Categories
What I've been reading lately

What I’ve been reading lately #2

I’d meant to read this for awhile, and when the audiobook was in at CPL, I grabbed it. And then it grabbed me.

Generally even if I am amused or educated or entranced by a book, it does not compel me to immediate action. This one did. Before finishing it, I’d ordered my own supplies to make cheese, looked up the next winter farmer’s market, and figured out a Community Supported Agriculture program to join for next summer. I’m still excited about it, even now that I’ve finished the book, to the point that my basics ways of thinking have slightly shifted.

“But wait,” you ask, “what is the book about that you are so excited?”

The book chronicles Barbara Kingsolver and her family’s year of trying to eat food that they grew, bought from local farmers, or bought fair trade for things that didn’t grow nearby (like coffee and chocolate). Her husband writes about the scientific and economic aspects doing so, and her oldest daughter contributes sections on nutrition and meal planning.  They acknowledge throughout that they were expert gardeners and had the land and preperation necessary to make the program a success, but give ideas about how even city apartment dwellers can do similar things.

What I took away is that by eating in season and trying to be as local as possible, you are part of a food culture, which is something the modern American diet lacks– we have bits and pieces of everything, and lots of junk, so it’s hard to find wholesome staples. Buying organically grown food isn’t so great if you’re buying it from far away, since it had to be shipped to you and you have no idea what the working conditions were like on the farm. You can eat well locally over the winter too, even in climates such as Chicago, if you think ahead over the summer to put up local vegetables– and in fact, it’s better that you buy out a stall at the farmer’s market, since fresh vegetables can’t really be stored for future sales like grain can.

Since I read this in November, it’s too late to follow most of the advice, but on my last trip to the grocery store I tried to buy only things grown in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, or Michigan, and to buy vegetables that are in season even if they were grown farther away. Lots of roots and members of cabbage family, but at least they are all easy to cook.

Anyway, I highly reccomend this book, even if you just like humorous accounts of farm life and turkey sex.

Categories
Cats

New members of the family

Last weekend we finally got our cats from the shelter. We’d picked them out a few weeks ago, but they had an illness and needed to stay in kitty hospital for awhile longer. They are about six months old, and thus the perfect blend of playful and trained, though I am working on training them in the proper use of the scratching post as opposed to the couch.

The boy is on the left in the picture, and his name is Fennel (he has just one white dot under his nose and is heftier). The girl is on the right, and her name is Nasturtium (she has two white dots under her nose). Obviously they are litter mates, and they also obviously like to hang out together. Seriously, how cute are they? They are a bit naughty, but only in a charming way. It’s great to have two little purr machines to visit with during the day, since I’m sort of resigning myself to being unemployed for the forseeable future.

Categories
Television

Relating to Gossip Girl on a personal level

I started watching Gossip Girl because it followed America’s Next Top Model last year, and Megan and I got hooked. Once mobile informatics entered thanks to a certain up and coming young librarian at U of I, we could view it as an honest intellectual pursuit. It helped that the New Yorker can’t stop talking about it.

And while I have always enjoyed the Jamesian (Henry, of course) aspects of the show, the lives of Upper East Side high school students living in a fantasy world of cocktails after school and trust funds do not, as a rule, have anything to do with my own life. But now there is something that I can root for beyond the Blair/Serena reconciliation. Jenny will be homeschooled so that she can pursue her career in fashion. Now there’s some sound thinking, and it only took Lily van der Woodsen cum Bass showing some cleavage to make it happen.

Now I hope they don’t make Jenny into an immediate sociopath, though according to an interview I read with Josh Schwartz, she may very well become the Bad Girl that she is in the books (which I haven’t made it through, though the New Yorker tells me that they are Tolstoy-esque).