We went to yoga class today and Bea explained that we'd been away to Buffalo, London, and Chicago. That's also part of the reason we've been away from the blog, but the every day of "just being" is really what keeps us away from the blog lately. It's more and more delightful to be offline, which raises a bunch of questions. We dumped Facebook and have forgotten about the chatter on the various neighborhood listservs and really somehow don't miss even the New York Times, but would like to stay informed about meteors striking the earth.  Also we dumped Youtube, for the sake of the kid (and the sake of my sanity because My Little Pony was full of baloney.) This has made family movie time a lot more exciting. We watch together on a big screen (not very big.)  Our friends Kent and Tara and Lyv and Fyo have a projector for their wall.  Hmm. Well, it's a thought. And Thomas brought home some Buster Keaton the other night, which had Bea cackling like a mongoose.

So what is the universe about? Mostly cooking and autonomous learning. (The term "unschooling" increasingly bristles in that it implies that school is a grid from which to "un-".) We're really using schools as places to poach from and doing something that suits us as learners. Art classes, yoga, museum tours. It's all around us and we tend to come and go as we please, depending on what time the kid wakes up and what kind of mood we're in.  But let me say now that I hope Bea never wants to go to school because I so much love our lazy morning wake up and variable breakfast-time.)  We did talk about "what-school-is" the other day and she said it wouldn't work for her if she couldn't be naked there. Fair enough.

 As for breakfasts, we're getting hot and heavy with the gluten-free pancakes. Here's one recipe we've been making use of:

4 eggs

tablespoon of honey

teaspoon of vanilla

teaspoon of baking powder (the hippie non-aluminum kind)

a handful of walnuts

a blended apple

1/2 cup of coconut flour

1/2 cup of raw milk or coconut milk or bone broth

heap up in big silver dollar shapes, slow fry in butter or coconut oil.

And yes! We just got bucket of organic coconut oil and a pound of raw cacoa powder.  It's heaven. 

We'll be back in a month, give or take a few weeks.  And here are some pictures. Peace out people.

Chicago Skyline

Central Park Snow Drops, February

Pool hall at the University of Chicago

Greetings All,

In the autumn I ran a workshop with the theme "poet's notebooks" and
it went really well. I'm hoping to do part 2 of the class on mondays
6-8:30 from Feb 25 to April 29 at my apartment in Jackson Heights,
Queens. I will see if I can get 7 students-- I think that's a good
number. It would be $300 for new students, $275 for returning
students. I want to run the class as a theater performance of sorts.
There will be five topics that we'll focus on in notebook writing:

Architecture
Food
State dept (current international affairs)
Language
Meteorology

And we will spend two weeks on each topic. The goal is to write
obsessively in the notebook about the topic in an "as if" mode.
(during these two weeks I AM an architect or I AM fluent in Japanese,
or I AM a state dept official.)  I'm thinking of the workshop meetings
as a kind of salon, where we come in, have a glass of wine, (or tea),
and talk about our discoveries, read from our notebooks, and spin off
into in-class writing exercises inspired by the information we've
gathered.

Please let me know if you're interested, and please forward this to
interested parties.

Thanks,
Lisa

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?