Just Like Honey

Green Weddings

2008-08-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

My cake topper was featured in a blog post about green weddings, in the fine company of several other lovely choices. See it here:
The Fab Miss B: Etsy Finds: A Green Wedding

Still Summer

2008-08-06T21:07:00.000-07:00

Today was a strawberry-blueberry-blackberry-raspberry-cherry-peach-soy yogurt smoothie to remind me that it's still summer. I'm glad I planted my garden so late because it is evidence that there is plenty of time for new creation before school starts again in the fall.

Pink Moon

2008-07-28T16:33:00.000-07:00

This weekend we drove 8 hours to Sheboygan, WI to watch our dear friends become husband and wife. I made the cake topper for the wedding cake, and got such a good response I decided to post it on my Etsy store as a custom item. We knew it would be a special weekend, but who could have predicted:

A painting of Eric and I as astronauts created by the multitalented Pat "dance machine-life of the party-biologist-portait painter" Abbott

Seeing "America's Best Bathroom" at the Kohler Art Center

Night swimming under the pink moon

Discovery!

2008-07-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

It's my first day of gardening and I've made and exciting discovery: there is a small raspberry plant hidden in the corner of our back yard!

Gardening. Finally.

2008-07-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

Since the beginning of summer I have wanted to learn to garden. For the first time since living with my parents, I have an actual yard. During the winter, as I imagined myself laying in the summer shade of our backyard, I decided I would begin a garden when school was through. But when the semester ended other projects took precedent--projects that come more naturally to me--and the weeks rolled by. Eventually, I figured it would have to wait until next year.

Then last week I got this very random call from my bank saying that I won (in a drawing I didn't enter) a gift basket full of gardening supplies. My first thought was how lame it is to get a gift that is so inapplicable to my life...like, why can't they just give me better interest rates? But then I decided to think of it as a sign. Its not that I really believe it's anything more than a coincidence, but sometimes it helps my brain and my spirit to think of things that way. Now, I wouldn't even have to go to the trouble of going shopping for supplies: they were all just handed to me in a little tote bag embroidered with sunflowers. "But still," I thought, "it's so late in the season. Maybe I should just give it to someone who would appreciate it more."

Then this weekend Eric and I drove to Pennsylvania with his brother and our sister-and-law for a wedding. The favors at the wedding were little hearts made of that pulpy paper with embedded seeds that promises to grow flowers if planted in the ground. It seems that I am further being coaxed: this is how easy it will be. Just put this heart in the ground.

The following day we got up early to meet our friends in a little neighborhood in Pittsburg where they own and operate a charming corner coffee shop. It happens to be located across the street from a beautiful, dense plot of wildflowers that was planted a couple of years ago, replacing what was a vacant gas station. As we spent the morning catching up, conversation turned to the plot in an urban garden that they have been developing over the last couple of years. We decide to wander down the street to take a look. Each plot, separated by brick paths or wooden stakes, revealed the owners personality and maybe something of their summer story; some were organized by color, some neatly weeded and set in rows, and others overgrown with the most hardy plant of their plot: squash, calendula, raspberries, or lemon mint.

We tasted a handful of raspberries and some fresh green beans off the plants. As we were beginning to say our goodbyes and getting ready to leave, our friends gave us a nearly foot-long, thick zuccini, which rested like an infant between Eric and I in the back seat of the Ford Focus as we rode home to Detroit. I decided I want vegetable babies of my own. I am officially inspired.

Almost Spring

2008-03-30T08:53:00.000-07:00

Haven't you always wanted Abe Lincoln to tell you to believe in yourself?

2008-03-14T06:44:00.000-07:00

Me too. Today's our day:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Leap Year

2008-03-03T20:09:00.000-08:00

Apparently my very modest goal of posting once a month proved too lofty for me, as February seems to have slipped by. February highlights:

Eric and I had a snow day together.

I was able to do a particular yoga pose for the first time.

We rearranged some of our furniture and our place feels much better.

I discovered an amazing pizza place just down the street.

My car's noisy exhaust was miraculously and inexplicably healed.

Homemade Christmas

2008-01-13T16:27:00.000-08:00

My amazing new letterpress

Eric's ukulele case

It's official.

2008-01-08T17:41:00.001-08:00

After 12 years as a vegetarian, I am, today, declaring myself omnivorous. Unlike the mousey, I-just-kind-of-don't-like-meat vegetarians I come across, I've always been in it for the animal welfare. When I was 13 and discovering the world and falling in love with many things I still adore, I went to my first punk show. I don't remember the bands. They had the obligatory haircuts and t-shirts and music and it was awesome. I picked up some vegan literature explaining the confinement of chickens and cows in factory farms. It was not news to me and since I grew up on a small scale dairy farm I also knew it wasn't the only option. As I looked into it, though, it seemed like the most prevalent option and I didn't feel right about supporting it.

It wasn't hard for me to give up eating meat, although my dairy farm family understandably hated my year long vegan stage. My reasons never strayed into the realms of health or taste, but they did broaden to include all manors of environmental benefit, which is where my concerns still lye. For a long time I have told myself that the concept of eating meat from free-range animals seemed o.k. to me. Life is death, inescapably. At least I could support the practice of giving animals a real life before they are killed for meat. Yet I've been comfortable enough as a vegetarian not to bother changing.

But here I am in 2008, married to a notoriously fast-food loving man, in grad school, trying to save money, too busy to cook everyday, and thinking about the possibility of appreciation and connection to the earth and to each other through sharing a meal. Eric and I have spent many evenings side by side at the stovetop, one of us making stir-fry and one of us making a hot dog, usually failing to time it so we actually consume the respective results in unison. I'd love to eat together, eating the same thing, but there's so little overlap.

This Christmas, my friend, Melisa, gave me the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver about her family's experience of eating only locally for one year. Of all the amazing stories, I was struck by the chapter about rare breeds of turkeys, like the Bourbon Red, that have been almost completely replaced by the 400 million Broad-Breasted White turkeys bred for industrial farming, which are very sadly so top-heavy and dumb (not to mention infertile) they couldn't live anywhere else. The poor things aught to be allowed to die off. The brilliant minds over at Slow Food USA had a plan.

"Slow Food has employed the paradox of saving rare breeds by getting more people to eat them, and that's exactly what happened in it's 2003 Ark of Taste turkey project. So many people signed up in the spring for heirloom Thanksgiving turkeys instead of the standard Butterball, an unprecedented number of U.S. farmers were called upon the raise them."

That does it for me. I want to share a meal with the person I live with, and in the tightly woven relationship of economy to environment to spiritual connection, I want the Bourbon Red to exist. Therefor I will eat him.