Tag Archive for 'web-link'

Since We Last Spoke

I’ve been busy lately and haven’t had too much time to update this thing. Here’s a rundown of the past month.

We bought a Toyota Prius. Barcelona Red. Love it.

Laura and I have been doing lots of planning for our house. Learning about concrete foundations, suspended concrete decks, solar power, standby electric generators (and the fact that ALL of them run on fossil fuels), rainwater harvesting, low power refrigerators, split ductless air conditioning, induction stove tops, composting toilets, water tanks, ceiling fans, doors, windows, and UV water sterilizers. Whew! Eventually we are going to write about it all over at Our Farm Adventure, which is just getting off the ground.

We’ve also been working on a year-long road trip through the U.S. and Canada that we’re going to take when I graduate in 18 months. We going to start in Georgia, go down and up Florida, across the Gulf Coast through Texas to Big Bend National Park, then up through New Mexico to see caves and desert, north to Denver, west to Salt Lake City, south to the Grand Canyon and Phoenix, west to San Diego, meandering north through California, Oregon, Washington, and B.C… and then… to Alaska! After Alaska, it’ll be back down through Alberta to Yellowstone National Park, northeast-ish to Winnipeg, east over the Great Lakes, to Toronto and Niagara Falls, then back north again to Ottawa and Montreal, south to Burlington, VT then east to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, north to Québec, northeast along the south side of the St. Laurence river to the eastern peninsula at Parc National Forillon, then south through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, then back towards Maine and finally south down the Atlantic coast home to Georgia. Fun! Got any ideas of specific places we should go or things we should see? Let us know.

A few weeks ago, we went to Georgia to check out our land and see family. Laura learned to use a machete. I got chiggers (sorry, no pics). Maybe next time we’ll make more progress on the land… because we’re never coming in the summer again (too many bugs). Hello, October! But we did discover that Toccoa has a beautiful downtown (even if it’s kinda sad in a historical context, like most small towns). One thing we do love? The Amtrak station. While we were down there, we saw my dad, my PaPa and MaeMae, MeeMa, Aunt Nina, and brother Whit.

I got a writing gig over at Accidental Hedonist. I’ve been reading Kate’s food blog for some time now. 3, 4 years? I forget. Anyway, my articles go up every Wednesday until the end of December. You can read the introduction to get a feel for what it’s about, or check out the first entry on Okra

Agriculture No Longer #1

For the first time in 10,000 years, farming is not the dominating industry.

Damn.

We’re screwed if the “services” industry is taking over agriculture.

More accountants, less food?

Farmer’s Markets vs Grocery Stores

Interesting discussion about prices and produce quality.

Michael Ruhlman and Russ Parsons Duke It Out over U.S. Agricultural System

(Be sure to follow everything he linked to, including back-story)

I’m skeptical of the claim that Farmers’ Markets are more expensive overall.

Ishmael

Ishmael

He Lives.

Why I Don’t Drink Bottled Water

I’ve always pretty much thought that bottled water was a scam. Essentially, why pay for something that you can get for free? Why are people so fucking lazy that they can’t go out and buy a stainless-steel (or lexan) water container and refill it from the tap? I really don’t get it. Really, send me 10 cents and I’ll bottle up some air for your dumb ass while we’re at it.

Seriously, does no one care about the future of the planet? Or is everyone just so self-absorbed in their suburban, alienated, Wal-Mart world that they can’t see the bigger picture?

Why not buy a re-usable water bottle? Anyway, this article on bottled water over at Fast Company sums it up nicely:

Message in a Bottle You can buy a half-liter Evian for $1.35–17 ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. That water seems cheap, but only because we aren’t paying attention. In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It’s so good the EPA doesn’t require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000. . . . Packing bottled water in lunch boxes, grabbing a half-liter from the fridge as we dash out the door, piling up half-finished bottles in the car cup holders–that happens because of a fundamental thoughtlessness. It’s only marginally more trouble to have reusable water bottles, cleaned and filled and tucked in the lunch box or the fridge. We just can’t be bothered. And in a world in which 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water, and 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water, that conspicuous consumption of bottled water that we don’t need seems wasteful, and perhaps cavalier.



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