picking perfect peaches!

picking perfect peaches!

i didn’t think we’d get any peaches this year, what with the brutal frost while the blossoms were out and the devastating drought over the summer. but lo! they survived, and dare i say, thrived. we have so many peaches this year that we didn’t even have to deploy balloon decoy peaches. the squirrels have taken their share and left us with plenty 🙂

and so, once again, we get to enjoy The Transformative Power of A Real Peach ( and a little heavy whipping cream ).

listening to raj patel speak in front of my three foot disembodied hand.

listening to raj patel speak in front of my three foot disembodied hand.

three years ago i took a picture of myself “stealing” peas from organic valley’s chief marketing executive’s employee garden. a few years ago, somebody from organic valley asked for pictures from the employee garden to be used in a presentation, so i gave them the picture with many others. it must have ended up somewhere in our graphics department, because this week i was pleasantly surprised to see it blown up on the wall of the employee cafe with a few other food/garden pictures.

so now you know how i ended up listening to academic, journalist, activist and writer, raj patel, speak ( he’s an excellent speaker by the way ) on the global food economy and participatory democracy at a fundraiser for the valley stewardship network in front of my disembodied hand stealing theresa’s peas.

i think there’s a metaphor in there somewhere. or maybe not.

IQ and Pesticides: Another Important Study

new research from the prestigious boston children’s hospital, published in environmental health perspectives, “A Strategy for Comparing the Contributions of Environmental Chemicals and Other Risk Factors to Neurodevelopment of Children”, identifies the top five risk factors associated with decreases in children’s IQs. number 3 on the list, right behind lead? organophosphate pesticides which are used in conventional/non-organic food production. according to wikipedia, “there are forty organophosphate pesticides registered in the U.S., with at least 73 million pounds used in agricultural and residential settings.” don’t panic, go organic.

on waking, once again, to a bat in the house!

on waking, once again, to a bat in the house! I.

there’s nothing quite like waking up to the swoosh! swoosh! of a bat flying around your bedroom and not too far from your head! it’s been 6 years since we’ve had any bats in the living space of our home ( i have to qualify that statement because there are plenty of bats we can hear crawling around the walls from time to time they just don’t come on the living space anymore ), and while i love bats and the fact that they can eat thousands of insects an hour, i certainly don’t love them flying around in the house while we’re sleeping!

odin woke us up when he heard it and we calmly shut the bedroom door after the bat flew out and slept relatively soundly together while the bat presumably tried to find its way out. we left the front door open to our enclosed porch and luckily it was smart enough to find a sleeping spot in a corner of the porch since that makes removal a lot less traumatic for everyone involved. not nets or whatnot required, we just left the porch door open and he flew out the next evening after waking up from his slumber.

i’m not expert enough to tell if he’s a little brown bat or a juvenile big brown bat, but either way i hope he stays out of our house and safe now that the deadly white nose syndrome that’s decimating bat populations has been spotted thirty miles from wisconsin.

on waking, once again, to a bat in the house! II.

at least we know for sure he’s not a vampire since he chose to sleep in the space where there was 200 head of garlic drying ( he’s the little brown blob up in the corner )!

i wrote about some of run-ins with bats 6 years ago and was amused to take a trip down memory lane after discovering this bat. feel free to check out, “Mr. Big Brown Bat!”, “Invasion of The Big Brown Bats! or could we be any more stupider?”, “bats are supposed to stay in the belfry!” ( wherein i rescue a bat from the toilet ), “it’s time for another exciting round of What Would You Do?”, “O RLY?” and “bats be gone?”