St Johns + Art

Our homeschool group had the pleasure of a guided tour of the St Johns + Art exhibition by its organizer today. It was a lovely, foggy autumn day, the kind that makes the changing leaves pop as if the trees had all been wired for electricity. Forty different storefronts had art pieces ranging from embroidery to ceramics--so much to look at but sadly very little photographed well through glass so I'm mostly just sharing images from our walk. If you're in Portland you should get on up to St Johns right away as this is the last week of the exhibit.

Sick of It

I was going to share with you a pretty post about lots of recently finished projects and upcoming plans. But my brain's been hijacked today and the following is what happens when you come to a blog whose focus is everything that comes through my head.

I've been reading T R Reid's eye opening book The Healing of America this week in which he details how numerous countries around the world established effective, affordable universal health care systems which make our current setup laughable. Except it's not funny. It's life and death.

And this morning's episode on OPB's Think Out Loud addressed the issue of a mandate as part of health care reform. How, exactly, does a mandate make health care affordable? It seems to me that it's a big old gift, wrapped up in a bow, to the very same for profit insurance companies that have made such a debacle of health care in this country.

Today I read that the health insurance industry can't support the proposed changes. Well boo hoo! How many other businesses have folded in our current economy? Let 'em fold. Then maybe we can start over with a real health care system designed to keep Americans healthy, not make corporate executives even richer.

There are so many ways we can make this work. Medicare for all. Private doctors paid through a public system. Private (but not for-profit) insurers paying doctors. Reid's book opened my eyes to so many ways of getting to what we really need: a health care system that puts people before profits, allows doctors to practice freely (without massive medical school debts and frightfully expensive malpractice insurance), and alleviates the fear of medical bankruptcy that haunts all of us, both uninsured families and those whose coverage is sparse and/or may be terminated at the whim of an insurance company employee.

I hope you'll read Reid's book and then write a letter, call a congressperson, make a stink in some way or another. We need to be loud and clear about real health care reform--it really is about life and death.

Next steps:

If you can't get your hands on Reid's excellent (and very readable) book, this video from Mad as Hell Doctors does a great job of explaining why health care is so insanely expensive in this country. Also--not to be missed-- Keith Olbermann's hour long Special Comment last week on the subject of health care. Here's the transcript if streaming video isn't an option.

Is our system in the US really so bad? Why yes it is. Take a look at this interactive map and see just how poorly we compare to numerous other countries.

Even if you're insured, you may not be once you actually need to use the insurance you've paid for. Googling 'health insurance horror stories" turns up pages and pages of results like this one and this one and this one. Of course Michael Moore's film Sicko (which, ironically, arrived in its cheerful red Netflix envelope the day I came home from an overnight visit to the emergency room without insurance) is another strong indictment of for profit health insurance in the US.

Now what?

Unless you've got a better idea (and please share it if you do) please consider working hard to support a public option in upcoming health care reform. It's the only way to cut into the insurance companies' stranglehold. Write letters, sign petitions, donate money, make a fuss because nothing the Obama administration has proposed to tackle comes close to this in terms of improving the economy and making American citizens healthier and more secure.

My lovely children were dispersed yesterday, the boys to the mountains and my youngest with friends which meant that my husband and I had some unscheduled time alone together on a beautiful, crisp fall day. I almost forgot to bring my camera but I am so glad he reminded me to tuck it in my bag. Sometimes I think I've already taken all the good pictures I ever will, and then the same old street I've walked 100 times surprises me with its colors.

What a treat to spend a fine, relaxed day off with the one I love best.

Fallow

While I know that the last thing one is supposed to blog about is one's lack of blog posts, I just wanted to acknowledge how quiet it's been here.

If you are also a reader of Magpie Eats, you know there's been lots of activity there this summer. I've spent nearly every day in the kitchen, making jam, preparing fruit for the freezer or the dehydrator, or slow cooking tomato sauce for the coming winter. I am regularly making yogurt, cheese, and kombucha and have even given roasting my own coffee beans a go. You may or may not be interested in the details of my kitchen life but what really interests me is how that part of my life seems to be gaining in importance.

I haven't done much else in recent months. There's been surprisingly little knitting and I don't think I've touched the sewing machine since the rickrack sundress back in late June. My garden pretty much runs itself now and was doing beautifully until the evil heat wave struck. My once-thriving tomatoes are just sulking now.

What I am doing is reading, lots of reading, and I thought I'd share a couple of titles with you. I just finished Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of my Stuff by Fred Pearce in which the author traces his stuff (food, clothing, electronics, and more) back to its origins which are always far from home. It's rarely a pretty picture which is exactly why I am grateful Pearce did the digging and shared his findings. From the gold mines of South Africa to the prawn fisheries in the Bay of Bengal, our need for cheap stuff is filled by exploited workers and decimated ecosystems. I am sure we have all had our suspicions, but Pearce rips the lid off a host of social, environmental, and economic disasters and encourages us to take a good hard look. This book was a huge eye-opener for me, but surprisingly not all gloom and doom which made it that much more powerful.

I first learned about Sharon Astyk's Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front from Chris at Lost Arts Kitchen. I have tried to read other books on peak oil, the climate crisis, and economic meltdown but never finished. Usually I start out with the best of intentions and quickly end up putting the book aside and looking for something that will calm my racing heart and allow me to sleep. I have a pretty low threshold for confronting the coming disasters but Astyk's book, read in small bits, kept me reading and, more importantly, thinking. Somehow, even though she is unflinching in addressing the numerous enormous challenges ahead, she manages to present her information in a non-hysterical manner, making it possible for me to read and learn and not fling the book to the floor in a panic. That is no small thing, and I am grateful for her skill. For a taste of her writing, you can visit her blog.

I'll just add one more book, a work of fiction that sucked me in at page one and held me in its richly detailed world for days after I finished it. The Hungry Tide was my second Amitav Ghosh novel and it captivated me even more than the first. Ghosh describes the fascinating world of people who live by the tides in the Sundarbans. Politics, natural history, caste and identity, plus dolphins and tigers made this novel a page turner for me.

Validation

Anyone reading this with kids has probably figured out by now that it's kind of a big waiting game. Once we get past the ever adorable baby/toddler stage and our kids begin to assert their own personalities, we realize that it's maybe not all going to be a piece of cake. Our kids argue and test and push and roll their eyes and swear they'll never make the choices their parents made--or is that just my kids?. They develop interests which their parents can't understand and begin speaking in a language almost incomprehensible to those of us who raise them. Sometimes it seems like they're just really far away and they simply cannot hear us. We might try to guide them but often as not, they insist on doing things their way. And we parents just have to sit back and wait to see how it all turns out.

Every once in a while, though, we get a glimpse of who they are becoming and, if we are lucky, we get to see the part we parents played in that transformation. I was blessed with one of those moments today and it brought tears to my eyes.

It happened, as these things so often do, in the car, while I was driving MonkeyBoy to the bank. He had finally saved up enough to buy his own computer and we were going to move his money into my account since I needed to do the ordering. I think I jokingly said something about how mean I was to make him make this purchase with his own money and then pointed out how lucky he was to be a kid. He could spend his money any way he wanted but we parents had so many things to pay for and often not a whole lot left over.

Then out of the blue, he said, "I think you guys totally made the right choice". I wasn't sure what he was referring to, but then he explained that he thought it really was great that one of his parents was always home, that he and his siblings never had to go to day care or school, and that they could be home schooled. He actually said these things were more important than money and he hoped to be able to raise his kids in a similar way.

We parents don't get to hear things like that all that often so you know I was paying attention!

Sometimes I look at my friends who seem to have it all: lovely homes and cars that aren't one breakdown away from the junk yard, money for vacations and beach homes and endless camps and classes for their kids. Oh, and health insurance. The Spouse and I traded those luxuries for time with our kids, more time than most American families ever get . There have been many, many times when we've questioned the wisdom of taking this route. We've explained this choice nearly every time the kids ask us why we can't take "real" vacations or eat out more often or any number of things that would be lovely but aren't really so hard to do without. I always figured that down the road, perhaps when they had kids of their own and were up against the kinds of choices we've had to make over the years, that hopefully then they might understand why we made the choices we did about money and time and work and family. But I was astonished and hugely gratified to find that my 14 year old already had it figured out.

16

Sixteen years ago today, Simon came into the world and I became a mother. It sounds so simple, doesn't it? But what a day--what a wild ride. I learned so much during my 24 hour labor: that birth plans mean nothing in a hospital (the nurses laughed at mine), that doctors mean nothing in a hospital (mine wasn't to be called until the nurses decided I was ready, which meant that my doctor very nearly missed the birth), that nothing really prepares you for labor (apart from pushing out a baby), that I was so much stronger than I ever imagined, and that time stops when a new baby arrives.

I'm still learning, every day, what it is to be a mother to this boy who's so nearly a man. His siblings will surely benefit from my trials and errors as I try to figure out how best to support him on his journey. I love the person he's always been and the one he's become: bright, observant, witty, and creative.

He's a typical teen full of sass and attitude, but every now and again he breaks out in unstoppable laughter and it's a sound that makes everyone smile. My wish for him is that he has countless opportunities for that delighted laugh to ring out.

A Disjointed Catchall Post

So, yeah, I'm still alive, still cooking and knitting and HATING MY JOB, and pretty much the usual summer stuff really. Nothing terribly exciting, no great thoughts. I tried to write this long, tortured post about (of all things) getting older and dancing and Michael Jackson's death but guess what? It really didn't go anywhere for which you all can breathe a big, deep sigh of relief.

In and around stressing about my job, there's been a lot of canning and jam making and fruit picking and freezing--all good things we'll appreciate in mid winter when there's nothing but bland, mealy apples. Today alone I canned 12 jars of blueberry marmalade which is good stuff. And then there are the cherries. The cherries!

I've managed to make two sundresses for The Princess, one of which you see here.


I even sewed on some vintage rickrack (in a straight line!) from my bottomless collection of other people's discarded craft items. I'm pretty pleased with the outcome and hoping sundress weather returns soon.

What else? I just glanced at my computer clock and noticed that--eek!--I am officially 44 which is pretty much cronehood, isn't it? That must be why I snapped up the high heeled dancing shoes and lime green sweater at the thrift shop today. There's only so much doomsday reading a girl can take before rebelling. Maybe I will grow up next year.