sastyk | September 13, 2012I have more to write, but it may get done tomorrow, or maybe after Rosh Hashana, depending. Right now I'm just recovering from the frantic compulsive worrying and cleaning the preceded my annual home inspection to remain a foster parent. I shouldn't have worried, but I do - our way of life is sufficiently different from that of most of the caseworkers that I never know how they will take it, but it went fine. They are far more worried about my smoke detectors and how many beds we have than they are about anything else, and they never notice that I scrubbed under the washing machine (as far…
sastyk | September 6, 2012Shockingly (or not so much, if you read here regularly), despite the supposed improvements in the economy, more and more American families are struggling to put meals on the table. The USDA reports a record 46.7 million American households are on food stamps. 17.9 % of American households (up 700,000 from 2010) didn't have enough food at least some of the time. In addition, the number of households with "very low food security" - meaning people regularly go hungry rose by almost half a million households - as high as at the height of the economic crisis. Notably, this is data that covers…
sastyk | September 6, 2012Love this weather report - check it out! Of course it is time to fire up the barbecue!
Sharon
sastyk | September 6, 2012There has been a fair amount of hoohah about a Stanford Study that suggests that organic foods are no more nutritious than conventional foods. This shouldn't be a shock, but many health claims have been waved about over the years that say otherwise. The Atlantic's Brian Fung rightly points out that only over the last few years has the discussion shifted to imply that nutritional content is why we grow organic - in fact, that's not how the organic movement started. The reality is that such claims are hard to evaluate - what varieties are you comparing? Is this industrial or small scale…
sastyk | September 6, 2012End of summer is a really good time to sit down and look at your preparations and your food storage and take inventory. What have you put by? What do you still need more of? What did you use over the last year? What did you have too much of? Whither from here? September is National Emergency Preparedness month, so now is the time to think - am I ready for the next crisis (do you even have to ask whether there will be one?)
If you’ve been working on this, but you don’t feel you are ready, here are some questions to ask yourself, and some possible remedies if things aren't where you want…
sastyk | August 23, 2012M. is back with her view from how the class is going - after an amazingly brief pause to give birth to a new baby!
o my week 4 update was simply labor, labor and more labor. We finally had the baby! We are home and healthy. And I get to brag that he was born in a bathtub (it was a water birth)! Do you think he will appreciate that when he's twelve? After another sleepy week off, I am back with week 6.
The class has been slowly zeroing in on brainstorming solutions to some of the more mundane issues of low power living. Things like sustainable rat population control, stockpiling toilet…
sastyk | August 23, 2012I find the ways we define ourselves by what we eat fascinating. We do this project of self-definition both through what we DO eat and what we refuse to eat. In Martin Jones' fascinating book _Feast: Why Humans Share Food_, he observes that our taboos about food can be so powerful that they are actively detrimental - observing that are indications that ancient peoples in coastal areas have had such a strong taboo against the ocean and fishing that they starved to death with easy access to plenty of fish. Most of us have a powerful sense, instilled culturally, about what we do and don't…
sastyk | August 21, 2012So apparently in my sleep-deprived, brain rotted state, I managed to leave out the start date of my food storage and preservation class - it starts on Thursday, August 23rd, ie, this Thursday. I still do have spaces, and as it is asynchronous and online, you don't have to be able to drive to my house ;-) (which is probably good, since it isn't very clean at the moment.) It will help all of us build up that reserve and deal with the summer's glut before the long winter (and high foot prices) to come! Email me for more details or to register at jewishfarmer@gmail.com. Cost of the class is $…
sastyk | August 14, 2012It is hard to believe that summer is coming so rapidly to a close, and that the opportunity to put up for winter will pass so fast. So if you'd like help and guidance in doing so, I'll be running my food storage and preservation class starting Thursday, August and running for six weeks into October. The class is online and asynchronous and will cover everything from putting up the summer's glut to building up food storage and a reserve to help temper hard times. That's going to be particularly important this year with predictions of skyrocketing food prices due to drought and other…
sastyk | August 14, 2012On my lap, I’ve got a set of school books that date from the 1850s to the 1890s. They belonged to various of my father’s family – my great-uncle, George Hume, who died long before I was born and studied Eaton’s Common School Arithmetic in Amesbury, MA in the late 19th century, 20 miles from where I would go to school 100 years later. The majority belonged to my great-grandfather, Edgar White, who studied latin and algebra in Jonesboro, Maine, and later went on to teach school in Cheshire, Connecticut, using the same books. My grandfather’s books were mostly published in the 1860s, right…
sastyk | August 9, 2012I don't think I really recognized how much stuff I've avoided dealing with by only having boys until I read _Cinderella Ate My Daughter_ by Peggy Orenstein. You see, despite the fact that I joke about living in the testosterone house, or being the only female in a house of guys (until C. and K. recently returned to their family, there were 8 males and me - now we're down to a mellow six males), my boys are growing up in a household without much in the way of rigid gender roles, or their toys. Given the combination of no girls and no tv, I am only vaguely aware of phenomena like Miley…
sastyk | August 9, 2012Hi Folks - So I had so many responses to the free book giveaway (between here, facebook, private email and the other site, 149 unique entries) that I decided to give three signed books away. The boys had an awesome time picking names from the hat, and the winners are:
JRB (entered at www.sharonastyk.com)
Johanne Perry (entered at Science Blogs)
and Khadijah (entered at Science Blogs)
Please email me with your address at jewishfarmer@gmail.com and I'll get them in the mail to you ASAP!
Didn't win? All is not lost, you can order one, or I would also consider bartering (and I also have a…
sastyk | August 2, 2012So I somehow forgot to mention when I went on maternity leave and promised to post on Thursdays that I meant I would start this Thursday, since I was on vacation last week. Sorry 'bout that. I will shamelessly blame the baby and sleep deprivation again.
We spent much of last week visiting family near Boston, which was lovely - the transition with K. and C. really took it out of us. I'm not a high-stress person, I tend to be pretty relaxed, but we really needed a break after two very hectic weeks and a lot of emotion. Among other things, we had sent K. and C. home two days before the movie…
sastyk | August 2, 2012I somehow forgot to draw your attention to Kurt Cobb's wonderful essay on the difference between oil and "liquids" - he does a better job than anyone I know in making clear what most Americans simply don't know about our energy - all liquid fuels are not equivalent. We have been told by implication that they are, and most people are not technically literate enough about oil and energy issues to understand the difference, so it looks like there's plenty of oil - but of course, this isn't oil at all. We could just as easily call it "oil."
But first, an important question. Why do government…
sastyk | August 2, 2012Let us begin with the clear statement that asking whether you have to believe in climate change in no way alters the fundamental scientific consensus, or the tens of thousands of peer reviewed papers. I personally think the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is very clear. But that doesn't change the fact that global warming at this point is viewed as an ideological issue, rather than scientific one, and that many people do not believe that it exists, or that humans cause it. In fact, while recent extreme weather has shifted the culture somewhat, it seems safe to say that a solid…
sastyk | July 25, 2012M. is due with her baby any minute now, so at some point there may be a hiatus, but for now, she's got a lot to say about what her family is thinking about. You can read her bio here.
This week I did some very hard work for this class. I have to admit, it wasn't anything exactly on the homework, but there is a hard decision my family needs to make and this class has allowed me to approach it from a new angle and I think opened up the discussion more between me and my husband. Basically, we have to decide whether to stay in Maryland, where we have a lot of friends, a pleasant house and…
sastyk | July 20, 2012Hi Folks - The more I look at my life, the more I think I'm not doing things as well as I could be - too many balls in the air. Many of the things I care about are paying a price. The addition of the chronic sleep deprivation that goes with a new baby is pushing me to strip down my life to the bare minimum.
What's frustrating me most is that writing and online work are taking up time I should be spending on sustainability measures - while I'm writing about the joys of pickling, I'm not actually making pickles with the kids. For a long time this was manageable, but right now, with a two…
sastyk | July 19, 2012It is easy to get fixated on the big things that you need to do to have an impact. You need to build a barn, buy a higher-mileage vehicle, pay down the mortgage, build a three month stash of food. These are big or biggish projects, and often they depend on you finding time and energy and money in a world where those resources are limited.
I notice that when I'm fixated on big projects I can't get done, I tend to ignore smaller ones that would be really useful. If I don't have time or energy or money for the big things on my list, I can forget the other kinds of projects - low input, high…
sastyk | July 19, 2012Every time my life settles down enough for me to return to regular blogging, crazy stuff happens. First there was the sudden arrival of newborn baby Z. - we were called at 2:30 pm and by 4:30, Eric was picking him up at the hospital. Since normally one gets more than umm...two hours to prepare for the arrival of a new baby, we were a little discombobulated.
Then there was much back and forth insanity as the County and C. and K.'s family attempted to make possible a visit from across the US to our area. We didn't know until last Friday whether it would happen - and all of a sudden it was. …
sastyk | July 19, 2012M.'s latest update (see the first post for her bio) on what it is like to take the class. It is funny - I always worry I'm not providing enough reading material for people. Apparently that may not be a critical issue ;-).
This class is very different from any other I've taken. There are a lot of suggested readings, let's just say many of them have been posts from Sharon's blog and we know how long those can be! But there's also the class discussion, which is online. That alone is new to me, I've never taken an online class before.
Something I'm noticing every time I read through the…