Ketchup

I heard Michael Pollan interviewed on the radio recently. (Hearing NPR is a rarity these days because when talk is on the radio Owain points at the radio and yells "Ga! Ga! Ga!" until you put music on. I'm not complaining - it actually makes me proud.) The interview concerned a recent book Pollan published debunking conventional nutritional science. He said the best diet is to eat foods that 1) can and will rot, 2) you can pronounce, 3) your grandma would recognize, 4) do not have high fructose corn syrup and 5) do not have a label explaining their health benefits.

I made pasties last week - placed a pork roast in a crock pot with carrots, potatoes, onions, garlic and spices. I made dough pockets and filled them with the diced pot roast and veggies to create a Michigan Upper Pennisula-style calzone. They are excellent with ketchup and creamy horseradish. The main ingredients in ketchup: tomatoes and high fructose corn syrup. We have made ketchup in the past with our tomatoes. In fact think I should be making ketchup again and not use this high fructose corn syrup variety.

And there, my friends, is the problem.

I have these goals, ideals, values and dreams I want to live by. I have no time to complete them all. When am I to make ketchup?

My mind swims with current projects, summer projects , Owain, Charis, roommates, music, education and adolescents, food, garden, nature, health, wood and resources. What happens? I have no time to get any of it done. I do a little of each and not very well. I can not put any aside (I did let maple syruping go until next year, however.)

I do acknowledge (rather frequently with Charis in conversation) the irony that ten hours of my day are consumed with a job that is frustrating. How can you know and thus successfully teach students when you have 25 at a time for only 45 minutes?

I also acknowledge that I am extremely impatient and selfish, which is the rest of the problem.

I want to be making full use of the wood cook stove (heat, oven, stove, hot water), brewing better beer, stewing tomatoes and apple sauce to last into June, growing greenhouse lettuce in December, collecting fresh eggs all year, skidding logs, clearing the woods of popple/birch, creating stock piles of split dry wood, riding my bike, making great recipes with local food, enjoying time to be with Charis and Owain and time to practice my saxophone and write music and time to play with my roommates, looking in to alternative ways to generate electricity, purchasing and converting a diesel sedan that runs on bio-fuel, playing hacky-sack and ping-pong, plus reading a book or two.

Is this too much to ask?

Balance. Did not I already write about this?

I think I start by letting go. How, what, where, why?

*****

On my carpool home today, Val mentioned her sister is having twins and the daycare only has room for one infant when she has to go back to work. All that I wrote previously crumbles like dry leaves in a fire. What a whiner I am. All these happy problems I have. I have Charis and Owain, health, shelter, food. So many people struggle daily for these basics and I am complaining about the seemingly extravagent.

Sometimes I think it would be so nice to order pizza, drink a Bud and sit in front of the T.V. after work. Why do I choose to live a life that is the opposite of this? Is there something I am missing? Or does everyone think about these things and become so overwhelmed that all they can do is sit down on the couch with that Budweiser?

I acknowledge how fortunate I am, but can not and will not sit still. Is this going to do harm? Are my actions really going to make a difference? Or better yet, what actions are truly going to make a difference? I know being with Charis and Owain first, but...

Jay