I have been making a version of this recipe for decades. It has been tasty. This time, it was deeeeeeelicious!

I use the following twists on tithing to do my part to help end hunger.

When I shop for groceries, I donate 10% of the amount of my purchase to Food for Lane County.

At the end of each month, I calculate how much money I have spent on luxury items – books, movies, concerts, anything beyond basic necessities – and donate 10% of that amount to Food for Lane County.

How to keep a sourdough starter alive during the winter

A friend of mine gave me a gift of sourdough starter. I had never made sourdough bread before, so I was very excited to get started. Unfortunately, a few days after bringing it home, my starter “died”. My house was simply too cold.

It turns out that the ideal temperature for creating or feeding a sourdough starter is 75 – 82 degrees Fahrenheit. We keep our house between 65 and 68 degrees during the winter months. As it certainly didn’t make sense to turn up our thermostat for the sake of the starter, I was eager to find another solution.

And there it was, sitting on my chest freezer. My mini dehydrator! Its lowest setting is 95 degrees, which is too warm for the starter. However, what if, I wondered, I set the bowl containing the starter on top of the dehydrator? Would that work? It did. Perfectly. I now have a lovely, healthy (new) starter bubbling its way towards someday being used to make an assortment of tasty treats: bread, English muffins, crackers, etc., etc.

Addendum: I took another look at the thermostat on my dehydrator. The lowest given temperature is 95 degrees, the temperature best suited for drying herbs and raising bread. It can, however, be turned down lower than this. There is simply no label to indicate what the temperature is below 95 degrees. So, I turned it all the way down and placed a meat thermometer (one that also gives an accurate reading of air temperatures) inside the dehydrator. It read 75 degrees. Ha! Even better.

And…. The instructions for sourdough starter call for filtered water at room temperature (75 degrees). Assuming that this is primarily to avoid poisoning the starter with chlorine, I simply left tap water out overnight to allow the chlorine gas to evaporate. To bring the water up to temperature, I simply placed the water bottle in the dehydrator on the highest setting for a few minutes.

How to keep leaves from blowing off the trays in a dehydrator

Sandwich the leaves between two of the plastic screens that line the shelves. This also flattens the leaves out, which enables you to fit more leaves/trays into the dehydrator.

A substitute for caulk for a small hole

I discovered this one one day when I was trying to think of alternatives to poison for the most recent ant invasion. I first located the crack in the baseboard in the kitchen they were using to stream by the dozens into the house. Searching for our caulk gun seemed enough of a hassle that I started brainstorming about an alternative.

Gum? The little bits of adhesive rubber stuff that they use to attach credit cards to paper?

In search of other options, I opened up my office supply drawer and saw ELMER’S Glue! “That’ll work!” I thought. And, it did! In fact, it’s even better than caulk because the aperture of the bottle is just the right size for the thin stream of glue that is needed for the task. It did the job perfectly. Hole filled. Ant invasion stopped without one drop of poison.

Other uses for a laundry basket

• Transporting wood from your woodpile into the house.
• Transporting a pot of soup (wrapped in a bath towel) from your house to a potluck.
• With a jump rope (or other item of length and strength appropriate for pulling a heavy object) tied to one of the handles, it is the perfect mode of transportation for young children to use to pull each other around the house.

• Uses for clothespins
• Attaching parchment paper to the side of a bread pan to keep it in place when pouring in bread batter
• Attaching juicing bags to the side of a bowl or pan when spooning in pulp previous to placing the bag in a cider press
• Keeping piano books open to the desired page
• Fastening the pieces of aluminum foil draped over a roast or turkey to the sides of the roasting pan

How to keep food cold in a cooler without buying ice or using ice packs

• Make your own blocks of ice using plastic take-out containers
• Freeze one of the entrées you are taking camping and use it as an ice pack

How to unwobble a wobbly restaurant table

If available, coffee stir sticks make great mini shims

How to avoid clumps in gravy

Use a small sieve and a spoon as a DIY sifter when adding flour to the gravy.

Use for a broken trowel blade

It was a chilly, drizzly fall day, and I was faced with the chore of cleaning mud off a shovel before putting it away. Running water over the blade with the hose got some off, but the thick clay and some dried-on dirt from the shovel’s last use were stubbornly remaining. The last thing I wanted to do was get my hands cold and wet, rubbing the mud off with my fingers. That was when I spied the trowel blade tucked between the pipe leading to the outdoor spigot. It worked perfectly! Also key was…

Keeping a bucket near an outdoor spigot for cleaning off garden tools

Here in Oregon, the soil is so saturated with water most months of the year that cleaning dirt off of shovels, trowels, and the like creates unwanted puddles. Having a bucket near the spigot both avoids puddles and conserves water: a bucket of muddy water is pretty much as effective at cleaning garden tools as clean water from a hose.

What an odd thing to invent, a birthday candle that keeps relighting when you blow it out when the only way your wish can come true is if you blow out all the candles. A bit sadistic no?

A quick thought.

Is the need for will power to achieve our goals just another unfortunate side effect of living in an industrial society that values individualism?

If everyone in your village or family gets up early to get the fires burning or milk the cows, do you need will power to get out of bed in the morning?

If you know that your community will be gathering at the fire circle or at the barn dance in the evening and that the music you will share with them will be greeted with joy and appreciation, do you need will power to practice your instrument?

If your friends and family are all in the field, or at the barn raising, or on the hunt, or gathering water, or at the river washing the clothes, and if they are laughing and singing and enjoying good conversation and good food, do you need will power to do your day’s work?

My answer, of course, is that no, no you don’t. We don’t need will power to accomplish our dreams (though it certainly will do the trick), we need community.

Life wasn’t meant to be a burden that we need to steel ourselves to take part in. It is not our weak (sinful) human nature that made life a burden but the rise of empire.

To transform our lives we don’t need to identify our faults and then have the will power to do better. The answer isn’t within it is without. It is in friendship and community, joy and love.

We don’t need will power. We need each other.

I heard it again the other day. On Netflix. A mother speaking to her daughter, explaining that the reason a boy was teasing her in school was because he liked her.

When are we going to stop saying this?! Boys don’t tease girls because they like them. They tease them because liking girls triggers painful, unhealed experiences that have left them too wounded to be able to directly express feelings of affection, to simply say, “I like you.” Boys tease girls because they feel scared, embarrassed, ashamed, and confused, and have learned that teasing is what one does when these feelings arise.

I want us to stop telling girls that boys tease them because they like them because I want girls to stop thinking that they need to be okay with things being said or done to them that they don’t like being said or done to them, particularly by the boys, and someday the men, they are close to.

I want us to stop condoning the teasing that boys do because I want them to have the opportunity to heal whatever hurts they are passing on with this teasing and to reclaim the full range of emotional expression that would enable them to be vulnerable, gentle and kind when they experience affection for another child.

I want us to be more careful with our words because telling girls that being teased is a compliment is on the same spectrum as saying that a young black man was killed because he was wearing a hoodie (rather than because the person who murdered him was acting out of racist hatred/fear). It places the burden of responsibility on targets of acts of violence, deflecting it away from perpetrators.

I want us to pay attention to the little things that we do to contribute to sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression for these are things that we can change and because by changing them we can help to create a better world for the next generation of little girls and boys.

I have a friend who has used electrolysis to remove all the hair on her arms and legs, receives regular Botox for her wrinkles, has eyeliner tattoos, and has undergone plastic surgery on her nose, breasts, and eyelids. Despite all these actions, she still finds herself unattractive.

I have a cousin who after decades of struggling with anorexia, committed suicide.

My friend’s choices have baffled me and I have judged her harshly for buying into the beauty myth created by patriarchy in partnership with sexism, racism, and ageism. I have even found her complicit in my cousin’s death: women who choose to alter their bodies in pursuit of the impossible ideal reinforce the notions that it is both desirable and attainable thereby amplifying the already deafening message women receive that they are not thin/tall/young/blond/white enough.

Then, this morning, sitting with the usual barrage of self-loathing that greets me upon waking, it occurred to me that I am no different really, my struggle just happens to be not with my body but with my worth as a person. The blade of my self-criticism is just as sharp as that of a plastic surgeon and no change, improvement or accomplishment is ever enough to erase the idea that there is something wrong with me and my life. I live my life in pursuit of a myth of self-worth that is based upon an impossible ideal, engaged in the constant battle of comparing which leaves me feeling not good enough.

I can see that my friend was beautiful with her smaller breasts, hairy arms, and droopy eyelids. I could see that my cousin was thin enough. Though I understood the social forces that contributed to the fact that one sees herself as ugly and the other as fat, part of me still judged them for lifetimes of both accepting their distorted self-views and making choices over and over that reinforced these lies as truth.

But I have fared no better really with seeing myself as a worthwhile person living a good life. Who am I to point fingers and cast blame? Indeed how am I contributing to the perpetuation of the myth of worth being based on what one does rather than upon who one is (with all its devastating consequences) when I question my self-worth?

This morning’s realization has left me deeply remorseful for how harshly I have judged my friend. I am also however deeply grateful for the priceless gift of seeing that the idea of needing to earn a sense of self-worth is no less a lie than needing to change one’s body in even the slightest way to be beautiful.

Afterward: I refer to this woman as being my friend when, in truth, she is, the friend of a friend. Though I have never expressed my disdain to her regarding the alterations she has made to her body, I think it is quite likely that the very fact that I held her in disdain is at least partly responsible for the fact that we have never become friends. It is my hope that in time letting go of my judgement of her will open the door for a friendship to grow between us.

One day in my early 50s I discovered that I no longer felt small twinges of envy when I saw mothers with young children. Instead, I experienced with a deep calm the simple reality that that is no longer me. That was me but now I am a woman with a body that no longer makes babies. Now I am this older me and there is no sadness, no grief in this.

Over time this led to the thought that, perhaps, when it is time for me to die, I will meet my death with a similar feeling of calm. Perhaps I will think to myself, “Ah yes, I have been alive and that has been wonderful. But now it is time to be dead and that too is wonderful.”

So perhaps I don’t need to conquer my fear of death. Perhaps I simply need to continue to be alive to and grateful for the joys and sorrows of each present moment and simply trust that when that future moment presents death to me, it will just be another moment, of another day, to deeply and fully live.

And that thought, could quite possibly, in time, conquer my fear of death.

In rock climbing, just before the climber begins their ascent, they ask of their belayer “Belay?” If the belayer is ready to belay, they reply, “Belay on”, and the climb begins.

Yesterday when Amanda and I were ripping large pieces of plywood on a table saw together (she was serving as my catching table), we decided that we needed a similar safety protocol when it was time for me to turn on the saw for the next cut.

“Sawing?” I would ask, making eye contact with her.

“Saw on.” She would reply, looking me back dead in the eye.

On went the saw with it’s wood chomping blade spinning madly near our tender little fingers. Dozens of cuts were made with no blood spilled. A good day’s work.