This could have been taken from my own life! Except in my case it was a costume designer, not a bra-store employee.

#26. Couldn't Keep It To Myself, by Wally Brooks and the Women of York Correctional Institution
Holy crap, this book is good. It's a collection of writings by women in prison in which they tell parts of their life stories. The stories are amazingly well-written, and heartbreaking and beautiful. Highly recommended. (Thanks to hope_persists for lending me this!)

#27. The Geography of Bliss, by Michael Weiner (audiobook)
This book follows Weiner on his quest to visit the world's happiest places, according to a list compiled by "happiness scientists." His travelogue is amusing and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny (I'm sure the neighbors thought I was nuts when I burst out laughing while weeding my garden), but for the most part I found it fluffy and inconsequential. I also got a bit tired of Weiner's complaining about how he has spent his life unhappy. News flash: No one cares about how unhappy you are living in Miami, happily married, getting to travel the world and being paid to write about it. Get over yourself.


Bonus movie rec: His Secret Life, an Italian film about a woman who, after her husband gets hit by a truck and killed, finds out he has been having a long-term affair with a gay man. Really good!

So, not being particularly patriotic folks, yesterday transversely and I decided to go sour cherry picking. We called the orchard and discovered that the time is right, so we grabbed our buckets and headed out.

The time is indeed right, my friends. If you want to go sour cherry picking in New England, go now! In my neck of the woods, this is the prime week to do it. We were literally grabbing handfuls of cherries off of the tree and dumping them into our buckets.

We managed to fill two 20-quart Cambro buckets in under 2 hours. It ended up being 36 pounds of cherries. Not too shabby! We will be well-stocked with cherry jam and cherry pie filling for the winter. (And some extra cherries for the freezer, I'm sure.)

Pictures to come, don't you worry. ;)

I also transplanted my eggplant (which was in danger of being crowded out by my incredibly zealous and fruitful hot pepper plants), ripped up my lettuce, and sowed a bunch of old seed packets I had laying around.

Now off to blanch greens, chop rhubarb, and pit and can cherries!

A couple weekends ago we did some speed-picking of strawberries for our friend A, who is crazy-busy studying for the bar exam. Here is photo evidence.


A in the strawberry patch.

( Lots more. Now with 50% more fake strawberry nipples! )

transversely and I took the birds to Look Park for the church picnic. Of course, there were pictures.



( +2 more )

Hey, I think the weed that keeps trying to plant itself all over my garden and potted plants might in fact be purslane. Who knew? Thanks, nancyvsont!

Poor transversely; he gets so nervous when I go around eating plants off of the ground (other than the traditional food plants I purposely grew in the garden, that is). Maybe he'll feel better if I tell him that purslane doesn't require cooking in several changes of water to remove the toxins... ;) (Just teasing, honey!)

We're on a mission to get rid of a bunch of our stuff this summer, and our first step is getting rid of all of our Nalgene bottles. If anyone local on my f-list isn't squeamish about potential BPAs, I've got three 32-oz bottles (the regular size ones) and one 14-oz bottle. They all have stickers on them, some queer-themed, some political.

If you want one, drop me a comment or an email.

transversely and I have been picking strawberries for the past month, and have stashed most of them in the freezer (the ones that didn't go into our bellies). Yesterday we picked a heaping 16 quarts of strawberries, and today we turned them into pie filling and jam (and some for the freezer, and some for our bellies).

Right now we've got three quart jars of strawberry-rhubarb pie filling and 20 half-pints and three quarter-pints of strawberry jam cooling on the counter. There was another pint of pie filling, so we made tiny individual crisps for dessert. (We keep a container of crisp topping in the freezer for occasions like these.)

I'm keeping a journal of my canning recipes so that if they're really good I can use them again, and if they need improvement I can tweak them next year.

Does anyone have a really good bran muffin recipe? I'd like to make some for breakfasts, but I'd love to get a proven recipe.

(x-posted to borkborkrecipes and rumorofrain)

Because I have such wee little garden beds, I planted everything very close together. On the one hand, this means the plants' leaves shade the soil and keep it nice and moist; on the other hand, it means they sometimes shade each other.

To prevent some plants from crowding out others, I've been plucking leaves off of many of my plants as they grow bigger. The cabbage, kale, and kohlrabi are particular culprits. Fortunately, all of their leaves are edible, so as I pluck them I turn them into dinner, feed them to the pets, or freeze them for the winter. I can attest that kohlrabi leaves are quite tasty!

In fact, it turns out that many food plants have "secondary" edible parts. This makes my garden go so much further than I had anticipated. Score one for Team Freezer.

Kris Porter of Parrot Enrichment Activity Book fame asked me for high-resolution copies of some pictures I'd taken of my birds playing with a particular foraging toy. Since I don't keep high-res copies of my pictures (or I'd be buying new hard drives every other week), I did a new photo shoot with the toy. Here are a few goofy pictures of the featherdemons foraging:


WANT A NUT!

( N-U-T! )

p.s. Austen got chosen to be an official Disapproving Rabbit! We always knew she had it in her. ;)

(x-posted to rumorofrain and caiques)

I just posted an amazingly scrumptious recipe for garlic scape pesto over in borkborkrecipes. (Garlic scapes are the shoots that eventually turn into the flower stems. Farmers cut them off to encourage more bulb growth.)

Evidently many farmers just throw their garlic scapes in the compost pile, but you can sometimes find them at farmer's markets or health food stores.

I got my first flat the other day. (On my bike, that is.) Fortunately I was almost home and only had to walk about half a mile, but (as my hard-core biker friend Anna was horrified to discover) I have no spare tubes, no patch kit, and no portable pump, so I was bikeless until I hit a bike store.

Not only is my bike now fully stocked in case of tubular emergencies, but I also wheedled Anna into teaching me how to patch my tire tube.

She was also horrified by how dirty my bike was, so I'd better pull it apart and scrub the heck out of it pretty soon or the guilt might kill me. Poor bike! It serves me so well and I abuse it horribly.

The third and worst horror is that my brake pads are completely worn out. Not just a little - they're practically flat, and I can barely get them to provide enough friction to stop my bike. I need to get off of my duff and take the bikes to get tuned up, or I'm going to become a metal-and-flesh pretzel one of these days. Sheesh.

Anna and I swapped bikes for a few minutes and I got to ride her lovely, lovely road bike. It's so light that I can pick it up with one hand and carry it around, unlike my monstrously heavy steel-framed mountain bike. (But having big fat tires makes it really easy to change the tube!)

I really need to get myself a lighter bike. If only there were road bikes on CraigsList for people shorter than 5'8"...

I take it back. It's a good thing I planted all that lettuce, because we have a certain beloved and salad-obsessed houseguest staying with us this week, and we've already managed to eat all of the CSA greens we got on Wednesday plus some of the lettuce out of the front yard. We'll need to stop by the sin-laws' house and re-stock!

The marigold seeds I planted are sprouting like crazy! And some of the mystery flowers (I can't remember what kind they are; something useful. I've got the seed packet around somewhere...) are sprouting, too, and a couple of the sunflowers I planted.

I'm about ready to give up on my bell pepper seeds. I don't think they're going to sprout. A few of the carrot seeds have poked little sprouts up, but not as many as I'd hoped. That's okay; we can get those from a farm easily enough.

This weekend I need to thin my bok choi and broccoli. Any of my gardening friends interested in a few? Also, I seem to have about 10 new volunteer tomato seedlings coming up, so if anyone wants some (ahem, callyboy) just holler.

Speaking of gardening, we went for a walk today and stopped by the house of the woman who runs our CSA, who happens to live around the corner from us. Not only did she rip up the grass in her front yard and plant lovely food plants (strawberries, currants, jerusalem artichoke, hops, plum tree, etc), but she also has two gorgeous hens in a lovely little coop in her back yard. She's pulled up all of the asphalt and cement that was around her house and replaced it with plants or beautiful slabs of stone. It's very inspiring. :)

She also plays host to the local free bike maintenance workshops, so I'm going to take my bike over tomorrow and work on it. The brakes are ridiculously loose, and the derailleur needs some attention. Also, I got my very first flat yesterday! I'm surprised that it took this long. Hopefully the bike folks can help me patch my tube. Note to self: must buy patch kit and learn to use it.

#22. The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley (YAF)
#23. The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley (YAF)
A many-times re-read, these are two of my favorite quickie comfort books. They're fantasy novels about strong young women who don't fit in but end up going on awesome adventures. Highly recommended.

#24. The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke (YAF)
A story about two orphaned German brothers who are supposed to live with their awful aunt and uncle, but instead run away to Venice, about which their mother told them many stories. They meet up with a little group of other homeless children led by the Thief Lord, a boy who supports them with his high-stakes thefts from rich houses. The plot thickens when the aunt hires a private eye to find the boys and the detective stumbles on some interesting information about the Thief Lord. Recommended.

#25. Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
A re-read of one of my favorite novels. This tells the stories of two women and a man in a rural southern town during one summer. All are at different stages of their lives, and all of their lives are changed by unforseen circumstances. Kingsolver is a master at weaving stories together, and this is some of her best work. Highly recommended!

I've also been skimming through a bunch of gardening and thrifty living books, which have been interesting but not cover-to-cover gripping.

Currently reading: the last few pages of Black Like Me, which knocked my socks off.
Currently listening to: The Geography of Bliss.

Someone remind me why I planted lettuce again?

We're currently getting a pound of salad mix per week from our CSA, plus a heck of a lot of leaves off of the six heads of lettuce in our garden, and we're supposed to be eating lettuce out of the sin-laws' garden while they're out of the country for six weeks.

Evidently we're going to have the best-fed rabbit and tortoises on the earth. That'll teach me to grow things that can't be put by.

Speaking of rabbits and tortoises, I've been taking them out in the front yard to get some sun and eat some grass and weeds (in a portable pen, naturally). They love this. Part of the goal was to give the rabbit some positive associations with being shut in her crate and carried around, and I think it's working. :)

Speaking of the sin-laws being out of town, they appear to have purchased every dairy product available and left it in their fridge. They then left us a phone message saying, "By the way, could you please take all the perishable stuff out of our fridge?" If you'd ever seen my sin-laws' fridge, you'd know how frightening a proposition that is. They had two open containers of sour cream and three packages of deli-sliced monterrey jack cheese. transversely has already removed three full paper grocery bags of food from their fridge, and we'll probably take another bag home this week. If we can fit it into our own fridge.

In happier news, we picked our first fruit of the season this weekend: six super-heaping quart baskets of strawberries, which turned into one gallon bag plus two quart bags of washed, hulled berries for the freezer, plus one quart basket left out for eating. m_dash, are you up for a strawberry picking adventure anytime in the next few weeks?

I also bought three bags (grocery store produce bags, stuffed full) of spinach for $1 each from a cute old couple at the farmer's market on Saturday. I've blanched two of the bags of spinach, and they don't even fill up one quart bag. This is why we always freeze kale and chard and collards and beet greens instead of spinach! But it's like candy in the winter, so if they're back next weekend I'm going to go buy a whole bunch more and freeze it up.

Our first food put by for the year! It makes my little inner self-sufficiency nut purr to have a freshly-defrosted freezer and food to put in it.

Yesterday I planted the rest of the starts girlreinvented gave me, plus four or five varieties of sunflowers, marigolds, parsley, and one other kind of flower I can't remember right now. I also transplanted some of my little volunteer tomatoes into planters (no more room in the garden! Maybe I should pull up that blasted lettuce and just eat it...)

I like gardening. There's something nice about grubbing around in the dirt and watching plants grow that is deeply fulfilling.

Collard and broccoli seeds are now sprouting, along with a few bell peppers. Evidently it's not too late to plant seeds in the ground. (Still waiting on the carrots, though.)

One of my tomato plants has little green tomatoes on it already. A couple of others have flowers, and even the little ones have grown bigger.

My lettuce is getting huge. We've been eating it for dinner for the last two nights.

Maybe I can get the hang of this gardening thing after all.

Oh, and Lakeside U-Pick Strawberries opens tomorrow. :)

More training notes from last week:

Icarus:
Behavior: Putting on the head-loop of his harness. Both of my birds will let me put their harnesses on them and will tolerate wearing them, but they're definitely not excited about the process of getting them on and off. I have to slip a loop over the bird's head, then pull the waistband over each wing and cinch it around the bird's waist.

I decided to do a little practice with Icarus. We've been working on this a little bit since the end of winter, but only very intermittently. I hold up the harness and lure him to stick his beak through the head-loop with either a target stick or a treat.

This session was notable because after a bunch of reps of him sticking his beak through, I was able to start gradually pulling the harness up onto his head a bit more at each rep. Then I was able to pull it all the way over his head at each rep! We practiced this step eight or ten times (impromptu session, so no training records).

The next time I harnessed up the birds to take them out, Icarus stuck his beak right into the loop and let me pull it over his head. :) This one bears more practicing, but I'm pleased with our progress!

Behavior: climbing the stairs. I picked up a tiny set of stairs from a free post-tag-sale pile because I thought it would be cute to have the birds climb them. After washing them, I set the little stairs on the coffee table and called Icarus over. First problem: Icarus was afraid of the stairs. He tends to be skittish around new objects for the first few minutes, although he's certainly not phobic.

Okay, step 1: practice targeting near the stairs, moving gradually closer. This worked well, although he got nervous when I moved the target stick right over the stairs. After some work, I got him to climb to the top of the stairs. Unfortunately, the steps are a little small for his huge dinosaur feet, so climbing them is a bit awkward. He managed, though.

I haven't hooked the stairs up to anything yet, so I held the target stick beyond the stairs and had Icarus hop off. We repeated the "climb stairs and leap off" behavior chain probably a half-dozen to ten times before I ended the session.

transversely and I just got back from Minneapolis, where his play Standards of Care was having its world premier. I've read this play or heard it read dozens of times, but seeing it done was mind-blowing. It's easy to forget, during our day-to-day life, that I live with a brilliant playwright. :)

We're hoping to bring the production out here in the fall, probably in October. After seeing the play twice this weekend, I am determined to find a way to make it happen.

When we staggered back into our house I went out to check on my front-yard garden, and was surprised (and excited) to see that many of the seeds I planted have already sprouted! The dill, spinach, and broccoli are up in force - I'll have to thin them in another week or two! I'm still waiting on the carrots and bell peppers. I wasn't sure how my direct-seeded plants would do, but so far so good!

"It behooves everyone to once in their life take part in the killing of their meat," Willicutt told me. "I don't really have mixed feelings. I've made my peace with it. It's an essential evil of omnivores."

I think about death a fair bit. Not my own death, but death in general. I find it very weird that our society has distanced itself so much from death: we put out elderly in nursing homes so we don't have to witness their final moments, and most of us eat meat daily but have never seen an animal slaughtered.

Actually, the whole age stratification of our society weirds me out; I know of people who have had babies without ever having held or cared for a baby before. But right now we're talking about death.

One of the reasons I'm a mostly-vegetarian eater is because I am not sure I could kill an animal for food. (The exception to my vegetarianism is fish; I have caught and killed and eaten fish, and I am sure I could do it again.) Could you guys kill an animal for food? (Right now, that is, not if you were starving to death and surrounded by tame chickens.) Have you ever killed an animal for food?

I also find it curious when people eat meat but have a hard time thinking about the life and death of the animal that provided it. Doubly so for people who buy generic store meat, which is guaranteed to have been treated inhumanely for much or all of its life.

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this. Do you fall into the above category? If so, how do you justify your meat-eating to yourself? Do you think about your meat's life and death? What's your thought process like?

Edited to add: I just realized this probably sounds incredibly preachy. For the record, I have no problem with other people eating meat; it's my personal decision not to, and I respect others' right to make that decision for themselves. I admit that I do think it's disgusting to eat factory-farmed meat, because I know what's in it. ;) End edit.