A Love Supreme

December 27, 2019

...s. Be wary of the mainstream media’s treatment of Sanders. The Los Angeles Times did not even bother to show up to the Sanders rally. When Joe Biden came and spoke to less than 100 people at LA Trade Tech back in November the LA Times deemed it worthy of attention. I struggled to find any wide shots of the Biden LA rally but couldn’t find any. It’s an exercise in how photographs lie. Frame a candidate tightly and it looks like there’s a lot of peo...

Read…

Embroidering the World

Mr. Homegrown

November 4, 2019

Design, Domesticus

6 Comments

...its. Both Kelly and I have done some embroidery before but now we have the time to go a little deeper. Beyond being a useful skill, embroidery has something to teach us about life. What if we took back the time that we spend on our devices to make the world a more beautiful place, to “embroiderer” our cities and suburbs? Let’s extend that metaphor beyond a physical sort of embroidery and imagine embroidering this world with a little more love and...

Read…

Waxed Cloth Food Wrap (Made in a solar oven for bonus self-righteousness points)

Mrs. Homegrown

June 2, 2016

Domesticus, Food, How-to, Solar Oven Summer

8 Comments

...it rockets up past 200F pretty quickly even without the clips. So, at this time of year, working at midday, all I had to do was watch the time and temperature to make sure the oven didn’t get too hot. I put the tray in the oven, closed the lid (no clips, making the heating is less efficient on purpose) and waited about 10-15 minutes. The temp would quickly rise above 150F and the wax would dissolve, then I’d take it out before it got any hotter. F...

Read…

Haint Blue

Mrs. Homegrown

June 5, 2015

Design, Insects

14 Comments

...rotect themselves from evil spirits. I spent a little time ( a very little time, admittedly!) looking for some solid historical writing on this haint blue business, but found nothing but hearsay. The same basic info seems to be distributed all over the Internets, which means the resource pool is pretty small, or pretty shallow. Nonetheless, I think the idea of a blue porch ceiling very appealing, if for no other reason than it extends the open sky...

Read…

Our hypocrisy revealed

Mrs. Homegrown

November 25, 2015

Design

8 Comments

..., and the house is about to be re-sold at a 100k mark-up. Yet when it came time to finally install a handrail on our staircase (just in time for the holidays, to appease our family, who for some reason find our treacherous staircase problematic) we discovered that arranging the boards horizontally worked best. In short, due to a combination of laziness and skill deficiency and general expediency (the usual deciding factors in our design decisions)...

Read…