Mita Williams's Blog – March 2010 Archive (9)

I have lived mostly all my life near the Great Lakes. I should say, The Laurentian Great Lakes because there's another group of lakes called The Great Lakes.



And since they are in the continent of Africa, they are called the African Great Lakes. But Africa is a very big place, so let's call them by their preferred names (according to Wikipedia) : African Rift Valley Lakes or East African Lakes.



I… Continue

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I love composting. I put in table scraps and by magic, it somehow turns into soil-food for my garden.



I remember the first time I saw I proper compost pile. It was my first summer job doing trail maintenance and there was a *huge* pile of grass and garden trimmings between the urban trail and a particular home. But it wasn't the size of the pile that impressed me. It was the heat. The biomedical breakdown work of the compost pile was radiating heat.



Normally, heat would have… Continue

My daughter is twelve today. Twelve, I suspect, is going to be a lot like eleven, but more so.



When she was 11, sometimes my little girl was happy being a little girl - a playful kid in the full throw of silliness and wonder. But, more and more often, I've started to see a more self-aware and self-conscious young person. She's like that today. And she's not distraught at all that her mother was not able to bake cupcakes for her birthday.



But I feel like I'm a "bad mom" for… Continue

You would think that the prospect of new wind turbines coming to your community would be welcomed as more and more people are realizing that we are living in the age of peak oil. But when the community response to such investment is "it scares the living hell out of us", you know that there are some serious drawbacks inherent with wind turbine technology.



For 700 years, the only… Continue

The city I live is surrounded by farmland although I wouldn't say that farming is much on the minds of most of the city's inhabitants.



In fact, the farmers in the area have to hold campaigns just to remind folks that farmers feed cities. And some of their marketing efforts have been working. The local agricultural association produced a map where one can buy local food from… Continue

Sometimes I feel completely overwhelmed when I do my research. Sometimes I hit a point when I just want to stop because every new bit of information I uncover only seems to add complexity and confusion instead of taking it away. When I reach this point, I do stop and I try a completely different strategy.



Food security is one of those topics that has the potential to overwhelm. Food is so integral to our being and ingrains so much of our history, our economy and our own lives that its… Continue

Despite all my best intentions, it is 2020 and I'm still living a busy life with hardly any time to curl up someplace quiet with a good book. With two lively teenagers in the house, this is next to impossible. But my family and I have somehow made it a habit to slow life down every week for a proper Sunday dinner.



And just like our in our grandmother's time, Sundays are now the only time in which meat becomes the primary main course. But that doesn't mean that we don't eat meat at all… Continue

Literally just as I watching Evoke Agent EVO's video of a co-working space in New York City, I learned that the city that *I* call home is experimenting with something like it for a month in July.



I'm tempted to put in an application but what to do? Radical Reference Work?… Continue