Ecology

After allowing my 13 year old daughter Hannah to sit on the couch all summer and watch TV, while surfing the net for days on end, my guilt that nothing worthwhile was filling that pretty little head of hers was mounting.  I started looking for things to do in this wonderful town of ours. I definitely wanted to go to the Lautner exhibit at the Armand Hammer Museum and Hannah saw a picture of one of his houses and was actually interested too, but then I saw something on Daily Candy talking about an event at the Santa Monica Library and thought “Aha! This’ll be the thing I do. This’ll be the antidote to all those episodes of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. I was going to take Hannah to a symposium on Food and Climate Change.”

The Santa Monica Library reminds me of the NRDC (National Resources Defense Council) building on 2nd street.  Its obvious that the entire building is green and a tremendous amount of thought was put into every detail. It’s modern lines and materials are beautiful and give me a sense of hope as I see more and more buildings like it.

The hors d’oeuvres and treats were supplied by the Co-Op and I gotta say “yeccchh!”  When it comes to trying to approximate a chocolate cookie without chocolate, sugar, wheat and dairy you might as well just f*#k off.  Hannah made the mistake of trying one and the look on her face as she tried to masticate this dust bomb was pitiful. 

Cooking and eating more sustainably doesn't require that you rethink your entire life. Here are some simple things you can do to get started.

Start canning some of your own pickles and jams when fruits and vegetables are at the peak of season. It will be cheaper than buying store-bought, and likely the quality will be better as well.

Grow your own — either plant vegetables in raised beds in the yard or even just put some herbs in pots on a sunny kitchen windowsill.

Eat lower on the food chain — take advantage of the whole animal by using off-cuts of meat that others might pass up, such as beef shanks or lamb's necks, and try cooking the less popular small, oily fish, such as mackerel and sardines that don't extract such an environmental cost compared with high-end fish such as salmon.

Meatless Monday. Even in the best circumstances, raising meat takes a toll. Make this change only one day a week and you probably won't even notice.

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I’ve never actually studied flower arranging... I’ve kind of learned it as I’ve gone along, over the course of about 25 years... For me it’s what painting is for many other people...a way of relaxing, a way of listening to programs on the radio or to music without fidgeting, a way of showing affection to people I care about.., a way of centering myself...especially for me if it involves certain fragrances.... roses, stock, freesia, lily of the valley, peaches, nectarines,  honeysuckle. 

It’s like cooking. There’s no one way to do it right. You can start with what flowers are available at any given moment, as if they were ingredients, and improvise on those; or start with an idea, and see what ingredients would bring it into focus; or choose a container and think about various ways it could be shown to its best advantage. Or, most likely, use some combination of all these approaches.

I spent the morning in Chinatown, the afternoon in Altadena (don't ask me where Altadena is; having just gone there, I still don't know) and I had to get to Venice by evening. It's a good thing I drive a hybrid or my carbon foot print would be out of control. With two hours to kill before my rehearsal in Venice I came up with the fabulous idea to hit up the Robertson car wash. 

You can imagine my dismay when it started raining literally the second I got my keys back. Not only was my car no longer clean, but there was bumper to bumper traffic since LA drivers immediately forget how to drive the second even one drop of rain falls from the sky.

That's when I realized I that I hadn't eaten in over six hours (which for me is just enough time to come close to death by starvation). To make matters worse I was in that no man's land part of west LA and I was sort of late to rehearsal. That's when I found it.