When I adopted Toby, I found him through CAWS. I was really impressed with their follow-through during the process of looking, and I even got an email about two weeks after he’d been home making sure we were all happy. Over the weekend, I got another email that his foster mom had wanted me to have, which had his baby pictures in it. Baby Toby!
June 2008
Friday Unrelated Information
1. All the schedules for free concerts and movie screenings for the summer are up, and guess who’s coming to the Gallivan Twilight Concert series this year? Neko Case, The Awesomest Woman To Sing Since Patsy Cline. She’s playing August 28th. For free. (Also free: An outdoor screening of The Muppet Movie at Lindsay Gardens in the Avenues July 25th.)
2. Speaking of thrifty entertainment, here’s a collection of thrifty tips (not mine) that we can learn from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
3. Toby likes the sun. He takes after me.
Non-Confusing Post About Bikes
I’ve decided to buy a bike. But after realizing I really, really disliked mountain biking, I haven’t been on a bike in ten years. While this may make my decision sound like a recipe for disaster, I’m remembering how much I liked just riding around (on pavement) in my teens. I’m also remembering how expensive gas is and how many hours every day I do nothing but sit. Plus, I live about a mile and a half from work and my car is not getting any younger.*
Another thing that helped convince me that I will LOVE riding a bike: the Internet. Did you know there are whole blogs dedicated to cycling stylishly? Blogs that advocate wearing dresses to keep cool and vintage capes to keep warm? Here are a few that helped me decide:
Copenhagen Cycle Chic
London Cycle Chic
Riding Pretty
I’ll start looking at bikes (pretty!) next week. I’m undecided about wearing a helmet, but the Internet has told me that there are even pretty-ish options for those, too–they look a little like a riding helmet, turning my bike into my pony…
I think I’ll like cycling.
*I do plan to actually ride a bike or two before I buy one myself, just to make sure I won’t hate it. It’s one thing to “cycle pretty” and another thing to spend $400 on an accessory you won’t use.
Things One Learns That One Is Really Embarrassed To Admit
I always though Ray Eames, of the design team Charles and Ray Eames, was Charles’s brother. No, Ray was his WIFE. The things you learn.
(I found this out at the US Postal Service site, because stamps with Eames designs are coming out.)
(Also, if people would use the proper convention for couples’ names and keep the husband’s name closest to his last name [because his name never changed, while the wife’s did], I would not have made this egregious error. I’m just saying.)
Tuesday Project Roundup: Remember When I Used To Knit?
Yeah, I remember when I did, too.
(I still have a sweater going, but it’s stalled on the sleeves. And I brought a market bag with me for travel knitting but it’s turning out way too small for anything that could be bought at the market, except maybe two tomatoes.)
Agricultural Monday
Continuing the “Where Does Your Food Come From/Are We Doomed?” theme of the past few weeks, here’s an an article by Michael Pollan for the New York Times online titled, “Why Bother?“–which was part of the angst of that trip to the Midwest:
The realization that all my efforts aren’t doing anything–that no matter how much I try to eat eggs from happy chickens, or buy organic parsley, that there will be thousands more people buying the cheapest eggs and parsley, with no thought as to where they come from–was really discouraging.
So imagine how happy I was to find an article telling me why I should still bother. Read it and see why you should bother, and we’ll resurrect the 1970’s back-to-the-land movement!
Friday Unrelated Information
1. Yves Saint Laurent died Sunday. Someone who popularized the trapeze dress is all right with me.
2. Photographs of beds deer made in long grass for the night–a whole series. I like that.
3. Words of wisdom from a writerly blog by a former Utahn: “When you are the person who says, ‘I want to go to the demoliton derby,’ or, ‘I know…let’s spend our summer vacation with war reenactors,’ and you find the person who’s like, ‘Yeah, and let’s also hit the La Brea tar pits;’ hold onto that like a rear-mount choke hold, people. Because that is LOVE.”
(And speaking of derbies, mark your calendar for Tooele–where they serve beer and it is awesome–on August 2 and for August 9 for the Weber County Fair. Perhaps it will be warm and sunny then.)
"The Grapes Of Wrath" Is One Of The Best Titles Ever
I took The Grapes of Wrath with me on my trip last week, thinking it would be a good mix of travel and agriculture. (I had forgotten how sad it is, though; I had to stop reading in the Denver airport because I was getting weepy.) Reading it now, right after all my other books about alternative farming and eating locally, and after visiting the family farm that miraculously still struggles on, I’m really struck by how current it is–Steinbeck saw the writing on the wall in 1939:
“…crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money…[until the landowners] were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.”
The Best Bar Ever
“…crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money…[until the landowners] were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.”
1939.