non-toxic wastebaskets

Eee gads, we've been steeping in the toxic waste of the mortgage-backed securities mess - and bailout, which didn't pass in the first round, then passed in the second after some changes. We generous taxpayers came through for our poor, suffering corporate dimbulbs. I hope it will be a better move than many of us feared and will help settle the markets down. (Whispering now . . .) Hey, if anyone sounds as though they understand this mess, don't believe 'em. As Don's economics professor said, no one really knows what affects markets and how to fix them. But don't tell anyone, this is just for you, because I know you can handle the ambiguity and not get freaked out knowing no one really knows what will happen.

Anyway, all that waste presents a good opportunity to show you my little wastebasket collection.

This one is in l'atelier. I picked it up at a yard sale.




This one is very old, and sort of falling apart. I think I bought it at a flea market, for the guest room. If you come for a visit, please don't throw anything into it, I think it would disintegrate. I see it as a sort of faux wastebasket, a wastebasket wannabe, a piece of art posing as a wastebasket. I should probably make a little sign to lean on it: PLEASE DON'T PUT ANYTHING IN ME. You can just throw your kleenex in the sturdy plastic bathroom wastebasket (which I'm not showing off here, as you see).

This one is a treasure because it was my mother's. It sat in her study for as long as I can remember, under her secretary desk. I think it was her mother's before it was hers. I keep it by my dressing table (not on the bentwood chair on the porch where I posed it for a photo). Peter and Lesley can fight over it when I'm gone.

Detail of my mom's wastebasket.

I guess I'm just as guilty as anyone of covering up and prettifying my trash.

I don't know about you, but this is what we do:

• recycle everything that can be recycled around here: plastic containers, newspapers, glass, magazines, junk mail, paper, tin cans
  
• get paper bags at the grocer to use for paper trash that we burn (I hope our little bit of paper burning doesn't hurt the atmosphere too much); goodness! some checkout clerks do not like bagging in paper! Yikes!
  
• give food scraps to the chickens, except what isn't good for them, which we dump in a compost pile (that isn't being dealt with as compost yet; we're lazy so far about that)
• the rest of the unrecyclable, uncompostable garbage goes into old plastic bags from the store; we finally stopped buying garbage bags - what a waste! We hardly have any garbage that goes into the dumpster now.
• Oh, and when I'm gone, I want to take up as little space as possible. I want to be cremated.
  

I've been excited to hear about NYC and LA and their recycling of food scraps for compost for farmers.

Assistir Filme »

Obama on campus Thursday: UPDATE

click image to enlarge

Thursday, Oct. 2, 4:00pm: I'm back from the rally, and it was electrifying! The man can speak and fire up a crowd of thousands of college students. The crowd was projected to be 20,000, but all I know is, it was BIG.

And I just heard that McCain has suspended his campaign in Michigan. What?? He's announcing that he's given up Michigan to Obama? Is that a smart political move? What is happening here?

Hillary was in my small home town last Saturday at a rally for Obama, and tomorrow the man himself will be here on campus at MSU, just a short walk around Circle Drive from my office. I'm planning on taking the student who is here for an appointment at 2 (if she comes!) over to Adams Field to hear him speak. It's supposed to be chilly outdoors, but I think this campus will give him a warm welcome. I know I will! I'll try to post pictures after the fact - at least of the crowd. Michigan is an important swing state in the election. We're expecting several more visits by McCain and Obama in the next month until November 4.

Assistir Filme »

you should be very afraid - but of whom?

me, John, Jim, Bennett, Nancy, Ginnie, Susan, Nelson

Sometime in this past week's accelerating and terrifying dance into fascism* I remembered an episode from childhood when I was faced with fear.

Like all pre-school children, I had been drilled on the danger of getting into the car of a stranger. What would actually happen if I did so was not spelled out. It was just fused in my brain: Never ever get into a vehicle with a stranger.

I was the last of eight children in my family to start kindergarten. My brother John, a fourth grader, walked me to school that first exciting day. If you saw the grid of streets in my home town, you'd see how the streets that run parallel to the river suddenly angle in a new direction after a few streets. My path to school was not 'go straight, turn left, turn right and you're there' but angled confusingly at a couple of junctures. So can you blame me that as a five-year-old (just - I had turned 5 the month before school began), after half-day kindergarten, I lost my way walking back home, alone?

There I stood on the sidewalk, facing a 5-way intersection in a residential neighborhood, utterly confused about which way to turn, crying. A strange (as in unknown, not strange) man in a pickup truck pulled up next to me on the street. He asked me if I was lost. I nodded. He told me he would give me a ride home.

How did this five-year-old face her conflicting fears? A. I am lost; I am alone; I will never get home again. B. A strange man is offering me a ride in his truck; I've been told never ever get in a vehicle with a stranger, but what exactly am I supposed to be afraid of? What could happen?

I got into the truck. He drove the maze of blocks to my house. I got out of his truck and ran inside to my mom. I don't remember what happened after that. Did Mom see my tear-stained face and hug me? Did my parents lecture me, or spank me, for getting in the truck of a stranger? Did they even know?

There wasn't really all that much wrong with the street layout in Grand Ledge. I just didn't know how to maneuver it. Someone I trusted should have shown me the way. We've trusted our leaders for decades that a free market system would work, and that it would somehow guide our economy safely along. As Winter Patriot says, it actually ran our government, but we were taught to ignore that and call it 'democracy.' Now that the free market system is a mile-high roller coaster whose tresses and pillars are crumbling, we are giving one of the guys who built the faulty roller coaster the contract to fix it. It's tantamount to giving a very bad stranger keys to a truck and asking him to go pick up your kid who is lost. And he ain't gonna take her home, folks.

*If you think this isn't starting to look like fascism (I added the italicized words after Loring's comment, since I agree that we are heading into it, and who can say how fast?), here's the Random House definition:

1. a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.

Assistir Filme »

collecting chairs

Next Farm Day will be Farm Wedding Day, when Lesley and Brian get married late summer 2009 here at the farm, yay!

Lesley is a designer, and when she and Brian started discussing the outdoor orchard 'room' being set up with chairs under a tent, she confessed how much she dislikes those white plastic folding chairs you rent. Their pocked, stained surfaces and flimsy construction got us thinking what else we could do. I agree with her, so I suggested collecting wood chairs via Freecycle. Lesley loved imagining mismatched wooden chairs lined up in rows for the wedding ceremony, then moved to tables for the reception and PAR-TAY.

We already had about 10 wood chairs at the farm we can use. (I'm still kicking myself for not picking this one up from someone's curbside last year. Duh! But I'm not the trash picker in the family, ahem, so I didn't think of it, until someone said, "why didn't you put the chair in your car?" Silent stupor. "The chair's value to me was the photograph, it never occurred to me to take it - the chair that is.") So far through Freecycle we've picked up another 18. (This feels much better than trash picking to me. I don't object to someone else trash picking, as long as I can slither down in the car and be invisible to passers-by.) Only about another 125 to go! I'm not sure the barn will hold that many though. And my goodness, are some of them HEAVY.

I asked Don how hard it would be to spray paint them all white, and he looked at me like I was possessed. I'm glad, because I think all those eclectic chairs as they are will be homey. Oh, and they'll be covered with tarps until The Day - we don't want no bat poo on dem chairs.

Assistir Filme »

glory

This was our first year with morning glories, although they should always be a staple at a farm if you ask me. Now as summer softens into autumn and before cold nights make the silk of these blooms wither, I want to publish this gallery.

We have at least a half dozen varieties all mixed together in our 'polka-star' drape of morning glories.

This bloom has two varieties mixed in itself!

When sweet Lesley planted the seeds under the picket fence Memorial Day weekend, we didn't envision that the skilfull tendrils would grow up over the two posts, and meet and weave in the middle into a perfect "M" - for our last name. (That white tank visible behind the "M" is our propane tank, for our furnace. We supplement with a wood burning stove.)

Below is Lesley's foot on Memorial Day weekend. In her jammies she drank coffee with her papa in the Adirondack chairs, after she had picked some honeysuckle for me, and before she planted morning glory seeds, and also radish and carrot seeds in the veggie garden. Her jammies fabric looks like morning glories wove it. Ahh - she's the best morning glory of all.





















Here is a blossom before opening. Don't worry, those wrinkles and crinkles will iron themselves out smooth in the sun, just like laundry on the line.

The delicacy and spiky leaves of this magenta variety astonished me the other day. I've never seen those before.

Lesley minored in fibers at art school, but I don't think she studied how to make a draped curtain of morning glories, although she did make dye from poke berries for one of her projects. I'll tell you about that another day.

morning glory

Ipomoea

Assistir Filme »

atumnal equinox tomorrow

On this last day of summer, I'm sharing a poem I wrote in 1994 at the same time of year. It's strange to remember how it was when the kids were home, at the start of a new school year.

-

Also, today is the International Day of Peace. See my sidebar and click for more information.

Tomatoes

The tomatoes are sagging to the ground,
red and accusing.
I already had to refrigerate
some overripe ones that stared
at me red-eyed
for a week from the formica.
It is a sin to refrigerate tomatoes
and worse
to allow them to putrefy
on the vine.

For a few brilliant weeks of August
I did my duty to Italian and Mexican sauces,
to Turkish village salad with cucumber
and tomato cubes, onions, parsley, olive oil and lemon juice,
to warm tortillas with scallions,
tomatoes, mushrooms and cheese.
They didn’t ripen quickly enough.
And hadn’t I waited all winter,
spring and summer for this?

But now it is mid-September.
The slanting sun is curling the leaves
of the six tomato plants up
to the sky
like Sunday School children
raising hands for recognition,
not subtly, but nonetheless
ignored in a corner
of the backyard fence.

Today, Saturday, after
a 40-hour week in the office,
the sun insists with all its
clear forgiveness
that I should sit outside,
not out front with the neighbors,
but out back inside the cedar fence
under the mesh umbrella with my back
to the tomatoes.

September is a strangely mixed
month of re-boxing routines
of work, school buses, piano lessons and doctor appointments
into calendar squares
while the air outside is wearing
amber, as if, like honey
it would slow down
the process
if it could.
Flowers are full, better really
than they were all summer when we kept them in order.
And the heavy disarray of ripe tomatoes begs
for indolent days
when stuffing manicotti shells
might fill a morning.

I wonder why someone
would even grow tomatoes
without the permission of Italian, Greek,
Mexican or Turkish time.
Tomatoes aren’t meant
to be rushed
in ripening,
in cooking,
in eating. They are
intended for moussaka and lasagna
and paste that is stored
in a gallon jar under the sink
without a chance of molding:
fresh paste is spooned off every day for a recipe
and a new layer exposed to the air.
In a month the jar is empty.

I deposited six little plants
in June, hoping for a taste, a return
to the old country.
Any old country.
I forgot that behind every taste
hides a little woman or man with shiny red round
fingers.
The old fruit is bursting the skin
and I am not watching.

- Ruth M. 1994

Assistir Filme »

my salvation

I'm nursing a head cold. Time to make ginger tea (chukku coffee and tea in India I found out from rauf when I posted this recipe in February 2007). On his way home from school Wednesday Don rescued me by picking up fresh ginger.

Ginger Tea

3-4 thin slices fresh ginger (unpeeled is fine)
juice of 1/2 - 1 full lemon
1 garlic clove, peeled and cut into 2-3 chunks (optional)
1 dried red pepper (optional)
honey to taste
hot water

Garlic has healing properties, and I love the taste, but leave it out if you don't like it. Dried red pepper helps clear congestion, but again, just ginger, lemon and honey are wonderful. Lemon with its vitamin C is great for a cold (maybe helps the cold end more quickly, well probably not in this small dose - but it can't hurt, and it tastes good!), honey is soothing on the throat, and ginger is nice on the tummy when you get all that yucky drainage. Lesley introduced me to this tea as a cold remedy last winter, and I fell in love with the flavor, even when I didn't have a cold. Now that colder temps and cold viruses are upon us (well, not in Australia, Letitia), it's time to share the comfort again.

Assistir Filme »