Romancin' the Job: The Dairy

 The Dairy
Please click on the illustration above
for a fuller appreciation of a job enjoyed 

Bird in the Bush (Green Movement Humor)

Go ahead and click on the illustration above,
 to fully enjoy the details


~~~


 Recent Letter to Japan: 
  
 Nature can be a tough friend 

Letter to Japan, March 11, 2011

Sister far island

I live on the edge here too

Sleep Pacific plate

Befuddled by Baht: Sherlock Holsemn’ the Coin

 Please click on the illustration above to enjoy the lovely details

Befuddled by Baht

Sherlock Holsemn’ the Coin

It’s a baht coin (฿) from Thailand.

Sherlock Holmes could, no doubt, have told you that in less than a minute. It took my husband, who spent the off hours of his childhood collecting coins, about a half an hour to find the coin’s primary origin.

But how did it make it way, way down the far reaches of our driveway? More precisely how did it turn up just in front of our back gate?

It’s extreme cleanliness told us that it hadn’t lain there long.

Besides, my husband is a geologist who spends much of his life looking for anomalies under foot. He was absolutely sure that it hadn’t been been there the day before.

Who do we know that’s been to Thailand? Nobody. There are several different different neighborhoods with asian flavors in our area, but as far as I know there haven't been a lot of people immigrating from Thailand. A few restaurants in the area are the extent of our connection. We have some vague sense of a faraway exotic locale full of  elephants, orchids, shrines and curry. Sherlock Holmes would have pointed out, however, that the photo of Bangkok on the web, doesn’t look like there’s a lot of room for large mammals.

Sherlock would have considered the possibility that it resulted from automatation. Our garbage, recycling and compost bins live near the gate. Did the great arms of the Recycling Works truck pick up the coin at somebody else house and deposit it on the lid of one of our bins? Then perhaps it flipped off when we banged the lid? You'd think dimes, quarters and pennies would be raining down if it worked like that.

Holmes might decide that someone came looking for us at our back gate, stood there uncertainly for a few minutes fingering the coins in her pocket, and then changed her mind. He’d know it was a woman, of course, because of something to do with the distance between gate and door. Don’t ask me to explain that.

Personally I think the baht coin is a sign. A sign that it’s my turn to do elephant duty.

฿

Sewing: Annhhh Just Bag It! Bribing Us to Be Green (Green Movement Humor)

 

Them Bags, Them Bags

Sung to the traditional tune, ‘Dem Bones’

Head bone connected to the shoulder bone

Shoulder bone connected to the arm bone

Arm bone connected to the wrist bone

Wrist bone connected to the hand bone

Hand bone connected to the finger bone

Finger bone holding them bags!

Them bags, them bags, gonna walk around

Them bags, them bags, gonna walk around

Them bags, them bags, gonna walk around

Oh HEAR the word of the Green!

The Green Studies Handbook

for Down-To-Earth Romantics

Did you miss the last Green Movement Humor Piece in this Journal?

Annnh, Just Bag It!

Bribing Us to Use Our Green Shoppin’ Bags

All us environmentally conscientious types know the problem. We acquire giveway bags or maybe we buy or sew some really great ones. Then we forget to take them to the store and end up staring blankly at the clerk when asked, ‘Pastic or paper?’.

Here’s what worked for me.

Bribery.

Remember a long time ago when you said you would never bribe a child to do something? That’s right. Children should be motivated by the pleasure of the activity and the righteous feeling that comes with well – doing!

If you nodded your head vigorously, then I bet you haven’t had or cared for a child in a long time, have you? Next time a young child comes over, be prepared with a few of those I-Voted stickers you got handed the last time you went to the polls.

~

Once I too forgot my bags. All those charming tote bags that I sewed from remnants, recycled bits and even brand new fabric. I was really into sewing bags for awhile. And all of them stayed tucked away at home when I walked, biked or, very occasionally, drove out for groceries.

My neighborhood Trader Joes started a little bribery campaign that did it for me. Every time we remember our own bags and don’t take one of their bags, we get to fill out a little drawing slip, and pop it in the bucket by the managers desk. It’s on the honor system. If I think I saved two bags, that’s how many tickets I put in. Once a week somebody at the store pulls the tickets (they just have our names and phone numbers – no nobody collects it for their database) and calls the lucky winner.

I know it’s going to happen for me any day now! I’ve been doing this for about three years, and I walk to Trader Joes at least five days a week to pick up maybe some yogurt, a box of cereal or a loaf of bread. This also satisfies any gambling yearnings I may have ever had. It’s pretty clear to me that I can save my money when it comes to going to Las Vegas or Reno.  Even though I’m sure I will win every time I put the slip in the bucket, it hasn’t happened for me yet.

The prize is a $25 gift certificate at the store. Trader Joes makes a good chunk of change off shoppers. They can afford twenty-five bucks. Not only that, they may be making money off their greenness. One of the cashiers told me that the very first week they put this system into place they saved an entire palette of bags. In terms I can relate to, he told me, that’s 25% of the bags they used to buy. Trader Joes uses only paper bags for carryout – no plastic- and I think he said those cost them a nickel a piece.

Maybe you can talk a few vendors in your area into doing something to reward people for bringing their own bags. A small store wouldn’t have to give away a great big credit as Trader Joes does. Maybe they could give out the free prize of the week – something they got a lot of or they got a good deal on. Maybe they could have the drawing once a month instead of once a week. Maybe they can figure out a way to save themselves a few bucks by giving out less bags and make it fun.

It worked for me.

Post Script

Whole Foods is a longer walk for me, and I don’t get there as often. They have a system whereby you can donate the nickel or two cents, or whatever the cost of the bag you didn’t use, to one of several charities. This is tied into the automation in the cash register system, but I don’t know why a regular small store couldn’t have one of those little donation jars for earthquake relief or something similar out, with a big sign encouraging you to donate the savings from your bagless use to the jar. The store could have a special campaign (a poster) up on the wall and say something about encouraging ourselves to be green and, at the same time, help out somebody. Oh, you marketing types, you get the idea.

Romancing the Rose (Green Movement Humor)

please click on the illustration above, for more rosy detail

The gentle rose bud

What could be more natural?

Soft soul of the earth

The Green Studies Handbook

for Down-To-Earth Romantics

Romancing the Rose

Coming back with a bike basketful of roses from the farmer’s market, I was reminded of the nineteenth century urban romantics fascination with the natural scene. I was admiring some of the great landscape art that came out of that era just yesterday in the Cantor Art Museum over at Stanford University.

Improved agricultural methods combined with the industrial revolution in places like England, and later in the Americas, sent people to live in towns and cities from the mid 1800’s on into the later part of the century. Food could be produced in greater abundance by less and less hands. Rural lifestyles for the common woman, like my great-great grandmother, Anna Sherman, and her sisters became a thing of the past as they moved off the farm and into downtown Chicago.

Fortunately for Anna, she was able to qualify as a telegrapher. Not for her the daily struggle at loom or in a factory. As they joined the new breed of white-collared workers, her descendants could romanticize the rural life Mama and Grandmama had left behind. The landscape painters and photographers whose works I was studying yesterday, captured the dreams of these new Romantics.

Forgotten was the manure pile, the backbreaking hours of pitching, lifting and straining, and the despair of drought, insect plagues and other natural elements that led to crop failure. We recalled  a fantasy world of  wide-open vistas, rolling hills and an earth of perpetual flowers, sunshine and fishing anytime we wanted it. We imagined walking out into our own gardens to harvest a head of still-growing lettuce or freeing a carrot to crunch fresh from it’s earthy compost-rich home.

Like the properly modern day Romantic I am, I carry on this fantasy tradition. On Sundays, I trot over to the farmers market on foot, or wheel over by cruiser bike. Often, of course, I  imagine that I am tripping gaily down the path on market day, with my basket dangling from one hand and my long skirts bunched up in the other. There I will buy farm fresh lettuce, rainbow hued chard and deep crimson or pale pastel colored roses cut just this morning and trucked in behind the farmer’s slow moving horse. Of course that horse is always named Old Dobbin. I think that was required.  I will feel just like I plucked these farm fresh products myself. 

And as an added benefit, I can feel smugly environmentally conscious arriving at the downtown market under my own power to buy locally grown products.

Today I stopped to talk to the farmer who sold me my roses at the downtown Farmer’s Market. The vendors are often happy to chat, especially when it’s a little rainy out and there are few shoppers taking their time. My roses came from his neighbors greenhouses in Watsonville. They are grown there in greenhouses throughout the winter months. Though these flowers came over the grade in the back of this gentleman’s truck, along with his spring greens and bok choy, the majority of the roses his fellow farmer grows are sent by big freight trucks or air plane to other parts of the country.

When the flowers arrive, still fresh in New York or Santa Fe, they must still look as though they’ve just stepped off the farm. We discussed the elaborate, expensive and resource consuming containers that are required for those shipping methods and wondered about the costs of fuel in contrast with the fuel this farmer’s Old Dobbin truck consumed on his way over from the coast. Once the flowers arrive at their destination, the florists arrive to eye these emigrants who have flown 3,000 miles away from California, or perhaps 2500 miles from Colombia.

So fresh, so natural. It’s almost as though we stepped outside our own back door and plucked the tender buds from the vine with our own dainty little fingers.

In the March Calendar- Podcasting from this Journal: Unpolished Performances

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The Discussion 

or 

Time To Fly 

For a better view of the discussion, click on the picture below

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Podcasting: Unpolished Performances

An Extension of The Simple Romantic

I've been publishing my monthly podcast, Unpolished Performances, since November. The podcast show is an extension of this art journal. Each month I focus on one theme that has come up here, and take it a little farther. Episode 4 for example expands on the piece I wrote about Jane Austen as the quintessential romantic. (Did you miss that? It was , Hey Even Jane Austen needed to perform!)


The first three months previewed on youtube. Episodes 1 - 4 of the the podcast are now up on the iTunes store. Click on this link to  download the show from the iTunes store or just search on the phrase 'unpolished performances' if you already have iTunes up.

Go ahead and click on this screen from the iTunes store 

for a little more detail about recent episodes