Last year at the New Year the Burmese Prince made a list called "Fifty Things", not of things he particularly wished to do, but of things he grooved on.  I made a list of Fifty Things that was more goal-oriented, which is my way of being— like a hamster on a wheel.  Last year's list had some nice things on it. Fermenting food (we've really had fun with that, and this week we came up with an excellent fermented applesauce that tastes like fizzy thick apple cider.) Baking bread— we gave up on that one as we don't eat wheat anymore, and the alternative bread-types are so odd and complicated (though a pie crust of almond flour and coconut oil is pretty fantastic). Buying a house in the Bronx. Well, we did buy an apartment in Jackson Heights, so that's the big deal for this year: having a homestead that is lovely and lovable. And then there was the theme of birds. In 2012 we learned to identify a lot of birds in the course of our Central Park walks: the titmouse, the chickadee (an old favorite from childhood in upstate New York), the house finch, the chipping sparrow, the golden crested kinglet, the downy woodpecker, the grackle, the wood duck, the northern shoveler, and so on and so forth. 

The theme lately has been simplicity, so in 2013 our Fifty Things will become Ten Things. Here it is.

Knitting

Sewing

Spanish

Chess 

Piano

Shakespeare

Astronomy

Finnegans Wake

Tai Chi

Defiant Lightness 

Old English could be on the list too. Ancient Greek? Back to that soon.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year to all our peops here there and everywhere. And a heads up to the UK crew: we arrive January 19.

In an effort to be cheerful despite the upcoming Consumer-Family Holiday, here is a photo essay.

 On a side street here there is good weird cheer (the santa pig is charming). The Beast and I took a stroll along this route the other night on our way home from the park. Jackson Heights continues to delight (and Bea actually now calls the neighborhood Jackson Lights). 

Milk and Cookies. In an effort to curb the kid's sugar consumption, we've instituted an afternoon milk and cookies ritual. We even found gluten free cookies so that I can join in (wheat has been out of circulation for some months here as it gives me wicked headaches). Instead of having a treat in the morning or a treat on the way home from the park, we wait til we're home and at the dining room table to break out the snacks.

 A tufted titmouse in the Ramble, Central Park. The last few weeks have been filled with winter bird sightings in the park. The Forest Nursery kids are now pretty clear about what's a woodpecker and what's a sparrow and what's a starling. As for pigeons, Bea refers to them as Rock Doves, which is what they are. And the toe action of the pigeon? Well, any Forest Nursery three year old can tell you that the pigeon foot is pretty similar to the T Rex or Allosaurus foot. The "unschooling" thing comes together organically, which is why we don't want to call it "unschooling"--  we're not "un-ing" anything and we're not relying on the apparatus known as "school". Learning all the time, autonomously, yes, but that's not radical, it's just what humans do. The Burmese Prince appreciates "defiant lightness" as a principle of being. That's how life-plus-kid-minus-school feels: defiantly light.

 This photo, well, I just like it. Leela (age 8) took it the other day when we had a mini-party with Miku, Yui, Toby, and Aisha.

The other miscellaneousness of the season is related to food. Shredded beets, carrots, and ginger are fermenting, and two more projects of fermented apple sauce and pickled turnips are on the schedule for tomorrow's kitchen experiments.

The news of the world is still the news of the world: haunting really, with massive ice melt stories (can't wait to see what the next hurricane season brings) and as for guns and the NRA, holy shit as my friend Bernadette would say. Because after all, if you're going to send your kid to school, you want to be sure they have the opportunity to see good guys shooting bad guys. (And you can imagine the mental state of any "good guy" who wants to volunteer his time to stalk around the outside of a school with a gun.)

We're pretty depressed about the fact that the victims list for Sandy Hook has been officially set at 26. Victim number 1, Adam Lanza's mom gets left off the victim list, as does victim number 28, Adam Lanza. The Guardian ran a good editorial piece on this part of the story: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/23/no-tears-nancy-lanza-newtown-mother 

Peace people, and eat the NRA (remove the buckshot first). 

It's a Saturday night on one of the shortest days of the year and we are nesting, grooving on doing less and staying in familiar habitats and sticking with familiar habits.

We were watching a video of a lecture by psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar the other day and one phrase he used (with fondness and in solidarity) was "colored people's time" (CPT).  

When we had our place in the Catskills, there was another variation of that, called "country time" (it meant the plumber would come, maybe next tuesday, so just be chilling).

When we visit the Simplicity Parenting site we see yet another version of this idea.  It's called "Maui Time", and yes, that's when you get away from it all and start to appreciate your family more, etc.  

Here at Lisablog headquarters, we can't currently afford to go on Maui Time. (There's only $53 in the South of France Fund, and $1.61 in the envelope titled "change found on the street". There are 32 pounds in the "UK fund" envelope, but going to the UK is never like country time for us because there's so much to do and so many people to see, like they say.)

So, we ponder Colored People's Time, and wonder if it's also TT (Toddler Time), since the Beast will leave the house when she's ready to leave the house, which is after certain Barbies are arranged in some weird voodoo fashion, and also after there has been an inventory of marbles, and a packing up of various trinkets to be taken with us wherever we go.  And then when we do get outside there are so many things to look at, so don't expect to get anywhere fast.

All of this must be okay, because really there is enough time to do everything there is to do. How is this possible? you ask; yes, I know.

My first question is How Important Is It?

Years ago a friend pointed out that the world will not collapse if you don't check your email every day since you're not Superman and you don't have superpowers to resolve any world crises anyway. We've found that to be true. And usually it's disappointing to come back to email after two or three or four days away. Why? Nothing has happened.  

As for Facebook, do you really need it? I don't know. Probably not.

As for learning things, yes it's great to learn things. The school model for learning things is the cramming model. You take five classes a semester, read eight books in each class, and commit a bunch of information to short term memory. Two years later it's gone. So why not learn things well and slowly? (For example, here at the Lisablog offices we are studying Old English, one word at a time at a pace of one word per day. It's a dead language, is it really that urgent?)

The same with exercise. It doesn't have to be a big production. Our new schedule includes a 10 minute run every morning.  Hey, it's exercise and we're doing it. And we're not paying a gym or a personal trainer.

What about simple food? We're lucky here in NYC. We have green markets around town every day of the week. The Sunday morning green market in Jackson Heights provides eggs, milk, cheese, bread, meat, fruit, vegetables, and honey and maple syrup. One big shop (take the rolly cart), and voila, a week's worth of food is in the house. Yes, we supplement (rice, nuts, coffee, etc.) at the local health food store. 

Not enough variety in local food?  How about mixing up the meals with some canned and fermented treats from across the seasons. I'm not talking about buying cans of food. I'm talking about canning foods. Tomatoes in February. That's our desire. And as for fermentation, we just scored the most excellent anaerobic fermentation set up: mason jar, recap-it BPA free plastic lid, cork, and airlock.  Here are the carrots (about to be shredded) and here are the jars where they will reside, anaerobically, to become carrot sauerkraut:

Simple kitchen?  Two more words: Crock Pot.  (Find one without lead in its glaze.) Also remember to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner in one go: tea kettle boils while toast cooks while lunch is packed (yesterday's leftovers) and jam everything else into the crock pot. You get home, dinner is there.

Okay, one other note: we just got this Big Berkey Water Filtration System: 

The filters in this dude take out fluoride, chlorine, lead, arsenic, copper, creepy crawlies, and so on. Tap water goes in at night, and clean water comes on in the morning. If the city won't agree to take the fluoride out of the water, we'll do it ourself. Very satisfying.  

Stay tuned to Lisablog for more tips on transitioning to CPT. And Peace.

It's six a.m. and Lisablog comes to you from Jackson Heights, Queens. We inhabit a new homestead, or as the Beast says, we have a new habitat. 

As always, moving shakes things up and we've been thinking about new unschooling possibilities.  Learning Spanish seems like a good idea. In Sunnyside Bea picked up a little bit of Spanish from our friend Zenado at the bodega on the corner of our block. In Jackson Heights, the immersion will be even more intense. Sixty percent of our neighbors are from Central and South America, with Ecuador, Argentina, and Colombia high on the list of home-countries. So, Spanish it is.  And very good food, of course.

Leaving behind the Americas, we have Asia. We're a stone's throw from the 74th Street strip of Jackson Heights that is dense with Indian groceries, restaurants, sweets shops, and fabric stores. Maharaja Sweets is our favorite for Indian burfi:

Burfi is made with condensed milk and nuts (cashews and pistachios). Trivia note: the Persian word of origin is "Barf" meaning snow (and these are cold white treats), and really you can call it barfi, if you must.

And hopping on the subway we can be in Flushing's Chinatown in ten minutes. My understanding is that Flushing Chinatown is a Mandarin community, where as Manhattan Chinatown is a Cantonese community.  When I was a youngster (21 or so) I spent three years living in Oakland's Mandarin Chinatown and it was life-changing. (Being white meant being a ghost, and it was quite fantastic, and strange, to walk crowded streets and always be invisible.) And of course there is the lure of cooking delights: raw water chestnuts, five spice powder, and winter melon for soup.

Now, as my 45th birthday looms, I can really say I have the best birthday presents anyone could have. A share in a cooperative housing project (80 shares, that is), a Burmese Prince and a Beast, and a shift in the voting patterns of this country that finally brings us closer to an integrated civilized world. (I know, the last one is a little bit utopian, but at least the Mormon didn't win.) 

And a final note about the neighborhood: we're walking distance from Malcolm X's house over near Laguardia Airport. So, that will be a pilgrimage too.

Hurricane Sandy howled through yesterday, giving us enough time indoors to knit, sew, and even now, yes, blog.

This entry comes as a simple plea. Please vote next week. And vote for the muslim. No, I don't like the drone strikes either, but please vote.

Here is inspiration in the aftermath of yesterday's fourteen foot storm surge—

(thanks to the Burmese Prince for alerting us to this speech snippet)

"President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet." (laughter from Republican backers) "MY promise … is to help you and your family."

                                                    --Mitt Romney

And if you don't want to vote to save the planet, can you at least vote to save the rights of the women who you love?

We are away from the blog these days because we started using a typewriter. The article in last week's New York Times on carbon emissions and the internet actually made us kind of sick. And then we stopped over-using the internet.  We, meaning not the whole household, but me, Lisa of the Blog. But actually Bea stopped asking to watch Winnie The Pooh when I stopped checking my email during the day.  This was really interesting.   What do we do?  The daily email check is at 8 am and usually takes about 15 minutes.  Business gets caught-up-with, and then the computer is off for the rest of the day.  Bea and I have been using the typewriter, knitting socks, sewing (yes, the sewing maching is up and running), and tomorrow we pick up our raw milk delivery so that we can make some yogurt. We're not shunning technology, but are trying to use it more wisely.  The result, for me, is better sleep and better concentration. Go figure. And peace out.

Thinking today of something Bob Dylan said in a telephone conversation circa 1971 to A.J. Weberman that great gentleman junkie Dylanologist who routinely picked through Dylan's garbage when he lived in the West Village.  Dylan was complaining to Weberman about his scavenging activities, since Dylan's kids, toddlers, would watch out the living room window. Weberman said "The kid didn't look scared," and Dylan said, "no, my kids aren't aware of this or that." 

Having a three-year-old means living with someone who's not aware of this or that, but is aware of everything. My kid knows the phases of the moon, she can scout out tiny mushrooms across a field, and she remembers the exact conversations of Tin Tin and Captain Haddock inside the frames of 80 pages cartoon books. Today she matter-of-factly recounted seeing a guy with no legs, and she often cheerfully tells strangers about our cat Harry who died last summer. But she isn't aware of the waves of bloodshed in the Middle East, or death by lethal injection in Texas, or hate crimes against queer and transgender people [and Sikhs, and fill in the blank].

It occurs to me these days that my energies are so consistently funneled into the daily orders (as Robert Duncan would call them) of raising a child, that another part of me is missing.  It used to be that I could read the New York Times and check in with Democracy Now and see what Noam Chomsky was saying and I even had the time and desire to exchange letters with those guys down there in Texas on Death Row.

Those guys have since been executed, and it's not the time, of course, to bring my kid into a conversation about all such things. It may be that there never will be a time or a reason for her to know about Anthony Nealy who possibly robbed a gas station and killed two clerks. I never asked him during the course of our letter exchanges. Mostly we talked about appeals, about what he read in the newspaper, about what he could and couldn't get with the few bucks he had in his snack bar account.

Sure, I'd like my kid to know that marching on the pentagon in 1987 to protest American policies in Latin America was a highlight of my youth. But who knows if that will be meaningful to her either. Perhaps what I hope for is more of what Alfred North Whitehead called "a feeling state." I'd like her to know that she's loved and that she can love other people. I'd like her to have some cosmic empathy for all the creatures in the universe, without any indoctrinating influence (or forced viewings of Eyes On The Prize) on my part. Perhaps I've set the bar too high.

This morning one of our neighbors across the street here on 39th Place stabbed his wife.  Bea and I went out for our trek to the park at about 9 and had to wade through a little crowd gathering on the sidewalk. "What happened", I asked? "A guy killed his wife; he's on his way to Boston, but they'll get him." My first thought wasn't to "get him," but there it was. We made our way up to the train platform at 40th Street and strolled down to our regular spot at the end of the platform (less crowded at rush hour with a stroller). And there he was, about my age, barefoot, sad, weary, wearing a white tee shirt with the red streak of a bloody hand-print across the shoulder. He was sitting on the white metal box at the end of the platform, looking at me while I looked at him. Everyone else was busy as usual with their personal devices. I thought to say something to him, as a gesture of reaching out, or figuring out if he was who I thought he was, but there I was with the kid in the stroller who was not aware of this or that, my little bundle of joy who I protect from trips and falls and sugar-rushes. So I stood there, and looked at him, and called Thomas to ask him to mention to the cops crowding our block that here was the guy they were possibly looking for. And then the train arrived, and I pushed the stroller through the doors and took one last long look at him, who was still looking at me, not in any particular way, except for in some deeply empty human despair that simply called for compassion. Ten minutes later he jumped off the platform onto Queens Boulevard and died there. It was probably about the time we were pulling into Queensboro Plaza and I was trying to decide if the kid and I needed to get off the train because she was shrieking, an ear-shattering shriek, loud and sustained, that came out of nowhere except for the morning crankiness that sometimes takes over.

Now we're at the end of the day; the New York Post reporters are gathered on the street eating potato chips waiting to take photos of the family coming into or going out of the building, because someone has to show up to clean the place up and make sense of what happened. One murder, one suicide, one kid who's not aware of this or that, and me, still not understanding the chasm between me and my neighbor as I watched him making his way out of the realm of human relation.

A few photos here from the Old Manse in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday. We've moved out, moved on, are moving on up to a new apartment in Jackson Heights, but our hearts will forever be in the Catskills. 

Now we say farewell and thank you to that small piece of land and little bit of paradise and musty mousey cabin in the woods. Thank you Esopus Creek for quiet fishing interludes as dusk descended and the trout were jumping and Herb the heron was soaring overhead. Thank you little patch of lawn for the opportunity to watch wild turkeys turkey-dancing their way into the woods behind the house. Thank you beech trees, sugar maples, red maples, hop hornbeams, shagbark hickories, cherries, black oaks, red oaks, hemlocks, white pines, and sweet birches for being yourselves looming all around. Thank you Mount Tremper neighbors for being friendly country advocates rather than noisy city adversaries. Thank you rolling hilly roads (Wittenberg, Old Wittenberg, Winne, Sickler, Mount Pleasant, Upper Ohayo Mountain, and Riseley) for being the best marathon training course in the universe complete with romping deer, crispy red and gold foliage, and wild grapes. Thank you bears for scaring us. Thank you Emerson Spa for being so weird and having hot water in winter and martinis year-round. Thank you rare spice bush next to the ancient red maple in the far corner of the back yard for being scented as you were. Thank you tipped tree for the tree of life root system awe. Thank you cabbage whites and swallowtails for dilly-dallying around the deptford pinks, the soapwort, the joe-pye-weed, the bergamot, and the chickory. Thank you agile garlic mustard of May who made an appearance in a poem and on a plate. Thank you Jotul woodburning stove for crackling through the midnight hour while ice crept on the windows. We shall return, sometime, as soon as possible, to hug all the trees in our forest.