Montana de oro

As Chad put it, our best Thanksgiving ever.

North view from the bluff walk.

South view.

We spent the first day walking along the bluff to the south - this is all walking distance from our campground.

When we got to the fence we headed inland up Coon Creek.

The air was extra oxygenated, and we felt great and invigorated, despite having got up at 3 am.

We managed to use only cloth diapers on this trip - here's Christian reading The Foot Book while on the can.

Spooner Cove, just before leaving this morning.

Typical layered sedimentary rock formation along the coast.

Loved the golden colors of the rock.

 

Hands in the air if

you’re thinking about food right now.

Although I thought I would skip the food stress around Thanksgiving – planning a couple night’s worth of meals for camping proved to require just as much foresight and preparation. True, I didn’t make cranberry sauce or pie crust today – but I did manage to make one loaf of fresh bread (to send along with Bella), one batch of oatmeal raisin cookies, one batch of flax muffins, AND several batches of braised cucumbers (they ARE a revelation!) I also ate my way through all the leftovers in the fridge and a good deal of the fresh produce.

We’re all packed up – and ready to hit the road at 3 am – yeah, that’s what traveling with Chad is like, we do crazy things like leave before the sun rises. I am going along with the plan though, because he errs on the side of caution and I don’t mind hanging out with hm over there sometimes. I know that driving five hours the day before Thanksgiving is a risky thing.

This is exciting. Montana del oro is one of those campgrounds that make it onto Best Beach Camping lists and the pictures I’ve seen have been spectacular.

The best part? We get to be outside for a solid 48 hours or so. The baby will LOVE that. (Friday night we’ll check into a hotel in Santa Barbara so we can hose off two days worth of dirt.)

The downer? Missing Tim’s brined turkey out in Joshua Tree. Have fun out there! We’ll be thinking about you.

 

The Elves’ Faire

Anna with the Acorn Elf

We had a blast yesterday at the 24th Annual Elves’ Faire put on by the Pasadena Waldorf School.

The leather craftsman modeling one of his masks.

Really. Amazing.

Imagine a fair or carnival designed FOR KIDS, but with all natural materials, nature- and magic-oriented, and nearly everything handmade AND nearly 100% green. There was live music everywhere; not only where there at least four different bands (mostly folk and kid’s stuff, but one rock band) but there was also a drumming circle with real drums and tambourines and a musician helping people along. Christian loved that spot, especially because there was an old table top in the middle that kids were jumping on as a makeshift see-saw (he just stood there and kept his balance while OTHER kids jumped up and down).

At the drum circle

And lest you think that sounds too airy-fairy, the games for the kids at the back of the fair were brilliant and imaginative. There was JOUSTING FOR KIDS! Two kids got to stand on a low balance beam and knock eachother about with gaily colored long padded sticks. No blows to the head were allowed – and it seemed to be mainly a game of balance and you could see the kids having a great time.

Other great games:

Walking a maze on stilts.

Maneuvering through a “labryinth” blindfolded.

A jumpline rigged with a tire horse: the kid (or grown-up!) got to wear a knight’s helmet and carry a jousting stick and try and catch the grass ring on the way down. (And the volunteer parent running this ride? JOHN C. REILLY!)

And there were others I didn’t even get to.

There were cool rooms and areas to visit, like the Doll Room (all kinds of Waldorf dolls for sale), Pixie Town (play area for toddlers – with things like small hills to climb and a rowboat full of sand), the Wishing Well (the school store filled with beautiful treasures), the Bake Shoppe (great baked goods and coffee), the Silent Auction and on and on.

Anna and her favorite heavy baby.

The fair was peopled with elves in full regalia and when we arrived there was an jester elf sitting on the ground with his legs splayed at the entrance playing his pipe. It was a great image but I was so in wonder that I forgot to take a photograph. Other favorites were the Pocket Elf, who had on a multi-colored coat with huge pockets. If you gave him a ticket, you could reach in one of his pockets and pull out a prize wrapped in tissue paper and raffia. We also loved the Acorn Elf who carried a large staff and was covered with pins and necklaces made from large lovely real acorns.

Another highlight was the Elves and the Shoemaker puppet show put on by the teachers. It was very inspirational as we’ve been doing (shorter and simpler) puppet shows at our weekly Waldorf in the Woods playgroup. There was a lot of singing and the traditional candle-lighting at the start of the show. I was captivated.

We loved the whole thing and will definitely be back next year. YOU SHOULD COME TOO.

P.S. It was the kind of place where the honey vendor had a display of live bees. The queen has a blue dot on her thorax.

Can you find the queen bee?

P.P.S. There were tons of craft booths for the kids too.

 

The Sound Wood Makes

I don’t what sound wood makes, but you could ask Christian.

One of his favorite pastimes is to “plug” a pair of old airline headphones into a small hole in a wooden pestle (as in mortar and pestle) and walk around “listening” to it.

Must make some cool noise that only kids can hear.

 

Jeanne Silverthorne

Ernest, but playful, like a female Tim Hawkinson, but not nearly so self-obsessed, Jeanne Silverthorne fills a gallery with tongue-in-cheek objects: botanical flora and fauna and other objects from her studio – all cast in rubber. The resistance rubber has to conducting an electrical charge works very much to this installation’s favor – instead of an angry studio critique, the worms creeping about in the decaying roses and the miniature rubber casts of Silverthorne reading Gone with the Wind on top of coffin-like wooden crate (a replica of one of the crates used to ship her work) become a hilarious nose-thumbing at death. Although one might expect the rubber trashcan can overflowing with rubber lightbulbs (tossed bad ideas) or the nest of rubber lightbulbs (stillborn bad ideas) to be so obvious as to be irritating, the stealthy mechanical movement of some of the works, the sounds of the jiggling rubber fans on the floor, the confusion of real and not-real, all add up to much more than the sum of its parts (Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station).

 

Green Like Him

My subscription to the New Yorker has lapsed and despite some withdrawal anxiety, I’m cheered up by thinking that I may finally catch up to the current issue.

I am further encouraged by the fact I found somebody on freecycle who is LOOKING for back issues of the New Yorker to send to a colleague in India.

But of course, I am now eking out every last pleasure from my remaining issues: the poetry, the fiction, the Sedaris columns, the cartoons…

And this August 31, 2009 issue, I can’t give up until I’ve listed all the books in the article by Elizabeth Kolbert. “Green Like Me” is a review of a book called No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process, but Kolbert manages to excavate a fascinating genre in the process: let’s call it reality-TV-meets-Mr. Let’s-Save-the-World-with-a-self-imposed-environmental-rule.

No Impact Man is a year in the life of a man (and his family) trying to reduce his carbon footprint to NOTHING for one year. Did I mention that he lives in the middle of New York City?

Kolbert refers to a slew of other books of interest: Farm City (one month of eating only food from a backyard garden); Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (I know, I know, I haven’t read it yet); Greasy Rider (driving across the USA using used cooking oil for fuel); and Farewell, My Subaru (giving up a car for goats-whatever that means); Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet (self-explanatory, based in Vancouver); Sleeping Naked is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days (one green resolution a day for a year) – all of which are now on my to-read list.

Despite Kolbert’s criticism (yes, we know that 2 billion people in the world already inadvertently live with lower impact just by dint of being poor), I believe that change has to start somewhere – and where, if not in the minds of people, one at a time around the world. I think that it’s encouraging to see books being written around the concept of a one-year eco-stunt, especially as it reflects a growing trend among people I know.

That is, a trend of growing awareness about our own consumption and trash production. My friends and family are all on that bandwagon; happily ferreting out local grassfed beef and buffalo, raising chickens, growing veggies, buying CSA basket, sewing our own reusable lunch bags, etc, etc.

For instance, I have had conversations with my sister-in-law about reducing plastic and she referred me to this blog: A Life Less Plastic.

And my friend Nathen has for several years collected all the trash he made for one month and carried it with him. This year he’s collecting all his trash for the year. For those of you who aren’t already familiar with Nathen’s trash project, here’s a link to his landfill page.

And not least, my brother Songbae who is still in the process of reducing the sum total of his worldly possessions to 100 things, like this other guy named Dave did.

 

That’s some very nice proscuitti!

Quickly now, so the finished book doesn’t languish in one of my slippery piles under my desk, a post about Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma.

I have two words for you: READ IT.

I am admittedly, the kind of person who buys ten copies of a new favorite book to give to everybody at Christmas (blogging is much more cost-effective), but this book – I have to find a new way to gush – is not only entertainingly written and meticulously researched (the guy teaches journalism at UC Berkeley), but it also tells you loads of information you feel you should have already known. LOADS.

Pollan follows four meals (his own – not too much preaching here, as he starts with by eating at McDonald’s) backwards to whence they came. The first meal is the quintessential fast food meal for four, eaten while hurtling down the freeway; the second is corporate organic; the third is grassfed organic (hurray for Polyface Farms!); and the last is one entirely hunted, foraged, and grown by Pollan himself.

And all so well-written that it reads like a fiction mystery thriller. And you don’t have to be a foodie to enjoy this kind of fiction, although it helps if the fact that they are eating terrine of lobster and halibut en gelee while out hunting for wild pig makes you smile.

Aside from the one tedious (but, I agree, necessary) chapter on the ethics of eating animals (and again, so satisfyingly well- researched: he goes straight to the granddaddies of animal activists), each chapter is more riveting than the one that precedes it. I mean this guy hunts down and shoots a wild (big!) boar right here in California, and he’d never shot a gun before researching writing this book. He tells me everything about hunting I’d ever wanted to know, from the perspective of a guy who didn’t think he’d ever be a hunter.

A few nuggets I pulled from this book:

My CSA basket is the best thing I do. Fast food is one of the worst. Corporate organic and even shopping at Whole Foods is not really all that. If I’m going to eat meat, I need to look for grass-fed beef. I want to visit Polyface Farms next time I’m on the East Coast.

P.S. My post title is from Angelo, Pollan’s wild food mentor – it’s what Angelo says when Pollan bags his first wild pig.

 

Grateful for

my impending health.

After having been knocked flat on my heiny for about 24 hours.

Although a child in our playgroup was (momentarily) suspected of having the measles, and the girl I drive home after school was diagnosed with bronchitis, I actually think I am recovering from a bout of the dreaded swine flu.

It appears that H1N1 is THE flu of the season and makes its appearance with a fever and sore throat. This is so characteristic of this flu that at Chad’s work, anybody who shows both these symptoms is asked to stay at home.

It started with a headache and some strange other-body-ness that was so unusual (for me) that I didn’t immediately attribute it to sickness. Then the next morning I woke up feeling better and I went out to a La Leche League toddler meeting (but I didn’t hold any babies and mostly stayed away from people in general). By the time I got home I was feeling much worse and by lunch I was alternating shivering and sweating, and I had such bad body ache that my eyeballs hurt. Every once in a while, I got an itch in my throat that made me cough – that hurt too.

By bedtime I could barely turn my head, and nursing the baby to sleep was agony. This plus I developed a razor sharp ache in the right side of my throat. I remember thinking, I can’t do this for another day, before drifting off. Sleep was not much better as my affected sense of equilibrium inflected my dreams, giving them a nightmarish quality.

When I woke up – I could feel the body ache receding.

Hallelujah. I was still sick, for sure, but well enough to appreciate how sick I HAD BEEN.

Now that it’s bedtime, I can really appreciate feeling better, although I’m not 100% by a long shot.

Whew. Hope this one passes you over.

[Update:

It has now been exactly a week since I got my first symptoms of sickness. No more body ache, but I still feel slightly weak and I still have a deep cough, although that only makes itself known very occasionally.

Recovery is slow.

I did notice that my fever ebbed and returned several times over the course of a few days. Also, I had many disjointed symptoms that would disappear and reappear, like the fever, a stiff neck, a sore throat, and even this cough.

Chad felt unwell and stayed home two days from work, but never got it as bad as I did - and never coughed either. His worst symptom was a mind-crushing headache which was accompanied by a slight fever.

Christian and Bella remain healthy and are getting plenty of rest.

I'm staying home today and eating lots of soup.]