Linda Whittaker <olsvig2000@yahoo.com>
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Friday, March 27, 2009 7:58:02 AM
To:Linda Olsvig-Whittaker
Hi everyone,
No doubt about it, this was the biggest cabbage we had ever seen. I had brought home the weekly carton of organic veggies from the co-op, which I share with my neighor. "You want it?" "What on earth am I going to do with it." "Dunno, stuffed cabbage maybe???" It was not as big as a basketball; it was bigger....we ended up splitting it, and will be eating cabbage all next week.
I joined this co-op for several reasons. First, I'm still American Midwestern enough to consider vegetables more a seasoning than real food. I know my cultural habits are not healthy, so this is a way of forcing me to change them. Second, the organic veggies come from Wadi Fukhin, a Palestinian village near my house. Not only is this stuff local; it is also raised from old varieties and on traditional terraced farms. I wonder what traditional strain produces the Cabbage that Ate New York??
Well, I'm sure eating more veggies these days; just made a cauliflower gratin from the (half) cauliflower in the same lot - yeah, the Arabs like giant cauliflower too - and am meditating on chopping up everything else and putting it in a beef stew. Long way from the canned beans and corn on which I grew up, that's for sure.
I followed this up by a visit this morning to the brand new organic farmer's market just started at the foot of my mountain by people in Waladja, the neighboring Arab village, with a few Israeli friends. This was fun. I had heard about it from my veggie co-op (www.ecobaladi.com) which is not related but doing some friendly advertising.
This was definitely a counter-cultural effort...a bunch of New Age types in Indian clothing, floppy hats and hemp bags were wending their way up the dirt path when I arrived and toiled up the mountain after them. After a quarter mile or so, we got to the terraced fields of a local farmer, who had set up a palm-thatched roof next to his sukka (fieldstone hut used in farming; the landscape is littered with them here). One corner was labelled the "Peace Cafe" and hippies were sitting on the ground sipping Arab coffee and herbal tea. On the other side were tables with fresh produce, jars of olives, honey, dibs (a kind of grape molasses), olive oil, handmade soap, herbs, spices, potted plants. I love it; this has the feel of the subsistence farm stalls we had in Ithaca when I was a grad student at Cornell.
I talked to one of the organizers, a Jewish kid, and learned that the market is only a month old, still finding its feet. The farmer hosting us was kept busy making coffee in the hut - and probably a little intidated by the hippie types. But I am sure this will prosper; there is an obvious hunger for this kind of, uh, lifestyle choice? in Jerusalem, at least. And it's just at the bottom of my mountain, too...I plan to take a bunch of people from my congregation there on the Friday of Passover Week, and cleared it with the organizer, who think that is cool.
Other news; I had been suffering from sciatica for some weeks now. Finally made appointments with my family doctor and my acupuncture therapist. My family doctor confirmed my diagnosis and was going to prescribe painkillers when I mentioned I would try the acupuncture route. This is cool with him; he's a young American trained in Massachusetts and has studied acupuncture too. He gleefully told me the sciatica needle is the longest in the business, as long as your forearm. He was right.
Next stop was the acupuncture therapist who did use these giant needles in a line up my leg and butt, and turned a heat lamp on the area for a half hour for good measure. Amazingly I fell asleep lying on my stomach under the lamp with my ass looking like a porcupine's behind....these needles don't hurt but sure look impressive....Woke this morning with no pain at all and have been nervously waiting for it to come back. So far it hasn't. Sonofagun, it seems to have worked.
What is this, anyway? I missed out on the 1960's by a hair, born a little bit too late, and was square and sober as a teen and young adult. Now I'm 55 and exploring alternative medicine and health food. Little bit late....still, I'm feeling better. The body no longer feels so good on a diet of McDonald's hamburgers and fries.
This was a nice week. I was down in the desert at Sede Boqer to lecture at a graduate student conference. An invited speaker, no less. The lecture went over very well, although I still tend to panic and hide in the toilet for the last ten minutes before I speak in public. Still I had to accept the students' request; you can't turn down grad students on something like this. It also gave me a chance to push forward some collaboration with research people down at Sede Boqer, which needed to be done.
To my amazement, I got caught in a rainstorm in the desert; it has beeen a drought year here in Israel but it rained buckets that night. Rain in the desert is always special, and this one made the waterfalls roar over the canyon walls. We should get flowers out of this despite the lateness of the season.
Not much more to mention. I was able to activate another member of my EBONE team (in this case my immediate boss) on a part of the project that is beginning to wake up. I think he was happy to finally have some real work to do, no less than the others. We've been busy this last half year while he was on the sidelines feeling a bit left out, I guess. Now he has as much to do as the rest of us, with his own connections to the Europeans. I tend to parcel out the work and turn people loose with light supervision; this is getting good result with the team I picked.
Well that is about all for now. Next week is the runup to Passover, so will be a little crazy, and then I am taking two weeks' holiday at home. Two weeks to actually sleep as much as I want in my own bed. Wow.
shabbat shalom,
Linda
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