Don't Be a Pickle Bump

He sat there on the curb – a ghost in the swing of my headlights. He was dressed in tan coveralls. The circular lenses of his eyeglasses flashing as the light reflected in them. His face was gaunt and there was something about him – an air of tiredness – that reminded me of some of the pictures I’ve seen from Great Depression. He was worker at one of the refineries or chemical plants in the area I suppose.

I relate to him because I feel his tiredness in my own existence. It’s crept in gradually, but it is there. In the moments of quiet when I’m sitting in my car, I feel it weighing on me. I wake up with it and find myself wanting to pull the blankets over my head and go back to sleep. And if R is around – sometimes it spills out and I’m cranky with him and I hate being that way. My temper is short and I think I’ve officially lost my sense of humor.

My diet hasn’t helping. I’ve been eating out more than I should and quite frankly, I feel like crap. I realized how bad it was this weekend when I was coming home from doing the things I love – photography and gardening – and realizing that I was exhausted.  And so this evening, I fought the urge to pull into a fast food place and get a quick bite. Instead I came home, pulled out a chicken, cleaned it, put in the oven to roast and an hour later, I had a healthy meal. The good news is that doing this, puts me that much closer to eating locally. I’m getting rid of the food from box commercial establishments buy eating it. It may not be “whole” food, but at least I have a better idea of what I’m putting in my mouth that if some else prepares it. At least I’m not wasting it – I have lunch for the next three days.

And when I am done, I’ll replace these commercial products with ones that locally grown and definitely a lot more sustainable. And as the crap clears from my body, I know I’ll probably feel worse for awhile before I feel better. But with plenty of rest and water, I know I will get through the detox phase and come out feeling healthier. 

And so it begins, cutting out processed foods and moving to a local diet. And with that I bid you all good night so I can get a good 8 hours. I just want to feel better.

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Did you know that even most organic foods that you find in health food stores and stores like HEB, Central Market, and Whole Foods have still travelled an average of 1500 miles to get to your fridge? Did you know that to meet the “free range” labelling requirements, the chickens in question only need to have access to a door and a small grass area outside the brooding house? These are just some of the thing that I learned this summer in my personal reading frenzy focusing on the United States Food Chain.

Between my reading, growing my first garden in 20 plus years and shopping at local farmers markets around Houston. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about about where my food is coming from, how far it’s travelled to get to the store I’m purchasing it from, and thought about how much fossil fuel is being used to produce/package the food I eat. And after a summer of hardly going to the grocery store and either producing my own food or getting to know the people who are growing the chicken and beef I’m eating, I’ve decided to take the leap and go off the food grid and become a locavore.

If you’ve never heard the term Locavore before, it means someone who only or primarily eats food grown or produced within their local area, usually within a radius of 100 to 250 miles. I have the following sourced already:
Beef – Law Ranch Cattle Company
Truly Free-Range Chicken and Pork – Georgia’s Texas Natural Meats
Eggs – Mrs. B has them.
Veggies – I raise my own and when I’m in the waiting time (like now) Mrs. B usually has some.
Dairy – Currently Promised Land dairy falls in the 250 mile range, but I’m hoping to find something that is closer than 220 miles from where I live. One thing I really like about Promised Land Diary though is the glass bottles they ship quarts of milk in. Those make great bottles to put water and store in the fridge. I don’t have to worry about chemicals leaching in from the plastic.

There are only a few things that I really don’t have covered – I’d like to find a local source for flour (preferably Organic) but I might have to bite the bullet on that one.
Other Grains – we do have rice fields in Texas so I have that covered. But other grains I may have to bite the bullet on.
Spices – If I read one of the books I have correctly, I would be able to grow a lot of my own spices (my ginger is thriving although I haven’t gotten brave enough to check out the root yet). But given that some things don’t grow in Houston, if I have to purchase spices, I’ll look for fair trade and organic if at all possible.
Coffee – again not something I can grow here, but I will purchase fair trade/organic when at all possible.

I’m really not sure where all this is going to end up. However, I know I’ll be doing my part for the environment.

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I love having roasted garlic on hand. As much as I love raw garlic, there’s something magically wonderful that happens when you throw a head of garlic wrapped in tinfoil on a bed of charcoal embers (preferred method) or in the oven and it roasts to this wonderful mellow caramelly flavor nubbins of goodness. So here’s how I make roasted garlic.

For each packet of garlicky goodness you need the following:

1 head of garlic, outer papery skin cleaned off.
olive oil
a little sea salt
2 equally sized pieces of aluminum foil

Take head of garlic and put in the middle of one piece of aluminum foil.
Drizzle a bit olive oil over the top (You probably won’t need more than half a teaspoon)
Sprinkle with sea salt.

Wrap the head of garlic up and bunch the aluminum foil over the top. Flip the package over and wrap in another piece of aluminum foil. You want to have a ball shape with equal amounts of foil all the way around.

Stick in the grill. If you have a pretty good amount of heat on your fire still, you can put the packets on the grill rack. If the heat has died back a bit, go ahead and put the the garlic package in the coals. Let it cook for 30-45 minutes. And when you peel back the foil, you’ll find wonderfully roasted goodness like this:

And you want it a little more caramellized, leave it on a little bit longer and you get this:

And when you want to use, just squeeze a couple of these wonderful sweet roasted cloves into your recipe and enjoy.

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A long long time ago, I was involved with the PCOSA, the national organization for women with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). While I worked with the the PCOSA, I met Randi Cecchine – one of the coolest persons I know. As far I know, Randi’s the only person who’s ever put together a documentary about PCOS and the havoc it creates in women’s lives.

For those of you who don’t know what PCOS is, it’s an endocrine condition that affects approximately 10% of the female population.  The most common symptoms include:

• hirsuitism
• a “string of pearls” around the outside of the ovaries due to undeveloped follicles
• insulin resistance
• Infertility

Most women are diagnosed with PCOS when they have problems concieving. However, like in my case, the signs are  often there but no one puts them together as part of the some condition until a woman goes to a reproductive endocrinologist in an attempt to find out why she’s not concieving.

When I first saw Randi’s documentary at the National PCOSA convention, I was touched. Her interviews with women got to the heart of the matter and Randi went places in that documentary that I don’t think I could have filmed if I were doing it. She is truly brave and fearless when it comes to addressing the issues related to PCOS.

I highly suggest that if you haven’t seen Scrambled, you check it out. It will really open your eyes to the damage that PCOS can do to your body and your soul.

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When Petapixel posts something, I always pay attention. This site always has good stuff to share with its followers on Twitter. This morning’s post was no exception – a good description of the basic settings found on various cameras. Since I liked this article, I started digging around PhotoTuts and I liked what I saw – people sharing knowledge about the something they are passionate about and want to share with others.

Most of the tutorials are geared towards beginners, but even a seasoned photographer can learn new things. The tutorials and articles cover a wide variety of subjects – Camera Basics, How to work in Adobe RAW, other kinds of post processing, how to take different kinds of pictures (waterfalls, B&W, high key) etc., and in some cases, are delivered in a video format. They are straightforward and give good explanations without being full of jargon.

So PhotoTuts is a Paula Pick.

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Tonight I went over to my garden and checked out the progress over the last week since I was sick and it’s been raining. I was pleasantly surprised.

The Beans are about 4 inches tall.

The Cabbage is taking off as well and starting to head a little.

Lovely Little Lettuces

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Well I finally bit the bullet and got High Speed Internet service from Verizon. The week has been a little frustrating in that there was bit of a snafu with when exactly the technician was going to be here for processing the service. Since Verizon never gave me a firm date, I wasn’t able to be home to let the technician come in and check my jacks when he turned it on Tuesday. I didn’t find out my service wasn’t working until after 6 PM that night. Then it was a matter of trying to figure out if the service issue was in the house or on their side of the wiring.

R came over and checked my lines yesterday and found that there was no battery (that the charge in the phone line that makes everything work) on the line. I ended up turning in a Repair ticket last night and I was really wondering if I made a mistake when it took 45 minutes to get to talk to a real live person. Verizon’s phone system sucks and it got caught in a circular loop at multiple times. By the time I finally was spoke to the gal in tech support, I was pretty close to saying the heck with it.

Once I got her to understand that 1) I wasn’t calling about my High Speed Internet, and 2) that I was very frustrated with how long it took to get ahold of a live person, and 3) I had no connection at all to my wiring outside, she hooked me up fairly quickly with the repair department and they were able to get a technician over here today.

I have to say that Leon the technician did a fantastic job getting everything taken care of. He was polite, courteous, and made sure all my issues were resolved. It turns out there was a bad port on my DSL connection and there was some sort of problem with how they had my phone line set up over in the central office. His supervisor is definitely going to get a letter from me commending Leon on his service.

Tonight has been spent trying to figure out the whole wireless connection aspect of this. I found myself frustrated earlier, but with a little digging through the manual, I was able to figure out how to get things set up on my modem so that I could connect wirelessly with my iTouch, work computer and printer. This wired/wireless thing is pretty sweet. I have one more free USB port on the computer since the printer is now networked in wirelessly. Now I just have to figure out how to get everything set up.

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The garden expansion is in progress. When I do stuff like this, it inevitably tells me how much R must love me because he absolutely hates to garden. And yet, when I say “Hey, I want to expand the garden so I can start managing my garden better and rotating my crops to help keep down pests that can plague Houston Gardens, he’ll be out there to help me drive stakes and do the initial breaking ground task.

And honestly, even though I know part of it is about his like of tinkering with machinery (he’s one of the few men I know who can take apart things in their head and put them back together again), it makes my heart beat a little bit faster because I know the other part of it is that he knows I enjoy gardening and he wants to support me in the endeavours that I enjoy.

So back to the gardening stuff. One of the advantages of Zone 9 gardening is that I can garden year around for the most part. So I’m taking advantage and starting the 8 Plot rotation described in Year Around Vegetables, Fruits and Flowers for Metro Houston: A Natural Organic Approach Using Ecology (12th Ed.) by Bob Randall, Ph.D. and available through Urban Harvest and select stores in the Houston Area. So I spent most of last weekend working on getting everything ready to plant.

We measured and staked:

I strung string to outline the plots and the paths.

Luckily most of the remaining plants in the garden fell within the new plots.

Then the planting began. The first plot to go in was the new tomato plants.

I followed up with the basil in the herb plot (which is right next to the tomatoes). And the broccoli, cauliflower and cabbages have been planted as well. And I can’t wait for tomorrow when I get to plant the rest.

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