7 Web Sites to Help You Become Someone Else

Okay, I'm not referring you to fake ID sites.  But most of us daydream about the what-ifs - a teacher who wishes to become an author,  or jettisoning the corporate world for a small farm, that sort of thing, or even just master a style of cooking.  Here are 7 web sites that can help you learn a new skill, even if just for fun:   


1. You want to master Italian cooking
Go here:  Vincent Scordo's blog is nothing short of brilliant, and his recipes are the real deal. Be prepared to develop an arancini addiction.


2. You want to learn how to think like, or become, a CEO
Go talk to Eric.  At the very least you'll be entertained by his narration of his Acela trip to New York City.   I can relate -back in my public transport days, I must have had a sign on my back that read: If you ate too much garlic for dinner last night, and it's eking out  your pores, plus you like to elbow people when you turn the pages of your newspaper, sit next to me!  I really don't miss that.  I'm all for public transport.  Hold the garlic.


3.  You want to be prepared for the Apocalypse, or at least become one of those mountain man types
Actually, some of the articles and information on Backwoods Home's website is quite good.  And if you are looking for an all-camo wardrobe and a 5-year supply of freeze-dried food, these are the folks that can help with that.


4. You want to become a consultant
Years of watching consultants work at your firm have convinced you that the lifestyle is one of travel and glamour.  (PSA: travel is often a yes, glamour not so much)  Go read Consultant Journal.  Good blog, good information.  


5. You want to escape the Rat Race
If you want a career change, or to retire early, there's a lot of web sites out there to help. But the most thoughtful and well-written article I think I've ever read on the topic is here.  For help with executing an early retirement plan, try here.  


6. You want to develop the next cool mobile device app - but don't have unlimited funds
Go here first.  Then do some googling.  Even if you don't, reading Business Insider is a good idea.


7. You want to be the next reality TV star
Think Mike Holmes has nothing on you?  Have more kids and better hair than Kate Gosselin?
Go here to learn how to get the cameras trained on you.  But be careful what you wish for...


Well, there you have it.   Just remember to tell all your future fans that you learned it here.

How Does My Garden Grow: 2011 Planning Edition

Today I skipped right past the holidays, ignoring the fact that I still have a gobzillion presents to wrap and baking to do - and ordered some seeds for next year's garden.  


Since I haven't done a full seed order in a couple years, nor have I kept track of the age of my seeds (PSA: most seeds increase, instead of decrease, germination year over year for a period of several years.  Onions and the rest of the allium family are an exception), it was time for a new seed inventory.  I promise to keep better track of this one.


My seed orders have improved over the years.  For one thing, I have a better handle on what we don't have success with, and what will get eaten vs. passed over once picked.  Do not talk to me of the nutritional value of rutabagas - I don't like them, and to paraphrase a former president, I'm 37 years old and I don't have to eat them if I don't want to.  You can mail my portion of rutabagas to the hungry children in Africa, okay? 


I'll even provide the envelope.


So there.


But despite that, I still get sucked into descriptions of French heirloom winter squashes (note to the squeamish, those bumps are created by the sugars in the pumpkin, which means it's sweet and tasty), tomato breeds created by Thomas Jefferson, beans bred by my own ancestors, the Cherokee, and so on.  If it says old and rare, I probably want it.


Because growing Reisentraube tomatoes, Vert Grimmpant melons (don't you just love the name Grimmpant?  If we ever get a pet we're totally naming him or her Grimmpant.  If I get my way, that is.), and Yok Kao cucumers is totally cool.  Would you like some Bleu of Solaise lettuce?  Doesn't it sound like it needs to be in a salad with blue cheese, candied walnuts and maple-roasted pears?


I do.  But maybe I'm just hungry.


We'll also grow some things the adorable one can enjoy - she's already planted last year's garden with us, and has become an expert at raspberry picking.  We can't seem to convince her to wait until the tomatoes are actually ripe to pick them, but what's a few cherry tomatoes sacrificed on the alter of learning to love being outdoors?  So this year we'll add miniature pumpkins, birdhouse gourds, and more annual flowers.  All the flowers, too, are old school - sweet peas, bachelor's buttons, love-in-a-mist, pansies, bells of ireland, and my personal favorite: 

                                                   Kiss me over the garden gate. 
                                                   The name says it all, does it not?




When the adorable one is a little older, say, in a year, we'll add Four O'Clocks too, and I'll read her the poem by my favorite unlikely poet about the naughty Four O' Clocks who refused to have their faces washed.  


We're also going to add apricot trees, a couple Cornelian cherry trees, and some blackberries.    I'd like to put in more apples and some peach trees, but we have to take down some trees first.   
I'd love to have some nut trees too, but space and the layout of our land do not permit it at the moment.


Oh well.


I'm in no rush for the holidays or winter to be over.  But gardening is important, and not just because I love to do it.  The number of people in this country that are food insecure is rapidly increasing.  Kitchen gardens are one way to solve that problem - perhaps even the best way. 


Chew on this from 1943-45: 


The US Department of Agriculture estimates that more than 20 million victory gardens were planted. Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9-10 million tons, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables. So, the program made a difference.


We grew, during WWII, 9-10 million tons of food in our front and back yards.  


Imagine what knowing we could, with just a few minutes a week, produce 9-10 million tons of fresh food from our back yards would do for our national optimism, which, quite frankly, could do with a bit of a bump.  What it might do for those going hungry.  What it might do for our own health and weight.  Imagine the wonder that kids have when they grow a pumpkin themselves, or make a birdhouse out of a gourd, or run through a field of giant sunflowers.  Imagine it's your kid.


It could happen again - one Quadrato D'asti Rosso pepper at a time.

Yes, Madeline, There Really Is a Santa Claus

For weeks now, the back corner of my living room has looked like a department store threw up in there.  So has my guest room, but that's a different Christmas altogether.

For the last several years, Sander and I have 'adopted a family' for the holidays, through Beverly Bootstraps, a local food pantry and outreach organization.  For the last two years, my in-laws have joined us, and basically doubled our ability to provide Christmas for a needy family.

The lists are heartbreaking.   Sizes for coats and shoes, needs for mittens and hats and underwear described.  This year the family that my parents 'got' had a little boy who needed a blanket for his bed.  I can only desperately hope his family doesn't wait until Christmas to give it to him. All too often, these are single parents, working and out of work, who can barely break even, and face the reality of having to hold out their hat for a donation or tell their kids that Santa isn't coming this year. 

We go a little overboard on the giving.  Everyone has some 'societal trigger' - something wrong with the world that bothers them more than anything.  For me it's kids being hungry and cold.  I find it utterly inexcusable, and totally frustrating.  It's not that I don't care about the cold and hungry adults- I do.  But kids are powerless to control or change their situations.  Add on top of that the notion that Christmas is the time of year that the discrepancy between children that are 'haves', like my daughter, are in stark relief to the 'have not' children themselves - they know they aren't getting what other kids are -  and that hunger actually affects a child's brain development, and you not only get the short term pain of no presents under the tree, but the long term societal impact of kids who grow into adults that are starting life out 10 steps behind the rest of us.

The shopping and sorting and dropping off has become the marker of my holiday for me.  I love Christmas with my family.  With every decoration we add to the house my daughter's excitement grows palpably.  I love to cook Christmas dinner, and I love the lights and decorations.  Cutting a Christmas tree from the tree farm next door and hauling it home is a favorite tradition.

But that's the fun.  For me, Christmas is knowing that this year, 3 kids and their Mom get to believe Santa Claus is real. 

My husband and my mother-in-law dropped everything off yesterday.  The pile in my living room is gone. 

And so Christmas for me is over, even as it is just beginning. 

This year, Beverly Bootstraps had 75 more applications for their holiday 'adopt a family' program than last year.  I'm happy to say that they covered every single family, and have extras toys to give out to walk-in parents as the season goes on. 

Theory of Economic Relativity: The Cost of Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Over the last few weeks, our hot water heater has started acting up.  Some mornings we get water so hot you could cook an egg in the shower on the cool setting.  Other mornings, it's on the lukewarm side at best.

So this week we'll have someone out to look at it.  Could be just a sensor, could be the whole thing is on it's last legs.

I like to be proactive about these things, and not wait until it dies, which will inevitably be on a morning when I'm midway through the shower, with shampoo suds running down my back, and I'm going to be late to a meeting. They say that Alfred Hitchcock turned the water to freezing cold without warning Janet Leigh during the shower scene of Psycho in order to get the appropriate reaction from her, although Leigh denied it.  Still, I've no doubt it would be effective.  There's nothing like an icy blast of water to elicit a shriek.

Water heaters are pricey, but in the realm of home repair, not that big of a deal. Traditional heaters run about $600 plus installation.  Tankless heaters are more expensive, running about $1000 + installation, but much more energy efficient.  If you can afford it, tankless is the way to roll.

But then there is the commitment we made to 'go solar' the minute it became feasible.  A grid-tied solar heating system is really costly, and low on the priority list right now, as it falls behind other big projects that are a tad more urgent, like insulating and residing the house.  But solar hot water is another story.

Solar hot water systems are more expensive than traditional systems.  We haven't yet gotten a quote on one, but let's give a safe estimate of maybe $3000-$3500 to install.  Which is a bunch more than $1000 for a tankless heater.  Still, a recent post on my sister's blog put this into perspective - and I'll quote her quoting her friend:

My friend Pat Meadows, a very, very smart woman, has a wonderful idea she calls “The Theory of Anyway.” What it entails is this – she argues that 95% of what is needed to resolve the coming crises in energy depletion, or climate change, or most other global crises are the same sort of efforts. When in doubt about how to change, we should change our lives to reflect what we should be doing “Anyway.” Living more simply, more frugally, using less, leaving reserves for others, reconnecting with our food and our community, these are things we should be doing because they are the right thing to do on many levels. That they also have the potential to save our lives is merely a side benefit (a big one, though).

So in other words, if solar is the moral choice in our opinion - and it is - we have an obligation to look at implementing it.


Still, the difference (for argument's sake, let's go with a $3200 estimate) in cost is big.  If a tankless heater is $1000 + installation - let's call it $1500, and a solar system is $3200 + installation - let's call it $4k, then that's a $2500 difference in cost. 


Let's say we take advantage of the 30% tax credit that we'd get early next year when we file our taxes.  That brings the cost down to $2700.  Then lets say it saves us $30 on our electric bill for the next 10 years.  That means that at the end of 2020, we've come up with a net profit of $900. 


It's a long haul investment, to be sure.  And it's a bunch of dough out of the gate.  But it has the result of being both the 'anyway' choice and being an economic benefit over many years.  It is one of those places where our morals and our pocketbook get to come together, which is what I call 'economic relativity'. 


What will we do?  Not sure yet.  But I like the fit.

Radical Thinking in the Garden

If you have an extra 5 minutes today, go read this invitation to the Tea Party by Dar Williams. 
It's just brilliant, spot on, absolutely on target.  

If you are still here, here's a little bit to whet your appetite:

"As you might have guessed, I don't want to scrap what you might call big government. I distrust big business more than big government. But often enough the two entities have been bedfellows with silk sheets and matching toothbrushes, so I'm willing to meet you halfway. I'll meet you in a community garden. Community gardens close the loop, decentralize power, and let people help people, addressing issues that differ from region to region. They improve our physical health and increase self-reliance. With greater strength of the community mind and body, we're better able to deflect the buzz and hype of anyone that does not have our best interests at heart. We The People can do that."


Radical thinking at it's best. 

Oh, and if you thought my idea that keeping kids warm, well-fed and safe was a means to a brighter future was idealistic or simplistic, go read this.  Even the Washington Post agrees with me. 

Holidays are the Gateway to Seed Season

Back in the day when my husband and I were in the midst of planning our wedding, which, being a somewhat DIY affair, was a time-intensive undertaking, my older sister gave me some particularly sage advice. 

"The wedding", she said with a wise nod, having done the deed herself a few years back, "is the gateway to the honeymoon". 

And whenever wedding planning got overly time consuming, as fun as it was, we reminded ourselves that it was the ticket to the 11 days we were spending up in the Canadian Rockies hiking and having daily cocktail hours. 

I feel similarly as the holidays approach.  I love the winter holidays.  There's eating, there's parties, there's cutting down a Christmas tree, there's eggnog, and mulled cider, and cookies. Every gathering seems to involve mashed potatoes, and heck, you could invite me to a closet cleaning if you served me mashed potatoes.  Especially if they have cheese in them.

But I digress.

Still, the holidays can be a lot of work.  There's the shopping and wrapping and baking.  Our December weekends seem to book up by mid-June.   And so as the relative chaos grows, and my living room becomes buried under a pile of pine needles and ribbon scraps, I start to look forward to January.  A lot.

Because January is when the seed catalogs arrive.  And so while everyone else is complaining about the dark and the cold (I whine about it too, just with a 2-week lag while I drool over descriptions of pumpkins and tomatoes), I'm curled up on the couch making lists of things to plant, and with drafting paper, planning where the seeds will go.

I always buy too many.  I'm always far more ambitious with the seeds I start than the space I have.  But I love seed season - because it reminds me, in the dark and cold of winter, that soon the snowdrops will peek up over the crusts of snow in the yard, and the ice will, eventually, 4 months later, melt.  

Usually I'm in no rush though.   I'm content to tuck the yard and garden in every year and take the breather that is January-March.  No leaves to rake, no weeding to do, few social demands - it's respite from the endless business of planting, growing and harvesting, the start of every year.  Lots of soup and bread dinners in front of the woodstove.

But I still plot and plan about growing season again.   We all have to choose what we work for.  Some people build things in clay or brick.  I like to build in dirt.   

When the sun rises, I go to work.

When the sun goes down I take my rest,

I dig the well from which I drink,

I farm the soil which yields my food,

I share creation, Kings can do no more.

- Chinese Proverb, 2500 B.C.

Hobby Shopping

This past Saturday, my husband and I took a wine making class at Old Sturbridge Village.  We've been wanting to make wine for a long time, and so when news about the class popped up this summer, just as my parents were asking me what I wanted for my birthday, we jumped on it.

On the surface, wine making is pretty simple.  You can pretty much turn anything into wine - fruit, vegetables, stinky athletic socks, whatever.  All you need is water, sugar, fruit (I'm skipping the sweat socks myself, your mileage may vary) and yeast.  A food-grade plastic bucket to ferment it in, a few sterilized glass bottles to rack it in, and food-grade tubing to siphon it with. Listerine makes for a great sterilizing agent for your corks and tubing and that sort of thing.  Rubber gaskets and corks may be the most expensive part of the deal, and those can be reused, albeit carefully.  The bucket can be gotten for the asking from a local restaurant.  Glass bottles can be picked up at a recycling center.  If you plan to strain your ingredients, bleach an old pillow case. 

 Wine making can be dead cheap.  Well, okay, unless you want to make really good wine, then it can get more complicated, and potentially more expensive.  But you can make some pretty good stuff with a minimum of cost and effort.  After all, people have been making wine for thousands of years before you could have frozen grapes shipped from Napa or before a hydrometer was even invented. 

Which brings me to my philosophy around hobbies.  The modern approach to hobbying seems to be an expensive one.  Take biking, or skiing.  Buy expensive, brand-new bike or skis.  Buy matching gear and single-purpose footwear (bike shoes that clip in, say, or $300 ski boots).  Then go out and play, after an investment of considerable money.  By then, of course, playing is serious business.  After all, look at what you have spent!

My personal opinion is that approach is backwards.  First decide if you like to do something, having made the most minimal investment possible, then put your money into it.  Let's take that biking example again.  Borrow, buy on CraigsList, or find on sale an inexpensive bike.  Buy a helmet, since spending $30 is worth not spending your remaining days as a drooling vegetable.  Put on some old sneakers and go for a ride.  Enjoy.

Love it?  Fine, invest.  Padded bike shorts definitely make long rides more pleasant.  Better, lighter bikes are much faster and easier to lug around, and you'll offset the cost by reselling your old bike anyway.  Hate it?  Resell your cheap stuff and make your money back. 

You may not look as fancy, but that isn't the point of a hobby.  The point is to take up something you enjoy.  I can't tell you how many good sets of golf clubs I see at yard sales for a fraction of the cost, after spending a few years gathering dust in the owner's basement. 

Try it first.  Decide if you like it.  Then spend your money.  Chances are you'll make better decisions about what to buy anyway.