A Homemade Day

This morning I made myself a quiche with a whole bunch of stuff from the garden: onion, lamb’s quarters, kale, bok choy, sunflower leaves, nasturtium leaves, and basil. The peppers and tomatoes in the garden aren’t ripe yet, so those were store-bought, but theoretically in a few weeks I should be able to make it all from the garden except the mushrooms and, of course, the eggs. If I could just have chickens, I could do the whole thing from scratch, really. I threw in some store-bought cheese too, but if I took the time, that could have been homemade also. I had a slice of homemade bread with the quiche, with homemade grape jelly.

This afternoon I’ll be cleaning the cured garlic, readying it for storage. Last night I cleaned the dried lavender and froze a bag of it, enough for hundreds of cookies to come.

Yogurt is now percolating gently in the slow cooker. There’s the prospect of lettuce/spinach/kale salad with strawberries for lunch. My husband is in the kitchen pre-making dinner with home-bottled tomatoes and zucchini fresh from the yard (the good Italian grey kind, not the dark-green baseball bat kind). And I have a glass to hand of homemade grape juice, bottled last year.

Life doesn’t get better than this.

A crazy week, with more to come

We've been up at the church we're renovating, finishing drywall so that the painters can come back to finish the remaining bits. I've never enjoyed drywalling, but it saves money to do it ourselves. I'm also scared of heights. Airplanes and cliffs, no problem, but chairs and stepladders make me feel woozy. So picture me standing on top on a scaffold, dust mask and protective glasses suffocating and blinding me, while I mud and sand the ceiling overhead. Dust raining down on my head, coating me completely. No air conditioning, of course, and it was about 28 celsius in the room I was working in. Completely mud-soaked by the time I finished. I still have one more sanding to do next week. I turned on the Bee Gees to distract myself, though, and at one point found myself dancing on the scaffold, so it was okay and --maybe-- a little fun.  

Meanwhile my long-suffering husband was downstairs drywalling and framing out bulkheads and doing all kinds of complicated math, and running back to Mississauga for band events before coming back up. Then we took a day to steam-clean the carpet the tradespeople had messed up downstairs, so we don't have to replace it right away. Bodies aching now.

Came home tonight, mowed the lawn and did three batches of laundry. Tomorrow I will visit with my niece, who is in town for a conference, which will be lovely. Then the next day it's back up to the church to finish the drywalling and start moving furniture downstairs to allow the painters to complete the upstairs in August.

I look at people sitting on their porches in the cool of the evening, and I wonder how on earth they find the time to sit down.

Visible progress at last!

A different interpretation of Isaiah 2:4

I have always thought that Isaiah 2:4 was referring to a peaceful time when people will no longer choose to make war on each other because they are subject to God's law. It says:

"And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

My husband and I were discussing this verse the other day, though, and he proposed a different interpretation. The reason people will beat their swords into plowshares could be because there is such a bad famine that they must put aside their differences and focus all their attention on growing food just to stay alive. Maybe they have to stop warring with each other and work together to survive.

Looking at the food shortages and predictions about coming famine, he could possibly be right. At some point on the continuum, people fight each other for territory or resources. But when it gets really bad and there are no resources, they turn their attention inward. It becomes the survival of the individual, not the nation. There is no energy for collective warfare.

And on that note, I'm going to go out and see how my garden is doing... 

I miss the card catalogue

These days, we are fed a stream of things on the internet based on our past searches and activity. I look up greenhouse kits once, and blam! I'm inundated with ads for greenhouse kits, and the Youtube videos that come up for me suddenly include things about greenhouse use and care. I bought a Nissan, and suddenly I'm getting ads for Nissans (as if I'm going to buy another when I've just bought one!). I watch one video on Croatian cookery, and I get spam emails for cooking pans and travel companies. Before long, all my internet "feeds" are limited to about four topics. I may think I'm accessing lots of information on the internet, but actually I'm being restricted to those limited "feeds." Sometimes I type in a really wild search, completely off topic, just to refresh my feeds a bit.

Remember the good old days when you walked into the library and were faced with banks of tiny drawers filled with index cards? They pointed you to sources of information on any topic you could imagine. (And they really satisfied my compulsion to organize things into little boxes.) Yes, Google searches can theoretically look up any information on any topic -- but the results that come up are based on popularity. What comes up one day may be different from what comes up tomorrow. On the internet you are restricted to what it wants to show you, and it keeps track of what you search. At a library, you have access to every book, all books, on whatever topic, any genre, on every shelf. It's all there for your perusal. And no one knows what you looked up unless you check the book out.

We need to protect our libraries, support them financially, support hardcopy books, and take a deep look at the idea of book banning. Libraries are the last safe haven of information. And when the EMP goes off and takes out your internet, libraries may be the only source of information.

The perfect friend

I was thinking over some fond memories, and I've come up with the definition of the perfect friend: You haven't seen each other in a year or two, but when you finally get together, you head for the beach with folding chairs and snacks, get yourselves all set up, and then sit side by side for hours...reading.

Sober Thoughts on the Death of a Neighbour

A woman I know died very suddenly and unexpectedly last week. It is the second time I've had a friend die without warning. The last time I saw her, I was out walking the dog and she rode past me on her bicycle and called out a hello. She was always on the go, busy with her children, involved in life. I didn't know her well enough, but everything I did know about her was likeable. She was young and vibrant, and she wasn't finished yet.

The conflicts and worries and stresses of this life really aren't that significant, you know, when you stop to think about it. It can all be gone in a moment, the unfinished projects, the half-read books, the unsaid apologies, the secretly-nursed hurts, the triumphs and acquisitions, the carefully-built bank account, the reputation, the granite countertops. The things we get caught up in -- paint colours, career choices, waist sizes -- don't matter in the end. For all of us, what matters will be who we have become as people, what we have learned, and how we have loved and served others -- those are the only things we take with us.

I watch leaders of the world get caught up in ego and posturing and flexing of muscles, and I just roll my eyes. We are hurtling through space on this teeny tiny speck in the universe. None of us are driving it. None of us can control it. None of us will be here for long. And yet we still argue and shove each other around on this speck and forget we're just plummeting through space for a very limited time. Surely there are better ways to spend what time we have.

Thought

There are days I look up from churning butter or threading my loom and get the weirdest feeling I was born in the wrong century.