Jim Willis

click to enlarge. These are my del.icio.us tags as done up by wordle.

If you’re not using Jott, you may want to check it out. Especially if you have a tendency to sms or email while you’re driving, this service may just keep you from killing me while I’m out riding my bike. David Pogue has a nice writeup on it. I’ve been using it for months. It’s not that accurate in transcribing all the time but then again I’m not the clearest speaker.

We just had our first neighborhood picnic in the park last weekend. It was fantastic on so many levels and I think that the fabric of our neighborhood has changed significantly for the better since the introduction of a neighborhood e-newsletter. So but anyway . . .this washington post article on social networks and their influence made me think that maybe our disconnection from our neighbors and learning how “we” eat is responsible for some of the food problems we have. Our food culture is driven not by families and households but by restaurants. If “we” learn how to eat by going to places like the olive garden, it’s no wonder we have a problem with food.

I bought my first Amazon MP3 this AM after having to deal with this crap one too many times:

I love the iTunes Music Store’s interface for buying music. It is without equal but the DRM is KILLING me. So, given the option to buy a non-DRM’d song from amazon vs the DRM’d one from iTMS for the same price I opted for Amazon. It was a bit more work to get the music and not something that I’d want to do all the time but, anyway. Just thought I’d mention that.

The most recent issue of Greater Good Magazine has some great articles on play in it. We’re coming to realize how valuable the loose ties we’re creating with all of our neighbors are as more and more often we can let our 4-year-old just go out and run around with the other kids from the neighborhood.

Finally children do as we do, not as we say. That gives us incentive to bring play back into our adult lives. We can shut off the TVs and take our children with us on outdoor adventures. We should get less exercise in the gym and more on hiking trails and basketball courts. . .When we adults unite play, love, and work in our lives, we set an example that our children can follow. That just might be the best way to bring play back into the lives of our children—and build a more playful culture.

from Can We Play?

Have picked up a couple new clients, watching the kids, working outside and feeling crappy from lack of sleep and alergies. That being said, I’m psyched that I picked up a couple new photography gigs over the past few weeks. Also, garden is coming along swimmingly; have arugula with spinach not far behind. Just planted the rest of my seeds (except melons) this afternoon (cukes, beans, carrots, herbs).

Bought some rye flour from which to start a sourdough starter but have not yet mixed it with water and left it to sit on the counter. Perhaps tonight.

Question for the other bakers: what do you keep your starter in? Plastic container with lid? Glass bowl with plastic wrap?

Breaking new ground on a couple of fronts today:

First off, we joined Costco. I calculated the diaper costs and on diapers alone it’s a win for us. A bit annoying that we can’t go in the store until 11:00AM since we only have the basic membership.

Secondly, I cracked open a fresh Moleskine today. This time though, instead of using black vinyl tape to affix my pen to the the side of the notebook, I used gaffer tape. It looks much more pro than the glossy vinyl tape. We’ll see if it holds up as well. I do love the feel of a fresh notebook. I’ve been though several moleskines over the past year or so and while i wish that they had a ctrl-f hot key of sorts to allow me to search for them, I find that I don’t actually mind so much the process of thumbing though them to find some piece of info writ months ago. It feels like going through a little time machine. Today, for example, I had to track down the number of a landscaper from a moleskine that I used last year and I thumbed through the pages where I was making notes about scheduling the to look at the house that we’ve ended up buying. Each page is in every way a s souvenir of that day.

Third, Jay and I did some planting of raspberry bushes and sunflowers today. I hope the sunflowers flower where we planted them.

“In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” (Michael Pollan)

Years ago I heard Pollan on NPR talking about his book Botany of Desire. I knew when I heard him that this was someone who was brining truly novel thoughts and ideas to the table. I read the book and loved it. I loved that someone was having thoughts that challenged the idea that we have cultivated or domesticated plants instead of the other way around. This is a Big Idea and has huge implications. I gave the book to a few people as gifts but I suspect that few of them read it. Now, years later, instead of reading the book, you can just watch this TED talk and get the general idea proposed by the book.

I read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” last year and enjoyed it such that again I passed it on to several people and again I suspect that no one actually read it. This most recent Pollan book, In Defense of Food, distills his previous books and other journalistic writing into something a bit more easily digestible. I don’t dare pass it on since it would be too much of a let down to know that people are so disinterested in their food that they couldn’t make it through this thin, quick read.

As breezy as the book is, Pollan makes it even easier for the lazy reader by distilling in the last chapter the contents of most of his current thinking into just a few bullet points. With the hope of inspiring a few folks to pick up this book and read it, here are Pollan’s suggestions on how to eat:

• Pay more, eat less. Buy better quality food and eat less of it. It’s better for you, for your family and for the planet.
• Eat meals. Sounds straightfoward but Pollan points out that marketers, realizing that they can only push so much food out to the consumer if there are only three meals a day, have been cultivating the idea of “eating occaisions.” It’s a bit sad that 20% of all eating now takes place in the car. So sit down and eat three meals. And no snacking.
• Do all your eating at a table.
• Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does. Convenience food is overly processed.
• Try not to eat alone. The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process…to a ritual..from mere animal biology to an act of culture. I love that line.
• Consult your gut. Slow down and listen to your body not the visual cues provided by marketers.
• Eat slowly. Be aware of how what you’re eating landed on your plate.
• Cook and, if you can, plant a garden. I’d guess that I spend about two hours a day in the kitchen doing cooking of one kind or another. That’s a lot of time but looking at what’s in our fridge and our cabinets, I see that there really are very, very few processed foods that make their way onto our table. Since I’m doing most of the “processing” myself, I know what’s going on with what we eat, albeit at the expense of my time.

If for some reason you get:

The disc is reserved for exclusive use by another application.

When trying to burn a CD or DVD on a Mac, make sure that Disc Utility is closed, then eject and re-insert the blank media. That seemed to fix the problem for me. Under Leopard at least.