When I work at home on Fridays (which is most Fridays) the radio that fuels my efforts streams from iranianradio.com. Traditional Persian sonati. There's just something about it . . .

My Sea Kitten, Sara

A new phrase entered my lexicon today, words that I'd not put together before: sea kitten. "Would people think twice about ordering fish sticks if they were called sea kitten sticks" inquires PETA in its campaign to associate our watery brethren with something less food-like. Admittedly, I don't contemplate eating lobster because I can't handle the prospect of quickly cooking them or slowly cooking them, while they're alive. Eating their fear, is how some circles describe it.

But my stance is unpredictable: I've eaten crawfish and langoustine, considered live bait in some circles. They're *smaller* than big 'ole lobster, afterall. Part of me thinks that if I indeed am going to consume fish, fowl or swine, I must be keenly aware of the consequences for that creature and myself and attempt to choose ones that I know have been treated humanely while alive, or that I've caught or raised and killed myself. (Just so you know, I haven't caught/hunted any critters that I can remember, beyond ants [heartless] and a sunfish or two. And the occasional snail: I tend to thrown them way out in the back 40.)

I keep buying vegan cookbooks like Vegan Soul Kitchen, but the reality is that I continue to eat all kinds of stuff and I am am capable of serious predation. I was enthralled with Babe, a mythic, filmic pig raised by sheepdogs, and then I have an ongoing relationship with bacon. Go figure.

Still, PETA has a site where one can build one's own sea kitten, like Sara here. Maybe I won't kill and eat Sara, but my kitty Huey would. No questions asked.

Can I kill and clean a chicken? Can you? My grandma May could and did. She was pretty happy when the A&P started bringing in packaged parts and 8 o'clock coffee...Does it count if you thank the creature for its sacrifice? Will the kale feel left out, on some level? It's quite the luxury to pick and choose one's food.

A new spot for my photo-posting

photos.yourwordsworth.com

Not password protected at the moment, as doing so gives the first-time visitor a display page of stock photos, which seemed odd to me.

What I love more.
What I love more than picking 10 pounds of blueberries, is the fact that they will fit into a 60-year-old refrigerator in my mother's garage. It refuses to break (the frig), though it's creaky, probably not efficient, and prone to collecting ice in its freezer--remember that? I've read of some who collect baby carrot bags, and now, refrigerator freezer doors of a certain age. A winner, here.

Simple ode.
Must the house be cleaned now, scrubbed of detritus, dear things, details? This photo is, by new decree, an homage to Pumpkin, who disappeared this summer after 10 years, perhaps to coyotes, perhaps to illness. He sounded like a squeaky pin cushion. He was swell.

A giant undertaking.
These photos have significance to me. Not the middle one, really, but how often does one see a lovely dog amidst the granite markers? The bottom, the current state of my paternal grandmother's house, which looks across the way where many of the Winamac folk are buried: May, Hugh, Tom T., baby twin sister, Lucy, so many of the early-generation siblings, Hoesels, Bakers, Torgersons, Torgersens, Jentzs, the bunch. There's room for 2.5 more of us in the plots, my mother says. Harry, being the oldest funeral director in Indiana, tells me he can get me an urn wholesale, when I ask--why not now, when the price might be better than the many years ahead than I hope would be needed before using it--but that one with a kitty on top would be too small for human uh, dust. Morbid? Perhaps. But vapor to vapor, dust to dust. Where and how to get composted: now that's a gardening question. . .