Hopeful

Purple Gallinule

Purple Gallinule

The colorful Purple Gallinule prefers warm-water marshes and is mainly found in the south and around the Gulf, although it often wanders great didstances and has been seen much further north in summer.  It spends the winter in southern Florida and down into Argentina.  Its nest is a shallow cup of grass stems and reeds, lined with leaves and attached to marsh vegetation.  It lays 5-10 buff eggs, spotted with brown, and the downy chicks leave the nest soon after hatching.

The adult bird has long legs and very large, yellow feet - which allow it to walk across lily pads and floating marsh vegetation.  It has a bright, purplish-blue head, neck and underparts, white under the tail, a pale blue forehead shield, a red bill tipped with yellow and a brown-green back.  The juvenile is much plainer, buffy underneath with an olive back, greenish wings and dull olive legs and feet.  The Purple Gallinule can fly, but is reluctant to do so and also rarely swims.  It eats seeds, grain, insects, frogs and birds' eggs, as well as vegetation.

Excerpt from The Encyclopedia of North American Birds, by Michael Vanner

The Gastronomes: Cauliflower

The Gastronomes: Cauliflower: ALERT:  COLOSSUS CAULIFLOWER ON THE LOOSE. FIVE-POUND, THIRTEEN-OUNCE MONSTROSITY MAY BE SEEN AT A FARM STAND NEAR YOU. ARMED WIT...

What to Eat

Currently reading What to Eat by Marion Nestle.  She's a professor of nutrition at NYU.  Cool.

Apparently she's done all sorts of extensive research on what food companies want us to think and buy, who owns food companies, why grocery stores are all laid out the same way, and what goes into genetically modified, organic, conventional, and local foods.

If you've ever been to a grocery store in North America, it probably has either flowers or the bakery section by the entrance [to stimulate appetite by smell], long long aisles of prepackaged foods [to keep you interested while walking along slowly], bright shining bins of produce [waxed over & labelled with various countries & states of nonlocal origin] and all that placed between you and the important stuff [milk, bread, eggs, meats - all located furthest away from the entrances] so that you look at more things they have to offer than you need.

The author states that 70% of grocery store customers create lists before shopping.  10% of shoppers don't buy more than their list includes.

Next time:  Sugar - How invasive it is in our diets.

failure

failure:  emily drinks real milk, phil drinks real milk,
    french dairy farmers of 1944 drink real milk; 
    milk is boiled to scorching, milk is skimmed
    milk is bleached, milk is tainted. 

failure:  using coordinates & clues &
    global positioning units for geocaching for hours & finding nothing.

failure:  reading "best meteor shower of the decade", reading "11 pm to 4 am",
    not reading "best view around 4 am", seeing only 4 shooting stars.

failure:  setting goals, breaking goals daily,
    seeking help in the wrong place, self righteousness, self decay.

failure:  landlord remodeling, research demographics &
    rent rates, nowhere to go, close store, lay off employees.

failure:  job searching, another opportunity for failure?

aspiration:  new job, new town, more meteors;
    drinking real fresh milk straight from the milk bucket.

climb mountains

live in a house
sleep under stars

shoes on pavement
feet on dirt

cityscape
clean air, clear skies

work for the man
climb trees, explore rivers, climb mountains

Two things

There are two things I wish all Americans would do. The world's cost of food has been rising because North Americans have been using corn for non-food purposes. If I could broadcast myself in the national media, I would ask folks to:

1. Stop using corn-based ethanol to fuel your cars. Sure, it may be a tiny bit more environmentally sound, but it still pollutes and it's wasting food that could be used to feed hungry kids in Africa/Asia/South America. Carpool. Ride a bike. Take a hike.

2. Eat less meat. It takes 5 months of feeding a pig 8 pounds of feed per day to get it to full size - 265 pounds. (http://www.pork4kids.com). 1200 pounds of food (say, corn) create only 265 pounds of meat (less the inedible parts of the animal). Those 1200 pounds of corn can feed a LOT more people than ~265 pounds of pork. Additionally, more energy and vitamins & nutrients are absorbed through eating corn - because the pig has already digested & used much of that energy by the time you get to eating the pork. Seriously, beans & rice will save the world. If we allow it.

Every day, I'm more and more appalled by the wasteful gluttony I see here in this country. I may just learn Spanish and move to a monastery in Peru.

On a more fun note, my friend Matthew has made a fun video to share:

With what do you wipe your butt?

Guess I never really thought about the fact that we literally send trees down the toilet every day. It makes me want to stop pooping! Or figure out an alternative...

American taste for soft toilet roll 'worse than driving Hummers'

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country's love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public's insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

Greenpeace offers a guide comparing recycled post-consumer vs. virgin paper pulp toilet papers here.

Crap Reduction

Okay, so this is a weird thought, but my brain enjoys tangents so this is what's going on in there:

Yesterday at Cornerstone Pastor Nate gave a sermon on John 15: Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. We have to be connected to Him or we'll whither.

His visual aide was a bit different. He had placed a large bowl of pure water on a pedestal above a smaller bowl filled with vegetable oil. He connected a siphon between the two, which allowed the larger bowl to fill the smaller one with water, pushing the oil out over the top. He likened God to the larger bowl, filled with goodness, and us to the smaller bowl, filled with icky stuff. We need to be connected to God so He can cleanse us of our gross stuff (our sins, our pain, all our dirt).

So that was a good idea. Then, he unveiled what was placed on a neighboring pedestal: a toddler-sized training toilet. You know, the plastic kind of tiny potty that comes in bright colours. He set the siphon between the toilet and the smaller bowl (representing individual people). He talked about how often we disconnect from God and suck our spiritual nutrition from something else - anything except God - which essentially means we're drinking from the toilet. Ick.

I loved the point P. Nate made and wrote notes and drew small diagrams of toilets and bowls of oil and then came the tangent...

Most people in America that are between ages 0 and 40 have parents who used disposable diapers on them. Now, the average baby soils about 6 diapers/nappies per day. That means one baby goes through 2190 diapers in one year. Multiply that by the time it takes for a kid to graduate from diapers to being potty trained, and that's between 4380 and 8760 diapers that each person in America has indirectly deposited into a landfill (how could plastic + crap be recycled?)

Let's say the average weight of a used diaper is one pound. That means each person has added between 2 and 4 tons of waste to any number of landfills in our country.

Are you as dumbfounded by this as I am??

I feel awful for the amount of waste my own body produced when I had no control of how it was disposed. Robin and I discussed this at breakfast (good timing, I know), and she could gladly say her parents used cloth diapers on her as an infant.

I usually try to be pretty cautious about wasting materials, but now I'm feeling the weight of this realization of my past as a babychild. How ridiculous!! I don't know what it will take to negate the effects of all that crap (+plastic) I put into the world, but I hope I can find a way to de-impact the environment, some how.