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Sunday: Tornado warning
Jul. 16th, 2023 09:34 amI woke up and was thinking about getting up and going for a walk before it got hot. Nope. Buckets of rain.
I went back to bed and thought I’d get some more sleep. Nope. Phones around the house blasting out tornado warning for an area that included us. R. was probably most at risk up on the 3rd floor, but the town has had a tornado hit in the past and I went and looked at the damage then. There has been a tornado death in Massachusetts in the time I’ve lived here. A. Death. I’ve been out hiking under a tornado watch. With R. A. however was not so calm. After R. looked at the map and we let a little time go by, it became clear which way things were headed, but by then, A. and I were pretty awake so we just got up and ate breakfast. Probably for the best, anyway.
ETA: M. came for a visit but not walk. I did get a walk later in the day when it was not so warm, and between rain bursts.
I also did a bunch of poking around at a map of Dublin and googling restaurants and activities. That was really fun. A. took a shower and R. cut her hair. She had a portal playdate. We did family zoom. R. went to see a show. It was one of those days where I was busy pretty much the whole day, but it’s kinda hard to precisely pin down exactly what I did all day.
It took me a long while to get to sleep. I went to bed early, and A. got up asking for a box of tissue, and then after a while R. came home. And to be fair, I kept thinking of things I needed to do. For the most part, I just made notes instead of getting up and doing them, but I got sufficiently bored at one point to just get up and poke at something, and I will confess to doing some late night Amazon shopping for something that had never made it onto a list to buy and was starting to get urgent.
I also worked on the Lego Ninjago set while listening to some podcasts. There were a couple of Odd Lots involving Arizona water, and there had been some earlier, too, that I listened to as they came out. The recent ones involved a bureaucrat, a farmer, and the somewhat older ones involved a property developer and it seems like there was a fourth but I no longer recall. Odd Lots has been pursuing this for a variety of reasons (chip making uses a lot of water, for example), but as I listened to the farmer, in particular, but also the bureaucrat, I realized several things.
First, I’m not a purist about eating plants, but I really believe a plant focused diet is important both for health and for the environment, from an ethical perspective and because of climate change.
Second, I’m not a purist at all about eating locally produced food, but I really believe that decentralizing our food system is important to reduce the risk of single point failure in our food system, to increase the number of people involved in food production so that our policy making as a democracy works better, and because the food tastes hella better.
Both of these things interact in really interesting ways with our current heavy dependency on growers in the Central Valley in California, and also on Arizona. When the farmer is saying, hey, this water thing wasn’t a problem before, I’m like, hunh. Interesting perspective there, given how much you benefit from your family having arrived in the 1820s and therefore being next in line after allocations to Native Americans. But when the farmer is saying, you wanna eat vegetables? Ya need Arizona and Central Valley produce, and that means ya gotta accept that we are gonna plant these thirsty crops in places where, you know, doesn’t make the most sense in other ways. I’m sitting back and thinking, yes, we do need to scale up plant production in more areas, because if we do this in the most “efficient” way from the wrong perspective, we’ll increase the fragility of our food system in dangerous ways.
Also, I think that the farmer’s explanation of why growing alfalfa in Arizona is actually better than growing it almost anywhere else may be the most compelling argument against eating beef that I have ever run across. Altho I’m going to _also_ keep eating beef from Walden and Lilac Hedge.
Lots to think about.
I went back to bed and thought I’d get some more sleep. Nope. Phones around the house blasting out tornado warning for an area that included us. R. was probably most at risk up on the 3rd floor, but the town has had a tornado hit in the past and I went and looked at the damage then. There has been a tornado death in Massachusetts in the time I’ve lived here. A. Death. I’ve been out hiking under a tornado watch. With R. A. however was not so calm. After R. looked at the map and we let a little time go by, it became clear which way things were headed, but by then, A. and I were pretty awake so we just got up and ate breakfast. Probably for the best, anyway.
ETA: M. came for a visit but not walk. I did get a walk later in the day when it was not so warm, and between rain bursts.
I also did a bunch of poking around at a map of Dublin and googling restaurants and activities. That was really fun. A. took a shower and R. cut her hair. She had a portal playdate. We did family zoom. R. went to see a show. It was one of those days where I was busy pretty much the whole day, but it’s kinda hard to precisely pin down exactly what I did all day.
It took me a long while to get to sleep. I went to bed early, and A. got up asking for a box of tissue, and then after a while R. came home. And to be fair, I kept thinking of things I needed to do. For the most part, I just made notes instead of getting up and doing them, but I got sufficiently bored at one point to just get up and poke at something, and I will confess to doing some late night Amazon shopping for something that had never made it onto a list to buy and was starting to get urgent.
I also worked on the Lego Ninjago set while listening to some podcasts. There were a couple of Odd Lots involving Arizona water, and there had been some earlier, too, that I listened to as they came out. The recent ones involved a bureaucrat, a farmer, and the somewhat older ones involved a property developer and it seems like there was a fourth but I no longer recall. Odd Lots has been pursuing this for a variety of reasons (chip making uses a lot of water, for example), but as I listened to the farmer, in particular, but also the bureaucrat, I realized several things.
First, I’m not a purist about eating plants, but I really believe a plant focused diet is important both for health and for the environment, from an ethical perspective and because of climate change.
Second, I’m not a purist at all about eating locally produced food, but I really believe that decentralizing our food system is important to reduce the risk of single point failure in our food system, to increase the number of people involved in food production so that our policy making as a democracy works better, and because the food tastes hella better.
Both of these things interact in really interesting ways with our current heavy dependency on growers in the Central Valley in California, and also on Arizona. When the farmer is saying, hey, this water thing wasn’t a problem before, I’m like, hunh. Interesting perspective there, given how much you benefit from your family having arrived in the 1820s and therefore being next in line after allocations to Native Americans. But when the farmer is saying, you wanna eat vegetables? Ya need Arizona and Central Valley produce, and that means ya gotta accept that we are gonna plant these thirsty crops in places where, you know, doesn’t make the most sense in other ways. I’m sitting back and thinking, yes, we do need to scale up plant production in more areas, because if we do this in the most “efficient” way from the wrong perspective, we’ll increase the fragility of our food system in dangerous ways.
Also, I think that the farmer’s explanation of why growing alfalfa in Arizona is actually better than growing it almost anywhere else may be the most compelling argument against eating beef that I have ever run across. Altho I’m going to _also_ keep eating beef from Walden and Lilac Hedge.
Lots to think about.