< 2. Motorpsycho, Little Lucid Moments (released in the US April 2008) Four songs, 60 minutes, everything there is to like about music for this woman of a certain age (39), from a certain time/place (early 90s/CHGO) - guitars, noise, harmony, rhythm, guitars, noise, slow, fast, quiet, loud, etc. This trio from Norway has been bringing it (in English) for 20 years, evolving from a Jesus Lizard-like noise outfit toward a Yes-like faux-prog sensibility, infused on either end with adoration for giant guitar and jazz/indie stylings. My only friend that has ever seen them live wasn’t impressed (ears bled), but the words “Motorpsycho” and “US tour” still make my heart go pitter-pat. [Motorpsycho! At! Terrastock 2008!] ################## So, about the food: I was going to scan my receipt, but seeing as the scanner is snug underneath a pile of health insurance paperwork, some CDs, and some tax software info, I can’t be bothered. I’ll go ahead and list what’s on the table - most of the food is organic, and some is local - the * denotes a bulk purchase: A dozen local eggs 2 pound jar of local honey Jason mouthwash 2 cans Organix cat food 1 container Greek yogurt 1 container local goat cheese 1 bunch broccoli 1 head lettuce 1 container of dish soap* 1 container popcorn* 2 containers raw sugar* 1 container raisins* 1 bag chocolate-covered almonds (WHAT!)* 1 bag rolled oats* 1 bulb garlic 1 bag white flour* 1 small bag local cornmeal* 2 jars white rice* 2 jars brown rice* Eighty dollars! >Gulp<. I in no way fault my co-op - they're having to cope with rising food prices just like other stores, and they raise their prices grudgingly. The whole food price thing has been morbidly fascinating to watch, actually, because a) I eat, b) my family eats and c) my livelihood depends on people eating. What will it be like at the Market? We don't grow rice in Illinois, or produce much in the way of flour. Or, really, fruits and vegetables. We grow corn used to feed animals whose bodies are meant to eat grass; we also grow corn used to feed cars. We grow soybeans for oils and for... everything. Will more people come to the Market to search out fresh food options when the grocery store alternative becomes too dear on many levels? Will the weather improve soon enough to ensure timely planting? Will there be a late freeze like last year's, killing a large percentage of the state's fruit crops? These variances have meant a lot to me for years, but this year they take on a whole new meaning; people, including me, come to the Market to procure food. Right now, I'm interested in the fact that many (certainly not all) of the same staples purchased at a "regular" grocery store - even if they've been conventionally raised/grown - are costing about the same as what I paid at my co-op or... more. I buy from my co-op because I like to buy in bulk, clean food is a priority for me, they buy from local suppliers, and they get that people gotta eat. They and the Market are going to be my go-tos even more as conventional options start to become, well, less of an option. We shall see, eh? I don't have much in the way of links today. I've been reading a lot about ankylosing spondylitis, which I doubt anyone else would find interesting (but there’s a link for you, just in case). I have an appointment with my rheumatologist in a couple of weeks to see if it’s a possibility. Whee! Oh, who cares. Like a bad back is going to stop me. Locals: I’ll be teaching some Gardening 101 at Common Ground’s gardening workshop from 10-noon on April 12. Email me for more info.

Remember that project I was talking about starting a week ago? The one where I talk about a different record/CD/whatever each day? I’m ready now. 365 records, one per day, each in 100 words or less. I’m not a huge fan of limiting my words when it comes to music, but I also know I will be utterly unable to do a full-on record review every day. I haven’t been capable of that since 1993. 1. Biff Bang Pow!, Bertula Pop (1994 compilation) Biff Bang Pow!’s basement-studio pop is a study in occasional twee and psychedelia, its (mohair, thrifted) cardigan-sweatered chimes introduced to me by my biggest crush/future husband long after either of our graduations. Oh, I smoked many impatient and lonely cigarettes to this record. Further: Creation records boss Alan McGee helmed BBP via songwriting and guitar and did the singing. Definitely more melancholy jangle than MBV-style shoegaze, though. Gems: “She’s Got Diamonds in Her Hair”, “Star Tripper”, “She Paints”. [Note 2nd Hand Tunes tag! Another story entirely.] ################# As the opening day of the Farmers’ Market approaches, I find myself totally, blissfully immersed in… food, localism, food politics, local food politics, best market management practices, weather forecasts, heedless growing season speculation, local and organic task force this, my own garden is a mess that, and I fear I’ve become rather boring to most. My job isn’t all about the Farmers’ Market, but during the season it’ll be a big part of it. Is it wrong to be excited? I know it won’t be, as my old friend Matt liked to say, all peaches and gravy, but I’m thisclose to doing what I’ve really been hoping and imagining I’d be doing with this part of my life. ######################### Surf here: Make cool plastic bags out of… plastic bags Make seed starting pots out of toilet paper cardboard I just joined this newish (?) Peak Oil forum - it looks like it could be cool Not that I use my cell phone all that much, but this article about the as-yet unknown dangers kind of freaked me out This thread at Kos prompted me to buy a little extra flour and rice and grain yesterday… I’ll write more tomorrow about my sticker shock.

Not that you’d know from the weather outside. Flakes of snow the size of half-dollars fell from the sky this afternoon while we hung out with some of Jim’s family watching the college boys take the hoop rock to the hub. Years of abnormal winter weather have spoiled me. I swear, what is with me? What is this whining and moaning about the weather as though I haven’t lived in the midwest for the last, yes, TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS of my life??



[Funny, seasonally-appropriate aside - when Cody was 4 he gave me a Mother’s Day card he’d made that read “YOU ARE BUNNY CANDY TO ME”. Easter must have made quite an impression on him that year. It’s definitely part of B-K family lore.]



In other news, I have LAVENDER germinating downstairs. I’ve never had any luck, so this is fantastic news!



So there are all these 365 days projects going on out there on the Interwebs, so I said to myself, I said, Self? You and your husband have, quite literally, THOUSANDS of compact discs sitting in the basement and in the, uh, garage, and so perhaps you need to drag some of the damn things out at random and listen to them and then tell the world about them via your blog and maybe, just maybe, you will find it in you to actually do something with all of them. I blame the current issue of MOJO Classic.



Well, I listened to myself (March Madness, indeed!), so you guys are going to be the beneficiaries of my not-very-selective mining of the B-K CD collection for 365 straight days. Ambitious, I know, especially for someone who can barely get it together to post once per week, but I’m going to give it a go. I have the first week’s selections all picked out, even! Here’s a hint: I must have been rooting around in one of the B/C boxes.



Click my links!



This video is on my watch list as soon as we’re done with Battlestar Galactica



Recycle Yr Crocs!



I found this profile of Michelle Obama delightful



Not to bum everyone out (though I do it so well sometimes!), but most of the chocolate we eat in the US is a product of child slave labor in Africa. There’s a great diary at Daily Kos here about it. Cody also wrote a paper on this topic last fall that really opened my eyes - let me know if you’d like to read it.



Lastly - I don’t watch much teevee, so I was totally stoked to see 60 Minutes giving some coverage to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway on tonight’s program. I’ve been following this project for a few years and think it’s one of the coolest/most important things going on the planet.

I never intended for my blog to be a food blog or a garden blog or any kind of blog, but since garden season is upon us and food is in the news, it’s where I’m at.



For the locals:



Mrs. Chicken emailed and asked about local CSA opportunities. It might be a little late to buy shares (though it seems like spring will never come and stuff will never get planted and I know shares are available), but there are three locally that I know of: Prairieland CSA, Brackett CSA, and Tomahnous Farm. Each one has something different to offer - all of these farmers are growers at the Market, so you may be familiar with what they do already. Check it out - it’s a great way to get fresh produce every week if you don’t grow your own (and even if you do!) and you want local produce in season.



There’s a cookbook to help out with all this CSA/seasonal produce stuff - Farmer John’s Cookbook. Farmer John is also a movie star, and you can rent the DVD locally. Oh - speaking of the Market, it opens for the 2008 season on May 10, rain or shine. There also might be a few plant sales going on around town (I know of at least one), so if the weather’s good, it’ll be a great way to usher in the growing/eating season.







I started seeds last weekend - tomatoes, peppers, herbs, some strawflowers. I don’t have the variety I’d like in my seed collection right now and my tight belt didn’t permit any ordering, so I made do… and it wasn’t bad making-do, with 5 varieties of tomatoes and two of peppers and a zillion basil and parsley plants I can sell or swap for other plants. I had the best intentions last year, but I wasted so much produce in my garden last year due to poor time management and lack of necessary equipment. I toy with the idea of investing in one of these to help me manage the tomatoes and the beans and whatever else I grow/come into. The pressure canner I own is vintage - 40s? 50s? - and while it’s a cool artifact and I’m definitely hanging on to it (because… I don’t know?), I have been unable to find parts to make it safe again.



It’s been raining so damn much that I’m considering investing in a decent umbrella, since I usually walk home from work (soon I’ll be walking to work, too). We used to have the cheap IKEA umbrellas (kids love ‘em), but they weren’t exactly built to last.



Links I’m following:



I think I love this Lawns to Gardens blog, which is way more than its title There are some of you garden/food dweebs out there who will die when you see this website - here’s a taste (the illustration above is one of many cartoons appearing in this book) This is freakin’ awesome as well, though probably for the dweebier of the dweebs. We’re talking access to journals from the 40s about biodynamic agriculture, people.

Misc & Co tagged me for the 5 Unusual Things About Me meme. I don’t often get tagged for memes, so I’ll bite: 1. When I was 13, I was 5′5″ and had a size 8 shoe. When I was 19 (a sophomore in college!), I was finally done growing… I topped out at 5′11″, and my shoe size remains an 8. And a half, thanks to pregnancies. Cody refers to my feet as “Barbie feet” -small in proportion to height and having high arches. 2. I can live anywhere pretty happily. I attribute this to moving around a lot and living in some unusual places, like our 1971 VW van for a summer in Ogunquit, Maine (I was 5) or a room just slightly larger than a closet the summer after I graduated from college. (There are many more unusual residences in my past.) When we bought our house in 2005, I didn’t really care how small it was or what it looked like on the inside, as long as it was clean and serviceable and not beyond fug (it was really perfect, actually) - I was more interested in the lot it sat on, which was large and unsullied by bad shrubbery and questionable landscaping, which meant that I could put in a massive garden. Which I did, with lots of help from Jim. 3. I’m relatively new to gardening and raising food and, uh, cooking, and I have a lot of failures under my belt, in addition to the successes. I only started gardening in 1999, which sounds like a long time ago, I guess, but it’s only been 9 seasons. Lilly was a baby and I planted three tomato plants and a couple of pepper plants in to the backyard at Ten-Oh-Five - I’d hoed the dirt up myself, a 3′x6′ wide strip - and thought I was Mother Freaking Earth. It’s only been the last three years that I’ve been able to garden on a larger scale, but I’ve been working full-time the last two summers. It kind of sucks, but it’s the way it is (and I like my job), so I make it work. We eat well out of the yard during the growing season, but there’s a lot I don’t grow. Garlic intimidates me for some reason. So do strawberries. 4. I’m a former welfare mom. 5. I rarely go to movies. In fact, if you name a movie outside of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Donnie Darko, and Will Ferrell’s oeuvre, there’s a good chance I haven’t seen it. That’s only a little bit of an exaggeration. I can’t pick 5 people so… if you like this meme - tag! You’re it! Just post 5 unusual things about yourself, then tag 5 of your best blog buds, if you want - just let ‘em know in their comments that you tagged them. Two links: Eating well - really well - on a food stamp budget Stuff Monsanto would rather you didn’t know Goodnight, courtesy Cody:

I’ve been reading Riana’s blog for several months now, and just got to reading the “back issues” last night. I found her blog during a recent desperate bout of Francophilia, but got far more than France. It’s interesting and inspiring stuff, this “Slow Year” thing.



Chez B-K has seen a temporary change in fortunes - that is, with me starting my new job at a wack time on the calendar (in addition to benefits extraction) and a vacation whose cost in gasoline was well into the hundreds of dollars, we’re a little bit broke right now. OK, a big bit broke. Our starting point is comforting - the bills are paid, the mortgage, too, and there’s plenty of food in the house and out in the freezer - but the reality is, we have very little money to spend for the next little while. We’ve been cooking out of the pantry and the freezer, keeping ourselves busy inside the house and on the grounds instead of looking elsewhere for entertainment or for things to do, examining things a little closer the last 5 days or so, and I realized that while we’re doing a Slow Month without really planning for it or consciously deciding to do it (I’d be far more into the idea as permanent practice even with improved cash flow if I knew I had everyone else in the household on board), it’s a good thing. It’s an eye-opener. It’s honest and difficult, especially with kids in the house who, while they do without a lot that their peers consider de rigeur, still have too much stuff and think it’s normal.



[We used to live slower, period, but when I started working full-time in 2006, things sped up. It’s a trade-off, one I’m not certain I’m comfortable with. And it’s a lot easier to be broke when you’re starting off in a good place (place to live, job, way to cook, food in the house, bills paid, car that runs, etc) and you know you’ll be back on track in a few weeks than it is to be scrambling to make ends meet all the time - always scrimping, always stretching, always worrying and wondering and doing without the basics, never mind new clothes or a pedicure or that magazine that beckons from the rack or a truckload of dirt for your garden.]



That said, I need to buy some more seeds. The garden’s going to be a big one this year (OK, bigger), I’ve decided, because I don’t like what I’m reading about food, the economy, and the general cost of living. Yes, I know that my garden, however large, won’t go a long way toward feeding us if things really go south; that’s why we’re getting to know our neighbors. But it can put a dent in our food bills, which are huge with two growing kids with matching voracious appetites.



Tonight I introduced my daughter to the wondrousness that was Olga Korbut in 1972:







Then I looked at some websites:



Absolutely awesome “ruminations on a dubious future” The latest from my favorite crabby writer guy, James Howard Kunstler I’m grooving on this next generation of farmers pretty hard Bacon is everywhere Imagine - a New Green Deal! Wendell Berry FTW! Who’s heard this record? It ain’t all doom and gloom; people are getting it done. Let’s keep on keeping on, shall we?

I can’t help it - we had such a good time there this year, and the weather here has been relentlessly un-spring-like.



I’m sitting here at the table stealing glances at my container of seed packets and wondering where my grow lights are, but there’s a horrible disconnect between the glancing and the wondering and the scene outside which, while deceptively sunny and blue-skied, also includes snow on the extremely soggy ground, and a bit of a wind chill. “They” say it’ll be 41 degrees today, but I don’t know.



[By the way - the above is a work by Cody, obviously (is it obvious? it is to me), and I encourage you to check out the rest of his stuff over here because, well, he takes beautiful photos and does amazing things to them, in my opinion.]



Not-quite-spring Sundays mean the baking of the bread, the laundering of the clothes, and, on this particular Sunday, the playing of the hoops. There are several basketball games on teevee for the masses (i.e., regular old network teevee, for there is no cable or satellite chez B-K), and the University of Illinois’ women’s basketball team has kicked ass and taken names throughout the Big Ten conference tournament and are playing in the final today against Purdue. That game’s on cable, sadly, but here on the faux-homestead we listen to those games on something called local radio. You haven’t lived until, etc. It’s fine… except for the fact that I think it’s shameful that they have no female broadcasters for the womens’ sports locally, and that far too much attention is paid to the men’s sports around here. $$$$, I guess. /rant off



So, it’s an hour later than I realized. I need to go kick Cody out of bed (he swore he’d do the dishes “first thing in the morning”… what was not ascertained, however, was whether it was his version of “first thing” or mine) and get this party started, but first I’m going to leave you with some links reflecting the open tabs I have going in Mozilla:



- the Buttermilk-Onion Pull-Apart rolls recipe Kelly posted this morning



- an interview with infamous urban forager/CHGO resident Nancy Klehm, who, incidentally, will be coming to town this summer



- love those folks at Homegrown Evolution



- hey, let’s eat weeds!



- When I’m feeling a little unsure of how to proceed, I consult my own personal Magic 8-Ball: Angry Women. I especially love the interviews with bell hooks, Avital Ronell, and Diamanda Galas, and I find something new and butt-kicking every single time I read it. Does anyone know what happened to publisher Andrea Juno? RE/Search is still publishing, but Angry Women in Rock Vol. 1 came out on her own imprint, which no longer seems to be her imprint. I was always hoping for Vol. 2…



Time to get going!

Photo taken by Cody




GRATITUDE LIST (because gratitude is good for you)


1. While things go well at work (this week has flown by), I’m deeply grateful for a couple days off to catch up on… everything else. 2. I love the birds at my feeders. Even the boring old sparrows. 3. Speaking of birds - on Wednesday I saw the fattest, roundest robin I’ve ever seen. 4. And the cardinals and mourning doves are calling. BIRD NERD! 5. Regardless of what the weather’s doing (and it isn’t pretty), spring is en route. Thanks for the reminders, birds. 6. I love Daylight Saving Time (turn your clocks ahead this weekend!). 7. I already have most of the seeds I need for my garden. 8. Driving is coming easily to Cody. 9. Lilly’s affection, usually in the form of a hug and some purring, always comes at the right time. 10. Jim. I’m just always grateful for Jim.



Time for the morning grind, literally and figuratively. What are you glad for in your life?

I don’t post… because I don’t have good photos or other interesting graphics because I’m not feeling creative and I like posting with them. I just spent 30 minutes at my beloved WPA site and couldn’t find anything suitably inspiring… and found out, in the process, that the government only has 900 or so of the 2000 posters that were created archived. Crap. I’m trying to drum up some inspiration for logo creation and I just feel like things have ground to a halt. I don’t post… because I’m so tired at the end of the day. I’m glad I can’t post from work, because I’d never get anything done, but posting in the evening just seems so…laden with effort. I don’t post… even though I’m full of ideas about work. I play things a little closer to the vest now where that’s concerned. But know that I am, indeed, going to allow myself to like my work even though I sometimes feel like I should hate it (see below). I don’t post… because I don’t really feel like I have much to say. Several people who read me now have been reading for years, and I wonder what they’re thinking. I occasionally feel like I must seem like a sellout because the kids are in school and I’m working full-time and the idea of the suburban homestead or the tiny farmlet or whatever is just that - an idea. A good one, and one I definitely wish to pursue in a modified fashion this summer, but an idea nonetheless at this point. I mean, I don’t feel like a sellout to myself - people do what they have to/want to do, and I know what I know and am reaching people and laying some serious groundwork - but, you know, sometimes I get all, I don’t even have chickens anymore, and it’ll be all I can do to get a garden into the damn ground, never mind keep it weeded or harvested and Ma Ingalls would never hold with this. I don’t post… because I’ve got a little blog fatigue and I figure you must have it, too. Because my neck hurts. Because pain has kept me out of the gym for the better part of 2 weeks. Because I can’t figure out how to make real paragraphs in WordPress. Because it keeps on snowing. Because it continues to be frigid. Because The Teenager ™ is learning how to drive and it scares the bejickens* out of me. Because I’m not in Florida anymore. Because I’ll be 40 this year. Because money’s tight, because I miss socializing with friends, because the incessant winter has done a number on my ability to be truly inspired, because the primaries are dragging on, because I miss eating fresh vegetables whenever I want, because February seems to have seeped into March. So I’m going to go do what any self-respecting not-really-a-sellout working mother of two would do - I’m off to have a glass of red, eat some chocolate-covered almonds, and watch Arrested Development DVDs with my very understanding spouse. I’ll be back soon. * Bejickens: phrase coined by Lilly, age 4, when surprised by someone entering the room: “You scared the… BEJICKENS out of me!” She couldn’t decide between “bejesus” and “dickens”, so came up with her own. It’s in the B-K family lexicon.