imple Vegetarian | Preparing to hibernate

The Troll and I have been busy preparing our cave for winter.  We spent much of last weekend transferring about 700 cubic feet of insulation from the basement (where it sat in tightly wrapped bundles) to the attic (where it now lies in a nice solid pink blanket).  The in-between stages of this process weren't nearly as neat; at the end of the day, I vacuumed up so much fiberglass from the hallway that the brush attachment looked like a wad of cotton candy.  But the effort was well worth it; we got the insulation in place just in time for the first frost of the season, and as the outdoor temperature dropped into the 20s, our house stayed a cozy 60 degrees.  Tonight's projects will include lubricating the boiler pump so we can fire up the heating system, wrapping up the air conditioner in its winter blanket, and attempting to salvage whatever fruits are left on our tomato plants.

I'm actually quite enjoying this whole process of settling in for winter.  It makes me feel all cozy and domestic.  Once the cold weather arrives in earnest, I'll probably be much grumpier about it, but right now it's, "Yeah, hot soup, wool sweaters, football games!  Bring it on!"

imple Vegetarian | Internet Dependence

I in no manner observed out how lots of my time I become frittering away at the Internet till my cable have been given taken out by way of excessive winds this beyond Tuesday. All of a sudden I determined I modified into getting round to all the ones little projects I'd been removing for weeks because of the fact I ought to never pretty locate the time for them.

Unfortunately, that benefit did not definitely outweigh the downside of being not able to run to the pc and cope with all of the ones little things that pop up a dozen times over the route of an afternoon. E-mails piled up in my inbox, and I can also want to simplest attend to the urgent ones in 1/2-hour blocks on the general public computers on the library. Worse than that, within the final week earlier than the election, I was cut off from realclearpolitics.Com, my supply of the up-to-the minute polling records that I required a very good way to obsess over minute everyday modifications within the electoral map. And, in what may be the great irony of all, I needed to pay my cable invoice by means of manner of mail, in area of the use of my on line invoice fee carrier, due to the truth I changed into afraid that I would not get it paid on time if I needed to stay up for the enterprise to get the cable regular.

So I am compelled at ultimate to widely known that, with out dependable Internet get proper of entry to, my life isn't always entire. For higher or worse, I am now a cyborg.

imple Vegetarian | On Wealth

Last year, my father-in-law gave us a bunch of old glass-top canning jars found at a yard sale.  Since we don't have a canner, we decided to use them to store a variety of dry beans and seeds we had in our pantry.  They're now lined up in a colorful row on the shelf next to our basement stairs--white beans, red lentils, chick peas, kidney beans, brown lentils, black beans, sunflower seeds.  Every time I pass by that row of jars on the way up or down the stairs, the word that pops into my head is "wealth."

The jars themselves, with their contents, probably aren't worth more than 30 dollars.  But when I look at them, I don't just see the beans themselves: I see curried red lentil soup, chick peas in broth with crisp bread crumbs, pasta fagioli, chili, white bean stew with dumplings.  I see a dozen hearty, savory meals, right there at our fingertips.  I see the means to make it through a week-long blizzard, if we ever have to, safe and well-fed.  Those are not just seven jars of beans; those are seven jars of security.

Sometimes I think Jack in the fairy tale was perfectly sensible to trade away his old cow for a handful of beans.  What could be a better investment than that?

imple Vegetarian | Where Have All the Bread Makers Gone?

My dad stated that he changed into contemplating changing their antique bread system, which become the very earliest model made. It's massive, bulky, and noisy, and it makes bizarre cylindrical loaves which are awkward to slice. So my sister and I decided to present them a ultra-modern bread maker as a Hanukkah present. Simple, right?

Not so much. The Troll and I visited four different stores that one would expect to carry this kind of small appliance: Sears, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, and PC Richard, a big electronics/home appliance store. We saw all manner of microwaves, coffeemakers, convection overs, rice cookers, and "portable wine cellars," but not one single bread machine. It was like being in an episode of the Twilight Zone--every bread machine on earth had suddenly ceased to exist, and we were the only ones alive who knew that there ever was such a thing. We could find any other type of electrical appliance imaginable, including some that we'd never imagined (an electric wine-uncorker?) but not the one we were looking for.

I called up my sister and she started searching the Web for stores that would have it in her area. Since she lives in the big city, she ought to have more shopping options, right? Well, not exactly. She found exactly one store that carried a bread machine--Williams-Sonoma--and they only had the fancy $200 model, not the modest $60 one we had in mind.

So then I figured I'd have to order the bread machine online. My parents wouldn't get to unwrap the machine itself, but we could at least present them with a description, printed out from the Web, of the new toy that would eventually show up on their doorstep. A quick Google search turned up several sites that had the right model listed for around $40 (plus shipping, of course). Unfortunately, every site I tried to order it from said the item was out of stock or on back order. One of them initially claimed to have the machine in stock and allowed me to place an order, only to e-mail me back two hours later informing me that the item was out of stock and apologizing for any inconvenience.

At last, I came to realize that, if I was ever going to succeed in my mission, I was going to have to resort to truly desperate measures. It chilled me to the core, but I knew I had no choice.

I would have to go to Wal-Mart.

Please understand, I had never set foot in a Wal-Mart before, and I had more or less sworn that I never would. I hate just about everything about that company, from its labor practices to its predatory pricing to its insistence on selling bowdlerized versions of popular music. (The list goes on and on and on... PBS made a whole documentary about it, and Brave New Films did the same.) So I had always viewed the Big Blue Box as a symbol of everything that's wrong with American capitalism, and while I was willing to admit that the other big boxes where I shopped (Target, Home Despot, etc.) were probably far from virtuous, I had always considered Wal-Mart the one place where I absolutely drew the line. And now that line was about to be crossed.

I must admit, once I gritted my teeth and stepped across the threshold, the whole trip was quick and really quite painless. It took us probably ten minutes to find what we wanted on the shelf, take it up to the checkout, and walk out again. In fact, after all the rigmarole I'd gone through trying to find this machine elsewhere, it was almost laughable how easy the trip turned out to be. All the same, I still felt kind of dirty afterward. I consoled myself with the thought that I really hadn't given Wal-Mart my business in preference to any other retailer--there simply was no other retailer willing to sell it to me.

I can't help wondering, though: if this bread machine is so popular that all of the online stores have it backordered, then why was Wal-Mart the only bricks-and-mortar store that carried it?

imple Vegetarian | Gratitude

At Thanksgiving dinner, my circle of relatives does not

I'm thankful that we took over a year shopping for a house because we absolutely insisted on staying within our price range, rather than taking advantage of low interest rates to buy a bigger house with a fancy adjustable-rate mortgage. I'm thankful that our house isn't among the 1 in 410 in our state that's currently in foreclosure.

I'm thankful that last year we kept so much money in our boring old bank account, earning a trivial rate of interest, instead of putting it all in the stock market to maximize our return.

I'm thankful that my being without work for the past couple of months hasn't really hurt us financially, because we live frugally enough to get by easily on one income. I'm thankful that we're not among the millions of people scrambling for minimum-wage jobs at federal employment centers. I'm thankful that this year we are still giving money to our local food pantry rather than relying on its services.

I'm thankful that I don't live in the Congo or the West Bank. I'm thankful that, if my country is involved in a war, it's all happening far away from me and my family--and I'm thankful that we will soon have a president who is prepared to set a date for ending the war altogether and bringing the troops home.

I'm thankful that my best friend, who was in the hospital for over a month with a dangerous heart arrhythmia, is now recovering, able to work again if not yet able to go dancing. I'm also thankful that he had a job waiting for him when he got out of the hospital after going for nearly a year without work. I'm thankful that he is engaged to a sweet woman who is taking good care of him during his recovery.

I'm thankful that my sister has found both a good man and a good house to share with him--and that she was able to sell her condo, even in a down market.

I'm thankful to have a wonderful, supportive (if goofy) husband, and a warm, fuzzy little cat to keep me company around the house (even if she does loudly request that we get up and feed her earlier than we might consider reasonable).

I'm thankful that we were able to get our attic insulated before the really cold weather hit.

I'm thankful that gas prices have come down (just in time for our annual cross-country drive next month to visit the Troll family). I'm also thankful that, despite the lower prices, Americans are continuing to drive less and pump less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

And I'll be very thankful to spend just one day focusing on all the things I have to be thankful for, rather than on the things that bug me.

imple Vegetarian | And ten percent of nothing is, let's see...

According to this newsletter within the New York Times, humans in the meanwhile are willing to shop for up Treasury securities at 0 percentage yield. That's zero as in nothing. Nada. Zilch. The identical amount you get placing your money underneath the mattress.

Now, I recognize instances are lousy and the markets are risky and those are scared of losing money, but--can't you still earn 4 percent or so placing your cash in a simple-vanilla CD? And isn't that identical to, let's have a look at, kind of four percentage greater than zero? I suggest, what, are the shoppers afraid that each one the banks are going to fall apart at once, bankrupting the FDIC and leaving them with not anything?

Hey, perhaps the government can enhance the cash desired for the bailout with the resource of persuading traders to shop for Treasuries at terrible hobby.

imple Vegetarian | So Crazy It Might Work

The Troll and I are within the process of refinishing our basement. Actually, we've been inside the technique extra or much less ever due to the truth that we bought the house 18 months in the beyond--tearing out paneling, repairing partitions and ceilings, installing new lighting. But the present day stumbling block is the floor. The floor's now not pretty stage, so carpet, tile, or laminate would possibly require the set up of a subfloor. In addition to the price, this will consume up approximately half an inch of location from an already low-ceilinged room, and there may not additionally be room for it under the baseboard heaters. So my idea turned into to stain the concrete--till we were given round to tearing up the antique vinyl floor and noticed what the concrete looked like under. Not pretty.

So my next idea became to colour the concrete, but I modified into unsure approximately what form of paint to use and the way to comply with it. I favored some element environmentally benign, no longer too high priced, and smooth to apply--and of direction, I preferred it to look exquisite too. Then the day prior to this I got here across this weird but exciting concept: paper-bag decoupage. Basically, you tear paper luggage (or brown kraft paper) into odd portions, observe them in overlapping layers to the ground (various sources have suggested the use of wallpaper paste, water-based polyurethane, or a 50-50 dilution of Elmer's white glue), and seal the entirety with 5 or six coats of poly. The finished product has been defined as looking like natural stone (however a good deal softer underfoot) or distressed leather-primarily based. You can comply with a stain, too, if you need a color apart from the natural brown paper-bag finish.

It sounds crazy, however the extra I think about it, the greater it looks as if precisely what we want. Of route, our grocery save would no longer have paper luggage, so we'd truely have to buy the paper. But it seems like, for an investment of a day's labor and the value of a gallon of poly and a roll or of kraft paper, we should have an appealing floor end that might additionally make a terrific communique piece. And the beauty detail is, if we did no longer find it irresistible, we have to commonly paint over it, that's what we have been planning to do anyway.

So in which is the evident flaw in this plan that I'm overlooking?