JanerBlog

Luvverly

This weekend I didn't get a whole lot done. I read a lot, did some sketching (for fun! Not even for a purpose!), helped Paul with some anatomy excercises, reviewed a friend's webcomic, and got a page painted. I baked a hand-kneaded loaf of wheat bread (a departure from the usual bread-machine) and watched a few episodes of Alton, including one on breadmaking, which enabled me to bake one of the best loaves I've ever produced. Did some crockpot cookin', some refreshing online research into Biblical history (history of the Bible itself, in its many incarnations, as opposed to the history within the Bible), went to Quaker meeting. It was heaven. I needed a low-gear weekend, and this was it. Yay!

Simplicity

As much as I love Treehugger.com for all its bulleteins on all things crunchy, I have to admit that I really have a strong dislike for all the consumer-oriented content. To paraprhase a comment I saw posted on TH.com not too long ago -- "You mean there will still be Peak Oil if I drive my Prius to Ikea while eating my organic microwaveable burrito?" Yeah. That.

We are not going to solve our conspicuous consumption problems with more consumption, regardless of how green it is. I strongly advocate making green choices wherever one can, but if we keep consuming at the same rate we are now, not much will change.

I've been casting around for someone, some book, to put its finger on what I've been proseletyzing all this time. I think I may have just found it. It's called "Voluntary Simplicity", and it was first brought up as a concept by a guy named Duane Elgin in the 1970's. (Too bad we got the eighties, instead.) I've heard of this movement before, but had never read much about them. I already know the concept in my bones: reduce your intake so that you don't have to work so darn hard to increase your income. Get off the ratrace treadmill by shedding your belongings until you are down to a nice, spartan, minimum equilibrium.

I found this page of essays, and after reading many of them, I went to the library and checked out a half-dozen books on the subject. I'll write more after I've digested the info, but suffice it to say I galloped through a hundred pages of this book last night.

I have always wanted to concentrate more on my comics. Who knows? Maybe these will lead me towards that end.

Diet

In a quest for healthier eating, I'm going to try the WW Core foods plan.I found the CF list on the internets, and my mom's loaning me a points book. It's enough like Atkins, which i always have good success with, that I should just be able to do it without meetings. Basically you trade being able to eat fruits, potatoes and whole grains for fats. So, I can't have cheese or nuts or whole milk for a while, but I can have oatmeal, whole wheat bread, and fruit, three things that are really hard for me to live without.

And you get five "points" per day, which you can "spend" on things like butter, cheese, chocolate, glass of wine, etc. I think I'll do pretty well. I really like the fact that I don't have to count or weigh anything, or worry about portions. It's like, you can eat all the fruits, vegetables and lean meats that you want, but go very lightly on the fatty/high caloric/high starch stuff. I'm down with that. And after about two weeks on the Atkins thing, my sugar sensors are way down. A tiny little bit of sweet, like fruit, tastes wonderful, but anything sweeter than honey is gross.

The other thing I have to be careful of is eating sweet stuff, pretty much at all. On Monday, one of our coworkers baked this really impressive spice cake from scratch, with homemade frosting. I had a small piece, and for the rest of the day I kept passing by the breakroom, snatching crumbs. It's like an ON switch: If I eat any of it, I want more, more, more. Sticking to fruits and ultra dark chocolate, I don't get any of those berzerk sugar cravings.

Now, just to compare, go take a look at these Weight Watchers cards from 1974 -- ironically, the year I was born.

Progress

After a week with absolutely no sugar or carbs, at all, I can finally pull on most of the jeans I bought two weeks ago. I celebrated this with a bowl of oatmeal and a pear. Another week of the same and I should actually be able to wear them out of the house.

Bleh.

Again with the peak oil

Mostly bad news, like the Kuwaitis have been fibbing about their oil reserves, but some good news, from this article in The Independent.

Rain and Sun and Snow

It rained all yesterday evening. Paul and I walked through it for something like two miles while we went out to dinner, a Wassail put on by the SCA at Kraftbrau, and finally to see Titus Andronicus at the Epic Center, starring our own Zee as Tamora, Queen of the Goths.

Everything was great fun; dinner was marvellous, the wassail was well-attended, and I got to sit in on a couple tunes on bodhran. The wassail itself -- well, let's just say they did a very good job recreating it, but I'm quite glad I'm in the 21st century. The spiced apples they plunked in on top of the hot wassail made it positively yummy, though, and the stuffed bread thingies were outrageously good.

Titus Andronicus (Tightass Androgynous, Paul and I snickered with juvenile glee) was a really well done play, and one that I'd never read or seen performed, despite my addiction to all things Shakespearean in College. Talk about gore! Fourteen deaths, nine on stage, cannibalism, rape, infanticide, three chopped off hands -- you name it, it's got it. Zee was an excellent Goth Queen, resplendent in red and completely alien from everyone else onstage. The girl who played Lavinia was also quite good, keening and tongueless and bloody. Titus and Saturninus were showstoppers, and stole the play, especially when they had to get creative with the staging in the second act, because the fake stage blood was so expensive. We came home and I dragged out my enormous collegate-era Big Book o' Shakespeare and read most of the notes and play, catching some of the more subtle historical references I'd missed. I knew some of them -- but Tarquin? He was a bit of a mystery.

Today I got up and tried to ski in the four inches of snow that fell overnight. Yes, you heard correctly -- it bucketed down rain until midnight and then switched to snow. Welcome to Michigan, and its schizophrenic weather. This morning it was blue and sunny and beautiful -- and 35 degrees. I attempted to go skiing, but finally gave up after about a half-hour and walked home with my skis over my shoulder. I was spending more time knocking the packed-on snow off my skis than I was actually going forward. Le sigh.

Still, it was time well-spent; it's absolutely beautiful now, even though there ain't much snow left.

Thoap

So, I'm looking into starting to make some soap. Here are some niftykeen links, so I don't lose them.

• http://www.canis-art.com/soaping.htm


• http://www.halderman.net/cgi-bin/showrecipe.pl?cp


• http://www.the-sage.com/calcs/lyecalc2.php


• http://www.pvsoap.com/recipe_castile_soap.htm


• http://www.soapnuts.com/indexcp.html


• http://www.teachsoap.com/smallcp.html


• http://www.cranberrylane.com/soapmaking.htm


• http://www.treehugger.com/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&SearchField=keywords&search=soap

I want to learn to make soap with items I can get cheaply and easily, otherwise it doesn't make sense to make it myself. I'd prefer vegetarian soaps (sans tallow or lard, though those are the most traditional), and don't really feel like ordering palm or coconut oils, but from what I've been reading, unless you want a very drying, no-lather bar, you've got to go with one or the other of those.

Ideally, what I'd like is a good recipe for a small (1# or so) batch of olive oil/beeswax/water/lye -- with green tea mixed in to the water to give a nice skin rejuvenator, and maybe a teaspoon or two of jojoba or almond oil (I have both hanging around from an earlier project) for superfatting. I think there's just such a one in the Cranberry Lane PDF, and I may try that one as my inaugural batch.

Any readers here have any soapmaking experience? Anybody want to come to / host a soapmaking party once I get a few batches under my belt?

Blanco

I made really yummy Queso Blanco tonight. The advantage of this cheese is that it requires no rennet or anything special.

Ingredients:
1 gallon whole milk, not ultra-pasteurized, preferably without hormones.
1/4 cup cider vinegar
Kosher salt (grind in mortar and pestle until fine)

Tools:
Accurate thermometer
Colander, lined with a clean, tight-woven dishtowel (NOT Terrycloth)
Two zucchini-bread pans
Cookie sheet
8-quart stainless steel pot (NOT ALUMINUM)

In a large stainless steel pot, heat the milk to between 180 and 195, stirring frequently to prevent burnination.

When the milk is at the correct temperature, add the cider vinegar in little bloops, stirring as the milk curdles. The milk should clearly separate into curds and whey; if it doesn't, add another bloop of vinegar.

When the curd has formed all the way, empty the pot into the colander. When the cloth is cool enough to touch, gather the corners and wring out as much whey as you can, then set it back in the colander, open it carefully, and salt the curds to taste. Bundle the curds in their towel until they're all wrapped up in a neat little package,then press it inside one of the zucchini bread pans. Set the second breadpan on top of the first, as though you were going to nest them together, with the proto-cheese in between. Turn the whole affair over, and set it in your sink or on a cookie sheet.

Wash your pot and fill the empty gallon jug that the milk came in with water. Set the pot on top of the inverted breadpans and put the full gallon of milk in the pot. Presto! You now have a cheese press exerting eight pounds of pressure. Press down on the handles of the pot to make sure the whey can still run out of the cheese. Let stand overnight. In the morning, you will have a cunningly shaped brick of Queso Blanco, suitable for slicing and frying, Palak Paneer, or a million other yummy applications.

Attention, Knitters and Crocheters:

I am in need of more shopping bags, the kind that you take to Farmer's Market or the grocery store and don't throw away. The goal is to have a couple in the house, and a couple in each of our cars, so that if we do quick pitstops we already have them with us.

Consequently, I want either some of these or some of these. Knitting and Crocheting are two domestic skills I just don't have. What I do have is a metric butt-ton of plastic bags, and a little money. I would be willing to make the "yarn" and slide a few bills your way. What say?

Suck!

No Silverleaf this year, lookin' like.

I lurve FreeCycle.

Some nice people just came and hauled away boxes of crap from my house. And they were happy about it.

I lurve you, FreeCycle!

YAY SNOW

YAY SNOW IT'S FINALLY SNOWING YAY

It's Done!

I cancelled the extended cable. No more bottom-feeding entertainment. Sadly, also no Good Eats, Iron Chef or Mythbusters -- no more Daily Show. These things I'll miss, but the brain rot, I won't. And thanks to A, I'll still be getting tapes of the new GE episodes every couple months.

Yay, one less distraction in the house!

UPDATE: I also just nuked my Audible subscription. I'm backlogged on audiobooks, anyway. I started the subscription because the Library was taking FOREVER to get the last three Dark Tower books on audio. In hindsight, I wish I had that $40 back. Bleh. Still, I did get some lovely books, ones that the library couldn't get on tape -- Sarah Vowell, David Sedaris, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman. I'll treasure those audiobooks for a long, long time.

UPDATE AGAIN: Just launched the first Freecycle salvo. Off go an old hatrack, a popcorn popper, my old cappuccino maker (french press from now on!) and a 17" monitor that I haven't used since I got my new flatscreen. I found Paul's grandma's waffle iron while I was cleaning out the cupboard -- I don't think I'm ready to give that up yet -- Alton just did a show on waffles and I may give them a try. (Oh, shut up. You guys all know I'm totally Alton's lurve slave.)

Yikes.

Dr. James Lovelock thinks we've pushed Mother Earth too far to save her.

Go me!

As usual, I celebrated MLK day by getting my tax act together. I'm anal enough in my own business dealings to not just hand my accountant a shoebox full of receipts. Every year, I go through and enter, by hand, all my receipts and expenditures, all my income and outgo, into a nice priddy XL sheet so that I can find everything from year to year.

Last year, what with the house purchase and the wedding and the move and the heyyyy, it took me a week to get it all entered and shored up.

This year? About six hours. Go me!

Slackathon

This weekend we had a small get-together with a group of friends, called the Bleak Midwinter Slackathon. At first it was just going to be Virus and Mike and Dagny, but since we missed Emily and Dirk on their way through Kzoo last time, we decided to invite them along, too. Some fellow Kalamazooans (Kalamazerds? Kalamazudlians?) also dropped by, and we had a really nice time doing a whole lotta nothin'.

Well, that's not true. We made a double batch of cheese, and Mike baked bread, and we went to Bell's, and ate a whole lot of good food. But it was fun, relaxing stuff. Yay.

Here's the group:

Here's Dirk and Emily:

Brodie plays King of the Clothes Pile:

Basia plays Queen of the Blanket Pile:

Mike plays King of the Virus Pile:

The Couch plays King of the Mike Pile:

And a grand time was had by all.

YAY!

Muchas Smooches

Miz Coopah, she lurves her some Brodie.

Brodie, he not so sure.

Hairs cut

A week or so ago, I got my hairs cut. Here are the photos:

Before:

After:

The Braid:

The Braid attacking Paul:

City Hippies

These guys are fun. They're what I imagine M & D might accomplish someday, only with the volume turned up to eleven.

They have a cob oven, they brew their own BioDiesel, make their own soap, keep rabbits, chickens and ducks, and live in suburban Pasadena. Everything you see them growing is being raised in a 1/10 acre plot: their total lot space is just 66 x 132 feet. The last two years, they've produced over three tons of food each year.

From what I can see, the four adults who work on this urban farm are making their living off the farm -- mostly by selling organic produce. It wouldn't surprise me if they had other jobs outside the house -- but they've been at it for five years now.

Go, city hippies!

New Diet

My brother-in-law Brian has the best idea for a diet, ever. It's called "The Three-Year-Old Diet".

You just act like a toddler: eat when you're hungry, refuse to eat when you're not hungry, sleep whe n you're tired, and run everywhere.

Dang, these kids've got it figured out.

Article Roundup

Here's some interesting reading; several articles I've culled over the last week or so from various sources. Paul and I had a really intense conversation last night about what's coming in the next few years, and these are the main articles I've cited while we were talking.

If you guys think I'm a total downer, check out this guy.

If you want some actual hope, check out what those wacky Danes are up to.

If you want something in between, here's an article from Harper's, A collection of arguments for and against hydrogen (I recommend both "Twenty Myths about Hydrogen" and "The Hydrogen Hallucination" for both ends of the spectrum), a Treehugger roundup of green power articles, and a hilarious Onion article about gas prices.

In a brief summation of what I told Paul last night, I see things along a sliding scale. Kunstler's at one end of the spectrum, next to the shrill, survivalist types who are buying gold and building bunkers, along with all those guys who say that the government and big business are not talking about peak oil because they want to keep the public complacent and distracted so they can amass as much wealth as possible while bringing around the end of the fossil fuel age as quickly as possible, rather than drawing it out over a number of slowly-declining decades.

On the other end of the scale are the Pollyanna types who say we won't need to cut our energy intake at all and that hydrogen or nuclear's gonna step in and save everyone and the world will be bright and clean forever (*jazz hands*).

I'm about 65% of the way towards Kunstler's end. Maybe a little more.

I think we're heading for some serious trouble over the next couple decades, as we make our way from complete and total dependence on fossil fuels to a more hybridized grid of various sources -- some renewable and some not. I think there are going to be some very painful years during this transition, made all the more difficult by the fact that no one seems willing to make the sacrifices necessary to make the transition go more smoothly. I don't think the world, or our economy, is gonna collapse in the next calendar year, and for the record, my idea of hell is an isolated, gun-bristling subsistence farm somewhere outside of Iron Mountain. I've done the hardcore farming in the middle of nowhere, and I'd rather have my friends near and be within walking distance of the Farmer's market, thanks.

However.

I also believe that our days of boundless luxury and cheap utility are nearly at an end, and that if Paul and I are going to have a life of reasonable comfort, we'd better start incorporating some forms of "inconvenience" into our lives ahead of time: in other words, we need to get used to doing without every single convenience exactly when we want it. I'm encouraging Paul to walk to work on a few days, in case we wind up with only one car, and I walk or bike everywhere I can. The fireplace is a backup heating source, if the cost of natural gas quadruples, and I'm getting myself back into the habit of building a fire every morning, something I did through a significant part of my childhood. I'm going crazy with the garden this year, even planting an auxilliary garden with my mother-in-law, and probably putting in some fruit and nut trees at their farm. There's a storage freezer in our future, and I'm going to really try to fill it full of food this summer.

I'm not doing this because the end is nigh. I'm doing this because it's second nature. And peak oil or not, fresh peppers are an insane $3 per pound right now. If I'd grown more and frozen them, we could be eating them for free right now. I think that between inflation and the insane cost of fuel, pretty soon food's going to get a heck of a lot more expensive, and growing our own will make real sense, not to mention the taste and nutrition benefits.

When I was growing up, the term "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" wasn't some highfalutin' concept we had to be taught. It wasn't even a hippy-dippy term. It was just what you did. It was common sense. Now that I've got my own home, and I'm spending a lot of time in it, I'm gravitating back to the ways I was raised with: frugality, self-sufficiency, and growing our own food. The fact that there's a storm a-brewin' just gives me all that much more incentive.

So yeah. I'm gettin' ready for the future by bein' old-fashioned. Want some cheese dip?

Dip Dip Dip

I made more cheese last night, in an opening cheesemaking salvo for the upcoming Slackathon: ricotta and some sort of devolved mozzerella dip. The mozerella was doing fantastically well up until the last step, whereupon it refused to come together. I think the "CountryFresh" milk I got at the local grocery had been heated too high, destroying the stuff needed to make it stretchy. I'm hoping to score some good, unadulterated milk from Ann Arbor next Monday, to have on hand for proper cheesing.

GrisGris

Man, is it grey out. I literally don't think I've seen the sun in two weeks. Wish I were kidding. Wish to heaven the skies would dump some snow on us so at least it'd be pretty, and I could go skiing. In the meantime, it's 35F, raining, and about as dreary as you can get. bleh.

On the other hand, I bought stuff with which to make cheese again. I wanted to make it last night, but biology worked against me and I wound up watching Alton on the couch, and not-calling Tish like I said I would, until it was too late. I extra-suck.

So I let the dreary and the tired hijack me, and went to bed at 10:30, something like 3 hours earlier than usual. I needed it, obviously -- slept in till eight. Mayhap cheese tonight. I must needs decide on the cheese. Kefir would be nice, but I dunno if I can eat all of it. I'd make neufchatel, but I can't remember what it tastes like. The 30-minute mozzerella's a little tasteless; maybe I'll make it herby this time.

Ah, the wonders of actually having a wee bit of free time.

Fireplace

A couple days after Christmas, we finally got our fireplace insert. It's way smaller than I pictured, but ours had been a coal-burning fireplace in its previous incarnation, so we didn't really have a ton of space to begin with.

I bought the insert (which was expensive enough to make me still writhe with buyer's remorse, something I hope will eventually fade) for a number of reasons. Reason the first was that since both our furnace and hot water heater vent up the chimney, there's no way to put in a damper or flue; we basically had just a solid column of cold air coursing through the middle of the house. Reason the second was that when we did actually burn the fireplace, it made the whole room noticably colder as it drew the warm air right up the chimney.

So... now we have a 70% efficient insert. It's pretty, and nice, and big enough to use our new piecookers in (THANKS, NANCY!) but it doesn't throw as much heat as I'd expected. I plan to burn it whenever I'm home -- we can get rid of all the branch-and-leaf trash our trees throw down, and all our junk mail, and whatever scrap wood we have -- to offset the astronomical heating bills we've gotten lately ($300 this last month and likely to climb! Argh!)

Anybody in the Michigan area got some scrap wood hanging around? The firebox is 18" and can burn most anything. We'll pick up. :)

Happy New Year.

Happy new year, everyone. 2005 was a rough one for me in many ways, but was also a very rewarding one in others. Here's best wishes for the new.

My Resolutions, in no particular order:

• Eat less, move more.
• Floss.
• Continue to make my life more environmentally friendly wherever I can.
• Stop wasting so much time on the internet. (damn.)
• Want what I have, not have what I want.