Letters from Glome

My nephew, Juicy, loves “Piderman”. A lot. He sings the theme song over and over, I’ll record it tonight and add it to this post for your enjoyment, it’s original. Sweetpea and The Mancub enjoy “Piderman” too. This morning I played the best version of the Spiderman theme song for them, they loved it very much. I’m so proud. Below, for your enjoyment!

This past week end, for those of you with your heads buried in the sand, or stuck on American Idol* or Keeping up with the Kardashians*, a cyclone struck Burma leaving destruction in it’s wake. First estimates gave the death toll at 22,000, a terrible number. In the normal course of events, a government would do whatever it could to help the people survive.

Unless, of course, it’s the military junta that currently reigns in Burma. So far they have refused aid, taken what foodstuffs that did manage to make it in country and refused to notify it’s people of the pending storm. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people are dying, suffering and starving.

None of this is surprising if you’ve been paying attention. Last year, thousands of monks were slaughtered. Before that, the Burmese have kept Aung San Suu Kyi under arrest for years and oppressed it’s people for years since the junta took over in 1989.

Years ago I was introduced to Burma through a tiny restaurant in Chinatown in Washington, DC. Last time I looked, it was gone. I ate the most ambrosial mango pork curry, an ethereal stew that made me happier than I can remember. I discovered it again later at Mandalay Restaurant in Silver Spring, Maryland. That pork mango curry was enough to give Burma a spot in my heart forever. Later I learned about Aung San Suu Kyi, learned of her sacrifices and strength. Of course I’d remembered the Burma Road, from WWII fame.

Many more people will die this week. Rain will be falling again shortly, flooding already flooded villages, washing more bodies into already fouled drinking water sources, spoiling any remaining food that wasn’t spoiled last week. Current estimates at the eventual total death toll of Cyclone Nargis are at 500,000. One half of a million people are expected to be dead before this horrible event is over. The Indian Ocean Tsunami killed 250,000, spread across many nations and several continents. I can only imagine the loss in intellectual, cultural and familial knowledge. Add to that the loss of fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, neighbors…..it really is more than they can bear.

My father suggested that perhaps the junta is allowing all these people to die because they intended to kill them anyway, it’s just cheaper to let mother nature kill them than to spend the bullets. I don’t know. I just can’t imagine any other reason why the extraordinary suffering is allowed to continue.

I’m praying for the people.

*I hate these shows. A lot. I’d rather shove needles in my eyes than watch them.**

** Except for the audition episodes of AI. After those, I refuse to watch it.

From an article in The Independant:

For two hours, the villagers were standing in water up to their waists. “There has never been a storm like this before. This is the first time,” said another man, Ko Khin My Aye. He said that when the storm struck he had been on his boat, which was tied by rope tight to the trunk of a coconut palm. While he and his family survived, some friends and an aunt were among the dead. “There were many, many children. We could not hold on to all of them.”

That last line breaks my heart. I can not imagine the heartbreak.

Yesterday the guy behind me at the checkout in Safeway piled the belt high with all organic product. Organic juice, organic milk, organic toiletpaper (I’m not kidding.) Most of what he purchased were organic convenience foods. Organic macaroni and cheese, enchiladas, etc. All stuff you can heat in a microwave. All crap.

On TV I heard a celebrity state, in tones of hushed wonder, that she bought the organic apple because that’s what she believes in! Alice Cooper wears organic cotton shirts on the golf course (in the dessert mind you).

The first guy accomplished nothing for the environment by purchasing all that prepackaged food, he gets no street-cred for that. Not unless he can effectively compost all the packaging. Even then he loses because of the production and shipping costs. He’s also lost any gain he may possibly have had from eating food because it’s all pre-packaged. It’s rather like smoking organic cigarettes.

Want to accomplish something for the environment? Something really meaningful, something that will make a difference now and a difference in your wallet? Plant a garden. Grow your own organic tomatoes, radishes, brocolli, strawberries, etc. There is no shipping involved, no oil or corn is burned in a combustion engine getting the strawberry from your patio to your lips. Another thing you can do is learn to cook. It’s not difficult, really, and the benefits far outweigh the time/cost. Most of the time, ingredients are cheaper than a finished product. Most of the time the food I make from scratch is of far better quality and far tastier than anything Annie’s or Stouffer’s can muster. Plus, my leftovers go into reusable bowls, I compost the vegetable waste.

Want to accomplish something local? Buy local produce, shop from the farmer’s market and in roadside stands. Even if it’s not ‘organic’, it’s better for you, fresher and more nutritioney.

Just because it says organic on the label doesn’t mean anything much, especially not if that organic food is wrapped in layers of plastic, cardboard and print. Conventionally raised products won’t kill you.

I love shopping at farmer’s markets and roadside stands; they carry many more types of produce than the supermarket does, it’s fresher and I get to meet the people who grow it.

If you’ve spent any time reading this blog you will have discovered that:

• I think Global Warming (as stated by Algore, many Newspapers, and many others) is a crock, an attempt at a new religion that requires throwing virgins into volcanos (metaphorically, it’s the economy of every first and second world country that gets thrown in, not to mention the effect on all third world countries when everyone else is in the crapper).
• I believe that the earth is a planet, not my mother.
• I do not think that climate/weather/shifting patterns of weather are controlled because I use one or two squares of toilet paper. (Thank you, Sheryl Crow, for that most cringe inducing suggestion. I just vomited a little.)

This is how I will celebrate Earth Day:

• Lobbying for more drilling in the US of A, please pretty please can we just drill in ANWAR already?
• Nagging my congress persons for more local nuclear power plants. (For crying out loud, if the French can manage to build safe ones, and since no one was actually hurt at 3-Mile, can we just get on with building safe, productive, CLEAN, nuclear power plants?)
• Lobbying for more coal burning. (Why? Because the less oil we burn for electricity the less we import, the less we import, the….well, you figure it out.)
• Driving, alone, in my own personal vehicle to work. Both ways. AC on, windows down.
• Mocking all the hilarious hippie types who dance barefoot worship a large, molten cored, spherical spinny thing. (That would be the earth.)

More importantly, I’ll be celebrating the lovely Charlotte’s Birthday. Since Charlotte lives in South Africa and I can’t drive to her home, both ways, alone, in my car with the AC on and the windows down, I’ll be doing something much more funner. Toasting to her health! YAY for Charlotte! YAY for her Birthday!!

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This is an homage to the lasting and wonderful euphoric effects of flowers on the soul:

The smell of the water after a week is something to experience, a singularly horrid olfactory haunting.  However, they went straight into the compost heap to nourish next year’s crop of beans, peas, radishes, tomatoes……

This will just be a whole bunch of pictures of my flowers. YAY for flowers.

Crabapple Blossoms: (do you like the power lines? Yeah, me neither. Except that they run my stuff. Nevermind.)

Creeping Phlox

This is one of the more interesting muscari I got as part of a mix. They start out looking moldy, I nearly cut them out so they wouldn’t infect the rest, but then looked more closely and saw that they just had really closely packed buds.

And this is a dramatic shot of my favorite flower in the genus Taraxacum, in the family Asteraceae. These lovely plants flourish everywhere and add color to every lawn.

Enjoy!

My brother-in-law, the Gallo Negro, Dad and I powerwashed the patio a couple weeks ago. I was going to post pictures of the process and before/afters. However, we had rain for days so the dang thing never dried up enough to see the difference. Now I’ve got proof: Power washers ROCK.

It began, innocently enough, when Dad pulled a couple of things out of the shed, one of them being the power washer that my nephew, Keg, lent to Dad. I was drawn to it like a moth to the flame, I could clean with POWER!!! So, I decided to set it up, clear the patio of stuff and wash it.

Except that I couldn’t make it work. At first I thought “surely this can’t be power washing. I could scrub better with a toothbrush.” I had it hooked up properly, I knew that, but just couldn’t get the power thing going.

So, Dad called Keg who ran over and fiddled with the power cord, then suddenly I HAD POWER!!!!! (insert mad laughter here)

Here is the Patio before

See how it’s yucky looking? It’s got 40 years of muck.

This is the power washer up close and personal:

I started the process, then I had to stop to go see RiotGrrrl’s achievement celebration. (Which rocked.)

Here is the Gallo Negro at work:

and here. If you look closely you can see the muckety build up of goo where the patio meets the flower bed. Euw.

Now, here is a picture I took this afternoon, see the loveliness of a clean patio?

Just a note: My Dad was out there cleaning in his basic Dad uniform. Shorts, white socks pulled up midcalf, white t-shirt and slippers. I was tempted to photograph him, but decided that I would do it a different time. He was a lovely sight.

Extra note: Gallo Negro is my Brother-in-law’s nickname.  Sometimes it’s also Gallo Frito.  But that’s personal.

It’s been awhile since I posted.  Sorry.  I’ve been planning (all in my head) to do recipe posts with photographs.  Hopefully this week I’ll be taking pictures of my baitChocolate Chip Cookies I’m making for the Spring Conference at Church. 

If I can figure it out, I’ll post a scratch and sniff area so you can smell the cookie.  In the mean time, though, I’ll be adding a recipe/food blog on the blog roll.  It will contain all the sites I actually visit regularly and like. 

Meanwhile, I’m hoping to get more pictures of my garden taken and up this evening.  The peas are up, as are the carrots, broccoli rabe, beets, radishes and the strawberries have babies out.  (Baby strawberries are the blossoms.)

I’ve been taking pictures of the flowers in my garden as spring progresses.  Later of course I’ll take provocative shots of my Zapotec tomato.  But for now, I give you my yard today:

Finally, a picture of my new cat.

This morning as I took pictures of the garden before a coming storm, the Box accompanied me.  He insisted that I take a picture of him in a tree.  Taa Daaa!

This is him showing his inner Spiderman: