AfricanKelli

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When Rebecca gave me this Rachael Ray trash bowl a month ago, I knew it would bring me one step closer to hippie nirvana. You stick the bowl on the counter when cooking, collect your compostable refuse and then drop it off outside to be reconsumed by Mama Nature.

The only hiccup to this plan was I didn’t have a composter outside and throwing stalks of broccoli on the garden makes the neighbors think you are a wee bit crazy. Plus, they are a pain in the butt to garden around.

Enter my fabulous carpenter grandfather who took one look at my composter blueprint and said he’d get right to it. This box smells so good for the time being. I think I’ll always associate the smell of fresh cut wood and sawdust with him. His carpentry skills are just so great.

And so the fun begins. This baby is sitting on my patio and will be filled, somewhat, with carbon and kitchen refuse this Spring. I’m not adding worms because it is already 80 degrees in Phoenix and they’d cook.

Instead, I’ll throw in the kitchen scraps for the time being. You can’t tell from the photos, but the box sits a bit off the ground. With these holes, the air will circulate and my hippie soil machine will take off!

Three cheers for another step toward sustainability, green living and being a successful gardener. Okay, I’m still working on that last part.

~K

Dear Finny,

You know how I was supposed to select a winner from our January CRAFT ALONG contest? Well, nearly impossible. I mean, did you see how cute these two are? How do you pick between them? And while we are in the hoodie department, um, he’s pretty darn cute too. I’m completely usless at selecting who wins when the entries are this great!

And if that wasn’t hard enough, the cookies! My goodness, the cookies. There is some serious food porn, great packaging and ones that nearly made me lick the screen. As well documented, my cookies flip flopped. They still tasted good, but they didn’t look anything like these. Wow.

So, the selected at random winner this time around is Ms. Sarah H! Bravo! And thank you all for your great submissions this month. I am writing this from a coffee shop and you have no idea how hungry I am suddenly for a giant plate of mouth watering lemon treats.

On to February — I’ve got some ideas. I know we said we’d consider posting two projects in different categories, but I’m already breaking the rules. There were two sewing projects posted on Craftzine.com in January that are just so rad. I think we have to make them.

First, how great is this fabric bowl? And second, how useful is this wall pocket thingie? I’ve got great plans for the second — I’m going to transform it into a diaper changing caddy for one of my many prego friends.

To restate the rules of the great CRAFT ALONG 2009 challenge: anyone can play; select one or both of the month’s projects and post your photo in the Flickr pool to be included in the monthly winner drawing. Let us know what you think of the projects. Blog about it, talk about it on your photo post, email us. We love it.

Huh, Fin?

xoxo,

Donk

I just finished reading, “Dreams from My Father,” per the nudge of my pastor. If you haven’t read President Obama’s first memoir, and you like this genre or politics, I recommend adding it to your bibliophile list. The book is set up in three sections detailing his complicated childhood, race in America, Indonesia and Africa and how his perspective of family, faith and values developed with time. I kept thinking as I read his blunt honesty about the ugly times he recounted, “This dude had no idea he was going to be President.” It is a refreshing read for that if nothing else; how great is it to have someone in the White House who wasn’t prep-school, genetically groomed for the job from day 1? I like it. It gives me that now cliche sense of hope that in fact anyone can be President.

Two sections in particular rang true:

“There does s to be something different about this place [Africa]. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps the African, having traveled so far so fast, has a unique perspective on time. or maybe it is that we have known more suffering than most. Maybe it’s just ht eland. I don’t know. Maybe I’m also the romantic. I know that I cannot stay away from here too long. People still talk to each other here. When I visit the States, it seems a very lonely place.”  — a professor friend of Obama’s in Kenya

“Eventually, the rain stopped, and we found ourselves looking on a barren landscape of gravel and shrub and the occasional baobab tree, its naked, searching branches deocrated with the weaver bird’s spherical nests. I remembered reading somewhere that the baobab could go for years without flowering, surviving on the sparsest of rainfall; and seeing the trees in the hazy afternoon light, I understood why men believed they possessed a special power — that they housed ancestral spirits and demons, that humankind first appeared under such a tree. It wasn’t merely the oddness of their shape, their almost prehistoric outline against the stripped-down sky. “The look as if each one could tell a story,” Auma said, and it was true, each tree seemed to possess a character, a character neither benevolent nor cruel but simply enduring, with secrets whose depths I would never plumb, a wisdom I would never pierce. They both disturbed and comforted me, those trees that looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, were it not for the knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another — the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that’s gone on before.”

Four out of five bananas, absoloodle.

I am now reading and really enjoying, “The Syringa Tree.” It is a fictionalized tale of a child growing up in South Africa during Apartheid and trying to make sense of the politics from a 4-year-old’s perspective. Next up, “A Spot of Bother.” I also received a lovely box of books from Rachael this weekend. I cannot wait to dig in! Let the end of TV start today; I’m not upgrading my set. I’ve got too much great reading to enjoy instead.

~K