Eating Goats' milk yogurt from Trader Joe's and enjoying this view (instead if -40).
To MA Wed am!!
New Zealand travels: 8/23/08 to 2/9/09
Monday, February 26, 2007
In Seattle for a few days
Eating Goats' milk yogurt from Trader Joe's and enjoying this view (instead if -40).
To MA Wed am!!
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
The children's book "Beatrice's Goat" is very popular
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/11/60minutes/main666166.shtml
CBS News Online
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Bunnies, Stethoscopes, High School, and Cold
Ok literati, whip out your Oxford English Dictionaries and riddle me this : How did we ever come to using the term "kindle" to describe when a rabbit has bunnies??
Parturition is the fancy term for “giving birth.” I’m still learning many of these, and I've left off some more obvious ones. Feel free to e-mail me additions
Parturition is the fancy term for “giving birth.” I’m still learning many of these, and I've left off some more obvious ones. Feel free to e-mail me additions
Rabbits kindle bunnies
Goats kid kids
Pigs farrow piglets
Sheep lamb lambs
Alpacas and Llamas [give birth to] crias
Dogs whelp pups
Hamsters [give birth to] pups
Cats queen kittens
Ratites (ostriches, emus) and anything with feathers, as far as I can tell still "lays eggs and has chicks" . . . but please be prompt with corrections!
Stethoscope: Late this afternoon one of my co-workers presented me with a brand-new high quality stethoscope "from The After Hours Vet Clinic" she said. It's now packed in my bag. I am a lucky girl, indeed.
High School: Two more days of being in one of Lathrop High School's Special Education classrooms, a job I'm really enjoying. The other teachers have been kind and appreciative, and the boys are very cool individuals. I don't substitute teach very often, nor do I have a teaching certificate, and that adds to my sense of
privilege at being included in a classroom setting and allowed to be creative.
Cold: It's cold. Yeah, that's about it. Twenty to thirty below zero the last few days and no end in sight. "Tropical" New England, here I come! At least contact freezing any exposed skin and the relentless cycle of plugging-car-in-warming-car-up-unplugging-car-plugging-car-in-locking-keys-in-car-ice-fog-ice-fog-pollution will be over!
Goats kid kids
Pigs farrow piglets
Sheep lamb lambs
Alpacas and Llamas [give birth to] crias
Dogs whelp pups
Hamsters [give birth to] pups
Cats queen kittens
Ratites (ostriches, emus) and anything with feathers, as far as I can tell still "lays eggs and has chicks" . . . but please be prompt with corrections!
Stethoscope: Late this afternoon one of my co-workers presented me with a brand-new high quality stethoscope "from The After Hours Vet Clinic" she said. It's now packed in my bag. I am a lucky girl, indeed.
High School: Two more days of being in one of Lathrop High School's Special Education classrooms, a job I'm really enjoying. The other teachers have been kind and appreciative, and the boys are very cool individuals. I don't substitute teach very often, nor do I have a teaching certificate, and that adds to my sense of
privilege at being included in a classroom setting and allowed to be creative.
Cold: It's cold. Yeah, that's about it. Twenty to thirty below zero the last few days and no end in sight. "Tropical" New England, here I come! At least contact freezing any exposed skin and the relentless cycle of plugging-car-in-warming-car-up-unplugging-car-plugging-car-in-locking-keys-in-car-ice-fog-ice-fog-pollution will be over!
Friday, February 16, 2007
politics on the farm
An easy guide to political ideologies using 2 cows
FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.
FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you
to take care of them, and sells you the milk.
PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. Your neighbors help you take
care of them, and you all share the milk.
APPLIED COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them,
but the government takes all the milk.
DICTATORSHIP: You have two cows. The government takes both and
shoots you.
MILITARISM: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts
you.
PURE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets
the milk.
REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors pick
someone to tell you who gets the milk.
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: The government promises to give you two cows if
you vote for it. After the election, the president is impeached for
speculating in cow futures. The press dubs the affair "Cowgate". The cows
sue you for breach of contract.
BRITISH DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. You feed them sheeps' brains
and they go mad. The government does not do anything.
EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. At first, the government
regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays
you not to milk them. After that it takes both, shoots one, milks the other
and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms
accounting for the missing cows.
CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
TOTALITARIANISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and
denies they ever existed. Milk is banned.
COUNTERCULTURE: Wow, dude, there's like...these two cows, man. You have got*
to have some of this milk.
SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take
harmonica lessons.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Thursday, February 08, 2007
First Failure
This is the first thing I ever sent out for publication thirteen years ago. The small literary journal I sent it to has long since folded. The hand-written reply I got from one of the editors commended me, said my work was “eminently publishable” but that the editorial board had stopped accepting essays just recently. I looked up “eminent” in my navy-blue paperback dictionary. So, here is lesson #64110 : Get a rejection letter; learn a new word. It’s all progress.
Underneath boughs of fuzzy dark hair, Aspeth’s passionate eyes flashed as she proclaimed, “I love animals, I don’t want to eat them! That’s GROSS.” She held her stomach and winced at the thought.
Unsure of what to do next our fourth grade teacher asked if her parents knew about her convictions, and, was Aspeth taking vitamins.
Was Aspeth taking vitamins?! If Mrs. Shapiro only knew about the cache of supplements they had at Aspeth’s house—magical bottles of blood-strengthening elixirs and pills, tablets the size of cookies that smelled like yeast, and powders to mix into full glasses of orange juice. Not to mention the way Aspeth’s mother never let her leave the house without a day’s supply of cheese. It was the protein of the gods! Yes, cheese: Neufchatel, Gruyere, Swiss, American, Cheddar, and cottage, as if cheese itself would cure their poor ten-year-old of her vegetarian “delusions.”
While the adult world politely humored her, Aspeth was deadly serious. With all the unripe wisdom, but soul-glowing impulse of childhood, she was laying the foundation for her life. Her beliefs never wavered. As faithful friends, over the years we have methodically refined our arguments against each other’s. From the interstices of our friendship, however, our branches have grown in different directions. We feel different breezes.
I remember having Aspeth over for dinner in the third grade, just months before her declaration of cruelty-free eating habits. We’d spent most of the dinner giggling and rearranging the food on our plates to look like a tropical paradise for auburn-colored men made of long grains of wild rice. We stood our broccoli spears up against our damp milk glasses. The chicken breast was a rocky shoreline. Romaine lettuce was the green sea on which our grainy comrades would sail on celery rafts. My mother didn’t see the creative gift in our edible architecture.
“But don’t you think,” stammered Aspeth, “that broccoli does look like trees?”
“Yes, but the meat on your plate doesn’t look like a bird, so why don’t you girls try and eat it.”
I ate my chicken. Aspeth ate our broccoli.
It took me three hours to fall back to sleep after the nightmare that woke me that night. I’d been lost in the gray dawn mist of a primeval forest. Pushing onward through leafy fronds, watching them bend and crack under my feet, I’d dared myself not to look behind me. There was an ominous rhythm, a pulse coming from nowhere. I stumbled faster, my feet tangling in the cords of vine at my ankles. Still, the panting drummed louder. My destination unrevealed to me, my tongue thick and sticky with thirst, it startled me that the pulse was more like a wheezing. It was like the gulping breath of a lioness after her prey; quicker, harder, louder, as her huge padded paws engulfed earth with each stride.
I whirled around in the thick foliage, when in horror I realized it was the hungry breathing of the forest fronds themselves! Suddenly, the greenery was circling around me cackling with victory, bulbous, knob-headed faces leaning in on me, with leaves that skillfully began ripping me, my skin coming off like clothe from the loom, then whole chunks of my flesh.
I ran to the bathroom to keep from peeing in my bed, and stared at my pink bare feet as I sat on the cold toilet. I wanted to wake Aspeth up (she was in the adjacent twin bed, face down in the pillow—peacefully). I wanted to go downstairs and stare at the seemingly inanimate two-inch broccoli lying captive in our refrigerator. But all I did was sit there. And stare at the flesh on my feet.
Somewhere in my little mind it was crystallizing that life itself had the property of being both prey and predator. The walls between species became transparent veils when sacrifice was measured against loss. What is lost for us, when we plunge our fork into a fine dinner? Then, what is sacrificed from the meal itself? In the fluid cycle of birth to death to birth, isn’t the sustenance of life the harvesting of other life?
We subvert this realization by using a sliding scale of value for organisms. Yet, by what means do we measure the validity of a ‘life’? Does a life become more valuable because it can move (like humans), utter sound (like humans), copulate, congregate, legislate, and educate (like humans)? Of course it is scary to equivocate the value of vegetables with higher vertebrates. Comparing broccoli to man means comparing man to broccoli. We already sign elaborate “living wills” to avoid becoming “vegetables.” Who are we to make biology hierarchical? Life may hold life, provide life, and take life—an ecological trinity, if you will.
The balance of sacrifice in the food chain can only be sincere if we fight the rampant cruelty and waste in many food industries. For millions of us, subsistence living is out of the question. Getting off the subway and Fifth and Noble to procure dinner, rarely means skinning and butchering it yourself. We’ve lost the directness of the experience of being meat eaters. Carnivory is presented to us in bloodless, sterile, cellophane wrappers. Many of us don’t know or care where our meat came from. The only sacrifice we witness now is the surrender of cash.
. . . There’s another paragraph to this essay, where I devolve into explaining how I’d certainly rather kill a carrot than my own kid . . .how we demarcate ‘sanctity’ and value, but you’ve been spared . . . funny how I never thought to bring religion into this argument. At the time, I had NO questions regarding whether I was a Christian. I just was.
In the interim years since this was written I did actually spend a decade as a lacto-ovo vegetarian. Aspeth and I have lost touch, mostly because she lives overseas. I last saw her in 1996 when she lived in San Francisco, dated women, was working in a vegan restaurant (I went with her. It was Thanksgiving. Ever make a turkey out of ‘seitan’??). We walked on the beach arm-in-arm. She’s now married (to a man) and, last I heard, is no longer vegetarian. I miss her.
- FYI: I’ve never known anyone named “Aspeth.” I changed her name
Underneath boughs of fuzzy dark hair, Aspeth’s passionate eyes flashed as she proclaimed, “I love animals, I don’t want to eat them! That’s GROSS.” She held her stomach and winced at the thought.
Unsure of what to do next our fourth grade teacher asked if her parents knew about her convictions, and, was Aspeth taking vitamins.
Was Aspeth taking vitamins?! If Mrs. Shapiro only knew about the cache of supplements they had at Aspeth’s house—magical bottles of blood-strengthening elixirs and pills, tablets the size of cookies that smelled like yeast, and powders to mix into full glasses of orange juice. Not to mention the way Aspeth’s mother never let her leave the house without a day’s supply of cheese. It was the protein of the gods! Yes, cheese: Neufchatel, Gruyere, Swiss, American, Cheddar, and cottage, as if cheese itself would cure their poor ten-year-old of her vegetarian “delusions.”
[My memories of Aspeth, to this day in 2007, fit inside the image of a tepid ice bucket, in the bathroom of the Boston hotel room during our 8th grade class trip, where a single-wrap ounce-slice of Cheddar floated limp and blanching.]
While the adult world politely humored her, Aspeth was deadly serious. With all the unripe wisdom, but soul-glowing impulse of childhood, she was laying the foundation for her life. Her beliefs never wavered. As faithful friends, over the years we have methodically refined our arguments against each other’s. From the interstices of our friendship, however, our branches have grown in different directions. We feel different breezes.
I remember having Aspeth over for dinner in the third grade, just months before her declaration of cruelty-free eating habits. We’d spent most of the dinner giggling and rearranging the food on our plates to look like a tropical paradise for auburn-colored men made of long grains of wild rice. We stood our broccoli spears up against our damp milk glasses. The chicken breast was a rocky shoreline. Romaine lettuce was the green sea on which our grainy comrades would sail on celery rafts. My mother didn’t see the creative gift in our edible architecture.
“But don’t you think,” stammered Aspeth, “that broccoli does look like trees?”
“Yes, but the meat on your plate doesn’t look like a bird, so why don’t you girls try and eat it.”
I ate my chicken. Aspeth ate our broccoli.
It took me three hours to fall back to sleep after the nightmare that woke me that night. I’d been lost in the gray dawn mist of a primeval forest. Pushing onward through leafy fronds, watching them bend and crack under my feet, I’d dared myself not to look behind me. There was an ominous rhythm, a pulse coming from nowhere. I stumbled faster, my feet tangling in the cords of vine at my ankles. Still, the panting drummed louder. My destination unrevealed to me, my tongue thick and sticky with thirst, it startled me that the pulse was more like a wheezing. It was like the gulping breath of a lioness after her prey; quicker, harder, louder, as her huge padded paws engulfed earth with each stride.
I whirled around in the thick foliage, when in horror I realized it was the hungry breathing of the forest fronds themselves! Suddenly, the greenery was circling around me cackling with victory, bulbous, knob-headed faces leaning in on me, with leaves that skillfully began ripping me, my skin coming off like clothe from the loom, then whole chunks of my flesh.
I ran to the bathroom to keep from peeing in my bed, and stared at my pink bare feet as I sat on the cold toilet. I wanted to wake Aspeth up (she was in the adjacent twin bed, face down in the pillow—peacefully). I wanted to go downstairs and stare at the seemingly inanimate two-inch broccoli lying captive in our refrigerator. But all I did was sit there. And stare at the flesh on my feet.
Somewhere in my little mind it was crystallizing that life itself had the property of being both prey and predator. The walls between species became transparent veils when sacrifice was measured against loss. What is lost for us, when we plunge our fork into a fine dinner? Then, what is sacrificed from the meal itself? In the fluid cycle of birth to death to birth, isn’t the sustenance of life the harvesting of other life?
We subvert this realization by using a sliding scale of value for organisms. Yet, by what means do we measure the validity of a ‘life’? Does a life become more valuable because it can move (like humans), utter sound (like humans), copulate, congregate, legislate, and educate (like humans)? Of course it is scary to equivocate the value of vegetables with higher vertebrates. Comparing broccoli to man means comparing man to broccoli. We already sign elaborate “living wills” to avoid becoming “vegetables.” Who are we to make biology hierarchical? Life may hold life, provide life, and take life—an ecological trinity, if you will.
The balance of sacrifice in the food chain can only be sincere if we fight the rampant cruelty and waste in many food industries. For millions of us, subsistence living is out of the question. Getting off the subway and Fifth and Noble to procure dinner, rarely means skinning and butchering it yourself. We’ve lost the directness of the experience of being meat eaters. Carnivory is presented to us in bloodless, sterile, cellophane wrappers. Many of us don’t know or care where our meat came from. The only sacrifice we witness now is the surrender of cash.
. . . There’s another paragraph to this essay, where I devolve into explaining how I’d certainly rather kill a carrot than my own kid . . .how we demarcate ‘sanctity’ and value, but you’ve been spared . . . funny how I never thought to bring religion into this argument. At the time, I had NO questions regarding whether I was a Christian. I just was.
In the interim years since this was written I did actually spend a decade as a lacto-ovo vegetarian. Aspeth and I have lost touch, mostly because she lives overseas. I last saw her in 1996 when she lived in San Francisco, dated women, was working in a vegan restaurant (I went with her. It was Thanksgiving. Ever make a turkey out of ‘seitan’??). We walked on the beach arm-in-arm. She’s now married (to a man) and, last I heard, is no longer vegetarian. I miss her.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Yup, gettin' excited!
Can you tell by all the excalamation points! In my "other" writing life I've learned you're
never supposed to use them! Watch me work it, BAY-BAY!!!!
I'm leaving Fairbanks on the evening of February 22nd to see my mom in Seattle for a few days before flying to Boston on the 28th. I haven't seen my mom in almost a year, so this is a real treat. I'm currently reading up on all kinds of species, doing a little substitute teaching, trying to get some "real" writing done and getting the apartment ready for a woman who will be subletting the place.
My very dear friends Karl and Alexander will be flying out to meet me at he learning center on May 22. We will be flying back to Fairbanks together on June 1. K will help me manage this blog while I'm busy in the field . . .something that will be very, very helpful, as genuine "computer time" will be at a premium once I'm working out there.
Take Care All!
never supposed to use them! Watch me work it, BAY-BAY!!!!
I'm leaving Fairbanks on the evening of February 22nd to see my mom in Seattle for a few days before flying to Boston on the 28th. I haven't seen my mom in almost a year, so this is a real treat. I'm currently reading up on all kinds of species, doing a little substitute teaching, trying to get some "real" writing done and getting the apartment ready for a woman who will be subletting the place.
My very dear friends Karl and Alexander will be flying out to meet me at he learning center on May 22. We will be flying back to Fairbanks together on June 1. K will help me manage this blog while I'm busy in the field . . .something that will be very, very helpful, as genuine "computer time" will be at a premium once I'm working out there.
Take Care All!
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Thank the girls!
Thank the girls!
I’ve been “hitting the books” and getting excited to use some of my refreshed knowledge of large animals. I had a course in school in 1997—and then some experience at the equine reproductive lab at CSU in Fort Collins, CO—but admit that, at the time, I couldn’t imagine when I’d use the information. From what I understand Heifer International’s projects work very differently than the American industrial agricultural practices that stock our grocery refrigerator case.
Imagine, an American dairy cow will give us milk for an average of 305 days a year. During peak lactation she will need to drink more than forty gallons of water a day.
For the sixty days she is not giving us milk she will be in the final stages of pregnancy with the calf that will freshen our supply.
Talk about a “service animal”!
Pour it into your coffee, onto your cereal, scoop it into an ice cream cone, but . . .
Thank the girls!
I’ve been “hitting the books” and getting excited to use some of my refreshed knowledge of large animals. I had a course in school in 1997—and then some experience at the equine reproductive lab at CSU in Fort Collins, CO—but admit that, at the time, I couldn’t imagine when I’d use the information. From what I understand Heifer International’s projects work very differently than the American industrial agricultural practices that stock our grocery refrigerator case.
Imagine, an American dairy cow will give us milk for an average of 305 days a year. During peak lactation she will need to drink more than forty gallons of water a day.
For the sixty days she is not giving us milk she will be in the final stages of pregnancy with the calf that will freshen our supply.
Talk about a “service animal”!
Pour it into your coffee, onto your cereal, scoop it into an ice cream cone, but . . .
Thank the girls!
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