(Eek!  I let the fun weekend slip by without checking my post lineup…sorry about that.)

Honnora, Lavena’s sweet and wonderful laurel potter friend from Up North is visiting this week, and she and I had a little mutual Christmas.

We’d worked out when she was here last to trade a red and blue chaperon for a flax wheel’s water reservoir.  We did that – pics and gushing about pots later.  (Honnora!  I forgot to take your picture!)  We had too much to talk about!

We also traded books – I introduced her to BookMooch about ten days ago, knowing it would be a great thing.  I didn’t realize I might be able to mooch three great books from her directly!  One is a boxed set of two – Medieval Gardens and the Gardens of the Cloisters, with Herbs for the Medieval Household.  Then there’s The Art of Florentine Drawings – for someone who spent a summer studying medieval art in Florence, this is particularly wonderful.  Finally a monograph on Albrecht Durer, complete works.  All of these books are particularly nice in that they are SMALL, but dense with wonderful information and pictures.  The herb books are packed with woodcuts of scenes and botantical IDs.  Just awesome – I’ll be able to show chamomile-dyed yarn, with a medieval woodcutty picture of chamomile.

And yes, that does mean I’ve done some dyeing over the weekend.  More to come!

Some links that I promised Honnora, and that might be of general interest:

Creative Mom Podcast – I don’t really want my own children, not in this life setup – but this podcast isn’t about how children are wonderful, it’s about being creative, and helping others find creativity.  Also terrific music selections.  Very introspective and inner-child-finding.

Brenda Dayne’s Cast On – Knitting podcast with lots of good music and the terribly witty and informative Brenda Dayne – who is an American living in Wales, who has the guts to complain about it, because there aren’t enough yarn shops.  Er, Brenda, there are plenty of places not nearly as pretty as Wales with no yarn shops.  Life could be worse.

Wiggly Wigglers Podcast – Very funny cast from Herefordshire, England – so you get entertaining accents, as well as wonderful ecological stuff from people who both run regular farms and sell ecological products like wormeries and bath siphons.

Geek.Farm. Life. Podcast – Not funny, but illuminating cast from a couple of California geeks who pulled up stakes in silicon-land and bought a hobby farm in Indiana.  It’s not their living, but they’re learning a lot, and telling us what they learn.  They record live in the barn, so you get to hear the animals.

Path To Freedom – The DerVaes family makes a living for four grown adults off their 1/5 acre urban Pasadena lot, growing lots of organic veggies (up to 6000 lbs!), using solar panels for minimal electricity, brewing biodiesel, and worrying about climate change.

ecofoot.org – This concept has matured quite a bit since I last took a carbon footprint quiz, back in 2001, when I still ate beef and drove a twenty-yr-old Suburban.  Back then I was a 5 Earths to sustain the world’s population, if everyone lived like me.         

FOOD: 2.5 acres
MOBILITY: 0.7 acres
SHELTER: 5.4 acres
GOODS/SERVICES: 4.2 acres
TOTAL: 13 acres
IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 ACRES PER PERSON.
WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 4.5
BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE 
ACRES
PER PERSON.
          IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU,  WE WOULD NEED 2.9 PLANETS.

Well, that’s much better.  I feel bad about the 10 hours spent flying – I really really prefer bus trips, but there was that Detroit wedding that I couldn’t get out of.  My efforts to produce more of our food (lunch salad with Honnora) will certainly help offset the shelter, which I can’t help at the moment.

Library Thing – I use this to catalog all the books I’d want to replace if our house washed away in a Katrina.  Daan uses it to catalog all the fiction series he reads, so he doesn’t buy the same books twice.  It’s particularly wonderful because you can reference either Amazon or Library of Congress. Moment of awed silence.

How To Be A Gardener – BBC series with Alan Titchmarsh, 8 half-hour episodes, on Google Video.  Terrific and entertaining introduction to gardening, and will carry a person a long, long way.