Tag: personal

Garbage Soup Redeux

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I’m reposting a excerpt from a blog I wrote last year about Valentine’s Day. Partly because it got a good response and I like praise and partly because the holiday is a loser holiday for Jesse as I am never materially satisfied. Either it’s too much or not enough.

In the next few days I plan to come up with gift suggestions to make Jesse’s life easier like fair trade organic chocolate or bath and body products I might actually use or maybe a Prius limo. Honestly, I think I might like a composter even though I have no clue what I’d do with good dirt out here in the desert. Maybe one of you will see something to put on your list.

And now for old news…

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February 12, 2007

Please don’t go out on Valentine’s Day and drop a chunk of change on flowers that were coated in pesticides, kept in a green house, and shipped across the country. What is that supposed to say? “I love you so muchly that I’m giving you something unnaturally begotten. Also, in its making a part of the world was poisoned. Lastly, even with the aspirin dissolving in the water, it’s doomed to die leaving nothing to show for the cash. THIS is the symbol of my love for you.” Please. Save your money. Buy a plant. I hear that bamboo palm is good for taking formaldehyde out of the air.

…

I am compelled to request that you forget the expensive roses! Instead, share this recipe for Garbage Soup, from a Sonoran Desert cookbook (with editorial from me). It would be good for your wallet, the environment, and an honest statement about the longevity of love.

INGREDIENTS:
water (the elixir of life)
vegetable waste (eggplant sounds like elegant fare for a Valentine dinner, but gack!)
coffee grounds (from the pot you shared over morning breath)
eggshells (you already walked on them so they are nicely crushed)
other similar kitchen waste (so not the shit you sling at each other like monkeys after the kids are in bed)
not grease (this is about living plants not the yummy goodness of slaughtered lambs)

DIRECTIONS: Chop waste in food processor or blender with equal parts water. Mix it up until it’s as convoluted as your fights. Bury soup around outer edges of plants along side the hatchet.

Commercial fertilizers can kill beneficial microorganisms in the soil. This recipe for plants can be used in lieu of those fertilizers. Can you feel the love?

Tree Room Star


George’s class made the newspaper! This time it’s for their work and not the MRSA scare, which wasn’t an issue at Borton to begin with. George’s class designed and executed a newspaper publishing operation. The front page article was a blurb but on 4A is this article.

As the daughter/great-granddaughter of a public school teacher (my mother is still in public schools as a speech pathologist) and the daughter of a former newspaperman, this project was fun to see come together. It brought back vivid childhood memories. Dad read the paper to us and frequently had smudgy inky fingers. His work was a madhouse! He taught me to use a dictionary with the command, “Summon your elder sibling.” My mother’s teacher lounge was endlessly fascinating with an old duplicating machine, typewriters with no letters on the keys (click, click, zip, bing!), and a vending machine. She was an English teacher and so I learned classic stories like that of Abelard and Heloise and in 5th grade, she helped me memorize the Emma Lazarus poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty. But back to George…

George is quoted in the article and to the right of the screen is a photo gallery that includes this picture of me looking every bit the exhausted mess I am. (Would somebody please shove me in the shower once in a while?!?) Molly, who is also quoted, is Parrish’s teacher. Don’t worry about her skipping math instruction. She has a math focused master’s degree and so her students get lots of it. The more I know Molly, the more I like her. Dana came to the U.S. last year from Iraq. During my tour, he pretended to be interviewing the president.

+++ rant on NCLB, scripted/corporate curriculum, crippling mandates and so forth deleted to highlight how looking at teachers as degreed professionals who teach between the cracks can make awesome things happen +++

Toilet Surfing White Lab Rats

The other night, I snuggled between the sheets to watch season 3 disk 3 of Six Feet Under and enjoy the ice cream sandwich I repeatedly denied to my kids. While savoring the moment, my cat stretched her tiny body out and farted. More than any other member of my family, including the dog and the guinea, that cat has the must putrid, wretched flatulence. I wanted to kick her, but Jesse is in Mexico and she’s the only security I have against toilet surfing white lab rats.

Oh, and I’m not even joking about toilet surfing white lab rats (story two). I am blessed to live in that one, small, midtown area plagued by toilet surfing white lab rats (story three!). I’m to understand these couldn’t possibly be coming from the university labs across the street. Well, maybe, but they still have to explain the toxic spill sewer roaches with super creepy powers from which my cat also protects me (along with lizards and other wee beasties that make the mistake of movement).

Husband Hunt Big Mammoth

I can’t believe I’ve been desperate for rain for so long, then today, the day I invited three sets of friends on a mammoth hunt with my husband, it poured rain. When we arrived at Jesse’s site, he and his crew of volunteers were tying tarps up to protect themselves and us from the rain while in the bone bed. Archaeologists have some quirky behavior that I can’t wrap my brain around, but their ability to deal with extremes of weather and large amounts of soil inspires awe.

Whereas we couldn’t help, but could greatly hinder the efforts, my friends and I set off with our children down the wash to the river. We romped in the San Pedro with the most fantastic Labrador who happens to be a member of my very own family. Once the cold and wet, by desert standards, beat us down, we walked back up the wash to Jesse’s mammoth site. He oriented us to the river and pointed out that the site elevation topped the cottonwoods that had just loomed over us.

Sitting on dirt buckets in the bone bed, Jesse showed us the mammoth tusk (and the scapula) as well as artifacts associated with the mammoth. He discussed the prehistory of the area, first Americans, megafauna extinction, and so forth. Then Jesse took us to a cut bank with an eroding mammoth tooth on display. Nearby was evidence of pot hunting, broken screens left behind by people who indiscriminately tear up these sites for personal profit. Rather than focusing on that, Jesse used the wall of the bank to demonstrate how archaeologists “look through the windows to the past” using marks like the black mat. Our finale took place at the Moson homestead, which retained its full foundation, including some of the ORIGINAL adobe brick that the rain slowly washed away.

We were cold and wet, but the snow covered Sierra Vistas were beautiful. Meanwhile, back in Tucson, everything is dry as a bone and all that once lived in my yard now crackles brown. But for a few glorious hours, it rained upon our heads ensuring continued growth.

decorative

Get out of the way! I’m driving.

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Quiet meditation, soft music, deep breathing, calm blue ocean – MY FLAT ASS! If any of this crap worked people wouldn’t overeat, get drunk, or peel out of the driveway.

Let’s call meditation by it’s real-world moniker – stewing. Soft music (and to a greater degree cheery pop) does not soothe, but rather irritates the crap out of me when I’m angry. The sound makes me want to ram my minivan into the nearest peacenik Vanigan. Deep breathing only helps in that it allows one to yell louder, longer.

Food, booze, and speed go much further to quell the beast inside.

* This post was originally published September 16, 2007. While I stand by the overall sentiment and still find meditation as pushed on the masses abhorrent, I wouldn’t be so glib about replacing it with destructive behaviors these days. Instead, I would laud the benefits of “just sitting.” I would write a tutorial about how to just sit, but the incongruity of people reading it on their phones would also make me have intrusive thoughts about operating said minivan. RB 7/11/24