After spending the morning tripping over and around five dogs who all needed to be next to me in case I wanted to bestow attention and they did not get any, and after spending 45 minutes trying to figure out Blackboard and deciding it has to be the most complicated, ridiculous piece of merde that I don't need for French 102, 103 or 104, I returned the Snickerdoodle to her native habitat and thwarted my mother's booby trap to see if I fed Emmah as instructed. Last year was the first time my mom booby trapped Emmah's food. She left me a present under the bowl I was supposed to use for Emmah's feeding and so when I responded, "No, I didn't see a present," my mother's suspicions that I was not following the Snickerdoodle Care Instructions as fastidiously as I should have, were proved correct. Today she stuck some erasers I had forgotten right by the food, but I'm no dummy and fed the dog as instructed, and took my erasers so my mom knows that I always follow directions. Then I told the Snickerdoodle one last time, "Ha ha, your momma left you. Ha ha. She doesn't love you. Ha ha. No, really, she'll be home tonight, but she still left you. Ha ha." After the motivational speech, I decided against all my better judgment that I was going to go for a walk, dammit. And I did. I only had to stop and sit in the desert about five times and of course now, I'm too sore to move. Tuesday I have my first real physical therapy appointment. The lady said I should be there an hour and one half, for the physical therapist to evaluate me. I guess a real physical therapist evaluates her patients. I'll be she'll even be on time.
Book Review:
I decided to move the book reviews to this part of the blog. Anyhoos. I finished My Empire of Dirt: A Cautionary Tale and I was disappointed on so many levels. I had seen this guy on the Colbert Report and he had thrown out words like locavore, and made it seem like he believed that. But no. Manny Howard doesn't start a farm in his backyard because he's interested in eating locally, or having organic food, or any of that. He starts it because an editor calls and says, "Hey, we think this'll make a great story and we'll pay for it." So he is not wedded to this farm financially because he's not paying (in dollars, he pays a price emotionally) for the farm. In fact he spends a crazy amount on stuff; that if you were truly interested in the idea of having your own farm you would, I think want to consume less. The whole fact that he was starting this just because of an article made the whole concept tainted for me. Where was the heart? It was a merely a stunt. My friend Kent has decided that for his 40th birthday he's going to live off his land for one month. He's been working for years to get his 'farm' up to producing that much food. He and his wife, Holly, have planted amaranth, so they can have their own grain. The two thought processes are completely different.
So in the end, I ended up skimming most of the middle of the book. It's hard to feel sorry for his missteps when so many of them happen because he's not finished something or done enough research. (Buying rabbits without even constructing the rabbit hutch for them, for one.) There's only a brief mention of the month in which he tries to eat off the land. I kept invariably comparing this book to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, whose year of living on the land was not conceived by a book deal. In the end, I'm glad I got this book from the library.
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