Here is the link to a free ebook I just wrote. It is titled: Emergency Water Storage at Home: Why, How, How Much Water, and at What Cost? It is a PDF file. If you just click on the link, it will open in a new tab or window. To download it to your computer, right-click on the link and chose “Save Link As” and then you will have it. You are very welcome to print it out or to share the PDF file with other people, provided you don’t charge them anything!

Emergency water storage at home is a topic that most people would probably just as soon not think about. At least when I started asking my friends how much water they had stored, I quickly realized that few had thought about it. I needed to ask, “Do you have any emergency water stored?” instead of asking how much. Most had nothing. Read the rest >>>

I recently read a fascinating account of the growth of the seed savers movement in the United States. Diane Ott Whealy, who wrote Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver, is one of the founders of the Seed Savers Exchange, which you can go to at seedsavers.org.

In one of the most beautifully created books I’ve seen short of expensive art books, she writes about how she and her family became the core of what became the SSE. Her passion for saving valuable old heirloom seeds and keeping them from dying out runs through just about every page of the book. I was moved and inspired.

I’ve gardened mainly with heritage seeds and so unknowingly I am one of the many who owe these dedicated people a big thank you!

The book is personal autobiography woven with the story of meetings, a house where seed collections threatened to take over every inch that Ott Whealy, her husband Kent, and their children lived in! Since she and I are of the same generation, I specially enjoyed her stories of different eras. Read the rest >>>

On the About Us page of this website, I mentioned in passing that my husband Kelly and I had lived at Sunshine Camp in Forestville, CA, in an intentional community with other family members. I don’t know why I happened to mention it, but that brief reference led to a fascinating communication. I do love how the internet brings people together!

Here is what happened: a few weeks ago, I got an email from a man named Dan Philipps, who described himself as a genealogist by hobby. He had come to that About Us page while searching for Sunshine Camp in Forestville. As he wrote me:

In the 1930s my grandfather’s cousin (Rev. Charles Philipps) was the Catholic priest and pastor of Saint Sebastian’s in Sebastopol. Somewhere during that time he obtained via foreclosure the property that became Sunshine Camp. From the 1930s to 1958  he ran the camp and each summer would bring children from the poorer areas of Oakland and San Francisco for camps on the Russian River. Read the rest >>>

This weekend the town where I live in Colorado had its 13th annual music festival. Going to the festival is one of my favorite ways to visit with people in the community that I may not see much of. When I first got to the festival on Saturday morning, I had a nice long chat with a man I know, about how happy he and his wife are to be raising their two young daughters in our peaceful small-town atmosphere, even though making a living here isn’t easy. Later, a woman I had met when we first came here in 1996 remembered me, and we caught up on things. Then I saw the people who bought our house when we left here for Mexico in 2005. Then a friend who is usually a self-described hermit and then… well, you get the idea.

And the music! Read the rest >>>

When I was a children’s librarian, I used to do a lot of story hours for preschoolers. One book that was always a favorite was called The Judge.

One person after another comes before the judge and says something like this:

A terrible thing is coming this way, creeping closer day by day—
Its eyes are scary, its tail is hairy… I tell you, Judge, we all better pray!

The descriptions get longer and the thing sounds worse and worse. It spreads its wings and does bad things. But the judge is unmoved. He says something like

Lock him up and throw away the key. He can’t fool me!

At the end, the horrible monster breaks into the judge’s courtroom. Kids loved it! Something about authority figures getting their comeuppance… Read the rest >>>

I was immediately drawn to the paradox of the title Meat: A Benign Extravagance, a book by Simon Fairlie published originally in the UK and then by Chelsea Green here in the US.

I eat meat myself, and luckily I live in an agricultural area in Colorado where we can get local grass-fed beef, lamb, and even yak, as well as locally raised organic chicken.

And that’s what we eat when we eat meat, for the most part. I am not drawn to eat meat where the animals may have been treated inhumanely, fed corn, or fed dubious feeds.

So this book turned out to be right up my alley. As the Chelsea Green webpage about Meat says, “Simon Fairlie presents in-depth research in favor of small-scale, holistic, and integrated farming systems that include pastured, free-range livestock as the answer to the pro-meat or no-meat debate.

“George Monbiot, for example, a well-known environmental activist and supporter of veganism, has retracted his support for veganism after reading Meat. This is a life-changing book.” Read the rest >>>