Avian flu article

A relative of ours passed on this article about avian flu. A few years back I wouldn’t have believed it. But now, what with the Downing Street Memo and other examples of manipulated media, I believe it a bit more. Of course the other option is that both options are true – there is a potential problem with a pandemic and it is getting more airplay because of the connections mentioned in the article.

Swords into Plowshares

Amazing – someone really is beating swords into plowshares.

Jack Kornfield on Mindfulness

There’s a pretty good interview with Jack Kornfield on the subject of mindfulness here. While he is a Buddhist, I think there is lots of good info for everyone of all (or no) religions. That’s one of the things I really like about some of the basic Buddhist teachings – they’re not about religion so much as a guide to the effective use of the mind. In fact, as far as I know several monastic Christian orders follow similar practices. Lately, too, Christians have been combining Zen (the mental training portion of some types of Buddhism) with Christianity since again, the Zen part is about how to use your mind not about who created the world and who’s running the show so to speak.

Kite says that the same sort of “mental owners manual” aspect is present in Sufism. Having read a little Idries Shah, I’d have to agree.

Wrapped up in work for a while

A while back I wrote an entry which was an excuse for why I wasn’t writing many entries at the time It was a rather boring one not worth looking up (and as I’m on the bus, I’m not going to bother. Anyway – my excuse was that I signed confidentiality agreements at work and couldn’t talk about that and wasn’t doing much else at the time. Now that I look back, it wasn’t particularly true – I just hadn’t been in my groove and really only needed to start writing to get back into it.

Today, though, I really do feel as if I am actually in that position. It will only be for a little while but it is now about 7:30 and I am only just heading home from work now. There’s a big push going on just before I leave next week and as a result, I will be working a bit late for the rest of this week. After that, though, it should settle down for a few weeks if all goes well.

That said, while I didn’t have a very interesting day, I did have a productive day. Instead of leaving for work at 7:00 AM, I headed first to the HRDC office to get my social insurance card renewed. It was very different heading downtown at that time of day. Subways were really frequent – as one pulled out, you could see the lights of the next coming. Once inside the subway, it was standing room only. Interestingly enough – due to the increased subway traffic, I think, they were running much more slowly between the stations..It was eye-opening to be reminded just how many people take transit here in Toronto.

After the HRDC, I grabbed a quick bagel with cheddar cheese (Maybe I am missing something but I had never heard of having regular (i.e. not cream cheese) on a bagel until coming here – it is quite good, though) and headed up to get Paul’s and my health cards renewed. At this point Irony makes her big entrance in the form of no less than 8 smokers clustered in the very small entryway of the Ministry of Health.

After that I picked up a coffee and headed to work. As I was coming from a different direction and bus service was in off-peak mode, I had to take a route that left me a ten minute walk from work. Fortunately, as it was lunch time, it dropped me one minute from a Carribean takeaway where I picked up a chickpea roti (chickpea curry, potato curry wrapped up like a giant burrito – very delicious). I brought it to work where I quickly ate it before diving into work until just a few minutes ago without a break. I could complain, and might be persuaded to given a bit of encouragement, but actually I didn’t really mind much. It is really nice to be super-busy for a while. I never have to spend a second asking myself “what do I do next” because it is obvious except when someone comes by with an even more urgent request. The days go by really fast to say the least.

And so now I’m on my way home – nothing huge planned. I’ll probably get a bit of pizza at the pizza place in Eglinton Station – strangely enough, in my opinion that is without compare the best pizza in Toronto. Their crust is the closest to that which you’d get in New York – thin and crispy on the outside, soft on the inside with a dusting of cornmeal on the bottom. Yes, I am hungry, why do you ask, Sage?

After that, I’ll head home, post these entries either tonight or tomorrow morning and head to bed. It is entirely possible that everyone will be asleep by the time I get home and so I’ll probably join them.

Chickpeas & Onions

I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this before in the middle of an entry, and I know I posted it in Sage’s old forums, but to make it easy to find, I’ll post it here as well. It has somehow become my comfort food – I don’t know why. If I’m having a bad week, or feel a bit off, a bowl of this gets me back on track. I remember when I was living by myself in Albuquerque and had literally gone for well over a year without cooking anything (the company paid for meals and so we hired a personal chef – who incidentally became a really good friend – I need to write her). Anyway, it was getting to a stressful point in the job, and I was feeling overwhelmed and depressed. I made a batch of this, with a bit of short-grain brown rice and while it didn’t fix everything, I definitely felt lots better. It is the new chicken soup.

Chickpeas and Onions

2 cups dried chickpeas
1 Large onion cut into crescents (cut off ends, slice top to bottom and then holding your knife so it goes down the middle of the onion from the top to the bottom slice from the centre diagonally to the outside)
1 TSP of salt
1 TSP of cayenne (when we lived in the Ozarks we had access to african bird pepper powder which was way hotter and way tastier)
OR
3 TBSP of berbere (an Ethiopian Spice Mixture – Torontonians can get this in the spice market in Kensington Market. Note that this makes a very different but quite tasty dish)
1/2 Stick of butter (if you’re being health conscious – use 1/2 stick of butter, come on – you owe it to yourself and will feel better for it)

Cook chickpeas in pressure cooker for about an hour (in my superstition regarding numbers, for some reason I am stuck on 58 minutes.but it probably doesn’t need to be that precise)

Drain the chickpeas, saving a 2-3 cups of the liquid they were cooked in.

In a large saucepan or dutch oven, fry the onions in a little oil until brown (almost carmelized).

Add butter, cayenne or berbere, salt, chickpeas and a little of the cooking liquid.

Simmer for 20 minutes or momre adding liquid as necessary so you end up with a little gravy to spoon over your rice when you serve it.

Chickpeas & Onions

I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this before in the middle of an entry, and I know I posted it in Sage’s old forums, but to make it easy to find, I’ll post it here as well. It has somehow become my comfort food – I don’t know why. If I’m having a bad week, or feel a bit off, a bowl of this gets me back on track. I remember when I was living by myself in Albuquerque and had literally gone for well over a year without cooking anything (the company paid for meals and so we hired a personal chef – who incidentally became a really good friend – I need to write her). Anyway, it was getting to a stressful point in the job, and I was feeling overwhelmed and depressed. I made a batch of this, with a bit of short-grain brown rice and while it didn’t fix everything, I definitely felt lots better. It is the new chicken soup.

Chickpeas and Onions

2 cups dried chickpeas
1 Large onion cut into crescents (cut off ends, slice top to bottom and then holding your knife so it goes down the middle of the onion from the top to the bottom slice from the centre diagonally to the outside)
1 TSP of salt
1 TSP of cayenne (when we lived in the Ozarks we had access to african bird pepper powder which was way hotter and way tastier)
OR
3 TBSP of berbere (an Ethiopian Spice Mixture – Torontonians can get this in the spice market in Kensington Market. Note that this makes a very different but quite tasty dish)
1/2 Stick of butter (if you’re being health conscious – use 1/2 stick of butter, come on – you owe it to yourself and will feel better for it)

Cook chickpeas in pressure cooker for about an hour (in my superstition regarding numbers, for some reason I am stuck on 58 minutes.but it probably doesn’t need to be that precise)

Drain the chickpeas, saving a 2-3 cups of the liquid they were cooked in.

In a large saucepan or dutch oven, fry the onions in a little oil until brown (almost carmelized).

Add butter, cayenne or berbere, salt, chickpeas and a little of the cooking liquid.

Simmer for 20 minutes or momre adding liquid as necessary so you end up with a little gravy to spoon over your rice when you serve it.

Another good reason to homeschool

Check out this list of books that one parents’ group wants to ban from schools. My first thought is – how horrible – I’ve read several of those books and don’t really see the problem with them. I’m particularly crabby about Black Boy and the Barbara Kingsolver books.

But once again I ended up thinking that this is another symptom of a system that just doesn’t work – you can’t put everyone’s kids in one big room and expect to give a quality education to all of them at once. Or at least you can’t satisfy all of the parents at once. Some will be upset at how Columbus was taught, some will be upset about evolution, others will be upset about these books. Schools only work for the average, middle of the road, moderate parent or one who feels comfortable providing the alternate viewpoint to the kids when they get home (and isn’t that homeschooling to a degree as well?

I’m of the opinion that the best thing to do in terms of giving kids a decent education would be to get rid of the current form of public schooling and replace it with learning centres – places you could go voluntarily as a child or an adult to take classes you are interested in? Don’t think it would work? Maybe not, but I am hopeful. After all, we don’t go making everyone go to the library for a few hours every day and read particular books and still people read a great deal of good books. And I agree, there would still be a need for some sort of childcare – but I am thinking that perhaps this book that I found at the thrift store might actually have some good ideas as how we may proceed after we have automated so much work that there aren’t really enough jobs for people. Maybe, for example, we take the funding currently going to schools and split it up – part goes to the new “learning centre” model. The other half could be a stipend to help enable at least one parent in lower income families to stay home.

I know – none of that is particularly well thought out – I don’t think that that idea would work implemented just as it is. I do think, though, that somewhere in that idea are the seeds for an idea that would work. Thoughts?

The solution to Plamegate

I don’t know how I missed it all this time but Linwood Barclay of the Toronto Star has a great (and incidentally extremely funny) idea as to how Dick Cheney can help everyone get to the bottom of Plamegate. Have a look here. Probably no major entries today since I have to spend the morning at government offices renewing all of my various paperwork and still need to get a full day of work in as well.

Productive weekend

I have a friend – a former coworker who is about ten years older than I am. He’s something of a workaholic and used to work incredibly long hours, evenings, and weekends. At the same time, he always seemed to manage to keep his home life together with lots of renovation projects, guitar practice, and even beekeeping. To this day, I have no idea how he does it. I really feel as if he has some time warp machine which allows him to get a few extra hours out of the day than the rest of us.

Still, this weekend, I got a bit of insight as to how he might be able to do it. I don’t know if I could sustain it, and I don’t even know if I could routinely repeat it, but as it stands, I managed to get so much done. I managed to write a 30 page project plan, review some other documents, make a podcast and a few blog entries, got out to lunch and spent many hours hanging out laughing with Paul. Don’t ask me how I managed, though. But writing it down makes it seem a little less difficult to repeat.

Today I woke up a little earlier than yesterday – about 7:00 and as Sage was sleeping in, I made up a bit of coffee and started this morning’s podcast. I had a lot of fun doing it and was surprised at how easy it was to put together compared to others. After that, Paul woke up and wanted some of last night’s leftover pasta and garlic bread so we had that for breakfast followed by tea and then played with legos for a while.

As I had promised a visit to the toy department for a bit of window shopping, Paul and I headed over to Zellers (people in the states – think Target) where we picked up some tylenol for Sage (cramps) and checked out the latest lego offerings before heading back home. On the way we picked up a raspberry water and something about that triggered something in Paul. He decided that when he got home he was going to try to help Sage feel better (she’s been tired and crampy all day) and so got several cups to share the water and started making “Happy Period Day!” signs and planned games (relaxing ones) that he and Sage could play while I worked (libraries aren’t open that long on Sundays and I was feeling homebodyish). The only game I actually was able to hear was where Paul was a fortune teller and Sage would ask him questions.

Finally, Sage was ready for another nap (she had been up from 3:30 AM to 7:00 AM) and so Paul listened to his audiobook while I finished my work. We did our separate things for a while before it became time for me to start dinner (chickpeas and onions on rice – I should put the recipe up on here one of these days). While dinner cooked, I looked at Google Earth. After a few minutes I attracted Paul and we were looking at the site of our old house, some of our old swimming holes and finally the East Wind Community where a few friends of ours used to live when we were in the Ozarks – a place I liked so much we even considered moving there for a while. I got up to tend to the food and when I came back Paul had taken over the controls. I had left it at a particular spot at East Wind – the spot in the creek where people usually swim and where Paul had his first swimming experience at about 8 months old – he adored it. Anyway, Paul got inspired and together we did a virtual version of a real-world project we dreamed of doing as far back as September 11th, 2001. Back then Paul, Kite, and I had a thought of possibly following the nearby creek all the way to the ocean. And while it wasn’t quite the same, Paul used Google Earth – fairly zoomed in at that – and we followed the creek from East Wind, to the nearby lake, down to the White River and then the Mississippi all the way to the ocean. We had a blast doing it though I have to admit I felt both regret that we didn’t really do it on foot (I suppose we still could someday) and relief that we didn’t do it when Paul was 3 since the rivers meander a ton – we’d have been walking far more than just the length of a few states. Paul spent another hour or so exploring the world with Google Earth which to me seems like something a sci-fi author would have dreamed up 20 years ago – and probably someone did. What a great way to get people interested in geography.

After that, the evening did go quickly. We had dinner, Paul spent a little more time on the computer, Sage and I chatted for a long time and now we’re all going to bed. All very satisfying.

So all in all I’m in a great mood – I had a fantastic weekend despite bringing work home, I had a very full, very happy day today, and last, some recent anxieties seem to be on their way out. Mostly I am very easy going and nothing bothers me but sometimes – maybe once every 2 years or so I get an irrational medical anxiety. It always happens in the autumn (I’m sure a practicioner of traditional Chinese medicine could probably explain something about that). This year I got three in a row in the space of about 3 weeks. I won’t say what they were just on the off chance that someone knows someone who had the same problem and it looked fine but then they died a horrible death – thanks, I don’t want to hear it). Anyway, I had three separate instances that I knew in my heart were fine (and are now gone) but still I couldn’t let it go. That’s part of the motivation for getting the meditation practice going again – I definitely need to get control of the monkey mind a bit more again. Anyway, it seems like things are finally settling down again and I feel quite happy and content.

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Just a reminder, by the way, to those that haven’t already put themselves up on the map, it’d be great to see where y’all are from – no real names, photos, or registration are required. Also, if you’re curious about the music I’m listening to these days, why not have a listen to the Quirky Outtakes Podcast? The feed can be found here.

Anyway – hope you all have a great night!

Podcast Feed

It took about thirty seconds once I decided to do it but I have finally figured out how to have wordpress automatically create podcast feeds for me with a minimum (read: no) grief. So those who are interested can subscribe here. Don’t expect daily entries like Sage, but every now and again I’ll probably give you a half hour or so of music and a little talking – maybe other stuff as it occurs to me.