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Music today: none... Radio Sweden on Radio 1 in the other room

Reading today: cookbooks and freezing instructions

Hold on to what is good even if it is a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe even if it is a tree which stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here.
Hold on to life even when it is easier letting go.
Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you.
- Pueblo Blessing

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Saturday, Nov. 08, 2003 - 8:48 p.m.

Cost of the War in Iraq
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WARNING!!!! if you know me personally, you may read my diary, but if you do, you take the chance of hearing things you don't want to know, misunderstanding what I've written and being hurt by it. If you are unsure if it is ok to read, save yourself and me the grief and heartache, and ask first!!! Please note that this is a DIARY, ie my subjective feelings, hearsay, suppositions, and outpourings of ranting of the moment. It does not represent objective news, the whole of what I think of a topic or someone, or even a thought-out representation of any of the above. Keep that in mind. Thanks. * Here is a Diary Etiquette Read Me.

Soaking swisschard and Eclipsed Moons

brrr brrr double triple brrr!

Just got in from looking at the full moon eclipse. Funny, I imagined it would look more like a sun eclipse... ie dark in the middle and light around the edges. Instead it looked like it was soft lit for a porn mag... all sort of glowing peachy, instead of it's usual screaming white glare, so that all of it's three dimensional shape was highlighted. Never have I seen the moon more obviously a round ball, instead of a spotlight or a flat plate. Interesting. I took some photos but who knows how they will turn out.

And now my feet, fingers and my blood are just frozen through!!

I have a bathtub full of swisschard soaking its dirt off, and a sink full of tiny carrots and beets (which I shall just blanche... the beets are so tiny that they are wee morsels on the ends of the beet greens, which will be the major vegetable.) Also green and orange peppers. Now I see the appeal of a digital camera... I took photos and have to wait til probably tuesday to get them back, so cannot insert them pertinently in this entry.

Now I shall take my Harrowsmith cookbook (the best) and my Moosewood Daily Special cookbook (the next best for soups) with me to the Belles Soeurs to warm up and look through recipes to make a shopping list. Mmm. I am just salivating thinking of the Tunisian pumpkin soup with spicy sauce. mmmm.

ciao! I'll be back later later (of course I will.. heck it's only 9pm... that's like noon to me!)

brrrrr. Warm warm brrrr.

10:16 pm mmm, toasty warm! I had a vegetarian hamburger (well it is marinated tofu slices grilled with mushrooms and onions on a hamburger roll), salad, frenchfries and allong�e. mmm. mmm. and my body, blood and feet are all warm. I am just home for a second before I venture out with my previously used plastic bags, to buy soup and quiche ingredients. Don't know that i'll make it in one go. I have about 6 kinds of soup I want to fill the freezer with. Cream of swisschard, carrot puree, leek and potato, borscht, mushroom barley, cream of cauliflower. I will attempt to freeze the tansanian pumpkin soup this year. We'll see how that goes. Also I will make parsley pesto. The guy at the community center gave me tons of parsley in gardens that had been abandoned. Apparently one can freeze it in icecube trays like regular pesto. I'll see how that goes as well.

I just looked back at the photo of me smoking the hookah in my recycled rubber corset (old tractor innertubes), and since I wore that same corset on Wed for my performance, I can definitely say that with the 20 plus pounds I have lost since March when the first shot was taken, I have lost tits big time. mmm. Mounds of cleavage overflowing (hey, yeah, for ME, it IS, ok!!!) in March, and now they just fit nicely inside the corset. Sigh. I can be pudgy and voluptuous or lean and flat. oh well! One cannot win (thus of course the huge market for weight loss shit AND for tit implants). sigh and sigh again.

On that tit-ilating note, i shall venture out again into the frigid air. brrr. back later!

zzz 11:53pm I am just losing energy like my dog sheds hair. No that is not right... she still has TONS of hair after losing so much... I am losing energy like the trees are losing their leaves. Yes that is better. Though I hope my energy will be back before April. I am back from shopping. I had an interesting conversation wth the guy pushing broom... I asked him if the display of items replacing the old "bulk food" (ie little bags of nuts, spices, flours, sugars etc) was new. Apparently yes. Then I pointed out that it had changed from such items as raw cashew bits to roasted salted cashews in oil (ie from baking items to tv snacks), and held up the ingredients of a supposed "chicken soup base" as an example. Cane sugar was the first ingredient of about 30. Chicken fat was the only mention of chicken, coming about 5th in the list. I pointed at a jar of Bovril which had dried chicken and chicken broth as major ingredients. He told me I was an "exceptional woman" to be checking ingredients on labels. Strange. He also didnt really see why there should be chicken in chicken flavour soup base. He said "it's not soup... it's soup base.. .you're supposed to add the chicken and other things." mmm, like I would buy a chicken flavour soup base just to up the cane sugar and preservative level of my chicken soup I'd made from my own chicken. mmm.

I mentioned the change of fourniseurs (hell my English has gone to pot) at the cash, and they said "call the manager tomorrow... we have had nonstop complaints since they changed it... you are not alone". OH MUSIC TO MY EARS!! I am NOT alone! OTHER people complain! I am NOT an EXCEPTIONAL woman! yay and yay again! I feel like getting out my cheerleader pompoms! It is so scrumptious to actually feel like I am not the sole weirdo complaining about our world going to pot for once! :) Maybe if I call the manager, they will bring back the little packets of wild rice, quinoa and raw cashews instead of the fake chicken shit, pretzels and fruit flavour crystals. mmm. mmm.

Today, I saw a Babelfish translator on a diaryland entry. So I plugged in "I love you and want to have your baby. Will you run away with me and elope." and passed it back and forth between English, German, French and Italian a couple times. Here is what it ended as:"I you and me do you run far elope with me would like your baby to have love and?" . So if any Italian says that to you, you will now know that he meant the first phrase. Consider carefully.

And now I shall share with you the gruesome site from two nights ago. Apparently in the late 1800's and right up to and including the '60's, lynching was a popular paralegal activity for townsfolk. And it seems that taking photos and selling them as keepsakes and curios was as popular. Collector James Allen has been amassing these photo postcards, and researching the events portrayed. It is now a series of website photos as well as an exhibit and a book called "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photographs". I advise you to think twice before you start looking at them. Many are gruesome. Some of the stories (ie people burnt to death for untrue rumours or being the mother of a suspected thief) are heartbreaking, and some are just sickening. I am sure some of the people lynched were guilty of crimes (there are a few known bank thieves for instance), but being ripped out of the law's hands, often before a trial, and beaten, castrated, shot, and burnt and hanged (in no particular order) seems horrendous no matter the crime. I find it says more about human nature and the desire for revenge as manifested by a mob, than it does about appropriate punishment. Looking at the (usually smiling, proud, and feeling rightfully vindicated) spectators on the photos is scarier than the bodies. Whoever said we are exposed to more violence these days is wrong. I know no one who has seen a public lynching, participated with their parents in beating a criminal to death, or walked by a head posted outside the train station for days. We are mostly divorced from this sort of violence. Even drive by shootings seem benign, compared to a crowd of the mayor, lawyers, doctors, women and children, setting out premeditated to torture and kill someone gleefully, then pose next to the body, and sell the postcards. If you want a good slap of real history, (there are researched stories connected to almost all the images), click here: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photographs and Postcards in America. Personally for me the (graphic death image warning:) most touching or angering stories are these: a black woman hanged for helping her son who had stolen, the town drunk who had been accused of inappropriately touching a white girl, and who had probably just stumbled on her while drunk according to locals, two men supposedly killed for stealing cattle.This story is a fascinating historical tale of competing interests, wherein settlers were framed by rich cattlemen, who hated the settlers for fencing land they ran their massive cattle herds on for free. Finally this postcard which declares on it that the black men pictured had sexually assaulted a white woman, which was a standard racial hatred accusation leading to a death by mob. The truth is that they were known to be critical of the white run legal system in a completely different state, and thus probably were shut up and smeared. Horrid.

There, that is the end of my history sharing for the day. Tomorrow we shall look at the dismal state of the Aral Sea. A horrible story of man-made environmental disaster.

Now i'm off to wash my swiss chard and blanche it for the freezer.ciao.

1:54 am Just finished chopping all the baby beets off their stems and leaves... baby beets are going in with carrot roots etc to make veggie broth. I just looked up the blanching time for veggies... and it says "to preserve taste and nutrition, freeze vegetables within 2-3 hours of removing from garden. Hmmm. I wonder if soaking the swisschard in the bath for 6 hours (it is perking up, so is not frozen to death) after leaving it in freezing rain in the yard for 6 days is the equivalent. Perhaps in Canada. hmm... back to work.

Wench's swisschard,2002. Copyright 2003 Wench77
5:33 am mmm, cooking. I love cooking. And I love putting up food to put in the freezer. I may be nuts but I think I find it more satisfying to reduce a bathtubful of soillogged swisschard to 8 shiny pint jars of cream of swisschard soup, enough cooked and chopped swisschard for 4 quiches (tomorrow) and 12 servings of frozen chopped swisschard than I do painting a color children's book. yup. Very satisfying. Kitchen is clean, and I only threw out, between the beets, carrots and swisschard, about one handful of compost. I am stewing up the rest of the leftover bits (not many) into broth. And incredibly most of the swisschard wasnt wilted, frozen or otherwise ruined (except for its nutritional content, remember). You know, i'm gonna use Duracell's phrase and say that swisschard gets me hard. Fucking hard. yes. Baah to spinach. Swisschard has crisp green leaves bigger than dinner plates and inchwide stems that are all edible. No washing little weeny leaves one at a time, and chopping up toothpick sized stems. nosiree. The stuff is WORTH your effort. And yummy to boot. Eat swisschard. yes.

Tomorrow, borscht (lots of grating beets and chopping cabbage) and quiches. I LOVE putting up food for the winter. This was supposed to happen in September when veggies were cheap and plentiful, but better late than never.

I better sign off now, or this will be the interminable imageless entry. Sorry! (6:21 am... yeah, i'm a suck, i had to find a swisschard photo... so it's not imageless anymore) Maybe I'll visit quizilla for a moment. Or look at the Friday Five. And if it is interesting, make another entry. tahtahgoodnight. The KitchenWench RULES!!

Here is my horoscope for Saturday, November 8:

Your authority doesn't carry much weight right now. Fire sputters out when earth offers no fuel to sustain it. The stars make it painfully clear that Leo must sit down and listen for a few days.

(Hey, that's what happens when I break up with all these Virgos, Taurus's and Capricorns! ... My fire sputters out when earth (them) offer no fuel to sustain it.... whereas I've always felt better after breaking up with water signs: Pisces for instance!... although earth... if thrown on top of fire copiously... can put it out as well)

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previous meanderings - future past

Goodbye Michael. May your next life be kinder to you. - Thursday, Jun. 25, 2009
Taking Care of Your Cows - Thursday, Jun. 25, 2009
Saint Joseph robs the cradle and eats spaghetti - Sunday, Jun. 14, 2009
sticky notes and broken irises - Friday, Jun. 12, 2009
The FOODCOMMANDER - Monday, Jun. 08, 2009

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