Captivity: Not Good For Man Nor Beast

A couple of years ago, I blogged about the increasing violence among disenfranchised elephants. Growing up being removed from the company of older, wiser adult animals, potentially seeing members of their families slaughtered for tusks or for sport, and driven off of lands taken over for farming, elephants are increasingly turning to violence against humans, other animals, and each other.

Now this week we have yet another case of intelligent animals with strong communication skills and close relationships who have taken to fighting back. With the Orca attack at SeaWorld this week, we are confronted with the issues around capturing sentient beings in their natural habitat and forcing them into a life of slavery and confinement for our entertainment purposes. I have to admit I've been to more than a couple of marine mammal shows at zoos, aquariums, and SeaWorld itself. This excellent article by Alexander Cockburn is making me think I will not ever be doing that again. These types of attacks are far from rare, and often are even coordinated between the animals in the tank. It's possible they are not so much random as deliberate acts of retribution. Having swum in the wild with cetaceans on more than one occasion, I have always been struck by the very feeling of intelligence you get from them. It's hard to believe that they don't feel much the same way we would if pressed into a life of servitude and enforced performance.

I will be interested to read the book mentioned in the article as well: Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden Story of Animal Resistance by Jason Hribal

Whoops

I put the lid up on our new cold frames today because it's been so nice and sunny. But then later I forgot and let the chickens out to forage. Of course they found the cold frame and all of the tasty little teeny plant shoots within. So there goes my veggie starts. Wah!

Chalk that one up to experience, I guess.

Mad Love for Re-usable Bags

My favorite re-usable bags are Chico Bags, I've probably raved about them here before because they're so lightweight and fold up into teeny-tiny stuff sacks just like little sleeping bags that dolls might use. They hold even heavy stuff and unlike canvas bags I don't forget them because of the nifty carabiner clips they come with that let me clip them onto everything in sight. I wish I'd seen their new Valentine's bags before today, aren't they cute??

So today I'm at a store across town and I tell the checker I don't need a bag because I brought my own, but she had already started putting things in a bag, so she takes the two items out and then throws that bag in the garbage. Like two self-contained rolls of masking tape are going to contaminate the bag. Sometimes I wonder if there's a little "Piss off the environmentalist" board game that they secretly play where you get points for something like that. Maybe the lady who almost ran me over in the crosswalk today with her 80-ton SUV talking (now illegally) on her phone was playing too. Or maybe it's just that they don't really think anything of just taking a perfectly good plastic bag and throwing it away for no reason whatsoever.

But while the checker was wasting the bag, it occurred to me how much the culture of where we live plays into our actions. Strangely, although I was just across town from where I live, the culture of this side of town is very different from the culture on that side of town. They could really be two separate cities (which is evident every time we have elections here and the votes are split 50/50 conservative/progressive.) In my side of town, where I shop for groceries the checker just sits there expecting you to pull out your cloth bags and start putting the food in them. If you don't do that in a reasonable amount of time, they say "Oh, do you need a bag?" and pull one out for you. On the other side of town, the goods are whipped into a plastic bag so fast you can't even get the words out to tell them you don't need it before they're ripping it off of the little rack and handing it to you. Sometimes if you're really lucky, they'll put one item per bag and even double-bag the heavy things so that by the time you get home you realize you've consumed not one or two but seven or eight bags. I guess no one blinks an eye at this over there.

Where the culture expects you to bring your own bags, you actually feel kind of bad when you don't have one. No one actually makes you feel bad, but it's clear that you're not following expectations when you don't have them. You feel keenly that you're out of the ordinary if they have to pull a bag from the small stack under the counter. Where the culture expects that you'll just consume endless bags, you might not think twice about what that really means to the world.

I know bags are a relatively small issue in the grand scheme of things (compared to say global climate change or peak oil) but they're just one indicator of how the culture around you can influence everyone's actions. If locker rooms or showers are provided at work, the message is clear that arriving by bicycle or on foot is not only acceptable but encouraged. If people scowl at you when you carry your helmet into the building or poke fun at your two-wheeled transport, it can change the way you feel about it. The only way a culture changes is by individual action, so while our actions might feel like drops in a bucket, eventually that bucket fills up and tips things in another direction entirely. Our actions are more than the sum of their individual parts, they're creating a culture in which everyone feels more comfortable acting that way as well.

By the way, if you love frogs, you can get this cool custom Chico bag by becoming a member of Save the Frogs.

One More Reason to Not Use Toxins

This is just so sad. A family lost two little girls (ages 4 and 15 months old) after hiring a company to use chemicals to eliminate voles from their lawn. The pellets used mixed with water to release deadly phosphine gas. It's pretty unthinkable to me that this sort of thing is even allowed under law. As it happened, the gas entered their home, possibly through cracks in the foundation. However, as soon as this kind of poison is laid down in a suburban area, there's no telling what it could kill (pets, other kids that might venture onto the lawn, other wild animals, fish in streams that the water drains to). I can't imagine what this family is going through, don't want to think about what it would be like to lose two of your children in a week. My heart goes out to them.

At the same time, we simply can't put poison into the environment and think that it's okay.

Veggies From the Sunroom

We enclosed our little front deck this year, turning it into a much-needed entrance to the house (formerly you had to stand out in the rain trying to get the front door unlocked since our door didn't even have a little roof or awning over it). The side-benefit is that, since it is south-facing, it's a nice little passive solar room. In the winter, it heats up nicely (and will do even better once we get finished putting tile in there), and in the summer it keeps our front door shaded from the blistering afternoon Western sun. All in all, it does a great job of passively heating and cooling the entrance to our house.

A little side-benefit is that it functions as a bit of a greenhouse as well. I brought in the last of the pepper plants from the garden in the fall and just picked the last fresh red peppers this week (that's them in the photo!). The last few were a bit small but still delicious. I think the sunroom will be a great spot to put some garden starts as well, and it's about time to get thinking about that now.

Also on the current docket: hubby is pruning the fruit trees, and just started building our cold frames with some glass doors he picked up at a garage sale last summer. Looking forward to expanding our growing season even more!

A New Danger From Facebook

I admit it: I shelter myself from the news. Not the really big news - I read up on politics, what's happening in congress, the war, the earthquake in Haiti. But I shelter myself from the horrifying, meant-to-be-shocking stuff that they fill the evening news with. The cruelties that people inflict on each other, on animals, on the earth. I know my own heart and reading these kinds of things just makes me feel sick inside, torn up like someone ran a rototiller through my heart. I figure I'm better off doing my best to make the world a better place in politics, the environment, etc., but not knowing about all of the people working to make it worse on a personal level.

I believe that some of us are just born with a more sensitive heart than others. Just like some people have more tastebuds and can taste the nuances of food and wine more intensely, others of us just feel more intensely. There are literally things I've read or seen that disturb me for years. There are books, like Sophie's Choice, that I wish I had never ever read. If I allow myself to think of the pivotal scene in that book I almost throw up. It's that visceral. My son cried for weeks after he saw some kids pulling the legs off of a bug at the park. He kept sobbing "the bug couldn't get away". This kind of sensitivity isn't learned, it's burned into the very makeup of our soul.

So it is that I face a quandary when it comes to Facebook. You see, people freely repost news articles there, some of which fall into the horrifying category, the things I really really don't want to ever read. I won't recap them here just in case you're like me, but lately there have been a couple of things posted (one today) that are just tearing at my heart. They will come back to haunt me multiple times through the days and weeks that follow a reading, each time bringing me to my mental knees and stabbing my spirit.

If you're reading this and you're my friend on Facebook, I would ask you to think long and hard about reposting some bit of news flotsam about extreme cruelty for all to see. To some of us, it's cruelty just to have to see that headline, and it reverberates out through the rest of our daily lives. If you feel that you absolutely can't keep from posting it to Facebook, I am asking that you not put the headline as part of the post. Don't attach the link so that it automatically shows up, but instead manually paste the link and give some sort of warning in your post that lets those of us who will be sensitive to this to not open the link.

Maybe you think I'm "overly sensitive" (I've heard that one more than a few times in my life), but like the fact that I can taste the sage, the basil, and the coriander all separately in a sauce, I can't help it.

Probably the Coolest Article About Energy Usage Ever

Okay, you've just got to read this article:

How many cyclists does it take to power a hairdryer? The answer's 18, as one family discovered in a unique TV experiment

If everyone could see the impact of their energy usage so clearly, I think peoples' behavior would change so much more easily! Very Very Cool!

More on Resolve

This time of year the media has a field day with New Year's resolutions. First, articles about resolutions, then articles about how to keep the resolutions you made. It seems that most of these are personal: lose weight, sleep more, be a better spouse/parent/friend. Often, they are ambiguous in nature, and have proven for many to be difficult to keep (as witnessed by the fact that the gym where I work will be busy for, oh, the next 6 - 8 weeks, after which it will return to normal).

I don't really do resolutions, but at various times in various years, I have set a goal to make a change and to make it stick. In an era of increasingly bad news (the war isn't going away, the economy isn't getting any better, the health care plan looks like it's flushing down the toilet in bits and pieces), it can be easy to lose sight of the way that small changes that we take can change the whole pathway that we're walking on, both individually and collectively. While a nebulous resolution may just be an occasion for future guilt, a well-elucidated goal can help you move in the direction you would like to see your life taking.

So, though they're not resolutions, here are some small things that I resolved to do this year that stuck.

I decided to always drive the speed limit. I'll raise my hand here, I'm a lifetime speeder. I think only the fact that I was young and had long blonde hair kept me from about 30 more tickets than I actually got pulled over for in those earlier years. Now that I'm a mom with kids old enough to take notice, and now that I have realized the environmental implications in speeding when we do drive (worse gas mileage for one), I figured it was time to make a change. How I did it: I started putting the car on cruise control for the exact speed limit. Leadfoot Be Gone!

This Christmas I only shopped locally. No orders from Borders, Amazon.com, no trucks pulling in the driveway from UPS or FedEx. Mackenzie's Santa gift came from a local toy store that has been here for 40 years. Asa's gift came from a local sports store, not Dicks or one of the big chains. Mackenzie shopped for Asa in a local bead store, and Asa bought Mackenzie's present at a small gaming store. The Christmas books I always buy for the kids came from a small local bookstore. I did not set foot in Target or Wal-Mart.

Every time I go in the grocery store, I pick up a coupon for a local food bank and scan it at the register.. Our town has a high homeless population, and I feel bad driving past the panhandlers at every intersection. At the same time, I'm not comfortable when kids are in the car to stop or roll down the window (remembering, I guess, a carjacking near where I used to work where a lady did this and the guy opened the door, pulled her out, and drove off with her child in the back). This is one way that I know of to support a place where people can go and get at least some of their needs met, in a way that feels safe for my family.

For me, it works best if what I decide to do is very black and white. The word "Always" works well. It removes that grey area where you're running a little late and well, you could just speed this once. Or a few things ordered online isn't bad (except that's a few more dollars that our struggling local stores don't get, and isn't it sad that our only locally-owned outdoors store is going out of business this year after decades and decades of thriving). To remove that grey area is to remove the opportunity for failure in accomplishing my goal.

Sometimes I forget this when goal-setting. For a few years, I've had a goal to call and write more to my congresspersons, because while it's easy to complain about politics, it really doesn't mean much if you don't let your elected officials know what it is that you support. I keep not accomplishing this, I think because I haven't really made it concrete. So I think this year I will try for one letter or call a month (even if it happens on the 31st at midnight!).

And I definitely have a long-term goal of expanding our family's growing season. Our first year it was just a summer garden. This last year we extended it into spring and fall. Next year I hope for a true winter garden! Oh yeah, and I'll mulch my perennials too for good measure :-)

What do you want to be doing? And how are you going to get there?

Resolve to Do This BEFORE the New Year

Here's one important way you can make a contribution to the safety of our nation's food supply and the health of our people (if you happen to live in the U.S.)

The U.S. Government is asking for comments on how corporate control of our food supply affects you. It's easy to speak against what's going on, it's harder to take action but this is one action that's simple and quick. Let them know how you feel about local farms, regulation of small farmers, letting corporations get away with unsafe, unsanitary, and inhumane practices. This is being undertaken by the Department of Justice anti-trust folks, not the usual USDA people who have been turning a blind eye for decades, so it might just be worthwhile to chip in your two cents.

You can email comments to: agriculturalworkshops@usdoj.gov BY DECEMBER 31st!!!!

or

Find out more details on Slow Food USA's blog post There are links to sample letters and summaries of the issues at stake.

Fostering Community: A Progressive Dinner

For a couple of years now, we've been celebrating the Solstice (both summer and winter) by having a progressive dinner with several families from our neighborhood. If you've never done one, a progressive dinner is so much fun! You start at one house for appetizers, proceed to the next house for salad, the next house for soup, and so on. This year we ended up at our house for desserts. Each family hosts everyone for about 45 minutes to an hour, and the walk between the houses is just as much fun as the dinner part.

This year, at about the salad course, we also started singing. We started out with rounds and went to carols and solstice songs (with several glasses of wine by that time, it took all of our collective brains to remember the right order for everything in the 12 Days of Christmas), and ended up at our house with me accompanying on the piano and singing more carols. This is a great way to reconnect with neighbors that you may not see as often as you'd like throughout the daily busyness of our lives. We stop and chat while walking the dogs, or our kids are running in and out of each others' houses, but we don't always get the time to really catch up. This gives us a chance to really talk and listen to what's going on in each others' lives.

Shopping Local for the Holidays

A letter in our weekly newspaper made a very good point this week. One of our town's big topics is downtown revitalization, with fingers being pointed at Walmart and all of the big box stores as culprits in stealing away vigor from our downtown stores. We have many open spaces and empty pits where stores once stood. This failed attempt at covering up with a mural obscures the pit where the downtown Woolworth's once stood. The letter writer just pointed out that if everyone who wanted a more vital downtown just took their Christmas shopping there instead of to the box stores, downtown stores would be more than vital.

So today, Mackenzie and I went on a little holiday shopping trip downtown and he bought his sister a really cool present for Christmas (can't reveal it here, I know she reads these posts on Facebook - hi Asa! No, I'm not telling!). We don't do a ton of Christmas shopping, but this year I'm vowing that what we do (other than my perennial Heifer Project gifts for family) will not be done online. No UPS trucks pulling up in the driveway, we're going downtown!

Lying Fallow

This is the time of year where things start to slide - the last few apples I socked away in the cold maybe start going bad before I get around to making them into applesauce, and I forgot to go out and pick the peppers before the first frost so I didn't get the last few good ones in. Now that it's so dang crazy cold, everything even in the winter garden is listless. My time is eaten up with the craziness that seems to hit all at once at this time of the year. I guess it's time to lie fallow and regenerate for spring. Starting next Monday (when the karate tests, Nutcracker performances and robotics competition is all over and done with) that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Happy Buy Nothing Day!

The sooner we, as a culture, realize that we can't spend our way out of our current problems the better. We live in a closed-loop system. In such a non-infinite system, we cannot continue consuming ever-increasing amounts of resources. It simply cannot happen. We must, like Americans with over-burdened credit cards simply learn to live within our global means. Toward that end, Buy Nothing Day is a small drop in the bucket. But its real value lies in realizing that we don't really need to buy much on other days either. Of course, we need food, we need clothes, we need toothpaste and toilet paper (well, my neighbor who has invented a hand-held bidet would say we don't even need that!), and we occasionally need fun splurgy things too. But do we need so much stuff, the avalanche of stuff that the average consumer buys in these holiday weeks? Does Aunt Martha really need yet another pair of Dearfoams slippers? Does Uncle Joe need another mug with a fishing joke printed on it?

One of the best things we did when our kids were very little was to tell them that Santa brought each child one present. And we give them each a Christmas book that they open on Christmas Eve and we read together (and then read many of the previous years' books as well). That's it. No expectations of piles and piles of stuff, just a simple family-filled holiday. Thus, I don't need to be standing in lines today for that mountain of gifts. One click to Heifer Project will take care of the rest of the presents for family.

Happy Buy Nothing Day.

Autumn Memories

Rainy days in the kitchen with the smell of applesauce all around just can't be beat. All too often it feels like I don't have the time to do everything I want to, so I'm glad when I can at least do a bit here and there, like make up a batch of applesauce or a homemade pumpkin pie. Here's a view out of my autumn kitchen window. The white crockery canister behind my sink was from my grandfather's restaurant. He died when I was six, and I only have one very strong memory of him: Once when we were visiting, I woke up scared in the middle of the night. Instead of sending me right back to bed. he sat on the stairs with me and read me my favorite book, The Little Gingerbread Man. I still think of that whenever I get a tea bag out of the canister. If you only had one memory to give to someone in your life, wouldn't it be awesome to make it as loving as that one?

Nice Website for Local Foods and Prep

I was looking online for a recipe for fresh pumpkin pie (since all the Betty Crockerish cookbooks carry is recipes with canned pumpkin) and stumbled across this nifty little site: http://www.pickyourown.org/

From the website description:

This website provides local listings of pick your own (also called U-pick or PYO) farms in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other countries. There are crop calendars for each local area to tell you what is available to pick throughout the year, local weather forecasts and really easy illustrated directions to show you how to make jam, jelly, salsa, pickles, spaghetti sauce, applesauce, apple butter and 150 other recipes with step-by-step directions to can, freeze, dry or preserve the harvest.

So far, our family can vouch for their pumpkin pie recipe. This is a great time to get deals on pie pumpkins at local farms, with the Halloween rush over and the Thanksgiving rush not quite yet starting. I'm really enjoying the roasted pumpkin seeds too. There's nothing commercially available that even comes close to my home-roasted seeds, which is a bummer because they usually go fast around here!

One More Reason Not to Shop At Wal-Mart

If it's not enough that Wal-Mart is a union-busting, employee-screwing detriment to communities and the environment,, or that its Chinese imports have displaced hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs, and if it's not enough that you might run into folks like these shopping there, here's one more reason not to shop at Wal-Mart: open discrimination against gays.

As a side note, I have only been in a Wal-Mart once in the last decade. Coincidentally, this was the only time I was ever harassed for breastfeeding in public. Asa was then an infant, in a sling where she was nursing very discreetly. A greasy-haired bulk-buyer of CPC (that's Cheap Plastic Crap if you know my family's lingo) and a shopping-cart full of junk food said very loudly to my face "That's disgusting!". I would've laughed if I hadn't been so stunned. Haven't been back since.

Summer Garden Lessons Learned

I took advantage of yesterday's warm weather and lack of rain to bring in the rest of the produce from the summer garden. I couldn't believe we got over two pounds of green beans this week, in the last week of October. And tons of tomatoes, too, including all of the green ones to store up in the cool basement. I'm going to do like I did last year and wrap them individually in newspaper. That gave us tomatoes through December and part of January last year, ripened a few at a time.

This week's haul alone was 22.5 pounds of produce. I think I've been averaging at least that for most of the summer. I meant to diligently weigh all of the veggies we brought in from the garden this year and get a good idea of how much we were growing, but of course most of the time we just go out and pluck some lettuce or a cucumber or the kids go grab some snap peas and it never gets weighed.

Lessons learned from this year's summer garden:

The yellow Taxi heirloom tomatoes were not a very good producer. They were supposed to be large, but ended up much smaller than the red ones, they split easily in the moister fall air, and produced about half as many as my romas and bigger red tomatoes.

I planted two types of green beans, Blue Lakes and Kentucky Wonders. One of them produced nice thin green beans that the kids like to eat, and the other had pods that quickly got fat and woody and not very edible. But I didn't write down which variety I planted where! So now I don't know which ones to order for next year. Anyone knowledgeable about green beans can help me out on this one?

Planting the peppers much earlier (March instead of May) produced a much bigger crop, even though it took them a long time to get going.

You can only eat so many cherry-size tomatoes. Next year I'll only plant one or two instead of three or four bushes!

Now it's on to the fall garden, I've got loads of kale and chard still going strong. Yum!

How Everything Transportation Ties Together

I've found myself frustrated this year with the kids' activity schedule and locations. It seems like everything has conspired to keep us from being able to bike to anything. Many of the locations we have to go to are either on the far fringes of town (7 - 10 miles from our house) and/or on the opposite side of town from the next activity that we need to get to.

I can't help thinking how in the future fuel prices may affect businesses that choose to locate on the outskirts of town, forcing them to reconsider closer-in locations. I'm sure it's economically more feasible right now for them to rent or buy on the fringes, but as more of their customers simply can't make the drive, perhaps that will change. One bright note is that our karate dojo, where we spend an awful lot of time these days, will be getting a direct bus route. They're building a big bus stop for the "EMX" (express) bus right in front of the dojo. That's good news because since they relocated last year they moved from a 3.5 mile easy bicycling trip for us to get to the dojo to an 11 mile difficult and much more hazardous ride.

As the kids get older, the old location would've been something they could've biked to themselves, largely on bike-friendly streets and bike paths. The new location involves riding through some of the most bike-unfriendly streets in our area. Sadly, though they put in a beautiful new bike bridge crossing the interstate (making the bike commute easier and safer), they chose to end the path in the back of a big shopping mall, along streets with tons of people zipping in and out of parking lots. So although we could get most of the way there on bikes, the last mile would be something I wouldn't want the kids to be navigating on bikes (the last time I rode down that road on my own bike, I was almost struck twice). So the bus will be a good alternative once the line is completed.

I do worry though because so much of our bus funding is tied to gas taxes. While that sounds like a terrific way to fund public transport, the reality is that when gas prices go up and people can afford to drive less (and some people can't afford to drive at all), the funding for public transportation takes a dramatic nosedive. The last time gas hit $4 a gallon here, they started cutting bus routes! Clearly, we need a different approach to funding public transport so that as we begin our transition from a 1-car-per-person approach to a conservation-minded approach, people have options.

Get Lit!

One of these photos is a cyclist (me) with an adequate light for night riding. The other photo is approximately what the cyclist looked like that I almost ran into on my bike last night. Sheesh people, I'm all for cycling but buy a light for heck's sake! I mean, these days you can buy a $1 LED keychain light that's brighter than my first cycling lights and duct-tape it to your handlebars!

When I started out commuting by bike (in college), I had an old-fashioned dynamo generator light on my sweet red single-speed Schwinn 40 pound fat-tired cruiser (can you tell I wish I'd never sold that bike??). The light caused a heck of a lot of friction while engaged, and put out a fairly feeble amount of light, but that was more or less what was available in those good ol' days.

Next, I moved on up while bike commuting to Microsoft. Since part of my 22 mile RT commute was on an unlighted powerline trail, I needed an optimum bike and lighting system. I upgraded my ride to a Specialized Rockhopper and my light to one of the new Niteriders, which came with this heavy duty battery that fit in your water bottle cage. It was cumbersome and I had to haul it in from the garage to plug it in every night, but it put out some good wattage and stood up to Seattle's rainy climate for years.

Now of course with the miracle that LEDS bring to our lives (let's all take a moment and truly appreciate the genius that is an LED folks), my bike light takes two rechargeable double-A batteries that last FOREVER. I can't remember the last time I had to recharge them, come to think of it. It fits in the palm of my hand, weighs a few ounces, and puts out a great beam (see photo above). The blinky on the back, also armed with LEDS and rechargeable batteries can probably be seen by sattelites orbiting the earth.

All of this to say, if you're out there and you're riding without a light, you're endangering yourself and everyone around you, and there really is NO EXCUSE. No cumbersome dynamo, no expensive gadget-laden professional lighting system, all you need is an el-cheapo LED and BINGO you're visible!

Myself, being the bike geek that I am, I really want some of THESE. They have internal micro-generators so they don't need any batteries and recharge themselves fully after 30 seconds of pedaling.
Made by DOSUN, I'm eagerly awaiting seeing them in stores.

Cool Product: Bamboo Clothespins

One thing my son inherited from me is a distaste for the feel of unfinished wood. I don't know how to explain it, other than that feeling unfinished wood gives me that fingernails-on-chalkboard feeling. I remember as a kid that one thing I hated about cooking was touching the wooden spoons or the cutting boards. Fortunately, they know make plastic stirring spoons and cutting boards. However, when it comes to clothespins, plastic is vastly inferior as we discovered.

I've been looking for a clothespin that isn't rough wood but the plastic ones just don't seem to grip well, plus after one season of being out in the sun they are cracking and falling apart. Bamboo clothespins to the rescue! Whitney Designs makes a nice bamboo clothespin that's exactly the same size and gripping strength as our regular wood clothespins. Better yet, they're environmentally friendly and smooth to the touch.