Thanksgiving month, days 5-7
Nov. 14th, 2011 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unhappytriad(Crossposted from Google+)
Thanksgiving month, day 5:
I am thankful for the bewildering variety of food I can get hold of. I like diversity. I've been known to go into raptures over how many different kinds of dried beans there are in the world (see also tomatoes, potatoes and peppers). I like Thai, Italian, French, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Peruvian, Jamaican, Hungarian, Moroccan, and Lebanese food, and I've had the opportunity to try all of them. I like fry bread and raw yucca blossoms. I like quail, dove, hammerhead shark and venison. I like trout steamed with lavender and duck a l'orange. I like blackberry cobbler and tiramisu. I think Bright Lights chard is one of the triumphs of civilization and Moon and Stars watermelon is a near-religious experience. I am thankful to have had the opportunity to grow my own food, and to live in a place where I can get fresh, organic, local produce all year round. I am thankful that I know how to cook a meal using nothing that comes in a can, box or plastic bag, and I am thankful that I don't have to do that every night.
Thank you, Daddy, for teaching me about gardening. Thank you, Mike McGrath, Ruth Stout and Mel Bartholomew for broadening that knowledge. Thank you, Locally Grown, for growing food for me since I now live in an oak grove.
Thanksgiving month, day 6:
I am thankful for hot showers. I grew up in a 1920s-built house that had only a bathtub (granted, a fairly deep one), so from childhood I have regarded showers as an exotic luxury. They make it a hell of a lot easier to wash long hair, and they make it much easier to get clean without wasting water. On the other hand, if you feel like wasting water, you can stay in the shower until your water heater tank is empty, which in a tub would require a lot of draining and filling.
Hot tubs are nice, but they're expensive and they require taking care of. Showers, on the other hand, are affordable and low-maintenance; you can even get a quite acceptable hot shower from a black plastic bag of water with an attached spray-nozzle, hung in the sun for a few hours. The hot shower, like the cup of tea and the fire in the fireplace, is one of the great means of telling yourself: It's okay. Everything is going to be all right.
Thank you, whoever invented the shower and the water heater. Thank you, folks who generate and transmit the power for my water heater, and folks who treat, store and pipe water into my house. And thanks, folks who built my house back in the 1960s and put THREE showers in. (The bookcases are nice too.)
Thanksgiving month, day 7:
I am thankful that I will never run out of things to read. Back in high school, I actually spent an afternoon in my school library, reading every title on the shelves (it wasn't much of a library). By the time I graduated I had read every book in that library I thought would be interesting (a small percentage; I was young and arrogant).
When I got to the University of Georgia library I thought I had died and gone to heaven. The folklore section became one of my favorite haunts (I still know a LOT of folktales). Then there was the music section, and the religion section, and the SF and fantasy; it's a wonder my grades stayed up.
Every year or two I discover an author I haven't read before who turns out to be a new favorite (in the past 5 years I've read all of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series, all of Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series, and a good many of Georgette Heyer's Regency romances, for example). Many of my old favorites are still writing (Oliver Sacks, Terry Pratchett, John McPhee, Ursula K. LeGuin) and there are a lot of younger authors who are both excellent and prolific (John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow). There is an excellent and expanding public library in my current hometown, and Project Gutenberg has enough public domain e-books to last me several decades. Even if my eyes don't hold out (and they're OK so far, though they do better with print than with e-books), there are some great audiobooks out there, and they're much more readily available than they used to be.
Thank you, teachers, authors, editors, publishers and above all, librarians! And thanks to my parents, especially my mother, who must have read Scrambled Eggs Super to me fifty thousand times before I learned to read it myself. Also thanks to my cousin Lili and my sister Liz, both of whom gave me books I loved so much from an early age (The Wind in the Willows and Dr. Doolittle, respectively) that I can still hear their voices every time I read the books myself.
Thanksgiving month, day 5:
I am thankful for the bewildering variety of food I can get hold of. I like diversity. I've been known to go into raptures over how many different kinds of dried beans there are in the world (see also tomatoes, potatoes and peppers). I like Thai, Italian, French, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Peruvian, Jamaican, Hungarian, Moroccan, and Lebanese food, and I've had the opportunity to try all of them. I like fry bread and raw yucca blossoms. I like quail, dove, hammerhead shark and venison. I like trout steamed with lavender and duck a l'orange. I like blackberry cobbler and tiramisu. I think Bright Lights chard is one of the triumphs of civilization and Moon and Stars watermelon is a near-religious experience. I am thankful to have had the opportunity to grow my own food, and to live in a place where I can get fresh, organic, local produce all year round. I am thankful that I know how to cook a meal using nothing that comes in a can, box or plastic bag, and I am thankful that I don't have to do that every night.
Thank you, Daddy, for teaching me about gardening. Thank you, Mike McGrath, Ruth Stout and Mel Bartholomew for broadening that knowledge. Thank you, Locally Grown, for growing food for me since I now live in an oak grove.
Thanksgiving month, day 6:
I am thankful for hot showers. I grew up in a 1920s-built house that had only a bathtub (granted, a fairly deep one), so from childhood I have regarded showers as an exotic luxury. They make it a hell of a lot easier to wash long hair, and they make it much easier to get clean without wasting water. On the other hand, if you feel like wasting water, you can stay in the shower until your water heater tank is empty, which in a tub would require a lot of draining and filling.
Hot tubs are nice, but they're expensive and they require taking care of. Showers, on the other hand, are affordable and low-maintenance; you can even get a quite acceptable hot shower from a black plastic bag of water with an attached spray-nozzle, hung in the sun for a few hours. The hot shower, like the cup of tea and the fire in the fireplace, is one of the great means of telling yourself: It's okay. Everything is going to be all right.
Thank you, whoever invented the shower and the water heater. Thank you, folks who generate and transmit the power for my water heater, and folks who treat, store and pipe water into my house. And thanks, folks who built my house back in the 1960s and put THREE showers in. (The bookcases are nice too.)
Thanksgiving month, day 7:
I am thankful that I will never run out of things to read. Back in high school, I actually spent an afternoon in my school library, reading every title on the shelves (it wasn't much of a library). By the time I graduated I had read every book in that library I thought would be interesting (a small percentage; I was young and arrogant).
When I got to the University of Georgia library I thought I had died and gone to heaven. The folklore section became one of my favorite haunts (I still know a LOT of folktales). Then there was the music section, and the religion section, and the SF and fantasy; it's a wonder my grades stayed up.
Every year or two I discover an author I haven't read before who turns out to be a new favorite (in the past 5 years I've read all of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series, all of Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series, and a good many of Georgette Heyer's Regency romances, for example). Many of my old favorites are still writing (Oliver Sacks, Terry Pratchett, John McPhee, Ursula K. LeGuin) and there are a lot of younger authors who are both excellent and prolific (John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow). There is an excellent and expanding public library in my current hometown, and Project Gutenberg has enough public domain e-books to last me several decades. Even if my eyes don't hold out (and they're OK so far, though they do better with print than with e-books), there are some great audiobooks out there, and they're much more readily available than they used to be.
Thank you, teachers, authors, editors, publishers and above all, librarians! And thanks to my parents, especially my mother, who must have read Scrambled Eggs Super to me fifty thousand times before I learned to read it myself. Also thanks to my cousin Lili and my sister Liz, both of whom gave me books I loved so much from an early age (The Wind in the Willows and Dr. Doolittle, respectively) that I can still hear their voices every time I read the books myself.
