First, special shout out thank you to Andrew and Marcie for their comments regarding politics on my last post. They have served to remind me that I stopped book blogging and started this blog as a way to talk about climate change and politics and all the things that wrap themselves up in our day-to-day lives. Because the personal is political and the political is personal. And the entire point of being a stone in the river is to change the direction of the story towards creating a better world.

Lots of stuff has been coming up lately about capitalism and I was going to take that on today, but it’s big and my day is growing short, so I’ll save that for next week I hope. Onward for today…

Y’all, were you, like me, cheering on Cory Booker in his marathon speech last week? It already has a Wikipedia page! The whole thing was energizing and made me think, at last! Afterwards I saw plenty of articles criticizing the speech as being useless and performative. But it was not useless in my opinion because it got attention, it got people talking, it had me feeling like maybe the opposition to the Trump administration will finally come unstuck. That is no small thing. I sent Booker an email to say thank you.

Of course, a day later when Bernie Sanders brought a resolution to the floor of the Senate to withhold sending yet more 2,000 pound bombs to Israel so they can continue the genocide in Gaza, Booker did not vote yes. In fact, only 14 senators, in addition to Sanders, voted in favor of the resolution. One of my senators voted yes, Tina Smith, and I emailed her and thanked her. The other, Amy Klobuchar, voted no, and I emailed her and told her how disappointed I was, and asked when she was going find some courage to do the right thing to stop the genocide. Baby steps I guess.

I had considered going to the Hands Off rally on Saturday but decided not to. However 25,000 people showed up for it at the state capitol in St Paul. I think I was not missed. While I have been to a few protests, I wrestled with whether to go. Thinking about, and reminding myself about, how we all have a place in the resistance, this is not my place. I am not in general a protest person, though I have been to protests. I’m the person who quietly works in the background instead of standing in a crowd with a sign and shouting. I’m the one who sends a message of love and support for those attending the trans healing ceremony a friend co-hosted. I’m the one growing extra seeds for the community garden a friend who leads a healing program for Native women just acquired. They will be having a planting ceremony at the end of May. I’m the one who asks how you are doing and genuinely wants to know, and listens to your answer. These kinds of actions are just as vital as standing in a crowd of thousands.

As an introvert, crowds exhaust me; too much stimulation. I asked myself if I was making excuses and I am satisfied that I was not. As much I would love to be out there making the big grand gestures, my role is not that. But because I was not exhausted from going to the protest, I was able to be excited and energized by the number of people who did. And I hope those who went can feel held and supported by people like me who attend to the smaller and more personal pieces of things.

Also, I’m tired and needed to rest. I’ve not had any real rest time off from work since the Christmas and New Year holidays. I took Friday off from work because it was my birthday. Did I rest? Weeelllll, kind of?

Friday morning James made me oatmeal raisin pancakes. Then we biked over to Baba’s for lunch. Later, we had cake. James made me a carrot Halwa cake (Indian carrot cake) and banana-based coffee ice cream. A day of deliciousness!

My birthday present to myself is some sourdough making accessories to take it all to new levels. I got a round and an oval banneton and a bench scraper. I tested out the round banneton today with a basic sourdough. The banneton and the scraper worked great and I am so happy to have them. The bread today looks pretty but didn’t come out quite like I had hoped. I had been using half whole wheat bread flour and have white flour and today I used all whole wheat and didn’t get a good rise so the bread is sort of dense. I think the dough needs a bit more water and some more gluten. I read I can add some gluten flour to give it more rise. I will try that next time and see what happens. If it doesn’t work I’ll go back to the half and half.

Spring is finally starting to take hold here. The trees are starting to bloom, ratcheting up my allergies, the rhubarb is coming up, the peony is coming up too. The elderberry has tiny leaves unfurling. The chives are several inches high and the walking onions even taller than that. Friday afternoon we moved a honeyberry bush from one side of the garden to the other. There used to be two honeyberry bushes but two years ago one of them was killed by an invader rabbit. I thought this one was dead too but they sprang to life last summer. There are three honeyberry bushes on the other side on the garden, so we tucked this one in amongst them.

We also did some anti-rabbit perimeter fence repairs and improvements. More to do yet, but I think we are ok at the moment.

Saturday the weather turned windy and cold again so I spent time working out the planting plan for the veg beds. Took me close to two hours to figure it all out. But I got there. Once I start planting there will be revisions most likely, but the overall plan is in place.

And today, it was gorgeous again. I got hot and had to take off my sweatshirt. We began setting up a new compost bin in the chicken garden so we can move all the compost, and hopefully the prospect of any future mouseguests, away from the house. There is a big black round bin in the chicken garden full of composting chicken bedding that we took apart because it is both in the way and will no longer be needed. I carried buckets of lovely compost to spread around the plum, peach, and cherry trees, and still have more to spread around. Yay!

While James worked on pounding in posts for the new bins, I tried to dig up as many sunchokes along the alley fence as I could find. Last year I had the thought of planting a few sunchoke roots along the outside of the chicken garden fence along the alley. I think we planted three, maybe four, roots. But they ended up getting so big they became a hazard for people driving down the alley and I had to tie them to the fence to keep them from causing problems. I don’t want them to come back, but I suspect they will in spite of all the sunchokes I dug out. A mistake I will be paying for the next few years. But now we have a big bowl of sunchokes to eat this coming week, and that’s a good and tasty thing.

Surprisingly, the chickens did not care what we were doing in their garden. They were too busy in our garden. I suspect they might be getting suspicious that we are approaching the time in which they get shut out of the big garden. And they are right! With any luck that will be Easter weekend or the weekend after, whichever one I am able to plant peas. The ground is still frozen solid below the top two-three inches or so. Looking at the long-term forecast, there is no snow, only rain. And after Tuesday the temperatures, both night and day, begin to climb.

The onions are out on the deck this afternoon beginning their slow outdoor acclimation. Indoors, the seed starting operation continues. The free tarragon seeds from the library never sprouted nor did the treasure flower seeds from my friend Care (very sad about that!). In their pots I planted seeds for Honesty and Spilanthes instead. And in additional pots I planted French marigolds.

In other news, we are approaching three car-free years and continue to be really happy about our decision, especially in light of the current tariff and economic situation. Friday morning James and I had some successful problem solving. James got a rear tire flat on Tuesday on his e-bike and has been riding the big cargo bike until we had time to figure out how to fix his tire. It’s not fixing the flat that was the issue, we are old hands at that. The challenge was getting the wheel off the bike. Because he has an e-bike it’s a bit more complicated than an acoustic bike, there are things that need to be disconnected.

It ended up we had to take off the entire derailleur assembly and then after much poking and prodding, I figured out how to unsnap and disconnect the shifter cable that connects into his internal hub gears. Once I figured that out, the wheel came off easy. Then we had to get it back on! When we did and James tested everything to make sure we had put it back together correctly, we felt so proud of ourselves. Teamwork! Problem-solvers! Bike repair pros! Could never have done that with a car.

If you are thinking of going car-free, or perhaps car-light, let our experience inspire you. And also, allow this article about a man in Michigan who went car-free and was able to save enough money to buy a house give you some possibly interesting things to think about.

Reading

• Book: Shikasta by Doris Lessing. This is the first book in Lessing’s 5-book science fiction series. Ursula Le Guin mentions it as being great. Turns out Le Guin isn’t right about everything. Written mostly as a series of reports and documents, the pacing is terrible. Also, spoiler, Shikasta is actually Earth and humans were created by colonizing alien people from the empire of Canopus. But the Evil Empire of Shammat ruined everything and humanity went to Hell in a handbasket. But Canopus managed to save enough worthy humans and genetic material to revive humanity after the nuclear war that took out everyone else. The idea of humanity being constantly manipulated by two warring space empires and the eugenics program Canopus uses both to speed up humanity’s evolution from primates and to try and fix the interference from Shammat with fresh genetics, felt gross and made me angry. Needless to say, I will not be reading any of the other books.
• Legal Brief. Perkins Coie, LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice. One of the things I get to do in my academic law library job is help students with their legal writing, and it isn’t often I get the pleasure of reading a truly beautiful legal brief. Because, contrary to popular belief, we don’t sit around reading legal briefs all day, or very often at all. This brief, however, was filed by Perkins Coie, one of the Biglaw firms fighting back against Trump and his vindictive demands that lawyers and judges bow to his will. Just reading the introduction I was already cheering. They lay out their argument clearly and persuasively, and if they do not win the suit then we truly are fucked when it comes to the rule of law.

Quote

“What an amazing and terrible and beautiful story we are all in together. We are all part of what’s going to happen, and we each have a part in which way the story will go.”

~Joy Harjo

Listening

• Podcast: The Nature Of with Willow Defebaugh: Esther Perel on the Nature of Connection and Modern Loneliness. This is the first episode in a band new podcast from Atmos Magazine and it is shaping up to be a good one. This episode is all about relationships and how our focus on the individual has cut us all off from ourselves, each other, our communities, and the other-than-human world.

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

Along with the birthday deliciousness, we still had some black-eyed peas from last year’s garden and some butternut squash, so James made vegan black-eyed peas and squash quesadillas. I got the original recipe that uses sweet potatoes from the Washington Post. Since I have access to WaPo via work, I’m not sure if the recipe is behind a firewall. If it is, and you want it, let me know and I can give it to you.

He also made red lentil granola, which sounds really weird, but is protein-packed crunchy yumminess! This is the first time he’s made it and he doubled the recipe and that made enough for each of us to have one bowl (his with oat milk, mine with soy kefir) with enough for one bowl leftover. So if you want to make it to have as breakfast with milk or yogurt, be sure to double the recipe.