Maybe I’ll have an comment about this later. But for now, it seems important enough to post. Focus the “save the world” energy toward women and girls and massively increase the impact and effect of the effort. Odd that this bit of information is still news.

Oh my goodness, it’s cold. The snow that fell on Seattle last night is mostly still here, which is unusual in my (limited) experience. Factor in the wind and the perceived temperature has been below 20 degrees F all day, which is about where it’s forecast to be for the next week to ten days. I’m very much not looking forward to standing at the bus stop for our rides to and from school tomorrow. Cold weather is good, however, for appreciating the work that went into food storage over the summer. I spent time this evening pouring over cookbooks …

I have a new favorite quote: Despite all our pretensions, we still are totally dependent on six inches of top soil and the fact that it rained. — Confucius So the economy is falling apart, retailers are starting the post-holiday sales before the holidays in hopes that they actually make some money, the Toys for Tots warehouse is empty, food banks have slim pickings, the American auto industry wants a bailout (Who’s next?!?! Is this the new consequence for making poor business choices, begging for taxpayer funds so that a failed business doesn’t actually have to fail? When the corporations …

Just finished reading Michael Pollan‘s excellent memo to President-elect Obama regarding the state of American agriculture. An excellent overview of the problems of the current intensive methods of “farming”, if that word can be used for monocultures of corn, CAFOs, manure lagoons, feeding antibiotics to cattle as a matter of routine, food irradiation, a process that requires an average of 10 petroleum-based calories of energy to produce one calorie of mass-produced “food”. What was on your dinner plate tonight? Do you know how much oil it took to get it there? But even better than the overview of what’s wrong, …

We watched election returns at a friend’s house and heard most of Seattle burst into cheers just before The Daily Show signed off with the announcement that Obama had won. For a moment, I thought it was just The Daily Show being funny, since sometimes I find it hard to tell when they are being serious. But when we switched to a “real” news station, it was all about the win. I don’t miss the nail-biting cliff-hanger at all. We watched McCain’s speech and were generally impressed. And we watched Obama’s speech – twice – and I teared up – …

We were briefly part of a group that gathered once a month for a “visioning potluck”, an evening of food and imagination. There was one evening, the one most memorable to me, when we all shared a vision of the future, as if it were the past. The idea was that rather than saying, “I wish things were like this,” or “I plan to do that,” we were to think as if all that had already happened. What if we were at a potluck celebrating something that was 20 years old? What did it look like? What challenges had we …