Happy Spring!

Vernal Equinox, 20 March 2009 07:43 (EDT)

Today marks the "official" beginning of the spring season.

Now is a time of balance, of equal light and dark,
when all the elements of the earth and within us
ask to be brought to peaceful harmony.

Spring Equinox is one of our favorite times of the year --
days are longer than nights, it's getting warmer,
the trees are budding and the air has that expectant
stillness before the full bursting forth of summer.

Now is the time to plant the seeds that will grow and
bloom into our hopes and dreams. Let us be fearless --
and wise! The world will reap what we sow. And
remember the Native Americans, who consider the
effects of their actions for seven generations to come.

Despite the above quote and popular belief, the equinox is not necessarily the day of equal light and dark. That day generally happens slightly before the spring equinox (or after the fall equinox), the exact date depending on your location on Earth.
Technically the vernal equinox occurs when the center of the sun crosses the Equator, rising due east and setting due west. It really means the "center" of the sun. Sunrise is defined as the moment the very top edge of the sun appears to peek over the horizon. Sunset is when the very last bit of the sun disappears below the horizon. Those astronomers get pretty precise about these things.

But for millennia humans have given much more significance to this day. It is celebrated as Alban Eilir, Eostar, Eostre, Feast of Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Festival of Trees, Lady Day, NawRuz, No Ruz, Ostara, Ostra, or the Rites of Spring among others.
While Winter solstice truly marks the beginning of the return of longer days, Spring Equinox embodies the return of light and warmth and renewed life, giving rise to traditions of life, resurrection, fertility, and feasting in many cultures.

We celebrate this time of renewal here with work on our garden-to-be. With snow forecast for the weekend we are not doing much outside, but there are seeds to start and young seedlings to tend. We do cultivate in a greenhouse to extend our season here and this weekend will be sifting dirt and compost and planting greens and cool hardy crops in large tubs.

For anyone, the easiest, most cost effective vegetables to grow to extend your food budget are greens. From lettuce to Swiss Chard, all grow happily in containers. They are very quick to mature and you can have fresh, organic vegetables and salad year-round with little effort. We grow ours in reused large storage tubs we scrounged. Drilled a few holes in the bottom and Voila! Free 18 gallon planters. I generally grow lettuce in succession for a constant supply. I start new seed within a week of transplanting out my starts. $3.00 worth of lettuce seed will keep you in salad most, if not all, year. Add to that radishes, other types of greens, beets, carrots and such and you can grow a large amount of vegetables in containers, easily, for a very small amount of money.

We mix our own potting soil with about 1/3 of our clay-ey soil, 1/3 compost and 1/3 mixed chicken or steer manure and bought potting soil. Often the latter is actually really old potting soil I have reclaimed from other planters. We never throw any out as it is a nice amendment to loosen up our clay soil here.
The nice thing about all these vegetables is that they are also beautiful. Even if you only have a couple of planters of lettuce, with maybe a dwarf marigold in them, they can double as landscaping. So start your own salad bar as a way to celebrate the spring season, and remember to garden organically. It's easy.

Rolling Along...

I originally wrote this Nov. 18, 2008. There was a little tremor that evening. A small earthquake about 20 minutes before I wrote the post. The computer USGS Site told me it was a 4.4 situated 17 miles out to sea, about 92 miles southwest of us. I didn't feel a thing. But Dennis, he felt it, and immediately went to check our hanging lamp which doubles as an earthquake detector. Sure enough, it was slightly swaying.

Earthquakes are one of those things that reminds us earth is not just a solid rock, but a geologically active structure. Reminds us that we humans are just a part of a very big picture, of which humans and other living beings, even the multitudes of microbes, are only an element.

In southern California there are raging fires accelerated by strong winds. Tearing through communities without prejudice for wealth or age or rank these fires are very destructive of homes and businesses and those parts of the infrastructure in their path. In 2007 terrible floods ravaged the area around the great rivers of America's heartland. And lest we forget, weather, earthquake, volcanoes and tsunami continually shape the entire planet and affect the lives of all the worlds peoples.

And while all these things are able to disrupt, destroy, and fill us with fear, at the same time they are the actions of change which have created the habitable planet. Out of tumult comes the future: fertile; strong; and different.

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences. -Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

I think we can get caught up in seeing these things as "good" or "bad". View them as actions to be tamed or conquered... as if we could. I think we have pretty much discovered that the forces of nature are without judgment and cannot be manipulated for human purposes. So we are left with the mission, as the inhabitants of a volatile planet, to learn to prepare for what may happen without fear and accept courageously the challenges. This is our opportunity to show our humanity by working as a community, local, regional, national and world-wide, to support each other in times of need.

Of course, this can translate over into the hardships of our own creation as well. The tight economic times also extend world wide. Each of us will have needs and/or ways in which we can contribute to others. It will be a time to see if we stand as a community and come to each others' aid or retreat to protect ourselves from the perceived need of others.

All things will pass, the elders say. All things are temporary. Change is constant and our strength is in how we choose to work with it. It is opportunity to work for the better - no?

Time Travel... into spring

In the northern California mountains where we live, the climate is often determined by elevation. Enough so that the seasons are accelerated (or decelerated) going from one altitude to another.

For us, town is on the coast and as we travel over 3000 feet down to sea level, we drive visibly into the future. I may drive out of snow and ice bound winter into blooming cherry plum and daffodil springtime! There is about a 3 week difference between and we get a sneak preview into the coming season. In autumn, the reverse is true.

So, this most recent trip to town was full of spring glory, including one of my favorites: frolicking lambs. They always remind me of this little ditty my mother used to sing and that I learned as a nonsense song as a small child "Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey" - only much later to learn the real meaning:

Mares eat oats and does eat oats,
And little lambs eat ivy.
A kid'll eat ivy too, wouldn't you?

My first "commercial" craft was hand spun yarns and hand knitwear. We raised sheep for years and the spring lambs, with their buoyant antics, were an annual delight. There is nothing so pastoral as sheep out grazing. I love their mellow demeanor and, of all our livestock, they were probably the easiest to tend.
However, of the larger livestock, they were also the most vulnerable to predators (only poultry are more delectable to a broader range of varmints). From Mountain lion to coyotes, they were targets, but dogs were the worst. After 15 years of sheep raising we gave up due to a particularly persistent pack of dogs in the neighborhood who thought running down sheep and maiming them was a grand sport. Sigh.
So now I enjoy the lambs in other people's pastures.

But I do I keep my hand in the wool work, spinning and knitting for my own pleasure and family.

So, what do you get when you mix wool and soap? To perpetuate on a small scale my earlier business, "Sheep Thrills", we craft felted soap!
A soap in sheep's clothing, our Woolies are the perfect travel soap and help me meld my two favorite crafts. Check them out.

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Update: Speaking of time...
Remember to set your clock forward this Sunday morning for Daylight Savings Time!

Oh Foo... we are under the weather

And I don't mean the rain! We are talking about the contagious nasty known as the flu, which is everywhere this time of year.

One of the greatest flu-fighters is soap. It sounds odd, I imagine, 'soap for health'... but in fact the act of hand washing with soap, is one of the greatest single advances in medicine.

Before soap and later, before the discovery of microbes and the idea of 'germs' became common knowledge, medical procedures from the common to the extreme were performed with no attention to cleanliness. Not only the environs in which treatment was done, but the hands of the healer were often filthy and doctors went from patient to patient without washing, as did the others who attended the wounded and ill. Little did they know that they carried with them the infection and contagious disease that often spread wildly among their charges. It was actually in fairly recent history that cleanliness became 'scientifically' accepted as a means of preventing disease.

You may have heard this anecdote: "Sometime during the 19th century, a doctor discovered that if he performed a simple procedure when assisting women in labor, their mortality rate was cut in half (this was at a time when childbirth was among the leading causes of death for women). He shared his findings with other doctors, who, much to his dismay, ignored his advice despite solid evidence that supported his findings. Only much later, after other researchers had come to the same conclusion, did doctors begin to adopt the practice... of washing their hands." (Thanks to Don Wangberg of Fair Oaks, CA. for contributing this).

More than two million children still die from diarrheal disease in developing countries every year. A review in The Lancet Journal suggests that "a surprising 42-47% of all diarrhea could be prevented if people washed their hands with soap. This makes hand washing more effective than water supply, fly control or sanitation improvement in preventing diarrheal diseases. There is growing evidence that hand washing also works to prevent acute respiratory tract infections, which are the biggest infectious killers in the world today."

And just last night on the National News, they capped the article on the current flu cases with a reminder that the best preventative is washing your hands several times a day.

"Most infectious diseases are spread by contact, either person-to-person, or by touching surfaces harboring germs," said U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona. "Proper hand cleaning is the best prevention against communicable illness."

What happens if you do not wash your hands frequently? You pick up germs from other sources and infect yourself when you:
* Touch your eyes
* Or your nose
* Or your mouth.
One of the most common ways people catch colds is by rubbing their nose or their eyes after their hands have been contaminated with the cold virus.
Yet in the United States today several studies have shown that 20% to 50% of us do not wash our hands after using public restrooms.

Doctors warn that it is critical to wash your hands before eating, when preparing food, when you or someone around you is sick, after touching animals, and after using the bathroom, and to do it correctly.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends the following technique:
• First wet your hands and apply liquid or clean bar soap. Place the bar soap on a rack and allow it to drain.
• Rub your hands vigorously together and scrub all surfaces.
• Continue for 15 - 20 seconds or about the length of a little tune. It is the soap combined with the scrubbing action that helps dislodge and remove germs.
• Rinse well and dry your hands with clean towel.

The most recent CDC guidelines for hand hygiene for practitioners in health care settings basically sums it up: wash your hands with soap and water. Additionally, use other hand hygiene preparation as called for.
It appears the key is "additionally" use other preparations. It seems that if your hands are even slightly dirty the other chemicals are not as effective. Everything seems to indicate that plain old soap and water remain the best all around health tool.

Taking care of your health includes eating right, getting fresh air and exercise, and washing well to ward off those sneaky microbes. Soap is your ally on the road to a healthy life! See all our excellent soaps for your health and pleasure.

Swine flu update - April 30: for current information, go to the Center for disease Control website: www.cdc.gov or The California Department of Public Health: www.cdph.ca.gov,both have up to date information specific to many situations including for schools, healthcare, home and more.

Billions and billions...

We used to imitate Carl Sagan using that term to describe the seemingly infinite stars in the universe. Back then it seemed like the ultimate huge number and, like "millions and millions" came to express an unimaginably large amount, without anyone really understanding what that amount really was.

These days the world has changed. We now talk in terms of unimaginably large numbers to define real amounts that we still have trouble understanding. As of today, Feb. 16, 2009, the world population is estimated to be 6,706,993,152. That is: 6 billion, 706 million, 993 thousand, 152. Wow. The United States alone has 305,830,170 (305 million) people.

With all this economic bailout, recovery, and stimulus talk throwing around gargantuan sums like $787,000,000,000 (787 billion), folks are often lost trying to decipher exactly how much this is. This leads to comments you see proposing that if they just gave the money to the citizens we would all be millionaires. Not so. These enormous sums are not so enormous as that. Distributed to every person in America using the population figure above, that would only be $2573.32 each. Not so much after all.

Part of the confusion arises from there being two scales for determining ridiculously large numbers. To paraphrase the Wikipedia page on this: The long and short scales are two different numerical systems used throughout the world:
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Short scale refers to a system of numeric names in which every new term greater than million is 1,000 times the previous term: "billion" means "a thousand millions", "trillion" means "a thousand billions", and so on.

Long scale refers to a system of numeric names in which every new term greater than million is 1,000,000 times the previous term: "billion" (from bi and million) means "a million to the power of two" or "a million millions", "trillion" (from tri and million) means "a million to the power of three" or "a million billions", and so on.
The difference between the two scales grows as numbers get larger. Million is the same in both scales, but the long-scale billion is a thousand times larger than the short-scale billion, the long-scale trillion is a million times larger than the short-scale trillion, and so on.

For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the United Kingdom uniformly used the long scale, while the United States of America used the short scale, so that usage of the two systems was often referred to as "British" and "American" respectively. In 1974 the government of the UK abandoned the long scale, so that both countries now exclusively apply the short scale interpretation in mass media and official usage.
So, one billion = 1,000,000,000, and 1 Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000.
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Fortunately, unless we are astronomers, other scientists, or government economists, most of us do not have to wrap our mind around numbers like this every day. But it is important we do have some sense of the scale they convey when following and voting on projects that effect us all.

The White House team promises to have a website where we can follow the expenditures of all this money. I plan to keep an eye on it. While I have faith in the intent and intelligence of President Obama's administration, I sometimes feel that a large sum of money given to the legislative branch is like a Pinata with kindergartners. They tend to get a little crazy with it.

UPDATE: 2/18/2009 here is the page on the White House site with the State by State information on the Recovery & Reinvestment Act

UPDATE #2 - Here it is, the official site: www.recovery.gov. If nothing else, this administration is keeping it's vow of transparency in Government. I'm impressed.