A New Thread....: August 2009

Have you heard? Thanks to the recession, Victory Gardens are making a comeback.

As is knitting. Apparently, "worried women knit". Maybe that explains my attraction to it.

Meanwhile, there are those things that are that are going the way of the dinosaur. Am I the only one concerned about the fact that our kids are growing up without knowing about carbon paper? They may go their entire lives without knowing how to dial a rotary phone! I don't want to be an alarmist or anything, but I feel we've really dropped the ball on this one.

Then there are the styles that should never, ever come back: shoulder pads, mullets, and acid wash jeans.

Lots of things from your childhood can come back to haunt you later in life: orthodontic braces, incontinence and acne, for example. I myself have actually suffered a recurrence of two of these childhood maladies. I'm not going to tell you which two ;)

For me, however, the chickens have come home to roost.... for lurking inside each and every person who has ever had chickenpox, a case of shingles lies in wait.....muwahaha!

Yes, it's been the "Itchy and Scratchy Show" at our house lately. What an uncomfortable little disease this is! I had much higher hopes for my second childhood. But, my inner child came out to play and ended up wreaking havoc, just like Thing 1 and Thing 2.

It started with a very puffy, painful, swollen, painful, red (did I mention painful?) eye. Luckily it was caught pretty early, and my cornea was not affected. But it's going on 4 weeks now and though there is no rash, it is still quite itchy and, yes, painful. David Letterman had shingles in his eye also. Here's his "Top Ten List" when he returned after being away from his show for 30 days. Once again, David Letterman has crystallized my thoughts exactly.

All this research of chickenpox has made me hungry

(KFC: My secret guilty pleasure)

Now that my confession is out of the way...over the last couple years, we have made a concerted effort to live more environmentally conscious lives. We've always tried to be responsible: recycling wherever we could, re-using when it was appropriate, trying to eat local when possible. But we always knew we could be doing much more.

When we moved back to California, we tried to stay very focused on what was important to us, and strove to live within walking/biking distance of the stuff we knew we needed to do and all the stuff we wanted to do. It has worked pretty well for us, and reinforces in us the commitment to try to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel. We are far from perfect in reaching this goal, but we're trying.

One of the great perks of living close to the stuff you need is having more time to do the stuff you want. Over the past few years we have become more and more interested in cooking and baking, especially in the perfection of these hobbies. One of the problems/advantages with striving for perfection is that you start to find that a product you used to happily buy off the shelf of the grocery store- such as bread- starts to leave you wanting. Lately we have branched out and tried to start baking our own bread (all sorts), with very mixed results. But when it's good, it's really, really good! But that's a post for another day.

Anyone that has eaten with us knows that we can spend literally hours critiquing our technique and/or taking pictures of our creations. I don't know why we get such a kick out of it- we just do. Interestingly enough, we find we have less of a desire to eat out at restaurants now, because we often decide, "Meh, we could do better." Slowly but surely we have become part of the "slow food" movement.

We are fortunate to be able to live so close to so many Farmer's Markets: Jack London Square in Oakland on Sunday mornings, The Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market in San Francisco on Saturday mornings, San Mateo Farmer's Market on Wednesday and a Whole Foods Market right nearby (Edited 8/13/09: I'll be shopping elsewhere for a while after reading this today.) And it's becoming more and more rare for us to buy something from a grocery that doesn't live by Michael Pollan's rules (from In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) quoted here from the NYTimes:

Don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
Avoid those food products that come bearing health claims.
Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than 5 in number-- or that contain high fructose corn syrup.
Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.
Pay more, eat less.
Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.
Cook. And if you can, plant a garden.
Eat like an omnivore.

With that in mind,we decided to plant our own little garden (the operative word here being "little"). We don't have what you would call a traditional backyard...if you were to walk too far into our backyard you would be in for a surprise (you and the ducks, that is.) But, we do have a deck, so we decided to start a little container garden there, which we now refer to as "the lower forty".

As soon as I started feeling a little better, we planted three basil plants, parsley, thyme and oregano (I know what you're going to ask, and the answer would be we really don't use that much sage, and the rosemary is in the front yard.)