Look out! Here come the holidays

Wow, this month has gone by fast. I can't believe Thanksgiving is less than a week away. We've had snow a couple of times already-- just a teaser, I'm sure, of what's in store for us.  Birds are showing up in droves at the feeders, left alone by squirrels and deer since we switched to the safflower seeds with chili peppers. Gloves and hats have become necessities when walking the dog.  And it's holiday shopping time again, so the predators (and pine scent) are everywhere.

The season "officially" kicks off with "Black Friday,"  the day after Thanksgiving, when the shopping fest pushes retailers' balance sheets into the black.  Some people have been so successfully coerced into believing they MUST HAVE the advertised specials that, not only will they forego sleep for an advantageous position when the doors open at 5 a.m.,  they will trample other shoppers in their frenzy to get their hands on imperative stuff -- while others will refuse to give up their place in line to let the paramedics reach the injured.

(Now some stores like Target are going one better and planning to open at midnight on Thanksgiving, so people can go from sucking down turkey and pumpkin pie to sucking up door buster specials, hardly breaking stride.)

Come on,  people! I know those 42-inch televisions and the Ultimate Optimus Prime are cool stuff, but shouldn't you really ASK yourself their importance in your life?

I guess it's easier to recognize crazy once you've stepped back from the brink of it.  Everyone likes a good deal, but that's not the problem. The crux is that nobody even needs all this stuff we're so deadly keen to acquire.

Now, some of us peasants are wising up and becoming more protective of our assets. I stopped shopping on Black Friday some time ago, because I really don't like being in crowds of frothing at the mouth batshit insane people. I avoid shopping malls like the plague, because the mass produced soullessness of everything is so damned depressing.

I personally like to infuse extra love, care, and meaning into gifts by making them myself, but I realize this takes time, a little skill, and patience that are luxuries not to be found for many people in these hurried, stressful times.

The other really good option is to  spend a Saturday shopping at your local and independently owned business establishments. You will find uniqueness and charm that are missing from all the McStores, and shop owners who conduct business as if people really matter. You will be strengthening your community by building relationships and keeping money circulating within that community. And you just might have a great time while you're at it!

What kind of options does that give you?  A gift certificate for dinner at a local restaurant, a pound of fair trade coffee from the local coffee shop (shout out to Labyrinth!), locally produced pure maple syrup and wines, an endless variety of items created by local artists and artisans, tickets to local arts and sporting events, books from the local independent bookseller-- just to name a few. 

Don't rule out secondhand items-- there are treasures to be gleaned from others' discards, found at thrift stores and garage sales (especially if you shop throughout the year and put things aside for future gifts).  You can find brand new (or barely touched by human hands) hardcover books for under $5 (sometimes much cheaper at garage sales), exquisite sweaters and unique jewelry, housewares, toys, games, and puzzles. At 2nd Chances, I recently found (but did not buy because I didn't need it and did not want to ship across country) a beautiful set of 8 vintage midcentury drinking glasses @ 89 cents apiece.

Some cities have started Shop Local organizations to promote local businesses. Jamestown has a fledgling effort underway with JTNY that I hope will blossom. 

Forget about the Lexus with a big red bow on it. Get a bike.

Indian Summer!

November has brought the beautiful fall weather that we got cheated out of last month. We've been enjoying walks (which make the dog very happy) and doing outdoor cleanup. My borders are all trimmed back for the coming winter, outdoor furniture is put away, and Tom has built another raised bed for vegetables. Soon I'll be able to move my dollhouses and crafting materials in from the garage and up to our new second story space. It's going to be unfinished space for a while, but after having NO space for working on projects, I'm not complaining.

It's been easier to get up and moving in the morning since we set our clocks back and gained an hour.  I'm feeling very productive.This morning I did laundry and some yard work, took Conor for a spin around the block, and started dinner slow cooking  in the crock pot -- all before the second pot of coffee. At noon, we packed up lunch and went to the little community park down by the lake for a picnic. About two dozen other people had the same idea! These are definitely "bonus days" to be savored ahead of the long winter.

Too comfortable

We had our first snow this past weekend. It was cold, wet, sloppy, but really not a big deal. Not like the storm that hit further east. Our grandson made his first snowman of the season, though he lives in a part of Massachusetts where the power stayed on.

We stayed in on Saturday until we absolutely HAD to go out, because there was a Halloween party at the church that evening and I was responsible for cupcakes and trivia.

The next day was better. Still cold, but sunny.  We had a special guest speaker at church and plans afterwards to visit the super energy-efficient new "green" home that Ruth Lundin, the Jamestown Audubon president, is having built. Our friend Dick Rose helped design the house, which is being insulated with bales of straw. Volunteers were invited to help out with the installation of the straw bales, compressing them and then fitting them into place. It's a very interesting type of construction, as you can see from the photo.  The house will also have a living roof when it is finished. If you'd like to see more, you can have a look at Ruth's photo gallery here.

But to back up, Sunday was a homecoming of sorts for Brian Willson, a Chautauqua county native and former member of our church, who is currently on a tour promoting his book, Blood on the Tracks. Brian is a Vietnam Vet whose wartime experiences transformed him into a radical peace activist. He lost his legs in 1987 when he sat on the tracks to block a Navy munitions train carrying weapons to Central America. He expected to be arrested for trespassing, but instead was run over and nearly killed.  Since that time, he has been on a mission to try to educate people about the diabolical nature of US imperialism while living a simpler lifestyle that doesn't feed the machine.  This is what a real hero looks like.

Because his talk was during our church service, it was a bit shorter than his normal book talks, but he stayed for a good while after the service to continue the discussion. Simply put, Brian Willson is a truthteller. His epiphany that we are all interconnected came in Vietnam, in the midst of (following orders) destroying villages and killing all of the innocent civilians in them. He understood that the war was immoral and we were murdering part of our human family. This understanding profoundly changed the path of his life.

He speaks of empathy, mutual respect, cooperation, and fairness as ancient archetypes which we humans must recover in order to survive. These are things we instinctively know, but our brains have blocked them out in order that we might adapt to our current culture, which he characterizes as the most dangerous force on the planet. He sees these archetypes now emerging in the Occupy Wall Street movement and this as an "age of consequences" when our monstrously destructive behavior comes home to roost. Because people cannot be repressed forever and the earth will not continue to tolerate our abuses.

During the Q&A, someone suggested that he was "preaching to the choir," because UU's are definitely a sympathetic audience on topics of peace and justice. Without rancor, he calmly replied that although he may be preaching to the choir, it was a very comfortable choir that no doubt uses a lot of energy.

And there it is. Even though we might "get it" and "talk the talk," most of us have not yet progressed to "walking the walk."  We still propel ourselves from place to place in two-ton vehicles as if this is our birthright. We stockpile and then discard useless stuff as if our lives depend on it, when in reality, the opposite is closer to the truth. We consume food that, besides being largely unnatural and unhealthy, is transported great distances to reach our markets and our tables. What are we thinking??

I highly recommend that you google Brian Willson and learn more about him, or listen to his Democracy Now interview with Amy Goodman, or read his book. Especially if you don't understand what the Occupy movement is all about.

Ladies and gentleman...

The growing season here is officially over.

Not much to say right now

It's been an odd week. (What else is new?) My neighbor across the street dropped dead at the age of 54. The construction drags on, but we're getting close to the end of it, IF the weather would only cooperate. Except for ONE absolutely glorious week, it has been a really crappy October! It's snowing today.

I'm working on my Halloween costume for a party Saturday night, and starting to make Christmas gifts. I've been keeping an eye on the Occupy movement, amazed at how they've been able to shift the national dialogue over to the REAL issues ordinary people are struggling with, although the corporate media and politicians are still as tone deaf and out of touch as ever.

I'm paying especially close attention to the situation in Oakland, where my son Brendan (an Iraq war vet) lives and works these days. He is outraged at the way peaceful protesters' rights are being trampled on. He points out that although the "hippies" and anarchists and other extremists play better on cable news, "the overwhelming majority of people in these groups are normal people with jobs and families." Got that, FOX?

We live in SUCH interesting times.

I am the 99%

While our home renovations continue--and believe me, you haven't lived until you've had roofers and carpenters pounding on your house when you have a blinding sinus headache--I've become captivated, almost against my will, by the Occupy movement, especially now that it has materialized in nearby Erie, PA.

Though I am in recovery from my past as a political activist (and I believe I am done with partisanship for good), I never intended to ignore the moral imperative to live in a manner which promotes equality and justice and the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. And that's what this is about.

The future of the human race depends on humans learning to cooperate with and care for one another.  The rapacious callousness and greed that has allowed wealth and power to be concentrated in the hands of the very few AT THE EXPENSE OF the majority has to be called out. And that day has come.

It's fascinating to watch the movement evolve and gain traction as people become aware of what has been stolen from them and by whom.  The corporate media continues to play dumb and obfuscate the message because they haven't figured out yet how irrelevant they are. The message is being communicated via the internet and social media and good old-fashioned face-to-face discussion. It's amazing how well people can add 2 + 2 when they tune out the distractions of Lindsay Lohan, Casey Anthony, and Charlie Sheen. When they stop getting bamboozled with buzz words like "socialist" and "real Americans." Ordinary people get smart when they stop feeding stupid into their brains and start talking amongst themselves.

I no longer have the stamina of my youth, so it's unlikely you'll find me camping overnight in Perry Square, but I unequivocally support those who are standing up to tell the truth about the purchase of the US government by corporate power and the systemic looting and gambling away of our wealth by those who just can't get enough.

There's no place like home

Maybe it's a sign of impending old age. But we're really becoming creatures of habit. Disruptions in our routine are discomfiting in a way they haven't been before.  We like our small town life in the middle of a big rural county. We're settling into a rhythm much more in tune with the earth. It took us a lot of years to take this step back from the manmade stresses superimposed on the natural world, and it's too bad we were too busy running marathons in our hamster wheels to figure this out earlier.

But with our entire roof being torn off and rebuilt to accommodate a (small) second story, it seemed like a good idea to take a trip for a few days. So we boarded the cat, packed up the dog, and took a road trip to visit my sister. Who happens to live in the nation's capital, one of the most densely packed (in terms of people, vehicles, buildings, and white collar criminals) areas on the planet. It used to be fun to visit--the museums, the monuments, the restaurants, the cosmopolitan vibe--but after a while, the novelty has disappeared and the overall unhealthiness of the environment has become suffocating. DC is about as unnatural as it gets this side of Disney World, despite the small green oasis my sister has created in her back yard. It confounds me that people who have a choice would voluntarily reside in a city where anything not bolted down or barricaded behind triple locks is fair game for thiefs.  The roadways are so choked with vehicles (many with only one person in them) that a lane closure due to construction turned the last three miles of our departure from the beltway into a 90-minute crawl. How do you evacuate a place like that in the event of disaster? The answer is, YOU DON'T.

So after our short and sweet visit with people we still love anyway, we thought we'd head for the mountains and camp out. Well, camping in October is way more popular than we ever knew. Especially on a gorgeous holiday weekend, which we somehow overlooked in our plans. It's October, how hard can it be to find a place to pitch a tent?   The campgrounds in Shenandoah National Park were full.  Plan B was a motel room outside the park. We found a Red Roof Inn, a chain that is dog friendly.  Not the camping experience we had hoped for, but it worked. We still got to enjoy the beauty of the mountains and the Shenandoah Valley.  And free wi-fi!

We finally got to pitch our tent in Allegany State Park, almost in our back yard. It's an amazingly beautiful 65,000 acres open year round for all kinds of outdoor recreation-- boating and fishing, camping and hiking, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.  Proving it doesn't require a LONG road trip to get away. And the wildlife like it too. You can find deer crossing signs everywhere, and even this sign on I-86 between here and there.

The campgrounds are pretty well populated with people and dogs, not the kind of place a shy black bear is likely to wander into, but we know enough about raccoons  to know that you don't leave food lying around your campsite.  Heck, you can't trust the omnipresent birds and chipmunks. We keep our site clean. Even the dog food gets locked up.

We had a nice hike around Red House Lake.  Conor met lots of other dogs.  We prepared dinner, ate, cleaned up, and got settled around our cozy little campfire. It gets dark early in October, but we had a beautiful, clear, moonlit sky, and a fellow camper with a guitar kept us entertained until lights out.

We retired to our tent and drifted off to the soothing night sounds of the forest. Only to be jolted awake by a sudden sharp WOOF! in the dark, which was immediately followed by a direct strike on our tent. Alas! Nailed by the diminutive striped terrorist of the woodland.   Conor, responding as good dogs will to movement outside the tent,  had unwittingly given away our position to the enemy. The front corner of the tent took the brunt of the chemical attack, but within seconds, the odor molecules permeated everything inside with a gagging stench.  Who knew that military surplus gas masks should be required gear for camping in state parks?

We're back home. The new roof has been built, but we'll be dealing with the continued commotion of construction for a while yet. Our days are noisy, temporarily, and there are all these guys with power tools all over the place, temporarily.  But the dog and cat are getting used to them, and I can sit on my own couch, sleep in my own bed, and cook in my own kitchen.  It's quiet and safe here at night. Oh, Auntie Em...