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1000 results for “it_is_soup_time”
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Seed for Thought
Saturday’s mail brought the first of the season’s seed catalogs. And Saturday night it snowed. The snow was just a sugar coated dusting, but it was a reminder that winter is coming—eventually—because it is forecast to be as warm as 59F/15C by next Saturday.
But today is gray and very windy and below freezing, a perfect reason to lose myself for a little while in the seed catalog. Yes, yes, I know, the garden just finished up and James picked all the collards Friday and has them fermenting—collard kraut! It’s a thing!
My internet recipe searches told me collard kraut used to be very popular across the southern United States and some people say it is even better than sauerkraut. James has ours fermenting with some garlic and crushed red pepper. I’ll let you know how it comes out.
This is the first year I’ve ever grown collards in the garden, and they’ve been a great success. Not only did they grow well, but we enjoyed eating them too. The small leaves made it fresh into salads and as they got bigger they’d get sautéed with onions and eaten as a side dish or combined with other things like tofu scramble, lentil eggs, curry, or soup. The variety I grew was “yellow cabbage” and came from a Minnesota seed company called North Circle Seeds. I asked James whether he liked the collards enough to grow them again next year, and he said that while it took him a little while to figure out how to use them and get used to cooking with them, he did indeed like them and we should definitely grow them again. Noted!
I also grew Swiss chard for the first time this year and we liked that too. I grew “bright lights” and the plant stalks and leaf vein colors ranged from golden yellow to bright red. We generally ate the leaves while they were small, chopped up in salads, which added some lovely color. The bigger leaves sometimes ended up in a stir fry. This will also make it into next year’s garden. Yum!
Tasty and nutritious!It’s sunchoke digging time! I dug up the first bowl Saturday afternoon just from one small area in the chicken garden. There are sunchokes in the chicken garden because last year I was silly enough to plant two roots along the outside of the chain link fence thinking—actually I don’t know what I was thinking. At the end of last season I dug up half a bowl of huge roots and thought, there, I’ve got them all. Yeah, right.
This year I had even more sunchokes growing along the fence outside and inside the chicken garden. So I dug and I dug and I didn’t worry about pulling out runner roots I came across because I am sure in spring I will discover that they have spread even more.
The sunchoke patch in the main garden is enormous. There will be more bowls to come as James has time to preserve them and I have time to dig and as long as the ground is not frozen. In spring when the ground thaws I will be able to dig up more, and there will be more, because I will find out as they pop up where all the runner roots have gone to this growing season. It’s a good thing we like them.
My turn for Reaping What She Sows: How Women are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System by Nancy Matsumoto came up on Friday. So far I’ve read the first chapter, “Black Mutual Aid, From the Rural South the Urban Northeast,” and it is fantastic.
As with everything in U.S. history, Black farmers have been, and continue to be, discriminated against. You can read a very good and succinct history in this September 2019 Atlantic article (gift link), The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms.
Matsumoto tells pieces of this history in her storytelling about a number of women farmers who have created cooperatives, training and helping Black farmers acquire land, seed, and fair prices through a cooperative distribution network. The women and their stories are inspiring and full of lessons on how to support regenerative farming outside a white-supremacist agri-capitalist system.
Matsumoto is familiar with cooperatives. Her Japanese grandparents were interred during World War II and her grandfather helped create a cooperative network in the internment camps. This network became the second largest consumer co-op in the United States. Given the political and economic situation in the United States currently, I suspect we will be seeing more cooperatives and mutual aid societies popping up all over the country in the coming years.
Throughout history women have been the seed keepers, carefully saving and preserving seeds from season to season and generation to generation. A few years ago I read a wonderful novel called The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. It is the story of a current day Dakota woman who is gifted a cache of seeds saved by her ancestors when they ran from being attacked by U.S. troops. It is a story of healing and renewal. I was reminded of this novel while reading the first chapter of Reaping What She Sows because one of the women she profiles is a seed keeper and works for Truelove Seeds, an heirloom seed company that offers culturally important seeds.
Of course I had to look at their offerings, and wow! If you want to read more about the company, The Sierra Club has a great article about them, The Preservation of Culture Begins With a Seed I am definitely going to try and grow green striped cushaw squash! And they also have Korean hong-gochu peppers so I can make kimchi and even collard-chi next year.
The next chapter of the book is about rebuilding the grain economy. Looking forward to learning even more!
While I am on the subject of seeds, I have been a fan of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and bought seeds from them many times through the years. But in the last few months I’ve found out that as wholesome as they advertise themselves to be, this is not the case. In 2019 they invited a white supremacist to speak at their spring planting festival. After much uproar, they uninvited him, but issued no statement of apology or anything that I was able to discover. I have also heard that they steal seeds from indigenous peoples and then rename them and don’t acknowledge where they really came from, though I am unable to find direct confirmation of that. However, just last year the tomato they had on the cover of their catalog turned out to be a recently released GMO variety they sold as non-GMO. They said their seed came from France and they tested it and the results were inconclusive. Nonetheless, they pulled it from their stock and destroyed all the seeds.
Along with just discovering Truelove Seeds, I learned a few months ago about Native Seed Search and there is also Bertie County Seeds I just found out about. I generally buy seeds from Fedco who tell you exactly where the seeds come from (corporate grower, independent farmer, etc) and also credit and pay indigenous communities for their seeds. There is also Seed Savers Exchange. And then, as I mentioned earlier, North Circle Seeds, a small independent Minnesota seed company that sells varieties that will grow in my climate.
I guess I am getting a lesson in seed keeping and seed companies that I hadn’t thought much about before. Seeds are more than hybrid, open-pollinated, heirloom, GMO, organic. It’s important to know their origins and to make sure the people who have stewarded them are acknowledged and compensated. For some reason I always believed this was the case, but it turns out to be otherwise.
#collardKraut #collards #cooperatives #firstSnow #NorthCircleSeeds #seedCatalogs #seedKeepers #seedSaving #seeds #sunchokes #swissChard #TrueloveSeeds
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Seed for Thought
Saturday’s mail brought the first of the season’s seed catalogs. And Saturday night it snowed. The snow was just a sugar coated dusting, but it was a reminder that winter is coming—eventually—because it is forecast to be as warm as 59F/15C by next Saturday.
But today is gray and very windy and below freezing, a perfect reason to lose myself for a little while in the seed catalog. Yes, yes, I know, the garden just finished up and James picked all the collards Friday and has them fermenting—collard kraut! It’s a thing!
My internet recipe searches told me collard kraut used to be very popular across the southern United States and some people say it is even better than sauerkraut. James has ours fermenting with some garlic and crushed red pepper. I’ll let you know how it comes out.
This is the first year I’ve ever grown collards in the garden, and they’ve been a great success. Not only did they grow well, but we enjoyed eating them too. The small leaves made it fresh into salads and as they got bigger they’d get sautéed with onions and eaten as a side dish or combined with other things like tofu scramble, lentil eggs, curry, or soup. The variety I grew was “yellow cabbage” and came from a Minnesota seed company called North Circle Seeds. I asked James whether he liked the collards enough to grow them again next year, and he said that while it took him a little while to figure out how to use them and get used to cooking with them, he did indeed like them and we should definitely grow them again. Noted!
I also grew Swiss chard for the first time this year and we liked that too. I grew “bright lights” and the plant stalks and leaf vein colors ranged from golden yellow to bright red. We generally ate the leaves while they were small, chopped up in salads, which added some lovely color. The bigger leaves sometimes ended up in a stir fry. This will also make it into next year’s garden. Yum!
Tasty and nutritious!It’s sunchoke digging time! I dug up the first bowl Saturday afternoon just from one small area in the chicken garden. There are sunchokes in the chicken garden because last year I was silly enough to plant two roots along the outside of the chain link fence thinking—actually I don’t know what I was thinking. At the end of last season I dug up half a bowl of huge roots and thought, there, I’ve got them all. Yeah, right.
This year I had even more sunchokes growing along the fence outside and inside the chicken garden. So I dug and I dug and I didn’t worry about pulling out runner roots I came across because I am sure in spring I will discover that they have spread even more.
The sunchoke patch in the main garden is enormous. There will be more bowls to come as James has time to preserve them and I have time to dig and as long as the ground is not frozen. In spring when the ground thaws I will be able to dig up more, and there will be more, because I will find out as they pop up where all the runner roots have gone to this growing season. It’s a good thing we like them.
My turn for Reaping What She Sows: How Women are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System by Nancy Matsumoto came up on Friday. So far I’ve read the first chapter, “Black Mutual Aid, From the Rural South the Urban Northeast,” and it is fantastic.
As with everything in U.S. history, Black farmers have been, and continue to be, discriminated against. You can read a very good and succinct history in this September 2019 Atlantic article (gift link), The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms.
Matsumoto tells pieces of this history in her storytelling about a number of women farmers who have created cooperatives, training and helping Black farmers acquire land, seed, and fair prices through a cooperative distribution network. The women and their stories are inspiring and full of lessons on how to support regenerative farming outside a white-supremacist agri-capitalist system.
Matsumoto is familiar with cooperatives. Her Japanese grandparents were interred during World War II and her grandfather helped create a cooperative network in the internment camps. This network became the second largest consumer co-op in the United States. Given the political and economic situation in the United States currently, I suspect we will be seeing more cooperatives and mutual aid societies popping up all over the country in the coming years.
Throughout history women have been the seed keepers, carefully saving and preserving seeds from season to season and generation to generation. A few years ago I read a wonderful novel called The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. It is the story of a current day Dakota woman who is gifted a cache of seeds saved by her ancestors when they ran from being attacked by U.S. troops. It is a story of healing and renewal. I was reminded of this novel while reading the first chapter of Reaping What She Sows because one of the women she profiles is a seed keeper and works for Truelove Seeds, an heirloom seed company that offers culturally important seeds.
Of course I had to look at their offerings, and wow! If you want to read more about the company, The Sierra Club has a great article about them, The Preservation of Culture Begins With a Seed I am definitely going to try and grow green striped cushaw squash! And they also have Korean hong-gochu peppers so I can make kimchi and even collard-chi next year.
The next chapter of the book is about rebuilding the grain economy. Looking forward to learning even more!
While I am on the subject of seeds, I have been a fan of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and bought seeds from them many times through the years. But in the last few months I’ve found out that as wholesome as they advertise themselves to be, this is not the case. In 2019 they invited a white supremacist to speak at their spring planting festival. After much uproar, they uninvited him, but issued no statement of apology or anything that I was able to discover. I have also heard that they steal seeds from indigenous peoples and then rename them and don’t acknowledge where they really came from, though I am unable to find direct confirmation of that. However, just last year the tomato they had on the cover of their catalog turned out to be a recently released GMO variety they sold as non-GMO. They said their seed came from France and they tested it and the results were inconclusive. Nonetheless, they pulled it from their stock and destroyed all the seeds.
Along with just discovering Truelove Seeds, I learned a few months ago about Native Seed Search and there is also Bertie County Seeds I just found out about. I generally buy seeds from Fedco who tell you exactly where the seeds come from (corporate grower, independent farmer, etc) and also credit and pay indigenous communities for their seeds. There is also Seed Savers Exchange. And then, as I mentioned earlier, North Circle Seeds, a small independent Minnesota seed company that sells varieties that will grow in my climate.
I guess I am getting a lesson in seed keeping and seed companies that I hadn’t thought much about before. Seeds are more than hybrid, open-pollinated, heirloom, GMO, organic. It’s important to know their origins and to make sure the people who have stewarded them are acknowledged and compensated. For some reason I always believed this was the case, but it turns out to be otherwise.
#collardKraut #collards #cooperatives #firstSnow #NorthCircleSeeds #seedCatalogs #seedKeepers #seedSaving #seeds #sunchokes #swissChard #TrueloveSeeds
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Seed for Thought
Saturday’s mail brought the first of the season’s seed catalogs. And Saturday night it snowed. The snow was just a sugar coated dusting, but it was a reminder that winter is coming—eventually—because it is forecast to be as warm as 59F/15C by next Saturday.
But today is gray and very windy and below freezing, a perfect reason to lose myself for a little while in the seed catalog. Yes, yes, I know, the garden just finished up and James picked all the collards Friday and has them fermenting—collard kraut! It’s a thing!
My internet recipe searches told me collard kraut used to be very popular across the southern United States and some people say it is even better than sauerkraut. James has ours fermenting with some garlic and crushed red pepper. I’ll let you know how it comes out.
This is the first year I’ve ever grown collards in the garden, and they’ve been a great success. Not only did they grow well, but we enjoyed eating them too. The small leaves made it fresh into salads and as they got bigger they’d get sautéed with onions and eaten as a side dish or combined with other things like tofu scramble, lentil eggs, curry, or soup. The variety I grew was “yellow cabbage” and came from a Minnesota seed company called North Circle Seeds. I asked James whether he liked the collards enough to grow them again next year, and he said that while it took him a little while to figure out how to use them and get used to cooking with them, he did indeed like them and we should definitely grow them again. Noted!
I also grew Swiss chard for the first time this year and we liked that too. I grew “bright lights” and the plant stalks and leaf vein colors ranged from golden yellow to bright red. We generally ate the leaves while they were small, chopped up in salads, which added some lovely color. The bigger leaves sometimes ended up in a stir fry. This will also make it into next year’s garden. Yum!
Tasty and nutritious!It’s sunchoke digging time! I dug up the first bowl Saturday afternoon just from one small area in the chicken garden. There are sunchokes in the chicken garden because last year I was silly enough to plant two roots along the outside of the chain link fence thinking—actually I don’t know what I was thinking. At the end of last season I dug up half a bowl of huge roots and thought, there, I’ve got them all. Yeah, right.
This year I had even more sunchokes growing along the fence outside and inside the chicken garden. So I dug and I dug and I didn’t worry about pulling out runner roots I came across because I am sure in spring I will discover that they have spread even more.
The sunchoke patch in the main garden is enormous. There will be more bowls to come as James has time to preserve them and I have time to dig and as long as the ground is not frozen. In spring when the ground thaws I will be able to dig up more, and there will be more, because I will find out as they pop up where all the runner roots have gone to this growing season. It’s a good thing we like them.
My turn for Reaping What She Sows: How Women are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System by Nancy Matsumoto came up on Friday. So far I’ve read the first chapter, “Black Mutual Aid, From the Rural South the Urban Northeast,” and it is fantastic.
As with everything in U.S. history, Black farmers have been, and continue to be, discriminated against. You can read a very good and succinct history in this September 2019 Atlantic article (gift link), The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms.
Matsumoto tells pieces of this history in her storytelling about a number of women farmers who have created cooperatives, training and helping Black farmers acquire land, seed, and fair prices through a cooperative distribution network. The women and their stories are inspiring and full of lessons on how to support regenerative farming outside a white-supremacist agri-capitalist system.
Matsumoto is familiar with cooperatives. Her Japanese grandparents were interred during World War II and her grandfather helped create a cooperative network in the internment camps. This network became the second largest consumer co-op in the United States. Given the political and economic situation in the United States currently, I suspect we will be seeing more cooperatives and mutual aid societies popping up all over the country in the coming years.
Throughout history women have been the seed keepers, carefully saving and preserving seeds from season to season and generation to generation. A few years ago I read a wonderful novel called The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. It is the story of a current day Dakota woman who is gifted a cache of seeds saved by her ancestors when they ran from being attacked by U.S. troops. It is a story of healing and renewal. I was reminded of this novel while reading the first chapter of Reaping What She Sows because one of the women she profiles is a seed keeper and works for Truelove Seeds, an heirloom seed company that offers culturally important seeds.
Of course I had to look at their offerings, and wow! If you want to read more about the company, The Sierra Club has a great article about them, The Preservation of Culture Begins With a Seed I am definitely going to try and grow green striped cushaw squash! And they also have Korean hong-gochu peppers so I can make kimchi and even collard-chi next year.
The next chapter of the book is about rebuilding the grain economy. Looking forward to learning even more!
While I am on the subject of seeds, I have been a fan of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and bought seeds from them many times through the years. But in the last few months I’ve found out that as wholesome as they advertise themselves to be, this is not the case. In 2019 they invited a white supremacist to speak at their spring planting festival. After much uproar, they uninvited him, but issued no statement of apology or anything that I was able to discover. I have also heard that they steal seeds from indigenous peoples and then rename them and don’t acknowledge where they really came from, though I am unable to find direct confirmation of that. However, just last year the tomato they had on the cover of their catalog turned out to be a recently released GMO variety they sold as non-GMO. They said their seed came from France and they tested it and the results were inconclusive. Nonetheless, they pulled it from their stock and destroyed all the seeds.
Along with just discovering Truelove Seeds, I learned a few months ago about Native Seed Search and there is also Bertie County Seeds I just found out about. I generally buy seeds from Fedco who tell you exactly where the seeds come from (corporate grower, independent farmer, etc) and also credit and pay indigenous communities for their seeds. There is also Seed Savers Exchange. And then, as I mentioned earlier, North Circle Seeds, a small independent Minnesota seed company that sells varieties that will grow in my climate.
I guess I am getting a lesson in seed keeping and seed companies that I hadn’t thought much about before. Seeds are more than hybrid, open-pollinated, heirloom, GMO, organic. It’s important to know their origins and to make sure the people who have stewarded them are acknowledged and compensated. For some reason I always believed this was the case, but it turns out to be otherwise.
#collardKraut #collards #cooperatives #firstSnow #NorthCircleSeeds #seedCatalogs #seedKeepers #seedSaving #seeds #sunchokes #swissChard #TrueloveSeeds
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Seed for Thought
Saturday’s mail brought the first of the season’s seed catalogs. And Saturday night it snowed. The snow was just a sugar coated dusting, but it was a reminder that winter is coming—eventually—because it is forecast to be as warm as 59F/15C by next Saturday.
But today is gray and very windy and below freezing, a perfect reason to lose myself for a little while in the seed catalog. Yes, yes, I know, the garden just finished up and James picked all the collards Friday and has them fermenting—collard kraut! It’s a thing!
My internet recipe searches told me collard kraut used to be very popular across the southern United States and some people say it is even better than sauerkraut. James has ours fermenting with some garlic and crushed red pepper. I’ll let you know how it comes out.
This is the first year I’ve ever grown collards in the garden, and they’ve been a great success. Not only did they grow well, but we enjoyed eating them too. The small leaves made it fresh into salads and as they got bigger they’d get sautéed with onions and eaten as a side dish or combined with other things like tofu scramble, lentil eggs, curry, or soup. The variety I grew was “yellow cabbage” and came from a Minnesota seed company called North Circle Seeds. I asked James whether he liked the collards enough to grow them again next year, and he said that while it took him a little while to figure out how to use them and get used to cooking with them, he did indeed like them and we should definitely grow them again. Noted!
I also grew Swiss chard for the first time this year and we liked that too. I grew “bright lights” and the plant stalks and leaf vein colors ranged from golden yellow to bright red. We generally ate the leaves while they were small, chopped up in salads, which added some lovely color. The bigger leaves sometimes ended up in a stir fry. This will also make it into next year’s garden. Yum!
Tasty and nutritious!It’s sunchoke digging time! I dug up the first bowl Saturday afternoon just from one small area in the chicken garden. There are sunchokes in the chicken garden because last year I was silly enough to plant two roots along the outside of the chain link fence thinking—actually I don’t know what I was thinking. At the end of last season I dug up half a bowl of huge roots and thought, there, I’ve got them all. Yeah, right.
This year I had even more sunchokes growing along the fence outside and inside the chicken garden. So I dug and I dug and I didn’t worry about pulling out runner roots I came across because I am sure in spring I will discover that they have spread even more.
The sunchoke patch in the main garden is enormous. There will be more bowls to come as James has time to preserve them and I have time to dig and as long as the ground is not frozen. In spring when the ground thaws I will be able to dig up more, and there will be more, because I will find out as they pop up where all the runner roots have gone to this growing season. It’s a good thing we like them.
My turn for Reaping What She Sows: How Women are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System by Nancy Matsumoto came up on Friday. So far I’ve read the first chapter, “Black Mutual Aid, From the Rural South the Urban Northeast,” and it is fantastic.
As with everything in U.S. history, Black farmers have been, and continue to be, discriminated against. You can read a very good and succinct history in this September 2019 Atlantic article (gift link), The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms.
Matsumoto tells pieces of this history in her storytelling about a number of women farmers who have created cooperatives, training and helping Black farmers acquire land, seed, and fair prices through a cooperative distribution network. The women and their stories are inspiring and full of lessons on how to support regenerative farming outside a white-supremacist agri-capitalist system.
Matsumoto is familiar with cooperatives. Her Japanese grandparents were interred during World War II and her grandfather helped create a cooperative network in the internment camps. This network became the second largest consumer co-op in the United States. Given the political and economic situation in the United States currently, I suspect we will be seeing more cooperatives and mutual aid societies popping up all over the country in the coming years.
Throughout history women have been the seed keepers, carefully saving and preserving seeds from season to season and generation to generation. A few years ago I read a wonderful novel called The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. It is the story of a current day Dakota woman who is gifted a cache of seeds saved by her ancestors when they ran from being attacked by U.S. troops. It is a story of healing and renewal. I was reminded of this novel while reading the first chapter of Reaping What She Sows because one of the women she profiles is a seed keeper and works for Truelove Seeds, an heirloom seed company that offers culturally important seeds.
Of course I had to look at their offerings, and wow! If you want to read more about the company, The Sierra Club has a great article about them, The Preservation of Culture Begins With a Seed I am definitely going to try and grow green striped cushaw squash! And they also have Korean hong-gochu peppers so I can make kimchi and even collard-chi next year.
The next chapter of the book is about rebuilding the grain economy. Looking forward to learning even more!
While I am on the subject of seeds, I have been a fan of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and bought seeds from them many times through the years. But in the last few months I’ve found out that as wholesome as they advertise themselves to be, this is not the case. In 2019 they invited a white supremacist to speak at their spring planting festival. After much uproar, they uninvited him, but issued no statement of apology or anything that I was able to discover. I have also heard that they steal seeds from indigenous peoples and then rename them and don’t acknowledge where they really came from, though I am unable to find direct confirmation of that. However, just last year the tomato they had on the cover of their catalog turned out to be a recently released GMO variety they sold as non-GMO. They said their seed came from France and they tested it and the results were inconclusive. Nonetheless, they pulled it from their stock and destroyed all the seeds.
Along with just discovering Truelove Seeds, I learned a few months ago about Native Seed Search and there is also Bertie County Seeds I just found out about. I generally buy seeds from Fedco who tell you exactly where the seeds come from (corporate grower, independent farmer, etc) and also credit and pay indigenous communities for their seeds. There is also Seed Savers Exchange. And then, as I mentioned earlier, North Circle Seeds, a small independent Minnesota seed company that sells varieties that will grow in my climate.
I guess I am getting a lesson in seed keeping and seed companies that I hadn’t thought much about before. Seeds are more than hybrid, open-pollinated, heirloom, GMO, organic. It’s important to know their origins and to make sure the people who have stewarded them are acknowledged and compensated. For some reason I always believed this was the case, but it turns out to be otherwise.
#collardKraut #collards #cooperatives #firstSnow #NorthCircleSeeds #seedCatalogs #seedKeepers #seedSaving #seeds #sunchokes #swissChard #TrueloveSeeds
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CW: Mainichi Seiten! festival book SCENE 1 part one
SCENE 1 (pp 7-17)
THE TIME: a morning in early May, shortly after Shuu and Taiga have their big wisteria fight at the beginning of novel #15.
(The backstory here: last autumn, Taiga and Shuu were split up at work so that Taiga got a new assigned novelist and Shuu got a new assigned editor. For six straight months, Shuu protested this change with all his might while Taiga pretended he was okay with it. Then in April, Shuu finally made peace with the new arrangement and proposed to Taiga that the two of them go on a trip to Ashikaga to see their famous wisteria; Taiga, however, was secretly still very much bothered both by the work switch and by Shuu's seeming acceptance of the work switch, and spitefully said Shuu should go on his own. Since then they have been sniping at each other about various trivial topics for weeks.)
THE PLACE: the dining table of the Obinata home in Ryuuzucho district three, where Taiga, Shuu, Akinobu (still a grad student), Jou (still a pro boxer), Mayumi (now a second year university student) and Yuuta (now in his second year of apprenticeship at the Yamashita altar makers) are all gathered for breakfast.
Akinobu and Jou are just happy that Shuu is recovered enough from the emotional turmoil of the author-editor switch that he's back to remembering to put the miso in their miso soup again. Yuuta thinks their standard for happiness is too low, because this low-sodium miso that Shuu has been using since last summer is clearly inferior to the full-sodium version he used to use. Mayumi is with Yuuta in feeling discontent, because even though Shuu is supposedly over his work-related discontent he and Taiga are clearly still fighting.
(Mayumi is also wearing the black tracksuit again, Yuuta observes. It's so comfy! Mayumi insists. It wasn't until he became the manager of his university's baseball club in spring of last year that he realized just how convenient it is to just be able to wear a tracksuit anywhere, all the time, even when your live-in boyfriend is starting to wish you would pick out sexier clothes.)
As they talk, Shuu scolds Taiga for reading the newspaper while eating. Jou glances over at said newspaper and sees that it contains an announcement about an upcoming book-signing event for Shuu's latest best-seller. Everyone else senses that bringing this topic up will result in their guardians having yet another fight about work, so to forestall it Yuuta hurriedly stuffs a piece of tamagoyaki in Jou's mouth and Akinobu is like BY THE WAY, did you all know that summer festivals were originally held in the Edo Period to ward off plague?
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Dear lovely Lovely Peeps,
If you have a moment, I recommend today's Love Letter - To A Little Clay Bowl by Sarah Gailey.
It is about stability, fragility, and back again. It is about recognition. About being *seen*. About talent and the roles we (are to) play. About trust. About nourishment. About community. And about joy.
It is a beautiful wee essay, and as someone who has her own version of A Little Clay Bowl, it resonates strongly. 🥰
This is part of a series, some written by Sarah, some by guest writers. Donations are appreciated, but they are all free to read.
From the website:
"Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive is a yearlong essay series in which we acknowledge, celebrate, and examine the objects and experiences that keep us going, even through the hardest of times. The series is free to read, for everyone, forever.
If you'd like to support the work of the team that makes this series and keeps Stone Soup running, you can subscribe here for as little as $1 per month, or you can drop a one-time donation into the tip jar.
In the meantime, remember: Do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up."
https://stone-soup.ghost.io/love-letter-gailey-bowl/
#SarahGailey #Joy #Clay #Pottery #Strength #LoveLetter #KeepGoing
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Dear lovely Lovely Peeps,
If you have a moment, I recommend today's Love Letter - To A Little Clay Bowl by Sarah Gailey.
It is about stability, fragility, and back again. It is about recognition. About being *seen*. About talent and the roles we (are to) play. About trust. About nourishment. About community. And about joy.
It is a beautiful wee essay, and as someone who has her own version of A Little Clay Bowl, it resonates strongly. 🥰
This is part of a series, some written by Sarah, some by guest writers. Donations are appreciated, but they are all free to read.
From the website:
"Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive is a yearlong essay series in which we acknowledge, celebrate, and examine the objects and experiences that keep us going, even through the hardest of times. The series is free to read, for everyone, forever.
If you'd like to support the work of the team that makes this series and keeps Stone Soup running, you can subscribe here for as little as $1 per month, or you can drop a one-time donation into the tip jar.
In the meantime, remember: Do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up."
https://stone-soup.ghost.io/love-letter-gailey-bowl/
#SarahGailey #Joy #Clay #Pottery #Strength #LoveLetter #KeepGoing
-
Dear lovely Lovely Peeps,
If you have a moment, I recommend today's Love Letter - To A Little Clay Bowl by Sarah Gailey.
It is about stability, fragility, and back again. It is about recognition. About being *seen*. About talent and the roles we (are to) play. About trust. About nourishment. About community. And about joy.
It is a beautiful wee essay, and as someone who has her own version of A Little Clay Bowl, it resonates strongly. 🥰
This is part of a series, some written by Sarah, some by guest writers. Donations are appreciated, but they are all free to read.
From the website:
"Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive is a yearlong essay series in which we acknowledge, celebrate, and examine the objects and experiences that keep us going, even through the hardest of times. The series is free to read, for everyone, forever.
If you'd like to support the work of the team that makes this series and keeps Stone Soup running, you can subscribe here for as little as $1 per month, or you can drop a one-time donation into the tip jar.
In the meantime, remember: Do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up."
https://stone-soup.ghost.io/love-letter-gailey-bowl/
#SarahGailey #Joy #Clay #Pottery #Strength #LoveLetter #KeepGoing
-
Dear lovely Lovely Peeps,
If you have a moment, I recommend today's Love Letter - To A Little Clay Bowl by Sarah Gailey.
It is about stability, fragility, and back again. It is about recognition. About being *seen*. About talent and the roles we (are to) play. About trust. About nourishment. About community. And about joy.
It is a beautiful wee essay, and as someone who has her own version of A Little Clay Bowl, it resonates strongly. 🥰
This is part of a series, some written by Sarah, some by guest writers. Donations are appreciated, but they are all free to read.
From the website:
"Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive is a yearlong essay series in which we acknowledge, celebrate, and examine the objects and experiences that keep us going, even through the hardest of times. The series is free to read, for everyone, forever.
If you'd like to support the work of the team that makes this series and keeps Stone Soup running, you can subscribe here for as little as $1 per month, or you can drop a one-time donation into the tip jar.
In the meantime, remember: Do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up."
https://stone-soup.ghost.io/love-letter-gailey-bowl/
#SarahGailey #Joy #Clay #Pottery #Strength #LoveLetter #KeepGoing
-
Saturday night was a very special night, for several reasons. As some of you know, this past year was a tough one as my father was diagnosed early on with terminal lung cancer, and subsequently suffered a few health crises which had him in the ICU a couple of times. For most of the past year, Jess & my lives were occupied with helping him, and visiting him regularly in New York. We were happy to do it, but it did mean a pause in our usual get togethers with friends, which we missed.
On December 10th, 2025, my father succumbed to his cancer. As you might expect, the subsequent weeks have been full of grief, and paperwork. Even death has bureaucracy.
December 10th was also the day that the Compass Box Whisky Confluence auction at Bonhams Skinner, to benefit The Wolfsonian-FIU, ended. I'd been watching the auction, but uncertain about bidding - despite being a longtime Compass Box fanatic. However, after my father passed early that morning, I decided that I needed something good to go with the day - and that was going to be winning Confluence, which I did. You only live once, as was painfully clear that day.
My birthday is at the end of December, and we had planned a small gathering with friends to celebrate - but Jess & I both came home from my father's services in NY under the weather, and not really in a celebratory mood, so we cancelled that.
Instead, yesterday we had a gathering which was partly a delayed birthday celebration, partly a toast to my father's memory, and partly an exploration of a truly unique whisky. But, more than anything, it was a gathering of good friends for the first time in quite a while - and boy did I need that more than I realized.
Thank you Jess, Jer, Shamala, Marc, Lizzy, Lisa, Carol, Friski and Betsy for making the evening wonderful.
Before we could dive into the whisky, we had to put something in on stomachs - so we had an assortment of my father's favorites, in his honor. There was an antipasto salad, some veggies and cheese, meatballs and sauce (for subs or over pasta), pickle soup (the Cafe Polonia recipe), kielbasa and sauerkraut, pierogi, a texas sheet cake, rice pudding, cupcakes, and some fine Läderach chocolates.
Properly fueled, we attacked the mission of the evening.
We'd assembled a lineup of whiskies for the evening - of course, there was the Confluence, but we also pulled some expressions from the component distilleries. Obviously, these were not *the* components used to make Confluence, but it was just a fun way to try a few things.
We'd lined up Mackmyra, a Gordon & MacPhail Miltonduff, a G&M Macallan, a Highland Park 25, a Flora & Fauna Teaninich, and a Glen Moray (which was peated, it was what we had). We also had a couple of whiskies from Nashoba Valley Distillery, right here in town - Papa's Bourbon and the Stimulus Twenty 20 year old American Single Malt. Thanks to Marc Follit, our good friend, neighbor, and distiller at Nashoba, for bringing those.
Oh, yes, and there is also the Black Tot Rum Last Consignment. It seemed like another special bottle to open - after the whiskies.
We started off with the Confluence, so that we'd have clear palates - the better to taste it with. Whisky reviewer extraordinaire, Friski Whiski, agreed to write up a joint review with input from the whole crew, and we spent quite a bit of time on that. A most enjoyable time it was, too. We avoided reading the official tasting notes before creating our own, and were pleased to see that our notes ended up aligning fairly well with the official ones once we were done.
Friski posted the review on his page (https://www.facebook.com/friski.whiski/posts/pfbid0cQjrjpvFAm7XzAwf54Y62YPcTHMwcriwn5aF1b4JifQrV9XumhkTR5NYcwrT18tMl), but here it is:
---START---
Dram of a lifetime on 1/10/26Compass Box
Confluence
Blended Malt Whisky
Age: NAS
Abv: 48.9%
No. of bottles: 1Components:
The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Cherry Wine Fresh Seasoned American Oak
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Oloroso First Fill Sherry Seasoned American Oak
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
American First Fill & Virgin Oak Casks
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Swedish Virgin Oak & First Fill Casks
3%Teaninich Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Sherry Butt
12%Miltonduff Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
12%Highland Park Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
Recharred Hogshead
3%The Macallan Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
14%Glen Moray Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
15%Glen Moray Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
15%Availability: 1 of 1 bottle. Bonhams auction house event "Art & Alchemy of Spirits: Presenting Compass Box to Benefit the Wolfsonian".
Crowd source notes: MegaZone, Jess Terry, Jer Johnson, Shamala Rao, Marc Follit, Lizzy Nicolai, Lisa Mulvehill, Carol Ann, Betsey Hendricks, and Friski Whiski.
Color: Medium honey and golden syrup
Neat (without water)
Nose: Soft and crisp. Honey, green apple, marzipan, cooked caramelized pineapple, confectioner’s sugar, lemon citrus, orange peel, with hints of cardamom and anise.Texture: Warm. Creamy, buttery, slightly drying through the finish and pleasantly astringent.
Palate: Apple blossom honey, honey comb, marzipan, caramel, and birchwood. Swedish Kanelbulle (which is a classic Scandinavian cinnamon bun, spiced with cardamom in the dough, less gooey and use a lighter cinnamon application).
Finish: A roller coaster ride of white pepper, fresh green olive oil, saline, toasted almonds, fine Corinthian leather, oak, grapefruit pith, and oleo saccharum.
Unleash the serpent (with water)
Nose: An orchard house of fruit moved to the forefront. Pear, apple frangipane, sliced almonds, sweet cracked malt and fresh cream. Birchbeer float with vanilla bean ice cream. Lakrits, lemon blossoms where floral and citrus combine into a confluence of marriage.Texture: Creamy, buttery, woody without the tannic astringency.
Palate: Baked apple dumplings, roasted butternut squash, demerara sugar, sweet cream, and candied meyer lemon.Finish: Earthy notes get amplified. Warm spiced sweet potato pie with a pastry crust, sea spray, salted caramel, walnut skins, and toffee with subtle hints of a gentle smoke.
Tasting notes glass used: Open Up Chef and Sommelier 5.5oz glass.
The morning after glass: Sweet cracked malt, dust, vanilla, and caramelPairings...
Season: AnyMusic: Lovefool by The Cardigans
Food: Rosemary pork loin with homemade applesauce
Media: Best enjoyed with great company and good conversation.
Overall: From first nose to final sip, several of us ended up in a journey from an apple orchard to our grandmother's seaside cottage while various desserts were being cooked. Fantastic debut from Angela D'Orazio at Compass Box! We really look forward to her future creations.
---END---As you can see, we loved it. This is a fantastic whisky, IMHO, and I'm thrilled that we were able to try it. Whisky is for sharing, not for staring. It would have been a crying shame for this to sit on someone's shelf, never to be tasted. You can tell we enjoyed it - we went through about 1/3 of the bottle compiling those tasting notes. ;-)
Afterwards we did taste through the other whiskies - which were good, but kind of paled a bit after Confluence. The Mackmyra was well-loved as well, and you can see the influence in Confluence. The other standout for the group was the Flora & Fauna Teaninich - really good. Enough so that we're going to be looking for more Teaninich at auctions to try in the future.
Really, everything was good - and, more importantly, we had a lot of laughs and great conversation trying them.
After we ran the line of whisky, we did open the Last Consignment - and I figured out why it comes with two extra corks! The cork in the bottle is fully seated and covered in wax - so you have to pull it like a wine bottle, and it isn't really designed to go back in. So you use one of the supplied corks to reseal the bottle. Mystery solved!
It is a very rich, unctuous rum that those who tried enjoyed. It is also liquid history, and it was special just to be trying it. The previous evening I'd also read through the little booklet that is included, going through the history of the rum and rituals in the Royal Navy, and that was quite interesting.
The molasses note is front and center, but there are tropical fruits, spices, chocolate, leather, a bit of funk (there has to be some Jamaican rum in there)... a really thought-provoking sip.
As the evening ran down, and some of the crew left for home, we decided to keep the evening going with a few additional drams. So I grabbed some Glenmorangie. We hit Year of the Snake first - I'd opened this, but some of the others had not had a chance. This is still a standout dram - a blend of ex-Bourbon and Amontillado finishing casks.
They we opened the Rare Cask 21 year Mizunara finish. As expected, this is a very fine whisky, but the Snake was still in the lead by consensus.
And we last turned to the new 25 year, The Altus. This is mostly aged in designer bourbon casks, but is seasoned with a little whisky finished in Malmsey Madeira casks. A very juicy, fruit-forward dram, this ended up coming in second place, bumping the Mizunara to 3rd. Still, they're all fantastic.
That pretty much wrapped up the night. It was an amazing time start to finish - fantastic drams, but even better friends.
Next Saturday we're doing a larger gathering - this time for Raising Glasses rums. Should be fun!
#Whiskey #Whiskey #Rum #CompassBox #BlackTot #Mackmyra #Miltonduff #Teaninich #Macallan #HighlandPark #GlenMoray #NashobaValleyWinery #Glenmorangie #Scotch #Bourbon
-
Saturday night was a very special night, for several reasons. As some of you know, this past year was a tough one as my father was diagnosed early on with terminal lung cancer, and subsequently suffered a few health crises which had him in the ICU a couple of times. For most of the past year, Jess & my lives were occupied with helping him, and visiting him regularly in New York. We were happy to do it, but it did mean a pause in our usual get togethers with friends, which we missed.
On December 10th, 2025, my father succumbed to his cancer. As you might expect, the subsequent weeks have been full of grief, and paperwork. Even death has bureaucracy.
December 10th was also the day that the Compass Box Whisky Confluence auction at Bonhams Skinner, to benefit The Wolfsonian-FIU, ended. I'd been watching the auction, but uncertain about bidding - despite being a longtime Compass Box fanatic. However, after my father passed early that morning, I decided that I needed something good to go with the day - and that was going to be winning Confluence, which I did. You only live once, as was painfully clear that day.
My birthday is at the end of December, and we had planned a small gathering with friends to celebrate - but Jess & I both came home from my father's services in NY under the weather, and not really in a celebratory mood, so we cancelled that.
Instead, yesterday we had a gathering which was partly a delayed birthday celebration, partly a toast to my father's memory, and partly an exploration of a truly unique whisky. But, more than anything, it was a gathering of good friends for the first time in quite a while - and boy did I need that more than I realized.
Thank you Jess, Jer, Shamala, Marc, Lizzy, Lisa, Carol, Friski and Betsy for making the evening wonderful.
Before we could dive into the whisky, we had to put something in on stomachs - so we had an assortment of my father's favorites, in his honor. There was an antipasto salad, some veggies and cheese, meatballs and sauce (for subs or over pasta), pickle soup (the Cafe Polonia recipe), kielbasa and sauerkraut, pierogi, a texas sheet cake, rice pudding, cupcakes, and some fine Läderach chocolates.
Properly fueled, we attacked the mission of the evening.
We'd assembled a lineup of whiskies for the evening - of course, there was the Confluence, but we also pulled some expressions from the component distilleries. Obviously, these were not *the* components used to make Confluence, but it was just a fun way to try a few things.
We'd lined up Mackmyra, a Gordon & MacPhail Miltonduff, a G&M Macallan, a Highland Park 25, a Flora & Fauna Teaninich, and a Glen Moray (which was peated, it was what we had). We also had a couple of whiskies from Nashoba Valley Distillery, right here in town - Papa's Bourbon and the Stimulus Twenty 20 year old American Single Malt. Thanks to Marc Follit, our good friend, neighbor, and distiller at Nashoba, for bringing those.
Oh, yes, and there is also the Black Tot Rum Last Consignment. It seemed like another special bottle to open - after the whiskies.
We started off with the Confluence, so that we'd have clear palates - the better to taste it with. Whisky reviewer extraordinaire, Friski Whiski, agreed to write up a joint review with input from the whole crew, and we spent quite a bit of time on that. A most enjoyable time it was, too. We avoided reading the official tasting notes before creating our own, and were pleased to see that our notes ended up aligning fairly well with the official ones once we were done.
Friski posted the review on his page (https://www.facebook.com/friski.whiski/posts/pfbid0cQjrjpvFAm7XzAwf54Y62YPcTHMwcriwn5aF1b4JifQrV9XumhkTR5NYcwrT18tMl), but here it is:
---START---
Dram of a lifetime on 1/10/26Compass Box
Confluence
Blended Malt Whisky
Age: NAS
Abv: 48.9%
No. of bottles: 1Components:
The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Cherry Wine Fresh Seasoned American Oak
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Oloroso First Fill Sherry Seasoned American Oak
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
American First Fill & Virgin Oak Casks
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Swedish Virgin Oak & First Fill Casks
3%Teaninich Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Sherry Butt
12%Miltonduff Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
12%Highland Park Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
Recharred Hogshead
3%The Macallan Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
14%Glen Moray Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
15%Glen Moray Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
15%Availability: 1 of 1 bottle. Bonhams auction house event "Art & Alchemy of Spirits: Presenting Compass Box to Benefit the Wolfsonian".
Crowd source notes: MegaZone, Jess Terry, Jer Johnson, Shamala Rao, Marc Follit, Lizzy Nicolai, Lisa Mulvehill, Carol Ann, Betsey Hendricks, and Friski Whiski.
Color: Medium honey and golden syrup
Neat (without water)
Nose: Soft and crisp. Honey, green apple, marzipan, cooked caramelized pineapple, confectioner’s sugar, lemon citrus, orange peel, with hints of cardamom and anise.Texture: Warm. Creamy, buttery, slightly drying through the finish and pleasantly astringent.
Palate: Apple blossom honey, honey comb, marzipan, caramel, and birchwood. Swedish Kanelbulle (which is a classic Scandinavian cinnamon bun, spiced with cardamom in the dough, less gooey and use a lighter cinnamon application).
Finish: A roller coaster ride of white pepper, fresh green olive oil, saline, toasted almonds, fine Corinthian leather, oak, grapefruit pith, and oleo saccharum.
Unleash the serpent (with water)
Nose: An orchard house of fruit moved to the forefront. Pear, apple frangipane, sliced almonds, sweet cracked malt and fresh cream. Birchbeer float with vanilla bean ice cream. Lakrits, lemon blossoms where floral and citrus combine into a confluence of marriage.Texture: Creamy, buttery, woody without the tannic astringency.
Palate: Baked apple dumplings, roasted butternut squash, demerara sugar, sweet cream, and candied meyer lemon.Finish: Earthy notes get amplified. Warm spiced sweet potato pie with a pastry crust, sea spray, salted caramel, walnut skins, and toffee with subtle hints of a gentle smoke.
Tasting notes glass used: Open Up Chef and Sommelier 5.5oz glass.
The morning after glass: Sweet cracked malt, dust, vanilla, and caramelPairings...
Season: AnyMusic: Lovefool by The Cardigans
Food: Rosemary pork loin with homemade applesauce
Media: Best enjoyed with great company and good conversation.
Overall: From first nose to final sip, several of us ended up in a journey from an apple orchard to our grandmother's seaside cottage while various desserts were being cooked. Fantastic debut from Angela D'Orazio at Compass Box! We really look forward to her future creations.
---END---As you can see, we loved it. This is a fantastic whisky, IMHO, and I'm thrilled that we were able to try it. Whisky is for sharing, not for staring. It would have been a crying shame for this to sit on someone's shelf, never to be tasted. You can tell we enjoyed it - we went through about 1/3 of the bottle compiling those tasting notes. ;-)
Afterwards we did taste through the other whiskies - which were good, but kind of paled a bit after Confluence. The Mackmyra was well-loved as well, and you can see the influence in Confluence. The other standout for the group was the Flora & Fauna Teaninich - really good. Enough so that we're going to be looking for more Teaninich at auctions to try in the future.
Really, everything was good - and, more importantly, we had a lot of laughs and great conversation trying them.
After we ran the line of whisky, we did open the Last Consignment - and I figured out why it comes with two extra corks! The cork in the bottle is fully seated and covered in wax - so you have to pull it like a wine bottle, and it isn't really designed to go back in. So you use one of the supplied corks to reseal the bottle. Mystery solved!
It is a very rich, unctuous rum that those who tried enjoyed. It is also liquid history, and it was special just to be trying it. The previous evening I'd also read through the little booklet that is included, going through the history of the rum and rituals in the Royal Navy, and that was quite interesting.
The molasses note is front and center, but there are tropical fruits, spices, chocolate, leather, a bit of funk (there has to be some Jamaican rum in there)... a really thought-provoking sip.
As the evening ran down, and some of the crew left for home, we decided to keep the evening going with a few additional drams. So I grabbed some Glenmorangie. We hit Year of the Snake first - I'd opened this, but some of the others had not had a chance. This is still a standout dram - a blend of ex-Bourbon and Amontillado finishing casks.
They we opened the Rare Cask 21 year Mizunara finish. As expected, this is a very fine whisky, but the Snake was still in the lead by consensus.
And we last turned to the new 25 year, The Altus. This is mostly aged in designer bourbon casks, but is seasoned with a little whisky finished in Malmsey Madeira casks. A very juicy, fruit-forward dram, this ended up coming in second place, bumping the Mizunara to 3rd. Still, they're all fantastic.
That pretty much wrapped up the night. It was an amazing time start to finish - fantastic drams, but even better friends.
Next Saturday we're doing a larger gathering - this time for Raising Glasses rums. Should be fun!
#Whiskey #Whiskey #Rum #CompassBox #BlackTot #Mackmyra #Miltonduff #Teaninich #Macallan #HighlandPark #GlenMoray #NashobaValleyWinery #Glenmorangie #Scotch #Bourbon
-
Saturday night was a very special night, for several reasons. As some of you know, this past year was a tough one as my father was diagnosed early on with terminal lung cancer, and subsequently suffered a few health crises which had him in the ICU a couple of times. For most of the past year, Jess & my lives were occupied with helping him, and visiting him regularly in New York. We were happy to do it, but it did mean a pause in our usual get togethers with friends, which we missed.
On December 10th, 2025, my father succumbed to his cancer. As you might expect, the subsequent weeks have been full of grief, and paperwork. Even death has bureaucracy.
December 10th was also the day that the Compass Box Whisky Confluence auction at Bonhams Skinner, to benefit The Wolfsonian-FIU, ended. I'd been watching the auction, but uncertain about bidding - despite being a longtime Compass Box fanatic. However, after my father passed early that morning, I decided that I needed something good to go with the day - and that was going to be winning Confluence, which I did. You only live once, as was painfully clear that day.
My birthday is at the end of December, and we had planned a small gathering with friends to celebrate - but Jess & I both came home from my father's services in NY under the weather, and not really in a celebratory mood, so we cancelled that.
Instead, yesterday we had a gathering which was partly a delayed birthday celebration, partly a toast to my father's memory, and partly an exploration of a truly unique whisky. But, more than anything, it was a gathering of good friends for the first time in quite a while - and boy did I need that more than I realized.
Thank you Jess, Jer, Shamala, Marc, Lizzy, Lisa, Carol, Friski and Betsy for making the evening wonderful.
Before we could dive into the whisky, we had to put something in on stomachs - so we had an assortment of my father's favorites, in his honor. There was an antipasto salad, some veggies and cheese, meatballs and sauce (for subs or over pasta), pickle soup (the Cafe Polonia recipe), kielbasa and sauerkraut, pierogi, a texas sheet cake, rice pudding, cupcakes, and some fine Läderach chocolates.
Properly fueled, we attacked the mission of the evening.
We'd assembled a lineup of whiskies for the evening - of course, there was the Confluence, but we also pulled some expressions from the component distilleries. Obviously, these were not *the* components used to make Confluence, but it was just a fun way to try a few things.
We'd lined up Mackmyra, a Gordon & MacPhail Miltonduff, a G&M Macallan, a Highland Park 25, a Flora & Fauna Teaninich, and a Glen Moray (which was peated, it was what we had). We also had a couple of whiskies from Nashoba Valley Distillery, right here in town - Papa's Bourbon and the Stimulus Twenty 20 year old American Single Malt. Thanks to Marc Follit, our good friend, neighbor, and distiller at Nashoba, for bringing those.
Oh, yes, and there is also the Black Tot Rum Last Consignment. It seemed like another special bottle to open - after the whiskies.
We started off with the Confluence, so that we'd have clear palates - the better to taste it with. Whisky reviewer extraordinaire, Friski Whiski, agreed to write up a joint review with input from the whole crew, and we spent quite a bit of time on that. A most enjoyable time it was, too. We avoided reading the official tasting notes before creating our own, and were pleased to see that our notes ended up aligning fairly well with the official ones once we were done.
Friski posted the review on his page (https://www.facebook.com/friski.whiski/posts/pfbid0cQjrjpvFAm7XzAwf54Y62YPcTHMwcriwn5aF1b4JifQrV9XumhkTR5NYcwrT18tMl), but here it is:
---START---
Dram of a lifetime on 1/10/26Compass Box
Confluence
Blended Malt Whisky
Age: NAS
Abv: 48.9%
No. of bottles: 1Components:
The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Cherry Wine Fresh Seasoned American Oak
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Oloroso First Fill Sherry Seasoned American Oak
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
American First Fill & Virgin Oak Casks
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Swedish Virgin Oak & First Fill Casks
3%Teaninich Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Sherry Butt
12%Miltonduff Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
12%Highland Park Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
Recharred Hogshead
3%The Macallan Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
14%Glen Moray Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
15%Glen Moray Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
15%Availability: 1 of 1 bottle. Bonhams auction house event "Art & Alchemy of Spirits: Presenting Compass Box to Benefit the Wolfsonian".
Crowd source notes: MegaZone, Jess Terry, Jer Johnson, Shamala Rao, Marc Follit, Lizzy Nicolai, Lisa Mulvehill, Carol Ann, Betsey Hendricks, and Friski Whiski.
Color: Medium honey and golden syrup
Neat (without water)
Nose: Soft and crisp. Honey, green apple, marzipan, cooked caramelized pineapple, confectioner’s sugar, lemon citrus, orange peel, with hints of cardamom and anise.Texture: Warm. Creamy, buttery, slightly drying through the finish and pleasantly astringent.
Palate: Apple blossom honey, honey comb, marzipan, caramel, and birchwood. Swedish Kanelbulle (which is a classic Scandinavian cinnamon bun, spiced with cardamom in the dough, less gooey and use a lighter cinnamon application).
Finish: A roller coaster ride of white pepper, fresh green olive oil, saline, toasted almonds, fine Corinthian leather, oak, grapefruit pith, and oleo saccharum.
Unleash the serpent (with water)
Nose: An orchard house of fruit moved to the forefront. Pear, apple frangipane, sliced almonds, sweet cracked malt and fresh cream. Birchbeer float with vanilla bean ice cream. Lakrits, lemon blossoms where floral and citrus combine into a confluence of marriage.Texture: Creamy, buttery, woody without the tannic astringency.
Palate: Baked apple dumplings, roasted butternut squash, demerara sugar, sweet cream, and candied meyer lemon.Finish: Earthy notes get amplified. Warm spiced sweet potato pie with a pastry crust, sea spray, salted caramel, walnut skins, and toffee with subtle hints of a gentle smoke.
Tasting notes glass used: Open Up Chef and Sommelier 5.5oz glass.
The morning after glass: Sweet cracked malt, dust, vanilla, and caramelPairings...
Season: AnyMusic: Lovefool by The Cardigans
Food: Rosemary pork loin with homemade applesauce
Media: Best enjoyed with great company and good conversation.
Overall: From first nose to final sip, several of us ended up in a journey from an apple orchard to our grandmother's seaside cottage while various desserts were being cooked. Fantastic debut from Angela D'Orazio at Compass Box! We really look forward to her future creations.
---END---As you can see, we loved it. This is a fantastic whisky, IMHO, and I'm thrilled that we were able to try it. Whisky is for sharing, not for staring. It would have been a crying shame for this to sit on someone's shelf, never to be tasted. You can tell we enjoyed it - we went through about 1/3 of the bottle compiling those tasting notes. ;-)
Afterwards we did taste through the other whiskies - which were good, but kind of paled a bit after Confluence. The Mackmyra was well-loved as well, and you can see the influence in Confluence. The other standout for the group was the Flora & Fauna Teaninich - really good. Enough so that we're going to be looking for more Teaninich at auctions to try in the future.
Really, everything was good - and, more importantly, we had a lot of laughs and great conversation trying them.
After we ran the line of whisky, we did open the Last Consignment - and I figured out why it comes with two extra corks! The cork in the bottle is fully seated and covered in wax - so you have to pull it like a wine bottle, and it isn't really designed to go back in. So you use one of the supplied corks to reseal the bottle. Mystery solved!
It is a very rich, unctuous rum that those who tried enjoyed. It is also liquid history, and it was special just to be trying it. The previous evening I'd also read through the little booklet that is included, going through the history of the rum and rituals in the Royal Navy, and that was quite interesting.
The molasses note is front and center, but there are tropical fruits, spices, chocolate, leather, a bit of funk (there has to be some Jamaican rum in there)... a really thought-provoking sip.
As the evening ran down, and some of the crew left for home, we decided to keep the evening going with a few additional drams. So I grabbed some Glenmorangie. We hit Year of the Snake first - I'd opened this, but some of the others had not had a chance. This is still a standout dram - a blend of ex-Bourbon and Amontillado finishing casks.
They we opened the Rare Cask 21 year Mizunara finish. As expected, this is a very fine whisky, but the Snake was still in the lead by consensus.
And we last turned to the new 25 year, The Altus. This is mostly aged in designer bourbon casks, but is seasoned with a little whisky finished in Malmsey Madeira casks. A very juicy, fruit-forward dram, this ended up coming in second place, bumping the Mizunara to 3rd. Still, they're all fantastic.
That pretty much wrapped up the night. It was an amazing time start to finish - fantastic drams, but even better friends.
Next Saturday we're doing a larger gathering - this time for Raising Glasses rums. Should be fun!
#Whiskey #Whiskey #Rum #CompassBox #BlackTot #Mackmyra #Miltonduff #Teaninich #Macallan #HighlandPark #GlenMoray #NashobaValleyWinery #Glenmorangie #Scotch #Bourbon
-
Saturday night was a very special night, for several reasons. As some of you know, this past year was a tough one as my father was diagnosed early on with terminal lung cancer, and subsequently suffered a few health crises which had him in the ICU a couple of times. For most of the past year, Jess & my lives were occupied with helping him, and visiting him regularly in New York. We were happy to do it, but it did mean a pause in our usual get togethers with friends, which we missed.
On December 10th, 2025, my father succumbed to his cancer. As you might expect, the subsequent weeks have been full of grief, and paperwork. Even death has bureaucracy.
December 10th was also the day that the Compass Box Whisky Confluence auction at Bonhams Skinner, to benefit The Wolfsonian-FIU, ended. I'd been watching the auction, but uncertain about bidding - despite being a longtime Compass Box fanatic. However, after my father passed early that morning, I decided that I needed something good to go with the day - and that was going to be winning Confluence, which I did. You only live once, as was painfully clear that day.
My birthday is at the end of December, and we had planned a small gathering with friends to celebrate - but Jess & I both came home from my father's services in NY under the weather, and not really in a celebratory mood, so we cancelled that.
Instead, yesterday we had a gathering which was partly a delayed birthday celebration, partly a toast to my father's memory, and partly an exploration of a truly unique whisky. But, more than anything, it was a gathering of good friends for the first time in quite a while - and boy did I need that more than I realized.
Thank you Jess, Jer, Shamala, Marc, Lizzy, Lisa, Carol, Friski and Betsy for making the evening wonderful.
Before we could dive into the whisky, we had to put something in on stomachs - so we had an assortment of my father's favorites, in his honor. There was an antipasto salad, some veggies and cheese, meatballs and sauce (for subs or over pasta), pickle soup (the Cafe Polonia recipe), kielbasa and sauerkraut, pierogi, a texas sheet cake, rice pudding, cupcakes, and some fine Läderach chocolates.
Properly fueled, we attacked the mission of the evening.
We'd assembled a lineup of whiskies for the evening - of course, there was the Confluence, but we also pulled some expressions from the component distilleries. Obviously, these were not *the* components used to make Confluence, but it was just a fun way to try a few things.
We'd lined up Mackmyra, a Gordon & MacPhail Miltonduff, a G&M Macallan, a Highland Park 25, a Flora & Fauna Teaninich, and a Glen Moray (which was peated, it was what we had). We also had a couple of whiskies from Nashoba Valley Distillery, right here in town - Papa's Bourbon and the Stimulus Twenty 20 year old American Single Malt. Thanks to Marc Follit, our good friend, neighbor, and distiller at Nashoba, for bringing those.
Oh, yes, and there is also the Black Tot Rum Last Consignment. It seemed like another special bottle to open - after the whiskies.
We started off with the Confluence, so that we'd have clear palates - the better to taste it with. Whisky reviewer extraordinaire, Friski Whiski, agreed to write up a joint review with input from the whole crew, and we spent quite a bit of time on that. A most enjoyable time it was, too. We avoided reading the official tasting notes before creating our own, and were pleased to see that our notes ended up aligning fairly well with the official ones once we were done.
Friski posted the review on his page (https://www.facebook.com/friski.whiski/posts/pfbid0cQjrjpvFAm7XzAwf54Y62YPcTHMwcriwn5aF1b4JifQrV9XumhkTR5NYcwrT18tMl), but here it is:
---START---
Dram of a lifetime on 1/10/26Compass Box
Confluence
Blended Malt Whisky
Age: NAS
Abv: 48.9%
No. of bottles: 1Components:
The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Cherry Wine Fresh Seasoned American Oak
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Oloroso First Fill Sherry Seasoned American Oak
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
American First Fill & Virgin Oak Casks
9%The Mackmyra Distillery
Swedish Single Malt
Swedish Virgin Oak & First Fill Casks
3%Teaninich Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Sherry Butt
12%Miltonduff Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
12%Highland Park Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
Recharred Hogshead
3%The Macallan Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
14%Glen Moray Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
15%Glen Moray Distillery
Scottish Single Malt
First Fill Bourbon Barrel
15%Availability: 1 of 1 bottle. Bonhams auction house event "Art & Alchemy of Spirits: Presenting Compass Box to Benefit the Wolfsonian".
Crowd source notes: MegaZone, Jess Terry, Jer Johnson, Shamala Rao, Marc Follit, Lizzy Nicolai, Lisa Mulvehill, Carol Ann, Betsey Hendricks, and Friski Whiski.
Color: Medium honey and golden syrup
Neat (without water)
Nose: Soft and crisp. Honey, green apple, marzipan, cooked caramelized pineapple, confectioner’s sugar, lemon citrus, orange peel, with hints of cardamom and anise.Texture: Warm. Creamy, buttery, slightly drying through the finish and pleasantly astringent.
Palate: Apple blossom honey, honey comb, marzipan, caramel, and birchwood. Swedish Kanelbulle (which is a classic Scandinavian cinnamon bun, spiced with cardamom in the dough, less gooey and use a lighter cinnamon application).
Finish: A roller coaster ride of white pepper, fresh green olive oil, saline, toasted almonds, fine Corinthian leather, oak, grapefruit pith, and oleo saccharum.
Unleash the serpent (with water)
Nose: An orchard house of fruit moved to the forefront. Pear, apple frangipane, sliced almonds, sweet cracked malt and fresh cream. Birchbeer float with vanilla bean ice cream. Lakrits, lemon blossoms where floral and citrus combine into a confluence of marriage.Texture: Creamy, buttery, woody without the tannic astringency.
Palate: Baked apple dumplings, roasted butternut squash, demerara sugar, sweet cream, and candied meyer lemon.Finish: Earthy notes get amplified. Warm spiced sweet potato pie with a pastry crust, sea spray, salted caramel, walnut skins, and toffee with subtle hints of a gentle smoke.
Tasting notes glass used: Open Up Chef and Sommelier 5.5oz glass.
The morning after glass: Sweet cracked malt, dust, vanilla, and caramelPairings...
Season: AnyMusic: Lovefool by The Cardigans
Food: Rosemary pork loin with homemade applesauce
Media: Best enjoyed with great company and good conversation.
Overall: From first nose to final sip, several of us ended up in a journey from an apple orchard to our grandmother's seaside cottage while various desserts were being cooked. Fantastic debut from Angela D'Orazio at Compass Box! We really look forward to her future creations.
---END---As you can see, we loved it. This is a fantastic whisky, IMHO, and I'm thrilled that we were able to try it. Whisky is for sharing, not for staring. It would have been a crying shame for this to sit on someone's shelf, never to be tasted. You can tell we enjoyed it - we went through about 1/3 of the bottle compiling those tasting notes. ;-)
Afterwards we did taste through the other whiskies - which were good, but kind of paled a bit after Confluence. The Mackmyra was well-loved as well, and you can see the influence in Confluence. The other standout for the group was the Flora & Fauna Teaninich - really good. Enough so that we're going to be looking for more Teaninich at auctions to try in the future.
Really, everything was good - and, more importantly, we had a lot of laughs and great conversation trying them.
After we ran the line of whisky, we did open the Last Consignment - and I figured out why it comes with two extra corks! The cork in the bottle is fully seated and covered in wax - so you have to pull it like a wine bottle, and it isn't really designed to go back in. So you use one of the supplied corks to reseal the bottle. Mystery solved!
It is a very rich, unctuous rum that those who tried enjoyed. It is also liquid history, and it was special just to be trying it. The previous evening I'd also read through the little booklet that is included, going through the history of the rum and rituals in the Royal Navy, and that was quite interesting.
The molasses note is front and center, but there are tropical fruits, spices, chocolate, leather, a bit of funk (there has to be some Jamaican rum in there)... a really thought-provoking sip.
As the evening ran down, and some of the crew left for home, we decided to keep the evening going with a few additional drams. So I grabbed some Glenmorangie. We hit Year of the Snake first - I'd opened this, but some of the others had not had a chance. This is still a standout dram - a blend of ex-Bourbon and Amontillado finishing casks.
They we opened the Rare Cask 21 year Mizunara finish. As expected, this is a very fine whisky, but the Snake was still in the lead by consensus.
And we last turned to the new 25 year, The Altus. This is mostly aged in designer bourbon casks, but is seasoned with a little whisky finished in Malmsey Madeira casks. A very juicy, fruit-forward dram, this ended up coming in second place, bumping the Mizunara to 3rd. Still, they're all fantastic.
That pretty much wrapped up the night. It was an amazing time start to finish - fantastic drams, but even better friends.
Next Saturday we're doing a larger gathering - this time for Raising Glasses rums. Should be fun!
#Whiskey #Whiskey #Rum #CompassBox #BlackTot #Mackmyra #Miltonduff #Teaninich #Macallan #HighlandPark #GlenMoray #NashobaValleyWinery #Glenmorangie #Scotch #Bourbon
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Here is another recipe for delicious borsch. Ukrainian dish, which includes in the top 20 most delicious soups in the world according to the CNN edition.
⠀
Fish borsch is not just a wonderful and aromatic soup, all components of which are useful for the body.
⠀
It is light and nutritious at the same time. It’s delicious to eat for lunch or dinner.
⠀
Directions:
https://proborsch.com/recipe/flavored-borsch-with-cod
⠀
#ProBorsch #borsch #ukrainian #borscht #soup #vegan #vegetarian #ukraine #food #recipe #ukrainianfood #yummy -
Finally Frost
As I sat at the kitchen table shelling dry beans Friday afternoon, idly gazing out the sliding glass doors to the deck. Spider Squirrel came for a visit. The daytime temperatures have settled into crisp autumn and the glass door was closed, but the screen door was open, pushed back almost all the way to the other side of the windows. Spider Squirrel hopped along the deck toward the glass door and leapt at it, expecting to latch onto the screen that wasn’t there. They splatted belly first against the window and slid back down to the deck.
I saw the whole thing and was having a great good laugh. Meanwhile, Spider Squirrel sat there a bit stunned for a few seconds before looking at the window in what I imagine was puzzlement. Then they turned around, climbed up the deck railing, jumped into the witch hazel, and scampered away.
I suppose it is too much to hope that Spider Squirrel learned a lesson and will, henceforward, cease throwing themself at the screen for the fun of scrambling across it leaving tiny claw holes. But at least for a moment I got to enjoy a bit of just deserts, especially since I’m pretty sure it was Spider Squirrel who demolished the large pumpkin in the garden.
The sweet potatoes are not from the garden but everything else isAfter almost a week of “it might frost tonight” forecasts, we finally got frost Thursday night/Friday morning. This means the growing season is now officially over. Oh, I still have collards in the garden and in a week we can probably start digging sunchokes, but the growing garden is done. Also, I can finally plant the garlic and cut the stinging nettles for winter retting.
Earlier in the week James and I were out picking all the still green tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos. I also picked the Ukraine winter squash—first time growing it—and a very small not ripe butternut that may or may not ripen indoors, we’ll see.
After all the final things are done, it will be nice to have a little break. How long do you think it will be before I start planning what to plant in next year’s garden? Heh.
Something new I will plant came to me last night as a gift from one of my Beloved Community Circle members. They had attended the funeral of a longtime friend who was an avid gardener and the family gave out little packets of seeds from his garden as a remembrance. Isn’t that a marvelous idea? I hope someone is able to do that for me when my time comes.
The seeds I was gifted are a crookneck smooth butternut heirloom winter squash. Since that is all I know, other than he originally got the seeds from his brother in 2022, they are now called “Jerry’s Crookneck Butternut.” I am honored to receive these seeds and look forward to growing them next year. I will be sure to give the non-gardening Circle friend who passed the seeds on to me a squash.
I do have a small complication though. Since I already grow a variety of butternut that I really like and that does well, I need to keep the two at a distance so they don’t cross-pollinate. Because of two large branches that died on one of the apple trees in the front yard, there is now a nice sunny patch that used to be shade. I believe it is big enough and sunny enough to plant a couple of Jerry’s Crookneck. I will need to be vigilant when the squash grows and make sure to protect them from Spider Squirrel and other miscreants. Hopefully front and backyard are far enough apart that the friendly bees don’t end up creating a whole new squash variety, but if they do, well that could be interesting too!
James and I are celebrating 34 years of wedded bliss this weekend. To celebrate we had lunch at our favorite plant-based diner. I took a chance on their burger of the month that they dubbed “Demon Burger.” It has smoked serrano aioli, ghost pepper mustard, pickled Granny Smith apples, Chao cheese (vegan), and arugula on a black sesame bun. I asked how spicy it was and was told, well it’s not Minnesota spicy. That didn’t scare me because “Minnesota spicy” is code for spice was waved around in the general area of your meal but not actually applied to it in any sort of quantity to make it above hint of spicy.
The serrano pepper horns are a nice touch, and no I did not eat those–too hot!So I asked whether after one bite my mouth would be on fire and I’d not be able to taste anything else the rest of the meal. Oh no, the server said, it’s not that hot. It’s hot enough to make your nose run, but you will still be able to taste all the things. Ok, let’s do it!
I can report that my nose didn’t run but my eyes watered a little bit and my mouth and lips tingled pleasantly the whole meal and for a little while afterwards. I was indeed able to taste the flavors and not be overwhelmed by the heat. I enjoyed it very much and hope I get to enjoy it again sometime, maybe next October.
Meanwhile, James has been on a kitchening tear, making some amazing meals. Friday night for dinner he made sweet potato apple soup which we ate with multigrain sourdough bread that I had made. Earlier in the week there was cous cous chick pea skillet, smokey bacony potato quesadillas, and savory whipped tofu and avocado on sourdough toast. Saturday I made a basic sourdough focaccia that James used as a pizza base adding leftover whipped tofu and hummus, bell pepper, sweet onion and garlic from the final farmers market of the season, some collards from the garden, and homemade “cheese.” So much yum!
On the reading front, I just finished a book called Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer. Our protagonist, Ruth, is caught shoplifting in the megachurch-owned craft store in her small town. The store goes into lockdown and she is strangely the only person in it except for the “employees” who have nefarious plans and are now trying to catch her. The book will not be winning any prizes, but it is amazing how much damage a person can do with craft supplies as weapons. It is horror light, though a bit gory at times, and I was getting a bit bored by the end and admit to skimming, but it was entertaining enough for spooky season. I passed it along to a coworker who accumulates new crafts and supplies even faster than I do.
A book that is very good is Madeline Thien’s The Book of Records. Lina and her father arrive for an extended stay at The Sea, a stateless place where migrants from all over gather until they can get a boat to somewhere else. There are four stories running through the book that speak to and echo each other, the main story of Lina and her father, and the stories of Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu, seventeenth-century Jewish scholar Baruch Spinoza and his exile from the Jewish community in Amsterdam, and twentieth-century philosopher Hannah Arendt fleeing the Nazis.
The narration moves between all the stories as well between past, present and future in Lina and her father’s story. It might sound like it is confusing but it is so well written I was never once lost. It also sounds like it might be heavy, but is often lightened with jokes like this one:
Q: Does anyone know why Beethoven got rid of his chickens?
A: They wouldn’t stop saying Bach, Bach, Bach!The book has much to say about time, memory, art, resistance, migrants and refugees, family both blood and chosen, survival, and much more. Here is a more serious quote from Du Fu’s story that rings all too true for out present moment:
Politics is dead. Integrity is dead. Art and ingenuity have been assassinated. Rot festers everywhere, and its source is the imperial capital. We live in an age of corruption. Haven’t you been paying attention? Don’t you see how abundance has created extravagance, which has necessitated scarcity everywhere, and the men in the capital are up to their necks in extortion, and that’s just the beginning? What’s left for you and me, a bit of poetry? If so, we should wear our learning with a bit more disrespect, do you know what I mean?
If I’ve piqued your interest, or you have already read the book, be sure to listen to (or read the transcript) the Between the Covers podcast interview with Thien.
Finally, in some potentially worrisome news, Ecuadorians will be voting on November 16th on whether to rewrite their constitution. The current constitution was written in 2008 and became the first in the world to enshrine the rights of nature. However, the current president is a right-wing anti-environmentalist who sees the 2008 constitution as an obstacle to business development. Indigenous people and plenty of others in Ecuador, are concerned not only for the environment but also for the future of the country’s democracy. Let’s hope the voting is free and fair and an overwhelming majority refuse rewriting the constitution.
So as not to leave you on a down note, please enjoy “This Joy” by the Resistance Revival Chorus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TbDPwA09Bc
Until next time, keep well and be excellent to each other.
#CraftingForSinners #demonBurger #EcuadorianConstitution #JerrySCrookneckButternut #MinnesotaSpicy #RightsOfNature #seeds #SpiderSquirrel #TheBookOfRecords #ThisIsJoy #weddingAnniversary
-
Finally Frost
As I sat at the kitchen table shelling dry beans Friday afternoon, idly gazing out the sliding glass doors to the deck. Spider Squirrel came for a visit. The daytime temperatures have settled into crisp autumn and the glass door was closed, but the screen door was open, pushed back almost all the way to the other side of the windows. Spider Squirrel hopped along the deck toward the glass door and leapt at it, expecting to latch onto the screen that wasn’t there. They splatted belly first against the window and slid back down to the deck.
I saw the whole thing and was having a great good laugh. Meanwhile, Spider Squirrel sat there a bit stunned for a few seconds before looking at the window in what I imagine was puzzlement. Then they turned around, climbed up the deck railing, jumped into the witch hazel, and scampered away.
I suppose it is too much to hope that Spider Squirrel learned a lesson and will, henceforward, cease throwing themself at the screen for the fun of scrambling across it leaving tiny claw holes. But at least for a moment I got to enjoy a bit of just deserts, especially since I’m pretty sure it was Spider Squirrel who demolished the large pumpkin in the garden.
The sweet potatoes are not from the garden but everything else isAfter almost a week of “it might frost tonight” forecasts, we finally got frost Thursday night/Friday morning. This means the growing season is now officially over. Oh, I still have collards in the garden and in a week we can probably start digging sunchokes, but the growing garden is done. Also, I can finally plant the garlic and cut the stinging nettles for winter retting.
Earlier in the week James and I were out picking all the still green tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos. I also picked the Ukraine winter squash—first time growing it—and a very small not ripe butternut that may or may not ripen indoors, we’ll see.
After all the final things are done, it will be nice to have a little break. How long do you think it will be before I start planning what to plant in next year’s garden? Heh.
Something new I will plant came to me last night as a gift from one of my Beloved Community Circle members. They had attended the funeral of a longtime friend who was an avid gardener and the family gave out little packets of seeds from his garden as a remembrance. Isn’t that a marvelous idea? I hope someone is able to do that for me when my time comes.
The seeds I was gifted are a crookneck smooth butternut heirloom winter squash. Since that is all I know, other than he originally got the seeds from his brother in 2022, they are now called “Jerry’s Crookneck Butternut.” I am honored to receive these seeds and look forward to growing them next year. I will be sure to give the non-gardening Circle friend who passed the seeds on to me a squash.
I do have a small complication though. Since I already grow a variety of butternut that I really like and that does well, I need to keep the two at a distance so they don’t cross-pollinate. Because of two large branches that died on one of the apple trees in the front yard, there is now a nice sunny patch that used to be shade. I believe it is big enough and sunny enough to plant a couple of Jerry’s Crookneck. I will need to be vigilant when the squash grows and make sure to protect them from Spider Squirrel and other miscreants. Hopefully front and backyard are far enough apart that the friendly bees don’t end up creating a whole new squash variety, but if they do, well that could be interesting too!
James and I are celebrating 34 years of wedded bliss this weekend. To celebrate we had lunch at our favorite plant-based diner. I took a chance on their burger of the month that they dubbed “Demon Burger.” It has smoked serrano aioli, ghost pepper mustard, pickled Granny Smith apples, Chao cheese (vegan), and arugula on a black sesame bun. I asked how spicy it was and was told, well it’s not Minnesota spicy. That didn’t scare me because “Minnesota spicy” is code for spice was waved around in the general area of your meal but not actually applied to it in any sort of quantity to make it above hint of spicy.
The serrano pepper horns are a nice touch, and no I did not eat those–too hot!So I asked whether after one bite my mouth would be on fire and I’d not be able to taste anything else the rest of the meal. Oh no, the server said, it’s not that hot. It’s hot enough to make your nose run, but you will still be able to taste all the things. Ok, let’s do it!
I can report that my nose didn’t run but my eyes watered a little bit and my mouth and lips tingled pleasantly the whole meal and for a little while afterwards. I was indeed able to taste the flavors and not be overwhelmed by the heat. I enjoyed it very much and hope I get to enjoy it again sometime, maybe next October.
Meanwhile, James has been on a kitchening tear, making some amazing meals. Friday night for dinner he made sweet potato apple soup which we ate with multigrain sourdough bread that I had made. Earlier in the week there was cous cous chick pea skillet, smokey bacony potato quesadillas, and savory whipped tofu and avocado on sourdough toast. Saturday I made a basic sourdough focaccia that James used as a pizza base adding leftover whipped tofu and hummus, bell pepper, sweet onion and garlic from the final farmers market of the season, some collards from the garden, and homemade “cheese.” So much yum!
On the reading front, I just finished a book called Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer. Our protagonist, Ruth, is caught shoplifting in the megachurch-owned craft store in her small town. The store goes into lockdown and she is strangely the only person in it except for the “employees” who have nefarious plans and are now trying to catch her. The book will not be winning any prizes, but it is amazing how much damage a person can do with craft supplies as weapons. It is horror light, though a bit gory at times, and I was getting a bit bored by the end and admit to skimming, but it was entertaining enough for spooky season. I passed it along to a coworker who accumulates new crafts and supplies even faster than I do.
A book that is very good is Madeline Thien’s The Book of Records. Lina and her father arrive for an extended stay at The Sea, a stateless place where migrants from all over gather until they can get a boat to somewhere else. There are four stories running through the book that speak to and echo each other, the main story of Lina and her father, and the stories of Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu, seventeenth-century Jewish scholar Baruch Spinoza and his exile from the Jewish community in Amsterdam, and twentieth-century philosopher Hannah Arendt fleeing the Nazis.
The narration moves between all the stories as well between past, present and future in Lina and her father’s story. It might sound like it is confusing but it is so well written I was never once lost. It also sounds like it might be heavy, but is often lightened with jokes like this one:
Q: Does anyone know why Beethoven got rid of his chickens?
A: They wouldn’t stop saying Bach, Bach, Bach!The book has much to say about time, memory, art, resistance, migrants and refugees, family both blood and chosen, survival, and much more. Here is a more serious quote from Du Fu’s story that rings all too true for out present moment:
Politics is dead. Integrity is dead. Art and ingenuity have been assassinated. Rot festers everywhere, and its source is the imperial capital. We live in an age of corruption. Haven’t you been paying attention? Don’t you see how abundance has created extravagance, which has necessitated scarcity everywhere, and the men in the capital are up to their necks in extortion, and that’s just the beginning? What’s left for you and me, a bit of poetry? If so, we should wear our learning with a bit more disrespect, do you know what I mean?
If I’ve piqued your interest, or you have already read the book, be sure to listen to (or read the transcript) the Between the Covers podcast interview with Thien.
Finally, in some potentially worrisome news, Ecuadorians will be voting on November 16th on whether to rewrite their constitution. The current constitution was written in 2008 and became the first in the world to enshrine the rights of nature. However, the current president is a right-wing anti-environmentalist who sees the 2008 constitution as an obstacle to business development. Indigenous people and plenty of others in Ecuador, are concerned not only for the environment but also for the future of the country’s democracy. Let’s hope the voting is free and fair and an overwhelming majority refuse rewriting the constitution.
So as not to leave you on a down note, please enjoy “This Joy” by the Resistance Revival Chorus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TbDPwA09Bc
Until next time, keep well and be excellent to each other.
#CraftingForSinners #demonBurger #EcuadorianConstitution #JerrySCrookneckButternut #MinnesotaSpicy #RightsOfNature #seeds #SpiderSquirrel #TheBookOfRecords #ThisIsJoy #weddingAnniversary
-
Finally Frost
As I sat at the kitchen table shelling dry beans Friday afternoon, idly gazing out the sliding glass doors to the deck. Spider Squirrel came for a visit. The daytime temperatures have settled into crisp autumn and the glass door was closed, but the screen door was open, pushed back almost all the way to the other side of the windows. Spider Squirrel hopped along the deck toward the glass door and leapt at it, expecting to latch onto the screen that wasn’t there. They splatted belly first against the window and slid back down to the deck.
I saw the whole thing and was having a great good laugh. Meanwhile, Spider Squirrel sat there a bit stunned for a few seconds before looking at the window in what I imagine was puzzlement. Then they turned around, climbed up the deck railing, jumped into the witch hazel, and scampered away.
I suppose it is too much to hope that Spider Squirrel learned a lesson and will, henceforward, cease throwing themself at the screen for the fun of scrambling across it leaving tiny claw holes. But at least for a moment I got to enjoy a bit of just deserts, especially since I’m pretty sure it was Spider Squirrel who demolished the large pumpkin in the garden.
The sweet potatoes are not from the garden but everything else isAfter almost a week of “it might frost tonight” forecasts, we finally got frost Thursday night/Friday morning. This means the growing season is now officially over. Oh, I still have collards in the garden and in a week we can probably start digging sunchokes, but the growing garden is done. Also, I can finally plant the garlic and cut the stinging nettles for winter retting.
Earlier in the week James and I were out picking all the still green tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillos. I also picked the Ukraine winter squash—first time growing it—and a very small not ripe butternut that may or may not ripen indoors, we’ll see.
After all the final things are done, it will be nice to have a little break. How long do you think it will be before I start planning what to plant in next year’s garden? Heh.
Something new I will plant came to me last night as a gift from one of my Beloved Community Circle members. They had attended the funeral of a longtime friend who was an avid gardener and the family gave out little packets of seeds from his garden as a remembrance. Isn’t that a marvelous idea? I hope someone is able to do that for me when my time comes.
The seeds I was gifted are a crookneck smooth butternut heirloom winter squash. Since that is all I know, other than he originally got the seeds from his brother in 2022, they are now called “Jerry’s Crookneck Butternut.” I am honored to receive these seeds and look forward to growing them next year. I will be sure to give the non-gardening Circle friend who passed the seeds on to me a squash.
I do have a small complication though. Since I already grow a variety of butternut that I really like and that does well, I need to keep the two at a distance so they don’t cross-pollinate. Because of two large branches that died on one of the apple trees in the front yard, there is now a nice sunny patch that used to be shade. I believe it is big enough and sunny enough to plant a couple of Jerry’s Crookneck. I will need to be vigilant when the squash grows and make sure to protect them from Spider Squirrel and other miscreants. Hopefully front and backyard are far enough apart that the friendly bees don’t end up creating a whole new squash variety, but if they do, well that could be interesting too!
James and I are celebrating 34 years of wedded bliss this weekend. To celebrate we had lunch at our favorite plant-based diner. I took a chance on their burger of the month that they dubbed “Demon Burger.” It has smoked serrano aioli, ghost pepper mustard, pickled Granny Smith apples, Chao cheese (vegan), and arugula on a black sesame bun. I asked how spicy it was and was told, well it’s not Minnesota spicy. That didn’t scare me because “Minnesota spicy” is code for spice was waved around in the general area of your meal but not actually applied to it in any sort of quantity to make it above hint of spicy.
The serrano pepper horns are a nice touch, and no I did not eat those–too hot!So I asked whether after one bite my mouth would be on fire and I’d not be able to taste anything else the rest of the meal. Oh no, the server said, it’s not that hot. It’s hot enough to make your nose run, but you will still be able to taste all the things. Ok, let’s do it!
I can report that my nose didn’t run but my eyes watered a little bit and my mouth and lips tingled pleasantly the whole meal and for a little while afterwards. I was indeed able to taste the flavors and not be overwhelmed by the heat. I enjoyed it very much and hope I get to enjoy it again sometime, maybe next October.
Meanwhile, James has been on a kitchening tear, making some amazing meals. Friday night for dinner he made sweet potato apple soup which we ate with multigrain sourdough bread that I had made. Earlier in the week there was cous cous chick pea skillet, smokey bacony potato quesadillas, and savory whipped tofu and avocado on sourdough toast. Saturday I made a basic sourdough focaccia that James used as a pizza base adding leftover whipped tofu and hummus, bell pepper, sweet onion and garlic from the final farmers market of the season, some collards from the garden, and homemade “cheese.” So much yum!
On the reading front, I just finished a book called Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer. Our protagonist, Ruth, is caught shoplifting in the megachurch-owned craft store in her small town. The store goes into lockdown and she is strangely the only person in it except for the “employees” who have nefarious plans and are now trying to catch her. The book will not be winning any prizes, but it is amazing how much damage a person can do with craft supplies as weapons. It is horror light, though a bit gory at times, and I was getting a bit bored by the end and admit to skimming, but it was entertaining enough for spooky season. I passed it along to a coworker who accumulates new crafts and supplies even faster than I do.
A book that is very good is Madeline Thien’s The Book of Records. Lina and her father arrive for an extended stay at The Sea, a stateless place where migrants from all over gather until they can get a boat to somewhere else. There are four stories running through the book that speak to and echo each other, the main story of Lina and her father, and the stories of Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu, seventeenth-century Jewish scholar Baruch Spinoza and his exile from the Jewish community in Amsterdam, and twentieth-century philosopher Hannah Arendt fleeing the Nazis.
The narration moves between all the stories as well between past, present and future in Lina and her father’s story. It might sound like it is confusing but it is so well written I was never once lost. It also sounds like it might be heavy, but is often lightened with jokes like this one:
Q: Does anyone know why Beethoven got rid of his chickens?
A: They wouldn’t stop saying Bach, Bach, Bach!The book has much to say about time, memory, art, resistance, migrants and refugees, family both blood and chosen, survival, and much more. Here is a more serious quote from Du Fu’s story that rings all too true for out present moment:
Politics is dead. Integrity is dead. Art and ingenuity have been assassinated. Rot festers everywhere, and its source is the imperial capital. We live in an age of corruption. Haven’t you been paying attention? Don’t you see how abundance has created extravagance, which has necessitated scarcity everywhere, and the men in the capital are up to their necks in extortion, and that’s just the beginning? What’s left for you and me, a bit of poetry? If so, we should wear our learning with a bit more disrespect, do you know what I mean?
If I’ve piqued your interest, or you have already read the book, be sure to listen to (or read the transcript) the Between the Covers podcast interview with Thien.
Finally, in some potentially worrisome news, Ecuadorians will be voting on November 16th on whether to rewrite their constitution. The current constitution was written in 2008 and became the first in the world to enshrine the rights of nature. However, the current president is a right-wing anti-environmentalist who sees the 2008 constitution as an obstacle to business development. Indigenous people and plenty of others in Ecuador, are concerned not only for the environment but also for the future of the country’s democracy. Let’s hope the voting is free and fair and an overwhelming majority refuse rewriting the constitution.
So as not to leave you on a down note, please enjoy “This Joy” by the Resistance Revival Chorus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TbDPwA09Bc
Until next time, keep well and be excellent to each other.
#CraftingForSinners #demonBurger #EcuadorianConstitution #JerrySCrookneckButternut #MinnesotaSpicy #RightsOfNature #seeds #SpiderSquirrel #TheBookOfRecords #ThisIsJoy #weddingAnniversary
-
Occupied
So much happening here and it changes from hour to hour and day to day. Minneapolis and Minnesota are all over the headlines and opening my email to the journalists’ newsletters I subscribe to or perusing the reporting of pretty much any news site is disconcerting. I’m reading echoes. Foreign news agencies have sent their war correspondents. There was a Danish film crew at my weekly neighborhood protest.
We Minnesotans tend to be a modest sort of people. When food is on offer, there will always be one last serving that no one eats because it would not be polite in case someone else might want or need it more. We are also known for apologizing to inanimate objects when we bump into them. I have actually apologized to a table, Ope! Sorry!
We have separation issues. It takes half an hour or longer to say goodbye. First you suggest that you will be leaving in a few minutes. Ten or fifteen minutes later, you actually make a move for the door. Depending on the season, it will take another 10-15 minutes to get ready to go out the door. Then you walk out onto the porch and the host follows and you spend another 10 minutes or so talking. Then you walk to your car or down to the sidewalk and the host follows you and you spend another 10 minutes or so before you finally, actually depart.
If you are ever talking with someone from Minnesota and they respond with, “that’s interesting,” it means they 100% disagree with you and think what you just said is incredibly ignorant or ridiculous. But they don’t want to argue with you about it because arguing is not very nice, especially if you are a guest in someone’s home or you are eating out with them and your dinner was just served and you have to get through the entire meal before you can spend 30 minutes saying goodbye.
We don’t like being in the spotlight. But more than that, we don’t like being told what to do and we don’t like anyone coming into our city and messing things up and hauling away the neighbor who has taken care of our pets while we were away and snow blowed our sidewalk just because, or the cook at our favorite little eat spot who always puts a special something into what we are getting because we helped dig them out of the snow or fished next to them for hours at the nearby lake or bought 5 candy bars we didn’t want from their kid who was selling them to raise money for a school field trip.
We don’t want to be in the news. We don’t want to be an example of peaceful resistance. And while we are greatly flattered and touched by the editors of The Nation nominating Minneapolis for a Nobel Peace Prize, we don’t think we deserve something like that because what we are doing here is just taking care of each other like we always do.
The Occupation
Contrary to Tom Homan and President Trump saying they would withdraw Federal agents, they have not. Today Homan promised to withdraw 700 agents immediately from the state. Even if 700 agents leave, there are still 2,300 remaining. They will continue to occupy my city and violate our constitutional rights with impunity. What you see and hear in the news is only the tip of the proverbial ICEberg.
My neighborhood is a backdoor entry for ICE and DHS agents wishing to avoid the protest crowds outside the Whipple building where their operations are based. They leave Federal property and drive, often recklessly, into my neighborhood looking for folks to detain, staking out houses, circling schools, threatening observers, as well as passing through to other parts of the city.
Because we are first to see the vehicles heading out on the road, observer patrols are active, reporting vehicles to citizen dispatch teams who then spread the word to other neighborhoods. Agents are aware they are being watched. They keep changing tactics to try and blend in or avoid being tracked. They change the license plates on their vehicles, use commercial and limo plates, use tape to change the numbers and letters on the plates, or drive with no plates at all. They are also putting sports team bumper stickers on their cars, stuffies on their dashboards, and increasingly driving sedans and minivans instead of SUVs. Sometimes they even drive trucks with company logos on them, pretending to be plumbers or electricians or delivery drivers.
They are using surveillance tech to hack and track phones. And have started using drones.
There are protests here every single day. I have attended so many community meetings and trainings with acronyms for all the things that I can’t keep it all straight.
This is where I live now. My once bustling city with its thriving small businesses and restaurants is now occupied by people with guns, tear gas, flash grenades, and giant canisters of pepper spray. Businesses are closing, students are staying home from school, people are afraid to leave their homes. Wired has an excellent article about how ICE has affected normal life here. Lit Hub has also been publishing a series of Letters from Minnesota that are very good.
The invaders have murdered two people. They point their guns at bystanders and threaten whoever they want to. They drive by folks peacefully protesting and spray them in the face with pepper spray. They push people to the ground and then accuse them of obstruction. They block in people legally following them in their cars on the street and then detain them for impeding law enforcement. They lie about everything. The lies are so egregious, the state has a webpage to correct all of the misinformation.
Nothing here is normal anymore, though there are plenty of people who behave as though it is; plenty of people who have no problem with what ICE is doing. But there are more of us who are out on the streets, more of us who are involved in mutual aid, more of us who are resisting any way we can.
And while things are grim here, there are plenty of moments of fun, absurdity, and beauty. There was a protest at the Whipple building where everyone wore costumes. We regularly have singing protests. The Saturday night following the murder of Alex Pretti there were candlelight vigils and walks throughout the city. My neighborhood and two others walked to a central meeting point and then went to together to a bridge over the nearby freeway. There were well over a hundred people there.
And this is what happened on Lake Nokomis, a few blocks from my house:
The letters are 100 feet in size, made from snow, and lit with candles. It is visible to the planes flying in and out of the nearby airport.
And then there is Smitten Kitten, a local feminist sex shop that has become a hub of mutual aid activities. They showed up at a protest with a big box of dildos to hand out to people. I laughed myself silly at their telling of the story and the photos of people with dildos affixed to their helmets.
There was a drum protest Monday as I was biking home from work. It was head bobbing, toe tapping fun with the sound amplified because of the tall buildings downtown.
There is joy in resistance, solidarity, and mutual aid. There is meaning in simply being a good neighbor.
Occupations, Other
Amidst everything I still have to go about the business of living. The arctic cold has finally lifted and it’s just regular winter cold.
My bathroom remodel is finally, finally done. We love the results. Eventually we will paint the walls, put up a different mirror, get a new shower curtain, and make a new window curtain. These things are a little lower on the priority list at the moment, but they will happen in the next few months.
Last weekend I did some winter sowing of prairie seeds that need a cold period in order to sprout. This was just before temperatures plunged to subzero F for a week, so they are definitely getting some cold. They are all in containers on my deck at the moment. Last year I had just written what I had sown in marker on the container or on a wooden popsicle stick stuck in the container. By spring the weather had worn it all away and I had to guess what was sprouting in each container. This year I wrote on the container and then put a piece of clear tape over it. We’ll see in a few months if that worked. Heh.
I made whole wheat sourdough bagels with zaatar spice topping. James has been making some delicious sandwiches with them. James has also been making tasty soups and stews from various pantry ingredients. We have been eating flax-spelt sourdough bread that I made with the soup.
We’re working on a jigsaw puzzle in the brief I-have-a-few-minutes moments when there is not time to sit down and do anything before you need to do something else or leave the house for work or a meeting.
I read James by Percival Everett—so good! Now I am reading Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin which I heard about on Between the Covers, and is delightfully strange. I am also reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, a book I have been meaning to read for ages. Fungi are so freaking amazing y’all! And there is poetry by June Jordan and New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe.
James and I celebrated Imbolc. For us it is the promise of spring and the season of letting go of what no longer serves us. We have a ritual in which we write down on a piece of paper the non-physical thing we want to let go of and then we bundle up and stand in the snow in the garden and light our paper on fire. It’s quite satisfying. Indoors, we mark the occasion by opening a jar of jam. In the past it has been dandelion jelly, but last year we decided that the tedious picking of dandelions and then the even more tedious removal of the petals to make the jam was too much work for too little results. So I saved a jar of rose petal jam for this year.
Opening the jar to the soft smell of roses was delightful. And now for the next week or so we get to eat roses on our toast and pancakes. If that doesn’t invoke the promise of warmth and sunshine and green and flowers, then I don’t know what else could.
My apologies for not keeping up with blogs or replying to comments here. It has taken me five days just to write and post this. Most days it is all I can do to just keep up with the required dailiness and community goings on. I long for slow, dull days!
For your musical entertainment, here is Bruce Springsteen’s Minneapolis protest song. He says he wrote it in a night, and well, yeah. I appreciate the effort but it’s not going to win any awards, that’s for sure. He did make a surprise appearance in Minneapolis over the last weekend for a fundraising concert at First Avenue, which is really cool.
#bathroomRemodel #Imbolc #Minnesota #protests #sourdough #winterSowing -
Occupied
So much happening here and it changes from hour to hour and day to day. Minneapolis and Minnesota are all over the headlines and opening my email to the journalists’ newsletters I subscribe to or perusing the reporting of pretty much any news site is disconcerting. I’m reading echoes. Foreign news agencies have sent their war correspondents. There was a Danish film crew at my weekly neighborhood protest.
We Minnesotans tend to be a modest sort of people. When food is on offer, there will always be one last serving that no one eats because it would not be polite in case someone else might want or need it more. We are also known for apologizing to inanimate objects when we bump into them. I have actually apologized to a table, Ope! Sorry!
We have separation issues. It takes half an hour or longer to say goodbye. First you suggest that you will be leaving in a few minutes. Ten or fifteen minutes later, you actually make a move for the door. Depending on the season, it will take another 10-15 minutes to get ready to go out the door. Then you walk out onto the porch and the host follows and you spend another 10 minutes or so talking. Then you walk to your car or down to the sidewalk and the host follows you and you spend another 10 minutes or so before you finally, actually depart.
If you are ever talking with someone from Minnesota and they respond with, “that’s interesting,” it means they 100% disagree with you and think what you just said is incredibly ignorant or ridiculous. But they don’t want to argue with you about it because arguing is not very nice, especially if you are a guest in someone’s home or you are eating out with them and your dinner was just served and you have to get through the entire meal before you can spend 30 minutes saying goodbye.
We don’t like being in the spotlight. But more than that, we don’t like being told what to do and we don’t like anyone coming into our city and messing things up and hauling away the neighbor who has taken care of our pets while we were away and snow blowed our sidewalk just because, or the cook at our favorite little eat spot who always puts a special something into what we are getting because we helped dig them out of the snow or fished next to them for hours at the nearby lake or bought 5 candy bars we didn’t want from their kid who was selling them to raise money for a school field trip.
We don’t want to be in the news. We don’t want to be an example of peaceful resistance. And while we are greatly flattered and touched by the editors of The Nation nominating Minneapolis for a Nobel Peace Prize, we don’t think we deserve something like that because what we are doing here is just taking care of each other like we always do.
The Occupation
Contrary to Tom Homan and President Trump saying they would withdraw Federal agents, they have not. Today Homan promised to withdraw 700 agents immediately from the state. Even if 700 agents leave, there are still 2,300 remaining. They will continue to occupy my city and violate our constitutional rights with impunity. What you see and hear in the news is only the tip of the proverbial ICEberg.
My neighborhood is a backdoor entry for ICE and DHS agents wishing to avoid the protest crowds outside the Whipple building where their operations are based. They leave Federal property and drive, often recklessly, into my neighborhood looking for folks to detain, staking out houses, circling schools, threatening observers, as well as passing through to other parts of the city.
Because we are first to see the vehicles heading out on the road, observer patrols are active, reporting vehicles to citizen dispatch teams who then spread the word to other neighborhoods. Agents are aware they are being watched. They keep changing tactics to try and blend in or avoid being tracked. They change the license plates on their vehicles, use commercial and limo plates, use tape to change the numbers and letters on the plates, or drive with no plates at all. They are also putting sports team bumper stickers on their cars, stuffies on their dashboards, and increasingly driving sedans and minivans instead of SUVs. Sometimes they even drive trucks with company logos on them, pretending to be plumbers or electricians or delivery drivers.
They are using surveillance tech to hack and track phones. And have started using drones.
There are protests here every single day. I have attended so many community meetings and trainings with acronyms for all the things that I can’t keep it all straight.
This is where I live now. My once bustling city with its thriving small businesses and restaurants is now occupied by people with guns, tear gas, flash grenades, and giant canisters of pepper spray. Businesses are closing, students are staying home from school, people are afraid to leave their homes. Wired has an excellent article about how ICE has affected normal life here. Lit Hub has also been publishing a series of Letters from Minnesota that are very good.
The invaders have murdered two people. They point their guns at bystanders and threaten whoever they want to. They drive by folks peacefully protesting and spray them in the face with pepper spray. They push people to the ground and then accuse them of obstruction. They block in people legally following them in their cars on the street and then detain them for impeding law enforcement. They lie about everything. The lies are so egregious, the state has a webpage to correct all of the misinformation.
Nothing here is normal anymore, though there are plenty of people who behave as though it is; plenty of people who have no problem with what ICE is doing. But there are more of us who are out on the streets, more of us who are involved in mutual aid, more of us who are resisting any way we can.
And while things are grim here, there are plenty of moments of fun, absurdity, and beauty. There was a protest at the Whipple building where everyone wore costumes. We regularly have singing protests. The Saturday night following the murder of Alex Pretti there were candlelight vigils and walks throughout the city. My neighborhood and two others walked to a central meeting point and then went to together to a bridge over the nearby freeway. There were well over a hundred people there.
And this is what happened on Lake Nokomis, a few blocks from my house:
The letters are 100 feet in size, made from snow, and lit with candles. It is visible to the planes flying in and out of the nearby airport.
And then there is Smitten Kitten, a local feminist sex shop that has become a hub of mutual aid activities. They showed up at a protest with a big box of dildos to hand out to people. I laughed myself silly at their telling of the story and the photos of people with dildos affixed to their helmets.
There was a drum protest Monday as I was biking home from work. It was head bobbing, toe tapping fun with the sound amplified because of the tall buildings downtown.
There is joy in resistance, solidarity, and mutual aid. There is meaning in simply being a good neighbor.
Occupations, Other
Amidst everything I still have to go about the business of living. The arctic cold has finally lifted and it’s just regular winter cold.
My bathroom remodel is finally, finally done. We love the results. Eventually we will paint the walls, put up a different mirror, get a new shower curtain, and make a new window curtain. These things are a little lower on the priority list at the moment, but they will happen in the next few months.
Last weekend I did some winter sowing of prairie seeds that need a cold period in order to sprout. This was just before temperatures plunged to subzero F for a week, so they are definitely getting some cold. They are all in containers on my deck at the moment. Last year I had just written what I had sown in marker on the container or on a wooden popsicle stick stuck in the container. By spring the weather had worn it all away and I had to guess what was sprouting in each container. This year I wrote on the container and then put a piece of clear tape over it. We’ll see in a few months if that worked. Heh.
I made whole wheat sourdough bagels with zaatar spice topping. James has been making some delicious sandwiches with them. James has also been making tasty soups and stews from various pantry ingredients. We have been eating flax-spelt sourdough bread that I made with the soup.
We’re working on a jigsaw puzzle in the brief I-have-a-few-minutes moments when there is not time to sit down and do anything before you need to do something else or leave the house for work or a meeting.
I read James by Percival Everett—so good! Now I am reading Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin which I heard about on Between the Covers, and is delightfully strange. I am also reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, a book I have been meaning to read for ages. Fungi are so freaking amazing y’all! And there is poetry by June Jordan and New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe.
James and I celebrated Imbolc. For us it is the promise of spring and the season of letting go of what no longer serves us. We have a ritual in which we write down on a piece of paper the non-physical thing we want to let go of and then we bundle up and stand in the snow in the garden and light our paper on fire. It’s quite satisfying. Indoors, we mark the occasion by opening a jar of jam. In the past it has been dandelion jelly, but last year we decided that the tedious picking of dandelions and then the even more tedious removal of the petals to make the jam was too much work for too little results. So I saved a jar of rose petal jam for this year.
Opening the jar to the soft smell of roses was delightful. And now for the next week or so we get to eat roses on our toast and pancakes. If that doesn’t invoke the promise of warmth and sunshine and green and flowers, then I don’t know what else could.
My apologies for not keeping up with blogs or replying to comments here. It has taken me five days just to write and post this. Most days it is all I can do to just keep up with the required dailiness and community goings on. I long for slow, dull days!
For your musical entertainment, here is Bruce Springsteen’s Minneapolis protest song. He says he wrote it in a night, and well, yeah. I appreciate the effort but it’s not going to win any awards, that’s for sure. He did make a surprise appearance in Minneapolis over the last weekend for a fundraising concert at First Avenue, which is really cool.
#bathroomRemodel #Imbolc #Minnesota #protests #sourdough #winterSowing -
Occupied
So much happening here and it changes from hour to hour and day to day. Minneapolis and Minnesota are all over the headlines and opening my email to the journalists’ newsletters I subscribe to or perusing the reporting of pretty much any news site is disconcerting. I’m reading echoes. Foreign news agencies have sent their war correspondents. There was a Danish film crew at my weekly neighborhood protest.
We Minnesotans tend to be a modest sort of people. When food is on offer, there will always be one last serving that no one eats because it would not be polite in case someone else might want or need it more. We are also known for apologizing to inanimate objects when we bump into them. I have actually apologized to a table, Ope! Sorry!
We have separation issues. It takes half an hour or longer to say goodbye. First you suggest that you will be leaving in a few minutes. Ten or fifteen minutes later, you actually make a move for the door. Depending on the season, it will take another 10-15 minutes to get ready to go out the door. Then you walk out onto the porch and the host follows and you spend another 10 minutes or so talking. Then you walk to your car or down to the sidewalk and the host follows you and you spend another 10 minutes or so before you finally, actually depart.
If you are ever talking with someone from Minnesota and they respond with, “that’s interesting,” it means they 100% disagree with you and think what you just said is incredibly ignorant or ridiculous. But they don’t want to argue with you about it because arguing is not very nice, especially if you are a guest in someone’s home or you are eating out with them and your dinner was just served and you have to get through the entire meal before you can spend 30 minutes saying goodbye.
We don’t like being in the spotlight. But more than that, we don’t like being told what to do and we don’t like anyone coming into our city and messing things up and hauling away the neighbor who has taken care of our pets while we were away and snow blowed our sidewalk just because, or the cook at our favorite little eat spot who always puts a special something into what we are getting because we helped dig them out of the snow or fished next to them for hours at the nearby lake or bought 5 candy bars we didn’t want from their kid who was selling them to raise money for a school field trip.
We don’t want to be in the news. We don’t want to be an example of peaceful resistance. And while we are greatly flattered and touched by the editors of The Nation nominating Minneapolis for a Nobel Peace Prize, we don’t think we deserve something like that because what we are doing here is just taking care of each other like we always do.
The Occupation
Contrary to Tom Homan and President Trump saying they would withdraw Federal agents, they have not. Today Homan promised to withdraw 700 agents immediately from the state. Even if 700 agents leave, there are still 2,300 remaining. They will continue to occupy my city and violate our constitutional rights with impunity. What you see and hear in the news is only the tip of the proverbial ICEberg.
My neighborhood is a backdoor entry for ICE and DHS agents wishing to avoid the protest crowds outside the Whipple building where their operations are based. They leave Federal property and drive, often recklessly, into my neighborhood looking for folks to detain, staking out houses, circling schools, threatening observers, as well as passing through to other parts of the city.
Because we are first to see the vehicles heading out on the road, observer patrols are active, reporting vehicles to citizen dispatch teams who then spread the word to other neighborhoods. Agents are aware they are being watched. They keep changing tactics to try and blend in or avoid being tracked. They change the license plates on their vehicles, use commercial and limo plates, use tape to change the numbers and letters on the plates, or drive with no plates at all. They are also putting sports team bumper stickers on their cars, stuffies on their dashboards, and increasingly driving sedans and minivans instead of SUVs. Sometimes they even drive trucks with company logos on them, pretending to be plumbers or electricians or delivery drivers.
They are using surveillance tech to hack and track phones. And have started using drones.
There are protests here every single day. I have attended so many community meetings and trainings with acronyms for all the things that I can’t keep it all straight.
This is where I live now. My once bustling city with its thriving small businesses and restaurants is now occupied by people with guns, tear gas, flash grenades, and giant canisters of pepper spray. Businesses are closing, students are staying home from school, people are afraid to leave their homes. Wired has an excellent article about how ICE has affected normal life here. Lit Hub has also been publishing a series of Letters from Minnesota that are very good.
The invaders have murdered two people. They point their guns at bystanders and threaten whoever they want to. They drive by folks peacefully protesting and spray them in the face with pepper spray. They push people to the ground and then accuse them of obstruction. They block in people legally following them in their cars on the street and then detain them for impeding law enforcement. They lie about everything. The lies are so egregious, the state has a webpage to correct all of the misinformation.
Nothing here is normal anymore, though there are plenty of people who behave as though it is; plenty of people who have no problem with what ICE is doing. But there are more of us who are out on the streets, more of us who are involved in mutual aid, more of us who are resisting any way we can.
And while things are grim here, there are plenty of moments of fun, absurdity, and beauty. There was a protest at the Whipple building where everyone wore costumes. We regularly have singing protests. The Saturday night following the murder of Alex Pretti there were candlelight vigils and walks throughout the city. My neighborhood and two others walked to a central meeting point and then went to together to a bridge over the nearby freeway. There were well over a hundred people there.
And this is what happened on Lake Nokomis, a few blocks from my house:
The letters are 100 feet in size, made from snow, and lit with candles. It is visible to the planes flying in and out of the nearby airport.
And then there is Smitten Kitten, a local feminist sex shop that has become a hub of mutual aid activities. They showed up at a protest with a big box of dildos to hand out to people. I laughed myself silly at their telling of the story and the photos of people with dildos affixed to their helmets.
There was a drum protest Monday as I was biking home from work. It was head bobbing, toe tapping fun with the sound amplified because of the tall buildings downtown.
There is joy in resistance, solidarity, and mutual aid. There is meaning in simply being a good neighbor.
Occupations, Other
Amidst everything I still have to go about the business of living. The arctic cold has finally lifted and it’s just regular winter cold.
My bathroom remodel is finally, finally done. We love the results. Eventually we will paint the walls, put up a different mirror, get a new shower curtain, and make a new window curtain. These things are a little lower on the priority list at the moment, but they will happen in the next few months.
Last weekend I did some winter sowing of prairie seeds that need a cold period in order to sprout. This was just before temperatures plunged to subzero F for a week, so they are definitely getting some cold. They are all in containers on my deck at the moment. Last year I had just written what I had sown in marker on the container or on a wooden popsicle stick stuck in the container. By spring the weather had worn it all away and I had to guess what was sprouting in each container. This year I wrote on the container and then put a piece of clear tape over it. We’ll see in a few months if that worked. Heh.
I made whole wheat sourdough bagels with zaatar spice topping. James has been making some delicious sandwiches with them. James has also been making tasty soups and stews from various pantry ingredients. We have been eating flax-spelt sourdough bread that I made with the soup.
We’re working on a jigsaw puzzle in the brief I-have-a-few-minutes moments when there is not time to sit down and do anything before you need to do something else or leave the house for work or a meeting.
I read James by Percival Everett—so good! Now I am reading Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin which I heard about on Between the Covers, and is delightfully strange. I am also reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, a book I have been meaning to read for ages. Fungi are so freaking amazing y’all! And there is poetry by June Jordan and New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe.
James and I celebrated Imbolc. For us it is the promise of spring and the season of letting go of what no longer serves us. We have a ritual in which we write down on a piece of paper the non-physical thing we want to let go of and then we bundle up and stand in the snow in the garden and light our paper on fire. It’s quite satisfying. Indoors, we mark the occasion by opening a jar of jam. In the past it has been dandelion jelly, but last year we decided that the tedious picking of dandelions and then the even more tedious removal of the petals to make the jam was too much work for too little results. So I saved a jar of rose petal jam for this year.
Opening the jar to the soft smell of roses was delightful. And now for the next week or so we get to eat roses on our toast and pancakes. If that doesn’t invoke the promise of warmth and sunshine and green and flowers, then I don’t know what else could.
My apologies for not keeping up with blogs or replying to comments here. It has taken me five days just to write and post this. Most days it is all I can do to just keep up with the required dailiness and community goings on. I long for slow, dull days!
For your musical entertainment, here is Bruce Springsteen’s Minneapolis protest song. He says he wrote it in a night, and well, yeah. I appreciate the effort but it’s not going to win any awards, that’s for sure. He did make a surprise appearance in Minneapolis over the last weekend for a fundraising concert at First Avenue, which is really cool.
#bathroomRemodel #Imbolc #Minnesota #protests #sourdough #winterSowing -
Occupied
So much happening here and it changes from hour to hour and day to day. Minneapolis and Minnesota are all over the headlines and opening my email to the journalists’ newsletters I subscribe to or perusing the reporting of pretty much any news site is disconcerting. I’m reading echoes. Foreign news agencies have sent their war correspondents. There was a Danish film crew at my weekly neighborhood protest.
We Minnesotans tend to be a modest sort of people. When food is on offer, there will always be one last serving that no one eats because it would not be polite in case someone else might want or need it more. We are also known for apologizing to inanimate objects when we bump into them. I have actually apologized to a table, Ope! Sorry!
We have separation issues. It takes half an hour or longer to say goodbye. First you suggest that you will be leaving in a few minutes. Ten or fifteen minutes later, you actually make a move for the door. Depending on the season, it will take another 10-15 minutes to get ready to go out the door. Then you walk out onto the porch and the host follows and you spend another 10 minutes or so talking. Then you walk to your car or down to the sidewalk and the host follows you and you spend another 10 minutes or so before you finally, actually depart.
If you are ever talking with someone from Minnesota and they respond with, “that’s interesting,” it means they 100% disagree with you and think what you just said is incredibly ignorant or ridiculous. But they don’t want to argue with you about it because arguing is not very nice, especially if you are a guest in someone’s home or you are eating out with them and your dinner was just served and you have to get through the entire meal before you can spend 30 minutes saying goodbye.
We don’t like being in the spotlight. But more than that, we don’t like being told what to do and we don’t like anyone coming into our city and messing things up and hauling away the neighbor who has taken care of our pets while we were away and snow blowed our sidewalk just because, or the cook at our favorite little eat spot who always puts a special something into what we are getting because we helped dig them out of the snow or fished next to them for hours at the nearby lake or bought 5 candy bars we didn’t want from their kid who was selling them to raise money for a school field trip.
We don’t want to be in the news. We don’t want to be an example of peaceful resistance. And while we are greatly flattered and touched by the editors of The Nation nominating Minneapolis for a Nobel Peace Prize, we don’t think we deserve something like that because what we are doing here is just taking care of each other like we always do.
The Occupation
Contrary to Tom Homan and President Trump saying they would withdraw Federal agents, they have not. Today Homan promised to withdraw 700 agents immediately from the state. Even if 700 agents leave, there are still 2,300 remaining. They will continue to occupy my city and violate our constitutional rights with impunity. What you see and hear in the news is only the tip of the proverbial ICEberg.
My neighborhood is a backdoor entry for ICE and DHS agents wishing to avoid the protest crowds outside the Whipple building where their operations are based. They leave Federal property and drive, often recklessly, into my neighborhood looking for folks to detain, staking out houses, circling schools, threatening observers, as well as passing through to other parts of the city.
Because we are first to see the vehicles heading out on the road, observer patrols are active, reporting vehicles to citizen dispatch teams who then spread the word to other neighborhoods. Agents are aware they are being watched. They keep changing tactics to try and blend in or avoid being tracked. They change the license plates on their vehicles, use commercial and limo plates, use tape to change the numbers and letters on the plates, or drive with no plates at all. They are also putting sports team bumper stickers on their cars, stuffies on their dashboards, and increasingly driving sedans and minivans instead of SUVs. Sometimes they even drive trucks with company logos on them, pretending to be plumbers or electricians or delivery drivers.
They are using surveillance tech to hack and track phones. And have started using drones.
There are protests here every single day. I have attended so many community meetings and trainings with acronyms for all the things that I can’t keep it all straight.
This is where I live now. My once bustling city with its thriving small businesses and restaurants is now occupied by people with guns, tear gas, flash grenades, and giant canisters of pepper spray. Businesses are closing, students are staying home from school, people are afraid to leave their homes. Wired has an excellent article about how ICE has affected normal life here. Lit Hub has also been publishing a series of Letters from Minnesota that are very good.
The invaders have murdered two people. They point their guns at bystanders and threaten whoever they want to. They drive by folks peacefully protesting and spray them in the face with pepper spray. They push people to the ground and then accuse them of obstruction. They block in people legally following them in their cars on the street and then detain them for impeding law enforcement. They lie about everything. The lies are so egregious, the state has a webpage to correct all of the misinformation.
Nothing here is normal anymore, though there are plenty of people who behave as though it is; plenty of people who have no problem with what ICE is doing. But there are more of us who are out on the streets, more of us who are involved in mutual aid, more of us who are resisting any way we can.
And while things are grim here, there are plenty of moments of fun, absurdity, and beauty. There was a protest at the Whipple building where everyone wore costumes. We regularly have singing protests. The Saturday night following the murder of Alex Pretti there were candlelight vigils and walks throughout the city. My neighborhood and two others walked to a central meeting point and then went to together to a bridge over the nearby freeway. There were well over a hundred people there.
And this is what happened on Lake Nokomis, a few blocks from my house:
The letters are 100 feet in size, made from snow, and lit with candles. It is visible to the planes flying in and out of the nearby airport.
And then there is Smitten Kitten, a local feminist sex shop that has become a hub of mutual aid activities. They showed up at a protest with a big box of dildos to hand out to people. I laughed myself silly at their telling of the story and the photos of people with dildos affixed to their helmets.
There was a drum protest Monday as I was biking home from work. It was head bobbing, toe tapping fun with the sound amplified because of the tall buildings downtown.
There is joy in resistance, solidarity, and mutual aid. There is meaning in simply being a good neighbor.
Occupations, Other
Amidst everything I still have to go about the business of living. The arctic cold has finally lifted and it’s just regular winter cold.
My bathroom remodel is finally, finally done. We love the results. Eventually we will paint the walls, put up a different mirror, get a new shower curtain, and make a new window curtain. These things are a little lower on the priority list at the moment, but they will happen in the next few months.
Last weekend I did some winter sowing of prairie seeds that need a cold period in order to sprout. This was just before temperatures plunged to subzero F for a week, so they are definitely getting some cold. They are all in containers on my deck at the moment. Last year I had just written what I had sown in marker on the container or on a wooden popsicle stick stuck in the container. By spring the weather had worn it all away and I had to guess what was sprouting in each container. This year I wrote on the container and then put a piece of clear tape over it. We’ll see in a few months if that worked. Heh.
I made whole wheat sourdough bagels with zaatar spice topping. James has been making some delicious sandwiches with them. James has also been making tasty soups and stews from various pantry ingredients. We have been eating flax-spelt sourdough bread that I made with the soup.
We’re working on a jigsaw puzzle in the brief I-have-a-few-minutes moments when there is not time to sit down and do anything before you need to do something else or leave the house for work or a meeting.
I read James by Percival Everett—so good! Now I am reading Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin which I heard about on Between the Covers, and is delightfully strange. I am also reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, a book I have been meaning to read for ages. Fungi are so freaking amazing y’all! And there is poetry by June Jordan and New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe.
James and I celebrated Imbolc. For us it is the promise of spring and the season of letting go of what no longer serves us. We have a ritual in which we write down on a piece of paper the non-physical thing we want to let go of and then we bundle up and stand in the snow in the garden and light our paper on fire. It’s quite satisfying. Indoors, we mark the occasion by opening a jar of jam. In the past it has been dandelion jelly, but last year we decided that the tedious picking of dandelions and then the even more tedious removal of the petals to make the jam was too much work for too little results. So I saved a jar of rose petal jam for this year.
Opening the jar to the soft smell of roses was delightful. And now for the next week or so we get to eat roses on our toast and pancakes. If that doesn’t invoke the promise of warmth and sunshine and green and flowers, then I don’t know what else could.
My apologies for not keeping up with blogs or replying to comments here. It has taken me five days just to write and post this. Most days it is all I can do to just keep up with the required dailiness and community goings on. I long for slow, dull days!
For your musical entertainment, here is Bruce Springsteen’s Minneapolis protest song. He says he wrote it in a night, and well, yeah. I appreciate the effort but it’s not going to win any awards, that’s for sure. He did make a surprise appearance in Minneapolis over the last weekend for a fundraising concert at First Avenue, which is really cool.
#bathroomRemodel #Imbolc #Minnesota #protests #sourdough #winterSowing -
Welcome 2026
After last weekend’s main drain backup it turned out the plumbing wasn’t finished with us yet. Thursday afternoon the shower in the basement bathroom we’ve been using for the past month while our main bathroom remodel takes its sweet time, decided to leak. And it wasn’t one of those slow drip, drip leaks. But we can fix leaky faucets!
It turned out the plumbing was original to our 1952-built house and there are no longer tools and parts to fix it. So we had to call a plumber. He had to replace the shower/tub fixtures, but in order to do that, he had to cut a door-sized hole in the wall of the adjacent bedroom to access the pipes. He then had to replace the steel pipes with copper ones. And now we have new basic shower/tub fixtures and a large hole in the wall. But no more leak!
James and I do not have the tools or know-how to do drywall, so eventually we will need to hire a handyperson to come and do it for us. Since this is a guest bedroom and it is winter and people do not come visit Minnesota in the winter, especially our southern California and New Mexico family members, we can wait until spring or summer to have the wall repaired.
Meanwhile, my main bathroom remodel is not yet done. It is getting close though and I expect it will be completed this week. The tile is done and looks oh so pretty. The grab bars and folding shower chair are mounted. Now we just need a shower door, shower fixtures, a toilet and sink. And of course, with all the new and shiny, I’m looking at the medicine cabinet and wrinkling my nose because it is showing its 25-year-old age. And of course, new paint on the walls is going to need to happen too. When we contracted for the project we both naively thought the rest of the bathroom would not need changing. At least these things we really can do ourselves.
We had vegan black-eyed peas and pumpkin quesadillas on New Year’s Day. They can also be made with sweet potato or another winter squash. Last year we used butternut. Such a tasty meal! I got the recipe a couple years ago from the Washington Post and sadly it is trapped behind a paywall. However, if it is a recipe you are interested in, let me know and I can email it to you, I just can’t post it online.
Eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day is supposed to bring good luck. It’s a tradition from the southern part of the United States. My mom is from Oklahoma and grew up having to eat them on New Year’s, but scoffed at the tradition, along with a lot of other southern cultural things, as an adult. Her mom, my Granny, always had to have them, however. Due to a stroke that left her paralyzed on the left side of her body, she lived the last ten years of her life in a nursing home. My mom always had to go to the grocery store and buy a can of black-eyed peas to take to her otherwise she would never hear the end of it. Since Granny couldn’t cook, I assume my mom opened the can and Granny just ate them. I was generally still in my pajamas after sleeping in on New Year’s Day, and was never present for the eating of the black-eyed peas. I just remember my mom grumbling about silly superstitions.
Because of this, I never ate any until I started growing them in the garden several years ago. We tried them out in hoppin’ John and a few other dishes, but not until I came across the quesadilla recipe did we settle on our own “traditional” way to eat them on New Year’s Day. Do I believe that they bring me good luck? No, especially since after we ate them the basement bathroom leak happened. Is it a fun way to honor traditions and ancestors and have a tasty meal in the process? Absolutely!
We ended up with some extra cooked black-eyed peas and James was trying to figure out what meal he might add them to. He’s going to be making split pea soup and thought he could add them to the soup. What did I think about that? I shrugged, seemed like it would be fine.
He continued kitchening in silence, and then suddenly asked, “Do you think it will kill the green peaness?”
“What?!” I exclaimed, and scowled a little.
If you are wondering about my response, say “kill the green peaness” out loud.
James looked at me a bit confused. Then I re-ran what he said in my head and saw the jar of green split peas on the counter. Then I started laughing. Then he realized what I thought he said and started laughing too. I laughed so hard I had tears streaming down my face. We are still laughing about it. And now, of course, kill the green peaness has become a thing.
There’s snow on the ground and will be for several months yet, but I ordered my garden seeds! I posted my list last week, and now you can all roll your eyes or giggle because yes, it changed. But I have a good reason!
I was planning on ordering from four different places and remembered Sand Hill Preservation Center in Iowa. They are an heirloom seed place I bought sweet potato slips from a few years ago. I did not get a good sweet potato harvest but that is no fault of theirs. Their product was good, my growing was not because I refused to put down black plastic around the plants to keep the soil at the really warm temperature they like. Surely a sunny spot and some straw will be just fine? Well, since the sweet potatoes weren’t much larger than ping pong balls, the answer was no.
But I recalled that they have lots of really interesting garden seeds I had never seen anywhere else. So I browsed their website to see if I might be able to consolidate my seed order. Why yes, yes I could.
I still had to order from three places, but Sand Hill prices are so good, I was able to shift around some of what I was ordering from the other two places and overall spend much less on seeds and shipping. Of course I had to throw in two additional seeds packets! I added caraway to the order so I will have a supply for sourdough pumpernickel bread making. And I added an interesting herb I had never heard of before called beetberry.
Beetberry, Bitum capitatum, is a member of the amaranth family. The leaves can be eaten raw as a salad green or cooked, and are highly nutritious. The tiny red berries that follow the interesting looking flowers are high in anti-oxidants and can be used to make jams or desserts. The plant also has anti-inflammatory medicinal properties. Even better, it is an annual native to most of North America.
Only two additions, but good ones you have to agree! One of the delightful things about Sand Hill other than their variety and great prices, is that they have no online ordering. I had to download an order form, fill it out, print it off, and send it through the mail with a check. This is likely one of the reasons why their prices are so good. I don’t mind at all that the whole process takes a bit longer because none of the seeds I am getting from them will need to be started indoors until March.
Seeds all done. Next I need to write out my planting calendar.
My two week’s vacation is drawing to a close and it is back to wage work tomorrow. In spite of the topsy-turvy bathroom remodel and plumbing problems, it has been a wonderful and relaxing break. I managed to read 84 books in 2025, more than I ever have before. If you are interested in poking around, check out my LibraryThing list. It says 90 but that’s because it also includes several books I chose to not finish. And there are charts and graphs too if that sort of thing floats your boat, though I’m not certain of their accuracy.
I had some fun on my vacation sorting books on my bookshelves. And I made progress on my attic project too. All the carpet is up. Now I’m filling in the seams on the plywood floor which will then get sanded and painted with primer and then painted with floor paint. Little by little!
I hope your 2026 is off to a good start. Please send good thoughts that I will not have any additional plumbing issues for a very, very long time!
#atticCarpetProject #bathroomRemodel #beetberry #blackEyedPeas #Granny #holeInTheWall #NewYear #plumbing #SandHillPreservationCenter #seedCatalogs #splitPeaSoup
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Welcome 2026
After last weekend’s main drain backup it turned out the plumbing wasn’t finished with us yet. Thursday afternoon the shower in the basement bathroom we’ve been using for the past month while our main bathroom remodel takes its sweet time, decided to leak. And it wasn’t one of those slow drip, drip leaks. But we can fix leaky faucets!
It turned out the plumbing was original to our 1952-built house and there are no longer tools and parts to fix it. So we had to call a plumber. He had to replace the shower/tub fixtures, but in order to do that, he had to cut a door-sized hole in the wall of the adjacent bedroom to access the pipes. He then had to replace the steel pipes with copper ones. And now we have new basic shower/tub fixtures and a large hole in the wall. But no more leak!
James and I do not have the tools or know-how to do drywall, so eventually we will need to hire a handyperson to come and do it for us. Since this is a guest bedroom and it is winter and people do not come visit Minnesota in the winter, especially our southern California and New Mexico family members, we can wait until spring or summer to have the wall repaired.
Meanwhile, my main bathroom remodel is not yet done. It is getting close though and I expect it will be completed this week. The tile is done and looks oh so pretty. The grab bars and folding shower chair are mounted. Now we just need a shower door, shower fixtures, a toilet and sink. And of course, with all the new and shiny, I’m looking at the medicine cabinet and wrinkling my nose because it is showing its 25-year-old age. And of course, new paint on the walls is going to need to happen too. When we contracted for the project we both naively thought the rest of the bathroom would not need changing. At least these things we really can do ourselves.
We had vegan black-eyed peas and pumpkin quesadillas on New Year’s Day. They can also be made with sweet potato or another winter squash. Last year we used butternut. Such a tasty meal! I got the recipe a couple years ago from the Washington Post and sadly it is trapped behind a paywall. However, if it is a recipe you are interested in, let me know and I can email it to you, I just can’t post it online.
Eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day is supposed to bring good luck. It’s a tradition from the southern part of the United States. My mom is from Oklahoma and grew up having to eat them on New Year’s, but scoffed at the tradition, along with a lot of other southern cultural things, as an adult. Her mom, my Granny, always had to have them, however. Due to a stroke that left her paralyzed on the left side of her body, she lived the last ten years of her life in a nursing home. My mom always had to go to the grocery store and buy a can of black-eyed peas to take to her otherwise she would never hear the end of it. Since Granny couldn’t cook, I assume my mom opened the can and Granny just ate them. I was generally still in my pajamas after sleeping in on New Year’s Day, and was never present for the eating of the black-eyed peas. I just remember my mom grumbling about silly superstitions.
Because of this, I never ate any until I started growing them in the garden several years ago. We tried them out in hoppin’ John and a few other dishes, but not until I came across the quesadilla recipe did we settle on our own “traditional” way to eat them on New Year’s Day. Do I believe that they bring me good luck? No, especially since after we ate them the basement bathroom leak happened. Is it a fun way to honor traditions and ancestors and have a tasty meal in the process? Absolutely!
We ended up with some extra cooked black-eyed peas and James was trying to figure out what meal he might add them to. He’s going to be making split pea soup and thought he could add them to the soup. What did I think about that? I shrugged, seemed like it would be fine.
He continued kitchening in silence, and then suddenly asked, “Do you think it will kill the green peaness?”
“What?!” I exclaimed, and scowled a little.
If you are wondering about my response, say “kill the green peaness” out loud.
James looked at me a bit confused. Then I re-ran what he said in my head and saw the jar of green split peas on the counter. Then I started laughing. Then he realized what I thought he said and started laughing too. I laughed so hard I had tears streaming down my face. We are still laughing about it. And now, of course, kill the green peaness has become a thing.
There’s snow on the ground and will be for several months yet, but I ordered my garden seeds! I posted my list last week, and now you can all roll your eyes or giggle because yes, it changed. But I have a good reason!
I was planning on ordering from four different places and remembered Sand Hill Preservation Center in Iowa. They are an heirloom seed place I bought sweet potato slips from a few years ago. I did not get a good sweet potato harvest but that is no fault of theirs. Their product was good, my growing was not because I refused to put down black plastic around the plants to keep the soil at the really warm temperature they like. Surely a sunny spot and some straw will be just fine? Well, since the sweet potatoes weren’t much larger than ping pong balls, the answer was no.
But I recalled that they have lots of really interesting garden seeds I had never seen anywhere else. So I browsed their website to see if I might be able to consolidate my seed order. Why yes, yes I could.
I still had to order from three places, but Sand Hill prices are so good, I was able to shift around some of what I was ordering from the other two places and overall spend much less on seeds and shipping. Of course I had to throw in two additional seeds packets! I added caraway to the order so I will have a supply for sourdough pumpernickel bread making. And I added an interesting herb I had never heard of before called beetberry.
Beetberry, Bitum capitatum, is a member of the amaranth family. The leaves can be eaten raw as a salad green or cooked, and are highly nutritious. The tiny red berries that follow the interesting looking flowers are high in anti-oxidants and can be used to make jams or desserts. The plant also has anti-inflammatory medicinal properties. Even better, it is an annual native to most of North America.
Only two additions, but good ones you have to agree! One of the delightful things about Sand Hill other than their variety and great prices, is that they have no online ordering. I had to download an order form, fill it out, print it off, and send it through the mail with a check. This is likely one of the reasons why their prices are so good. I don’t mind at all that the whole process takes a bit longer because none of the seeds I am getting from them will need to be started indoors until March.
Seeds all done. Next I need to write out my planting calendar.
My two week’s vacation is drawing to a close and it is back to wage work tomorrow. In spite of the topsy-turvy bathroom remodel and plumbing problems, it has been a wonderful and relaxing break. I managed to read 84 books in 2025, more than I ever have before. If you are interested in poking around, check out my LibraryThing list. It says 90 but that’s because it also includes several books I chose to not finish. And there are charts and graphs too if that sort of thing floats your boat, though I’m not certain of their accuracy.
I had some fun on my vacation sorting books on my bookshelves. And I made progress on my attic project too. All the carpet is up. Now I’m filling in the seams on the plywood floor which will then get sanded and painted with primer and then painted with floor paint. Little by little!
I hope your 2026 is off to a good start. Please send good thoughts that I will not have any additional plumbing issues for a very, very long time!
#atticCarpetProject #bathroomRemodel #beetberry #blackEyedPeas #Granny #holeInTheWall #NewYear #plumbing #SandHillPreservationCenter #seedCatalogs #splitPeaSoup
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Welcome 2026
After last weekend’s main drain backup it turned out the plumbing wasn’t finished with us yet. Thursday afternoon the shower in the basement bathroom we’ve been using for the past month while our main bathroom remodel takes its sweet time, decided to leak. And it wasn’t one of those slow drip, drip leaks. But we can fix leaky faucets!
It turned out the plumbing was original to our 1952-built house and there are no longer tools and parts to fix it. So we had to call a plumber. He had to replace the shower/tub fixtures, but in order to do that, he had to cut a door-sized hole in the wall of the adjacent bedroom to access the pipes. He then had to replace the steel pipes with copper ones. And now we have new basic shower/tub fixtures and a large hole in the wall. But no more leak!
James and I do not have the tools or know-how to do drywall, so eventually we will need to hire a handyperson to come and do it for us. Since this is a guest bedroom and it is winter and people do not come visit Minnesota in the winter, especially our southern California and New Mexico family members, we can wait until spring or summer to have the wall repaired.
Meanwhile, my main bathroom remodel is not yet done. It is getting close though and I expect it will be completed this week. The tile is done and looks oh so pretty. The grab bars and folding shower chair are mounted. Now we just need a shower door, shower fixtures, a toilet and sink. And of course, with all the new and shiny, I’m looking at the medicine cabinet and wrinkling my nose because it is showing its 25-year-old age. And of course, new paint on the walls is going to need to happen too. When we contracted for the project we both naively thought the rest of the bathroom would not need changing. At least these things we really can do ourselves.
We had vegan black-eyed peas and pumpkin quesadillas on New Year’s Day. They can also be made with sweet potato or another winter squash. Last year we used butternut. Such a tasty meal! I got the recipe a couple years ago from the Washington Post and sadly it is trapped behind a paywall. However, if it is a recipe you are interested in, let me know and I can email it to you, I just can’t post it online.
Eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day is supposed to bring good luck. It’s a tradition from the southern part of the United States. My mom is from Oklahoma and grew up having to eat them on New Year’s, but scoffed at the tradition, along with a lot of other southern cultural things, as an adult. Her mom, my Granny, always had to have them, however. Due to a stroke that left her paralyzed on the left side of her body, she lived the last ten years of her life in a nursing home. My mom always had to go to the grocery store and buy a can of black-eyed peas to take to her otherwise she would never hear the end of it. Since Granny couldn’t cook, I assume my mom opened the can and Granny just ate them. I was generally still in my pajamas after sleeping in on New Year’s Day, and was never present for the eating of the black-eyed peas. I just remember my mom grumbling about silly superstitions.
Because of this, I never ate any until I started growing them in the garden several years ago. We tried them out in hoppin’ John and a few other dishes, but not until I came across the quesadilla recipe did we settle on our own “traditional” way to eat them on New Year’s Day. Do I believe that they bring me good luck? No, especially since after we ate them the basement bathroom leak happened. Is it a fun way to honor traditions and ancestors and have a tasty meal in the process? Absolutely!
We ended up with some extra cooked black-eyed peas and James was trying to figure out what meal he might add them to. He’s going to be making split pea soup and thought he could add them to the soup. What did I think about that? I shrugged, seemed like it would be fine.
He continued kitchening in silence, and then suddenly asked, “Do you think it will kill the green peaness?”
“What?!” I exclaimed, and scowled a little.
If you are wondering about my response, say “kill the green peaness” out loud.
James looked at me a bit confused. Then I re-ran what he said in my head and saw the jar of green split peas on the counter. Then I started laughing. Then he realized what I thought he said and started laughing too. I laughed so hard I had tears streaming down my face. We are still laughing about it. And now, of course, kill the green peaness has become a thing.
There’s snow on the ground and will be for several months yet, but I ordered my garden seeds! I posted my list last week, and now you can all roll your eyes or giggle because yes, it changed. But I have a good reason!
I was planning on ordering from four different places and remembered Sand Hill Preservation Center in Iowa. They are an heirloom seed place I bought sweet potato slips from a few years ago. I did not get a good sweet potato harvest but that is no fault of theirs. Their product was good, my growing was not because I refused to put down black plastic around the plants to keep the soil at the really warm temperature they like. Surely a sunny spot and some straw will be just fine? Well, since the sweet potatoes weren’t much larger than ping pong balls, the answer was no.
But I recalled that they have lots of really interesting garden seeds I had never seen anywhere else. So I browsed their website to see if I might be able to consolidate my seed order. Why yes, yes I could.
I still had to order from three places, but Sand Hill prices are so good, I was able to shift around some of what I was ordering from the other two places and overall spend much less on seeds and shipping. Of course I had to throw in two additional seeds packets! I added caraway to the order so I will have a supply for sourdough pumpernickel bread making. And I added an interesting herb I had never heard of before called beetberry.
Beetberry, Bitum capitatum, is a member of the amaranth family. The leaves can be eaten raw as a salad green or cooked, and are highly nutritious. The tiny red berries that follow the interesting looking flowers are high in anti-oxidants and can be used to make jams or desserts. The plant also has anti-inflammatory medicinal properties. Even better, it is an annual native to most of North America.
Only two additions, but good ones you have to agree! One of the delightful things about Sand Hill other than their variety and great prices, is that they have no online ordering. I had to download an order form, fill it out, print it off, and send it through the mail with a check. This is likely one of the reasons why their prices are so good. I don’t mind at all that the whole process takes a bit longer because none of the seeds I am getting from them will need to be started indoors until March.
Seeds all done. Next I need to write out my planting calendar.
My two week’s vacation is drawing to a close and it is back to wage work tomorrow. In spite of the topsy-turvy bathroom remodel and plumbing problems, it has been a wonderful and relaxing break. I managed to read 84 books in 2025, more than I ever have before. If you are interested in poking around, check out my LibraryThing list. It says 90 but that’s because it also includes several books I chose to not finish. And there are charts and graphs too if that sort of thing floats your boat, though I’m not certain of their accuracy.
I had some fun on my vacation sorting books on my bookshelves. And I made progress on my attic project too. All the carpet is up. Now I’m filling in the seams on the plywood floor which will then get sanded and painted with primer and then painted with floor paint. Little by little!
I hope your 2026 is off to a good start. Please send good thoughts that I will not have any additional plumbing issues for a very, very long time!
#atticCarpetProject #bathroomRemodel #beetberry #blackEyedPeas #Granny #holeInTheWall #NewYear #plumbing #SandHillPreservationCenter #seedCatalogs #splitPeaSoup
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Welcome 2026
After last weekend’s main drain backup it turned out the plumbing wasn’t finished with us yet. Thursday afternoon the shower in the basement bathroom we’ve been using for the past month while our main bathroom remodel takes its sweet time, decided to leak. And it wasn’t one of those slow drip, drip leaks. But we can fix leaky faucets!
It turned out the plumbing was original to our 1952-built house and there are no longer tools and parts to fix it. So we had to call a plumber. He had to replace the shower/tub fixtures, but in order to do that, he had to cut a door-sized hole in the wall of the adjacent bedroom to access the pipes. He then had to replace the steel pipes with copper ones. And now we have new basic shower/tub fixtures and a large hole in the wall. But no more leak!
James and I do not have the tools or know-how to do drywall, so eventually we will need to hire a handyperson to come and do it for us. Since this is a guest bedroom and it is winter and people do not come visit Minnesota in the winter, especially our southern California and New Mexico family members, we can wait until spring or summer to have the wall repaired.
Meanwhile, my main bathroom remodel is not yet done. It is getting close though and I expect it will be completed this week. The tile is done and looks oh so pretty. The grab bars and folding shower chair are mounted. Now we just need a shower door, shower fixtures, a toilet and sink. And of course, with all the new and shiny, I’m looking at the medicine cabinet and wrinkling my nose because it is showing its 25-year-old age. And of course, new paint on the walls is going to need to happen too. When we contracted for the project we both naively thought the rest of the bathroom would not need changing. At least these things we really can do ourselves.
We had vegan black-eyed peas and pumpkin quesadillas on New Year’s Day. They can also be made with sweet potato or another winter squash. Last year we used butternut. Such a tasty meal! I got the recipe a couple years ago from the Washington Post and sadly it is trapped behind a paywall. However, if it is a recipe you are interested in, let me know and I can email it to you, I just can’t post it online.
Eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day is supposed to bring good luck. It’s a tradition from the southern part of the United States. My mom is from Oklahoma and grew up having to eat them on New Year’s, but scoffed at the tradition, along with a lot of other southern cultural things, as an adult. Her mom, my Granny, always had to have them, however. Due to a stroke that left her paralyzed on the left side of her body, she lived the last ten years of her life in a nursing home. My mom always had to go to the grocery store and buy a can of black-eyed peas to take to her otherwise she would never hear the end of it. Since Granny couldn’t cook, I assume my mom opened the can and Granny just ate them. I was generally still in my pajamas after sleeping in on New Year’s Day, and was never present for the eating of the black-eyed peas. I just remember my mom grumbling about silly superstitions.
Because of this, I never ate any until I started growing them in the garden several years ago. We tried them out in hoppin’ John and a few other dishes, but not until I came across the quesadilla recipe did we settle on our own “traditional” way to eat them on New Year’s Day. Do I believe that they bring me good luck? No, especially since after we ate them the basement bathroom leak happened. Is it a fun way to honor traditions and ancestors and have a tasty meal in the process? Absolutely!
We ended up with some extra cooked black-eyed peas and James was trying to figure out what meal he might add them to. He’s going to be making split pea soup and thought he could add them to the soup. What did I think about that? I shrugged, seemed like it would be fine.
He continued kitchening in silence, and then suddenly asked, “Do you think it will kill the green peaness?”
“What?!” I exclaimed, and scowled a little.
If you are wondering about my response, say “kill the green peaness” out loud.
James looked at me a bit confused. Then I re-ran what he said in my head and saw the jar of green split peas on the counter. Then I started laughing. Then he realized what I thought he said and started laughing too. I laughed so hard I had tears streaming down my face. We are still laughing about it. And now, of course, kill the green peaness has become a thing.
There’s snow on the ground and will be for several months yet, but I ordered my garden seeds! I posted my list last week, and now you can all roll your eyes or giggle because yes, it changed. But I have a good reason!
I was planning on ordering from four different places and remembered Sand Hill Preservation Center in Iowa. They are an heirloom seed place I bought sweet potato slips from a few years ago. I did not get a good sweet potato harvest but that is no fault of theirs. Their product was good, my growing was not because I refused to put down black plastic around the plants to keep the soil at the really warm temperature they like. Surely a sunny spot and some straw will be just fine? Well, since the sweet potatoes weren’t much larger than ping pong balls, the answer was no.
But I recalled that they have lots of really interesting garden seeds I had never seen anywhere else. So I browsed their website to see if I might be able to consolidate my seed order. Why yes, yes I could.
I still had to order from three places, but Sand Hill prices are so good, I was able to shift around some of what I was ordering from the other two places and overall spend much less on seeds and shipping. Of course I had to throw in two additional seeds packets! I added caraway to the order so I will have a supply for sourdough pumpernickel bread making. And I added an interesting herb I had never heard of before called beetberry.
Beetberry, Bitum capitatum, is a member of the amaranth family. The leaves can be eaten raw as a salad green or cooked, and are highly nutritious. The tiny red berries that follow the interesting looking flowers are high in anti-oxidants and can be used to make jams or desserts. The plant also has anti-inflammatory medicinal properties. Even better, it is an annual native to most of North America.
Only two additions, but good ones you have to agree! One of the delightful things about Sand Hill other than their variety and great prices, is that they have no online ordering. I had to download an order form, fill it out, print it off, and send it through the mail with a check. This is likely one of the reasons why their prices are so good. I don’t mind at all that the whole process takes a bit longer because none of the seeds I am getting from them will need to be started indoors until March.
Seeds all done. Next I need to write out my planting calendar.
My two week’s vacation is drawing to a close and it is back to wage work tomorrow. In spite of the topsy-turvy bathroom remodel and plumbing problems, it has been a wonderful and relaxing break. I managed to read 84 books in 2025, more than I ever have before. If you are interested in poking around, check out my LibraryThing list. It says 90 but that’s because it also includes several books I chose to not finish. And there are charts and graphs too if that sort of thing floats your boat, though I’m not certain of their accuracy.
I had some fun on my vacation sorting books on my bookshelves. And I made progress on my attic project too. All the carpet is up. Now I’m filling in the seams on the plywood floor which will then get sanded and painted with primer and then painted with floor paint. Little by little!
I hope your 2026 is off to a good start. Please send good thoughts that I will not have any additional plumbing issues for a very, very long time!
#atticCarpetProject #bathroomRemodel #beetberry #blackEyedPeas #Granny #holeInTheWall #NewYear #plumbing #SandHillPreservationCenter #seedCatalogs #splitPeaSoup
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My Vision,
When we all live with and show true compassion, respect and love towards one another, we bring dignity to humanity and we as a society can truly prosper.
Creative Visionary Philip A. Swiderski Jr, Is A passionately creative Bi-Polar social outcast, who’s goal in life is to inspire others to overcome what ever is holding them back. My mental issues foster my creativity. They allow me to see the world with an open mind. I have compassion towards others, because I know first hand. How hard life can be.
2nd Shot Photography is about 2nd chances and using my #Passion of photography to #Create a life for myself, while developing a #Vision to #Help others.
2nd Shot Photography is more than #Photography, it is about Focusing on the shot, the name 2nd Shot Photography came to be out of desire to have a second shot, although sometimes we need a 3rd, 4th, 5th, ect, My goal behind this is to provide a moment of rest for those that are broken, suffering, struggling and otherwise displaced in life, Compassion is to actively remove the burdens of another and give them a moment to rest, to provide them with the help they need to get back on their feet, a Second Shot, if you will, so thats the name, the short story behind it, and what I am working on creating with it, you can support at any time, and sharing is caring, stay tuned to see what develops.
Current Needs And Hope To Do: From Hunger to Hope: A Disabled Man’s Plea for Help Imagine the bite of hunger replaced by hope. One click can make it real. As a disabled man living in poverty with bipolar disorder, PTSD, ADD/ADHD, and severe anxiety, I’m no stranger to hunger and hardship. My reality is a constant battle for basic needs, a fight I wage every day. My Story I’m on SSDI, which means I live on a fixed income of $12,000 a year. I don’t have access to healthcare, transportation, or a support system. I struggle to complete daily tasks, and my mental health is declining due to lack of care. I’m constantly worried about what to eat, where to sleep, and how to make ends meet. But There’s Hope Your kindness can rewrite the script. With just a click, you can transform the clatter of an empty cupboard into the melody of hope ringing in my belly. A single donation becomes a shield against hunger, a warm coat against the biting wind, and a bus ticket towards a future brimming with possibilities.
How Your Donation Helps Here’s how your small act of compassion becomes a giant leap towards stability: A Full Plate: Your gift fills my fridge with nourishing food, fueling my body and mind to battle the storm of bipolar disorder. Warmth Against the Chill: Your generosity drapes me in comfort, shielding me from the harshness of the world and allowing me to focus on healing. Mobility, Not Isolation: Your contribution puts me behind the wheel of opportunity, connecting me to crucial appointments and empowering me to manage my health. Stability, Not Despair: Your kindness becomes the cornerstone of a safe haven, a sanctuary where I can dream and rebuild my life, brick by brick. My Vision I want to build a forever home, a place where I can live without worrying about my basic needs. I dream of creating a creative studio, a tranquil RV camping ground, and a community center. I want to restore an old farm house and turn it into a bed and breakfast. I want to create an organic farm, to never go hungry again, I want to be able to set up as many tiny homes as possible on my property, that will be open to those in need of respite and compassion, a place for those that have been battling a losing fight, so that they can rest and find their footing in life, I want to live a life with purpose and dignity.
The Benefits of Supporting Me By donating to my cause, you’ll not only be helping me achieve my vision, but also contributing to a larger impact: Breaking the Cycle of Poverty: Your support will help me break free from the cycle of poverty and create a sustainable life. Promoting Mental Health Awareness: By sharing my story, you’ll be helping to raise awareness about mental health and the challenges faced by people with disabilities and living in poverty. Empowering Creativity: Your donation will enable me to pursue my creative passions and bring joy to others through my art. Building a Community: Together, we can create a community that values inclusivity, compassion, and support for people with disabilities, and those living in poverty.
How You Can Help I need your help to make my vision a reality. Here are some ways you can help: Donate: Any amount will help, whether it’s $1.50 or $10,000. Your contribution will go towards food, housing, and hiring a qualified advocate to help me navigate the system. Share: Please share my story with your friends and family. I need to reach as many people as possible to make my vision a reality. Support: If you have any skills or expertise that can help me, please reach out. I need advocates, social workers, and professionals who can guide me through this process.
Let’s Rewrite My Story Together Please, share my story. Spread the ripple of possibility. And when you’re ready, join me in this fight with a donation, no matter how small. Together, we can turn hunger into hope, cold into warmth, and isolation into community. Be a Hero in My Story Thank you for taking the time to read my story. Thank you for considering my plea for help. I know that together, we can make a difference.
A home one can own, is a home in one can grow, Security, Sustainability, and Stability are keys to healing past traumas and having a prosperous future, A home one can own, ends poverty, and always offers refuge and the opportunity to provide self sufficiency, Owning my own forever home, will allow me so much more than struggling just to barley exist.
So you maybe wondering how exactly I would use $5million if I was to receive it all at once and today, well let me break it down a little for you, of course it starts with actually receiving enough to cover taxes on $5million and processing fees, anyways your wanting info,
I have a plan of spending $2million on purchasing property, hopefully it is between 100-200acres and would have an old farm house on it that is actually still liveable, and of course an old barn, along with the purchase I am hoping to stay within this price range as a total where I would also build my forever home, a small but efficient home and I would like to of course fully furnish my forever home,
So now I have $3million left, I plan on spending $1million on refurbishing the old farm house and converting it into an bed and breakfast, and renovating the old barn and turning into a bit of a community center, with full laundry and bath facilities, a semi commercial kitchen with a full time coffee cafe, that will offer soup and sandwiches,
Now I have $2million left, in which $500k to set up my small organic farm, and cover all the odds and ends I have yet to deal with, leaving me with around $1.5million which I will use to live off of for the rest of my life, which roughly works out to $37k a year for the next 40 years, allowing me to cover taxes, utilities and all the other life costs.
My hopes are that the bed and breakfast will generate enough money each season to help supplement property maintenance taxes, the community center I hope to sell enough coffee, soups and salads to help fund the farm until it can somewhat sustain its self, along with providing meals and facilities to those in need.
Now of course I am very aware of market changes, and cost of goods, and labor ect and know that things may all have to happen in a slower and out of order pace to truly do what I want, but eventually I hope to be able to add a campground that too will bring in revenue that will help the day to day costs of everything, nothing is really for profit, but for maintenance and slowly growing, in where I also hope to set up several small tiny homes, to offer to those in need of compassionate respite,
I have spent many years thinking and planing and I am confident had some said right now Philip here $5million, go do what you want with it, I can make it both a blessing to me, and for others for years to come. I have chosen Northern Vermont or Maine as my destination of choice, as 4 seasons really fit into the whole artist approach I plan on employing through out my endeavor, along with hopefully the property I select will have a healthy stand of maple trees on, in which I would love to harvest small batch maple syrup from to add to my supplies, and well there is so much more, but spilling the beans sometimes is both overwhelming and self defeating so exactly how all this will happen and work as far as the public is currently concerned is going to remain a bit of a mystery,
Now all I need your support to get this rolling, and as a disabled man living in poverty, and suffering and struggling every single day, there is a very real sense of urgency for your support begin rolling in right now so please share this with everyone in your circle and please support now,
Thank You
Philip A. Swiderski Jr,
$5-10-15 It All Helps, via #cashapp at $woctxphotog or via #paypal at paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=…
-
My Vision,
When we all live with and show true compassion, respect and love towards one another, we bring dignity to humanity and we as a society can truly prosper.
Creative Visionary Philip A. Swiderski Jr, Is A passionately creative Bi-Polar social outcast, who’s goal in life is to inspire others to overcome what ever is holding them back. My mental issues foster my creativity. They allow me to see the world with an open mind. I have compassion towards others, because I know first hand. How hard life can be.
2nd Shot Photography is about 2nd chances and using my #Passion of photography to #Create a life for myself, while developing a #Vision to #Help others.
2nd Shot Photography is more than #Photography, it is about Focusing on the shot, the name 2nd Shot Photography came to be out of desire to have a second shot, although sometimes we need a 3rd, 4th, 5th, ect, My goal behind this is to provide a moment of rest for those that are broken, suffering, struggling and otherwise displaced in life, Compassion is to actively remove the burdens of another and give them a moment to rest, to provide them with the help they need to get back on their feet, a Second Shot, if you will, so thats the name, the short story behind it, and what I am working on creating with it, you can support at any time, and sharing is caring, stay tuned to see what develops.
Current Needs And Hope To Do: From Hunger to Hope: A Disabled Man’s Plea for Help Imagine the bite of hunger replaced by hope. One click can make it real. As a disabled man living in poverty with bipolar disorder, PTSD, ADD/ADHD, and severe anxiety, I’m no stranger to hunger and hardship. My reality is a constant battle for basic needs, a fight I wage every day. My Story I’m on SSDI, which means I live on a fixed income of $12,000 a year. I don’t have access to healthcare, transportation, or a support system. I struggle to complete daily tasks, and my mental health is declining due to lack of care. I’m constantly worried about what to eat, where to sleep, and how to make ends meet. But There’s Hope Your kindness can rewrite the script. With just a click, you can transform the clatter of an empty cupboard into the melody of hope ringing in my belly. A single donation becomes a shield against hunger, a warm coat against the biting wind, and a bus ticket towards a future brimming with possibilities.
How Your Donation Helps Here’s how your small act of compassion becomes a giant leap towards stability: A Full Plate: Your gift fills my fridge with nourishing food, fueling my body and mind to battle the storm of bipolar disorder. Warmth Against the Chill: Your generosity drapes me in comfort, shielding me from the harshness of the world and allowing me to focus on healing. Mobility, Not Isolation: Your contribution puts me behind the wheel of opportunity, connecting me to crucial appointments and empowering me to manage my health. Stability, Not Despair: Your kindness becomes the cornerstone of a safe haven, a sanctuary where I can dream and rebuild my life, brick by brick. My Vision I want to build a forever home, a place where I can live without worrying about my basic needs. I dream of creating a creative studio, a tranquil RV camping ground, and a community center. I want to restore an old farm house and turn it into a bed and breakfast. I want to create an organic farm, to never go hungry again, I want to be able to set up as many tiny homes as possible on my property, that will be open to those in need of respite and compassion, a place for those that have been battling a losing fight, so that they can rest and find their footing in life, I want to live a life with purpose and dignity.
The Benefits of Supporting Me By donating to my cause, you’ll not only be helping me achieve my vision, but also contributing to a larger impact: Breaking the Cycle of Poverty: Your support will help me break free from the cycle of poverty and create a sustainable life. Promoting Mental Health Awareness: By sharing my story, you’ll be helping to raise awareness about mental health and the challenges faced by people with disabilities and living in poverty. Empowering Creativity: Your donation will enable me to pursue my creative passions and bring joy to others through my art. Building a Community: Together, we can create a community that values inclusivity, compassion, and support for people with disabilities, and those living in poverty.
How You Can Help I need your help to make my vision a reality. Here are some ways you can help: Donate: Any amount will help, whether it’s $1.50 or $10,000. Your contribution will go towards food, housing, and hiring a qualified advocate to help me navigate the system. Share: Please share my story with your friends and family. I need to reach as many people as possible to make my vision a reality. Support: If you have any skills or expertise that can help me, please reach out. I need advocates, social workers, and professionals who can guide me through this process.
Let’s Rewrite My Story Together Please, share my story. Spread the ripple of possibility. And when you’re ready, join me in this fight with a donation, no matter how small. Together, we can turn hunger into hope, cold into warmth, and isolation into community. Be a Hero in My Story Thank you for taking the time to read my story. Thank you for considering my plea for help. I know that together, we can make a difference.
A home one can own, is a home in one can grow, Security, Sustainability, and Stability are keys to healing past traumas and having a prosperous future, A home one can own, ends poverty, and always offers refuge and the opportunity to provide self sufficiency, Owning my own forever home, will allow me so much more than struggling just to barley exist.
So you maybe wondering how exactly I would use $5million if I was to receive it all at once and today, well let me break it down a little for you, of course it starts with actually receiving enough to cover taxes on $5million and processing fees, anyways your wanting info,
I have a plan of spending $2million on purchasing property, hopefully it is between 100-200acres and would have an old farm house on it that is actually still liveable, and of course an old barn, along with the purchase I am hoping to stay within this price range as a total where I would also build my forever home, a small but efficient home and I would like to of course fully furnish my forever home,
So now I have $3million left, I plan on spending $1million on refurbishing the old farm house and converting it into an bed and breakfast, and renovating the old barn and turning into a bit of a community center, with full laundry and bath facilities, a semi commercial kitchen with a full time coffee cafe, that will offer soup and sandwiches,
Now I have $2million left, in which $500k to set up my small organic farm, and cover all the odds and ends I have yet to deal with, leaving me with around $1.5million which I will use to live off of for the rest of my life, which roughly works out to $37k a year for the next 40 years, allowing me to cover taxes, utilities and all the other life costs.
My hopes are that the bed and breakfast will generate enough money each season to help supplement property maintenance taxes, the community center I hope to sell enough coffee, soups and salads to help fund the farm until it can somewhat sustain its self, along with providing meals and facilities to those in need.
Now of course I am very aware of market changes, and cost of goods, and labor ect and know that things may all have to happen in a slower and out of order pace to truly do what I want, but eventually I hope to be able to add a campground that too will bring in revenue that will help the day to day costs of everything, nothing is really for profit, but for maintenance and slowly growing, in where I also hope to set up several small tiny homes, to offer to those in need of compassionate respite,
I have spent many years thinking and planing and I am confident had some said right now Philip here $5million, go do what you want with it, I can make it both a blessing to me, and for others for years to come. I have chosen Northern Vermont or Maine as my destination of choice, as 4 seasons really fit into the whole artist approach I plan on employing through out my endeavor, along with hopefully the property I select will have a healthy stand of maple trees on, in which I would love to harvest small batch maple syrup from to add to my supplies, and well there is so much more, but spilling the beans sometimes is both overwhelming and self defeating so exactly how all this will happen and work as far as the public is currently concerned is going to remain a bit of a mystery,
Now all I need your support to get this rolling, and as a disabled man living in poverty, and suffering and struggling every single day, there is a very real sense of urgency for your support begin rolling in right now so please share this with everyone in your circle and please support now,
Thank You
Philip A. Swiderski Jr,
$5-10-15 It All Helps, via #cashapp at $woctxphotog or via #paypal at paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=…
-
Atmosphere Resort & Spa Dumagaute – Travel and Dive Report
My dive buddies and I spent a week diving with the team at the Atmosphere Resort and Spa. The resort is located in the Philippines, in the Municipality of Dauin. Most foreigners and dive enthusiasts refer to the entire area as Dumaguete. I’m not sure why. However, Dumaguete is the largest city in the region and the airport code DGT.
Scuba divers are attracted to this region because it is located in the Coral Triangle. The Coral Triangle covers the waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste. This region is clearly the epicenter of biodiversity in the world. While the region only covers 1.6% of the planet’s oceanic area, the region hosts 76% of all known coral species in the world and 37% of the world’s reef fishes. It’s estimated that more than 3,000 species of fish live in the Coral Triangle. This alone makes the trip from New York worth while.
Getting To Dauin:
Traveling to Dauin was not that difficult even factoring the number of flight transfers. I flew from NYC to Manilla (via Tokyo). When I booked, I think only Philippine Airlines offered a non-stop flight to Manilla from NYC. And I think that flight was sold out. Nonetheless, there many different ways to get to Manilla from the east coast of the United States – Dubai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul and a few other cities. A non-direct flight adds about 3 to 4+ hours of flight time in comparison to the direct flight.
Based on the time I could leave NY (after work) and the time the international flight arrived in Manila. I had to spend a few hours overnight in Manila since the first domestic flight was not until the morning. I knew my patience would be very low after the international flights. So, I booked a room at the Belmont Hotel.
The hotel provides airport shuttle service at no additional charge. The room was quite clean, had a hot shower, A/C and quick room service. I didn’t get a chance to walk around the hotel or use any of the facilities but it appeared to be nice. A good and very convenient element about this hotel is that it’s walkable (with all of my dive gear) to the terminal 3, which is the domestic terminal.
My room at The Belmont Airport Hotel near Terminal 3 in Manila.The domestic flight from Manila to Dumaguete is quick – about an hour long. When I arrived in Dumaguete, staff from the Atmosphere Resort & Spa were outside and waiting for us with sign. The resort is about a 30 to 45 minute drive from Sibulan Airport (DGT) depending on time of day and traffic.
Airport art in the Manila’s domestic terminal. Sunrise on the way to Dumaguete Airport from Manila.Scuba Diving:
Diving off the coast of Dumaguete and Duain is amazing. There is a ridiculous amount of marine life just off the coast. Add the super large turtles that inhabit the waters off of Apo Island and you will have a premier dive experience.
During the week, each dive guide assigned to our group was amazing. Every morning our dive guide asked us what we wanted to see – Frogfish, Octopus, Cuttlefish, Nudibranch’s, etc. and we then searched for them on specific dive sites. The dive guides were all good at pointing out unique creatures underwater. We did both shore dives and boat dives.
Diving off the coast of Dumaguete, Duain and Apo Island is quite diverse. I could easily spend more than a week in the region without getting bored. We observed more than I can list. The video above showcases the various species of Octopus, Cuttlefish, Pipefish, Devilfish, Jellyfish, Eels and Crinoids.
We also had the opportunity to see the magical and deadly Blue-Ringed Octopus.
10 Cool underwater critters in dauin Philippines scuba video playlistDive Center:
The dive center runs quite efficiently and offers a lot of flexibility for divers. And everyone I met on the dive team were friendly and helpful. There is plenty of space to store gear in between dives. The air compressor is located behind the wet-gear storage room which reduces noise and it also pumps warm dry air into the room to help dry dive gear. Next to the wet-gear storage room is the camera room. This room allows underwater photographers and videographers to make camera adjustments, charge batteries, clean equipment, and view images on a monitor in a dry environment. Also, there are plenty of rinse bins which are refreshed regularly.
Scheduling dives is quite easy. There a sign up sheet on a wall which indicates the destination of each boat and how many people are on the boat. There’s no penalty if you drop out of a dive last minute. And since the dive center is only open to resort guest, the boats are not over crowded.
We didn’t take advantage of this feature, but we could have rented a boat at a slight premium to do specific dives. For example, if you wanted to do multiple dives on one site to look for a specific species of Octopus or Frogfish.
Atmosphere resort gear storage room Spacious camera room. Fresh water rinse bins. Dauin Scuba Dive Site MapThe dive shop utilizes a large wall to display useful information such as dive site maps, events happening at the resort, excursions, and boat & night dive schedules.
Dive site my for Apo islandDive Boats:
The resort had several boats to accomodate guests. There were a few short-range boats and 2 long-range boats. Access to all of the boats is from shore. The dive staff loads all of your gear on and off the boats. The short-range boats will go out with 2-3 divers at no additional cost. All of the boat were pretty fast. And the open-air toilet allows for great photographic moments.
Short-range dive boat. The luxurious toilet on the long-range dive boat to Apo Island. Divers making themselves comfortable on the long-range dive boat. The view of Apo Island from one of the long-range dive boat.Rooms:
We booked a 2-bedroom spacious penthouse. My dive buddy and I obtained a great deal at a local dive and travel show in the New York area. Each room has its own bathroom and very comfortable living environments. Each day the staff left fresh fruit and after dinner snacks in the room.
2 – bedroom penthouse on the top floor. Our kitchen/living room area. I should have taken a picture before I unpacked and took a nap. My dive buddy took the better and larger room.Food & Drinks:
We were on an all-inclusive food package. The selection of food was fantastic. There was a wide selection of delicious Filipino and Western food. The resort hosts one restaurant that specializes in Filipino dishes which was tasty. I forgot to take a picture of my the Filipino dishes but I did take a picture of a steak and my daily scoop of after dinner ice cream.
The food selections for breakfast and lunch included everything a typical diver would want. Since we were diving 4-5 times per day, I didn’t really explore the lunch menu. I mainly pre-ordered a soup and salad daily. The kitchen team timed it pretty well. They were informed when our boat was heading back to the resort and the food was nearly ready as soon as I sat down.
We didn’t take the drink package when we booked, but I wish I did. We assumed the drink package only covered alcohol beverages and since we were planning on diving 4-5 times a day we declined the package. We didn’t realize the drink package also included the fresh fruit smoothie station. Oh well! Next time!
I couldn’t pass up a steak after a 5-dive day. A scoop of ice cream for dessert.Surface interval fresh smoothie.Resort:
The Resort & Spa is situated on a very large and spacious property. The resort hosts two seperate restaurants, 2 bars, 2 pools, dive center, camera room, spa, yoga hut, and outdoor gym. All of these areas have beach front views except for the spa and gym.
Dual pools and ample lounge chairs in front of the beach.I enjoyed my time at the Atmosphere Resort & Spa and I would definitely return for another week of diving.
All of the images were taken with either a iPhone 8 Plus, Sealife DC2000 and/or Gopro Hero 8 Black. My camera set up can be found here.
#AtmosphereResortAndSpa #Dauin #Dumaguete #featured #GoproHero8Black #Nature #Philippines #ScubaDiving #Sealife #wildlife -
Tues. Nov. 18, 2025: Good Writing Flow
image courtesy of Peter Olexa via pixabay.comTuesday, November 18, 2025
Day Before Dark Moon
Neptune, Saturn, Chiron, Uranus, Mercury, Jupiter Retrograde
Cloudy and cold
Welcome to another week!
The Community Tarot Reading for the Week is up here.
There is so much misinformation being yapped on so many issues. Some of them are major, like all the disinformation the extreme right puts out every time they open their mouths. Other is just annoying, like the chicklet on Friday saying we’re “halfway through” Mercury Retrograde. Um, basic math skills, please? Or use your calculator? It went retrograde on the 9th and goes direct on the 29th. The 14th is not “halfway through.” Compared to all the other crap that’s going on, it’s minor, but it shows just how much people don’t pay attention and say anything that comes into their vapid little heads. I’ve removed a half a dozen sites that come up in my newsfeed over the past month, because it’s painfully obvious that they’re using AI to generate their “articles” rather than hiring an actual writer to research and write up actual information. The awkward phrasing, the repetition, and the basic inaccuracies make it very obvious.
Errands were fine, good grocery shop, good library run. Hauled everything home, up the stairs, and put it away. Read one of the plays for Monday’s play discussion.
Put in a couple of hours on the ghostwriting, trying to get ahead on the next project, while I wait for notes on the last three. The Chewy order arrived, always a good thing.
Cooked dinner, read in the evening, tried to settle down after a tumultuous week, and knowing I have yet more unpleasant admin to deal with early this week. I read this month’s Read Christie book club selection, CAT AMONG PIGEONS, which I thought had a lot of large plot holes in it. Read the next Bruno mystery, which was pretty good.
Up early Saturday morning. The cats were fed first, but the rest of the routine was changed so I could get the eggplant curry soup in the crockpot early enough so it would be ready for lunch, not dinner. Willa loves it when I chop vegetables (I don’t get it, either), so she sat with me in the kitchen while I did it.
After breakfast, with the curried eggplant soup on its way, I made another batch (two loaves) of the Ina Garten recipe for honey bread. It turned out really well again. I like that the recipe is consistent. It only takes about 4 hours from yeast to out of the oven, which is faster and easier than many other recipes. And it tastes wonderful.
The bread came out of the oven as the curried eggplant soup was finished, so the timing worked and we could have them together for lunch. Very yummy. I had the spices on hand, so the fresh ingredients for the soup were about $6, and we have lots of leftovers. Always nice to have leftovers of something we like!
I tried to get some stitching done in the afternoon, but every time I sat down with needle and thread, a cloud covered the sun, so I finally gave up. I need sunlight, or I need to get a stronger lamp just for sewing, like I had in NY (which I may do at some point over the winter).
I got the housework done, and read a memoir by a producer I worked with off-Broadway, before I made the leap to Broadway. I did not enjoy working with him. He doesn’t think the crew matters on a show (honey, shows don’t run themselves). The show of his I worked had no place backstage for the crew to be/sit between cues, just the stairwell. And there were long stretches of no cues. Folding chairs were “not allowed” because of fire regulations. I ended up sewing cushions for every crew member so they wouldn’t be on a concrete step for hours every night. We also had no heat backstage. I crocheted an afghan large enough for the entire company to sit under, we took a photo and sent it to the producer, and then we finally got a couple of space heaters. Yes, we first tried talking to the company manager about all of this, and were told the producer said no to requests for chairs or cushions or heat. In spite of the fact that there were huge ticket sales, and the show wasn’t going anywhere for a good, long time. I mean, the list could go on and on, especially with out-of-town tryouts, but you get the idea. I still have the afghan. It currently lives in the hamper in our bathroom. I still have some of the cushions I sewed, too (ones I made for myself and as extras, when crew members couldn’t carry the cushions with them from one side of the stage to the other. They got to keep their personal cushions). Those cushions are all over the house, in use. (This is the show I left shortly before closing, because a show I wrote was part of the Adelaide Fringe in Australia).
The memoir didn’t make me like him any better, but I did understand him better. I’m still grateful our paths have diverged, and am unlikely to ever have to deal with him again.
Retrograde season: things from the past return, and you can close out those chapters for good.
Up at the usual time on Sunday. Morning routine. Out the door early right after to pick up something I needed for the holidays that had arrived in a local store, but I knew would be sold through by the end of the day.
After breakfast, I had a lot of chopping to do again to prepare a chicken and andouille stew in the crockpot (onions, carrots, peppers, parsley). Got that started, and then we did our overseas holiday cards. It didn’t take long. We don’t have many this year. I was going to wait until next week to mail them, but I might trot down to the post office at some point this week.
Got some planning/pattern work done on the textile piece for the January show. I wasn’t up to the ironing and cutting necessary.
I read a novel in the afternoon/evening which was okay, but not brilliant. I was interested in the premise, got frustrated at times with the characters for the wrong reasons, and kept getting ahead of the story. I think Sarah Addison Allen and Ann Aguirre cover this terrain better in their work.
Did not sleep well Sunday night. Bad dreams, and I woke up fretting at 1 AM. Managed to get to sleep again, but overslept by about an hour, much to Tessa’s disdain. But everything got done in the morning in the right order.
Monday was Day 88 of the 90-Day daily 15-minute free write sessions, and it went well. It was a good warmup to the first session with the Feminist Writing Community in Amherst from 10-12 (via ZOOM).
The session went well. I wrote nearly 2500 words of prose on a piece, and I’m happy with the bones of it. It flowed really well, and it flowed out of the free write I worked on that morning. I had to create a tarot reading for the piece, which was fun. When I create a tarot reading for a piece of fiction, I start with the card I need at the end (which drives the next plot point) and work my way backwards to create the reading, but write it reading forwards.
I ducked out a few minutes early to heat up some lunch, and then hopped onto the other ZOOM link for Honor Roll Playwrights group. I started work on the Alice section of I WILL BE DIFFERENT, and then realized the scenes I’m writing around WWII are too early in the relationship for it to align properly with the Milly section. I need to pick a date for the Ron/Milly party scenes and then work backwards so the Alice section dates work. Milly would actually have had to marry in the late 1940’s, after the war, which means I might need to move a lot of the Alice stuff I wrote today around. If Milly’s not even born at the start of the war, she can’t be ready to marry when it’s over! Time to sit down and do the timeline, or I can’t work back to the beginning of the play properly. I hate it when that happens. Ugh. Math.
I did the day’s marketing, per the content calendar, wrote up a review, and submitted it. Sadly, there’s nothing else in the queue to request, which also worries me. I had hoped to be able to invoice next week. But the print book for review arrived, so I will start reading that, and check the list all week to see if I can grab something else, and either invoice next week, or right after Thanksgiving.
The noise from the Sidewalk Chewing Demons was ridiculous. It’s been six weeks, and they still haven’t finished the far corner on our block. They keep digging it up, then walking away, then wondering why it gets wet (have you figured out that rain falls from the sky and fills up holes, my dude?) and then starting over. At this point, they’re just jerking the city around to get more money.
I did not attend the third ZOOM call of the night, the play discussion. I let them know ahead of time that I couldn’t attend, so I wasn’t letting anyone down. After reading the two plays, I felt I had nothing of value to add to the evening’s conversation within the parameters of the discussion.
I couldn’t stand the thought of leftovers, so I cooked one of our favorite comfort dishes from scratch. It’s like shepherd’s pie, but with chicken. That was really good.
In the evening, I did some of the reading on Queen Anne’s reign, which is when the historical mystery is set. I need to get on the stick with that this coming weekend. The whole King Charles II—King James II—William and Mary—Anne is mostly about people being horrible to each other, and very similar to what is going on here now, because That Thing thinks it is a king.(The dehumanization in the pronoun is intentional).
Slept reasonably well, got up at the usual time, good morning routine. This morning was Day 89 of the 90 day free write experiment. If I don’t blow tomorrow, I will have achieved it! I actually use the material in the notebook now, on most writing days, so it’s not just writing and then never looking at it again. It’s an actual repository of useful material.
It’s not even 8 AM, and the Sidewalk Chewing Demons are out there making a lot of noise and making zero progress. And Public Dis-service still won’t respond to questions.
On today’s agenda: writing, ghostwriting, possible taking in things from the back balcony, yet more unpleasant admin and filing some paperwork with the state, a walk down to the post office to get overseas stamps and mail the cards (unless it starts to rain; then I will wait until tomorrow), yoga.
Yesterday was a good creative day. Let’s hope I can get a decent balance of creative and practical in today. Have a good one!
#fiction #freelance #life #onlineCommunity #playwrighting #prose #reading #theatre #writing
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Tues. Nov. 18, 2025: Good Writing Flow
image courtesy of Peter Olexa via pixabay.comTuesday, November 18, 2025
Day Before Dark Moon
Neptune, Saturn, Chiron, Uranus, Mercury, Jupiter Retrograde
Cloudy and cold
Welcome to another week!
The Community Tarot Reading for the Week is up here.
There is so much misinformation being yapped on so many issues. Some of them are major, like all the disinformation the extreme right puts out every time they open their mouths. Other is just annoying, like the chicklet on Friday saying we’re “halfway through” Mercury Retrograde. Um, basic math skills, please? Or use your calculator? It went retrograde on the 9th and goes direct on the 29th. The 14th is not “halfway through.” Compared to all the other crap that’s going on, it’s minor, but it shows just how much people don’t pay attention and say anything that comes into their vapid little heads. I’ve removed a half a dozen sites that come up in my newsfeed over the past month, because it’s painfully obvious that they’re using AI to generate their “articles” rather than hiring an actual writer to research and write up actual information. The awkward phrasing, the repetition, and the basic inaccuracies make it very obvious.
Errands were fine, good grocery shop, good library run. Hauled everything home, up the stairs, and put it away. Read one of the plays for Monday’s play discussion.
Put in a couple of hours on the ghostwriting, trying to get ahead on the next project, while I wait for notes on the last three. The Chewy order arrived, always a good thing.
Cooked dinner, read in the evening, tried to settle down after a tumultuous week, and knowing I have yet more unpleasant admin to deal with early this week. I read this month’s Read Christie book club selection, CAT AMONG PIGEONS, which I thought had a lot of large plot holes in it. Read the next Bruno mystery, which was pretty good.
Up early Saturday morning. The cats were fed first, but the rest of the routine was changed so I could get the eggplant curry soup in the crockpot early enough so it would be ready for lunch, not dinner. Willa loves it when I chop vegetables (I don’t get it, either), so she sat with me in the kitchen while I did it.
After breakfast, with the curried eggplant soup on its way, I made another batch (two loaves) of the Ina Garten recipe for honey bread. It turned out really well again. I like that the recipe is consistent. It only takes about 4 hours from yeast to out of the oven, which is faster and easier than many other recipes. And it tastes wonderful.
The bread came out of the oven as the curried eggplant soup was finished, so the timing worked and we could have them together for lunch. Very yummy. I had the spices on hand, so the fresh ingredients for the soup were about $6, and we have lots of leftovers. Always nice to have leftovers of something we like!
I tried to get some stitching done in the afternoon, but every time I sat down with needle and thread, a cloud covered the sun, so I finally gave up. I need sunlight, or I need to get a stronger lamp just for sewing, like I had in NY (which I may do at some point over the winter).
I got the housework done, and read a memoir by a producer I worked with off-Broadway, before I made the leap to Broadway. I did not enjoy working with him. He doesn’t think the crew matters on a show (honey, shows don’t run themselves). The show of his I worked had no place backstage for the crew to be/sit between cues, just the stairwell. And there were long stretches of no cues. Folding chairs were “not allowed” because of fire regulations. I ended up sewing cushions for every crew member so they wouldn’t be on a concrete step for hours every night. We also had no heat backstage. I crocheted an afghan large enough for the entire company to sit under, we took a photo and sent it to the producer, and then we finally got a couple of space heaters. Yes, we first tried talking to the company manager about all of this, and were told the producer said no to requests for chairs or cushions or heat. In spite of the fact that there were huge ticket sales, and the show wasn’t going anywhere for a good, long time. I mean, the list could go on and on, especially with out-of-town tryouts, but you get the idea. I still have the afghan. It currently lives in the hamper in our bathroom. I still have some of the cushions I sewed, too (ones I made for myself and as extras, when crew members couldn’t carry the cushions with them from one side of the stage to the other. They got to keep their personal cushions). Those cushions are all over the house, in use. (This is the show I left shortly before closing, because a show I wrote was part of the Adelaide Fringe in Australia).
The memoir didn’t make me like him any better, but I did understand him better. I’m still grateful our paths have diverged, and am unlikely to ever have to deal with him again.
Retrograde season: things from the past return, and you can close out those chapters for good.
Up at the usual time on Sunday. Morning routine. Out the door early right after to pick up something I needed for the holidays that had arrived in a local store, but I knew would be sold through by the end of the day.
After breakfast, I had a lot of chopping to do again to prepare a chicken and andouille stew in the crockpot (onions, carrots, peppers, parsley). Got that started, and then we did our overseas holiday cards. It didn’t take long. We don’t have many this year. I was going to wait until next week to mail them, but I might trot down to the post office at some point this week.
Got some planning/pattern work done on the textile piece for the January show. I wasn’t up to the ironing and cutting necessary.
I read a novel in the afternoon/evening which was okay, but not brilliant. I was interested in the premise, got frustrated at times with the characters for the wrong reasons, and kept getting ahead of the story. I think Sarah Addison Allen and Ann Aguirre cover this terrain better in their work.
Did not sleep well Sunday night. Bad dreams, and I woke up fretting at 1 AM. Managed to get to sleep again, but overslept by about an hour, much to Tessa’s disdain. But everything got done in the morning in the right order.
Monday was Day 88 of the 90-Day daily 15-minute free write sessions, and it went well. It was a good warmup to the first session with the Feminist Writing Community in Amherst from 10-12 (via ZOOM).
The session went well. I wrote nearly 2500 words of prose on a piece, and I’m happy with the bones of it. It flowed really well, and it flowed out of the free write I worked on that morning. I had to create a tarot reading for the piece, which was fun. When I create a tarot reading for a piece of fiction, I start with the card I need at the end (which drives the next plot point) and work my way backwards to create the reading, but write it reading forwards.
I ducked out a few minutes early to heat up some lunch, and then hopped onto the other ZOOM link for Honor Roll Playwrights group. I started work on the Alice section of I WILL BE DIFFERENT, and then realized the scenes I’m writing around WWII are too early in the relationship for it to align properly with the Milly section. I need to pick a date for the Ron/Milly party scenes and then work backwards so the Alice section dates work. Milly would actually have had to marry in the late 1940’s, after the war, which means I might need to move a lot of the Alice stuff I wrote today around. If Milly’s not even born at the start of the war, she can’t be ready to marry when it’s over! Time to sit down and do the timeline, or I can’t work back to the beginning of the play properly. I hate it when that happens. Ugh. Math.
I did the day’s marketing, per the content calendar, wrote up a review, and submitted it. Sadly, there’s nothing else in the queue to request, which also worries me. I had hoped to be able to invoice next week. But the print book for review arrived, so I will start reading that, and check the list all week to see if I can grab something else, and either invoice next week, or right after Thanksgiving.
The noise from the Sidewalk Chewing Demons was ridiculous. It’s been six weeks, and they still haven’t finished the far corner on our block. They keep digging it up, then walking away, then wondering why it gets wet (have you figured out that rain falls from the sky and fills up holes, my dude?) and then starting over. At this point, they’re just jerking the city around to get more money.
I did not attend the third ZOOM call of the night, the play discussion. I let them know ahead of time that I couldn’t attend, so I wasn’t letting anyone down. After reading the two plays, I felt I had nothing of value to add to the evening’s conversation within the parameters of the discussion.
I couldn’t stand the thought of leftovers, so I cooked one of our favorite comfort dishes from scratch. It’s like shepherd’s pie, but with chicken. That was really good.
In the evening, I did some of the reading on Queen Anne’s reign, which is when the historical mystery is set. I need to get on the stick with that this coming weekend. The whole King Charles II—King James II—William and Mary—Anne is mostly about people being horrible to each other, and very similar to what is going on here now, because That Thing thinks it is a king.(The dehumanization in the pronoun is intentional).
Slept reasonably well, got up at the usual time, good morning routine. This morning was Day 89 of the 90 day free write experiment. If I don’t blow tomorrow, I will have achieved it! I actually use the material in the notebook now, on most writing days, so it’s not just writing and then never looking at it again. It’s an actual repository of useful material.
It’s not even 8 AM, and the Sidewalk Chewing Demons are out there making a lot of noise and making zero progress. And Public Dis-service still won’t respond to questions.
On today’s agenda: writing, ghostwriting, possible taking in things from the back balcony, yet more unpleasant admin and filing some paperwork with the state, a walk down to the post office to get overseas stamps and mail the cards (unless it starts to rain; then I will wait until tomorrow), yoga.
Yesterday was a good creative day. Let’s hope I can get a decent balance of creative and practical in today. Have a good one!
#fiction #freelance #life #onlineCommunity #playwrighting #prose #reading #theatre #writing