Woman misses flight. Woman flips out. Woman doesn’t want to have a nice day.
Feb 152009
Feb 032009
Thanks for visiting. I spend most of my time out the West Fork so I may never have the privilege of meeting you. That is, unless you attend a house concert or help with your online marketing. Or we meet by chance at one of my favorite local haunts. The chef there, Michael Campbell, is a real life saver.
You may be wondering what our motivation to invite the Ravalli Republic to cover our concerts is: Why do my wife Tamera Rackham and I present touring acoustic musicians in our home on a regular basis? Simple: It’s great fun to stage these small events, and our friends (whether old or new, young or ancient) love the shows!
And on a practical note, knowing we’ll soon have a house full of guests, it’s a great motivator to clean up our house from top to bottom. 
Feb 012009
On January 20 we went over to a neighbor friend’s house to watch the Obama Inauguration festivities. It was really cold on his deck alongside Nez Perce Creek and the crystal formations were spectacular. This frozen little chainsaw bear says it all.
I’ll spare you a hastily assembled catalogue of the many well-known benefits of composting organic waste. Almost everything food related that most folks in our great country throw away or send down the garbage disposal—except meat and dairy—is fodder for a compost heap. Even cardboard, unbleached paper and newspapers (soy inks are biodegradable too) are compostable if you can tackle it.
What, if you really think about it, is it that keeps you from composting? The smell? Working compost heaps don’t smell, but they do get warm from all the decomposition going on. The time and effort? Dump your garbage in a neat pile, toss a few shovelfuls of dirt on it and keep it stirred up and you’ll get dirt. Good dirt.
Could it be that you’ve never started a compost heap or sniffed the wormy, rich and loamy soil it magically creates in just a few weeks? This is rather likely.
Starting and maintaining your own compost heap is brain dead simple. Build or buy a composter, or if you have a fenced yard, start a pile in a convenient area and feed it your kitchen scraps and see what it happens! That’s it. But then it gets more complex because rotting vegetable matter makes incredibly fertile soil.
What to do with all that rich, loamy earth replete with earthworms and friendly bacteria? Well, you could grow a garden. Or at least use the resulting dirt to feed your lawn. Get your hands dirty and smell the fruits (and vegetables) of your labor. Better to start when you don’t need the veggies you’d grow. Because these days you never know when you and your family, friends and neighbors might.
