Summer produce!

I took a little break from work this afternoon to go to the local farmstand before the rains hit. Including a stop at the co-op, I spent all of $35 on an awful lot of amazing local and organic yumminess, suported local businesses and foodcrafters, and made a significant first step towards meeting two of my summer goals

1. eating better, healthier, more locally and
2. paying more attention to the quantity of my shopping so as to waste less

Today’s trip was in support of two recipes, and I stayed mostly on list. Well, except for the apple batard (that was supposd to be a baguette) and the 2 quarts of local organic strawberries. Because, well, they were there. And local and organic and ripe and aromatic….

The recipes I was shopping for? Zucchini Ribbons with Garlic and Lemon Pepper and Wheat Berry And Barley Salad With Smoked Mozzarella I forgot mozzarella in my local goat cheese lust, and the potatoes are for a dish to go with that. If I don’t make specific plans for fresh goat cheese, I tend to put it over hot noodles (with garlic infused EVOO…). Which is fantastic, but lacks a certain degree of healthiness.

So, a quick trip to the store to get the mozzarella and maybe some rosemary, backed up with the edamame, cereal, milk/coffee and eggs already on hand (and the raspberry sorbet), I’m going to see if this is a week’s worth of food. What do you think?

So, the bounty??

local:

apple batard
goat cheese
butter
2 qts strawberries
a small handful chard
2 large tomatoes
garlic
red onion
chives
2 zucchini
8 new yellow potatoes (adoro? I’ve never of this kind before)

not local
pistachios
avocado
lemon

Taking a chance…

This post is the sort of thing I was thinking about when I launched this blog. thoughts and wonderings from outside my professional sphere, but things I still engage intellectually. This post makes me feel very exposed, however. Please be gentle!

There was an interesting story this morning on Morning Edition, about the conflicts between churches and legally recognized same sex unions, and it has my brain whirring around.

A note before we start: I fully support same sex civil unions. I also support heterosexual civil unions. I believe that a civil union is all the government has the power to convey. Marriage is the eternal mating of souls, a magical and spiritual act, and outside the realm of government. What government can do is provide legal incentives, tax changes, ease name changing, “legitimate” offspring (which has to do with ancient inheritance laws) and make de facto certain other inheritance rights under a legal status it conveys. Legal stuff.  All that is civil union. And I think everyone who is so lucky as to find the person they love, and who loves them back, the person they want to spend the rest of their life with, their partner, everyone who is just that lucky and brave should be allowed the right for legal protections of the unit they form.

I also believe that religions should be free from legal interference into their practices and actions. They’ll change or die on their own abilities and perceptions, and social forces will play a role. But I support a thick tall wall (with a moat even!) between Church and State.

And I also support a legal system that makes sense, because if it isn’t built on sense and precedent, it can’t stand up over time. Legal decision based on anything else will crumble! If the legal bricks aren’t in place, point out where they are missing and build a stronger foundation! Anything else is just rigid quicksand! So please take the following with that in mind: this is not a critique of same sex marriage, or the rights of gay and lesbian folks. It is a critique of our legal system, and how religion is enacted in America.

Well, that was a bot of a long digression… this morning’ story included a piece about a lesbian couple who wanted to hold their NJ civil union ceremony in a Methodist owned pavilion on a bordwalk, a place where marriages are often held. They were denied, and sued. Not only did they win the suit, the church lost their tax exempt status for the pavilion and the surrounding area. Another couple sued the photographers who told them they didn’t shoot gay marriage ceremonies (because of their religious beliefs).

I don’t see these two as comparable at all! The photographers were more clearly discriminatory, although the story was cast in the light of the photographers as employers, and the discrimination flowed from there. I saw it as the couple was the employer and the photographers refused to work for them. Phrased that way, is it still discrimination? It’s unpleasant, and doesn’t make me happy, but don’t folks hold the power in deciding who they wish to work for?  And the reason this story was included in the news piece was because of the religious motivation of the photographers: they wanted to act in accordance with their religious beliefs. NPR didn’t really take that up in the telling, but it’s an interesting wrinkle. If the photographers are the employees, they are free to act on their religious beliefs in terms of who they work for, right? Aren’t we all? If the photographers are the employers, different laws hold precedence and if they refuse to take on a client due to their religious belefs, that’s another box of monkeys. NPR dropped the ball on spinning out those ramifications!

The first story, the main stoiry, engaged me for all the reasons that I pursued a PhD in religion and politics, religion in America. I think that Freedom of Religon in America has never been really enacted, and instead we have a freedom to beleive whatever we want, but we must act in ways that resemble Christianity.

For example, Islam will always be a hard sell for American businesses to work with, because of the floating calendar. Feast and fast days and other major holidays happen on fixed days in the Islamic calendar, but float on the Gregorian calendar. Businesses can’t deal with that sort of scheduling; Native Americans face similar lack of acceptance (and significant employment discrimination) because their holidays (especially the western peoples) are often called at the moment and not scheduled on any sort of calendar. We could talk about the lack of acceptance of peyote as a sacrament for the Native American Church, denials of candles and incense and access to the open air under the full or new moon for Wiccans in prison, even the difficulties faced by observant Jews who won’t work on Saturdays. Dare I bring up polygamous marriages based on scriptural precedence (I will say that government has an obligation to protect the underage, and and am not equating acceptance of religiously based polyamory with abuse of young children and forced marriage of minors). I studied New Religious Movements (aka cults) so I have lots of examples of the ways that people who practice religions that don’t behave like Christianity are discriminated against and denied rights. And I would love to see true freedom of religious behavior in this country, accepted by all.

But that also means I have to accept the same rights of practice for Christian groups. And I am frankly baffled at how a Methodist-owned chapel can lose it’s status for following the beliefs of it’s church. And it makes me very uncomfortable; it is a huge crack in the Church/State wall, a weak and tenuous wall to begin with.

This got to be very long, and I feel like I haven;t spun it all the way I want to, so I’ll sum up the high points:

• religious freedom is legally assured in America
• religious freedom is less frequently enacted in America
• I support the rights of all to civil union
• I am deeply worried about legal decisions based on what the law ought to say but perhaps doesn’t
• I worry that the wall between church and state is crumbling

A sign of the times… but how do I read it?

Ani DiFranco is playing Disneyland.

I am without words.

well, not entirely…

News of this came across the ACRL Women’s Studies section discussion list (she’s playing downtown Disney during the ALA Annual meeting n two weeks). It came without comment, but I find it mind-boggling.

Feminism’s independent woman. A fierce denier(?) of The System. Perhaps the most independent musician to ever hit it big time. A woman, poet, singer who opened my eyes and made me question so much (including the role of happiness on fierceness in women’s creative spirit). A woman/musician/entrepreneur who rejected ever rule she ever met

Is playing DISNEYLAND???? The icon of The System. Capitalism by playing along. The epitome of selling out.

My spirit folds a little under the news.

tomatoes as metaphor

yesterday a friend of mine convinced me to adopt two tomato plants, comparing them to a stray kitten who will die without my help. The only problem being that I am very good at keeping stray kittens alive, and not so good at keeping plants alive. Seriously, I’ve kept three plants alive in my entire life (four if you count the air plant I had in third grade). I also have a secret: I have never gardened. I used to have a spring ritual of planning a garden in my head, and once in college some roommates and I covered a patch of grass to kill it overwinter in anticipation of gardening in that spot. But I’ve never actually put trowel to dirt and gardened. Add into this the fact that my apartment is surrounded by open meadow and forest and that I am visited daily by my small brown woodland furred friend, a few families of deer, clutches of turkey and a variety of other woodsy beasties, an dgardening sounds too much like a war zone to be enjoyable.

But I took the tomatoes. We planted them in pots (and in an old popcorn gift bucket. See, it’s good I’m a packrat!) and made psuedo-greenhouses/deer protectors by wrapping the tomato cages in clear plastic, and set them on my deck. I got surprisingly attached to them, checking on them every 20 minutes or so, looking at the growing things right there on my deck! Really, to the plants themselves, not just the idea of fresh yummy brandywines in August!

And then it poured. And now I am nervous. Can potted plants, ones that were just transplanted that day, survive the kind of deluge we had last night? How delicate are they? Because I’ve realized that these are my trial balloons. If I can keep them alive and if they can survive the deer I might plant more things in the future. But if my balloon goes down on day one, I may lost impetus to trial it again next year. The gardener in my head would like incentives to grow in the world. Did the thunderstorm just steal that away, along with my brandywines?

Naming the inspiration

As summer has set in and I’ve had slightly more time for leisure activities, I keep wanting to blog about things that wouldn’t really work on my professional blog. And so I decided to create Rudy’s Ramblings.

Here will be thoughts and ideas and links and other words about books, movies, food, friendship, politics, life and love. anything, really but librarianship and technology & education. Enjoy. Contribute. Participate!