November 2011 Blog Posts (7)

In my childhood, people the age that I am now would double over at rubber chicken jokes. Some geezer on the Art Linkletter show would pull out a rubber chicken, a lovingly painted rubber likeness of a plucked and eviscerated chicken with the head and feet still attached, and my greying babysitter and her skinnny sister would start laughing. Merely waving the chicken around would cause them to have difficulty holding on to their glasses of beer (no lady drinks beer out of the bottle.) With…

          Thanksgiving is my favorite "American" holiday. It is a celebration of life, of the harvest, of the power of people coming together, of remembering. Although it wasn't a holiday until Lincoln made it one, the story it tells is powerful mythology. Early European settlers fleeing persecution in Europe, for their ideals, would have died out but for the help of local Native American communities. Thanksgiving Day commemorates their profound generosity, the neighborliness that resulted,…

As we make our way to a lower level of cheap energy use we need to find ways to increase our energy for our own personal Transitions. Daily life can sometimes drain our energy for doing the hard work of Transition- with new worries about the economy, climate change, the growing rifts in our culture (just to name a few) we can end up finding ourselves to drained to make progress on thew tasks we need to do to prepare.

I have found that making the time (and saving the energy)…

I knew when I decided to run for County Executive that I would give up most of my income making capacity to do so. I also knew from past experience running for election that it would take all of my focus and not allow me to seek consulting clients for my business. Well all that was true and so when I lost in the primary I had a wonderful opportunity to look at the last couple of years of being self employed critically and make a decision as to whether this was going to work going forward.…

Published Nov 9 2011      by Post Carbon Institute,       Archived Nov 10 2011

A funny thing happened on the way to the occupation

The multipettaled blooms of delicate daisies,

shower us with wonder and calmness.

Richness in powerfully, and subtly scented herbs…

Bellingham Blue corn was given its name by the elder who showed up at the First Annual Bellingham Seed Swap in 2009 and shared the treasure that he had saved in his backyard for decades. It's blue, a deep blue-black, it's small (the ears are 3" - 7" long), and it grows on bushy 4' - 5' plants with 2-3 ears per plant. The blue tastes a bit different from white or yellow sweet corns. Bellingham Blue is early, always a good trait in corn in these parts, and it's open-pollinated, so you can save…