Alexandria Stands

I arrived at work with only a few minutes to spare. Most of the other librarians had already started going through the teletype that had come in over the radio the previous evening. Some busied themselves collecting books put on hold and getting them ready to send to other branches. Others updated the availability of books in our copy of the system wide catalog. Data processors sat behind the glass of a soundproof room operating the radio and teletype equipment. They would periodically stand up and pass the printed pages through a drawer that allowed them to move the documents in and out of the room without disturbing the quiet of the library with the din of mechanical typing.

As expected my boss gave me the dead eye as I walked in. According to the clock on the wall I still had almost five minutes to spare before my shift began, so this attitude seemed unnecessary. Especially since I always managed to get all my morning duties done long before we opened to the public. I found her a bit too rigid and neurotic. I guess I should expect that from someone who grew up at a time when everyone had a computer in their pocket coordinating all their behavior.

“Good morning Kathleen,” I said as I put my jacket and bag down at my desk. She did not even acknowledge my presence but turned her head of short gray curls, walked into her office, and closed the door. Tristan looked at me and snickered.

“Don't laugh.”

“I'm sorry. I just enjoy seeing someone else get the treatment.”

“I showed up two minutes late once and she won't get off my back. But she also won't even give me the common courtesy of saying 'hello'.”

“Just don't let her get to you,” said Tristan as her slender caramel hands wrote notes on the catalog update sheet. As a children's librarian she had the kind of patience and composure specific to teachers and other people who work with kids.

I grabbed a book cart and a list of the remaining holds. It did not take me long to find them all. Getting them sorted and labeled correctly so they could get to the right branch took a little longer. The list included a few inter-library loan requests from outside our the Hudson Valley system. Those took a little longer to fill out, but it was a pretty rote process that I could just about do in my sleep by this point.

When I finished with this I had a few minutes to read the newspapers before we opened up to the public. I had to work the first reference shift, so I sat behind one of the reference desks and caught up on current events for a few minutes. All the papers this morning had the same international story on the cover. Germany had just elected Mishal Jahani chancellor, making her the first chancellor of Arabic descent in the country's history. Some editorials compared her election with last year's surprising election of french president Hassan Farouk who had campaigned on a promise to crack down on national front terrorists. I flipped around the paper following this story. On this side of the atlantic I read a lot about climate refugees from Florida seeking asylum here in the Northeastern republic. One editorial warned of a crime wave if we allowed the Floridians to enter. The author argued that unlike internally displaced people fleeing from the flooded coastal cities in our own republic, the Floridians had a different culture that did not respect law and order. He also felt that we should not have to shoulder this burden, because Floridians had denied the reality of rising sea levels since before the old union broke up. I wanted to check the business news next, but that had to wait. The doors opened and patrons who were waiting outside for us to open shuffled inside.

Some people headed towards the circulation desk to return books and a young man walked to my desk.

“Good morning. How can I help you?”

“I just moved to town and I would like to sign up for a library card.”

“Ok, they usually handle that at circulation. But they seem pretty busy right now and I'm not. So let me get you a form.”

“Thanks.”

“Here you go,” I said as I handed him the form. “Fill this out. When you finish bring it up to circulation with some form of ID and your membership fee. Please read rules on fines and your responsibility as a library member.”

“Ok, thanks again.”

“No problem.”

I read the paper for a few more minutes. Then I took out a copy of Anais Nin's Diary. I had wanted to read it for a while and I wish I had not waited so long. I looked up over the cover periodically to see if any patrons were approaching the desk or looked like they needed help. Then she walked in. Long black hair, a simple but well-fit dress that showed off her curves, crocheted stockings, and black boots caked with a bit of spring mud. We caught eyes for a moment and then I looked back down at my book and she headed towards the fiction section.

A moment later Cliff, one of my regular patrons, walked up to the desk. Depending on the day I either enjoyed his company or hoped people would start lining up to ask questions so I had an excuse to get rid of him. He apprenticed for Mr. Carson, who had a business that repaired and retrofitted all kinds of old electric appliances to operate on mechanical power. Mr C even had a few designs he built from scratch, though those tended to cost a bit more. I usually learned interesting things about mechanics and such from talking to Cliff. But he could not read social cues and on the days I preferred to be left alone he had a hard time taking a hint. He wore jeans and a brown hoodie and seemed excited as he walked up to the desk and pushed his greasy black hair away from the glasses on his pale face.

“How's it going Cliff?”

“I got this great idea. I'm about to start going through the card catalog, but I wanted to tell you about it first. Maybe you can give me some direction and I can find what I need a bit quicker. I call it a friction stove. You know how you can rub two objects together to generate heat? Well I got to thinking that maybe you could use a mechanical device, something pedal powered probably, to generate enough heat to cook a meal. Or at least bring something to a boil or simmer before you put it in a hay box. Maybe even heat a small space. If you pedal to charge up a battery or run a generator you lose most of that energy in the conversion process and as heat, but if heat is what you want than you have something much more efficient. I don't know if I can do it, but I want to try.”

“Huh. I could see that working with a metal disk rubbing against another surface to create heat. I don't know how you would keep the materials from wearing out. Do you need any help doing research?”

“Not just yet. I'm gonna look through the 620s first. If I don't find anything there I will rummage through the card catalog and do some subject searches.”

“Ok, good luck,” I said as he walked briskly to the non-fiction stacks.

When he left I noticed that the girl from before had sat down at one of the tables facing me. She looked up from a copy of Henry Miller's Sexus and I could see she had lovely green eyes that looked back down at her book nervously when they met mine. I kept reading my book trying to avoid looking at her even though I wanted nothing more than to steal another glimpse. Fortunately, things picked up and I had a lot of work to keep me busy. I gave a refresher lesson to a middle-aged man who had not used the card catalog since his school days. I placed holds on a few books for an elderly woman. In between I answered a few general reference questions. Most of these people just needed me to point them to the right reference book. Then one question actually stumped me.

The question came from Troy Mathis who walked up to the desk wearing his trademark mix of homespun fabrics and vintage sneakers. His shaggy dirty blonde hair and glassy stare made people who did not know him a bit wary. But most people in town recognized the talented scop musician and knew his jovial attitude. He had been looking up lyrics in one of our Rap Genius lyric anthologies when he came across a few phrases that he simply did not understand. I wrote down the question and his info and told him I would put in a query to Plex when I got off the desk. Like any great scop, Troy had a way of reworking even the most electronic laden old songs using currently available instruments and arrangements. He also wrote some great originals that seamlessly mixed genres from the past and present. His most recent album had some of both.

“Do you want to come back in a day or two for an answer, or do you want us to send a telex message to you?”

“I will probably come in again soon, but send me a telex,” Troy replied. “You coming by the Macrophone tonight?”

“Why should this Friday be any different than any other Friday?”

“Cool, I'll see you there. Some good acts coming through. Not to mention yours truly.”

“See you there.”

When he left the girl with the green eyes stood up and started towards my desk, but before she reached it Cliff came out of the stacks and cut her off without realizing it.

“Check out what I found,” he said. “Two ways of doing this already exist, but I don't think anyone ever put them to use for anything practical. Seems like a mechanical curiosity some gear heads tinkered with before and during the peak. They just did not see any need for it with so much cheap energy. Anyway, one method is called a Frenette heater and the other is called a Lloyd heater. I think I could adapt one or both of them to do what I have in mind. They might even work in conjunction with a geothermal heating system.

“Look at this diagram,” Cliff said. “The Frenette heater uses two wheels rotating in opposite directions..”

“With oil in between them so they don't wear out. That answers my question from earlier.”

“Yep. I have a good amount of info here. But I need to get a hold of one of the books referenced in the footnotes, because the diagrams in this book are very rudimentary. I already checked and it does not look like it is in the Hudson Valley system. Could you take a look for it somewhere else?”

“Sure. It just might take a while to get it. You probably want the schematics and we can't send those over telex.”

“No problem. I can work on what I have in this book until I get more detailed plans.”

I wrote down all the info so I could do an inter-library search when I got off desk and Cliff went to check out his book. My heart beat faster as I realized I would finally talk to the young lady I had my eye on the whole morning. But before either of us could speak a word I heard Kathleen walk up behind me and say, “I'm on desk now. I'll take this one.”

I walked into the back room thinking about a lost opportunity. I sat at my desk for a minute composing myself before I walked to the electronics room. I opened the first door and waited for it to close and seal. Then I opened the second and had a seat in front of some radio equipment and a teletype machine. First I sent a request for Cliff's title to the Northeastern Nationwide Catalog. The staff there would look through a combined catalog of all the libraries in the country. If one of them had it they would send the library an inter-library loan request. If more than one library had the book they would try to find the closest available copy. NNC would send us a message with an expected arrival date once the other library had sent it out.

Next I sent a query to Plex asking them to explain the meaning of the lyrics Troy had dug up. Like a lot of librarians I often daydream about working for Plex. They have a giant staff of librarians with tons of research material at their disposal. Plex rose from the ashes of one the old internet search engines, so they even have an electronic database that they managed to keep running. However, they only use it when none of their staff can get an answer doing regular print research. They can answer pretty much any question you have. Libraries and various organizations subscribe to the service, but only very wealthy individuals can afford a Plex account. Most people can't justify the expense of something they only need occasionally and can get a lot cheaper via a subscription at their local library the few times they have a query their local reference librarian can't answer.

When I finished up sending out messages I went to the break room to eat my lunch. I sat and talked to Tristan about some of the children's programs she was doing this month. Denise and Tivia, two of the clerks, spent most of the meal talking about an injury that Denise's nephew had sustained working on a salvage job down in Manhattan.

“They had to dive into the water to get him. But the break was not too bad. Thank the mother that the union pays for his medical expenses and gives him some wages while he can't work. I'm really worried about the gash getting infected,” Denise said.

“I hear that water is full of all kinds of nasty things,” replied Tivia. “Chemicals, filth. But I would not worry. The doctors that work for the Salvage Union seem to know what they're doing. It is the scabs that get into trouble.”

When I finished up eating I went to my desk and read a bit more of Nin's diary while my lunch started to digest. It got me thinking about the young lady I saw that morning. I took a quick walk around the stacks and the reading area, but she had gone. Not that I know what I would have done if I saw her. Kathleen would give me hell if she saw me flirting with a patron and I have trouble just walking up to women and talking to them anyway. I went back to my desk and did some more reading. Officially, the library encourages librarians to spend as much free time as possible reading. They figured this would make you more knowledgeable and more able to answer reference questions. Perhaps it worked like that at other branches, but not this one. If Kathleen saw anyone reading she basically interrogated them about which of their duties they had completed. When it became clear that you had indeed done all your work, instead of leaving you alone she ended up giving you some kind of busy work. I don't much care for pointless tasks, so I tried to only read when I knew she worked the reference desk. Looking at the clock I realized she would get off the desk soon, so I started to get things ready for my afternoon program.

A brought my notes into the small meeting room. A handful of people shuffled in and took seats. After waiting a few extra minutes for late-comers, I started my information session on telex message boards with a little bit of historical background. I began with the familiar history of how radio became the preferred method of communication during the war of partition because cell towers, telephone lines, and other 21^st century communication infrastructure were easy to sabotage and difficult to protect. Then I discussed how this technology grew and changed after the war with the increasing incorporation of teletype machines.

“People had become accustomed to using the internet. With all of its faults, they still wanted to retain some of the features it produced. For the most part, the net did not allow people to do anything they had not done before, but it did create some ways of doing things they might never have imagined without it. They wanted ways to crowdsource ideas and connect with people who shared similar interests across great distances, but they had to achieve this in a way that did no depend on such complex technologies. Most of these attempts failed. You simply could not scale many of the social and economic tools of the internet down to fit the limits of teletype radio. But the message boards weathered the transition rather well with humans performing most of the data processing once done by machines.”

“A lot of people wanted to try and rebuild the internet. However, resource bottlenecks and a lack of funds due to war and instability at home and abroad made this very difficult. Also, unlike the old union, most of the countries that formed after it broke up placed substantial taxes on resource extraction. So few could justify the cost of rebuilding the internet.”

After this brief background I got down to the business of showing how to use telex message boards. I started by familiarizing the group with some of the ways to find out about existing boards. This sometimes happened by word-of-mouth. But you could also learn about a board through various publications. Special interest magazines had information about relevant boards. In fact, many of them operated their own boards. However, reference directories gave you the most extensive list of boards and they usually had the most intensive amount of information on them. In addition to a description of the board and its community, each directory entry told you about fees, contact frequencies, hours of operation, board rules, and how to set up a membership. I gave a few examples of how to set up a membership, make a request for the text of a page, and submit a comment to a board. Then I mentioned some of the more popular in-depth guides to teletype message boards and handed everyone a pamphlet that went over the basics of using the medium before opening up to questions.

When I finished the presentation, I had a few minutes to answer questions and to ask for some feedback on the course. I heard a lot different reasons for coming to the class. Most of the attendees wanted to converse with people who shared their taste in music, movies, or books. Some wanted a place to discuss religion, politics, and economics. One wanted a way to sell some things he could not find a buyer for locally, but thought someone would probably pay a lot of money for. Knowing what I do about message boards, I assume that a few of them wanted to find people with the same sexual proclivities but of course they would never mention this. Or maybe I just have a dirty mind. In any case, I like teaching this class.

When I finished up I went to the reference desk. Right before the afternoon rush of kids and teenagers getting out of school came in, a woman stopped by the desk to check on the results of a NNC search I did for her the day before. I found the book, but it was up in a library in Maine. She wanted it sooner rather than later, so she decided she would pay to have the book telexed to the print shop where they would collate and bind a copy for her. She even payed an extra fee to have a copy printed for the library, something patrons often do to help expand our collection.

The kids and teens kept me busy for the rest of the afternoon and made the remainder of my day go by very quickly. Shortly before we closed I noticed Tamara Chang, a kinky haired teen who liked to hang around the library, walking towards the desk. She had a huge smile on her face and seemed to have something to share with me.

“I got in,” she said.

“Where?”

“C'mon. Stop messing with me. You know where.”

Beaming with pride he showed me his acceptance letter to The New Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Way to go. Still plan on studying preservation materials?”

“Yep. They have a few teams working on creating sustainable, durable, plant-based replacements for movie film, magnetic tape, and vinyl records. Creating replacements with all three of those qualities has proven very tricky.”

“Well, I wish you luck. It certainly makes this librarian happy knowing we have such bright young people working on this. We can't keep giving tax exemptions to preserve old audio and video formats forever and I like catching old films and news reels at the cinema on a rainy day.”

~ ~

We closed for the day shortly after and I felt very light as my feet hit the dirt street. The spring rains had passed and the worst of the mud had dried making travel much more pleasant for people and horses alike. This part of town contained a mix of post peak buildings designed to maximize energy efficiency and retrofitted structures from before the peak. Tiny windmills and radio antennas rose just above the buildings. They all had the deep dark patches of solar water heaters on some part of the roof. A few even gave off the gleam of solar thermoelectric generators.

I decided to stop by the record shop before I headed home. So I walked a few blocks, passing the train station and the Criterion cinema on my way. The marquis proclaimed that they would show Yojimbo and Sanjuro tomorrow for a Saturday night samurai double feature and I debated going as I walked the last two blocks to my destination. The head shop next to the record store advertised ceramic filter style vaporizers in both wood and glass. I thought about getting a glass one to use at home and keeping my more durable wooden vape for traveling before heading in to Prime Cuts records.

Friday visits to the shop had become almost a weekly ritual. I would usually pick up one or two records every week. Sometimes I left empty-handed, but between the local radio stations and all the acts that came through town I had no shortage of albums I wanted to acquire. I picked up a copy of Freddie Hubbard's Backlash in the jazz section and started looking through the classic rap section for an MF Doom album one of my favorite Djs had played earlier that week when I heard a voice from behind say, “looks like you have good taste in music too.”

A bit startled, I looked up and to my delight I saw the girl I'd had on my mind most of that day. She had a sly smile that I matched when I recognized her.

“Thanks, I.. uh, had really wanted to talk to you earlier today. I noticed you reading one of my favorite Henry Miller books and got very bummed out when my boss came on the desk. Did she end up answering your question?”

“Actually, I had come up to talk to you because I saw you read Nin's diary. I love her writing. In fact her relationship with Miller is what made me check him out. I had to think of a phony question when you left and your boss seemed a bit peeved when I asked it.”

“Nah, that's just her personality. But that's funny because I decided to read Nin for the same reason you picked up Miller.”

We had one of those very awkward pauses. Then I cleared my throat and asked her, “Would you like to get a bite to eat and head over to the Macrophone? Loretta Martin and Jimmy Mack are both playing sets and given the weather we will definitely hear at least one of them play with some electric instruments.”

“I would like that.”

“Great.”

We went up to the counter and I payed for my records. Then we stepped outside my heart beating somewhat nervously. Having a sudden realization I turned to her, “Sorry, I did not get your name. I'm Val...Val Thompson.”

“Alexandria... Alexandria Stands.”

I'm Glad We Had A Home Birth Even Though Something "Went Wrong"

When we told people we planned to have a home birth we got a few positive reactions, but we had many more people tell us flat out how they thought we were crazy. Others probably felt this way, but had enough courtesy not to say it. These people responded with a long awkward silence as they tried to find the right words. My family voiced a lot of concern. What if something goes wrong? Wouldn't you rather be in a hospital? Well, something did “go wrong” and we are still very glad that our daughter was born at home instead of in a hospital. There are a lot of reasons for that, I will get to them in a bit. But first I would like to tell you how our midwives handled a rather scary situation as well as I had hoped they would.

Monica started having contractions after midnight on January the 5^th. We called our midwives and we also called Monica's parents so they could come and pick up my 2 year old son to watch him for a few days. Both parties arrived early in the morning while Monica's contractions were rather far apart. She labored that morning, able to eat and move around as needed. When it came time to push we moved to our bedroom. Monica was happy that unlike even the most accommodating hospitals she was able to work with gravity and give birth on her hands and knees. The labor went as smoothly as something that painful can go and she gave birth to Sophia shortly after noon on the 5^th. She is beautiful. Monica held her skin-to-skin and nursed her very shortly after she was born while munching on one of my homemade granola bars.

Monica had lost a lot of blood during the birth, as she did when our son Theo was born in a hospital. But it seemed to have stopped and this had happened last time around so everything seemed ok. Then about an hour and a half after Sophia was born Monica began to feel faint. She got very pale. She had hemorrhaged more than I had realized. The midwives helped her expel the remaining blood clots. They quickly got an IV in to start giving her fluids and I heated up some broth to feed her. Then her vein went flat and they could not get another needle in. One midwife gave her oxygen and kept asking her questions to keep her mind engaged while the other tried to find a vein. She was doing a lot better with the oxygen and was now much more awake and no longer seeing spots, but at this point the midwives decided it was safest to call an ambulance.

I held Sophia in my arms and rocked her as I worried about my wife. I knew she would be ok because she looked a lot better than she did a few minutes ago, but I was now worried that they might need to take her to a hospital. Even though this would mess up our plan of having a homebirth and require me to bring Sophia to the hospital so Monica could feed her (I had not set up the car seat yet) I was of course ok with this if it was necessary. I just worried they would make us take her to the hospital even if it wasn't necessary. The ambulance arrived a few minutes later and luckily they were able to get a vein. I felt doubly relieved because not only did they get an IV in her quickly, but they ultimately decided they would not make us transfer her to a hospital. The paramedics were great and commented on how calm my daughter seemed with me. They left and I went to pick up some grass-fed burgers to help Monica replenish her supply of red blood cells.

Now some people might hear this story and see it as a reason to have a baby in a hospital. They would argue that this would not have happened if we were in a hospital. But her hemorrhage was not caused by anything having to do with the home birth. As I stated earlier, she experienced excessive bleeding when she delivered in a hospital. And while there were things about giving birth in a hospital that would have made the situation go a bit smoother, the opposite is also true. Each healthcare modality has advantages, disadvantages and risks to weigh. If Monica had given birth in a hospital she would have already had a an IV catheter in her arm and it would have taken less time to get her hooked up to IV fluids. But after giving birth in the hospital they tried to move her from the delivery room to the recovery room after not eating anything solid for 24 hours. She almost fainted getting up to go to the bathroom. Whereas after giving birth at home our midwives made a point of getting her something to eat promptly and were in no rush to get her out of bed even though she had eaten only a few hours earlier. Sure they had a hard time getting an IV in when her vein went flat, but that is one of those skills comes from a ton of practice. They informed me that they have only had one other case in the last decade where a woman bled as much, so they were not as practiced as the paramedics who hook IV catheters to people all the time. They also had good enough judgement to err on the side of caution and call for help, something they also rarely have to do.

Now that I have dealt with the specific challenges we faced during our homebirth, I would like to address why we wanted to go this route in the first place. All the women in our family, from our mothers to our sisters and sisters-in-law, had given birth via caesarian section. The more we read the more we realized that some of these were unnecessary. There are a variety of reasons for this, but it basically boils down to the fact that we have an overly litigious society and the one thing that OB/GYNs can do to show they have done everything in their power and therefore prevent getting sued is perform a c-section. The mindset of many hospitals also contributes to this. If things are not moving quickly enough they start with interventions which cause complications, or perceived complications. The next thing you know the doctor is telling parents their baby is in danger and they need to do a c-section. If someone is not fully informed this will scare the bejesus out of them and they will quickly give the doctor the go ahead. Other times doctors tell mothers that they must have a caesarian because their baby is too big. We wanted to avoid this.

For our first child we decided to give birth in a hospital, but to hire a doula to advocate for us and help Monica labor. The combination of this, a great hospital, and great OBs allowed Monica to have less interventions and to have a vaginal birth like she wanted. However, we still felt that things could have went better. Her water broke before she started having contractions and where a midwife would have felt more comfortable letting things progress on their own, in the hospital they wanted to get things moving. Monica also did not like the fact that she could not eat to keep up her strength during a very long labor and that the machines and IV restricted her movements.

So for our daughter we opted for a homebirth. It allowed Monica to labor at home where she felt most comfortable. Laboring without pain meds is tough, but in some ways being able to feel the process makes it easier (from what Monica tells me anyway). The midwives let the birth follow its natural course which made the experience more relaxed than at a hospital and allowed us to avoid any interventions. For instance, Monica needed no stitches even though Sophia weighed 9 lbs. If she had been born in a hospital there is a good chance they would have given her an episiotomy for reasons I won't get into.

Instead of waiting to go home from the hospital when it was over, we were already home. She got to eat good food during her recovery instead of hospital food. I did have to play the role of nurse for a few days, but considering all the work Monica did I think I got off easy. We are so happy we had a home birth and want to commend River and Mountain Midwives for the amazing job they did.

Community Sponsored Agriculture

This year our family did something I wish we would have done when we moved to Poughkeepsie the previous year: we joined a CSA. For those unfamiliar with the term, CSA stands for Community Sponsored Agriculture. CSAs vary, but they all have some things in common. Generally, you pay a fee for the season and pick up some fresh local vegetables every week or so. As far as I can gather that seems like the one thing they all have in common. From there they can vary a bit. But this one feature brings a lot of great benefits that are relevant to the mission of this blog. I will start with those then talk a bit about some of the great things I get from my particular CSA The Poughkeepsie Farm Project, which in my opinion is a very good one.

The most obvious advantage of a CSA is that it provides you with produce that is locally grown and therefore also in season, as opposed to something that is not in season and shipped half way across the country, or farther. This reduces your carbon footprint and makes you less dependent on the industrial food system. It also supports an alternative local food source and the people working to grow it.

Of course my reasons for joining a CSA are not entirely altruistic. I get a lot of great things from my membership. The produce I pick up every week is a lot fresher than what I can buy at even the best supermarkets. So it tastes a lot better and lasts longer. I also get exposed to vegetables I have never tasted and in some cases never knew existed. Sometimes these are entirely unfamiliar vegetables, other times they are different varieties of a common vegetable. Still, other times it means eating a part of a plant that simply does not make it to most grocery stores for various reasons (garlic scapes are a good example). Exploring new foods puts you out of your comfort zone and will introduce you to new recipes. This can really help you change things up if you find yourself in a rut cooking the same meals every week.

In the context of this blog CSAs do something else great: they get you used to eating what is local and in season. For many americans this presents a challenge. The typical US supermarket has no seasons and you can get pretty much any fruit or vegetable you want year round. This seems like a good idea at first, but when you actually taste a lot of the produce out of season it simply does not satisfy. For example, I have no desire to eat a tomato outside of tomato season and will simply pick up canned tomatoes for a recipe if I need them out of season. Most supermarket tomatoes are picked while they are still green and ripened using ethylene gas, so they don't taste very good. The greenhouse tomatoes they sell are a little better, but still nowhere near as good as one of the tomatoes that comes out of my garden or CSA between August and early October.

Some research shows that our bodies do better eating fruits and vegetables in their proper season. This might explain why I crave salads more in in the summer and roasted potatoes more in the winter. It also makes sense to get used to eating produce in season now, because shipping some agricultural products long distances might become prohibitively expensive in the future.

I feel very lucky that my particular CSA has some great features. It offers working shares which give you a discount on your membership if you volunteer some of your time. I like this because I get to meet other CSA members who generally have common interests. They give the option of several kinds of jobs to fulfill a work requirement, but I always choose some kind of field work because this allows me to learn more about growing food from the farm staff.

My CSA also lets members pick some of their own vegetables. This saves the staff some work and again puts me out in the field where I can see the source of my food. I often will take my two year old son who loves to help pick (and eat) beans, tomatoes, and berries. This provides a great learning opportunity for him. I also learn a lot. While picking okra this summer, a vegetable I don't have a lot of experience with, an Indian woman and an African-American woman from New Orleans showed me how to avoid picking pods that had become too tough (if the tip bends they are good). In general, the CSA attracts people from many cultures who appreciate good produce.

The opportunity to pick my own vegetable also works out very well because it allows me stock up. One week I might be allowed to pick a pint or a quart of something. But during the peak of the growing season I might be encouraged to take as much of a vegetable as I can carry home. I took advantage of this by picking a shopping bag full of green beans, blanching them, and storing them in the freezer for the winter. This will come in handy because the only drawback of my CSA is that, like the growing season for most crops in my area, it is not year round. Eventually I would like to have season extenders at home that will allow me to grow greens in the winter. But for now I'm back to going to my local grocery store and looking forward to when my CSA starts up again in the spring.

I hope you will look into the CSAs in your area and consider joining. I'm very happy with mine.

A note on my absence:  I have neglected this blog for a while due to Theo's irregular nap schedule, other obligations, and poor time management on my part. I hope to keep posting regularly (at least monthly). I'm also very happy to announce that we are expecting a baby girl around the new year. We plan on having a home birth and I will write a bit about the experience. If you don't want to miss a post please subscribe. Thanks.

Back in September

Sorry I have not posted in a while. I have been busy doing the things I write about here. I plan to have a new post up in the beginning of September and will start posting on a monthly basis instead of a weekly one. I have too much on my plate at the moment. If this changes I will begin writing more regularly again. I also plan to submit a story to the space bat challenge, so keep an eye out for that.

Finally, my brother-in-law who is also a stay-at-home dad writes a great blog. He recently lost his daughter to a stillbirth and he has written a very touching post about it. You should give it a read, but have some tissues handy. 

Allergy Tea Recipe

I like going to herbal remedies first whenever I have any kind of health problem. In my experience they work well, don't cost much, and for the most part carry none of the scary side effects we associate with modern pharmaceutical medicines. So this week I would like to give you my recipe for an effective and great tasting allergy tea that I have used for years to treat my seasonal allergies. I tried over the counter and prescription medications when I was younger, but I really did not like them. One stopped working, another dried me out to the point of extreme discomfort, and another made me incredibly drowsy contrary to the claims made on the package.

For a long time I simply suffered with allergies. Then I came upon a great apothecary in Brooklyn. There I found a tea that worked wonders for my allergies without any side effects. I now drink it everyday to deal with my allergies to pollen, pet dander, and dust (a real problem when you have the windows closed during the cold winter months). I no longer live near the apothecary, but after looking at the ingredient list I have come up with my own version of the tea that works just as well. And since I buy herbs in bulk it costs me even less than I would pay for the tea at the apothecary. There are lots of places to find bulk herbs, but I like to order from Jean's Greens. They have a large selection of organic herbs at great prices and they are just up the river from me.

Allergy Tea

1 Part Nettle Leaf
1 Part Golden Rod
1 Part Ginger Root
1 Part Peppermint
1 Part Sage

Steep 1 Tablespoon of the tea for twenty minutes. Then enjoy. It tastes very good especially with some honey. Depending on the severity of your allergies drink 1-3 cups a day.

Note to nursing mothers: Sage can lower milk production. So nursing mothers should omit this from the recipe.

LESS Toys and TV

Some parents might call me a monster for the topic of this week's blog. Others will likely nod in agreement, or even let out a "well, duh". No matter what you think, it certainly makes me feel like a curmudgeon to suggest that kids don't need a fraction of the toys most of them have. This goes especially for babies and toddlers, but also extends upward in age.

Now this does not mean that my son does not have toys. He has lots of them. Though I feel no shame admitting that I have bought him very few of them. Most came in the form of gifts from friends and family. I bought him a xylophone for his first birthday and I have given him some balls and blocks on other occasions. Like I said, he has a lot more toys than the ones I bought him.

But you know what? He doesn't even want to play with his toys most of the time. I can picture many parents nodding after reading this. It often seems like he wants to play with everything but his toys. He find the "toys" that grown-ups play with much more interesting and a few implements from the kitchen will often occupy him for much longer than any toy he owns. So while I appreciate all the gifts that he has received, I don't feel a need to buy him toys. If someone wants to get him a gift I usually suggest something practical (clothes etc.), or a new book.

Some folks might wonder how I occupy him. Well, unless the weather is very brutal we spend a lot of time outside. He runs around, plays with a ball, inquires into the natural world, and attempts to "help" me in the garden. I let his curiosity dictate what we do most of the time. As long as there are no hazards I let him explore indoors and out.

This saves money and keeps the small home we rent from getting too cluttered with things that don't hold his attention for too long anyway. It also prevents us from spoiling him or overstimulating him. I find the latter a huge problem nowadays. How do we expect a child to focus their attention on one thing when we present them with so many options to divert it? Many parents give little thought to this. They plop their kids down in front of the TV with some toys that flash and sing, then they wonder why their child has a short attention span. But to me ADD seems like the inevitable response to a constant barrage of inane sounds and pictures. For this reason and one I will get to in a second, I also plan to keep Theo away from television as much as possible.

I realize that if I want to continue with the LESS (Less Energy Stimulation and Stuff) approach to toys, that I need to keep the child marketing machine from getting its hooks in my son. Limiting his exposure to commercials should help. Except for a few shows via the internet, my wife and I don't watch much television. Theo does not watch television now and we don't plan on letting him watch much when he gets older. We will probably introduce him to Sesame Street after his second birthday. Though I'm still weighing if and how we will do this. I watched a lot of TV as a kid and I don't think it had a positive influence on me. But I don't have a problem with Sesame Street, especially after a recent study that claims the show helps prepare children for school. In any case, keeping him away from TV should help us in that fight, because the demands for particular products usually come from TV commercials. I know that many of the cartoons I watched as a kid were nothing more than thinly veiled advertisements for the show's line of toys (Transformers, GI Joe, HE-Man, etc.). And I know that advertising to kids has gotten more sophisticated since then.

The services we use to watch TV don't have commercials, so we can keep him away from them at home if, for instance, we decide to let him watch some pre-approved cartoons on weekend mornings while we sleep in. But I know that he will get exposed to advertisements elsewhere. So I imagine that I will need to talk to him about commercials and advertising. He will get exposed to some video content. I can see us watching movies together on weekends, especially in the winter. I have looked forward to showing him Star Wars for the first time since long before he was born.

We will also need to pay attention to the influence other children have on him. But that is a subject for another blog. Ultimately, I know that much of the joy of my childhood did not come from my toys. Far more of it came from the little adventures I had with friends and the active imagination that kept me occupied when I was alone. I certainly don't look back and wish I had more toys, or that I had watched more TV.

Rounding Corners

Our culture has an obsession with cutting corners. Marketing and popular opinion encourage us to do things the quicker and easier way. But this approach often gives poor results whether cooking something in the kitchen or building something in the garage. Cutting corners has become synonymous with shoddy products, yet many of us still fall for the marketing that tells us otherwise. Walk down the center aisles of any supermarket and you will see a plethora of products claiming to make your life easier. Pre-made this and pre-done that. This in a can, that in a bag in a box. Usually this "convenience" comes with a big mark up.

I would like to go against the grain of popular thought and suggest the opposite approach. Instead of cutting corners, we should look to round them. By this I mean that we should look to make things ourselves instead of buying them and we should tend towards using older less energy intensive methods and tools.  It might take a little bit longer, but it costs less and usually gives better results than cutting corners. To help understand what I have in mind I will give an example

I recently started baking my own bread. When I did this instead of buying bread, I rounded a corner. It saves money and makes a better loaf than I would buy at the grocery store. Now I have a lot of experience cooking, but baking is new to me. So I buy packaged yeast. But if I learned how to make a good sourdough starter, I would not need to buy yeast. That would save me more money and make a much more delicious and nutritious loaf than the one I make now (I read good things about the health benefits of eating sourdough). I could round another corner if I milled my own grain instead of buying flour. Although it would require an initial investment in a grain mill, over the long run it would be cheaper to buy grain and mill it myself than to buy flour. Freshly milled grain tastes a lot better and has a lot more nutrients, because it contains the entire grain of wheat. The flour in the supermarket, even the whole wheat flour, has had the germ removed. This allows the flour to store for a long time, but you lose a lot in taste and nutrients. If you look very hard you might find freshly milled flour for sale, but it will cost you a lot more than the flour sold at most grocery stores. I could round another corner by growing my own grain.

Here is another example. I like to garden. This rounds a corner because I produce some of my food right at home. But many opportunities exist within gardening to round corners. For example, I don't have a good space to start seeds at the moment, because my toddler can now reach the spot I used last year. So I buy some plants from a local nursery. However, some seeds grow very well sowed directly into the ground (zucchini, beans, peas, nasturtiums, sunflowers, some lettuces). So I rounded a corner and saved some money by sowing these seeds instead of buying seedlings. If I had a better space to start seedlings I could round another corner and start more plants from seed. I could round yet another corner if I saved my seed instead of buying it. This would require me to learn more about seed saving and to have space suitable for starting seedlings, but I could easily do this given the time and space.

Rounding corners saves money and produces a better end product. I like the phrase because I think it communicates the idea very clearly and simply. At the same time it can be applied very broadly. It also syncs with the principle of LESS (Less Energy Stimulation Stuff). You can round some corners now and get to others as circumstances permit. I had the concept knocking around in my head for a while, but I could not find a good name for it. Doing things the more time consuming way and saving money is a major theme of this blog, so I'm glad I could find a good shorthand for this approach. What corners have you rounded? What corners will you round?