2008 . . . a year of luxury

January 1, 2008

...w to poultry and, in just an hour of reading, have learned a lot from this book. It’s a must have for anyone thinking about getting chickens. Thanks to info in the book and our microscope, we’re looking forward to a year of DIY chicken fecal examinations and turning those parasite egg counts into a drinking game. We’ll inaugurate a new year of posts with an entertaining excerpt from The Chicken Health Handbook, “Spontaneous sex change is a phenome...

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Building a Makeshift Treadmill Desk

Mr. Homegrown

December 20, 2012

Fitness

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...m since 2002. I’ve written for Culinate.com, Ethicurean.com and have a cookbook review column at Bookslut.com. I’ve been published in the Best Food Writing of 2010, and am currently working on a book proposal for a nonfiction book about finding and building a home saw me through and got me past some devastating personal losses. Here’s Livingsmallblog.com’s first treadmill desk post. And an update here. Thanks Christine! If you have a project you’d...

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Least Favorite Plant: Yellow Oleander (Thevetia peruviana)

Mr. Homegrown

June 2, 2009

Least Favorite Plant

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Thumbing through a book of toxic and hallucinogenic plants, I finally manged to i.d. the neighbor’s shrub that looms over the staircase to our front door. The popular name given for this plant in the book was “suicide tree”, so named for its use in Sri Lanka, though I’ve found other plants with this same moniker. The scientific name is Thevetia peruviana, and it’s also known as “lucky nut” (can we change that to unlucky nut please?), Be Still Tre...

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Bonfire of the Billys

Mr. Homegrown

January 27, 2020

Design

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...uthor and woodworker Christopher Schwartz’s said in The Anarchist’s Design Book that, “it annoys me when I see an IKEA Billy bookshelf in a woodworker’s house.” Schwartz goes on to explain why, Yes, you get about 15 linear feet of shelving, plus a carcase that is ridiculously unstable. Only two shelves are fixed. So unless you secure the Billy to the wall (or other Billys), it will rack in short order . . . I say this with experience. When my wife...

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Sorting the Digital Photos of a Digital Pandemic

Mr. Homegrown

December 8, 2023

Thoughtstylings

...t fondling. Unlike the Matrix there’s no neat way out of the mirror house postmodernity of the eXistenZ universe. Ariadne has left no thread to escape the maze. The best you can do is to map the territory. Towards that end, instead of a photo sorting app, I’ll leave you with two book recommendations: K-punk : the collected and unpublished writings of Mark Fisher which contains the essay on eXistenZ that inspired this post (I’d recommend reading hi...

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