Loosely Speaking

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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Disasters... not all that natural...

The earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and Turkey... Hurricane K in New Orleans... Dense fogs and driving rains and 70-car pile-ups... Nature does what it does. It isn't doing anything new. The disasters are not of nature but of our own unreadiness for the predictable, the inevitable. Where are the common sense and foresight to be prepared? What if the billions of recovery dollars going to Haiti now had gone years ago, to break the poverty there, and to build properly, to preserve human life and... Sign in to see full entry.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

peaceWorks

A few years ago, there was an organization started locally to promote peace. It lasted a while with its founder, but she left the area and put it in the hands of her second, who strove to keep it going. I connected with her and this fledgling effort at about the time she, working pretty much alone, was close to burn-out. That was 1988. We worked together on it, held some public meetings, wrote up a flyer, started a newsletter and did a few consciousness-raising projects around the state. The... Sign in to see full entry.

Monday, February 22, 2010

I mentioned hot'n'sour soup...

Today I brought home a container from the restaurant that makes the good stuff... with bbq pork and bamboo shoots and carrots and mushrooms... and I shopped for a few more items... green onion, water chestnuts, some napa cabbage, and shitake mushrooms... fresh! Added in some lime juice and a little hoisin sauce... mmmm, not bad...! Only one thing wrong with it. It's gone, now. Sign in to see full entry.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Breakfast, fast...

In fact, soup is one of the best fast and simple breakfasts there is... particularly if you are retranslating fat into less-fat. However... this is also a quick one worth the flurry of activity it takes to achieve, and because it assembles in one pan, I can attest it is a fine campfire breakfast, too! Way better than individually boxed frootloops. I prefer a cast-iron skillet, hot, with some olive oil in it. When the oil is hot, too, I turn down the heat to moderate high, and add either pieces... Sign in to see full entry.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

youtube Auden

If you read the WH Auden poem I posted in and about in recent weeks, you might enjoy this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWtVYYoJFl4 Sign in to see full entry.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Never leave soup alone

I always cringed when Mom said we were having soup for lunch. Slow to eat, and as boring to taste... Usually canned Campbells, frequently chicken noodle. Sometimes tomato. When I got to college, dorm life changed soup for me. I had a stove and a pot... and I started making my own soup. Now that was a revelation! The first was a pot of beef broth made with some leftover roast beef and fresh vegetables, then at the end, I added in the last of the unsimmered beef so it had its full flavor in the... Sign in to see full entry.

Friday, January 15, 2010

some good healthy inanity

This is just too funny not to share again: Something someone sent me a while back: After every flight, UPS pilots fill out a form, called a "gripe sheet," which tells mechanics about problems with the aircraft. The mechanics correct the problems, document their repairs on the form, and then pilots review the gripe sheets before the next flight. Never let it be said that ground crews lack a sense of humor. Here are some actual maintenance complaints submitted by UPS pilots (marked with a P) and... Sign in to see full entry.

Monday, January 11, 2010

More idiocy

Once again, though it is no new thing, I am dumbfounded by the moronic attitude that some political adversaries put forward: He should lose his job, be ridden out on a rail, scorned and shunned... because he said something in private that could be construed in its most ungenerous light as a slur. In fact, it takes the adversarial mind to make that leap from a simple and not entirely untruthful personal and private comment to a fabulous, world-shaking, outraging racial slur. And the implied... Sign in to see full entry.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Breaking Silence

I wrote a bit down the page from here about the corrosiveness of silence under certain circumstances, and I wrote that piece from pain. Being in that moment, I wrote what I felt most keenly was the truth of the matter. But it was not the whole truth. I wrote that my only recourse in that pain is retreat, and while it is the truth of what I feel in that place, it is not, in fact, true. In fact, I have since decided that it will not be true again, not my truth, to choose to nurse an imaginary... Sign in to see full entry.

Kabu has said farewell..

We are, it seems, soon going to be down an Elder. For a village like ours, the loss of an Elder, with her wisdom, her particular life-experience, her sharing of the joy and love in her life, is a serious matter, a matter for grieving because we are all diminished by her going. She goes because she has been hurt and offended by something written here by another member of our community, or so I gather from what she writes. Perhaps it is not the only reason: Actions rarely have only a single... Sign in to see full entry.

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