Early morning thoughts.
The autumn leaves are just beginning to change colour. Red and yellow, orange and green and all that lies between them are just outside my window. There is to be rain today, but it hasn’t begun and the the sun is playfully peeping through the trees for now.
I have a few errands on my list that will take me out of doors and must try to accomplish them before the skies cloud over. One is to wash the car exterior.
After taking the car into the dealership when water leaked into the passenger compartment, it has needed to be cleaned and the floor mats returned to their rightful positions. The dealership found nothing wrong with the car, but admitted it was full of water for unknown reasons. At first they were going to charge me for checking it, but upon discussion decided to reseal the car and dry it out free of charge. Toyota. I will be calling them to let them know if it is leaking this week. So far, it has remained dry. We still have no idea why it filled up with water, it poured in on my feet as if a cup was emptying! We hope it won’t happen again.
I will also hang a load of laundry out to dry and try to remember to collect it before the rain begins later today.
Yesterday I received a call after 8 a.m. asking me to fill in for someone who called in sick. Since it was a short drive, I accepted and went in to work for three hours, my first work of the month. I have another three hours booked later in the month.
Today I intend to putter in the kitchen and work on my genealogy book.
I finally found a place to purchase 4 litre, wide mouthed glass jars to use as food canisters. I do not trust plastic for long term storage, in part because mice can chew right through it. I will be picking up the jars this week; then I’ll be busy filling and organizing them.
I grew up on a farm. My mother canned and we had a large freezer. We did not use value added foods, with a few exceptions, such as bread and pasta and the occasional can of baked beans or tomato soup. We ate food prepared from raw ingredients. I loved to cook and became a Home Economics teacher. I was very interested in domestic independence and have developed exceptional skills in that area. Skills developed by most who lived on farms before the fifties and sixties.
As a Home Economics teacher I watched the decline in skills taught to the young regarding nutrition and food preparation. When my girls were in urban schools these things were not taught by qualified teachers, if they were taught at all, and were often merely “electives” taught outside the regular curriculum without guidelines. The quality of instructional content was abysmal. I doubt it has improved over the years.
On the Internet I see young people attempting to revisit these skills, learning from scratch, painfully reinventing the wheel, and am saddened. In less than a generation our culture has lost its ability to pass on basic knowledge and skills for maintaining health. The young people, all from urban backgrounds as far as I can tell, are unaware that there are many women, from rural backgrounds, who possess incredible knowledge and skill at in the field of nutrition and food preparation. These women are a living history it would seem, one that is ignored by the urban young.
Age groups seem to have become extremely insular and self-referencing on the Internet, and perhaps in the real world as well. Healthy communities include all members and generations, each valued for their special qualities. Our North American culture is suffering from unbridled agism.
Worldly Distractions
Weather
14 °C
Condition: Cloudy
Pressure: 101.7 kPa
Visibility: 16 km
Temperature: 14.1°C
Dewpoint: 11.7°C
Humidity: 85 %
Quote
“I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. The transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse.”
Brian Eno, Wired 1/99, p. 176
Note
Brian Eno
“Brian Eno was born in 1948 at Phyllis Memorial Hospital, Woodbridge, Suffolk, and was educated at St Joseph’s College, Birkfield, Ipswich, which was founded by the St John le Baptiste de la Salle order of Catholic brothers (from whom he took part of his name when a student there),[5] at Ipswich Art School in Roy Ascott’s Groundcourse and the Winchester School of Art, graduating in 1969. In school, he used a tape recorder as a musical instrument and experimented with his first, sometimes improvisational, bands. St. Joseph’s College teacher and painter Tom Phillips encouraged him, recalling “Piano Tennis” with Eno, in which, after collecting pianos, they stripped and aligned them in a hall, striking them with tennis balls.
Brian Eno has been active politically throughout his life, frequently writing letters to government ministers, appearing on political debates, and writing newspaper columns to express his political views. He was sharply critical of the Thatcher government’s decision to reduce funding to the BBC World Service, arguing that the £5 million cut to its £25 million budget was damaging, and was the equivalent cost of “just one wing of one F-16 fighter jet”- a reference to a large order of military hardware the government had just made.
In 1996, Eno and others started the Long Now Foundation to educate the public about the very long term future of society.[34] He is also a columnist for the British newspaper The Observer.
In 2003, he appeared on a UK Channel 4 discussion about the Iraq war with a top military spokesman; Eno was highly critical of the war. In 2005, he spoke at an anti-war demonstration in Hyde Park, London. In March 2006, he spoke at an anti-war demonstration at Trafalgar Square; he noted that 2 billion people on this planet do not have clean drinking water, and that water could have been supplied to them for about one-fifth of the cost of the Iraq war.[citation needed]
The Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition mobile phone features exclusive music composed by Eno. Between 8 January 2007 and 12 February 2007, ten units of Nokia 8800 Sirocco Brian Eno Signature Edition mobile phones, individually numbered and engraved with Eno’s signature were auctioned off. All proceeds went to two charities chosen by Eno: the Keiskamma Aids Treatment program and The World Land Trust.
In 2006, Eno was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter calling for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions.
In December 2007, the newly-elected Leader of Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, appointed Eno as his youth affairs adviser.
In January 2009, Eno spoke out against Israel’s military action on the Gaza Strip by writing an opinion for CounterPunch and participating in a large-scale protest in London.”
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno