childhood friends died yesterday.  There’s no one left alive who was a child with me, no one with whom I can reminisce about the “old days”, no one who shared my teachers and professors and dreams.

I sat vigil over her death, as I’ve done for so many of my family and friends, and I’ll preside over her memorial service by her last wishes.

All the rest of you who are still alive – you’re all too young to die.  So, you better not die while I’m still alive, you hear me?

May 1

Today is a pretty significant day.

First, last night was Walpurgisnacht. We don’t celebrate that in American. In fact few Americans not of German descent even know what it is. When I was growing up in Germany, Walpurgisnacht was a lot like Halloween is here. We dressed in scary costumes, went door to door to collect treats or perform tricks. We had a bonfire and the oompah bands were playing and there was beer and dancing and really bad jokes. And during all of this, people would slip away to make cones of flowers to hang on doors all through the village. We kids would eventually straggle off to bed. Come morning, we’d get up early and hang flowers on the doors of people we liked. Then, as the day progressed and the adults would wake, we’d bring in the flowers and start our May visits. We’d visit everyone, and sip from the Maibowle and have coffee, or hot cocoa, or tea, and cookies or cakes and admire the flowers they got and secretly compare their bouquets to our own to see who was the more favored.

I’d say it was one of my favorite holidays, but honestly, they all are. I love all the holidays.

This May 1 also has the dubious distinction of being the 30th anniversary of the first ever spam email, thank you Gary Thuerk.

This May 1 is also the National Day of Prayer, once again we had a small ritual on the Capitol steps followed by a windy picnic. I think the Christians are beginning to resign themselves to our presence. There were more of us than them because it was threatening to rain and it was very windy. It was so windy our picnic was consumed hiding inside cars so we wouldn’t blow away. It was kind of funny, all of hunkering in cars eating our sandwiches and waving at one another through the windows.

Now, we have tornadoes. Itzl alerted on tornado sirens three times so far. I have no clue if they actually went off as there’s no one here but me and the critters. There’s sun shining and the wind’s still high. Clouds are scudding past. Sometimes, this not hearing well stuff is a pain. I turned the news on when Itzl alerted the first time, so the sirens probably went off then because all we’re getting is tornado chaser coverage. It’s all to the east of here heading east, so all we’re likely to get is rain.

All in all, it is a good May day.

Convenience Foods

Grocery stores sell a lot of their products based on convenience – pre-made and all you need to do is add one or two things, heat and eat.  You can get the same degree of convenience at home for much less money and really not a lot of your time.

There is some equipment you will need to accomplish this.  You will need a freezer for this.  It doesn’t matter if you use a chest freezer or an upright freezer.  If you are a single person or part of a couple, the freezer section of most refrigerators may be enough.  In case of short term power outages, an inverter and a marine battery or two will power a freezer until utilities are restored.  A 750 watt inverter with 1500 watt surge capacity will power most freezers, and will cost less than $200.  Freezer bags are essential, as is heavy duty and/or quick release foil.

Not essential but certainly guaranteed to speed things up and make it easier to prepare your own convenience foods are things like a vacuum sealer, either one of the little handheld ones (http://www.amazon.com/Reynolds%C2%AE-Handi-Vac-Vacuum-Sealer-Batteries/dp/B000XY8PDW or http://www.amazon.com/Packmate-95000-Vacu-Seal-Starter-Handheld/dp/B0011FJS4M) or the fancier tabletop ones (http://www.amazon.com/FoodSaver-Ultimate-V1505-Vacuum-Sealing/dp/B0002795OS, http://www.amazon.com/Rival-Press%252c-Release-Sealer-VS240, http://www.amazon.com/Deni-1830S-Freshlock-Vacuum-Sealer/dp/B0002AZ0G2), a food processor (I like the Big Mouth – http://www.amazon.com/Hamilton-Beach-70590-14-Cup-Processor/dp/B00065L68Y), scales, dry and wet funnels, and a set of knives and cutting boards.

The method is to discover what your cooking style and needs are and then to develop your plan for making your own convenience foods.  You don’t have to do this alone, either.  You can buy in bulk with family and friends, and spend a day socializing as you make up your convenience foods for yourselves.

The “Once a Month” (http://www.once-a-month-cookingworld.com/, http://realfood4realpeople.serverbox.net/oamc.html, http://organizedhome.com/freezer-cooking-guide, http://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Assets-Deborah-Taylor-Hough/dp/1891400614, http://www.amazon.com/Freezer-Cooking-Manual-Day-Gourmet/dp/0966446755) method works for a lot of people and the assemble and freeze method  (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Panic-Dinners-Freezer-Great-Tasting/dp/0800730550, http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Dinners-Dinnertime-Assemble-Freeze/dp/0060784229) method works for others.  If you use one of these methods in conjunction with the “make a mix” method (http://www.amazon.com/Make-Mix-Karine-Eliason/dp/0762426020, http://www.amazon.com/Mixes-Prepared-Foods-Cost-Calories/dp/156825007X), you will circumvent almost all of the store bought convenience foods, saving time, money, and getting exactly what you want without all the chemicals and additives.  I tend to do a mix of these methods and store them all in the freezer, labeled, dated, and ready to go.

And this book, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes (http://www.amazon.com/Artisan-Bread-Five-Minutes-Revolutionizes/dp/0312362919) is utterly amazing, quick, and delicious – fresh, home made bread in minutes.  It takes a little longer than 5 minutes a day until you gain some experience with the method, so stick with it.  Once you get the routine and don’t have to pause to read the instructions every step of the way, it really does pare down to 5 minutes or less in preparing fresh bread every single day – rolls, loaves, buns, specialty breads – fast, easy and made fresh by you.

Other little suggestions for building up your freezer repertoire without spending all day cooking is to simply double or triple whatever recipe you are making and freeze the rest for later.  Casseroles lend themselves particularly well to this trick, as do pancakes and waffles.

You can prepare ingredients in advance and freeze them to add to future meals.  Chop vegetables such as onions, celery, bell peppers, broccoli, carrots, parsnips, summer squashes, edible pod peas, and green beans for soups, stews, casseroles, sauces, stir-fries and breads, then divide them up and freeze for later.   Brown ground beef and divide it up into meal-sized portions to freeze.  Cooked roast beef slices can be frozen in advance for sandwiches or to form salads or entrees later.  Poultry can be deboned and chopped or cut up for recipes for later and frozen, too.  You can package these individually or blend them in recipe-sized portions.

Gravy itself doesn’t freeze well, but the roux of flour and fat that thickens it freezes marvelously, so make roux in advance, freeze it in tablespoons sized dollops in an ice cube tray, then transfer to a freezer bag – it only takes a short time to plop a cube of frozen roux into a pot and stir in your liquid – gravy faster than a mix!

Cooked rice and bulgur freeze well, thaw well, and can form the base of many recipes faster than Minute Rice – and tastier, too.  Package it in recipe sized portions.  It can be reheated in the bag in boiling water, or thaw slightly and add to cooking food.  It stir fries best when mostly thawed.

You can bake rice in the oven along with casseroles and other dishes – 350º for about an hour in a covered dish. Use the same water to rice ratios you would for stovetop cooking.  The rice will come out fluffy and unburned.  You can bake large batches of rice for freezing much easier this way.

Line casserole dishes you plan to freeze with quick release foil before you bake and freeze it in the dish in the foil.  When it’s frozen, just lift it out of the casserole dish, seal it in a freezer bag, and you’ll be able to re-use your casserole dish sooner.

Place newer foods at the bottom or back of the freezer.  Pack your freezer in “zones” – meats, breads, recipe ready vegetables, recipe ready fruits, snacks, freezer inserts for lunch boxes, ice, prepared entrees, appetizers.  That way when you go to pull what you need or want, you’ll know which zone it’s in and can remove it faster, reducing the energy strain on the freezer.

Never freeze foods you want to eat crisp and raw, like lettuce, celery, onions.  Heavy whipping cream will not whip after freezing, but can still be used for coffee, tea, hot cocoa, and as an ingredient that doesn’t require whipping.  Creamed cottage cheese will get gritty, so only freeze uncreamed and dry-curd cottage cheese.  Sour cream will separate when frozen and thawed.  Potatoes will become mushy if frozen raw, and tough if boiled and then frozen.  Whole raw eggs need to be separated before freezing.  Cooked egg whites will get rubbery and gross when frozen.  Never put glass containers in the freezer.

Freeze small items like meatballs, berries, or cookies on cookie sheets, then vacuum seal the frozen items.  They will retain their shape better, freeze faster, and won’t stick together when frozen.  They’ll also thaw faster.

Grains, cereals, and flours can be stored in the freezer to increase their shelf-life and reduce pest infestation.

One Seed

Dill, Chives, Parsley, Nasturtiums

Originally uploaded by nodigio

I’ve been mulling over Al Gore’s movie, and the way we faced food shortages in WWI and WWII, and the energy crisis of the 70’s, and life as a hippy, and Numenism and its Bounty Ministry, and life as we know it today, and I wonder. I wonder just how we got from the united purpose of the World Wars and the dedicated activism of the hippy era and even the more recent bonding of the Murrah Bombing in Oklahoma City to the disenfranchisement and isolation of now – the “I can’t do it” attitude so many people now espouse, and the willingness to let “specialists” handle all of our affairs outside a narrow range of things we feel competent to do.

I’m not a social scientist to pinpoint when this decline began, but I have dedicated my life to studying patterns. The earliest ripples may well have seeded themselves all the way back at the founding of this country – or earlier still. When it began isn’t anything we can change and knowing the beginnings won’t alter how we proceed into the future. The pattern itself is the issue here – the fact that we did change, and the knowledge that having changed, we can change again. “Change Is” and “Everything She Touches, Changes” are two chants frequently sung among the Pagans, yet it doesn’t seem to have sunk into the psyche of the Pagans. Or maybe it did, but the zeitgeist overrode the message.

The point is, we have changed. We’ve become specialists. We produce one tiny thing (whatever it is we do for work) and we consume a great many things. Occasionally, a few of us vote. We depend upon a lot of other specialists to meet our needs and desire: the wheat farmer, the doctor, the teacher, the film industry, the music industry, and so on. Maybe we have a hobby that lets us expand our one tiny thing – maybe we knit caps for preemies, or play the guitar, or bake our own bread. We’ve severed our connections with so many things to build a society of innate specialists. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – specialization has given us computers, cars, and Fair Trade coffee. Specialization freed us to concentrate on one thing at a time. Specialization allowed us sell our skills far outside our local community, making us wealthy. Specialization allowed us to sell our skills far outside our community, destroying that community and severing our ties with our neighbors. Specialization allowed us to sell our skills far outside our community, taking away any personal responsibility for how we destroyed our communities.

Maybe specialization is a good thing, but it comes at a very high cost to us.

What made specialization on this scale possible was cheap energy. It allowed us to pay distant others to provide all sorts of things for us, from entertainment to food to problem-solving. It’s inconceivable to us to live without energy – how will we eat, what will we do for entertainment, who will heal us, who will make our decisions for us? We’ve become so specialized we can’t imagine doing things for ourselves – we wait for a specialist to come up with a solution – a politician or a scientist. Hopefully the solution will be elegant and easy and not cause us to change our lifestyle very much. We’ve put our faith in market-driven solutions on the presumption that those same market-driven solutions got us into this fix in the first place so of course they will get us out.

I was so frustrated at Al Gore’s movie because he presented us with a wide-sweeping problem and then told us in the closing credits that we could “change a light bulb” to fix it. The puniness of what he asked against the enormity of the problem told me clearly that Al Gore was a dedicated specialist. His mind could not conceive of the average American being able to do anything more. His is a mind divided and reliant, compartmentalized, and unimaginative. That is the curse of specialization – the inability to think beyond one’s specialties.

I can, though. See, I’m a Numenist and deeply involved in our Bounty Ministry. Our goal isn’t sustainability, nothing that paltry. No, we’re striving for a thriving, bounteous environment. We can have it, even if we must go through a Little Ice Age or a Long Drought. We can do much more than change a light bulb. We can plant seeds. Real seeds, as in planting radishes, and tomatoes, and strawberries, and seeds as in ideas and suggestions and inspirations.

The specialist mind looks at this huge, overwhelming problem and it freezes up. The problem has so many parts, is so wide-spread, so large, they can’t fit into any of their compartments, can’t imagine any single thing they can do to change things. Someone else will have to take responsibility, and they go back to their lives, convinced that by having thought of the problem, they’ve done all they can do.

We Numenists are people of patterns, of change. And we say we can all do something. Yes, even Al Gore’s little “change a light bulb” thing – it’s a start – a seed. If you change just one thing today, you can influence others to change that same thing. By changing one thing, you open the way to add another little change. Maybe this time, you’ll be influenced by someone else’s change. Over time, those changes will add up. This is a viral social change. If we all pick just one small thing to change – maybe we choose to eat less meat, or use cloth and net bags for shopping, or to ride our bike to work or out shopping or to the park or the movies instead of driving, or to unplug things that are energy vampires (how many clocks do we really need in one room anyway? – the kitchen has one on the oven, the microwave, the refrigerator, the toaster oven, the coffeemaker, etc. Only one needs to be accurate – I pick the refrigerator – unplug the rest when they aren’t in use), or to pick one day a month or a week where we don’t go shopping, don’t drive anywhere, don’t use anything electronic, where virtually everything we do is powered by our own muscles. One thing. One seed to get the others all going.

It’s easy. I know you can do it.

We’ve also been advocating locavorism and growing your own food. Putting in a garden is easy. Our ancestors did it without all the nifty tools we have now. We have better information on soil testing and amendments, and easier methods of getting good plants growing without a great deal of labor or expense. If you plant it from seed, nourish it from your compost and don’t need too many drives to a garden center or nursery, you can grow a free lunch! Not only that, but you’ve grown the freshest tastiest food you can eat with a carbon footprint so small it hits the negative numbers – meaning you’re actively healing the earth and making things better. Your compost is reducing the bags of garbage hauled away from your house even as it feeds your garden – a double positive! You’ll get free exercise, too, and reduce the trips to the gym – that means you’ll be healthier, stronger, get lots of good Vitamin D, and still reduce your carbon footprint. And when you’re in the garden, you won’t be depending on other people to entertain you – a further reduction in your carbon footprint.

If you live in an apartment or condo or hi-rise, you can garden in an abandoned lot, or on the roof, or in window boxes or join a community garden or work with your city council to get gardening land allotted to people who want to claim it (like Germany does).

More importantly, by planting and tending a garden, you will heal not only the earth, but your community and yourself. You’ll meet your neighbors (maybe for the first time!) and form bonds with them (zucchini bonds!), and you’ll gain personal power through your increasingly diverse abilities. You won’t be trapped into a specialization mindset, but will become the creative problem solver who can provide for yourself and your family not only without diminishing the world about us, but by actively increasing the bounty of the earth. Our relationship with the earth is not and should not be a zero-sum game – and gardening is proof of that.

Pick your seed. You can do it. We can do it.

I Feel Violated

I have to pass the Murrah Bombing Memorial every working day, and so I see the Fence every day and am reminded every day of what happened to me, to my friends, and to friends of friends there. Every one I know was either in the Bomb or knew someone who was in the Bomb – Oklahoma is just that connected.

When I passed today, there were people out there with library carts and bins, taking things off the Fence.

I know some of the ribbons were tattered by the weather and the little T-shirts were sunfaded, and some of the teddy bears and other plushies had gotten moldy – but these were mementoes, offerings, and propitiations to that day, that event. They serve as a marker to those who stroll the Fence and pause to finger a dilapidated toy or sunkissed ribbon and remember the lives and the love that came pouring out that day. America was at its finest that day and in the days that followed.

Removing these memorial tokens is like desecrating an altar.

Those women probably thought they were doing something nice, sprucing the memorial up for the ceremony on the 19th. But what they were doing was taking away pieces of our hearts.

Frugal Tips

New Fence

Originally uploaded by nodigio

Pay cash, especially for large ticket items. Many tradesmen and small businesses, and even some quite large businesses, will offer discounts for cash. I recently was shopping at Lowe’s for gardening supplies – weedcloth, bird netting, edging materials, jig saw blades, wood screws, “L” brackets – and got my entire purchase at a decent amount below the listed prices. I’m not talking a 10% discount, either, which barely covers the tax. I’m talking substantial enough to make the drive there worth it.

If you’ve got cash, you can haggle, and more places are open to haggling than you’d expect. Lowe’s was one such place.

Check where the sales are, make a list of what’s on sale where, and then plan the most optimal route to get to them all. Stick to your list. Bring only enough cash to pay for what’s on your list and leave the credit/debit cards at home.

Don’t buy this season’s things, buy at the end of the season for next season. Consider shopping second-hand stores at the end of the season to get the seriously discounted things others bought and are now done with – sometimes without ever getting around to using it.

If you plan vacations, travel during off-peak times. Buy early bird specials when you can. Shop around extensively and make sure you get and keep confirmation numbers and exact details – in case things change between the time you book and the time you go.

Get a library card. You can use it for more than books – there are magazines, movies, and music you can borrow, and you can reserve time on the computer. If you return your borrowed items promptly, it’s free.

Buy local wines – they are as good, and often better than, named labels. If you take a wine tasting tour of local wineries, you can often buy the wine at a discount – especially if you pay cash. You may find new favorites – and don’t leave out hte country wines – a wine made with fruit other than grapes. These are tasty and can expand your food/wine pairings dramatically.

Buy your own coffee machine if you drink a daily take-away cup of coffee from a coffee shop. If you drink 2 cups a day, you can save over $1500 in 2 years. It doesn’t take long to make your own coffee – certainly less time than standing in line or waiting at the drive-through for a coffee to go.

If you drive, trade your SUV in for a smaller car with better mileage. The smaller cars are as comfortable, safe, and luxurious as the SUVs, provide a surprising amount of space, are more maneuverable, and fit into tighter spaces so parking is closer and easier.

Buy essentials in bulk when on special – toilet paper, soap, washing powders, and other non-perishables. You get a double benefit from this – you’ll never run out of these essentials and if you keep it stocked up, you’ll have what you need in the event of a disaster, personal or more widespread.

Shop around for your groceries. Supermarkets aren’t always cheaper. A local butcher or farmer’s market may be less expensive and tastier. Ethnic grocery stores often carry many of the same grocery items you’re used to buying in a supermarket for less than supermarket prices, especially their meats, spices, and produce.

Consider growing some of your own vegetables: salads are expensive to buy, cheap to grow and even an apartment dweller can grow a salad.

Fence Done

Well, the fence is done.  The dogs were an amazing help in getting it all done.  Shika and Drooly spread the dirt from the post holes around and helped put gravel into the bottoms of the post holes.  Dogmatix helped haul the panels around and braced them so I could screw them to the posts.  Since he’s bigger than me, and stronger, once he understood what he had to do, he was pretty good at it.  Itzl carried the basket of screws for me.

Now, when I paint the house next month, I can paint the fence to match.

After the fence is painted, I’ll plant some climbing vines and put in some nice hanging baskets.  Conduit strapping along the bottom crossboards will hold a garden hose so I don’t have to run a hose there all the time to water the plantings.

I’ve picked out the colors for the paint for the house – different shades of blue, the blues that are on a good quality Zwiebelmuster.  I’ll repaint the Blue Moon above the front porch and this time, I’ll make it less shaky-looking.  I’ll have to rent scaffolding because – oddly enough – I don’t even have a ladder.  Fortunately the house is mostly brick so I only have the high up trim to paint, the triangles at the peaks, and the garage.

While I have the scaffolding, I’ll put up gutters.  I’ve been needing to do that for a while.

Lazy Day

Today is a nice, lazy day.

It’s chilly outside and I don’t mind because I have no outside work to do.  It’s too wet to paint the house, the gardens are in, and the yard was mowed earlier, so it’s all in wait mode.

Inside, I have the dishes to wash and I’d like to re-organize a few things, but there’s no rush for any of it.  The laundry’s all done from MedFair and the costumes and accessories packed away until next year.  The ice chest and beverage dispenser are cleaned and out away.  The tables and chairs are folded and put up, too.  The dogs’ costumes are cleaned and folded into their drawers.  The dog carriage has been disassembled and put away.

At the Fair site, the tents are all gone, the Fair’s buildings are disassembled and back in storage, and the grass has been reseeded.  The park is as back to normal as it can be.

Later today I need to buy food for the big dogs and trash bags and light bulbs, but again, there’s no rush for any of this.

I wrote a couple of chapters on the new book, did some re-writing on 2 other books-in-progress, and wrote a couple of articles for my survival blog and my badges blog.  There are some new books awaiting my eyeprints, a freshly baked apple pie, and a dance performance video to put on for background noise and motion.

A lazy day.

No Impact?

This is not the way to go about a “No Impact” Lifestyle.

Living causes an impact on the environment.  The only way to live a “No Impact” Lifestyle is to either not be born or to die.  Not existing is the  one and only way to have no impact on the environment.

Now, “Low Impact” – that’s possible.  But,  it needs to be done with thought and care.   There are some things that, as a living being, are essential.  There are others where the “primitive” version causes a greater impact than the more modern.  For example – toilet paper.  At the moment, there really isn’t a better substitute for the task.  We can use recycled, no perfume, no color toilet paper to reduce the environmental impact.  That will make a substantial difference if enough people convert.  Using primitive alternatives actually has a greater impact – count the cost of using cloth rags for this – and the subsequent laundry bill; or using lots of water to flush the area clean- again, not an environmentally sound practice.  Inside a city limit, living in an apartment or condo or hi-rise equipped with reasonably modern plumbing, the lowest environmental impact is using recycled toilet paper, not no toilet paper at all.

Consider transportation – using bikes means accepting all the environmental impact producing that bike cost.  Walking involves wearing shoes – another item of environmental impact.  Eating alone has a great environmental impact whether one chooses to eat locally or to eat anything at all.

We can’t live a “No Impact” life and live.

However, we can make responsible choices.  Installing a low-flow showerhead if you haven’t already; those Japanese have weird toilet set-ups, but some are very environmentally aware (like the one that allows you to choose your waterflow based upon your “deposit” so you use less water than our American “low flow” toilets which are an utter joke); using a dishwasher instead of handwashing (because new dishwashers use less water than handwashing does); changing lightbulbs to the more energy-efficient ones – and using a higher wattage so you use fewer bulbs to achieve the same degree of lighting; using a Bokashi odorless countertop composter would eliminate the smell of being a home composter; using cloth napkins and dish towels instead of paper is a reasonable choice; bringing your own lunches with your own cutlery is good as is using the refillable cups and mugs.

Consider your lifestyle.  Look at it really well, and see where you can easily make changes.  Do that as your first step.

Once you are comfortable with those changes (and really, it shouldn’t take any time at all to make some switches – the lightbulbs, for instance), look at your lifestyle again and see where you can make greater differences, and implement them.

Walk where you can when you can, but don’t fret too much if you need to use mechanical transportation.  If you live in a sprawling city like I do, where everything seems to be 4 or more miles away, just pre-plan any trips.  Mapquest is your friend.  And take a page from UPS, they plan their delivery routes so the drivers make mostly right turn – speeding up both the delivery and reducing the amount of fuel the drivers expend in driving because making right turns means waiting less time at the corners.  When you plan extensive shopping trips, use MapQuest and see how you can plan your route so you travel the shortest distance with the fewest left turns.  If possible, car pool with a friend or run errands for a housebound neighbor on these trips.  And lobby for alternative, non-bio-based fuels.

Why non-bio-based fuels?  The search for bio-fuels, while it sounds good in theory, isn’t viable in fact.  It takes more acreage to grow corn and soy for biofuels than it does to feed people and livestock, driving the cost and bounty of food up.  Biofuels aren’t efficient enough to power our vehicles.  However, there are fuel alternatives that are cheap, environmentally sound, and won’t impact our food sources:  the Air Car is one such alternative, solar powered cars work for in-city use, fusion-powered cars would have the power and range we’ve come to expect , and hydrogen fuel cell conversion cars may also power our need to travel.

Instead of thinking “No Impact” we should be thinking “Lower Impact”.  When faced with alternative ways of accomplishing something, we should consider which way will accomplish the required task with the lowest amount of impact.  And “impact” varies.

Consider Food Miles and  the Hundred Mile Diet and other such local foods movements.  These are great, and I love them, but humans have spread to places where participation in such movements isn’t viable.  There’s also the global aspects of such a movement.  By buying Fair Trade food imported from other countries, we help those countries gain prosperity and end their own battles against poverty, hunger, and deprivation.  Yes, definitely buy local any food that is grown locally.  Do what you can to encourage your local farmers to grow a wider range of foods.  Join a CSA, shop at farmer’s markets, and buy locally produced foods when you can.  But fill in the gaps of your diet with imported foods that are responsibly chosen – salt, spices, coffee, tea, even some fruits and vegetables.  Buy Fair Trade when you buy imported foods.  That way, you are helping both your local economy and increasing your local food choices and you’re helping the global economy.

Clothing is another area that is ambiguous.  We don’t need to blindly follow fashion, changing our entire wardrobe each month to keep up with the fads.  We do need clothes and shoes.  Buy responsibly here, too.  Buy natural fiber clothes instead of ones made from oil (polyesters, some rayons, olefin, and fake silks are all oil-based fabrics).  Find what looks good on you – your “signature” look – and stick with it instead of trying to look like everybody else.  Get clothes that are made by people being paid a fair wage.  Leather is not evil – we eat meat, we might as well use the leather that comes from eating meat instead of wasting it.  I’d rather a nice, well-made pair of leather shoes than a pair made from oil – a component in so many man-made shoe materials.  Consider wool blankets and feather beds and cotton comforters instead of poly-fill and and polyester blankets and bedding.  You’ll look fabulous regardless of the current fashionable rage and your bedding and house linens will last longer and look great and be low-impact on the environment.

You’re bright, I’m sure you can think of many other ways to reduce your impact and still live a comfortable urban/suburban lifestyle.   So, go for it!

Back

I’m back from taking the ex for his colonoscopy.

Apparently, he likes Demoral much better than morphine.  He babbled a lot for an hour afterwards.

I suppose, if I were an evil ex-wife, I could have gotten him to do any of a number of things.  Instead, I took him to a buffet and made sure he got sufficient protein and vegetables to dilute the Demoral and restore some of his strength.  A few words to the waitress and he had an unlimited supply of water and weak tea to rehydrate him from the crud he had to drink to prepare for the colonoscopy, the dry air of the clinic, and the procedure itself.

Then I took him to a store and had him pick out snack foods he was willing to eat and a couple of movies to watch.

Last, I took him home, plopped him in front of his TV with a couple of pitchers of water and tea, his new snacks, a remote and his movies.  I fed and walked his dog.

And then I left him.

Now, I’m at home, finishing up the last few things I need to do to get ready for MedFaire.   Most of those things are ones to make sure my hearing partner has what he needs to perform his job efficiently and fit into the atmosphere of the Faire.  He needs some matching dawgie bags and at least one new costume.

It also means making special provision for his friend, who isn’t a service dog (although she has potential…) but gets to come with us because MedFair is pet-friendly.  For her, I’m building a carriage all barded up in blue.  When I get it finished, I’ll post a pic.  She will be happier inside it.  If it gets cold, she’ll stay warm in there, and if it gets hot, I have ways to help her stay cool.

Itzl may spend some time inside the barded up wheeled crate with her, but he knows his place will be with me, particularly since I will be doing some work that will require a hearing ability I lack.  He will alert me to them and everyone will be happy.

Tomorrow’s my last day to get everything done, since I had to spend over 6 hours helping my ex get through his colonoscopy.  The sacrifices one makes to keep vows…