For once, I'm not talking about the stuff at our house.
My mom, textiles PhD and sustainable consumption blogger Nice White Lady, is doing a series this week on clothing/textiles made from bamboo. We personally are all too aware of how "highly renewable" bamboo is, but does that alone make it a more eco-friendly source of material for fabrics? Find out here.
As for us, we're finishing up a week at the beach, so we'll catch up after we get back.
Nice White Lady, a.k.a. my mom, is going to be on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show tomorrow talking about a longtime favorite topic (can you tell?): clothing and gender. Check it out!
The show is the second in a three-part series about clothing and culture. She was also on last Wednesday to discuss sustainable/ethical fashion--audio is still available online.
In other news, hi. I'll be back soon.
Along with strawberry season came a baby named Jackson. As of Thursday morning, the queen of the mountain only kid at the Small Red House is now also the omnipotent ringleader eldest of three over at Family Hack. We hear everyone's doing great and we wish them the very best!
A few months ago, my nearby aunt and uncle told us that our local energy provider, Pepco, offers 100% wind power. A little investigation revealed that Pepco does indeed have a private subsidiary, Pepco Energy Services, that offers residential power generation/transmission from either (1) 100% wind sources or (2) a mix of wind, solar, hydro, and biomass.
Great, think the skeptics, but only chi-chi yuppies can afford the whole "green" racket, right?
Sorry, dear skeptics, but the price tag for either source turns out to be only TWO CENTS more per kWh than your nasty (NOT the least bit "clean") coal or nuclear power. Last month, this amounted to a difference of SEVEN DOLLARS.
(We opted for wind because we were uneasy about some of the ecological dangers of hydroelectric dams and biomass. And because windmills are just doggone cool, notwithstanding the NIMBY naysayers.)
Honestly, coal and nuclear just aren't as pretty.
To recap:
For seven dollars a month, you can
(a) save part of the world's oldest mountains, North America's largest contiguous forest, and lots of poor folks' lives, homes, schools, drinking water, roads, and health, all of which are destroyed by destructive mountaintop removal mining,
(b) save tons of carbon emissions at the other end of the coal power process, thereby helping stop global warming,
(c) save tons of other pollutant emissions from coal-fired power plants, and
(c) reduce the dangers for humans and other life from nuclear waste, nuclear energy production, and nuclear catastrophe (not that nuclear production offers much for efficient carbon reduction, either).
How about that, folks?
Now, of course, that cost difference (i.e., our $7) varies with power consumption. But cutting down on power use is easily within a household's grasp: the key is just to unplug or shut off ("standby" doesn't count!) things you're not using anyway, such as phone chargers, coffee makers, stereos, TVs, microwaves, computers, and so forth. They're not doing anything but costing you money!
Aha, pipe up the skeptics, this is all well and good for you Marylanders with your Pepco, but who's to say we could get a similar deal in Minnesota, Wyoming, Maine, etc.?
Oho, quoth we in the Small Red House, who's to say you can't?
Making pizza at home is becoming more popular, as are an arsenal of specialized home-pizza-making supplies. You could use a regular baking sheet for your homemade pie, but some folks will tell you that to get that perfect crispy crust, you need a pizza stone to simulate the stone floor of an old-fashioned wood-burning pizza oven. Better hightail it to your favorite kitchen gadget retailer and pick one up for $35 or more, right?
Wrong. No. No. Step away from the overpriced yuppie merchandise. There is a better way, and you don't have to go any further than your local building supply.
We got this brilliant idea from my next husband Food Network television personality Alton Brown, back when we had cable: Those fancy pizza stones? They're nothing but ceramic tiles. The same thing you can get at Home Depot, Lowe's, or preferably, a surplus building supply place like our beloved Community Forklift.
You can buy an unglazed ceramic tile or quarry tile in the dimensions of your preference for around a dollar. (Do not make the mistake of buying flagstone--it's too lightweight and it will crack at high temperatures.) Take it home, give it a good scrubbing, and voilà ! Perfectly crispy homemade pizza, without the gourmet price tag. Mmmm.
I like to start books. I don't like to finish them. It's because I'm not so great at managing time, because I'm not a quick reader, and because a lot of my reading time is usually devoted to textbooks (which take even longer to read than regular ones).
But the other day I finished a book:
Jacob has been dutifully working his way through Michael Pollan's entire catalogue, but all I'd read were some of Pollan's articles for the New York Times. This book is an entertaining read, and it incorporates some of the material from the NYT articles and from Pollan's past books to support his argument that our culture's obsession with nutrition is what is really keeping us from being healthy.
By breaking foods down into nutrients, Pollan says, we value only those tiny and poorly-understood pieces instead of the food itself. It's not yogurt that's good for you; it's calcium. It's not carrots that are good for you, it's beta-carotene. So go ahead and isolate some calcium and some beta-carotene and put it in Gatorade and you'll be fine. Or something. The point, though, is that humans as a species had a generally healthy diet, and their eating habits generally didn't kill them, up until the past century or so when we decided to start messing with food and trying to synthesize it. And there was really nothing wrong with that yogurt or that carrot in the first place.
I've always thought I had a decent diet, but it wasn't until recently that I started paying more attention to what other people eat and what is really available to us as consumers. Most recently I didn't bring enough for lunch one day at school, and I decided to go look in the vending machine. Out of all the edible food-like items in the machine, I found one thing (trail mix) that wasn't mostly processed corn and soy in one form or another. I was pretty surprised that I had never noticed before. This book explains why it is that what's most available is all corn and soy, and why that's not so great.
If you eat, and you live in the United States (or Canada, or any of the countries rapidly assuming our food habits), you might want to check out In Defense of Food.
If you don't have time, you could just watch this interview with Michael Pollan from the CBC show The Hour. It sums up the general message pretty well.
Maria tells me I am a bad brother. Last weekend, while calling my brother, I noticed that the first tomato seed-leaves were poking up out of the planter. Like any first-time gardener, I couldn't contain my amazement and started shrieking about how we were having a baby! This naturally amazed and befuddled my poor brother, which amazement and befuddlement quickly turned to irritation when he realized I was talking about tomatoes. Apparently nightshades don't exactly put one in an avuncular state of mind.
But I've already gotten ahead of myself.
I've read and been told that first-time gardeners tend toward overeagerness: they plant too early, thin too little, water too much. Even with this warning, and for all our almanac-checking and calendar-comparing, we probably started our tomatoes and peppers too early. Ah well. What can I say: we wanted to stop reading and start planting already!
In order to save money and pursue the reduce-and-reuse-before-recycling ethic, we had some fun making our own planters out of toilet paper tubes. (The VERY VERY EASY process is documented on YouGrowGirl.com.) To spur germination, we made the seeds a greenhouse out of a translucent plastic bin we had lying around, which we covered with a translucent piece of plastic we cut from a bag. We sprayed in a little moisture and set it on a radiator in a window, et voilà ! the first tomato sprouts popped out in three days' time! So that the shoots wouldn't rot in the moisture, we moved the sprouted planters one by one off the radiator, into mini-greenhouses we made out of plastic milk jugs.
After two weeks, 3/4 of the tomato seeds sprouted - nine in all. Of the nine fish pepper seeds we planted, four have sprouted so far. We're still waiting on another trio of fish peppers and one of bell peppers.
Care for a tour?
The sprouting greenhouse:
The post-sprouting greenhouses:
Tomato seedlings in their tubes, in a milk jug greenhouse:
A fish pepper seedling in its own mini-greenhouse/planter:
Eurobabble: Our friend Annie documents her semester in Berlin. Jacob looks on in vicarious glee.
Erin's Easy Eats: My high school classmate Erin draws inspiration from The Pioneer Woman to come up with simple, tasty dishes for her and her husband.
As promised, here's the link to tonight's news segment on the DC-area CBS station:
Eco-Fashion Folks Ask 'What's In Your Underwear?'
It's a local news story, so there's not much substance, but if you really want to know more about sustainable fashion, head over to Nice White Lady for the lowdown.
Not to turn this into maria.com or anything, but thanks to my friend Carla in San Francisco, I've discovered Yelp, a user-powered review website for restaurants, stores and services. Apparently Yelp is a big thing in SF (where all good internet trends are born), but it's got a decent following here in DC too.
I've added their tacky badge to our blog (over on the sidebar; scroll down), at least until Jacob, with his disdain for animated website doohickeys, comes home and brings this madness to a stop.
Do you love food? Do you enjoy giving people the impression that you can afford to eat at restaurants? Be my friend on Yelp!
P.S. Guess what! My mom was on the 5 o'clock news tonight, and it was not because she did anything illegal. Stay tuned for a link...
Long ago, in a town uncomfortably close to here, I was in my third year at the University of Maryland. I was a member of the Maryland Chorus, but I had decided, for pretty much no reason, to join one of the university's non-western ensembles. They offered West African drumming (always full), Japanese koto, and Balinese gamelan. I chose the one I had heard the least about. I couldn't have found Bali on a map if you had asked me, and I don't think I knew that it was part of Indonesia. I also thought a gamelan was an instrument. I found out that it's the name for the whole percussion orchestra, the set of instruments or the people who play them.
I started out playing one of the biggest, lowest, instruments there was, called jegogan. It's a huge metallophone that comes up to a person's waist, with five heavy bronze keys, and a large, heavy padded mallet. Its function is sort of like a bass instrument in a western ensemble. Maybe that's why I liked it so much. As a soprano and violinist, I had spent a lot of time on the treble end of things. And this kind of music was totally new.
Around this time in the semester, our teacher told me and the other girl playing jegogan (there are two of almost everything in Balinese gamelan) that he needed people to play that same instrument with his independent DC-area group, Gamelan Mitra Kusuma. I started coming to rehearsals and I've never looked back. Even during the time I lived in Baltimore, I'd drive an hour each way to weekly rehearsals. And I've moved on to more difficult instruments.
A year after I first signed up for the gamelan class, at a small liberal arts college in Ohio, Jacob was starting his senior year. The college had just hired an ethnomusicology professor and procured a set of gamelan degung instruments from Sunda, or West Java, another Indonesian province. Jacob was in the gamelan for his last two semesters in college, and the next year, he moved to DC.
Jacob had really enjoyed playing gamelan in college, so once he was settled in DC, he looked around for a group to join. There was Gamelan Mitra Kusuma, the Balinese gong kebyar ensemble I had then been a part of for about two years, and there was the Central Javanese gamelan at the Indonesian embassy. Neither group's music was like the Sundanese gamelan Jacob had played in college, but he chose the group at the embassy because of their proximity to the Metro and to his apartment. For the next couple of years, Jacob learned about Javanese gamelan and dance, and started taking Indonesian language classes, and I continued to play Balinese gamelan, and never the twain did meet.
A little over a couple years ago, at a local DC Irish festival, I met an Irish music enthusiast about my age. When I introduced him to my gamelan instructors who had come to hear my Irish band play, he enthusiastically exclaimed, "Apa kabar?!"
The rest, as they say...
Maria playing with "Jacob's gamelan," the Central Javanese gamelan of the Embassy of Indonesia (Jacob is hidden behind the gongs). Melissa and Totok are performing a traditional Javanese social dance.Swango is a new clothes swapping site based on a system of credits. I'll be trying it out the next time I want to do a clothes purge. Anything I don't think would belong on there will go to the thrift store or the Baltimore Free Store.
Read more...And because I am still feeling a little stressed out...
This is Sharon Jones, Soul Sister #1. She will rock your world.
As Sharon would say, "If you can't feel the music...then you must be a dead ass!"
Read more...it's as if this cartoonist snuck into our house, slept in our bed for a night when we were out, and made a cartoon about our cat. seriously. kneading the face and everything. it's uncanny. so uncanny that maria pretty much laughed until she cried.
First of all, a happy birthday to Susie, one of the stars of Family Hack* and Khymi's little sister!
Susie is a kid after our own hearts. Khymi informed Dad on the phone last night that, "this morning, my sister woke up and she was crying, so I just sang 'Panik' to her and she stopped crying!" Clearly, a two-year-old who has her priorities straight.
Khymi is referring to this song by Wir Sind Helden. Ever since this summer, she has decided that it fits the bill for any scenario where music is required. We're really glad she likes it so much...we just hope Mama and Papa aren't on the verge of "accidentally" running over the CD in the driveway.
*Bonus: Family Hack is Khymi's mom and stepdad's resource blog for families on the go--check it out!
I waited to post on this until today. Yesterday when I heard the news, I was too frustrated and angry, and I would have just written some long soapbox-y diatribe. I'll try not to do that now. But I do feel like I have a lot to say.
Jacob tried explaining to me that sometimes, judges make decisions that even they may not agree with because their job is to decide within the confines of the current legal framework and the particular arguments with which they have been presented. And this one was tricky because the argument, as I understand it, was that marriage discrimination is sex discrimination, not sexual orientation discrimination. If you look at the example of the lesbian couple who was forced to separate because one of them was an Indian citizen and had to return to India because her visa had expired, and if they had been married, the American citizen could have sponsored her partner for citizenship, you could say that if one of them had been a man (something that is of course beyond their control), they wouldn't have had all the trouble they did. And that's unfair. But if you say, if they had been an opposite-sex couple, then you're talking about sexual orientation discrimination. It's semantics, but it's a very fine line, and the judges weren't buying it.
That's all a little hard for me to swallow. It's hard when from my perspective, the choice should be simple, and not a question of interpreting laws this way or that way. We're at an age where a ton of our friends are getting married, and I can think of three friends and their partners off the top of my head who would probably jump at the chance (or at least consider it seriously) if it were given to them. One of them is my best and oldest friend.
We struggled with the decision to get married, not because of how it would affect our lives directly, but because we felt conflicted and almost guilty about being in a position of privilege. This summer I wrote a research paper on same-sex marriage, and it made me think critically about what the institution has come to mean in American society. The counter-arguments almost always mentioned something along the lines that marriage exists in its current form because of the possibility of procreation, and opposite-sex couples are the only ones who can procreate "naturally."
I promised no huge rant, so I'll just say, if you have children, if you don't have children, if you've dealt with infertility, if you are a woman of any age, if you know children whose parents were never married and are (shocker, this one) totally normal, if you never plan to have children, if you have children who are not your biological offspring...think long and hard about the implications of that line of reasoning. Think about what really matters to you. "Legitimacy"? "Tradition"? Not so much for me. What matters are love, respect, admiration and dedication. Between any consenting adult partners, and among any family. Among human beings, really. And when you look at all of the marriage debate, those things aren't mentioned very much. Something's wrong with that picture.
We are very happy that we got married. In the end, it was what we wanted for ourselves. But I promised myself that I would try to help the effort toward winning this right for everyone who wants it.
So what can we do, now that the final decision has been made? The next place to focus is the state legislature. What couldn't be won in a lawsuit may be possible through legislation. If you live in Maryland, I encourage you to contact your state senator and delegates and tell them you support marriage rights for all.
P.S. The Washington Post hosted an interesting online Q & A session about same-sex marriage this afternoon. The transcript is available here.
We all love IKEA, right? Sure we do. It's the whole package: a socially-conscious purveyor of inexpensive, space-saving and attractive European-style home furnishings, and a place you can take your kids where they'll actually look forward to hanging around while you're pricing sofas. If you stay through mealtime, no problem. Another family-friendly oasis awaits you in the store's cafeteria. What more could you ask for?
As if that weren't enough, IKEA is also the place where my dad has been happily employed for many years. So my loyalty runs deeper still. Dad is one of two store carpenters, which means, among other things, that he builds the larger parts of the "rooms" on the showroom floor (walls, kitchens, and so on). They have other employees (or in Scandinavian social-democratic IKEA-speak, "co-workers") whose job it is to assemble the furniture for display, but my dad can usually tell me the difference between the base model and the next best one, and steers me away from the real lemons. There's a difference between the fiberboard-and-melamine nightmare that'll only last you a year and the more durable pieces (for example, my steel-frame bed, purchased c. 1999-2000, that's been disassembled and reassembled over the course of five moves and is no worse for the wear).
Jacob had never been to an IKEA before he met me. If he had a nickel for every time I've told him, "You know, they have that at IKEA," well...he'd probably have enough for a delicious IKEA breakfast. And that includes coffee.
That all being said...IKEA's not the be-all and end-all. Since we moved into the small red house, we've been itching to put away all our boxes of books, but we had nowhere to put them. Our first instinct was to run to IKEA and come home with 300 dollars' worth of BILLY bookcases, but then we thought of the fact that a) 300 dollars might be a pretty good deal, but it's still a lot of money and b) we've been trying to quit buying newly-manufactured things when we could be saving something from the landfill.
So we decided to check out Community Forklift, a local organization that sells salvaged and surplus building materials at drastically reduced prices. What should we find on our first trip to their huge warehouse in Edmonston but a set of bookshelves, recently removed from the GWU law library:
Cheaper than BILLY, and solid oak to boot. We haven't unpacked all the books yet, but for now that bottom shelf has been serving as a "cat cubby."
Bonus: Want to get more mileage out of your IKEA stuff? Get inspired by ikea hacker.
