Lift Up Your Hearts!

Green is as green does.

[Quoting Desperate (Green) Housewives] The greenest people are totally unhip and unlikely to be photographed for the Times or a glossy magazine. They’re still wearing their clothes from twenty years ago. They aren’t keeping their home spa-worthy clean. No need to worry about polluting the air with chemicals, if you aren’t dusting every five minutes. They aren’t constantly renovating their kitchens and bathrooms, all of which uses enormous amounts of energy and resources; they are still living with the Formica numbers from the 70s. They aren’t jetting off to Europe to browse the Paris markets; they go bowling in the next town over. They aren’t constantly shopping for new things and tossing out the old things.

Barring the bit about jetting off to Europe (is it okay if the purpose is to visit family?) the author could have been peering in our window.  Good to know we're cool if not hip. (More)

Where does Stephanie find these things?  I'm four days late but have to share this anyway.  If their country is no longer quite as pristine as when I visited 40 years ago, it's not the fault of these intrepid and dedicated Swiss!

Or, if you wish, in Russian, Dutch, or Italian.  Enjoy!

I know—the last thing you need is another blog to read!  And the one I’m about to recommend had several authors and consequently great risk of overwhelming your feed reader.  Especially since nearly all the posts are thought-provoking and well-written.

The Front Porch Republic is new—the first posts were on March 2 of this year—but has already produced so many shareable articles that it deserves its own post.  Treat yourself and subscribe to the Front Porch Republic; they have a Comments RSS feed as well, though I can’t usually keep up with it.  A mark of the quality of this blog (and its readers) is that the comments are so far above the “Your a &%$#& moron!” level seen all too often on websites without benefit of sufficient editorial oversight. (More)

Observant readers may have noted a new category of post, which I’ve labelled “Conservationist Living.”  When considering a title for this particular type of post, my first thought was “Green Living,” but that’s too trendy and not really what I mean.

I was born and raised a conservationist.  I’m not sure what people might mean by that label today, but in my family it meant someone who loved the world of nature, cared for it, and used it prudently and wisely.  Conservationists loved hiking, mountain climbing, camping, and picnics.  They never threw litter on the ground and didn’t waste water.  They knew the rules of the wilderness: how to build a safe fire, pitch a tent on dry ground, keep food out of the reach of bears, dig a latrine that would not pollute the water supply, and leave.  At a conservationist’s home one was likely to find a lovingly-tended garden, with bright flowers and the best-tasting vegetables in the world—and a compost pile. (More)

Today at the grocery store I bought sugar.  This is not a confession; I refuse to feel guilty for the purchase.  After all, displayed prominently on the package was this warm-and-fuzzy logo:

I wonder, though:  What am I going to do with my five-pound bag of H₂₂O₁₁?

Keep Meadows, Not Lawns.  That's the title of a Front Porch Republic post (more on the FPR later), the sole content of which is this 16-minute video:

I have nothing against lawns, per se.  We had a large yard when I was growing up, and its lawn was the perfect surface for our volleyball, croquet, and touch football games, for whiffle-ball hitting contests, picnics, tumbling runs, tag, and running through the sprinkler on a hot summer afternoon.  We didn't baby our lawn, though:  aside from mowing in the summer and clearing of leaves in the autumn it received minimal attention, but it grew tough and we grew up thinking dandelions were a positive addition to the landscape.  That said, we do need to rethink our use of the land, and the resources it costs to keep the now-common sterile, pristine, perfect lawn. Let's not overlook the fact that meadows don't require mowing, except for use as baseball fields—and for that even a teenage boy might crank up the lawnmower without being asked.

Despite the title, however, the video is less about lawns than about bees, what's happening to them, and why this is a serious problem.  It's well worth the investment of 1% of your day to watch.

Declining by Degrees:  Higher Education at Risk premiered on PBS in 2005; I watched it for the first time this week, intrigued by this Netflix summary.

Debunking commonly held notions about the rite of passage known as the college experience, this PBS documentary follows 30 students and their teachers along the path of higher education, from admission to graduation, and exposes the disappointment, disorientation and deflation many students feel—in both public and private schools. This revealing study also addresses the quality and readiness of America's future work force.

"Disappointment, disorientation, and deflation" fairly describes how I felt watching the show.  Here's what I learned: (More)

I grew up on orange juice reconstituted from frozen concentrate, but I have since forgiven my parents.  It was convenient and inexpensive, and oranges did not grow on our New York State trees.  It tasted fine to me, because I didn't know any better.  Why I was so ignorant I'm not certain, since every two years we visited relatives in Florida—and this was in the days before a cooling cycle in the weather teamed with developers to destroy most of Central Florida's citrus groves.  Perhaps orange juice from concentrate simply tasted better to me because that's what I was accustomed to, much as many children who grow up with Aunt Jemima often prefer the imitation to real maple syrup.  Or maybe I simply didn't care enough, but ate what was set before me without giving it much thought.

With maturity came discrimination.  When "not-from-concentrate" orange juice appeared in the grocery stores I winced at the price, but never looked back, as it made the frozen concentrate taste like so much flavored sugar water.  (Later, when I read John McPhee's marvelous Oranges, I learned that flavored sugar water is a fairly accurate description of the product.)  It would be another 20 years before I discovered orange juice that was orders of magnitude better than the best not-from-concentrate available in the grocery stores. (More)

We're not much of a pet family.  We had a cat for a few years, but he didn't get along with the new baby.  He was old and accustomed to having all our attention; he did not like the intruder.  (A few years later she returned the favor by becoming allergic to cats.)  He left for greener pastures, i.e. other family members who returned him to his spoiled, prince of the family position.  As the kids grew older they acquired a few pets—two hamsters and a cockatiel.  We enjoyed them all, and even paid for surgery on a hamster that could have been replaced for $2.50, but I never did understand people who treat their pets like children.  I'm not saying that's wrong, just that it doesn't appear to be part of my makeup.  What's more, we tend to travel a lot, which is a lot easier to do if you don't have pets to worry about.

So...those who know us may be surprised to discover that we have recently acquired some new pets.  Many new pets:  about 2000 red wiggler worms.  They live on our back porch in their own recycled-battery-casing worm condominium.  I've been admiring these garbage-converting little guys for four years, and finally took the plunge with a visit to the Our Vital Earth worm farm in Apopka. There I met Bernie and Carl Moro, both in their 70s and more spry and active than many of us in our 50s.  They started their worm venture as a retirement project after discovering how well home vermicomposting works in Australia. You can see a news story about Bernie and Carl here. (More)

Once again I'm piggy-backing on something Jon posted in Google Reader, but I haven't figured out how to comment on any of the "shared items" in Google Reader yet, and of course I have an opinion that I want to express!  I'm not going to take time to quote the article, called Understanding Generation Y, since my point is more about the principle than the content, but clicking the link will take you to the pdf itself.  It is somewhat interesting, but not, I think, particularly revealing.

When our church invested in a Korg electronic keyboard, everyone was amazed at the quality of the instruments sounds, and how much they sounded like the real instruments—everyone, that is, except those who were most familiar with those instruments.  The pianists hated the piano sound, but thought the flute was great.  The flute players thought the flute sound anemic, but the harp beautiful.  The more you knew about a particular instrument, the less you were satisified with the attempt to distill its sound into something electronic.

So here, I suspect.  I read the supposed characteristics of the Baby Boomer generation and found it only partially true in general and certainly not true of us, yet caught myself accepting the truth of the depictions of other generations. Finding characteristics of myself and those I know in all of the generational descriptions, I'm not convinced these stereotypes are any more accurate or helpful than the horoscopes on the placemats in certain Chinese restaurants. Like the placemats, they can be fun—but dangerous to put much faith in when making real life decisions.

This showed up in my Google Reader feed, from Jon.  I'm not certain, actually, that this was the video he intended, as I had to guess the url because the link didn't work—but whether or not, this is worth posting so you can see it.  Those Welsh shepherds and their dogs are amazing.

This time I had my camera ready.  Click on an image to see the whole, larger picture. (More)

Lord of the Rings fans may remember Shire Year 1420, when "the fruit was so plentiful that young hobbits very nearly bathed in strawberries and cream...."  That's what life has been like at our house for the past few weeks.  It's strawberry season in Florida, and we've been treating ourselves to strawberries on our cereal, strawberry shortcake, strawberry-yoghurt pie, and—fresh rhubarb is also available now—strawberry-rhubarb crisp.  Life is delicious good.

As I try to steer a course between providing too much information and too little, let me attempt to explain what I plan to institute as a general policy with regard to links in my posts.  I provide links to other sites for various purposes:  to give credit where it is due, to provide resources for further exploration of a subject, and/or because I think I can't do justice to the source with a few excerpts.  At the request of several of my readers, what I will try to do is provide enough information within my own post to make it informative and perhaps interesting, providing links for the above-mentioned purposes but not expecting the majority of my readers to follow them.  When I do think a link is particuarly important, I'll make that clear.

I've been thinking about the subject recently, as the amount of information that comes my way continues to expand exponentially.  I like to think of myself as an aggregator for my friends and family, passing on important ideas, worrisome trends, and interesting stories that others might not find; I know that I am grateful to people who provide that service for me.  But I also know that merely being sent a link is no longer particularly helpful.  If I don't know something about the subject, and what's more important, what the sender himself thinks about the link he has sent, I find I'm less and less likely to check it out.  Too much information, too little time.  Since many of my readers have less time than I do, I'll try to provide better service here.