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April 28th, 2007
08:29 am
So I just stumbled across the calendar for the monthly contra dance in Belfast, Maine. I'm falling in love with the contra scene up here, but reading through this left me uttering orgasmic squeals of increasing intenstiy. Here's the executive summary:
- May-- Nightwatch (folk-baby kids I went to Oberlin with)
- June-- Notorious
- July-- Wild Asparagus
- August-- Lissa Schneckenburger
- September-- Nightingale!!!!!!!!!
Oh baby. I think I need a glass of water.
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April 24th, 2007
01:27 pm - Snugglepig
A bunch of new piglings just arrived at the farm. And now I understand the etymology of the term "Pig Pile."
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April 12th, 2007
11:04 pm - Feel the food production!
There's no time for a full post, but I'm just too proud of this bloggable moment to pass it up. I'm wrapping up the third week of my 6-month apprenticeship at Buckwheat Blossom Farm in Wiscasset, Maine. The apprenticeship means a lot of hard work but a lot of good food. I think I'm really starting to get into the flow and my kitchen will be bubbling with activity this night:
- Sourdough is formed into loaves and rising overnight. I'll bake it in the morning as I feed the sheep.
- A chicken is in the pot and boiling. I'll let it cook all night and all day tomorrow and have some kind of soup for dinner.
- Walnuts are soaking in salt water. I'll dry them in the oven tomorrow after the bread's done baking.
- Yogurt is incubating.
- Oats are soaking for breakfast tomorrow.
Current Mood: accomplished
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February 27th, 2007
11:31 am - February Tour 2007
It's been a quite amazing week and a half for me. I've criss-crossed New England, visiting farms and contra dances, and been met with incredible hospitality everywhere I go. The world looks so great right now, and I share some of it before memory fades.
I set out a week before this past Friday, right after work, for the Dance Flurry. I'd spent the past couple days snowed in by the Valentine's Day Blizzard of aught-seven, which dumped 4 feet of snow on our house. Those days were spent digging out and making bread, yogurt, eggs, and other snacks for Dance Flurry. No paying 7 dollars for lunch for me! I made a pie too, which I was going to swap for a fiddle lesson Friday morning, but she cancelled on me, so I brought the pie to Saratoga.
Oh Dance Flurry! I'd never known you could be so wondrous. When I first went, two years ago, I was but a novice dancer, and last year's festival was blacked out into an intensive, 6-hour dance of desperation. But here was the festival in it's full 17-concurrent-venue glory. I danced all day and played music deep into the night. I met friends from Ithaca (it seemed like the whole town was there) and D.C. and Oberlin and Vermont. I somehow wound up in a room in the same hotel as the conference (a very precious find) and we piled 2 extra homeless dance bums in it every night. I came away smiling and gliding and spinning everywhere for the rest of the week.
After the Flurry, it was on to Ithaca. Gave a ride to a nice girl from Portland, who talked a lot and kept me awake on the drive Sunday night. Outside of Bainbridge, my back right tire spontaneously disintegrated, but I popped the spare on and found a carload of Ithaca dancers at the gas station willing to drive slow with me the rest of the way in case anything else happened. Ithaca was a fun but too short three days of Cornell Soil Health Workshop (very conventional-ag focused :( ) playing fiddle with Sara Rose and Anna, and moving the last of my stuff out of Bradley's old basement.
I had originally intended to go home to Vermont first and then on to Maine, but I got a tip about a really awesome horse-powered farm in Western Massachucets called Natural Roots. So I changed my itinerary to go visit him. David Fisher is a magical farmer. I spent the day doing chores with him, building a round pen for his beautiful Belgian horses, and playing with his incredibly articulate 2 year old daughter. He's incredibly detail oriented, yet at the same time easy going, and doesn't make you feel dumb when he tells you how to do something. And his crop production is apparently top-notch. A former apprentice I spoke to said that last year he didn't even have to weed! The apprentice also told me though, that most of his apprentices seem to have a full season or two under their belt already, so it seems unlikely I'll get an apprenticeship with him.
While in Western Mass, I stayed with an old family friend who's a senior at Hampshire College. I can't tell too many stories without making this entry private, so I'll just say that it was a trip being around college kids again. Especially hippy college kids. Probably the most wholesome thing I did there was attempt to learn some Klezmer music from some music kids, and I in turn attempted to teach them to play their violin like a fiddle.
Friday I was supposed to go to Gouldsboro, Maine to visit my first scheduled farm, but I got a late start and after a few hours of driving I was feeling tired and a little grumpy and decided what I needed was a contra dance. So I stopped at a Tourist Information Office, looked up the contra dance, which that week was in Whitefield, and altered my route. I showed up at the dance hall an hour early, when they were just getting set up, and within 5 minutes the organizer had offered me a place to sleep for the night. The dancers were great-- about the same size and ability as Ithaca, just maybe a notch better, more numerous, and friendlier. The band rocked-- it was Adam and Jaige, two-thirds of Crowfoot, the most gorgeous looking and sounding contra dance band on the planet. They live like 30 miles away, so I guess they're regulars. And at the break my world got even smaller. I met Beth Whitman, a friend of a friend of my father's who had heard I was coming to Maine, and the farmers of Longmeadow Farm, a farm I'd applied to through the MOFGA apprenticeship program but had neglected to return their phone calls after they expressed interest in me. We had a good laugh about it though.
After the dance, I went home with Toki and John, a 40-something couple who have been lovingly organizing the Whitefield contra dance for over a decade. They gave me a bed, and in the morning stuffed me with a feast of pancakes before breaking out the instruments. They all seem to play a little of everything, even their kids. And there was a friend staying over who was a 12-year old fiddle prodigy. We jammed late into the morning, first on fiddle tunes and then Beatles songs. I finally tore myself away from those sirens around noon, just as they were singing an altered refrain: "You like us too much and we like you." That damn near brought tears to my eyes.
Hmm, so that seems to be the first week, up to this past Saturday. I'd love to keep writing, but I need to get to yet another farm to visit. Stay tuned for the ever-expanding list of farm visits.
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February 1st, 2007
10:31 pm - Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Michael Pollan, author of the awesome Omnivore's Dilemma, had a new essay published this weekend in the New York Times. It deals with the culture of nutrition, which is a topic that's particularly poignant to me. You see, in the past year I've become an official mostly-vegetarian, worked for organic farms for nothing but vegetables, experimented with pickling and fermenting, discovered Nourishing Traditions, and started drinking raw milk.
Pollan provides a well-reasoned and insightful overview of the political, economic and philosophical forces that influence what Americans are encouraged to eat. He tells the story of how a scientific community wedded to reductionism and the isolation of causal factors has conspired with a late-stage-capitalism food industry where producers must innovate or perish. Every few years, the scientists identify some new secret key to unlocking healthy eating (Low-Fat! Low-Carb! Oat Bran!!!) and the food industry releases a fleet of new products to sell you health. Food processors make a killing, finance a bunch more nutrition research, and the process repeats. Meanwhile, the chronic diseases these food products are supposed to be curing have actually increased.
Here's one of my favorite quotes:
If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
If there is a silver bullet to healthy eating, it's this: don't worry about medical research revealing the latest (cause|cure) of (cancer|heart disease|obesity|diabetes|impotence). Eat food your great-great-grandparents would have eaten (yes, that's how far you have to go back before capitalism started poisoning the food supply), and get it from sources that they could have gotten it from-- pesticide and fertilizer-free farms, a cow fed on grass rather than grain, homebrew, etc. That Nourishing Traditions book I mentioned and its author's Weston A. Price Foundation are both great sources of information on how to eat old-school.
Anyway, don't just sit here and listen to me yak about how great it is. Go read it for yourself:
http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=85
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November 6th, 2006
06:14 pm - Fiddles, pickles, and cider
It was a good October. The first two weeks, I mostly sat around the house, but in a good way. I played a lot of fiddle and made pickles from the free vegetables I was getting from the farm. Oh the pickles! I'm eating great veggies long after the frost has come, and I didn't have to go to California to get them. There are cucumber spears, tomatillos, green peppers, green tomatoes, and fermented daikon radish already up on the shelf, and I just started fermenting a batch of sauerruben (fermented shredded turnip) this morning. I also have a big bag of carrots I should do something with. Real Pickles sells a gingered carrot fermented pickle that may be worth immitation.
About halfway through October, Bradley came back from Virginia, thoroughly miserable from hanging around her parents' house and thoroughly excited to be back in Ithaca, even if she didn't have much to do. But, oh, there was much to do, for right after she returned we began our tenure as cider salespeople for Eve's Cidery aka Autumn Stoschek, a local woman barely older than us who produces small batches of delicious hard ciders and fruit wines. Every weekend for the past three weeks, she's filled up with cider her bright red pickup with a back that doesn't lock, and we've driven it down to New York City to hawk it at the farmer's market in Union Square. It can be stressful selling wine to New York wine snobs, and late in the day people crowd around for samples like we're a bar at happy hour, but I really love being in The City again, and I'm getting to see friends and family I haven't seen in years. I've visited my 93-year old grandmother (twice!), gone clubbing in a bear suit with my best friend from childhood, rescued the drunk roommate of my Obie-friend Juliana, and impressed my dad with my Manhattan driving skills.
November's looking to be pretty good too. Bradley and I will be celebrating our birthday (we're both November 9, subtle hint). I'll be doing a few more cider sales down in New York City, and then I'll go home to Vermont for Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, Bradley's leaving at the end of the week to start an internship at an Ecovillage outside Asheville, NC. It'll get a little lonely without her here, but the time we've been spending apart has been good for both of us, allowing each of us to find our own identity and realizing how important we are to eachother.
Anyway, I'll be lonely and in New York City with a truck full of booze for several weekends this month, so let me know if you're in town and want to hang out.
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October 11th, 2006
01:15 pm - moment of hopeless sentimental idealism
Here's what a South Korean farmer had to say about the North Korean nuclear crisis:
"To be honest, I don't think about it. I work hard all day, so I don't have time to watch TV or worry about it."
What if everybody farmed? Would we still think we needed nuclear weapons?
(Heard on Morning Edition, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6246130)
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October 5th, 2006
05:14 pm - I have a house! (plus a tangent articulating the benefits of participating in local agriculture)
Yup, its official. I've been moved in for a week and everything. I'm housesitting for a couple of contra dancers for three months. The arrangement is just perfect. I'd been looking for a short-term place, so I can get my life back in order and decide what to do next. Fall sublets are notoriously hard to come by in this town, and the Ithaca housing market is pretty expensive for someone who plans on being only partially employed. This place, then, is perfect, both for duration and cost (I'm only paying utilities).
The plan then, is to hang out in Ithaca for the fall and work part time, and also do some volunteer work for some of the many Good Causes around town. I'm thinking I can more easily find a cause I really agree with if I'm not looking to be paid for helping out, and there are plenty of businesses around town that could be pretty fun to work for. Recycle Ithaca's Bicycles (RIBs), the local bike co-op, could be a good candidate.
But there's also plenty of work in the agriculutral world right now. Its the harvest season, when the earth's overflowing bounty and the night sky's frosty air conspire to deprive farmers of sleep and sanity. Just last week, I worked an 11 hour day at a local organic farm, picking peppers until the sun went down. The pay ain't great picking vegetables, but I get free vegetables, which lets me cook delicious stir-fries that feed me for 2 days and cost maybe 50 cents for rice and soy sauce.
Bradley and I have also been doing some kitchen prep work at the ABC Cafe, a local vegetarian restaurant. Our friend and former housemate Heather is Head Cook for their weekly special that features all local ingredients, so every so often we go and hang out for a couple hours on Saturday night and rip chard and chop carrots. We only get paid in restaurant credit, but it barely counts as work and Heather hooks us up with overflowing plates of food.
Right now, I'm eating some of the best-tasting food I've ever eaten. I'm also eating the healthiest food of my life, and I've never spent less to feed myself than I am presently. How's that for a delicious oxymoron?
Current Location: The Gimme! Coffee just down the street
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September 21st, 2006
11:29 pm - Hegemony or Survival
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez delivered an inspiring speech to the UN General Assembly the other day, and I think you should read it.
The New York Times treated it as regular old Bush-bashing, and covered it with the headline Iran Who? Venezuela Takes the Lead in a Battle of Anti-U.S. Sound Bites, but here are some of the quotes they didn't print.
"The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It's not that we are extremists. It's that the world is waking up. It's waking up all over. And people are standing up.
I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism, who are shouting for equality, for respect, for the sovereignty of nations."
The speech also contains plenty of grievances. There are complaints about globalization creating more poverty, UN Security Council vetoes, and the double standard with which America applies the term 'terrorist.' But it's the positive messages that make this speech so poignant for me. They allude to a world in which people are conscious of the forces that shape their lives, in which people are able to throw off their dependence on those forces that would oppress them. Harriet Tubman said "I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had only known they were slaves." Well, as Chavez says, "The world is waking up."
The full transcript of the speech is available at http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0920-22.htm
Our newspapers call it antagonistic grandstanding. I suggest you read it as a list of simple truths, spoken by one who stands outside the Power which has given you, me, and especially the newspapers, so much.
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August 19th, 2006
03:13 am - Back on the Blog
Well here goes. My attempt to revive this thing and the Contact with loved ones far away that goes with it. My life these days is a delicious cacophony of vegetables and fiddles as I divide my time between working on organic farms and getting progressively less bad on the fiddle. But I should backtrack a bit. To the start of the summer.
After a really stressful winter, Bradley graduated and we took off for three weeks in Sweden. But not before I sprained my ankle at a graduation picnic. I was bummed when I hurt myself, but we nevertheless had an amazing time sneaking into unattended hostels in Stockholm, hopping around the islands of the Stockholm Archipelago, eating tasty and expeditious hard rye crackers, calling contra dances and dodging trebuchets at Allan and Charlotte's wedding, reading stories to goats in the forest, dancing round the midsummer pole, and wandering through beautiful artist homes.
Upon our return to English-land, we got stuck in New York City for a few days because the road home through Binghamton was underwater. So we stayed with the family of the boy who was my best friend, just down the street from the house in Yonkers where I lived for 11 years. I got to reconnect with Brendan a bit and I was very touched when he gave me some of his artwork.
When the Odyssey finally pulled into Ithaca, there was just enough time for me to quit my job and move out of my apartment. I've been unemployed and homeless ever since, but it hasn't felt like either. I've got some pretty wonderful friends with some really soft couches, and there are some really cool organic farmers around town. A few days working in the fields help keep Body busy and Mind at ease. It also means I get to eat for free and thank my hosts with tomatoes.
Bradley's been bouncing back and forth between her friends in Virginia and me. We went to see my family in Vermont and attend the Champlain Valley Folk Festival. It was good to see my family, since recently I've been talking to them about as often as I write in here. Maybe the highlight was playing fiddle duets with my dad. He's been hooked on folk fiddle ever since I took him to a jam this spring.
And wow, we're already at last week. Jeez the summer goes by fast.
Bradley and I returned to the Ithaca area to farmsit for a local dairy farm. What exactly did we do? Bradley has already written a good account:
Specifically, I milk 6 lovely Jersey and Guernsey cows, and Rafe tends to the enormous draft horses, devil chickens and big-eyed cow-babies. Meadowsweet is probably one of the only dairies in the country where the babies are allowed to stay with their mothers part of the day. We drink and sell raw, unpasteurized milk and have not died yet.
The only thing I should add is that I also got to serve as Farm Wife, producing some quite tasty Blueberry Pie, Homegrown Strata, and Former-Member-of-the-Herd Stew.
After our farmsit, Bradley returned to Virginia, and I'm finally getting to think about what I want to do with the next couple years. Cornell has turned me off to grad school and students in general (and computers and technology, perhaps not unrelatedly) , I want to do something that helps people but still pays health insurance, and I'm getting pretty into the whole farming thing. Americorps is sounding pretty good right now.
This weekend is another wedding with a contra dance for a reception, and next week, I'm tagging along as Bradley's family tackles Asheville, North Carolina. I've got friends in North Carolina. Good friends, from Oberlin, who distance and busyness mean I haven't talked to in years that I'm afraid to count. I'm going to put down this self-indulgent post right now and email them.
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July 6th, 2006
12:03 pm - Moose Schlock!
I just got back from 3 wonderful weeks in Sweden. 3 weeks of midnight sun, quaint red cottages, and pickled herring. There were also lots of moose-themed souveniers available for purchase. My techno-hip, blogging librarian friend Erica (http://www.librarianavengers.org) has something of a moose-fetish, and is getting married sometime in the indefinite future. So I thought to myself, "Self, I should blog this massive pile of moose crap as an engagement present to Erica." So I did.
The photos are on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/existentialmutt/sets/72157594189560742/
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June 2nd, 2006
11:09 pm - Coming of Age Moment
I just called my first contra dance! Here's the story:
Bradley and I are going to the wedding of my friends Allan and Charlotte in Sweden in a couple weeks, and they've asked us to teach the guests some American folk dancing. It was house caller's night at the Ithaca contra dance, so I went out to tap the brains of the local callers. Ted Crane, the local Contra Boss, gave me a few easy dances and then suggested that I call one. I was mildly terrified, but after practicing calling the dance to myself to music, it didn't seem that bad. Ted and his wife Pamela stood up on stage behind me and helped me count beats. The band was wonderfully clear and precise, and the dancers were all very experienced and very forgiving of my missed calls and deliveries that only sometimes landed on the downbeat. There were no disasters, Pamela helped me stop the dance, and it was only when I climbed down from the stage that I realized how fast my heart was racing.
The place was Bethel Grove pre-school, the band was Kitchen Chair, and the dance I called was a modified version of Jefferson and Liberty. I have no clue what the tunes were.
This event is definitely worthy of my first post in approximately forever.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/smile.gif) excited
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January 19th, 2006
08:42 pm - Not dead
Indeed, I'm very much alive. I've been in New Orleans for the past two weeks, working with the Common Ground Collective, an amazing organization that is working to rebuild the communities most devastated by Hurricane Katrina. There's lot's more to tell, but Bradley's getting back from India in an hour and I have to get ready to meet her. So stay tuned.
Love y'all
Current Mood: weary
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December 2nd, 2005
12:32 am - At the library...
on the eve of the last day of Cornell classes. Listening to people discuss their papers on their cell phones, I yearn for some good ol' Oberlin PoMo meta-discourse.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/thinking.gif) nostalgic
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November 19th, 2005
04:24 pm - Saw this, and had to blog it
The Rules of Distraction
http://www.slate.com/id/2130600/?nav=tap3
This is just too perfect. I just got back from a conference of the National Science Digital Library, where over half of the audience in the sessions had their laptops open. Thus, it didn't matter that the presentations were undefined jargon-filled reports of unknown projects presented without any context, the audience wasn't listening anyway!
I should add, however, that these sessions foucsed mostly on various library-type information collecting tools. The poster sessions, during which I got to meet reps from several neat collections similar to the animal sound and video library where I work, were quite interesting. And that Denver is a very interesting city with a subtle but noticable Native American presence, and that Wilderness Exchange Unlimited has very good prices on hiking packs.
Current Music: Talking Heads - Cities
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August 15th, 2005
04:34 pm - However shall I choose?
Oh man is this gonna rock- I went last month and they had a good sized crowd for a town the size of Ithaca.
From: wolfe23@riseup.net
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 13:28:31 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [ithacacriticalmass] Theme
To: ithacacriticalmass@lists.riseup.net
Cc: pinkypirate@riseup.net, justicia@riseup.net,
jennifer@kitchenchairmusic.com, skunkrising@hotmail.com
From ithacacriticalmass-owner@lists.riseup.net Mon Aug 15 16:29:02 2005
The minutes of yesterday's meeting should be posted sometime soon. But
for now, not the theme for August's Critical Mass (on August 26th):
Pirates vs Vikings.
oh my.
-bw
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July 14th, 2005
08:47 am - Redbud Self-Promotion
The Redbud Woods [link] issue has errupted again. The new Cornell president drew the opponents of the parking lot to a meeting to announce that construction was indeed going to go forward, and simultaneously sent in University Police to fence off and secure the woods.
Needless to say, the Redbuddies freaked at this blatant disrespect, pushed the panic button, and drew a crowd of about 100 people to the woods. Nothing much seems to be happening at the moment. There have been no signs of construction equipment since yesterday afternoon- just half a dozen cops who seem intent on keeping people from climbing trees and repairing any damage done to the fence. Meanwhile, the Redbuddies have one person up in a tree platform, 4 more locked to the ground, and a regular revolving crowd of around 30 people on both sides of the fence.
Anybody in Ithaca should go and hang out for a bit and do something to raise their spirits- Bake them some cookies, sing them a song, or juggle cats.
And on a personal note, my face turned up on the front page of the Ithaca Journal:
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July 8th, 2005
12:29 pm - thinking of you, Mark Stockett
Current Mood: nostalgic
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July 7th, 2005
09:42 am - Oh dear lord god bird
Sufjan Stevens (who aspires to record an album about every United State) has written a song about the Ivory-billed woodpecker and the small town near where it was discovered. Mp3 available here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4721675
Thank you workplace email list
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July 5th, 2005
01:05 am - independent day
I showed off my patriotism today by pretending it wasn't a holiday and went in to work. It was kind of bizarre, being in an empty office after being away for a week, and I didn't really get into it. But it still counts as work- it got the "wasted post-vacation day" out of the way.
After work was contra dancing on the commons. Afterwards, I lured some cool people back to my house for baked beans and ice cream, and then we trucked out to a golf course to set off some of the fireworks I scored in Pennsylvania. And then I capped off the evening with a cookie and some good conversation with a very nice girl named Mandara.
There are too many cool people in this town. How did I get so lucky to hang with them all?
Current Mood: cheerful
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