My experience BaRACKing the vote

I know my month-long absence means nobody will be reading this, but - I'm back, nonetheless.

Gentle Reader, trust me when I say you've been better for my absence, because I have been pathologically obsessed with the election and the polls. It's not pretty, though I know I'm not alone. The other night we had dinner with my friend Megan, and at one point I heard myself saying "I feel so much better after talking to you because you're WAY crazier than I am."

In the past few days I attempted to channel my anxiety into something other than obscene amounts of cable news-watching and internet poll-checking, by knocking on doors for the Obama campaign. These folks are crazy-organized, let me tell you. You get your list of people, with their polling place and ballot type, and a map. You get literature and talking points and a phone number to call for anyone whose absentee ballot went missing, or who has a problem with their voter registration. So off I went.

Both times, I was assigned to some hard-knock parts of my neighborhood. These were some of the lowest-income areas of a low-income part of town. And it says something in Seattle when you can spend four hours knocking on doors, and only talk to one white person. I also only talked to two undecided people, and no McCain voters. So really I spent my time making sure people knew how to vote. And boy, was that satisfying.

I encountered a number of people who had questions about where to vote, or who hadn't received their absentee ballot, so I was (hopefully) able to help them actually vote. I met so many first-time voters, including many recently naturalized citizens. They were so excited, some of them invited me in so they could run through what they needed to do and make sure they understood. I met a family of east African women, all voting for the first time, who proudly reported that they'd already mailed in their ballots, and then they erupted into a happy kind of dance, cheering "Obama, Obama, Obama!"

At one point I caught a woman who was heading to her car, and she looked wary when I approached her. I explained my purpose, and she affirmed that everyone in her house knew what to do and that they were all voting Obama/Gregoire. As I walked away, she pulled up next alongside me in her car. "You know, I'm from Africa," she said, "and recently I was back home for a visit. And in Africa, they are all watching us. The world is watching what we do in this election. It is terribly important, because our choice will affect the whole world."

I don't know what it would be like to do get-out-the-vote work in Georgia, or Indiana. Maybe different, maybe not. But here, it was so inspiring. Not only to see all these people inspired to vote, excited about casting their first vote, determined to vote for change. But even just to get deeper into this neighborhood that I've called home for nearly 15 years, to walk down a block that intimidates me a little bit because I stand out so much, and to meet these people who are my neighbors, so different from me and from each other in many ways, but all holding firm to the belief that our vote can make a difference to the world.

A PS re: Obama and Africa - a relevant Doonsbury...

So scary, yet I can't stop looking

I'm sure everyone's seen Tina Fey's wickedly good impersonation of Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric, but...It took me a while to realize that for the scariest part - the answer about the bailout - Fey was simply quoting Palin, nearly verbatim.

The skit:
http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/couric-palin-open/704042/

Ok, so she did add the part about the dollar value meals. Which was pretty funny. Here's the text of the original interview:

"But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the -- oh, it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track.

"So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, um, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is part of that."*

*From the Seattle PI.

More on our first direct blow from the economy's collapse

Apparently the FDIC took over the bank, and literally auctioned it off to the highest bidder. The newspaper this morning has some helpful updates on what our that means to us - regular, everyday depositors, mortgage-holders, and shareholders. I paraphrase...

Depositor: Your new bank is JPMorgan Chase. Your money is safe. Please do not panic.

Borrower: Your new lender is JPMorgan Chase. Please continue to make payments as usual.

Stockholder: JPMorgan Chase bought WaMu from the FDIC, not from its shareholders. You will receive nothing.

So that pretty much sums it up for us.

They also have a few words for the employees:

Employee: Your new employer is JPMorgan Chase, who sent you an email last night asking you to please come to work this morning. Branch employees are probably pretty safe, because there is so little overlap between the banks' branches. Headquarters employees (about 3,500 people) are probably screwed, eventually.

And, a new twist on the real estate slide: WaMu is also downtown Seattle's largest tenant, with about 1.6 million square feet of office space. Fire sale on office space!

Where's George Bailey when you need him?

In other news, my bank collapsed today.

"The largest bank seizure in American history!" It's so exciting to be a part of history, isn't it?

Of course, I've been working on getting our money out of there. I have new bank accounts all ready to go, and we're going the credit union route this time - I'm done with greedy, adrenaline-junky executives who take crazy risks with your money and then pocket a bagillion dollars on the way out.

I initiated fund transfers on Monday, but they haven't gone through, yet. I guess they've been a little overwhelmed, what with me and my fellow WaMu customers withdrawing $17 billion, or 9 percent of the bank's assets, in the last ten days. So I guess I'll just have to have faith in the good old FDIC. And, it appears, JPMorgan, who just bought my checking and savings accounts at bargain-basement prices. I have no idea who owns my mortgage.

We're also shareholders in our bank - which used to be a fine, venerable institution, and a solid investment - and that's a TOTAL loss. But we've known that for a long time.

Strange times, indeed.

Vote Obama. Please, for the love of whatever deity you worship. Stop the madness.

Locavorism update

One of the things I was doing while not blogging of late, in addition to taking vacations and re-starting the book, was the continued pursued of locavorism. Many aspects of this way of life have now become habit - the farmer's market, bread-baking, using honey instead of sugar. The juice and the milk that we buy has the added benefit of coming in returnable glass bottles (the old deposit system), which adds the satisfaction of reducing our waste. I know, glass is recyclable, but the world can only absorb so much recycled glass.

One thing that didn't go so smoothly was my quest for canning tomatoes. Because we had The Summer That Wasn't here in the Northwest, the tomato crop was rather sad, and in particular, there was a near-complete absence of canning varieties. That would be the meaty ones, the Romas and San Marzanos and such.

I had in my head that I would attempt to put up some of the foods that would not otherwise be available in winter, rather than import them from California or Mexico. I canned 12 pints of cherries and four quarts of peaches. I roasted and froze five pounds of peppers, blanched and froze a couple pound of green beans. I purchased, and have stored in neat glass storage jars, two quarts each of dry kidney, red, black and garbanzo beans.

But the tomatoes proved elusive. Week after week I would ask around at the farmer's market, even visiting other markets. People had a few canners here and there, but not enough to make it worth the effort. Twice I received an absolute promise that they'd be there the next week, at another market...only to be disappointed.

Finally I saw a box of decent-sized Romas at one stand in the U District. I bought their whole stock - 20 pounds, at a 10 percent discount. I brought them home and cleaned them, skinned them (after a quick dip in boiling water), and then hot-packed and canned them in quart jars.

How many quarts do you get from 20 pounds of raw tomatoes? Ten. I might have canned more the next weekend if I could've found them, but alas. Nothing but slicers and cherries to be had. And yellow tomatoes, which aren't acidic enough to can safely.

One interesting thing about the locavore experiment is thinking about what really is better for the environment. So: growing summer produce year-round using greenhouses and irrigation, and then trucking it all over the country, uses an unsustainable amount of energy and water. Fine. What was required to produce my ten quarts of canned tomatoes?

I bought them from a local organic farmer. Good. They cost me $55 - that's $5.50 per quart, just to start. Then there's the cost of the jars, which I'm not really counting because they're reusable, though the flat part of the two-piece lid can't be re-used for canning purposes. So add a few cents for that. Then there was the lemon juice needed to ensure a safe level of acidity (tomatoes being right on the PH bubble, in terms of being inhospitable to botulism). And then lots of boiling water: the initial boil to loosen the skin, the boiling water to fill up the jars, and enough to fill a 20-quart canning kettle. Lastly, there's the electricity to run the stove, bringing the kettle to boil and keeping it there through two 45-minute rounds of canning. Theoretically you could throw in the value of my time, about four hours total for the canning process, but we'll ignore that since I don't have a billable rate for canning.

Conservatively, we're talking $6 to $7 per quart of tomatoes.

That's not totally outrageous, but it's not cheap either. It probably still produced fewer carbon emissions than the fresh tomatoes shipped up from Mexico in the middle of winter. (Though to some extent that turns on the electricity that powers my stove, which happens to come from greener wind and hydro sources in this neck of the woods...still more complexity.) So, I'm doing better eating these than eating fresh this winter. But how do my canners compare to other canned tomatoes I might buy, industrially canned and shipped in bulk from ... somewhere?

Well, I don't know where exactly the store-bought canned tomatoes come from. If it were Oregon or California, that might still be a better deal than home-canning, carbon-wise, but maybe not Florida.

I have ten empty quart jars left, and would consider doing some more canning before the season ends but I'm not sure I have the time. I'm out of town the next two weekends. And I'm only really committed to it for things that I legitimately can't get fresh and local in winter. The best fruit for canning right now is pears, and we'll be able to get Washington-grown pears that are cold-stored all winter.

If anybody out there has 20 more pounds of San Marzano tomatoes, though, let me know.

Updates and possible adventures

Wow, nearly a month since I last blogged.

I like to think that I've stopped blogging because (in addition to taking lots of great vacations this summer) I finally started writing the long-awaited Saga of the Canadian North. The one that Moxie and I have outlined, researched, even travelled to three different far-flung Canadian cities to research, courtesy of various archives and distant relatives. But now I've actually started writing. And I like to think that I am using up my writing energy there, rather than procrastinating it away on blogging.

The book is painful. At every, single, sentence, I am confronted with questions. It's 1859 in what will eventually become Winnipeg, Manitoba. My protagonist is 10 years old. What does she eat for breakfast? How does she address her mother? What does she buy at the store? How high is the river running?

At the same time, our story is following real facts wherever we have them, which just goes to show that truth really is stranger than fiction. Even as I struggle with a dearth of knowledge about the details of everyday life, I am paralyzed by an embarrassment of historical riches. Floods. Political intrigue. The first steamboat. An honest-to-gosh plague of locusts, for heaven's sake. I could not possibly make that up.

I know the exact plot of land that my ancestors lived on in 1859. I can see it on a map. I can find out how high the floodwaters of 1826 and 1852 rose on that exact plot of land. I know the names of their neighbors, their clergy, their teachers. I know how many oxen and horses they reported to the census-takers. I know the location of the general store, the post office, and the saloon.

So my goal is to crank this story out, and take a couple more research trips next year, ideally one to Winnipeg in February or March (god help me), and one to the Northwest Territories next summer.

Enrico really wants to go along to the far north. He is proposing a month-long driving trip, with the dogs. To a place 1,500 miles due north of here. A place with 35,000 people spread over an area two-thirds the size of Mexico. Where you have to carry your next tank of gas with you. Where the only animal hospital - should our geriatric dogs require one - is in Yellowknife, a good 250 miles away from the places I really need to visit. Where the town has only two restaurants, but six air charter companies. Where the largest surviving herd of wild bison in North America roams. And bears - lots of bears.

In other words, it would take some planning.

But we're considering it. What the heck, you only live once, and if Enrico wants to see the Great Slave Lake and the mighty Mackenzie River - see it he shall!

Let's just pause, shall we?

I have been dipping my toe in and out of the Democratic convention, half hoping that my sense of inspiration and hope would get re-ignited, half fearing the relentless gravity of that dreary, myopic, politics-as-usual that drained the primary of all its sunlight.

I listen to NPR and read the speech post-mortems on Slate, mostly on the XX Factor, where for months I've followed the most intelligent debate I could find on the Clinton and Obama candidacies, and all the hopes and angst and bitterness that they engendered.

This morning the post-mortems were all about Bill Clinton's speech, without a single mention of one of the momentous events in US history: Yesterday, one of the two major political parties named a non-white person as their candidate for president.

Oh, the actual roll call vote was buried early in the day's schedule, thanks to lingering nervousness about how the die-hard Hillary supporters would behave. And the traditional absence of the presumptive nominee himself always detracts from the drama of the moment, in my opinion. But still, it was a moment that literally made me weep. I'm not sure I really believed that I, born less than a year after the Voting Rights Act gave black people a meaningful right to vote in this country, would ever see a black man at the top of the ticket.

Sure, seeing a woman at the top of the ticket would have been just as momentous, and I am just as hopeful about that too. I refuse to be unhappy about having to choose between two kinds of momentous.

When we were in France in April, once someone realized they had an American who could converse in French, it was as if they couldn't resist the opportunity to ask: Really, you actually might elect a black man? I could see them rock on their heels a bit, rethinking all the exasperated thoughts they had about us. They want to like Americans, they really do; they find us endearing and strangely, naively kind as a people, yet also so selfish and short-sighted. We share an historical legacy with the French, birthing Western representative democracy through our twin revolutions. But they have been despairing about us lately. This unexpected twist in our election process made them feel genuinely hopeful, for their strange old friends, and for the world.

It really does give me hope, that we might be that kind of a country after all. It's a nice feeling. Not nearly as nice as it'll be if it actually happens.

Floating along

In general, when I get so far behind that I don't know where to start, I respond by procrastinating even further. I cannot face the deficit of shoulda-done's piling up, and thus the should-do's in front of me go straight to the avoidance list too. It's not a very healthy response, I know. But eventually I snap out of it. I pick something, anything, off the endless behind-schedule list, just to get moving; once moving, I triage everything else, and get myself off the dime.

Thus, my back-to-back vacations (Hawaii, Canon Beach) and business trips (Portland, more Portland) got me out of the blogging routine, and every time I'd think of ALL the things I could've blogged about, I'd become overwhelmed and put off blogging for another day. Feeling neglected, Gentle Reader? Just imagine what my Inbox looked like. Oy. At least my bills got paid.

So: here is me, getting off the dime.

This week the consulting work is a tad slow (and by slow, I mean I have billed exactly one half hour all week). So I took a load of stuff to Goodwill, took a load of food to the overwhelmed neighborhood food bank, updated my emergency kit, filed a year's worth of paper, mailed a bunch of stuff to my parents, baked bread, canned four quarts of peaches, got the finances up to date, and weeded the vegetable garden.

More Aloha

Yesterday, we went to the Bishop Museum where we learned about the rich, vibrant culture of the Hawaiians and how their government was overthrown by the Dole Corporation. Poor Queen Lili'uokalani. We also learned about the two kinds of hula, the origin of the ukelele, and the three social structures within Polynesian cultures. Moxie took a horseback ride and saw sea turtles.

Today we ate shrimp from a shack 20 feet away from where the shrimp were harvested. We also drank coconut juice directly out of the shell:

Plus there has been so much tropical fruit, oh good golly, the fruit! I had been so sick of the berries, and here I've been eating pineapple, guava, passionfruit, papaya...Then there's fish, chicken, pork, rice (is that still grown here?), tomatoes, sweet corn, Hawaiian onions, and sea asparagus. I'm ordering wine from Australia and New Zealand, since I figure this is a close as it's ever going to get to local.

Keep visiting Flickr for more photos.

Aloha!

I think Hawaii may be the best place on earth.


I'm here in Hawaii with my sister, Moxie, and we spent our first full day taking a lovely hike to some falls, getting rained on, eating lunch at a local restaurant on the "best local hole-in-the-wall restaurants" listing, and then washing off the day's mud and sweat with a dip in the ocean.

For now, I will just link to some photos. More to come!

Locavorism update

We are 13 days into our one-month locavore challenge, although I'd been preparing ahead before we started. To review, our particular locavore challenge is: Washington state grown only in July, with two exemptions, olive oil and coffee. We are also not counting basic dry-good ingredients such as salt, yeast, baking soda & powder, and spices.I figured out where to buy things, ordered Washington-wheat flour from Winthrop, and started practicing my bread-baking skills.

Here are some things I’ve learned so far.

Lesson #1 - This isn't bad at all. There's lots of great stuff to eat from Washington state. The farmers markets offer a wealth of produce, we can bake our own baked goods, use honey instead of sugar, and eat plenty of meat, eggs and dairy for protein.

Lesson #2 - BUT: It would be completely impossible without farmers markets, and the family-run butcher shop in our neighborhood. If we were relying on the local grocery stores - even the ones, like PCC and Whole Foods, that claim to support locally produced food - we'd have no produce whatsoever, and a limited amount of meat and dairy.

Lesson #3 - I do not much care for okra. And that's all I'll say about that.

Lesson #4 - The perniciousness of sugar and salt: Eating whole foods cooked from scratch reveals just how much sugar and salt we generally eat. Having eliminated sugar, I am going through a 16-ounce jar of honey per week. That includes sweetening my morning coffee every day, as well as up to ¼ cup of honey every time I bake bread. I’d probably be using more in the winter, when we wouldn’t have the sweetness of fresh fruit. Similarly, having eliminated all processed foods I’m really aware of how much less salt we’re eating.

Lesson#5 - Good meat is...good! Though historically leaning vegetarian, we’ve been buying high-quality meat from our neighborhood meat market, and I’ve taken to cooking with bacon – good, thick, juicy bacon. I now understand why it has been prized, historically, not only for its keeping power but for the flavor (and salt!) that it adds.

Lesson #6 - Baking bread is fun! I’m baking two to three loaves per week. From start to finish, elapsed time is about 4 hours with two rising periods, a bit more with three rising periods, which makes a much lighter bread. I’m getting the hang of it, and I find the old saying is true: kneading bread is soothing. We’ve also tried wheat tortillas once, which were a little heavy but very easy to make, so we’ll do that again soon and hopefully improve. I tried cookies today for the first time - hazelnut shortbread thinghies with whey powder and honey instead of sugar.

Lesson #7 - I haven’t been appreciating juice enough. This month we’ve been relying on the very excellent apple juice from Rockridge Orchards, available at our farmers’ market for a whopping $7 per half-gallon. To supplement, I bought a steam juicer and was able to create a very lovely, if rather tart, half-gallon of juice. Using FIVE POUNDS of fruit. Clearly, I have been taking my juice for granted. And by the way, the steam juicer leaves behind a lovely fruit mush which, with honey and some cider vinegar as preservative, makes a great compote for toast or yogurt. Which leads me to...

Lesson #8 - Making yogurt is easy, boiling milk is a pain in the neck: I’ve found all dairy products available locally except for yogurt, for some reason. But I’d heard that yogurt is easy to make. All you need is a quart of milk, and ½ cup of yogurt, to make another quart of yogurt. I'm only about 50-50 on yogurt success so far, for some reason. Unlike bread, this is not something I see myself making from scratch in the long run.

Lesson #9 - Bring back Home Ec! I hit middle & high school in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when the feminist revolution had exposed the sexism of offering home economics to girls and shop to boys. As a result, we got neither. I didn’t miss it at the time, but now I’m realizing how little I know about the basics of food preparation and preservation. Every week I find myself asking remedial questions like: What’s the difference between blanching and parboiling? Does buttermilk keep longer than regular milk, and if so why? Is it better to freeze berries or can them? Why doesn’t whole wheat rise as well as white? I hope these days young people are getting some kind of education on food.

Lesson #10 - A gal's got to have chocolate on her birthday: Today happens to be my birthday, and we cheated for the first time. We bought Halibut flown in from Alaska, and some Tillamook Udderly Chocolate ice cream. Mmmmm....

That's the rundown so far. Enrico isn't as enthused about this process as I am, but he's gone with the program so far. I think he misses corn chips most of all. A friend who's a lifelong Washington resident told us he thinks one of the Native tribes grows corn and makes cornmeal, so perhaps that's available after all; more research is in order!

Things I have learned

First, a correction: It turns out it is not, in fact, illegal to let your cat roam loose in Seattle, as I recently and incorrectly asserted in my posting on coyotes. The City of Seattle's leash/containment laws apply to all pets except for cats and...pigeons (I kid you not). My apologies for the error, and let me just emphasize that I am sincerely sorry for the loss of anyone's pet cat to a coyote. Please, I do not want hate mail from the cat community, some of whom seem to be quite agitated about this whole coyote situation. I just still think the coyotes are entitled to live here. And that cats are safer indoors anyway - seems to me their demise is more likely to come from a car or a raccoon.

Speaking of which, we heard a coyote howl nearby last night. It was cool, I've only heard that sound in the desert of Utah before. Our dogs went absolutely bonkers. I do hope all the neighborhood cats made it through the night unscathed.

Second: I had an arborist out today to look at our ailing maple tree, which is apparently suffering from the tree equivalent of congestive heart failure. But the arborist also pointed out that one of the ornamental trees on our property, planted by the previous owner (a landscape architect), is apparently a rare and valued species which we could likely uproot and sell to an enthusiast for something like ten thousand dollars. And in fact, if the tree were smaller and in a more accessible spot, somebody might even steal the tree to sell on the rare-tree black market. Jiminy Christmas, the world is a strange place.