Spring Stuff

Love it when the violets appear. When I have a yard, I want it to be full of nothing but violets, clover, and some other low-growing weeds/wildflowers. Hell with mowing.

Yesterday morning I heard a Bullbat for the first time this year. That's what my father calls them anyway, but I guess most people call them Nighthawks. I love the sound they make (You can hear that in the link), the way they fly circuits in the sky, and the dramatic dives they perform.

I don't know where they go in the winter but I'm glad they're back.

One thing I miss this spring is the sound of spring peepers. There are places in town where I've heard what sounds like hundreds of them in years past, but this year I've only heard one. It was a lonely sound. Hopefully he's a prolific breeder and there will be more next year. I've heard that frog species are in decline worldwide. Maybe the drought we've been entertaining on and off for several years has taken its toll on their numbers here.

Serendiptious Epicurean Bonanza

I put cilantro on our grocery list last week, and Wyatt came home with a big bundle of kale instead. I cook with cilantro all the time, but if he had to identify it out of a lineup of vegatable suspects, an innocent one would likely go to the chair. Or into the food processor, as was the case here.

No worries - I found this great recipe for kale pesto. It's incredible. As a consummate tomato hater, I've found that I like tomatoes just fine if they're smothered on a sandwich with this pesto instead of mayonnaise. Mayonnaise might be the reason I hate tomatoes in the first place. The sight of raw tomatoes slathered in yuckass Duke's mayonnaise oozing out from between two slices of white bread - I'm gagging right now. As a child I always suspected I was adopted because all of my relatives wallow in tomato & mayonnaise sandwiches all growing season long. Then my brother came along and he hates them too, so I guess we just got double doses of a recessive tomato-mayonnaise hating gene. Maybe we're mutants.

Went To A Dance

When's the last time you went to a dance? In high school maybe, where you hit a bottle of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill in the parking lot outside the gym and then went in to sway under crepe paper streamers taped to the basketball goal? Or maybe it was at the Spring/Winter Formal in college, when you wore new dress shoes that blistered your feet.

Well, I went to one Saturday. There was no cover charge, no proffessional DJ, and nobody got totally fucking wasted. It was the best Saturday night out I've spent in a long while. The host swooped around in a cape part of the time and I wore a cardboard top hat until I started to sweat under it.

The thrower of this party has a business downtown which contains a room large enough to hold maybe 15 people getting their groove on. Somebody let him borrow a professional PA system and his wife hooked her laptop up to it. She had a lot of choice music on there and other people brought some in too. We heard a random selection of songs from the 1960s to now, but not at ear-crushing volume. We were't confined to whatever music is popular currently, and we got to hear our favorite songs like we like them, not chopped up in mixes.

I have been known to have similar events at home, but I'm the only one who attends. It was very refreshing to dance with others for a change. It's nice to do it in a setting where it's all about movement and enjoying yourself, not about hooking up with somebody or avoiding somebody or impressing somebody or getting trashed, which is what it was like for me at the school dances and clubs of my youth.

How come people don't grow more cheap, organic fun like this?

Self Reliance Training

Have been working too much to write and post regularly these days, so blogging has become one more thing for me to feel bad about not doing, filed alphabetically in the Guilt cabinet ahead of Cooking, Dishes and Laundry.

Fortunately, somebody forwarded me the following e-mail about a cool upcoming event in Chapel Hill. Supposedly, similar events are coming to Greensboro in May.
I think this will serve well for this week's entry.

Here goes -

In these tough times we all benefit from building skills that make our communities more self reliant. Many of us have never learned the skills that got our parents, grandparents and/or great grandparents through hard times. Knowledge around these skills and others still exists in our communities. We all have valuable skills, let's come together and share them with our community. Join us for a skill share hosted by Spence's Community Educational Farm on Saturday April 11.

Tentative Schedule:
10am-12pm Skill Sharing workshops\
12pm-1pm Lunch (BYO Bag lunch)
1pm-3pm Skill Sharing workshops

5pm-7pm Potluck dinner
7-late Bonfire, drumming, dancing

Potential topics include:
Canning
Partnership with Horses
Seed Saving
Poultry Processing
Basket Weaving
Ceramics
Small Engine Repair
Composting
Building Raised Beds
Foraging for wild edibles
Fermentation

Have a skill? If you are skilled in one or more of these areas or have another skill you'd be willing to share email me rejemail@gmail.com. You don't need to be an expert, just willing to share.

If you'd like to attend Please RSVP to me at rejemail@gmail.com let me know if there is a particular skill you'd like to learn and we'll try our best to make sure it's represented.

The address for Spence's farm is: 6407 Millhouse RD Chapel Hill, NC 27516 googlemaps or mapquest will get you here.

Feel free to bring friends and forward this email to people you think might be interested.

I look forward to learning with you,
-Rob Jones

What A Difference A Week Makes

Can't believe last week we were throwing snowballs, and this week we're breaking out the shorts. Have a great week everybody - go out and soak up some vitamin D. I hear the wintry weather isn't done with us. Hope that butterfly hasn't packed away the snow boots yet.

Snow Photos

Thanks to whatever weather gods read my blog yesterday. This snow was just the thing to get everybody excited and make the neighborhood beautiful.