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Today I am dialing down the Block, Street & Building Blog. Scaling it down may be a better way of putting it. Mostly because I really honestly no longer have the time to keep up with the growing structure I had lined out for it in the recent past. Since the move back to Arkansas (we miss you Kentucky!) my daily routine has, to say the least been turned upside-down, and the grand scheme for the BSB site must necessarily play a different role than it has in the past. But! There is still so much out there to share. So there’s no way I’ll be shutting down this site, in so far as I can tell now. What’s so new in our life, you ask? (Or maybe you don’t ask, but I just did for you.)

Well, Meredith and I are pretty much completely settled in to our new home in Dardanelle, Arkansas. I’ve been promising to catch ya’ll up on this move for a while, and now I think I’m prepared to do so. We moved back to Arkansas from Kentucky to be near my wonderful mother-in-law who is courageously battling a cancer that has taken a tenacious hold in several parts of her body. Meredith has taken on the daunting role of caretaker and is handling the duty magnificently. Few people are as capable as Meredith is, and I’m not just saying that.

She and I are also keeping close ties with the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights’ program Kentucky Remembers!. They have hired me to create the online presence (and oh so much more) of the Kentucky Remembers! program - probably my largest and most formidable freelance job I’ve taken on to date. It is one of the many things that have kept me from keeping up to date on this site. Meredith is hard at work as well with Kentucky Remembers!, but could far better explain her roles herself. You can catch parts of it via her blog. All of this plus we are briskly working to get a grant written for submission to the National Endowment for the Humanities very soon. More on that hopefully soon.

Aside from all that, there are other strange and rather unexpected turns of fate some of you will be interested to know. Chiefly that I am now an employeed, sorry - Associate of the local Wal-Mart. After a couple months of applying for work, submitting resumés, CVs, emails, and calls and finally running out of money, I finally buckled and applied at Wal-Mart and quickly received a call, interviewed without much delay and now I am working the night shift (10pm to 7am) in receiving. I have walked in a few anti-Wal-Mart marches, supported worker’s rights campaigns aimed at Wal-Mart’s unjust policies of the past and present, and signed numerous petitions addressing Wal-Mart’s terrible environmental record. Now I’m scraping $7.10 an hour (I get an extra .50 for working the night shift) off the corporation I believe best represents capitalism’s most evil nature.

This morning, after work, I came home and put on Dances With Wolves to help lull me to sleep. Last thing I remember is Kevin Costner narrating, “The strangeness of this life cannot be measured.”  Dances With Wolves, in another irony, is a movie about the white man’s encroachment on land he was never invited to.

A purty butterfly on the front walkway

Although we arrived later in the season, we have still managed to get up a few plants in our fledgling garden. So far, despite the oppressive heat we’ve managed to establish numerous flowers along the front of the house (we plan to slowly squeeze out the lawn and replace it with more reasonable plants, like flowers, herbs, etc. Lawns, when you think about them, are sort of ridiculous things) and have a healthy patch of watermelons, young peas full of late-in-the-season hope, basil, and two tomatoes plants that are sadly underwhelming compared to the two we grew last year in Bowling Green. 

However, we have begun preparing early for this fall. In our ongoing efforts to wedge out the non-organic, the gene-altered, and the from-afar, we ordered (and just received just today!) a package of heirloom seeds. The harvest will include a selection of vegetables specifically grown to combat cancer, extend the life of rarified, non-altered heirloom varieties and to support Arkansas business. We ordered our seeds from the Heirloom Seed Shop in Norfork, Arkansas, who in a great gesture of heirloom business style, sent fifty cents change taped to the invoice. Who does that?

Part of the fun, we’re finding, in growing heirloom varieties is in the choosing what you’re going to grow. It’s almost like choosing which horse you’re going to bet on at the races. Sometimes you go by the name that strikes you at the moment. Here’s some of what we picked for our fall garden.

• Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage
• Russian Red (or Ragged Jack) kale
• Table Queen winter squash
• Hubbard True Green Improved squash
• Winter Luxury Pie pumpkin
• Little Finger carrot
• Evesham Special brussel sprouts
• Romanesco Italia broccoli
• Cherokee Trail of Tears beans

Check out the Heirloom Seed Shop’s website and order something to keep the variety alive. For more information on why buying heirlooms is important (environmentally friendly, subversive, etc.) check out The Campaign. You can also read a book about it. I’ll probably be adding a few selections to the list in the books page on this site. Meredith some great information about the issue in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Okay, that’s all for now. There’s so much going on I know I’m forgetting something. About the site design, I’ll be slowly changing it around here and there. Hope you like it! Any thoughts?

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