the porch swing

In the pantheon of awful 80s shows that I remember, but don't remember watching (Misfits of Science, Manimal, AirWolf, and that one with the motorcycle), probably the pinnacle was Cover Up. Only, I didn't know it was Cover Up. All I knew was, the opening song was that "I need a hero..." song (apparently from Footloose). Well, after years of wondering, I finally turned to the internet to find out who used "Holding Out for a Hero" as theme. I am so embarrassed.

So, this weekend: lots of reading, lots of housework. Saturday, T & I went to the farmer's market, a cafe downtown, and the library. We both walked out with peculiarly amibitious stacks. That day, I read Richard Stark's (latest?) Parker book, "Nobody Runs Forever," and started Elmore Leonard's "The Hot Kid." We replaced the garage door opener, which has been broken for a few months now. T swept out spiderwebs as I built a screen for sifting compost. We watched Veronica Mars, and painted the windows and screens on the front of the house.

The screens are these big, old-fashioned storm windows that sit on hangers at the top of the window and latch onto the bottom with hooks. We had both screens drying on the porch, amidst a bunch of other junk--bunched up rugs, potted plants, some other tools. T was putting a second coat on one of them, and I'd just finished putting the first coat on one of the windows, heading inside to wash the brush--I turned to say something to T, then turned again to head in--and stepped on a goddam rake leaning next to the door, and the goddam rake hit my goddam forehead. I've got a lump.

The past couple of weeks, I've been reading mass-market paperback thrillers--legal and serial killer stuff. Right now, I've got "Prime Witness," by Steve Martini. I'm sure I read a couple of his books maybe ten or eleven years ago--the main character in this one, as well as the place names, seem familiar. Anyway, one crutch of Martini's that's really starting to tick me off is,"So-and-so makes a face." As in, "I make a face, like this Greek to me." He's up to nearly once every page. I find it face-gougingly awful.

First harvest of cucumbers today. I looked at them for a while on the vine this morning, and wondering if these weren't the real first cucumbers or if there was something stunting them, since they seemed to be getting plump, but not long.  It occurred to me that I should check the variety, whose description is as follows:

Richmond Green Apple

A unique heirloom from Australia and is still popular there. The fruit are the size of a lemon but are of a beautiful light green color. For eating these are excellent, very mild, sweet and juicy. Hard to find and really fun to grow.

They're a little small for a lemon, but I went ahead and cut four down and sliced one up. Tasty! Clearly cucumbers, but also a little melon-like. Entirely edible, and I look forward to experimenting with them.

Looking for a new travel destination? How about ... North Korea.

And later: we go to Lake Michigan for a rock-skipping competition.

Last night, in celebration of the first little pumpkin to appear, I made pumpkin bread with pumpkin we froze last October.

When Target Corp. reported its first-quarter earnings in mid-May, analysts were annoyed that the retailer missed their consensus forecast by a penny per share. But few seemed to notice that three-quarters of the company's 15% earnings gain came from its credit-card operations, not its retail business.

...

When the company added Target Visa to its regular department-store card in 2001, the idea was to attract high-credit-quality borrowers and expand the lending business. But only one of those things has happened. A close look at Target's $5.8 billion credit-card operation reveals a portfolio growing at four times the rate of other lenders and brimming with riskier borrowers -- a dangerous combination.

The article goes on the say thatI don't quite know what to make of this. According to Elizabeth Warren, this is Target preying on the vulnerable, but the BusinessWeek article makes it sound like they turn to the sub-prime market was an accident, or at least because they got hooked on the returns (so, a trap in which both lender and lendee are getting caught). Moreover, I'm not sure what "3/4 of their earnings gain" means -- that's not saying, as Warren translates it, 3/4 of their profit, is it? It seems more like it's 3/4 of their growth in profit. It's hard to tell how much of their business lending really amounts to.

Even though I always mean to, it seems I never quite make it to the farmer's market. Well, after telling myself that I was reinspired by This Organic Life, I made a commitment: farmer's market today to get fruit. (I eat a lot of bananas, and Gussow singled out the banana as a bad apple, if you get my drift.) So I got up and read for awhile, then watched some of the women's final of Wimbledon. Around 9:30, I decided enough was enough, and hopped on the bike.

I should back up here, and say that one of the other things I got interested in again from TOL was building a cold frame, for keeping a small garden of cold-tolerant plants into and conceivably through winter. There are a lot of instructions out there for how to do it, and most of them start off with some variation on "I got an old window," usually for free. I've never seen a window just floating around, asking to be taken. So, I've been looking for instructions on starting from scratch with just a pile of sand piece of glass. I've got some dandy dreams all lined up, climaxing with my plan to set up a solar water heater, with warm-water pipes running underneath the cold frame, driven by a windmill-powered pump. What can I say? I dream big, in small ways.

So I'm hopping on my bike, and zoom off. I'm taking my usual route to downtown, and see a garage sale. And, sure enough, propped up in one corner is a window. I turn around, park, saunter up to the proprietors, and ask if the window's for sale.

It's not, it's for free. It's not even theirs; their neighbors saw they were having the sale, and put it out, telling them to let people know anyone could haul it off.

After my trip into town (peaches! jalapenos! corn! getting Chase to zero out two days' worth of overdraft fees!), I checked on the way home to be sure that it was still there, then drove over and picked it up. It's small, but I figure that's a good way to start. Mostly, it's just in crappy condition, but I figure that goes with the territory.

Anyhow, it's been a good morning. I planned out a menu for the week, and it turns out I only need one thing from the store (goat cheese).

As you might imagine, I'm intrigued by the 100-mile diet. Not only am I intrigued as a personal matter, I'd be curious to know if it could be used as an organizing principle for rearranging our agriculture subsidies. Move away from blanket subsidies, and towards subsidies that encourage diverse production for local consumption.

But that has me thinking ... why 100 miles? The creators say, "A 100-mile radius is large enough to reach beyond a big city and small enough to feel truly local." I guess. But it hardly seems fair to give Vancouver and Springfield the same area, much less Chatham, IL, and New York City.

So I started trying to figure out what would be a good way of operationalizing "local," some way of formalizing sustainable city-hinterland regions. I'm kind of primed for this from a lot of work with ecological footprinting in grad school. Sadly, I couldn't find any quick calculation for typical land consumption for food. So, I googled around, and found that humanity as a whole uses (going by memory here) .9 ha per capita for food. But is that good or bad?

What I'd like to do, of course, is get some indication of what how an "ideal diet" would translate into acreage, but that obviously has a bundle of problems, from whose ideal to the role of agricultural technology. Also, it's really tough to google that and find an answer.

I even worked up a formula for finding a foodscape, based on population, per-person agro-land, and percentage of local land devoted to agriculture (so: you know each person gets an acre of food; you don't want to draw a circle around your city so tight that there's no room for anything but agriculture). But given the difficulty of getting my food rate and that completely made up percentage, I abandoned this as an geeky diversion.

So instead, I'm settling for now on simply going with the hundred-mile diet, but indexed to Vancouver's size. So, metro Vancouver has a population of about 2.2 million. That means that the 100-mile diet is, per capita, a .014 square-mile diet. Sangamon County, my stand-in for metro Springfield, has a population of about 200,000, which gives it a foodscape of 2,854 square miles, which comes out to about a circle with a radius of 30 miles.

So: my thirty mile diet. That's not very big. Decatur--home of ADM--is about thirty miles from Springfield. On the one hand, it'd be fascinating to see how much food Springfield could get from this area. On the other hand, that's really small. I don't know whether to be inspired or discouraged by this. I guess I should find out where the people at the farmer's market come from.

I finished the cancer book I was reading--more on that when I have it in front of me--and picked up This Organic Life, a memoirish thing by Diane Gussow, a nutritionist turned relocalization activist, about the experience of her and her husband in turning various backyards into gardens that would provide the two of them (and their many guests) all of their fruits and vegetables. The project started as simple, if ambitious gardening, and took on its full project flair as Gussow, increasingly espousing the importance of eating local foods, within their seasons, decided to show that, even in New York, such as a thing was possible and desirable.

I'm sort of becoming a fan of this genre (I guess it started with Richard Manning's A Good House), and I think TOL is a great example. I tend to read these more for some combination of philosophy and pragmatics, but TOL was the first that actually moved me to care about how her, her husband, and her garden fared. It is urgent and kind and the chapter when she goes to a supermarket isn't too screechy. And more than anything, it's a challenge and an inspiration.

I've been a little down on my garden recently: reliable producers have started moving--the zucchini, the beans, the tomatoes. But there are gaps, due to failed seedlings and insufficient effort on my part to fill the failures. I have not kept up with my planting of lettuce, carrots, various herbs, and onions, and I know I'm going to be overwhelmed by zucchini and cucumbers. TOL has reinvigorated me, I think, and I'm starting to doodle with to finish off the season, and maybe even extend it a little.