Pictures from Pella

Back when I joined Facebook, I started a Kruidenier Family Group for people with the last name "Kruidenier"—a rare enough name to create a small group. I haven't counted lately, but I think around 30+ Kruideniers have found the group and joined up from all over the world.

I looked at the Group's page the other day and found a note left by a nice lady in Pella, Iowa, who isn't a Kruidenier but lives in a house built and inhabited by a "Dirk Kruidenier" in the late 1800's. Dirk Kruidenier, and his wife, Wilhelmina Pluggers Kruidenier, were my paternal great-grandparents. I contacted the lady and asked for more information about the house. She and her husband had bought and renovated the house and lived in it for a number of years, but were selling it. She directed me to a local real estate web site where I found some pictures.

Pella, Iowa, (40-50 miles east of Des Moines) was founded in 1847—the settlement of around 800 Dutch immigrants who journeyed to America. I actually have the beautiful wooden trunk brought from Holland by Dirk Kruidenier when he emigrated with his parents as a six-year-old in 1854. He and Wilhelmina Pluggers were married in Holland, Michigan, (her hometown, also the daughter of "pioneer Dutch settlers") in 1877, and they lived in Pella in the house (below) where Dirk owned a "general merchandise store there, with considerable success" (from his obit). They moved to Des Moines, Iowa, in 1904 where he entered the wholesale carpet business. Then, in 1910, he along with his three sons became the distributor of Cadillac automobiles in the region: Kruidenier-Cadillac Co.

Here is Dirk Kruidenier:

And Wilhelmina:

These pics of their house are from the real estate web site, so not great quality. The lady who currently owns the house offered this info: 11-foot ceilings downstairs, transoms over all the interior doors for air circulation, plaster medallions on the ceilings in four rooms with a large hook for hanging gas lights, three bedrooms upstairs (plus a bath the current residents added) and a master bedroom and bathroom downstairs. She said they love the house and hate to sell it.

The design is unusual to me: the bulbous living room on the front of the house with dual front doors (?), one on each side of the porch (?):

The lady said the brick walls of the house were "three bricks thick!"

Nice detailing over the windows and in the brick work on the right:

The interior of the aforementioned living room with the curved front wall. I like the period wallpaper:

I'd never seen pictures of this house before. Nice to get a glimpse of where one's forebears lived—especially after coming to America with everything in a small trunk.

Dirk died in Des Moines of a heart attack at age 68 (1916), and Wilhelmina lived until age 80, also dying of a heart ailment of some sort. (Unfortunately, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn wouldn't write Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease until 2007.)

I would love to have known them both.

Attentive Marketing

Today's stage in the Tour de France was one of the most exciting I've ever seen. They boys rode up a massive final peak in the Pyrenees with a screaming, twisting 20k downhill to the finish. I'll quench my inner sportswriter and not describe the entire thing and mention only a decisive event that determined the winner of the stage: When the leader of the Tour attacked near the top of the peak his chain popped off and his main rival sped past him and started the downhill with a 30-second lead, eventually displacing the unfortunate rider at the finish line as the new Tour leader.

Many of these very expensive bikes have a small accessory installed called a chain catcher that prevents chains from popping off the front rings (which happens rarely, anyway). But this rider's bike didn't have one installed (although I bet it will tomorrow).

I laughed when, about three hours after the race ended, a marketing email came through from Competitive Cyclist in Little Rock, Arkansas—a terrific seller of high-end road and mountain bike wares. They sell the best of EVERYTHING related to this sport, and I have gotten quite an education just from lurking about on their web site. The highlighted item in their marketing email? Chain catchers:

Selling on the news of the day. That's why they're the best in the biz.

Colin Campbell on the Flawed/Failed Strategy of the NIH

It's awesome to witness the macro-views of Dr. Colin Campbell, author of The China Study and Emeritus Professor of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell. In this Huffington Post piece, he calls on the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the "most prominent biomedical research institution in the world," to establish an Institute of Nutrition -- amazingly, not one of its 27 existing institutes is dedicated to that subject!

Is that amazing? The "National Institutes of HEALTH" has 27 institutes and centers that deal with everything except the connection between food (nutrition) and health.

In his piece, Dr. Campbell explains why this is needed: the "genome project" has been a failed exercise in promoting health. It serves other purposes, but its hoped-for ability to reverse major diseases by genetic manipulation has produced no results. Rather, laboratories like Dr. Campbell's, and others', have shown that nutrition has the power to suppress genetic tendencies toward disease. Yet this is being totally overlooked, if not ignored, by the NIH and other mainstream medical institutions.

He concludes:

As for health professionals who claim they cannot convince patients to change their dietary practices, this is not surprising when the professionals themselves are not educated in this field and are vested in a strategy that is the antithesis of good nutrition. It is time we recognize what nutrition can do and a good place to start is to establish an NIH Institute of Nutrition dedicated for this purpose.

What a Great Way to Eat!

Great second-week update -- with beautiful pics, recipes, and nutritional info -- on the "Healthy Librarian's" three-week test of Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's "no oil" vegan diet. Seeing the pics of this food, and the positive results as noted by the Healthy Librarian, makes one wonder why everyone doesn't eat this way all the time.

Dehydrated Tomatoes

The influx of tomatoes (mine and from the CSA shares) has created the opportunity to dehydrate plenty for use during the winter. Here's a tray of slices ready to go into the dehydrator with a dusting of five different spices:

Here are the spices—all tomato friendly—that I sprinkle on the tomatoes: (L to R) garlic powder, dulse flakes, sea kelp seasoning, basil, and garlic and herb.

Because the dehydrator mats are perforated, allowing lots of spices to fall through to the counter, I put down waxed paper beneath the trays to catch the overflow spices:

I then pour the spice mix into an empty spice bottle to use next time. (When I get a large enough empty container -- like the garlic shaker in the picture above -- I'll go ahead and make a mix of all the five spices to use when dehydrating tomatoes or preparing things like hummus or pasta sauce or as a potato or pasta sprinkle.)

My dehydrator has five shelves, but there is a larger model that has nine shelves. Here are three shelves of tomato slices ready to dehydrate, the second picture showing all five shelves:

The dehydrator has a thermostat that controls the temperature of the circulating warm air that dries out the food. The goal of dehydrating is to dry the food slowly (at a low enough temperature) so as to preserve the enzymes -- usually 115 degrees F. or less. I usually set the thermostat at 95 degrees.

You can see in the above picture that the tomato skin (on these half-dried tomatoes) is very much evident on each slice. As anyone who has cooked tomatoes knows, tomato skins come off when heated, separating from the meat of the tomato creating a not-so-desirable effect. And it will happen when these dehydrated slices are mixed into, say, a hot pasta sauce that is cooking. To prevent that from happening, I add the dehydrated slices last -- turning off the heat, putting the tomatoes in the pasta sauce, then covering the pan. The heat and steam in the pan will soften and hydrate the tomatoes but not so much that the skins separate off the slices. Before serving, the tomatoes can be folded into the sauce and they will be soft enough to mix in.

Beautiful Beagles

Thanks to vegan.com for the link to this great video:

Bionic Bikers

The Radio Shack professional bike team hired Dr. (Ph.D) Allen Lim away from another team (a reported $500,000 contract) to handle the riders' performance development (nutrition, performance output, recovery, etc.). One of his major emphases is the connection between core temperature and performance—the hotter the riders get during a race, the more their performance suffers.

To monitor the riders' core temperature during a race, before each day's stage in the Tour de France (going on now) they swallow a tiny "thermometer" contained in a small capsule. The thermometer transmits their core temperature to the team car that follows the riders. When a rider's temperature starts to rise too far, Lim will use the team radio to remind the rider to take in more fluids, or drop back and pick up an ice pack which he drops down the back of his jersey, or pour more water over the top of his head while riding -- all of which can help lower the rider's core temp and increase his output.

The team members also wear a light headband at night when they're sleeping that transmits sleep patterns (brain waves) to a monitor that records their "quality of sleep" during the night. As the three-week tour progresses, nightly recovery becomes increasingly important to the next day's performance, so sleep is critical.

Sounds like Radio Shack is getting their $500,000 worth -- I guess.

Craft Day

Last Saturday I took the materials for a couple of craft projects and paid a day-long visit to Columbia. Before Ellen, Arianna, and I worked on the crafts, we all visited Daniel at the Farmer's Market where he has sold home-brewed compost tea every Saturday morning for the last four months. UrbGard Compost Tea (short for Urban Gardener) has been an experimental, entrepreneurial venture to test the market for compost tea. There was a lot of educating involved as not that many folks are familiar with C.T., but he always sold a few gallons. A few shots of Daniel's "booth" at the market, explaining C.T. to customers, and the girls helping bottle up more tea:

Back home, the girls and I decorated watering cans. I brought them each a blank can with plenty of paints and markers and they did a great job decorating them:

The girls used their digital cameras to record their artwork for posterity:

And, yes, the watering cans worked even better after being decorated:

We took a break before the next project, during which Arianna beat me soundly (even with Daniel coaching me) in a game of Spit:

The next craft was using a product we called "gimp" when I went to summer camp 50+ years ago—plastic coated threads that can be braided into necklaces, bracelets, lanyards, and other indispensable objects d'art. I haven't made these since 1960 or so and was amazed I could still remember how—and that this product was still available at craft stores. The girls caught on quickly and were soon churning out all manner of beautiful items.

This is a lanyard I made out of gimp at church camp as a kid, which I somehow have held on to. The hook provides a starting place for the braid (we would attach the hook to our tennis shoe laces to start braiding) and served to hold wooden name tags, small crosses carved from cedar or braided from gimp, or whatever. Note the psychedelic green and orange color combo—shades of the 'Sixties:

To start the girls' braids we attached the hook to a drawer handle:

(Thanks to Jen for this pic and several others:)

And to Ellen for this one!

And a little home movie to conclude a great day of fun stuff:

Doesn't Hurt to Dream

Saw this little beauty for sale near my house today: a 1950 Ford N8 tractor, complete with bush hog (for cutting grass). I've always loved these little Ford tractors. They seem to be a perfect size for a hobby farm—a way for little boys in their sixties to play in the dirt. I'm thinking about it . . .

Hit Came a Hard Rain

It's been dry of late—both my 55-gallon rain barrels were nearly empty. But earlier today we had a short storm, a genuine toad-choker. I had checked the weather forecast this morning to make sure it wasn't going to rain before I sprayed my kale with BT, and sprayed away. Like washing your car and hanging out laundry, I guess spraying BT is a sure way to make it rain.

It was light rain at first, and I checked the barrels and happily found the water trickling in. But then the bottom fell out. I went back out a few minutes later and found this—both barrels full and the water overflowing onto the porch. (The water enters the barrel on the left from the downspout going into the top, then flows through a connector into the barrel on the right causing them to fill together).

I pulled the downspout out of the barrel to send the overflow out into the yard. I am astounded every time I see the amount of water coming off the roof. Not quite a fire hose, but close:

It kills me not to be catching that water for the garden, so I grabbed another plastic trash can (33 gallons)—it took about 90 seconds for it to fill up. Out of barrels and containers, I pointed the spout out into the yard:

I could have captured nearly 700 gallons of water, I believe, in the half-hour the storm lasted (90 seconds to fill a 33 gallon container equals 660 gallons in a half-hour, right?).

Zucchini Bread

My favorite (i.e., my only) daughter-in-law, Jennifer, posted her recipe for zucchini bread on her blog recently. And it is excellent. She started with a recipe from a cookbook, then veganized it and tweaked it over time to get it to its present delicious state. I had made it once before and it was great, but decided to use up some more zucchinis this afternoon and made it again.

But I tweaked it a bit myself as a test. I cut the sugar in half, some of which was using up some date sugar I had. I also made it with no oil at all. In her recipe, Jennifer suggests cutting the oil in half and substituting organic apple sauce for the other half of the oil which I did the first time I made it. But having read a refresher on Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's no oil lifestyle this weekend, I decided to use all applesauce and no oil at all. And to my (admittedly unsophisticated) palate, it tasted great—the same as the previous batch I made using half oil and half applesauce.

Re: no oil. On June 23, I posted a reference to a post on the "Happy, Healthy Long Life" blog which contains the notes from a recent orientation class by Dr. Esselstyn for a group of heart patients entering his "prevent and reverse heart disease" lifestyle program—which allows no oil for those with heart disease—nor any oil-containing whole foods (nuts, avocados, etc.). You can read the notes from that class to get the reasoning.

I've gotten religious about cutting back on oil in the last year or so because of Dr. Esselstyn's (and others') view that men who have eaten the Standard American Diet consistently, and are now 65 years-old or older, have heart disease to one degree or another. Since I am now 62.5, and ate the Standard American diet until I was 52 (vegan since then), that puts me close to the suspect category. But even as a vegan I consumed copious quantities (off and on) of "heart healthy" oils like extra-virgin olive and hemp. The problem is that "heart healthy" is a misnomer—it should be "heart healthier." Those oils are healthier than canola and other refined vegetable oils, but not by much because of the damage they do to the lining (endothelial cells) of arteries—according to Dr. Esselstyn and others like Dr. Dean Ornish.

Today, the Happy, Healthy Long Life blog (written by a medical research librarian) posted another must-read post in which she paraphrases Dr. Esselstyn's summary of people who criticize his no-oil position, and his response:

"When people tell me my diet's extreme, or too strict, I ask them, 'How would you like to spend your last years in a nursing home, sitting in a wheelchair, incontinent, immobile, unaware, with saliva dribbling out of the side of your mouth?'"

Of course, not everyone who consumes oil is going to end up like that. His point was that ill-health is the result of long-term abuse of the body. The same thing that abuses arteries that leads to heart attacks abuses arteries in the rest of the body—namely, the brain, leading to strokes (and the male penis, leading to erectile disfunction. ED is a warning sign for a heart crisis waiting to happen). The post of the Happy,Health Long Life blog is a tragic story of several people, including the author's father, who spent the last years of their lives wasting away due to strokes and other debilitating conditions—exactly the scenario hypothesized by Dr. Esselstyn in the quote above.

Having had two parents who died of chronic diseases—one lingering for more than a decade after the quality of her life had fallen to near zero—I decided 10 years ago to try to learn what I could about staying healthy, which led to my vegan, mostly-raw diet. Now that I'm firmly committed to the preventive part, the no-oil (and other) protocols are part of the "repair" part—doing what I can to give my self-healing body every opportunity to make up for damage previously done. I'm not doing it perfectly, but want to keep expanding my horizons as much as possible. The more I learn, the more I realize just how processed our food has become—even "organic, vegan" food—and why eating out of one's own garden (or local farmer's market) is the best way to eat.

At the weekly men's Bible study I attend at my church, I listened this past Tuesday night to a man I've come to know and admire (an elder in our church, around my age I think), describe the angina attack he had suffered the week before, resulting in the placement of three stents in his arteries. (27,000 deaths occur annually from bypass and stent procedures.) I came home and wrote him a long email outlining some things I hoped he would read and consider looking into to help "reverse" his heart disease. His return reply was gracious, but not indicative of someone who is "desperate" not to have heart disease. In my Sunday school class this morning I heard another couple ask prayer for their adult daughter who has been battling breast cancer and just discovered she now has colon cancer. I'm going to try to send them materials to consider—evidence that shows these cancers can often be reversed by a change in diet. I hope they'll be interested enough to follow through and begin investigating these protocols. When a good friend of mine from high school discovered he had a rare, aggressive cancer two years ago, he and his wife immediately began a juicing regimen and change in diet which resulted in reports within a week of how much better he felt. But his oncologist shut down the juicing for fear of getting "germs" in the raw juices that his immune system, weakened and ultimately destroyed by chemo, would not be able to fight off. I flew to Dallas a couple months later to help lead his funeral service.

I'm trying to get a handle on why desperately ill people won't listen to counsel about the power of diet to either destroy or heal the body. Is this, like one's response to the Christian Gospel message, a spiritual issue since it deals with God's truth (Genesis 1:29)? Or is it because people are so conditioned by conventional medical practices that if they don't hear it from their doctor they simply won't put any stock in it? (And very few doctors will admit to diet having ANY impact on the cause or reversing of disease.) Perhaps it's both. Again, since I don't do this perfectly, occasionally eating (vegan) things I know aren't "best," perhaps it's our emotional link to the foods we have become accustomed to that mitigates against chance.

All that to say, the zucchini bread I made today, while definitely not raw, is proof that wonderful foods can be made with no oil, no salt, and little sweetener and still be awesome to eat. Here are the two LONG loaves I made (using unusual shaped long, narrow pans I bought at Ikea. Is this size a Scandinavian thing?):

The dark spots are raisins, the green flecks are zucchini, and the beige specks are walnuts (Dr. Esselstyn allows some walnuts for patients not in a heart crisis due to their Omega-3 strength):

A piece (okay, a couple) of this warm bread with some organic applesauce makes a sleep-good snack:

Summer Tomatoes

The tomatoes are coming in—large, red, and healthy. There have been more that I've already eaten, plus several varieties of volunteer cherry tomatoes. The largest of these weighed in at just under one pound:

What I don't eat, along with many tomatoes from the coming CSA shares, will be dehydrated and bagged in the freezer to use later. I use an Excalibur dehydrator which works great for dehydrating fruits and veggies. These tomatoes were dried last summer and are in perfect shape a year later:

One of my favorite things to do with dried tomatoes is to crush them into small pieces and add them to hummus. They provide a wonderful flavor after the moisture of the hummus "hydrates" the tomatoes:

Attend Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's Heart/Health Classes! Free!

Okay, the headline is a stretch—but I needed you to read this:

The author of the "Happy, Healthy Long Life" blog, a medical librarian -- a certified health geek-researcher! -- recently attended one of Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's orientation classes for a new group of his heart patients. In this class, Dr. Esselstyn dumps the whole truck on his plant-based protocol for "preventing and reversing heart disease." The blog author's (I don't know her name) notes are very thorough -- reading them is like getting the bullet-point evidence for why a plant-based, no/low oil diet is the only way to become heart attack proof.

This is one of the best blogs I read on health matters. The author has adopted, based on evidence, Dr. Esselstyn's plant-based lifestyle and regularly reports on medical research supporting it (and other healthy protocols). The report on Dr. Esselstyn's class is here. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of her updates which are only occasional, but ALWAYS entertaining and informative.

Obama at the Bat

The more you know of "Casey at the Bat," and the more familiar you are with the names of current players on the cultural/political stage, the more meaningful this will be. I don't know who the speaker is, but he's terrific!

Time Always Tells

When Monsanto's RoundUp herbicide was introduced in 1976 it was supposed to be the farmer's salvation. Now, three decades later, the truth is that there are many new strains of RoundUp-resistant weeds that are forcing conventional farmers to return to much stronger (and deadlier for the environment and human health) herbicides—even chopping weeds with a hoe, heaven forbid!—they gave up when RoundUp was introduced: 10 new weed species across 22 states. Read the Associated Press article here.

There are so many things in life that when introduced, seem like good ideas, but which time proves otherwise. Think about doctors promoting cigarette smoking in the 1950's, or feeding cows cheap corn instead of grass (which makes them sick, resulting in the need for powerful antibiotics which humans consume), or cell phones which may prove to be harmful to the health of a generation of young people who use them for the next 20-30 years.

I'm not against progress. But I am more and more for this biblical principle:

"'Everything is permissible'—but not everything is beneficial. 'Everything is permissible'—but not everything is constructive. Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others." (1 Corinthians 10:24)

The entire, post-biblical West lives by the idea that if something is possible, we should do it, especially when there are no moral issues involved. Even when moral bumps in the road slow some movements (same-sex unions/families, human cloning, etc.), if history is an indicator it just means that possibility will take longer to realize, not that moral red flags will be heeded.

Modern man seems to be fulfilling the warning of Proverbs 29:18: "Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint." When there is no ancient path by which to establish the boundaries of modern paths, anything is possible. But not everything, we slowly discover, is profitable.

On Learning

These days I call myself a farmer, However, I was not born into the farming life. In my late teens and early twenties, I began to have the creeping suspicion that my privileged upbringing in a first-world household, my secondary education and suburban lifestyle had left me completely bereft of any useful skills with regard to the fundamental situation of being a human animal on the planet. When I came of age I had this gnawing suspicion that in the first eithteen years of my existence on earth I had learned next to nothing of the kind of skills that would allow a person to survive in the natural world. Skills that had been of vital importance to all our common ancestors for the first fifty-thousand years of our tenure on the planet had been all but lost and abandoned in our time. Of course, such skills were not valued by the majority of my peers because no monetary value accrued to them. And yet I was profoundly disturbed at my own lack of basic orientation in regards to right relationship with the living environment. I set about to begin and try to rectify this situation. I had absolutely no faith in the long-term viability of our modern civilization. I was yearning to find a path with heart that could lead me back to an essentil connection with the earth. (Stephen Leslie writing in Small Farmer's Journal, Spring 2010, p. 68)

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,

It's a wonder I can think at all.

(Paul Simon, "Kodachrome")

Go to the ant, you sluggard;

Consider its ways and be wise!

It has no commander,

No overseer or ruler,

Yet it stores its provision in summer

And gathers its food at harvest.

(Proverbs 6:6-8, NIV)

My son, do not forget my teaching,

But keep my commands in your heart,

For they will prolong your life many years

And bring you prosperity.

(Proverbs 3:1-2)

The Pleasure of a YardFarm

So nice to go out into a small garden early in the morning and bring in food for the day, and more. (There is more kale available than I can eat, and just planted New Zealand spinach where the America and Bourdeaux spinach had been. New Zealand will apparently tolerate the heat like the Malabar spinach which is doing great.) The tomatoes are turning red—these could have stayed on the vine a couple more days, but I had to do a gymnastic routine to get to these so went ahead and pulled them once I was there. I pick these squash when small because it makes them the perfect size for dipping in hummus and eating raw for breakfast.

Cell Phone Radiation

I have posted several times about the potential dangers of cell phone EMF (radiation) discharges, especially when phones are held to the head rather than using a wired or air-tube earpiece. (Bluetooth earpieces don't qualify as they are wireless.) San Francisco has now become the first city to mandate that cell phone retailers list the amount of radiation discharged by the phones they sell in the interest of consumer safety. While I would never be quick to cite San Francisco as a model of what's reasonable, I mention SF's action only to say that this issue isn't going away. If you are a cell phone user you owe it to yourself to be aware of the dangers and available workarounds. Read the San Francisco article here.

Hummus Is Humming in America

Good New York Times article on the rapid rise in popularity of hummus in America. I made a batch today using a third each of black, garbanzo, and red kidney beans. Any way to get more beans is a good thing—the most under-appreciated nutritional powerhouse around: cheap, versatile, tasty, and full of fiber and protein.

Stuff that Works: Lemon Squeezer

For a long time, and religiously for the last six months or so, I've squeezed fresh lemon juice into the bottle of drinking water I keep at my desk during the day—refilled 2-3 times daily. Fresh lemon juice, contrary to logic, has a powerful alkalinizing effect on the body's pH, important since so many foods in the Standard American Diet are acidic. I don't eat the SAD and depend on my plant-based diet to keep my pH balanced, but use the lemon juice as added insurance.

I've been using a hand-held lemon squeezer for a long time that was a flaky product from the beginning. I bought it at Sur la Table, the high-end kitchen store, so assumed it was good. But I hadn't had it two days before the hinge pin snapped due to the pressure I was putting on it. So I discarded the hinge pin and replaced it with a finishing nail, cutting it off to length and blunting the cut end to keep it from sliding out—and it's worked fine ever since. Sort of. Over time, the acid from the lemons caused the paint to begin flaking off and the lemon oil stained the paint. I would occasionally find a little chip of yellow paint in my water—not good. It's obvious that this product was put on the market without any kind of thorough testing or these deficiencies would have shown up. But I have seen this squeezer sold lots of places in three sizes: yellow for lemons, green for limes, orange for oranges. DON'T BUY THIS PRODUCT!

Instead, I have found a great replacement—a stainless steel squeezer that is a bit more expensive but a delight to use. Granted, I haven't yet put it through months of use like the other one, but so far it's been great. Ergonomically, it feels better. The stainless steel doesn't stain, and the hinge pin takes all the pressure I can give it. I found this at Amazon (4.5 stars by 75 reviewers) for sale through a third-party seller who has a kitchen gadgets storefront on Amazon. But when I went back to get the link for this post, it was gone! The squeezer is there, but only listed for sale by Target which lists it as "Out of Stock." Not sure why my seller isn't listing it currently. I bought it from them (got it in two days!) even though it was a bit more expensive than Target since they had it in stock and Target didn't. The squeezer is made/distributed by Norpro, a wholesale distributer of kitchen tools. It seems to have limited availability on the web for some reason. [Note: a friendly reader provided a link in the Comments to a source for this juicer for $23! Click here to see it—and thanks!]

Anyway—I really recommend this as a better, safer (no paint chips) lemon/lime squeezer. (And I recommend adding the lemon juice to your water daily as well.)

Compare the old and new (note all the places where the yellow paint has chipped off the old one):

Spellbinding

I posted a link to this a long time ago -- am reposting it for those who missed it. Just gorgeous. This kind of talent is mind-boggling to me. The artist is North Carolinian Jane DesRosier:

Why Churches Have Choirs

White guys (and gals) can write and sing a good worship song, but it takes an "A.M.E." (or similar) choir to take it to a higher place:

(Music video of "Love Has Come" by Mark Schultze from his album Come Alive.)

Beautiful Buildings

Made my third trip to Cold Spring for water yesterday and took these pics of some beautiful structures in the countryside near Mount Pleasant, NC.

A beautiful, old white farmhouse is flanked on both sides by two gorgeous barns. Something seems odd about this setting. First, though I don't have a good picture of the house, the barns seem much older than the house. Plus, the fact they're in front of the house rather than behind, is unusual. Were the barns moved there?

Old, small buildings/sheds supported on rocks isn't unusual in the countryside, but something about this doesn't look right. Though its creative and fascinating, I'm not sure barns would have been built from the ground up with stones as support, though it's certainly possible. The stones suggest the possibility of the barns having been moved to their current location. (Disassembled and reassembled?) The lack of stairs up to the first-floor door suggests the same -- not rebuilt after the buildings were moved? Note the second story door for conveying hay to the loft. And note the old wagon wheels showing in the right corner of the barn. What other treasures might lie within?

There is a falling down barn of the same general design across the road. It seems to have had open sections in the wall beneath the eaves -- for air flow to dry hay?

On this barn, note the cantilevered corners jutting out from the right front corner. How are they supported -- and for what purpose? It's hard to see, but there's another old farm wagon sitting in the shadows under the eave on the right front corner:

Just a quarter mile down the road from the house and barns is this lovely little white house. It looks thoroughly fixable and livable, but it has obviously been abandoned for a long time given the growth around it. Look how high the peak of the metal roof is:

I love the picket-fence railing on the front porch. Note the large size of the glass window panes in the four-over-four windows and the curved-top glass in the front door. It almost looks like there are two front doors as another set of the curved-top windows is to the right:

It's amazing to contemplate the number of interesting houses and buildings that exist from a prior period in rural settings—and how many are sitting empty, at the mercy of the elements.