the birthday and the egg

So the chickens (Sunny, Kiwi, and Olive) turned 20 weeks old yesterday. And today we were graced with….our first egg! We were thrilled of course–and it might be why the girls were so excited this morning at 7:15. They were cooing and squawking every 15 minutes on the dot until about 8:30 or so. I [...]

the bar and the brew

andy has just finished brewing three beers and a cider and they are ready for summer evening drinking. one is a sierra nevada clone, another is a strawberry ale (from fresh louisiana strawberries), an auburn ale, and an apple cider. we hung a large piece of chalkboard and drew labels for each. See the pictures [...]

our barred rocks…all grown up

the hens are only one month old and look how much they’ve grown! to compare, here’s one from a week ago:
chicks near the brooder
today was one of the first sunny days in a while. temperatures were in the 70s (yay!) and it was just what i needed to get over the horrible cold/flu that has had [...]

baby hens!

we finally got baby chicks. they’re barred plymouth rocks (barred is the color. it’s looks like herringbone when they get a little older). the barred rocks lay about 200 eggs a year, are very friendly and curious, and are so pretty. we got them when they were 3 days old. the picture in andy’s hand [...]

ecotexts class

i’m very excited about teaching an ecotexts class this spring. it’s a “literary themes” class at the 2000 level. i’m putting together the website for it right now and i’m also trying to put finishing touches on the syllabus. i decided to change the format of the class a little bit than what i [...]

almost full circle: the “reappearance” e.coli

Today’s news reveals that e.coli has made a dramatic encore on the media stage–this time emerging in ground beef. As many others and I’ve mentioned before, the “spinach scare” wasn’t really about spinach. It was/is about food preparation–about commercial agriculture–about our own food literacy. Unlike the spinach media coverage, a lot of the mainstream stories [...]

reclaiming the productive schedule!

after a quite a bit of time slacking off on my reading schedule, i am back, roaring and ready to go. now with new and improved tagging and note-taking (which by the way was inspired by earth wide moth and his musings on notes specifically).
in other news, i have cancelled not one but two conferences [...]

beware spinach?

e. coli in spinach? i love how not a single news story that i’ve heard so far has mentioned that e. coli comes from animals. every story so far has just said “beware spinach! people are sick from spinach in 20 different states!” perhaps the american public would like to know about the relationship between [...]

conferences, publishing, and food

i’ve now been to about eight conferences or so and i have yet to have more than about 10 people in any session. and in the sessions i attend, there are only ever about 10 people. most of these conferences have at least 1000 people so what’s going on? is it that there are too [...]

nwsa conference

just got back from the nwsa (national women’s studies association) conference in oakland. it was pretty good–but not for the reasons expected. i have a peculiar relationship, i think, with feminist scholarship, in that i think of social justice/ power relationships first and identity politics second. always.
so, for instance, i rarely look at a text [...]