Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Working at getting in.
Phew! I just received an email notification from SFU Admissions letting me know that I filled out my application for graduate studies correctly and I am now allowed to pay my application fee. Thank-goddess. At least I can get that part right in addition to cajoling three references to send letters in on my behalf!
On the other hand, I’m still working on the final and most important piece – the *dreaded* admissions essay. As of last night, I’ve got an acceptable draft which just needs some fine-tuning and a good edit to be ready. I really struggled with approach to this essay over the last little while, but got myself sorted out yesterday by asking some fundamental questions like: what am I interested in writing, discussing and researching about?
The answer? Apocalypse of course. Social and ecological crisis. The fundamental whys of a civilization that brought us to this point and the inquiry process that might lead us back out. The human artifacts that are evidence of our struggle to connect the dots over and over. The shocking divide in the world that allows the G-8 countries to walk around as though everything is okay while others are starving and overthrowing their governments. Etc.
And so from that premise – intellectual interest – the essay flowed and I was able to fill in the notes I started with two months ago, crafting descriptions of my work, my interests, my writing, my nascent book project ideas. Although it’s still in draft form, I think the substance of it is quite good (much better than what I had put down earlier) and Brian gave me a couple more suggestions for connecting my interests to the program last night which I’m going to include in my final draft. My plan is to get this done before the end of February so my application is in a month before the deadline. I’d really like to have it in, do my interview, and have an answer as soon as possible since I’m itching to know if I get to start the course readings in May (there is so much reading for the first year that they advise reading for the summer before the program starts).
Of course I am ridiculously nervous about my prospects, though I probably shouldn’t be. I just hate all this being judged part of application processes, and I can’t think of a grad program that is a better fit for me right now. We’ll see how it goes.
Smooches.
A slightly blurry valentine on my precious Underwood. A kiss to go with it. Will you be mine?
In the bookshed: Soil Mates
Soil Mates
Sara Alway
Quirk Books, 2011
Oh Valentine’s Day! What better way to celebrate than to mate your plants in a match bound for glory? That’s just the idea in the new Quirk Books release – Soil Mates: Companion Plants for Your Vegetable Garden
Soil Mates is an easy entry to the world of companion planting – a style of gardening that pairs certain combinations of veggies, herbs and flowers together for increased yields and pest resistance. Included here are twenty pairings described in detail, along with recipes that use the paired veggies as main ingredients *and* advice on seed starting, natural pest resistance, container gardening and planting timelines.
Useful as all that is, what really makes this book for me is its style and design appeal. Written like a matchmaking guide to plants (with sections including turn-ons, turn-offs, love triangles, stalker alert and foreplay), Sara Alway gets away from the dry language found in many garden how-tos. The illustrations are bright and inviting and include helpful visuals for plant placement and spacing – and overall this is a visually appealing book in the hand or on the shelf. This is definitely something I would give to a new or burgeoning gardener as a stocking stuffer (or a Valentine’s Day gift) for something fun and informative (even a little romantic – gotta watch those veggie pairings before they run off and elope after all).
Overworked
As I prepare myself for another week of work, this passage comes to mind… we may tell ourselves otherwise, but we are certainly overworked by any measure.
One of capitalism/s most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit — but rarely articulated — asumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.
These images are backwards projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely, the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.
Consider a typical working day in the medeival period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (siteen hours in the summer and eight in winter) but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent — called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual… The pace of work was also far below modern standards — in part because the general pace of life in medieval society was leisurely.
Juliet Schor, The Overworked American
Sewing, book reviews and getting ready for the bees
For your visual pleasure – here is a phone-picture of the market bags I finished this morning which are a housewarming present for some friends. I really love making these because they are so straight-forward, and the inside pockets can be customized for whatever the bag is being used for. I also managed to make a simple zippered pouch today using this tutorial. I had started with another tutorial that just wasn’t doing it for me, but since there about a hundred different explanations for making zippered pouches on the web, it was really easy to find a better one. I can’t say it turned out perfectly, but for the first time ever, I sewed a zipper into something and that’s progress in my books.
I’m hoping to have some garden pictures by tomorrow, along with some of the finished beehive because B. and I were hard at work this morning (early, before the torrential downpour started) clearing out our bee-space at the back of the garden. Over the winter it became our bucket and planter stashing spot and so we moved everything out of the way, planted a couple more vines along the back fence, and re-mulched the area with half-rotted leaves and bark mulch. Tomorrow morning we’re going to work on putting the top-bar beehive together now that I’ve glued all my wood – I’m a bit nervous about how this is going to go, but I suppose the worst that can happen is $10 of wood gets trashed and I get frustrated, so that’s not particularly awful. On the other hand, I believe my bees are on their way in the mail (c/o West Coast Bee Supply) and I want to make sure things are all set-up for when the package arrives.
And for those of you who are curious – yes, I am buying a package of bees, they come in a box with a caged queen and apparently 3 pounds worth is what I need to start a hive.
Look forward to lots of book reviews in the next couple of weeks here as well as I try to get through the stack of books for review in an orderly fashion. I’ve been really blessed lately to have a number of great volumes end up in my possession and I’m working my way through them for posting here as the spring season kicks off. Wet as it was this morning in my garden, I found myself getting really excited as we moved planters around and tidied up a bit – I’m hoping for another great gardening year with a steep learning curve on the bees and some fine-tuning of my planting plan from 2010.
Red Cedar 