Distracted Mind

It’s misting in Cleveland. The sun is nowhere to be seen, the wind’s a little harsher than usual, but up here it’s business as usual. Down South a different story is unfolding. People are salvaging what they can from abandoned grocery stores, waiting for rescue on rooftops, watching their world dissolve under so many feet of polluted water. Writing about my mundane powdery mildew concerns is trivial next to everything else that’s going on.

I’m seeing a different side of Northerners now. The past few days emotions have ranged from absolute horror to smugness. I’m hearing a lot of “I told you so” coming from people on the radio and around me. Now is not the time for “I told you so.”

Yes, people built homes in hurricane pathways. Yes, people stayed in their homes, defying logic and nature, determined to wait this one out. Those people are suffering now and the best that some can say is “I told you so”? Get a soul.

This disaster will echo for years to come. It will be more than the gas prices, more than the federal money spent on rebuilding and repairing. It will be about the homeless families, the jobs lost, the lives washed out to sea. The effects of this hurricane will touch us all, even as far north as Ohio.

The many, the proud, the heartless can be as cavalier as they like. It’s their right to speak their mind. I even encourage them to &emdash; at least I know who they really are inside if they say it loud and don’t hide it behind some false wall of charitable mumblings. I only hope that these reactions are the only ones they can muster against this horror and that this is their bravado. I’d like to keep some faith in humanity, even in a dark and rainy time like this.

Brandon, at [badchristian.com](http://www.badchristian.com) has an interesting test for Christians. Take the [Worldview test](http://www.worldviewweekend.com/test/register.php) _(warning: registration required),_ and see how you measure up as a Christian. Me, I’m a pinko, rating an 18% on their scale and earning the *”Socialist Worldview Thinker”* title.

I find these sort of tests interesting because they show how different Christians can be from one another in their beliefs and their ways of relating to other Christians. I find it absolutely _fascinating_ that the statement “George W. Bush is the President of the United States of America.” is in the _Family_ section of the test, and that my answer, “No Opinion” earned me negative points. I’m wondering what the President of the United States has to do with my spiritual worldview or my spiritual health.

It’s an interesting test. Somewhat terrifying, when you begin to think about the fact that there are actually people that would score a 100% on this test without a drop of irony, but definitely interesting.

I’m sitting on our deck, drinking a fine glass of cheap red wine and writing another post while my neighbor’s cat harasses me for attention. The weather has lingered around seventy degrees today, making me sort of nostalgic for fall, which isn’t helped by a bonfire in a different neighbor’s backyard. I’m in the city of Cleveland and I smell bonfires. I love this place.
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My husband, D, and I have lunch together almost every day. This is one of the benefits of working together and it gives us time to talk, exercise and just be ourselves outside of having to also be parents. I appreciate this time and it’s one of the benefits I consider when I think about the advantages to my current job. Our lunchtime conversations are about our family, weekend plans, work, and anything else we feel like talking about. These times are precious just because we pound the pavement and get to know each other just a little more.

D hasn’t really been very enthusiastic about my gardening this year. A lot of the lack of enthusiasm is from my rather _freeform_ method of gardening, which has led to some very interesting and overgrown plots in our backyard, and some of it comes from the overabundance of items like zucchini, which is a very occasional food for him. He views it as my project, doesn’t get involved, and only complains when I try to sneak yet another zucchini into dinner, but I can tell that there are some times that he’d rather I had taken up knitting instead.

He’s put his foot down at suggestions like vermicomposting, which I can understand, but he’s starting to come around to the idea of having food in our backyard. When some of our friends have plant questions, he refers them to me. When my own parents were having difficulties with their tomatoes and dismissed some of my ideas as “old wives’ tales,” he said “They should listen to you. You took crappy soil and did something no one else we know has been able to do this year: you got stuff to grow.” He probably didn’t even realize how huge a compliment that was, but I glowed a little inside as we walked back from our lunch.

He hit on the reason why I love gardening so much: I’m taking something little, small and sparse and making it into something much more. It’s a therapy for me, this way of growing and nurturing living things. I get to make food, my daughter gets to watch little plants grow, and she even gets to pick a few green tomatoes (she thinks they’re far prettier than those soft red ones).

We’ve talked more about the garden for next year, about widening the space for it, planting a more diverse crop (less zucchini and winter squash) and how to keep things a little more sane in my patch. I think he appreciates the more frugal methods that I’ve been attempting to employ (organic pesticides from the kitchen, making dinners from the garden instead of the grocery), and I think that somewhere deep down he actually likes seeing a little bit of green in the backyard in a dry and brown August.

My microwave is for thawing frozen vegetables, heating leftovers and warming milk. It’s normally not used for actual cooking, but for prep work. I have, however, found a use for it that transcends the workhorse station to actual cooking from a recipe, even if it’s an extremely simple one. This recipe is for fresh tomato paste and works best with paste-type tomatoes like Romas. It’s based on the tomato paste recipe in the New Basics Cookbook.
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### Throw Some Confetti, It’s Finally Done (-ish).

This is the first actual post to Distracted Mind. I’ve worked on this site for a while just getting it up to anything that I’d actually want to look at on a daily basis. I still think it needs work, but like anything else in life, a website is a work in progress.

Distracted Mind is an outlet; a place for me to throw my thoughts up, record the things I find interesting and a place to share information that doesn’t fit anywhere else. I have a site for my art, a site for my work, a site for my family, and now I have a site for the other parts of my life. I need to find a support group for compulsive web builders.

This site started out in my head as a personal journal, but I’d really like it to be a little more. See, even I get tired of my personal life. I have to live it every day and it gets damned boring. I don’t get tired of the things I encounter in my life though. The things I learn everyday, since I’m a sucker for stupid facts and useful tidbits, that’s what makes my life worth living. I’d rather write about those than what I had for breakfast.

### What to Expect

Anticipate diversity. I like to take photographs, when my camera’s battery is charged. I love finding new websites, particularly ones about gardening, cool local sites, or ones that are just plain strange. I sometimes even write the odd political post, although I try not to write about what I don’t understand (don’t expect much on economic policy, because I don’t think _anyone_ really understands it).

I tend to find very odd things. Maybe it’s because a lot of my paying job revolves around constant research (we have to keep up with technology in order to teach it), maybe I really am, as my friends say, a magnet for weird. I like to share those odd things, just to get them out of my head.

There may be recipes. I like to cook. A lot. I sometimes even make good food. When I first got an apartment in college, I was excited because I finally had an oven and a stove. When I turned twenty-one I was excited about buying cooking wine (probably because I got all the other hard partying out of my system beforehand). In my opinion, garlic needs to be a food group all by itself. So does chocolate.

Gardening is something that I really love to do. Maybe I’m domesticated, but I like to think that it’s because I’m cheap. I like good food and I hate paying a lot to get fresh fruits and vegetables. I’m also very interested in organic gardening and food. I have the largest garden that I’ve ever attempted this year and I’m already planning for the next season. That’s just how obsessed I am.

### Some Closing Notes

In the interest of not getting [dooced](http://www.dooce.com), I don’t write about work on this website… at least not in a disparaging manner. I’m trying to keep language here on a fairly PG-13 or better level so that anyone visiting this site can at least feel comfortable about the language if they can’t about some of the content.

Views expressed on this website are only my own. If you disagree with them and can debate them in a mature manner, please feel free to post a comment. In the immortal words of [Peter Griffin](http://www.familyguy.com/) (and that Voltaire guy), “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.”

Comments are moderated through a few simple questions within the comments form. Answer it correctly and your comment will appear. If you don’t bother to answer the question, your comment won’t appear. This is to determine that a. you’re a human, and b. you aren’t trying to spam me. This is not to exclude anyone except comment spammers, who just need to go sit in a corner.

Other than that, everything here is fair game. Thanks for reading.