Category: Essays and Musings

  • Somebody’s Poisoned the Water Hole

    Do you remember BPA? The chemical that was in the baby bottles from which my children drank from the time they were a few weeks/months old? It was in the bottles that attached to my breast pump (and almost certainly the pump itself). I was recently reading “Slow Death by Rubber Duck“, and I came…

  • Making noise

    The consequence of keeping your mouth shut is that you never get to meet the people that you agree with. A lot of us keep our mouths shut a lot of the time. You might never guess it from the number of fringe-dwellers that have started to speak up out here, but a lot of…

  • Control that Lawn!

    My day today included a scythe, a push mower, and the digging of garden beds by hand. I also made a REAL pound cake: butter, sugar, eggs, flour, one pound of each. I added a pinch of salt to the flour and a splash of lemon juice. No baking powder – it wasn’t invented yet…

  • Frugal by Habit

    I got a really sweet love seat from Freecycle the other day, so I now have a nice looking sunroom for the bargain price of… oh, $6 of gas to run to town for the couch. Everything else was already in the room, but this was the key piece of furniture necessary to ‘anchor’ the…

  • A Mom Who Blogs?

    Just to be clear: I understand that I’m just about nobody in the “blogosphere”, so my reaction to the “Moms who blog” furor that recently hit after the NYT scoffed at us is a little less intense than that of women who are doing it for a living, as a calling, or for other reasons…

  • Chopping Wood

    It is a commonly quoted Zen proverb: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” I first came across it at the entry to the Zen Garden in the Arboretum at the University of Guelph, and I was struck motionless. It seemed so obvious; even the attainment of enlightenment doesn’t absolve…

  • No Body

    You do not have a body “What?!” I hear you respond. “Clearly ludicrous! This woman’s insane.” Very good, very good. Glad to see you’re listening. I’m afraid it’s not as exciting as all that, though. I’m not going to claim that existence is an illusion, that the body, or life (or the world for that…

  • School Gardens – or not?

    Sierra on Strollerderby asked us what we thought about Caitlin Flanagan’s article on School Gardens in the Atlantic Monthly. I did make a comment, but it left me thinking all evening, so I guess it goes in here. If you read my last posting, you will rightly predict that I’m in favor of school gardens,…

  • Idea Collector

    I spend an enormous amount of time pondering the overall arch of my life. In front of me on the desk is a mock-up of a pamphlet that highlights the range of my experience, which goes from nuclear engineering plants (drafting of shut-down systems, studying the materials that surrounds the fuel rods), through universities (teaching…

  • Review: No Impact Man

    Title: No Impact Man Author: Colin Beavan Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2009 This book surprised me. I have read a LOT of the “My Year Of…” category of books, and I arrived at this one from a not-particularly positive commentary on the New York Times. I found myself with book in hand only a…

  • Local Buying

    I have been lying awake trying to solve the economic problems of the island I live on in my head. I did this all day also. This is not a new activity; I grew up in Newfoundland. I spent rather a lot of my youth on this issue. Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Every…

  • Book Review: Cheap

    Title: Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture Author: Ellen Ruppel Shell Penguin, 2009 This book begins in the same place as a surprisingly large number of books of this type: with the author’s (seemingly sudden) realization that something she takes for granted might be a problem. In this case, it is the purchase of…