The Flying Machine

This time spent in Boise has a finality to it. It didn't feel that way last summer. I felt like I wanted to come back here, like I could always come back here.

I am suddenly not so sure. I have some doubts. It's funny how my sense of 'home' is so closely tied not to the geography of a place but to my relationships with the people who inhabit it. And those aren't as good in Boise as they used to be, as I thought they were. It's all so much more fragile than you'd think.

Tonight I'm heading to Ontario for New Year's Eve because J doesn't want to celebrate. It'll be a night at Saddles with E and the Malheur folks. I wish I could have stayed in Florida. Saddles is not what I'd planned, but hopefully it will be fun. E is a good guy. I guess I need to stop putting so much weight on plans.

Tomorrow I will be on the road to the Gorge again. I've got a whole bunch of goals for 08 and thoughts on 07. Hopefully I'll have a little time to put those down between now and the end of the week. I've got some great photos from home, too - bowling, friends, canoeing with Meg...

Posted by Sarah at 3:36 PM | Permalink

Home was good. Great. Fantastic. I'm sitting in the airport right now and I am not ready to go back. I guess I don't really get that option.

Posted by Sarah at 1:53 PM | Permalink

How to have a good birthday:

Take one nice family dinner
A few good birthday presents
Your brother, his girlfriend, and all of his buddies
A few of your friends too
Drive to a bowling alley in the neighboring city
Get yer shoes and a camera and some bowling balls
Goof off nonstop
Drink lots of beer and shots of SoCo, all on their tab
Bowl the worst 3 games of your life, score-wise
Have a fuckin blast

Go to bed at 1:30 AM
With plans to get up at 5:30 AM
For a day of kayaking, hiking, and HANGIN OUT with your friend Meg

Think to yourself,
Life is really good.

(pictures coming soon)

Posted by Sarah at 10:19 PM | Permalink

I watched the weather and it predicted freezing rain and shitty conditions across the Pacific Northwest for Christmas. In Florida it is in the 70's and sunny. I am in no hurry to get back to Oregon. None at all.

p.s. It is good to be on vacation.

p.p.s. Here are some sweet photos from biking in Portland with Tom. There would have been more but my camera batteries died.

Posted by Sarah at 8:24 PM | Permalink

Biking in Portland.
- Was great!
- Pictures soon.

Boise.
- I am so tired of doing the thing that is Right even when it's not what I want because it's what somebody else needs. Of course it's the Right thing and I'm doing a fine job of being understanding and forgiving and supporting but dammit why does 'Right' always translate into "SUCKS FOR YOU, SARAH"?

Home in Florida.
- It is good to be home.
- It is hard to get work done at home.

Posted by Sarah at 6:57 PM | Permalink

Today: last full day at work, loose ends excepted, until 2K8! Also, catching a screening of Monumental.

Thursday: bike- and food-touring PDX with T. It may or may not be 40 degrees and rainy all day. It may or may not still be rad.

Friday: the (very) long haul to Boise in the snow. Leaving behind this godforsaken cold wet dark windy place for some icy highways and hopefully NOT snow chains.

Saturday: "something fun" TBD, some good times with my two favorite Boiseans in the sweet sweet desert.

Sunday: FLY HOME.

Monday: wear flip-flops and a skirt and eat my weight in citrus.

Posted by Sarah at 10:15 AM | Permalink

Not that this is new news to those of us who work in the local food movement, but this piece in the NYTimes raises a few sticky questions:

Here are a couple of other puzzlers: Are canned tomatoes a better environmental choice in the winter than fresh tomatoes from abroad? If a product that contains heavy packaging reduces the amount of food waste, is that a better choice than one that is lightly packed and spoils quicker?

And there's so many more - does a carton of strawberries driven 20 miles in a gas-guzzler old pickup truck have a smaller or larger carbon footprint than a carton of strawberries flown or trucked in from hundreds of miles away? If you drive to the farmers' market in your car, do you negate all of the benefits of buying local? How is anybody supposed to be able to make the 'right' decision at the grocery store?

At some point, the ethical maze can make you dizzy. But there was one line of inquiry from the California researchers that hit particularly close to home: the carbon impact of shoppers themselves.

Some people walk or take the subway to buy their groceries and then compost what they don’t use. But, let’s face it, most of us drive and toss the leftovers into the garbage disposal or the garbage can. In doing so, we may be contributing nearly a quarter of the greenhouse gases associated with our food, research has shown.

Ouch.

I'm interested to see the final results from the research that's described in this article. I and a lot of other people across the country are putting a lot of time and energy into re-localizing food systems, and we damn well want to make sure we do it right and don't cause more problems than we solve.

Posted by Sarah at 11:12 AM | Permalink

Song of the WEEK:

Dr. Dog - Heart it Races (Architecture in Helsinki cover)

The original's good too, but really, this is where it's at. Because it makes me think of summer and warm dusk and riding my bike no-handed past all those sweet funky onion fields. Mmm.

Posted by Sarah at 4:43 PM | Permalink

I keep starting and erasing entries because they all look something like

ALL CAPS SONG LYRICS
WITH VAGUE EXPLANATIONS
AS IF THIS WOULD HELP CONVEY THE MOOD

The mood being a weird mix of I-need-some-fing-alone-time and I-need-a-better-social-life and I-need-to-get-outta-this-job-home-job-home-routine. This is not a novel state of being, historically speaking. But it won't last long.

A week from today I'll be on the road to Boise. I don't know with whom I'll be staying, or what I'll be doing once I get there (hotspingzplease), but I'll be there and then I'll fly out and then I'll be on VACATION.

Hey, know what's awesome? Making plans with a new friend for a growing season garden partnership. She got the land, I got the weeding skillz. Know what else is awesome? Planning a potluck for the ragtag bunch of people out here I call friends. And crafting cool Christmas presents. And key lime pie at home in the fridge made from key limes I picked at my aunt's house while sweating under a September Florida sun. And knowing that even if one thing doesn't work out another thing will, it always does. And the fact that it is going to be by god sunny tomorrow and I am going to by god live it up.

Posted by Sarah at 3:42 PM | Permalink

Home in less than 2 weeks. Gettin' pretty excited. Next time you're in Arcadia and bored out of your mind you best call me.

Look at all this fun stuff!

Bluegrass at the RV park, Casanova rednecks at the bar

Sweet rides

ALSO,

Posted by Sarah at 8:30 PM | Permalink

In case you were wondering, the sun is mostly out today.

It is still raining, though.

(Coming soon: fave albums / songs of 2007!)

Posted by Sarah at 8:55 AM | Permalink

It was kind of an off-weekend. You know how sometimes even when you're giving it a good effort your timing's just off? On everything? That's how it was.

This weekend my mom told me that my Amma is not doing well, health-wise. She will be 91 in a week. Anyone who knows me knows how close we are. It is weighing on the back of my mind. The whole family is hoping she makes it OK through the holidays.

It's been raining and snowing and wintry mixing for days. The river is up and people are worried it might flood like it did last year, when the Hood River tore out hunks of highway 35 and left a swath of gravel and downed trees up the valley. I was sitting at Dog River this afternoon for a coffee+meeting and a ceiling tile not 5 steps from my head crashed to the floor, splattering accumulated rain and wet particleboard across the room.

Just kind of hanging in there today, trusting that things will get back online in good time, as they always do. There's bikram yoga tonight, nothing better on a cold cold day. I hear the weather's gonna clear up later this week. I will get to see my Amma in 2 weeks. And I've alway got my Bobby Bare Jr and Todd Snider.

Posted by Sarah at 3:29 PM | Permalink