Life is a Process

We took the plunge and purchased a Ford Escape Hybrid 2008 back in May, complete with the “fancy” navigation package.  (To afford this purchase, we traded in our 1999 Ford Escort ZX2 and returned the leased Ford Escape a few months early.)  Google Maps does a better job at finding places and plotting routes than does this thing.

We recently drove from the middle of Indiana to the eastern corner of West Virginia. The Nav system wanted to send us off to Cincinnati for the shortest route (it isn’t) or on backroads for the fastest route (they aren’t). And when we did take a known shortcut that is also faster, the Nav system complained and requested that we do a legal U-turn. Over and over and over again.

The maps are not current. Google Maps has had our house pinpointed for at least 4 years now (it’s a new-ish subdivision). The Nav maps can’t seem to locate it - it’s like our house is in an abyss or “fluidic space”. Because the maps aren’t current, the points of interest are also not current. Why oh why didn’t they have this system be update-able over satellite? Why does it cost so bloody much to get an updated DVD?

I’m not even going to express my frustration with the user interface. Let me just say that they need to hang out more with Apple UI or Google UI engineers.

I owe the Japanese a debt of gratitude for sending a probe to the moon that has taken awe inspiring high-definition pictures of this overburdened planet that we call home. As a pantheist, I find these images humbling, breathtaking, and in many ways spiritual. But no matter what you believe, there is only one earth in this universe and it is fragile, tiny, and dare I say it… insignificant. That’s right, the earth and everything that lives on it is insignificant from the universe’s perspective. Stuck in an uncaring universe, the earth toils along doing the things that planets do. It will continue to do this until it is destroyed by some cataclysmic event, such as the Sun going supernova, being sucked into a blackhole, or possibly when the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies collide. So why does this tiny pale blue dot matter, anyway?

Obviously it matters to its inhabitants, and should matter to humans in particular, given our complete dependence on it for survival. But here we are with our government denying that global warming is a problem, unable and unwilling to take the most basic actions to try and slow its effects. If only we could frame global warming as being so crucial to our survival as the so-called “war on terror”, maybe then we could spend billions of dollars doing something that would actually make a difference. The fight against global warming is ultimately about saving humanity, but we can only do that by saving the planet. Unfortunately, the whole anti-global warming camp focuses on the latter instead of the former. To them it’s one in the same and is completely obvious. What they really need to be telling the masses is that global warming is about the people, stupid! If people cared about saving the planet then they would be doing more to save the planet. People care about themselves, their children, and supposedly the troops, and are more likely to take action if the threat is brought closer to home. Something like “the terrorists are using the planet against us! Cut back on your C0₂ emissions to help the war effort!” might work.

Then again, I often wonder if the earth and the universe really would be better off without us. After all, humans are just as insignificant to the earth as the earth is to the universe.

Last winter, we used a lot of Apitherapy elderberry syrup to get through the daycare colds. It worked! We emerged in the spring having had only a few minor sniffles - nothing like the first winter in daycare.

I’ve become a little more frugal and a lot braver now. I discovered, for instance, that Mountain Rose Herbs (MRH) carries dried elderberries. Then I became more inspired and hunted down a recipe. I was able to buy almost everything through MRH, though I declined to include the Osha root as MRH’s stock is wild crafted, the species is endangered and in limited supply. I doubled the recipe and ended up with 3 wine bottles of super juice.

For the skeptical out there, this little study showed that influenza symptom were relieved about 4 days earlier for those using elderberry extract, compared to placebo. Another study showed that elderberry extract revs up the immune system by boosting cytokine production - both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines. An older study demonstrated the ability of elderberry extract to reduce hemagglutination and inhibit replication of 8 strains of human influenza viruses (both type A and type B); patients that took the extract recovered faster (2-3 days compared to 6+ days without extract).

I’ve always been skeptical of the flu vaccine, especially since I heard a talk from an evolutionary biologist who is involved in helping pick the strains for the vaccine. But I’ll save the debate about phylogenetic reconstruction methods for another day (and another blog?). I sleep better at night now just knowing that we can continue opting out of the thimerosol-loaded influenza vaccines and chug-a-lug our homebrew elderberry syrup (with Grand Marnier) instead.

We have 2-3 black walnut trees on our suburban property. This year had a bumper crop. Black walnuts, when they first fall, are a pain in the lawn mower blade. So now we have 20 gallons of black walnuts (before husking). What to do with them?

Well, since I’m in the market for a more natural hair colorant, I have toyed with the idea of using a strong black walnut husk tea to hide the gray. An activity that my hair stylist wants to observe - or maybe prevent?

Of course, hair color only needs the husks. Then you need to deal with the nut itself. Now we go through about 0.75 lbs of (English) walnuts per week. Yes, since I’ve told my toddler that walnuts are brain food (love those Omega-3s), and since I started dousing them in maple syrup (after I soak but before I dehydrate them), he’s decided that he loves walnuts. Black walntus are a different can of … well… nuts. Trust me on this one. You cannot use a standard nut cracker to get into them. I tried and failed. Other half tried and failed. Toddler tried banging a few toys on the nut - and failed. The hammer is a most inelegant way to open them though it does work. Inelegant in that one loses most of the nut meat all over the place as the whole nut (and nut meat) completely shatters. What’s a holistic walnut-eating mama to do?

It turns out that there does exist a special black walnut nut cracker. Guess what’s on my wish list now?

My other half and the toddler don’t really care for squash or pumpkin. When we get either of those in the CSA share, I have to either eat it all myself (which is just fine with me, once in a while) or I have to find ways to disguise it.

This morning was pancake and bacon morning. I made my usual midas gold pancakes (from pecanbread.com), using cashew butter and 2-3 heaping tablespoons of cooked, mashed pumpkin. I tossed a bit of cinnamon into the batter for good measure. They were a hit with everyone.

Now I’m also getting ready, food-wise, for the big haul to visit the in-laws over Thanskgiving. With our way of eating, we usually do end up bringing the whole fridge. We’re going to be bringing our turkey (which we didn’t quite get to meet, but we know the farmer) and some goodies. So this morning, toddler and father were outside while I slaved over the hot oven. And slurped coffee. I’m waiting for some nutty coconut chocolate chip cookies to bake (from Fife’s Cooking with Coconut Flour), along with cranberry-pumpkin bars, adapted from Olson’s A Vegetarian Mother’s Cookbook.

So now I’ve used up about 1/3 of the mashed, cooked pumpkin in the fridge. I think I can get rid of most of the rest by doing a crustless pumpkin custard pie (from Garden of Eating). Then I’ll only have a tiny bit left, possibly for a coconut flour pumpkin loaf.

Next hurdle: black walnuts.

I feel blessed, in some ways, that I grew up in an area that pioneered “blue box” recycling. Saving up the cans, paper and containers has become second nature to me now. It MADDENS me that we live just a teeny tiny bit outside city limits that (a) we have to pay for private trash collection; (b) no private trash collectors do recycling; and (c) we have to haul our recycling products to the local recycling center (where we often battle with the yellow jackets). Yet, if we lived in the city (well, large town), we have FREE curbside recycling though we would have to pay a modest fee (but much much less than our current fee) for trash collection.

I have heard, over the years, arguments that “bah, recycling isn’t worth it - it doesn’t save anything”. Well, I was elated to read this tidbit in the Economist. I can sleep again at night knowing that my recycling efforts are not in vain.

Well, I can sleep until I get the next package in the mail from Gaiam.com. This mail-order/web-store company purports to be a green company. We ordered some rechargeable batteries from them and I cannot count the bits of unnecessary packaging that arrived. One set of batteries were in a ziplock bag - so far so good. The AAA batteries came in this elaborate, shrink-wrapped package, surrounded with additional layers of cardboard and recycled plastic. The shrink-wrapped part would have been sufficient.

People people people…. PLEASE figure out how to use “then” and “than”. This distinction is not a hard one.

then can be used, general, as an adverb to indicate a particular time in the past or future.
for example,

• (adverb) after that or subsequently in time, order or position
• (adverb) that being the case, or in that case
• (adverb) in addition to something else, or besides what has been mentioned
• (adjective) being at that time, or existing or belonging to the time mentioned

than is generally used as a comparative adjective or adverb to introduce the second element of the comparison. If people would only remember this bit about the comparison, they’d be able to remember proper usage of these words.

• (adjective or adverb) introducing a rejected alternative in a contrast between two alternatives, in order to state a preference
• (adjective or adverb) after inverted constructions to say when something happened

This pair of words must be very confusing. It is mentioned in various Handbooks of Style, and on a number of websites. I liked this little poem, and this example of usage. But I especially liked this resource.

We’ve been casein-free for well over a year now (read: dairy-free; no cheese, no milk, no uncultured dairy). I am the kefir queen here, dropping my kefir grains into almost any liquid - coconut milk, berry juice, cow milk. I can’t set aside enough of our local apple cider to try kefir-ing that though.

For a few months, I have been largely gluten-free. I try to maintain a mostly GF house, though the car is another story. I have got to find a GF substitute to those darn animal crackers or fig bars that the toddler adores. Maybe he’ll be happy with apple chips…

Some wonder how we do it. I don’t bake, and now when I do (which is more often than the pre-GFCF days), I use coconut flour or rice flour. Though I like having the book, the excerpts from “Cooking with Coconut Flour” are enough to get a GF-baker well on the way to using coconut flour. We have pancakes more often now than we did pre-child; I found 2 recipes that are acceptable to my crew and I alternate between them (depending on the number of eggs or on the status of our nut butter): Buttermilk Coconut Pancakes, where we use kefir in lieu of buttermilk; and Midas Gold Pancakes, using nut butter instead of nut flour. Cashew butter works really well, phytates be darned.

Over the summer, I experimented with the “diet” from The Garden of Eating. Grain-free, instead of just gluten-free. I’m finding, though, that winter brings a yearning for beans and rice and tortilla chips. I did notice, however, that we have actually reduced our food consumption since dumping the beans and grains, as evidenced by our expensive grocery trips (instead of embarrassingly expensive).

The challenge for me still rests with daycare - a nut-free, vegetarian facility that requires packaged goodies as alternative snacks, if provided by the parent.

GFCF diets seem to be the diet du jour.  People perceive it as hard.  It is really only hard if you regularly eat out or if you live in the packaged-food aisles of the grocery store.  As soon as you realize that GFCF means, really, meat + veggies + fruit + nuts, it becomes quite surmountable.  I won’t be focusing on our GFCF efforts here, but occasionally I’ll sneak in a gem of a recipe (sorry! without pictures as my cooking is not a work of art).

I usually consider myself to be fairly “crunchy” (i.e., green, a treehugger, at one with mother nature… you get the idea). Some time ago, I subscribed to Ideal Bite and I find it only occasionally gives me something useful. Generally it is just yet another email in the inbox to delete. However, this morning’s tip actually does contain something useful.

With gift-giving season right around the corner, the thought of the money spent on stuff nobody wants is on my mind. If you really aren’t altruistic enough to ask your loved ones to buy someone else a cow, you can avoid those long return lines by just giving your family a very specific list of what you do want instead. Check out this free general purpose gift registry. Even better (than it being free) is that it is apparently compatible with wishlists already in existence at Amazon, JC Penney and so on.

Back to crunchiness though…. This morning I dropped off some Holistic Moms flyers at a local Wellness Expo. I must admit, for all my perceived crunchiness, I felt amazingly soggy (mainstream, even) in that environment. Maybe I just need to go hang out there to absorb it all. Bloomington townies - if you’re reading this - please do go check out this expo. It should be quite informative if one is beginning a journey into holistic-ness.

When the toddler was an infant, this mother watched a lot of television - mostly MacGyver reruns but also some news (what else do you do when nursing a squirmy infant?). Around the time that the toddler (then infant) arrived, I declined to renew my subscription to the local newspaper - a silly newspaper that hasn’t figured out that more people would read it online (and generate ad revenue) if they offered that content for free. A few months ago, we dropped cable to basic and, having found ourselves not even watching TV much then, we dumped cable completely not long thereafter. Since then, I have pretty much stopped following news. Except on the rare occasion.

Let’s start with the news that I do read… Most of it is depressing. Just check out the headlines featured on Truthout. Death, doom, destruction. As a movie once put it, “The Decline of the American Empire.”

Occasionally, I stumble on news that just leaves me scratching my head. Like this CNN tidbit today. Really now, with all the resources for newborns and their parents (have you ever looked at the shelves in Barnes and Noble or Borders?), can’t CNN send its reporters out to, well, report on something other than babies? Though I must credit CNN for enlightening me today and reminding me why I object to plastic toys - some plastic-y toys undergo a chemical conversion to a date-rape drug when it is ingested (as most kids will do at least once). Yes moms, not only do you have to worry about lead in those toys, but it seems you also have to worry about those toys turning into rohypnol.

To be fair, Fox News also has me scratching my head. I think it is safe to say that most of the Fox viewership probably doesn’t have “green” tendencies. Which made me wonder why Fox has this “Go Green” section accessible from its main website. But then I started poking around at its content and realized that we don’t have to worry too much about Fox educating its viewers. This old one, Mow away your weeds, advocates tweaks to the lawn mower. Why does it feature a nice not-so-green gas mower? Why wouldn’t a push mower be featured? Well, at least they didn’t include a picture of this puppy.

But in searching for silliness for this post, I did find some good, not-so-silly news. At least one person - a politician no less - has decided that clotheslines aren’t so awful. Ontario’s energy conservation head honcho wants the clothesline bans to be rescinded across the province so that people can actually choose not to waste energy drying the clothes that can be just as easily dried on a line outside.