her able hands

My gardening to-do list is starting to grow again and I’m attempting to look at it with quiet enthusiasm and to pay attention to the pulse of trepidation that beats just one layer down. That thump, thump, thump is my Overload Radarâ„¢ (Angelina, this trademark’s for you…and you’re welcome to use it anytime you like) and it doesn’t take very much to set it off these days. I’ve come to understand that a wise and healthy woman keeps an eye on the Overload Radarâ„¢ and lets the to-do list languish when necessary. It isn’t going anywhere.

This weekend I intend* to do a thorough seed inventory so I can figure out what I need to buy. I’m thinking it’s mostly salad greens and some Roma beans. Thanks again everyone for your helpful comments about the beans. I have a package of Fava (Broad) beans from last year and will plant them early in the spot where I had the carrots last summer. It gets plenty of sun before the leaves are all on the trees, and the beans will give the soil a little nitrogen boost to make it ready for whatever I plant there late spring.

After seed inventory comes winter sowing. Hopefully I also manage to clean out my iPhoto, so I can photoblog the process. Right now I can’t even get my Christmas pictures uploaded, it’s that jammed up with images dating back to April 2007.

Meanwhile, it appears that Big Bad Bastard Bronchial Infection is tapping at my lungy doors again. I’m fighting, throwing everything in my arsenal at it, and so far (4 days in) it seems to be holding steady at a sinus nastiness and an upper respiratory coughing situation. Let’s not go full-blown this time, shall we? Everyone tells me that the preschool years are the worst on a mother’s immune system. I’ve had ten different women tell me that they spent an entire winter sick with one thing after another when their kids were in preschool. That right there just might be one of the best arguments I’ve heard for homeschooling.

One last bit…a request for some Bloggy Mojo in the direction of the young couple who looked at our house last weekend. They seemed very interested and mentioned looking to secure a bridge loan so they can buy our house at the same time they put theirs on the market. I feel the winds of change swirling. Thank you so much!

*I’m giving intention a try again, in an effort to reign in the chaos. I’m doing it at home and at work. At work it’s particularly beneficial. I set the intention of accomplishing my work without participating in the daily, minute-by-minute fire drill that goes on even though I had no idea of how to make that happen. After I made that choice, the answer presented itself: don’t deal with requests immediately. Pretty simple right? Well, not so easy to implement when everyone in the company expects that you’ll turn requests around same day, if not same hour. But unless the requester can show me a true need for instant results, I reply, “I’m adding it to my schedule now (which is just an ongoing list, but helps keep things almost clear) and can have that to you by _______.” Generally that’s two to three days out, sometimes a full week. I’ve only been doing this since the new year, and it’s reduced my physical and mental anxiety at work tenfold.

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Can I get an amen and a hell yeah?!

I didn’t sleep in too long, up by 7:15 to pay some bills and get thinking on the week’s menu/shopping list. A small pot of oats is simmering on the stove with chopped almonds. I’ll add blueberries from the freezer and a spot of the last container of maple syrup from the farmers’ market. Listening to the Into the Wild soundtrack on itunes and letting some ideas percolate. They’re loosely connected bits and I’m going to toss them up here so I won’t lose them in one of my twenty three notebooks.

I’m working my way through Derrick Jensen’s books and enjoying the hell out of the conversational tone and the balls-out pronouncements about how unsustainable our society and culture are by their very nature. At the same time, he weaves a thread of light and love for relationships, for the shrinking populations of creatures on the planet and for the land on which we all play out our lives, throughout the work. I’ve read a lot of gurus works on kindness, empathy, compassion, being here now and they all had this backdrop of hope that I just don’t feel. The world has felt hopeless to me for as long as I can remember. I’m not calling Derrick a guru, I’m just noticing the level of consciousness he has in his writing and one can presume in his living. He doesn’t talk about hope for the future. I’m reading and questions arise. Some asked directly, as in: “How do you want to live?” Well, free, of course. Then he shows me how much of a pipe dream and illusion my ideas of freedom are—how we’re all caught in the mouse trap of our culture.

Yet, there are all of these stories of human connection that are used as examples of teaching and learning. He never comes out and says “Hey! Loving each other is the way.” But the spark in his writing lights up these examples of him experiencing or facilitating or witnessing his or another person’s moments of awakening. It makes me want to be more awake. It makes me realize just how far off the path of critical thinking I have wandered in my pursuit of a comfortable lifestyle. Would you believe me if I told you that in recent weeks I have felt areas of my brain tingling? Spots on top and in the back of my head that I wouldn’t have any awareness of unless I cracked my skull on an open cabinet door or on the door frame of the truck while lifting out sacks of groceries. But it’s not the surface, it’s way inside, this tingling. Interesting that I’m reading these books while detoxing and cutting out sugar. It feels as if a layer of sludge has peeled away and I can see myself and my surroundings more in focus. No idea what it all means other than recognizing that I’ve been hibernating for a long time and that waking up feels terrifyingly fantastic.

Dang, this oatmeal is delicious.

So my cast-iron Lodge wok finally arrived. Jeeze-oh-man, it took three weeks. See? I’m such an American. I almost left negative feedback on Amazon, but really, I got free shipping and when I contacted the company two days after the projected delivery date to ask for an ETA, they wrote back to say that they were waiting for a shipment and would send it out as soon as they had it on hand. And I thought to myself, well, I should have bought it direct from the manufacturer or sourced it in a local store instead of trying to save seven bucks. And providing the machine with more information about my habits.

My credit card statement arrived the other day and while I did quite a lot of Etsy purchasing for the holidays, I still managed to rack up some serious amazon mailings. While looking the statement over for inaccuracies, I noticed a credit at the top of the month from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now, I had never noticed a charge from them and haven’t subscribed since we lived in the old house. Looking at that $5.75 credit, I saw this vast web of connected threads of digital information about me running all over the country criss-crossing with the same kinds of threads belonging to (no, not belonging to, but about) most of the other people in this country. The information belongs to corporations and the government. And I give it away every day.

But hey, I’ve only had one cup of coffee and I’m not ready for quite that much awareness this morning. Baby steps and all that bullshit.

So! A wok—seasoned cast iron with loop handles and deep enough to fry if I’m feeling like saturated fat is the way to go! My big Teflon coated Calphalon sauté pan is going out to the garage for Chris to use sorting parts while he rebuilds that motor for the Datsun. Dinner tonight? Stir fry!

Oh, and Cheril gave me a great faux snake skin covered journal that has lined pages on one side and blank on the other. I’m going to use it for a garden journal. The only real notes I kept last year were on this blog, and while it’s nice to know it’s recorded somewhere, it wasn’t very well organized and is beyond impractical to try to extract the facts from the narrative. I’ll use the blank pages for sketches and charts and the lined pages for notes.

Our stocking-exchange dinner at the local bistro was yum, but the rich food gave me a bit of a belly ache. We finished off the meal of shared appetizers and salads with a vanilla crème brûlée. The custard was a little more pudding-like than I prefer, but the burnt sugar was spiced with cardamom and topped with a few fresh blueberries. The combination? Sublime. I need to do some sort of dessert with cardamom and blueberries. After I’ve lost this baked goods belly and have strengthened my self-control muscles enough to have just a taste instead of emotionally stuffing my face with half a cake, one sliver at a time on the sly, over the course of a Sunday afternoon.

And now on to the question. Tell me…who or what is informing your thinking today?

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Gale-force winds began to buffet (I first wrote bugger, then backed up and corrected it, but bugger? really?) the house sometime around 2am. The air leaking in through the edges of the windows smelled like spring, just like it did all day yesterday. My body felt so confused when I went out to pick up a few groceries at lunchtime and it was 67 degrees. The impulse was to run home and start turning over the soil—to sow some hearty greens seed.

It’ll be about 20 degrees cooler today, though, so I guess I can quit fantasizing about that and just get my seeds organized for winter sowing. Gracious, it’s windy out there right now. We should have moved our Christmas tree out and stuck it in the ground during this warm spell, but I’m looking at it right now with all of its lights and ornaments. Meant to do it last night, but once again the evening just slid down the rabbit hole to bedtime and I crashed at 9. We’ll try again tonight.

I think I’m extra tired the past few days because I’m changing my eating habits drastically. Hell, over the holidays I lived on cookies and coffee cake. And coffee and wine. I’d love to stuff my face with buttermilk pancakes right about now, but it’s eggs or yogurt and nuts for brekkie and a salad with chicken or tuna for lunch, and then lots of vegetables for dinner with maybe a small bit of pasta and a protein of some sort. Just one cup of joe to start the day, and then lots of water and tea. I haven’t had any soda for over a week and my guts thank me very much. So I guess I’m detoxing because I am perpetually tired. This is the point in the past year or so where I’ve hit the wall and said pass the Pepsi. But I’m going to power through this.

Before bed last night I did some stretching and a few yoga poses, which interestingly enough, settled down the hungry feeling I had even though I’d already eaten. It’ll take some time for my stomach size to catch up with the portion reduction. I’m just not going back for seconds and dammit, I’m hungry all the time. But the stretching calmed that right down and I slept very well until the wind hit the front wall of the bedroom like a giant fist.

I am going way outside of my eat local boundaries in order to clean myself up this winter, and doing so gratefully. Thank goodness I can easily buy broccoli and kale and salad greens. Last winter I didn’t touch cucumbers, but I have a half dozen in the fridge right now because they make a wonderful lunch with chopped celery and cottage cheese. I guess I should say thank you California. I won’t be heaping metric tons of bullshit guilt on myself for the food miles I’m ingesting right now. My health is more important than my social conscience and it’s mostly the vegetables that are grown far away. I will, however, be making some local, small farm meat purchases this weekend. I can’t quite stop thinking about the soulless-sourced meat the FDA is going to allow into the market. I also can’t wait to get some greens started in the raised beds, under the windows, at the beginning of next month. Next year I will have some sort of a greenhouse or at least a low tunnel.

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Thank you all for the kind words and commiseration. I’m feeling tons better and the rash is just about gone. Terrified to eat a shrimp again, but that’s how it goes. It was a bummer to toss that entire pot of soup out, because it was delicious—I highly recommend making your own dashi to use in soups. It’s super easy and oh, so tasty. I wonder if it freezes well?

This week will likely bring a bit of overtime at work, so posting will still be light, but I’m getting ready to blog the Great Basement Clean-Up 2008, as well as the winter sowing of perennials, the living room, dining room and kitchen painting and the dining room chair re-upholstery. I’ve only had the fabric and foam since May and have decided that I’m simply going to do the seats for now because the wood is in very decent condition. That can come later some day when I don’t work outside the home a full 40 hours a week.

In other news, I’m gagging and fuming and wishing I could bitch-slap the FDA for saying it’s safe to eat cloned meat. Factory farm at its finest, people. I don’t think I’ll be able to eat meat in a public food setting ever again. A whole new layer of “from whence came this meat” is added to the already mysterious game of eating. Will they put on the menu “Chicken-Thrice-Removed Marsala”? Chew on that.

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Saturday night I made a soup with a dashi and miso broth. Dashi is made by simmering water with a piece of kombu seaweed, then turning off the heat and adding bonito flakes (fish) and letting it sit until the flakes all fall to the bottom. Then you strain it, which I did into a pot of sautéed mushrooms, carrots, bok choy, ginger and shrimp.

An hour after I ate it, I was hanging over the toilet, turning myself inside out. I now have a disturbing looking rash all over my lower face and neck. Tiny red dots that may be broken capillaries? I have no idea. It’s not pretty, though.

I’m assuming it was a shrimp because nobody else got sick.

Such a shame, it took me almost two hours to make this soup and it looked, smelled and tasted so healthy and yum. Going down, at least.

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