We’re closing on our very first house on Friday. It’s smallish, just because the rooms aren’t organized well, but I’m hopeful we can make it feel Not-So-Big rather than cramped, as the current owners have it.

I’m trying to learn how to haggle with vendors over the many, many things we’re purchasing. I’ve finally worked myself up to say “We’ve been loyal customers for ___ years now/I’m buying a lot; I’m hoping you can give me a discount.” Still produces the fight-or-flight response, I’m embarrassed to say.

Awesome. Makes your starling-in-the-head story look kind of tame, doesn’t it, honey?

Part I of Return of the King: Extended Edition over peanutty noodles on Thursday night, continued skirmishes with the rats; a lively exchange of ideas with the boss and a few new library books on Friday, continued skirmishes with the rats; plans to see Coraline on Saturday, dashed by a non-starting car. Oh, then it snowed. It’s lucky we live on a hill so Richard could tuck it in a little closer to the curb for the plough. The rats were quiet.

An appreciation of what might have been.

Today I’d like to make a lasagna, but there’s no ricotta within walking distance. Boo.

More a note to myself than to you.

Let’s Spend on Broadband and the Power Grid

I’m rewriting the same paragraph over and over (Since You Asked)

Survival tips for the Middle Ages

Wow. So obviously I skipped NaBloPoMo this year, and have mostly neglected my blog since last November, anyway. Boo. I have thoughts! I have feelings! That deserve to be immortalized!

The snow here is shin-deep, and although I usually like the first month or two of snowstorms, this felt too early. In fact, I’ve felt that about everything this year. Summer completely passed me by, I didn’t manage much enthusiasm for Halloween, and suddenly its winter! Sigh. I haven’t made good on my New Year Resolution to live in the moment, needless to say.

So I’m starting early on Christmas cheer. Here, have some Sweet Potato Biscuits.

A fun little Op-Ed from the New York Times: The Endorsement From Hell

[T]he endorsement of Mr. McCain by a Qaeda-affiliated Web site isn’t a surprise to security specialists. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism director, and Joseph Nye, the former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, have both suggested that Al Qaeda prefers Mr. McCain and might even try to use terror attacks in the coming days to tip the election to him.

Dooce wrote a post last week about American politics and was barraged by thousands of comments, hundreds from conservatives who 1) felt insulted for being called selfish because they oppose universal health care, 2) insisted that they had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, had never taken a dime from the government, and everyone else can choose that path, too! and 3) adamantly maintained that allowing people to choose which charity to give to is a much more cost-effective means of distributing money to the less fortunate than any bureaucratic institution could ever be.

Rebuttals (that none of them will ever read):

1) There is no reason to oppose universal health care; it will not be a mandatory program. You can opt out if you have private coverage. What you’re really supporting with that argument is a system that denies children necessary asthma medication because their parents (who both work full-time) can’t afford to buy it as often as they need. Yes, there was a government program in place the kid who don’t qualify for Medicaid and whose parents can’t afford coverage. It was called SCHIP. Bush vetoed its extension last year. While he extended coverage on previously enrolled children until March 2009, very few of the (state-administered) programs have been accepting new enrollments for more than two years.

2) How about some perspective: If you have ever relied on police, firefighters or EMTs to come to your aid in an emergency, you’ve taken a dime from the government. If you’ve ever eaten a chicken breast produced at a plant overseen by government meat inspectors, you’ve taken a dime from the government. If you have ever attended a public school, driven on a public street, watched Sesame Street, or checked a book out of a library, you’ve taken a dime from the government. If you’ve ever used municipal water or sewer systems, or strapped a child into a car seat and driven in a crash-tested car, you’ve taken a dime from the government.

The federal government does not just fund those storied welfare queens and donate aid to ungrateful foreign governments. We’re all in this together. Isn’t it better to err on the side of generosity, possibly enabling the occasional system-abuser rather than allow the unspeakable poverty of 1950s Appalachia return?

3) We’ve actually tried that altruism-based system before; it was called the Nineteenth Century. For further reading on the matter, please examine the works of Dickens, Charles J. H. (1812-1870). Cliffs Notes version: it didn’t work.

There’s certainly a touch of mania in my psychological makeup, and I’ve been having a week full of wild dreams, fantasies, ambitions, and have begun a number of new projects.. all of which will most likely be abandoned in due course. I wish all the mental energy would translate into physical energy (more hours in the day would mean more got done), but instead it translates into my body slipping into an exhausted sleep at the usual time, while my brain continues chattering endlessly.

As you might imagine, this makes for some pretty vivid dreams:

• Sunday night’s dream inspired me to buy a tiny island in Sebago Lake, upon which i should erect a small cottage and hang a hammock, and live from the beginning of June until August, observing a strict media fast. Weekly boat trips into Windham or Standish for food, then back out again. Think of all the novels that could be completed in such a place!

• Last night was an action-adventure set in a Disneyland gone awry (“Oh, I never allow guests into the Northwest parking lot alone after dark,” said the desk clerk), which evolved into an action adventure of this basic equation: Sims 2 + Barack and Michelle Obama as superheroes + Harry Potter-syle magic = awesome⁷

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We just bought two tomato cages for our savage tomato plants… far too late, as we probably would have realized if we were anything but starry-eyed hipster poseur gardeners. So, between the two of us, we pretty much massacred the two tomato plants that had any chance of delivering fruits this year, although we had many straight sticks of bamboo readily available. Forethought is not my forte these days, apparently.

So then, of course, I tried to stuff our MONSTER pumpkin plant into the tomato cage so it won’t be massacred itself by our apathetic lawn tenders on Friday. That exercise didn’t go well, either, if you were wondering, but I still hold out hope for them. Howard Dill bred ‘em hardy. I hope.

On our trip to procure tomato cages (actually it started as a pansy run), we decided to treat ourselves to ice creams, with disappointing results. Although it did prompt a baby (embryonic) Proustian meditation on whether every job requires skill. Conclusion: yes. It may seem that ice cream scoopery is a pretty basic, mindless job, but no. Proper cone construction doesn’t come naturally to everyone, and it sure didn’t to this woman.

Picture your ideal cone. Now imagine its exact opposite. That’s what I got.

And let’s talk for just a second about sizing. What does “one small cone” mean to you? Does it mean 16 ounces of dairy perched off-centered on a cone whose structural rigidity wouldn’t have been able to support that mass even without being exposed to 550% humidity for three weeks? Well, that’s not what I meant by “one small cone” either.

Damned First World problems. If all those starving Ethiopian refugees found out about this kind of travesty it would be a real eye-opener.

Feel-good story about France’s far-reaching efforts to boost its stork population. Quite a successful program; they’ve gone from 9 breeding pairs in 1983 to 270 pairs today. I especially like the schoolchildren’s efforts to repair nests during the birds’ migration.

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The best ratio (so far) for Kung Pao Tofu sauce is:

1 cup vegetable stock
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons corn starch
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon habañero sauce (2 t if using Tabasco)
1 soy sauce (only if the peanuts aren’t salted and you’ve forgotten to salt the tofu)

Food blogs worth visiting regularly:
Fine Furious Life
Evolving Tastes

Is this gorgeous-looking rum bundt cake on Design Sponge worth making even though it calls for both cake and pudding mixes? Am I being a snob? Or am I just easily swayed by its sculptural qualities?

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You know someone at The Wall Street Journal hates you when this is the photo they use to illustrate a story:

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They Feed the Lion
from Philip Levine’s New Selected Poems, Knopf

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of the creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion Grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
They grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

Not the stratospherically-rich kind who took their time in discovering the less fortunate, the frugal kind.

October 2007 article in the Telegraph Fashion section

The July 2007 piece about Hollywood New Victorian types

Sort of related: Elspeth Thompson, a British gardening expert, is converting two Victorian railway cars into an ecohome.

And that Kipling poem that’s always haunting me:

The Glory of the Garden

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.
For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You’ll find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dung-pits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts, and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.

And there you’ll see the gardeners, the men and ‘prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise ;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.
And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows ;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:-” Oh, how beautiful,” and sitting in the shade
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.
There’s not a pair of legs so thin, there’s not a head so thick,
There’s not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick
But it can find some needful job that’s crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it’s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner In the Glory of the Garden.
Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!

And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!