Shiny Bits of Foil

Had the local stitch-and-bitch on my calendar today, but I wrapped up my current knitting project last night and I have nothing else going right now that I can work on.  I considered blowing off the group, but I hadn’t been able to attend for the last several months due to TEDx meetings and I really miss the camaraderie. Plus, after a craptacular day at work (nothing specifically bad, really, just a day of completely mindless slog-work done through the haze of a bad arm day, pain-wise), I really needed some yarn therapy. And some chocolate.

So I went anyway. Took my project folder so I could figure out what I wanted to do next. Flipped through some of the books Malaprops always put out on our table in case someone wants to buy them. Bought myself a mug of hot chocolate and a chocolate chip cookie. Talked craftwork and commiserated about the state of individually-funded health insurance/DIY healthcare with the hostess. And came home to a freshly made black bean and spinach lasagna thanks to hubby-who-can-cook.

Not a bad night, if you can swing it.

Today my afternoon started off with a visit to the early voting location to express my preferences about who should sit on our city council, moved on to a leisurely walk through a local arts and crafts fair, then on to the bookstore (to check on the availability of a book) and the library (to renew my pile-zilla of current reading material).  Afterward, we continued our leisurely walk around town, including a surprise stop at a sample table  set up on Wall St. by Imladris Farms, a local berry and fruit farm that makes and sells jellies, jams and stuff, where I sampled the OMFG heavenly apple butter, chatted up the farm’s proprietor for ideas about taking successful blueberry bush cuttings and got a free farm-tour pass for later. On the way back to the truck, we picked up a bag of chocolate at the Fetish for later (mmm…choc covered candied orange peel FTW) and I got to pet a very happy dog and get wet nose prints on my cheek.

After our jaunt downtown, we stopped by Sunny Point Cafe for a lovely lunch in the sun, for which I shall doubtless pay with a massive sunburn. I don’t care, though, since I’ve spent most of the previous week stuck behind my keyboard in a chilly, rain-damp apartment bemoaning the onset of cold weather and chilled to the bone due to the building’s thermal lag and (on our side) poor sun exposure (it’s great in the summer and not so hot, literally, in cold weather).  I was like a lizard on a hot rock, soaking up the infrared and hugging the sun-warmed table to thaw out my cold hands. Ahhhhh.

After lunch, of course, there was the getting-to-be-habitual stroll through the restaurant’s garden. I’m beyond envious of their massive nasturtium spread…I have the worst luck with nasties and I love them soooo much, both for their pretty flowers and their spicy salad leaves. I just want to lay down in their overflowing flower bed and chew my way out.

After our stroll, we hit the farmers market and got stuffed to the gills on apple samples. We ended up with a box of Johnny Gold apples (the honeycrisps are a bit mellow this year, and we both wanted something with plenty of zing), some grapes, assorted veg and the only carton of figs I’ve had all year (too cold for good harvests, I think). Also, some local 5-year-aged Chedder sharp enough to make Freddy Kreuger think ’safety first.’  Tomorrow, I am making the Times’ fig and carmelized onion tart for dinner (although I’ll probably substitute some soft goat cheese for stilton). Yum!

So that was my day – voting, strolling, art perusing, chatting, dog petting, patio lunching, sun soaking, garden touring, farmers-market shopping and chocolate munching. Some days, my life seriously doesn’t suck.

Smashing Success! TEDxAsheville 2009 Rocks The House and Blows Minds

Seriously. We blew it out of the water, considering it was our first event and we pulled it together in just a few months. We ended up turning away almost as many as we sat, the speakers and performers rocked and the audience responded in spades.

Total win. Can’t wait to do it again next year.

So, spent the afternoon doing the “weekend in Asheville” thing that I love to do – grabbing a meal out, squandering a portion of my mortal hours in mindless enjoyment of this place, and catching some entertainment before heading home for the night.

Today’s tour d’ville started with a late lunch at Laughing Seed (both of us ordering our current favorite, the hempnut burger with goat cheese), where we were treated to the sight of a dove and her babies who were nesting in one of the patio’s hanging flower pots. Adorable. The staff have even named them (the momma dove is Penelope, but the waitress couldn’t remember the babies’ names).

After, we had over an hour to kill before our movie, so we rambled around the river arts district looking at houses and neighborhoods, in case we find someone doing a Crazy Eddie sale on a reasonable piece of property. Today, though, we got a total surprise when we rounded a turn down by the river, just to the East of the Patton St. Bridge, and saw a flock of turkeys in the road!  For a moment, Thom thought they were wild turkeys, until I reminded him we were still more or less in downtown Asheville not a block out of a heavily industrialized zone. As we slowly drove down the street, we watched the turkeys head up into a yard with coops and gardens (and across the street from them, I just barely caught a glimpse of something vaguely goat-like in another yard).

Dude. Someone in AVL has a flock of fricken turkeys.  And their neighbor has a goat-ish something! That so rocks. That is totally my kind of neighborhood. I’ve been tickled about the sighting all damned day.

Tonight’s entertainment was “Julie and Julia,” the movie about Julia Child and the blogger who got a book deal from blogging about making every single recipe in Mastering The Art of French Cooking in one year.

Total foodie porn. Loved it! My favorite line in the whole movie was about the fact that there really is no such thing as too much butter. Seriously, someone cooking Julia Child’s recipes could keep a small local dairy in business all by themselves. I spent a few hours poking through blogs and articles around the movie, and all I can find are people freaking out about the damned butter. One person even admitted to making Child’s infamous Boeuf Bourguignon with canned french onion soup and canned cream of mushroom soup so they could avoid the unhealthiness of all that butter!

Uh, folks…two points:

1. That canned shit has so much crap, chemicals and faux food in it that it’s only slightly more healthy than radioactive sewage sludge.

2. Julia and her hubby ate butter-soaked French food for pretty much every meal of their lives from their 40’s on, and lived to be 90+.

Seriously, people. Don’t fear the butter. The butter is your friend. Embrace the butter, throw out the crap and live to be an extremely well-fed 90-something without a shred of regret.

Having seen the movie, now I want to learn how to cook, official-like. Luckily, there’s an excellent culinary school just down the road, and I have some college money that needs spending. It’s a serious thought, although if I did go I wouldn’t be going for the degree (I’d never get ll the credits anyway, since I wouldn’t be taking the meat courses). Nor do I want a cooking job (god forbid – chefs get up way to frakking early, work like dogs until the late evening and apparently spend the entire day cutting themselves with red-hot knives coated in flaming brandy, to hear Anthony Bourdain kvetch about it in his book). No, I think I’d just saunter (or perhaps sautee) my way through the classes that interested me and call it a day.

And yes. I’ll be using butter. Lots and lots of butter.

I’m helping to organize our first ever TEDxAsheville. Check out the cool shit that’s going to be happening:

Nauhaus and Hemcrete to demo at TEDxAsheville

What to expect (click for dates, times, etc):

Hand-picked, visionary local presenters
Music
Poetry
DJs
Pizza
Beer
Ideas worth spreading, Asheville-style
A few surprises!
A one-of-a-kind, first-ever, Asheville-centric event created by local TED fans and some of Asheville’s most amazing people

What is TEDx?

Hubs and I decided to take the advice of the local free community paper and spend Sunday afternoon taking in the masses of bloomination of rhodedendrons up on Parkway, after we stopped by the farmers’ market to snap up whatever produce goodies were on sale for the week. (We ended up with a big basket of peaches, a big basket of eggplants, a peck basket of red bell peppers and a small watermelon, which we tucked away behind the seat in the extended cab for later processing and nomnomination).

On the way out of town, we picked up some takeout to eat while we enjoyed the view, then we hit the Parkway and headed up north to find an appropriately flowery picnic spot.  As per the paper, it was gorgeous – mounds of pale pink and dark fuschia rhodies interspersed with orange and yellow azaleas and other wildflowers tumbling down blasted rock walls to one side and steep dropoffs on the other. Lots of long, breathtaking views of the mountains, complete with red-orange cloudy backdrops and that foggy fadeout you get where you can’t tell what’s mountain-line and what’s cloud-top.

Eventually we pulled in at  the Craggy Gardens picnic area, which was beauteously overrun with blooms and views (and civilized enough to have a bathroom, which I needed badly, lol).

That’s when the fun started.

As I was coming out of the ladies’, hubby motioned me to slow down and approach quietly.  As I did, I turned toward where he was pointing and saw my very first NC black bear in the picnic area behind the entry area bathrooms snorfling around the tables about about 30 feet away.  Zoinks!

At first my brain was like, awwwww…look at the cute fuzzy bear.  Then the tasty-mammal-that-doesn’t-run-very-fast part of my brain kicked in and I was all, OMG BEAR!!! and wanting to run anyway.  Thankfully, my higher functions took back control of my brain pretty quickly and I realized I was not, actually, in any immediate danger (and that running could actually change that situation by setting off his chase instinct).

Luckily, he was way too involved in rooting up leftovers to pay us any attention, even at that close range (I’m guessing from his utter lack of response that he’s already perfectly familiar with the sudden appearance of naked apes in this spot, and rates us as exactly the immediate threat that we are, i.e. about on par with a brain damaged squirrel).  Since black bears normally aren’t aggressive and this one appeared to be a young singleton, rather than a mother with cubs, I wasn’t too worried.  But I wasn’t exactly relaxed, either.  Around park areas like this, bears learn to associate people with food, which can make for dangerously unpredictable behavior.

Hubs and I eyeballed our fill, then decided to take our food to the other side of the picnic area under some lovely rhodie bushes, across a wide expanse of open parking lot that said bear was unlikely to cross. Thus ensconced, we proceeded to chow down on our burritos and watch the sun work it’s way down toward dusk, all while keeping a fond yet wary eye on El Fuzzybuns (who had now attracted the attention of several people in the picnic area, who were lined up at the end of the parking lot shooting snaps of him like papparazzi tagging Britney coming out of a liquor store).

Eventually, I got a bit concerned about having the truck so far away from us (it was still down in bear country), on the consideration that if this end of the picnic area did turn out to be on his regular rounds, he might end up between us and our ride.  So I decided to go fetch it closer.  It wasn’t until I swung open the truck door, however, that I absorbed a very important bit of information – the truck (being warmed in the sun and having the windows cracked) was positively exuding the irresistible perfume of fresh peaches, a mouthwateringly inviting odor that I had just released in a large cloud and fanned out in El Bearo’s direction.  In a brief second of “oh shit,” my mind replayed all those videos of bears ripping open cars to get to coolers and other food items inside.  Luckily, our furry friend hadn’t seemed to notice yet, so I started up the truck and hightailed it out of sniffing range down to where we were eating.

We finished our picnic unmolested, watching the bear snuffle around and rolling our eyes at the photogs, especially the idiot who had the bright idea to lob what looked like an apple up into the picnic area during one of the bear’s brief returns to the woods.  Gah.  You just want to strangle morons like that.  I mean, I get it.  I do.  I had to exercise a bit of willpower myself not to chuck him one of our fresh peaches, since I knew how much he’d enjoy it.  But seriously, people.  Don’t you ever watch the Discovery Channel?

Here’s a hint: DON’T FEED THE BEARS!!!

It makes them more dangerous to humans, because it reinforces the notion of people = food, which leads to dangerous interactions, which just ends up getting the bear killed when he acts on the information you gave him, i.e. that people = food.

But aside from that one stupid asshat, it was a cool (if vaguely anxiety-making¹ ) experience.

Squeeeee! My first bear!

Of course, being the geek that I am, the first thing I thought of of once the initial goosebumps and tasty-mammal jolt of fear wore off was, “Good thing Stephen Colbert isn’t here.”

He stayed around for the entire time we were there, so as we were leaving we stopped to watch him from a bit closer up (now that we were protectively armored in a running vehicle).  Until, that is, he started sniffing the air and pointing his nose at our truck like he smelled something good.  At which point we decided it was wise to GTFO while we still had ourselves and our produce intact, lol.

1. I’m a geek, I know my position on the food chain down to several decimals [↩]

Talk about a great weekend. Early Sunday afternoon, we started off the day by taking part in a service to dedicate 16 more homes with Habitat for Humanity. That’s 16 families who used to live in housing projects and dangerous neighborhoods, and who now have a great home in a great neighborhood in a quiet little cul-de-sac just up the hill from a huge sports park, down the road from a public library and a hop/skip from grocery stores and other businesses. A home they can afford to pay for, heat and maintain, in a place that safe for the kids to play outside.

I got all choked up. Damned allergies…sniff.

During the ceremony, they called up the families to receive a book of faith and to say a few words, and it turns out that one of the families was one that I had worked with in my Americorps service, a single mom with two kids that I really got attached to during my service. The brother and sister are really good kids (their mother is doing a phenomenal job of raising them despite the circumstances), but during the time I worked with them, you could see the gang-violence-heavy and poverty-saturated environment of the projects starting to make inroads into their actions and choices. I was so worried about them after my service year was up and I had no idea they were one of our families, so I got so excited to see them at the dedication that I was literally bouncing up and down in my pew and had to restrain myself from squealing out loud.

*squeeeeeeeeee!*   asplode!

After the service, we did the kool-aid and cookies meet-and-greet thing, and I got a sudden idea to ask the HFH staff about the possibility of putting a community garden in the neighborhood.  Turns out they have a few lots in the development that are unbuildable for some reason, so they’re hooking me up with the community’s HOA to talk about possibilities. I’ve got no clue how to do this, but when has that ever stopped me?   Here’s hoping it works out.

After the event, hubs and I grabbed some take-out burritos and spent the rest of the day hiking around the arboretum’s nature trails and soaking our feet in the (brrrrrrr…cold) creek while we ate our late lunch/early dinner.

Totally one of the best ways to spend a Sunday afternoon. I highly recommend it to anyone.

Here are a few pics of the Women Build project for 2009. The house itself is done except for a few odds and ends. All that’s left is the landscaping (which is waiting on the driveway to be poured, which is waiting for a few others to be ready since the guy who does it does them in batches). The home is in a quiet little cul-de-sac subdivision with a few dozen other homes, all of which are done up in Arts & Crafts styles and colors and surrounded by trees and mountain views. It’s a gorgeous neighborhood, and it’ll just be more and more beautiful as the homes are finished.

I’m so juiced about this. It’s my second year, and I’ll be staying on the leadership committee for as many years as they’ll have me.

The first wall going up, back on Valentines Day

Lou F., head of our leadership team and regular site volunteer

A group of our volunteers on our final official workday

The 2009 Asheville Area HFH Women Build Home

Wordfest, a three-day poetry festival here in Asheville, wrapped up today. I attended all day Friday, took yesterday off and wrapped it up today at the final event at the local bookstore. Heard some great work, learned a lot, made some connections, and wrote and made notes for several poems-to-be. Had a blast.

Verdict: Win.

Best memory: Getting rousted by the fire marshalls at an over-crowded gallery during a program of dueling Sufi poets trading mystic verses over the sounds of an amazing spoken-word backup band, and finishing up the set listening from the sidewalk outside with a crowd of enthusiastically responsive poetry groupies cheering on their favorite poet like they were rock stars, then walking back to the truck enjoying the feel of a beautiful spring night in the mountains on my skin.

God I love this place.