Notes from above the 49th
It’s not when the roof starts leaking for the second time in six months, in the same spot.
It’s not when the roofers say “we tried, but its such a mess up there its hard to know if you’ve fixed anything”
It’s when the neighbor says in stilted English “who need fix roof, free shower” and laughs leaving you in misery in the elevator.
Like most of my age group, I’ve been on Facebook (the social network they are talking about when they talk about social networks) for the past 5 years or so. While its still a media phenomenon and despite the fact that a teenager I know recently told me that what I thought was the next big thing, twitter, was only for old people and that Facebook was still where its at, I thought Facebook had more or less run its course for me as many of my friends have completely lost interest and don’t even bother to update the city they are in.
Turns out I can still be surprised. While it didn’t surprise me at all when my mom, my aunts and even my professors joined my social network, I was a little surprised to get friended but Laura, the other “new girl, outsider” in my class in Sicily while I was a high school exchange student. I had been facebook friends with my host sisters from Sicily for several years, but they are all super international so it was no surprise that they were connected. It has been my experience that Facebook has moved a little slower around the world in all groups expect that extremely international, English speaking group my host sisters belonged to.
Nonetheless, I friended Laura, no second thoughts. When I started thinking twice was when someone in Laura’s network, Paulo, friended me. It’s embarassing to say that it took me nearly a day to remember a person I spent a year sitting in class with, but it did and I only remebered after I started digging into their friends and realized that by friending Laura I had connected to a whole year of my high school life, almost everyone I had socialized with in Sicily was part of this friend network.
I recently heard a professor who had interviewed his graduate students about facebook (most of whom are probably my age) say that what was most amazing to them about was that they could connect to almost anyone they had ever met. This is an odd realization to the next generation (more on that later) who takes this for granted, but its astounding for my generation, being on the edge of the precipice as we are.
While my Sicilian friends and I exchanged addresses and e-mails when I left Sicily I don’t think we ever really planned on staying in touch. I don’t think I sent more than one letter nor did I receive more than one. With my regular high school classmates I suppose I expected to see them again either visiting my family or going to a reunion in some distant future. The Sicilians I didn’t think I would. Here in lies the extreme power of the distant closeness in Facebook.
I am a theoretical believer in do it yourself. Colin, is a hard and fast do it yourselfer. He rarely buys anything and half the time he buys stuff who’s sole puropse is to take care of what he already owns. Today I took a step closer to realty from my theoretical hold.
Now I can change the oil in my car (thanks Robert) and I can change my own tires, but I haven’t been driving much, I’ve been biking. And though I was under the impression that, because bikes didn’t need gas, they didn’t need any maintenance at all, it turns out that they need quite a bit when you ride them everyday in the winter. So today I changed my own brakes for the first time as well as tightening all the other little things about my bike.
Really, if you bike because it makes you feel self sufficient, providing your own power and all, you should really know how to fix and maintain all the simple parts on your bike. After all it’s a purely mechanical machine. Now, I’m not really all the way there, but man, are the resources in place. Check out the website filled with bike fixing tutorials like the one featured above.
Rear derailer here I come.
I finally decided to take a look at the trailer for The Road, the new film based on the book by Cormac McCarthy. I have long been a fan of McCarthy’s dark dark worlds but this book sunk me into utter depression for the two days it took me to read. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest waiting until a beautiful sunny day when your favorite flowers are blooming and you have lemonade and Pimm’s in ready supply.
So if you cant tell, that’s a rave review for the book and the trailer makes me a little worried about the movie. The trailer is bright and dramatic, filled with stunning desolation and destruction. This is bad. Its not that I don’t like stunning destruction- I, like everyone, do enjoy seeing CGI of chaos carnate. I just don’t think that is what the book was about. To me what was so disturbing about the book is that the surroundings weren’t't awful/ awe-full, but that is was just nothing, just without life and meaning, but not destroyed… because in the book the death of the world is kinda a mystery. Colin pointed out that the book doesn’t really point out what the scenery is like and whether things are really destroyed or just bleakly dying. I would argue however that McCarthy’s style of writing implies the second.
Also the cinematography is so rich and the dialogue in the clips so dramatically delivered. I would rather the film be in the vein of the recently released Gomorrah. That is the first film I’ve seen where the mafia isn’t portrayed with even a bit of glamor and daring and you don’t feel even a tinge of a desire to be a gangster even for a second. What you learn in Gomorrah is that Italy has white trash (I knew this, but it does go against commonly held belief about Italians) and that the mafia sucks, plain out right sucks for pretty much everyone involved. That’s what The Road needs to portray…the apocalypse sucks- straight up.
There is hope, trailers often mislead people and Viggo Mortensen, who scared the crap out of me in A History of Violence. So I still might see it.
potential chicken killer
I finally put my garden to rest for the winter. The balcony is sadly barren with nothing but strawberries and marigolds left out there. The balcony desolation does bring a beautiful stream of light onto my desk as the tilt of the earth moves away from the sun and as long as it stays away from my computer screen things are good. I threw a cover crop mix into my boxes, newly and more safely reattached to to the balcony. I’m not sure if I’ll be here for the summer, but I want my garden ready if I am. Plus the rye and legumes might add some nice green before things freeze up. I know, it’s mid- November, but they are sprouting to my surprise.
I despretely want to fill out our from-scratch living (growing veggies, making beer (with our own hops), baking bread, biking everywhere) with some chickens. I know they can’t live on the 12 x 4 balcony but I’m thinking the roof is a good place for a chicken coop. I might run it past the landlord and hopefully he doesn’t know its illegal to have chickens on less then an acre in Vancouver. Only other problem might be our cat, who has managed to kill two birds this season even though her only access to the outdoors is the balcony and roof.
The other option towards becoming a 19th century peasant would be to learn to make my own clothes… that might happen, someday, but I doubt I can make anything cheaper or better than I can buy it from China.
Its difficult to get back into things that you have put aside for a while… perhaps even more difficult than starting anew, so I’m going to, after this sentence, pretend that I haven’t not been blogging for the past 3+ months.
It seems as though things are finally coming to a settling point after a busy summer that just bled into fall. A model for the social housing competition kept that to-do on my list long after the official win. Apparently when you win things it means you have to do more work. I will be reconsidering the goal of winning things.
Second place seems to be a nice comfy spot for me though. In addition to the design competition, my rowing crew won second in our last two races of the season. Even though the days are too short now to row during the week, we put together an 8 about 7 weeks ago and we’ve been training pretty intensively since then. This past weekend we raced in Seattle and a few weeks ago we had 2 races in Victoria. All three got us 2nd place. Getting back into rowing has given me another look at the city, both from the water and through people who aren’t students trapped in the architecture building at UBC. I’m really liking the women I row with and comradery of the club. It can get pretty sentimental and sappy (refer to previous sentence) when you have all that adrenaline running through your body, but none the less.
I’m thinking of taking up fly fishing though I’m not sure where my startup funds will come from. There’s a sport that has no winning, except belly filling winning and its just one more thing to do in the beautiful outdoors that doesn’t involve too much potential for me getting hurt.
So one of the big reasons I didn’t post all summer was this project, Future Social. It was a design competition sponsored by BC housing and UBC. The project I did with two of my collegues focused on women working to get their children back from the state’s care (thanks Katie for the info/inspiration). The awards ceremony was last night. I’m not sure how it happened since there were lots of really great entries, but we got second, SECOND! The images are the boards that we submitted (the images got a little long in the upload if they look funny).
Ah… Summer’s almost up and sitting inside on my computer more than I have to might start sound appealing again. In reality, I have managed to get myself into one of my busiest summers ever. I’m not quite sure how I do this to myself, but I do. I’ve been working full time at my awesome job, I started rowing and went from rowing 3 times a week to 5 before the Canadian Master’s regatta, plus I have been working on a little architectural competition for school, gardening and I’ve been reading- 10 books this summer and I think I can finish at least one more before Sept. This might not be impressive to all ye PhDs out there, but I draw for a living so I’m out of the habit I never got into.
A well loved but distant friend commented that my blog doesn’t actually say very much about me and what I’m doing. It’s true- it doesn’t focus on a single subject and it doesn’t focus on me so its probably not interesting to anyone. I’ll be working on that in the next few days catching people up on what I’m actually doing.
Till then, I’m not dead, just busy.
Strawberry fields in Watsonville from Kelsey Parker's Flickr stream licensed under the creative commons
There are many wonderful things about eating local foods, but I’ve always wondered, product by product, if it really is better for the environment to be a localvore. See, we only ever seem to take transport costs into consideration when we think about this, but there are really so many other factors. For example, natural gas is primarily used to make fertilizer. If a region grows more pounds of food on less fertilizer, it could have a higher enviromental benefit than a plant grown locally, that doesn’t want to grow there and needs more fertilizer. Or think about lamb. Some places you can raise more sheep per acre because of how well grasses grow. I’m not sure where this is done best, but if you need a ton of land (which must be fertilized) to raise fewer sheep than it might make more ecological sense to ship in lamb from somewhere else.
But I don’t know. I don’t know all the variables and I don’t know the numbers that go with each one. Some economists would argue that if there were not outside incentives (but there always are) than the products that are the cheapest use the fewest resources and are best for the environment. I can think of arguements against this, but there is a generalized point.
This question is why I found this article in the Toronto Starso interesting. It tracks a batch of strawberries from its begginings to its ends while comparing them to local Ontario strawberries. To start, the process of breeding strawberries is amazing as each strawberry plant has 8 distinct cromosons. Wen you go read it make sure to check out the comments. I swear some of the commenters didn’t read the article. They rail about how this is genetically modified fuit, when what it is breed fruit, just like all our other food, local organic or not. Saying this is genetically modified is like saying that a german shepard has the same genetic manipulation as a glow in the dark bunny.
I found two of the comparisons to Ontario strawberries interesting. First “On a per-pound basis, an 18-wheeler emits one-fifteenth the carbon dioxide of a delivery van heading to a local farmers’ market.” I’m not sure if that is mile for mile or in total though I’m guessing the first, meaning its probably still better in this part of the equation to buy local. Second cooling strawberries in Ontario takes 3 days in a fridge in California they have a super cooler that takes an hour and a half. Again I’m not sure how much energy both systems draw except that the 1.5 hour method uses 1/5 the energy of the 3 hour method.
So I still don’t really know which is better, but if we really want to know- here’s a sample of everything that would go into it.
I’m a pretty simple girl when it comes to home made cookies- I just want them to be good and in my book the tollhouse recipe is good enough. Unfortunately the tollhouse chips have been hard to come by for me in Canada and with it the recipe. (who would write down a recipe when you have known where to find it your whole life?) So I was pleased as punch that Cook’s Illustrated came out with an improved recipe in this months magazine. I’m not going to give it away because I appreciate the work Cook’s Illustrated does and I want you to go buy the magazine. If you are not familiar, its the one that always has the hoity toity paintings of veggies or fruit on the cover. But what they do is remarkable, it’s like a cooking magazine for scientists. In each article they have a goal of something they want to make or make better. They do research start with a combo of recipes and test them on food testers all the way along. When they have made 1200 cookies and are satisfied, the recipe is done. You get the recipe and the story of how it came to be.
So back to the cookies. The main move in this recipe is melting and browning most of the butter which gives the cookies a really deep nutty flavour and it you bake them right away they get this awesome crust. They are not as amazing when you freeze and then cook the dough, but I’m sure experiments could be done toward that end as well. The down side is it took a bit more hand beating in intervals, but more importantly the opportunities to surreptitiously eat cookie dough diminished. My favorite part (like everyone else) is licking the “empty” bowl, spatulas and beaters. Here the melted butter made the the dough stick together better and be more greasy so if you wanted to eat cookie dough, you had to just admit it to yourself and take a wad off the giant ball (I did).
All and all, better that the recipes of Canadian chocolate chips and probably better than tollhouse.
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