TROUTS LATEST PHOTOS
January, 2012 Issue #128
KICKIN’ OFF ANOTHER NEW YEAR
Many of our friends made it over for a lucky bowl of rice and beans on the first day of 2012. Jill and Tami shared a good belly laugh and we also caught Sam, Carol, Glen, Chris and Andy having a good time. For more pictures, check out: Third Annual Hoppin’ John Party 2012
FIRST RIDE OF THE YEAR
Sharon and Barbara with Peggy tucked in there somewhere as seen through Hailey’s ears. Barbara on the ground, after checking out a small bleeding foot on her horse Joker. Peggy’s horse Simon is snuffling Barbara for the carrots he knows she carries. Sharon is laughing, as per usual while Hailey and Mingo have silent words with each other. Notice the absence of blaze orange. Deer hunting season ends on January first, a date all non- unting woodsy types look forward to eagerly.
LUCKY BREAK
This is what happened when Camille punched Hailey for kicking at Joker and Barbara when they walked up alongside them on the trail. She smacked the horse with enough force to break the fifth metacarpal neck in her right hand. More on this on our blog.
THE JENNY
Life has been a little livelier since Jenny joined Tami and Camille at the Abundance Foundation. She rides her bike to work, laughs easily and isn’t afraid to take her shoes off and wade across icy Robeson Creek on the cross country commute to town from Oilseed. Tami took this picture of Jenny and Camille in front of the grain silos at historic Lindley Mills in Graham, a family-owned mill that has been in the family for one hundred years and grinding flour for thirty-five years.
ADVENTURES IN TAMI-LAND
Tami usually swirls around us like a tornado – a force of nature who is never in one place too long. On this day both Jenny and Camille hopped onto Tami’s roller coaster car for the day. We started at Link and Hannah’s, applying paint to the exterior of their new home, then on to Burlington for a meeting at Company Shops Market and a memorable stop at Lindley Mills for four twenty-five pound sacks of flour and wheat berries on the way home.
BREAKFAST AND DINNER
Well, we haven’t gotten tired of eating yet. Nor of taking pictures of our food. For breakfast, fried potatoes and ketchup, tofu scramble and browned seitan sausage slices. For dinner, pan fried Quorn Chick’n Patty, mashed potatoes, vegan gravy and braised greens.
MORNINGS
Mornings are made for sitting in the sun or working, depending on the day and who you are. Scott and Rachel’s cat, Orange Ligons hangs out in the sun with Spot on another impossibly bright Friday morning. Bob brews beer with the precision of a Swiss clock maker on a Sunday morning.
MOVING
Molly and Shane found a cute little house on five acres to rent and are leaving the farm. Bob helped disassemble the very bed frame that bit Shane’s foot. With the help of Molly and Garth the frame and box spring were loaded on Blanche for the ride to the new place. We’ll miss having Molly and Shane next door but are excited about the move. This will be the first time they have lived in their own home without roommates.
DAIKON OF A DIFFERENT COLOR
A hybrid happened in the fields next door. Seed was saved and this year we are enjoying the subtle colors of the purple daikon.
FLUFFY
Fallen branches grow moss, especially during a wet and mild winter. Glen took this picture of Camille and the decorated branch while sharing a walk together through Tami and Lyle’s woods.
FUELING AROUND
We finished off the month by burning some biodiesel driving over to Asheville for a couple of nights. Bob went to attend a Grocery Coop workshop and Camille went along for the ride. We stopped at Dana’s home for a tasty brunch and got to meet some of her super fun friends and get caught up with Matt before making the three and a
half hour drive back to the flatlands. Naturally, Bob brought an extra five gallons of biodiesel along so we wouldn’t have to buy any of that nasty dino-fuel.
THIS MONTH’S QUOTES:
“So the current crisis really began in the 1970’s when the wages stopped rising, but it’s effects were postponed for a generation by debt. By 2007, however, the American working class had accumulated a level of debt that was unsustainable.”
“The amazing thing about the last thirty years is the collective self-delusion in the U.S. You cannot keep borrowing money if your ability to pay it back – i.e., your real wage – isn’t going up. You don’t need a PhD in economics to understand this.”
“If you go back to the end of World War II, for every dollar that Washington got from American taxpayers, it got $1.50 from corporations. >snip< In 2011, for every dollar that the federal government gets in revenue from individuals, it gets twenty-five cents from corporations. Corporations have lobbied successfully to shift the tax burden from themselves to wage earners. That’s class warfare.”
“Much of the rhetoric in the Right is less an ideological debate than it is a thin fig leaf for private
business interests. When the Right says it wants the government to “create jobs,” it means it wants subsidies for private business and bigger defense contracts, but not higher taxes to provide funds to hire government workers.” – from “Capitalism and its discontents, Richard Wolff on what went wrong” in the February issue of The Sun Magazine