We just read about the 1983 Mitt Romney dog incident. (He put his dog on the roof of the car for a twelve hour ride.) Well, what do you expect from Republicans? 

Meanwhile, we're back from the UK where we had a wonderful time with the family and friends. As ever, the land across the pond feels more humane than the land of the lost NYC. People compost their vegetables, not just by themselves, but with the help of the sanitation department. Doctors and dentists, yes, I know people say it's a crap system, but it's there, and it serves everyone, and you can call the National Health anytime day or night and say "I have a headache and I'm pregnant, can I take these blue pills with the number 7 on them?" Someone will actually give you an educated answer.

There's a certain social contract to life in the UK that is not the USA "who gives a shit?" lack of social contract. And the public transport? There's always a dude at the turnstile who can tell you the quickest route to your destination. There are services for people. Hot damn.

In New York we're always trying to find these things tribally, in little tiny communities of the outcasts of capitalist culture. It's an upstream swim, very Mad Max. 

Now, the Superbowl. Well, someone will win. More on this later. Our t.v. keeps pixilating and saying "no signal", so it's also an upstream swim. 

And finally, for all you fearful flyers out there, we finally have the answer: 3 Ativan, and 1 Beta Blocker. Flying is fun. 

Peace out people. We'll be back next week with news of this and that, including but not limited to tales from our beekeeping class and ideas for fermenting beans and grains.

 

We're heading to London on Saturday to see the peops across the pond. It's hard to think about lifting off from New York in the midst of such a comfortable schedule of days spent wandering Central Park with a pack of wild and wooly toddlers. The routines of mom-hood (making snacks, taking baths, reading Tin Tin) are very soothing. 

At the same time it's exciting to imagine the visit with grandma and grandpa and Aunty Mapes. We're hoping to make it out to a walking adventure at Kew Gardens with some UK Unschoolers, and we're hoping to make a stop at Westminster Abbey where many of our favorite kings are entombed. Creepy? Well, we'll skip Lindow Man at the British Museum for now, and that nutty Museum of Medical Anomolies. But we will go to the Museum of Childhood and the Tin Tin shop. Mostly we want to see friends and drink tea and maybe have a pint.

As fearful flyers, we've been doing all the crazy stuff that we always do pre-flight: checking out the turbulence maps (very turbulent today over nova scotia and the north atlantic), taking pills (beta blockers and ativan), checking cruise ship schedules. Sigh. Tips welcome, as always. 

We'll check in from the old country. Peace out peops.

We had a nice first week of the New Year, despite the strange weather (sub-zero, then tropical, but no locusts yet). The dinosaur theme saturates the days. On Monday we went back to the Natural History Museum to look at ancient mammoths, particularly the Warren Mastodon that was discovered in Newburgh, New York in the early 1800s.

In Central Park we've been looking at contemporary dinosaurs, doing some bird watching near Azalea Pond behind the Loeb Boathouse. Downy Woodpeckers are all the rage.

Friday for a change of pace we went up to Harlem to see the Three Kings Day Celebration. There were camels! Yes, three camels for three kings, lurching up 3rd Avenue. We all dug it. The Beast is a big fan of the three kings song.

In the kitchen it's been a week of pickles, soup stocks, yogurt, granola, and bread. We are finally tackling bread-making and it's pretty exciting. We bought spelt kernels from the farmers and we've been grinding them and soaking them overnight in raw milk to release the nutrients from the grain. It's a moist milky bread, which the beast refers to as "cake-bread."

Now, on January 21 we head to London for a week and a half. We're looking to connect to some unschoolers there. Anyone have leads? Please email us at ljarnot@gmail.com.

The orchid bloomed, we have two baby guppies, and our friends Paul and Lizzie and Jack sent us a chess set for xmas. What more can a family ask for? The Beast woke up yesterday and said "let's play chest!" She already knows the difference between the rank and file. Since we're all recovering from colds we decided to watch Mary Poppins too.  Thomas and I have been making lists of "50 Things"— he saw it as an affirmation list; I see it as an affirmations/goal list. His list has great things like "small art" and "Saxon churches". Here's my list (which overlaps with his in a couple places— especially owls, and defiant lightness). Peace out people, and Happy New Year.

50 THINGS

1.     domesticity (a house in the Bronx)

2.     hiking and farming (land in the catskills)

3.     relaxation (a sauna)

4.     family (adopt a kid)

5.     more family (a kitten)

6.      more family (a dog)

7.     friendships (‘staying in touch’)

8.     friendships (an unschooling community)

9.    community (conversational Spanish)

10.    community (conversational French)

11.    activism (fight the death penalty)

12.    activism (feed the homeless)

13.     activism (anti-war/knitting one hundred hats)

14.     self-sufficient farming and localvorianism (keeping bees)

15.     self-sufficient farming (summer vegetable gardening)

16.     fermented food

17.     baking bread

18.     knitting sweaters and scarves

19.    a sewing machine

20.    mushrooms

21.     conifers

22.     grasses, sedges, and rushes

23.   bulbs

24.     owls and other birds

25.     butterflies and moths

26.    chess

27.     piano

28.    old english

29.       british history

30.     shakespeare’s plays

31.     english pastoral metaphysicals (andrew marvell)

32.    ancient greek

33.    translate the iliad

34.     freud’s collected works

35.    freud’s house, london

36.    dublin

37.    madrid

38.    paris

39.    madagascar

40.   poland

41.   rangoon

42.     eucalyptus scented san francisco

43.     train trip through the deep south

44.       yoga

45.       black belt in seido karate

46.     another marathon at fifty

47.   finnegans wake

48.     movies with bea

49.     night sky

50.     defiant lightness
 

We decided to observe the beginning of the New Year with the Solstice. It made more sense. The days begin to get longer and we begin to think about spring planting. We're ordering seeds today from Johnny's. And we're trying Feverfew and Borage for the first time. (And also the colorful stuff that clients like-- pink petunias, yellow zinnias, mix and match violets, some red sages.)

Christmas is over, hurray. The music and crowds and christo-capitalist undertones and overtones are just too much. We asked the beast what she wanted for Christmas and she didn't express any great interest in any particular thing. We've talked a lot about gifts for the new king, the sun king, the king named Jesus or Mithra or Mithras, and she's definitely more interested in gifts for babies than in gifts for herself. We did shop for a pink dress (pink dress number 6) and we had a chocolate brownie yesterday in Central Park after visiting Gus the polar bear at the zoo. The Burmese Prince and I didn't get any presents (except for pieces of the Beast's brownie) and it felt pretty sane to be free of all that.

We also baked some cookies and made some popcorn and bought some oranges to give to homeless people. Then I realized that heck, we should do that all the time. A box of tangerines was $4 at our corner fruit stand, and a carton of eggs would run us another $3. So why not take food for other people every time we go outside? At $7 a week there's no excuse not to.

Also, we're saving money through our contract with the Amish farmers of Pennsylvania. Raw milk is cheap, and this week we made another batch of yogurt and a first round of cheese-- an Indian paneer. Suddenly it's true we're 90% localvore, and that's a good feeling.

In the realm of unschooling, I'm finding that I learn more every day about how I learn, what I "need" to learn, and about the fluidity of learning as part of life rather than as part of an EDUCATION SYSTEM. Bea picks up Spanish because our local baker and grocery guys talk to her in Spanish. Her friends in Forest Nursery speak Spanish with her. And we have a little local Queens group for kids to get together and speak/sing Spanish. So, there it is. Spanish surrounds us. French is still lurking. The umbrella is a parapluie, and the birds are petite oiseaux.

I've been eager to take a class on conifers at the NY Botanical Garden, but it costs money and we don't have it. So I'm not going to take a class. I'm just going to learn conifers. We're in Central Park three days a week. Plenty of time to do fieldwork.

So if we save some money on horticulture and botany classes I will put it aside for the dojo. I do still want to get a blackbelt in karate, and that's something that I'd like to learn with other folks in a more structured setting. And perhaps a class on bee keeping. When we make the move from apartment living to house-owning there will definitely be bees in our backyard.

But now, there's a chicken that needs to come out of the oven. Peace out people. We'll be back next week.

There's a food revolution happening in our kitchen these days, mostly thanks to the very hip moms we've been hanging out with in the forest nursery. We use recipes from the Nourishing Traditions cookbook for a lot of stuff, and also we just make up recipes, which is fun.  Here's a view of the week's experiments:

Homemade granola. butter, oats, raisins, cashews, honey, cinnamon. I warm it on the stove top to mix the honey and butter, then put it in the oven for 20 minutes at 200 degrees. Presto, cheap good granola. (maybe $2 a pound rather than $8-10.)

Yogurt. 4 cups raw milk, 1/2 cup starter (we used thick greek yogurt for the first batch, and left over yogurt from the second batch as a bacterial starter.  Heat the milk in a double boiler to 180 degrees. Cool it to 110 degrees. Mix in the yogurt starter. Put it in a clean sturdy container (we use a clay pot) and keep it in a warm place for 7 hours. (An oven with a pilot light is a good one, or a pre-warmed oven. You want to keep the temperature at about 110 degrees so the bacteria can eat the milk.)

Pickles.  two large cucumbers cut into sticks. two cloves garlic, some sliced up leeks, a pinch of cayenne pepper, two seaspoons of salt. Mix it, stuff it all into a jar, add some water to cover the cucumbers, (leave an inch at the top of the jar so it doesn't explode.) Keep at room temperature for 3 days and it's done. Refrigerate after that.

We have to admit we were wary of raw milk but now that we're using it, we're ecstatic. It tastes better than ultrapasturized organic milk and it's cheaper. We get ours in glass jars-- no more plastic milk jugs, and no more plastic yogurt containers-- all the yogurt is now in a clay pot. And, we pay the farmer directly. It's nice to pay a farmer for milking his cow.  We've read through the endless safety warnings from the FDA and CDC re: raw milk and have found that 1) pastuerized milk and all kinds of other corporate farmed foods (spinach, for example) are the major culprits in food poisoning, and 2) the small number of raw milk food poisonings have mostly come from raw cheeses served off the back of taco trucks. Also, the beast prefers warm maple milk, so her raw milk tends to be home-pastuerized at 165 degrees anyway. 

Meanwhile, the estimate is that 100,000 civilians died in the Iraq War and 4000 plus Americans got blown to bits. We're done with all that now. Except for the pesky blood stains that won't come out of our clothes. This is what we've been reflecting upon as the solstice nears.

We'll be back next week with news of this and that. The beast and papa are reading Tintin and it's time for the mama to take over reading duty. These days we're finding that even twenty minutes away from the Beast feels like too much. She's just so damned fun to hang out with.

Peace people. And eat the rich; pickle them first.

Hey All. I changed my mind. I was going to teach a class on Epic Dicks in January 2012 but have decided to go for Cool Chicks instead.  Here's the description:

It Is Almost That: a writing workshop based around the recently published Siglio Press anthology collecting image+text works by women artists and writers.  We'll read, view, write around works by Eleanor Antin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jane Hammond, Bhanu Kapil & Rohini Kapil, Alison Knowles, Bernadette Mayer, Carrie Mae Weems, Hannah Weiner, and more.

10 weeks, $300.

Contact me at ljarnot@gmail.com for more details.<P>

We're thinking of moving to the Bronx because it might be where we can afford to live. We'd like to live in a house rather than a rental or a co-op. It feels ambitious, economically, but perhaps it is possible. Anyone have tales of life in the Bronx? Any unschoolers up there?

Meanwhile, the Christmas music surrounds us, as do the bright red and green lights, "decorations" the Beast shouts, but perhaps she knows not what they are for. Christmas and Solstice and Halloween seem to blur together for her, which is nice, in that the spooky pagan candle-burning feeling of Halloween and Solstice seem to out-shadow the weirdness of Jesus and Santa.

We're hoping to go up to the Old Manse for the solstice to get the wood burning stove up and running for the longest night of the year.

What we do have is a yule wreath that came from Brother Toby at the Starcross Community out in Annapolis, California. It's the third year now that we have a Starcross wreath, and it brings some cheer to the December darkness, though really, December doesn't seem so dark. There are sunny days and walks in the park, crisp and cold, but not so dark. Finally all of the leaves have fallen off Matilda the cherry tree at the top of 39th Place near Queens Boulevard where there's also another new 99 cent store as if the world needed more plastic.

We'll be going to London in January, and we're dreaming of Paris. Not on this trip, but soon, we'll get the Beast over there to have some real hot chocolate.

Meanwhile we were at the Museum of Natural History today where the dinosaurs are already like old friends. I paid particular attention to the duck billed dinosaur mummy today (a terrific sample of dinosaur skin), though we always make the rounds of the Beast's pals: t rex,  apatosaurus, allosaurus (chomping on apatosaurus's tail), triceratops, the ankylosaur family, and corithisaurus. We picked up a brachiosaurus in the gift shop, my new favorite toy.

There were thoughts of getting a solstice kitten for all of us, and especially for Bela who seems lonely these days, and then there was the thought that the Beast would terrorize a kitten. We've been using the line "the cats have to feel safe in their own home," but the Beast has Mars in Aries, and Venus in Aries, and no interest in cat-human love-ins. She gleefully screams "Baaaa!" at the cats and they scatter toward the closet. So, the kitten may have to wait. 

The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria has an ongoing display of Muppet trinkets, including some original puppets of kermit and miss piggy and such. And they are showing films throughout the upcoming weekends, so we'll head over there on xmas eve to see some Muppety stuff.

And we'll be back next week with more news of this and that.  Until then, peace out peops.

These days mostly we're cooking. The other families in the Forest Nursery have inspired us in new directions. We just joined a raw dairy delivery service, and we're going to start getting even more back to the land. Milk fresh from the cow/goat/sheep. Chickens. Yes, chickens are cooking in the soup pot. Pickles. We started our first jar of pickled radishes yesterday and they are bubbling away on the kitchen table.

Meanwhile we had an early solstice celebration with the Forest Nursery crew yesterday, hiking down around the lower pond in Central Park and picnicking and hearing the story of the Old Sun King and the New Sun King. It was a good day all around and the Beast napped on the way home.

And what else? The days are short, the weather is fine, the leaves are falling off the callery pear trees in streams of deep red and gold. And the guppy is pregnant.

Peace out peops.

The Beast slumbers and the Royal We has a headache.

I've been working on the 100 Hat Project. http://www.angelfire.com/poetry/lisajarnot/iraqhat.html

I just sent hat number 65 to Brother Toby in California. 

It's 60 plus degrees in nyc today, which perhaps accounts for the headache. Cooler is better for me. 

Sad news, our old friend Ted Enslin died last week.  He was the first writer to support my work, and his correspondence with me in the early years of my "career" (late 1980s) kept me going. We last met up in Milwaukee some years ago for the Lorine Niedecker Conference there. Ted in all his woodsy Mainey pipe smoking style hung out with us youngsters at a taco joint and also a bowling alley.  Ted's influence on the musicality of my poetry is huge, and it occurs to me now that this is a fact I've overlooked sadly in interviews. 

Heading toward the darkest days of the winter we prepare for the solstice. The Central Park hiking crew meets this week as usual with an extra Saturday outing to get the dads involved.

And as the weather changes we find a lot of the social on-the-street world tedious in the expectations that others have that we will dress our kid like a fricking eskimo pardon my french. The Beast still likes to be a layer cooler than most kids. When it's 60 degrees she wears a tee shirt. When it's 50 degrees she wears a long sleeve shirt. When it's 40 degrees she wears a jacket (but still sometimes shuns the leg warmers). Every day (literally) people on the street say "put a jacket on her" or "isn't she cold?".  I have finally come up with the best come-back "No jacket. Our religion forbids it."

We'll be back next week with more news of this and that.  Peace out peops.