Dreaming Forward

Good Morning -

It was a good and quiet day yesterday, complete with a couple of errands, a nap, some work on a near-future goal, and some reading for some far-future goals.

Remember how I said in Looking for a Cause (wow...somehow linking to myself makes my navel-gazing eyes cross a bit...) that I would start my ideas about growing and gardens and community and sustainability by reading, since I'm not in a place (geographically or in my life) to pursue this idea directly?

To that end, I ordered a bunch of books from our local library (side note - my partner loves the library and considers it the ultimate in socialist, frugal entertainment. She's not a socialist, but she loves the leveling and freeness that comes when anyone can get a card, order books, enjoy the books, and then return the books without spending a cent.
Our library is particularly lovely, in that you can reserve and renew online, so that you just show up and your books are waiting at the counter for you - no hunting and pecking through the shelves. Also, they have wonderfully current CD's and DVD's - more great, free entertainment. Separate side note: the library isn't always free for me, because sometimes I'm bad about returning items on time and get charged a late fee (this is why I pay for Netflix)).

(Did you notice how the above paragraph is just one giant parenthetical aside? It's that kind of morning - just off to the side and in a slightly softer tone.)

Back to the books. I ordered books on gardening, books on activist gardening, books on eating locally, books on goats, and books on bees (no chickens yet). Specifically, my current reading list is:
Grassroots Gardening by Donna Schaper - little essays about gardening and the metaphors it encourages. She's a minister, so there's lots of spiritual reflections woven throughout.
Goats: Small-Scale Herding for Pleasure and Profit by Sue Weaver - so fascinating. I'm not done yet, but it doesn't seem to answer my biggest question - how many? How many goats does one need if one wants to do a little milking and make enough cheese to enjoy and maybe give some away at the holidays? One goat? Two goats? Do they get lonely so that you need more than one? Are they like some things in which if you have two, you may as well have 200 because the impact on your life is about the same? These are my questions.
Beekeeping: A Practical Guide by Richard E. Bonney - I haven't started this one yet, but a quick flip through the pages and some caption reading validated that it'll be a fascinating read.
Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasure and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan - I haven't started this one either, but from what I understand it's of a similar vein to Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle except that he eats locally in Tucson, which I admit is an idea I come to with much scepticism.
Food Not Lawns - How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community by H.C. Flores - my partner read this one months ago and, from what I remember, it's well written and has interesting ideas about how to use your yard space to contribute to feeding your family and the community.

So, that's my summer reading list and that's my Virgen. The image is from an ad about Oregon in the best food magazine ever (Saveur - the only magazine I read cover to cover. I love the stories of local foods and families and the way they celebrate a variety of foods, not just the million dollar truffle oil found only at the exclusive market) and has a glimpse of the far future - goats and homegrown produce. The raffia border is along the natural lines.

It feels better to have clarity of direction. I've got the big goal of goats and chickens and community gardening, with a smaller goal that will get me there.

It's good to have goals.

Oh, as if to spite me and keep me guessing - this tomato was red when I went out this morning. It's not ready yet, but will be soon. The black on the leaves is coffee grounds we toss on from time to time.
This is our half cat, Max. He adopted us over the holidays and seems to be abandoned from students (he's neutered and not feral acting). We got him checked out and shot up at the vet, but are unable to bring him inside because some of our other cats have bad social behaviors and they don't know how to welcome the stranger. Here he's balanced between the fence and the monkey bar running across the tomato garden. We feed and love him from the porch, and it works for now. His loyalty rivals that of the best dog ever - he's always waiting for us when we come home and is the first to run and greet the car. On bad cat behavior days, I threaten to ship our mean cats to China to become dog food and bring Max inside as the new house cat. They know I'm lying and could never afford the cost of shipping live cats to China - even offset by the money I'd get from them as a dog food ingredient - so generally they just glare and saunter off.