Check something (if not many things off) your bucket list.
Our time on earth is limited.  We all have lots of things we would like to do someday but it is so easy to let the routine of busy schedules get in the way.  If you don’t have a bucket list of things that you want to do someday, make one, and then prioritize a couple of things that you can do this year.  It will help with the mental preparation for the end of the world if you know that you have a few less things outstanding.

Explore apocalyptic/dystopian scenarios through novels and film.
While the earlier debate in this series of computers vs. zombies may have you convinced of how the end will come, it seems to me that there are lots of other options for how the world could end.  It could be a flood, it could be a nuclear winter, it could be a plague, it could be World War III, or it could just be the end of the world as we know it with corporations, governments, the media, and/or all of humanity changing how we live in terrible, horrific ways.  Thankfully, the human imagination has explored countless scenarios already through the genre of dystopian novels and film, and even has the sub-genre specializing in apocalypse.  Wikipedia has compiled extensive summary, so check out a few to see what we might be in for.

Prepare a community asset map.
When the apocalypse comes, you will not be alone.  You need to look around you to think about how your community will cope.  And this shouldn’t be an exercise in who is the best candidate to be the “Piggy” on your island.  Instead, I would suggest that through your networks and neighbourhood there are many strengths and opportunities that you haven’t yet discovered.  You need to look around you in a positive way to maximize your chances during the apocalypse and work together to leverage the skills, knowledge and resources that are on hand or can be developed.

Develop outdoor skills.
While the world is ending, odds are food, water, energy, transportation and many of the other things that we enjoy in our everyday lives will stop being as readily available to us.  Plus zombies tend to congregate in urban centres. One of the best ways to prepare for this is to head outside and start learning skills like building fires, sleeping outside, purifying water, traveling by human power (hiking, skiing, canoeing), and protecting food stores from wildlife.

Begin a physical training program.
It might come down to survival of the fittest, so a key part of apocalypse preparation should be physical conditioning (as tempting as it might be to live on a diet of beer and cheese the last couple of months).  You might need to doing some outrunning, some climbing, or some squeezing into awkward spaces if you want to survive. So the generally recommended mix of cardio, strength and flexibility training is likely a good baseline for end of the world preparation. Zombies are slow, but persistent, so focus on endurance training.

Pack an apocalypse emergency kit.
Most of us aren’t even ready with a 72 hour emergency kit that the federal government recommends for natural disasters.  So that isn’t a bad place to start and there is already a great Gumboot post on this.  Since we don’t know how it is going to go down, it would likely pay to have the kit remain fairly light weight and portable in case you need to be on the move.  The bonus is that it shouldn’t be prohibitively expensive and if you already have camp gear most of it can play double duty. Thinks about adapting this kit to include tools practical to both dig gardens and for zombie defense.

Have a plan for December 21.
A combination apocalypse and solstice calls for special plans.  Whether it is a grand party or more low key celebration, you should do have something to do that day to keep you busy up until the end, however it might come.  It is a great chance for reflection, celebration, and exploration of the potential if tomorrow does somehow come.  And most importantly, a time to feast and share.

And in the off chance that the Mayans were wrong, by using this list you still have done something you’ve always wanted to do, explored a genre of literature and film, got to know the strengths and potential of your community, are in better shape, explored the great outdoors, have an emergency kit on hand, and had the great party.  Not a bad way to spend 2012.

Getting (and Sleeping) Outside.

I wasn’t always a fan of spending time outside in winter until I started running a few years ago and kept on running right through winter.  (Check out Jim’s past post on the lonely community of winter runners).  I then realized that being outside in winter makes those dark vitamin D deprived months a lot better. Sure there aren’t seemly endless hours of sunshine and instead there are layers of every type of clothing imaginable, but there also aren’t sunburns or mosquitoes.  This year, Jim and I are taking our quest to embrace winter a step further with our plan to complete a whole year of camping every month.  And after sleeping outside on Dec. 23 and Dec. 24, with temperature dipping close to -20C the first night and waking up to a white Christmas the next, I can say that I’m looking forward to more outside time in the months ahead.

Seasonal Hobbies (and hobbies that adapt to the season).

When I’m not outside in winter I enjoy being curled up on a coach with cat on my lap, watching TV, which I do way more of in the winter (I’m re-watching The Wire right now).  Two additional hobbies make this better, knitting and beer.  I’m a seasonal knitter and it wasn’t until last week that I picked up the needles again, which coincided with Toronto’s first substantial snowfall.  It means that when my tendency is more towards hibernation than outside, I end up with something cozy coincidentally makes winter better.  Beer, which I’ve recently started brewing, had to undergo some adaptations for winter, which we’re still working out.  The brewery has moved from friends’  backward to our apartment for the winter, where our back deck’s overhang and ground-level bathtub (for the beer chilling) means we can brew through the cold months.  And as long as we figure out how to adjust for the higher evaporation rate in winter we’ll keep ending up with amazing beer.

Tomatoes, Endings and Beginnings

And finally, what would one of my lists be without a reference to tomatoes.  I’ve just cooked my last fresh tomatoes a couple of days ago. That’s right, tomatoes that I grew on my back deck that have been slowly ripening wrapped in newspaper in the months since they’ve been picked in the fall.  They were delicious.  And while that should make me sad, it is only a mere month and a half until I plant tomato seeds again.  In the meantime, I have cans of crushed tomatoes, homemade salsa, pizza sauce, and ketchup for the down-time in mid-winter.

What makes you happy about winter? 

Food Charters are still fairly new.  Toronto has had one since 2000, Sudbury since 2004, and Vancouver since 2007.  In the past three years at least half a dozen other communities have adopted them and even more are starting to work on them.  When a food charter is adopted by a municipal council it becomes a public document to guide decision-making.  It also can be endorsed by other organizations and form the basis of partnerships to work toward common goals.  In many ways, the food charters adopted so far look fairly similar.  I imagine the small steering committee that I’m on could sit down and write it over an afternoon and it wouldn’t look that different from what we are likely to end up with.  But while having a statement of shared values might be the obvious outcome that we want to achieve, an even more important outcome is the relationships that the process of co-developing a Food Charter will forge.

One of the things that I like most about the Food Charter process so far is it has been a tool to bring together stakeholders from a range of different backgrounds, including health, agriculture, environment, tourism, processing, retail, transportation, local, regional and provincial government, social equity, poverty, waste management, and education.  Individuals and organizations that have never been in the same room before have come together to discuss the Food Charter.  To me, this means that even in the main goal of getting a Food Charter adopted doesn’t happen right away that’s OK.  The relationship building that is occurring during the process of meetings and community engagement is already incubating new projects.  Even after one public meeting an action plan to go along with the charter started to emerge and at the top of that list was the need to collaborate, cooperate, network and share.  A new food community is budding and I’m looking forward to being a part of it.

Making bread isn’t new to me.  As a grad student I made bread a lot, even keeping a sourdough starter for a while.  But my schedule was more flexible then, I often worked at home and could adapt my schedule to the rhythm of whatever bread I was making.  That isn’t the case now that I work a regular 8:30 – 4:30 job.  Add in a morning run, commute time, and making dinner and there isn’t much flexibility or time left over to accommodate most bread recipes.  Bread needs to fit my schedule, not the other way around.  And that is where this no-knead bread recipe fits in.  I can mix the ingredients before work, let it rise during the day, shape it for a second rise when I get home, cook dinner as it rises, and it bakes as I’m relaxing. Most of the work is doen by time.  The recipe has been around for a while and was introduced to me a few years ago by a friend in Kingston (who does a bread CSA).  And it wasn’t like it was from an obscure source; it was originally published in the New York Times.  So I am by no means that first who blogged about it (go ahead, Google “no knead bread” and be amazed by the reviews and variations), but I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway. 

So why is this bread a recipe for community?  First of all, it is accessible.  There isn’t any complicated skill involved in getting amazing bread with this recipe.  You need to know how to stir, fold, turn on an oven, and wait for intervals along the way.  Kneading, which is the hardest and messiest part of a lot of bread recipes, is cut out of the equation.  Second, it connects us with our past.  Not that long ago, a lot of bread was made at home or locally in smaller batches.  And that is how it has been for most of the 10,000 years or so that people have been making bread.  The process of turning the basic ingredients of flour, yeast, salt and water into bread and witnessing the steps of that transformation has inspired and astonished us for millennia (like in Christianity, where bread represents the body of Christ).  And thirdly, this bread is one that you can share with your community.  Sure, you won’t believe this when you’ve devoured the first few loaves before they’ve had a chance to fully cool off.  But, as it becomes part of your routine, you will begin to share the bread you’ve made and the recipe with your community.  Enjoy!

No-Knead Bread – New York Times

Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1½ hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.

The session at Excellence Canada offered examples of how workplaces across the country are taking steps to better address metal health as part of their workplace health and wellness programs that have more traditionally focused on physical health. The activities and topics covered were broad reaching during the discussion, including identifying risk factors in organizations, employee access to benefits when experiencing mental illness, and approaches for how organizations can help their employees cope with challenges and stress in the workplace. The Bell Mental Health Initiatives was one of the projects covered. It is a $50 million commitment to enhancing the lives of Canadians by increasing awareness, understanding and treatment of mental illness across the country by focusing on anti-stigma, care and access, workplace and research. When large corporations like Bell are undergoing a paradigm shift with mental illness (or at least want to brand themselves as having done so), it is a good indicator of how far we’ve come.

The Rendezvous with Madness Film Festival is another indicator. The festival has been around for 19 years. The film I saw was “People in White” and told the stories of psychiatric patients through reenactment with other patients (and a handful of actors representing the stories of real patients. It showed the complexity of the doctor-patient relationship and raised questions about power dynamics and treatment method. It opened a discussion about how realistic these relationships were depicted and how dramatically things have changed in the couple of decades since the festival started, including that such a film that focuses on the stories of patients never would have been told until recently. The venue for the film screening was Workman Arts, an organization dedicated to working with artists with mental illness and promoting art that creates greater understanding of mental illness. It was inspiring to hear how far this project has come and how they have observed and reflected the changing perceptions of mental illness.

–

Masthead photo courtesy of floodllama

Like many things gasoline is complicated.  It has enabled us to live the lives we are now – as a cheap, portable fuel that drives us, our lifestyles, and our economy.  And while the local (as in where we extract oil from) and long-term (as in climate change)  impacts can be devastating, our adoption of gasoline powered engines was considered a cleaner alternative to horses and coal.  And, as I recently was reminded at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the discovery of gasoline resulted in a significant decline in whaling at a time when whale population depletion was getting critical.

But as you likely already know the ending of the story isn’t looking as good.  Oil is a finite resource, prices at the pump are climbing and climate change is already happening.   Whether these crises significantly affect the way we live in 30 years, 60 years, or even in 100 years, is yet to be seen.  And all the driving we do takes away time from our family, friends and community.  The time we’ve relied on gasoline for how we live, move around and feed ourselves will only be a short blip in human history yet it seems completely normal to so many of us.

To not end on a negative note, even though I’ve generally been feeling pretty blue the last couple of days, I’ll quote the band Po’ Girl and their song “Gasoline” that I listened to on my slow drive home on the 401 today.

Gasoline gasoline
It’s dragged on too long
What should have been
A weekend affair
Cause there are stories to be told
And that’s what we’re made up of oh
All the stories in our hearts cause in our hearts
Is what we are

—

Masthead photo courtesy of Rennett Stowe

Once the Lonely Planet or some other off the shelf travel guide was my only tool to plan trips. But increasingly, the paper books have given way to the Internet. Odds are by now you already know about the many travel websites offering deals and feedback from a community of previous vacationers. If not, you should look into it. This is increasingly the way most people I know make their travel decisions. But beyond the basics of the where to stay and what the key attractions are the Internet is offering way more. For Jim and I this means that we are getting to know and even starting to contribute to online communities around two of our current main vacation interests: canoeing and beer.

The traditional guides for canoeing in Ontario are park maps and a single prolific author on canoe routes, Kevin Callan.  These are still great resources to access, but choosing the right trip at the right time of year is the key challenge in planning a successful trip. Online paddling communities, such as Canadian Canoe Routes offer a forum to share trip routes, provide advice, and learn about seasonal differences in a region. Other sites like Virtual Algonquin and Algonquin Map provided more specific details on Algonquin for our trip planning this summer and fall. These resources have meant we were able to get off the beaten track in August when some parts of the park get booked to capacity and let us know when to check out the most popular lakes, like Canoe Lake, without being steamrolled by the crowds.  As new canoeists, it meant were were able to have multiple great vacations in our first year.

Travel guides for good beer seem to be few and far between in published form. But online there are thriving beer communities offering advice on the best places to get pints in whatever town you might be in.
My favourite is Beer Advocate – offering listings and user ratings for breweries, eateries, bars, retailers and u-brews. It offers a crash course in great craft beer no matter what city in North American you are in.  Another great resource is The Beer Mapping Project, helpful for thirsty travelers to get acquainted with the local beer landscape.  And there are what seems like countless more resources, recommendations, and reviews out there to guide the way to better beer rather than large scale commercial brews that I could just as easily find in the bar around the corner from where I live.

The Internet is now my main gateway to traveling. It lets me get closer to communities that share my interests and gain more intimate knowledge of a space that I will only be in for a short period of time. And very little of this knowledge, advice or tips would be available to me without the previous travelers or generous locals that took the time to share and document their experiences. Bon voyage!

Similar to my previous post on the federal election I feel that these elections will have an impact on your community.  Provincial governments provide, support or influence a number of services including health care, education, welfare and intra-provincial transportation.  The government will make important decisions about things like how electricity is generated, how our cities grow, how much university costs, and how our healthcare system works.  They also have a lot of influence on municipal governments, deciding their areas of jurisdictions and which services or powers will be “uploaded” (responsibility shifted from municipal to provincial jurisdiction) or “downloaded” (responsibility shifted from provincial to municipal jurisdiction).

The Association of Municipalities of Ontario has been lobbying all parties to consider the current division of service delivery and seeking a funding model to make it easier for municipal governments to deliver front-line community services.  In particular AMO determined a top 12 list of priorities and provides assessments of each of the mainstream parties’ platforms against these 12 priorities.  This allows voters to assess where the parties stand on the services and investments that are made into their local government. 

But municipalities are not the only part of our community that will be impacted by the election.  A number of organizations aiming to improve the sustainability of our communities have launched campaigns to inform voters and garner the support of politicians.  My two favourites are Sustain Ontario’s “Vote ON Food & Farming” and the Heart & Stoke Foundation’s “Healthy Candidates”.  The Sustain Ontario campaign is to raise awareness around food and farming among both candidates and voters.  It is focused on the positive impacts that a sustainable food system can have on the economic, health, environment, education and community well-being of Ontario.  As well, it offers questions to ask candidates to find out more on where they stand on food and farming issues.  The Heart & Stroke Foundation’s Health Candidate Campaign is focused on getting every candidate in Ontario to pledge to invest in health promotion.  It makes it really easy to see which of your candidates has made the pledge (as seen below for my riding).  As well as offers a tool on their website to encourage your candidates to sign up.

The point of this post is not to promote a particular party, but to encourage everyone heading to a provincial election this year to consider how that election will impact what is important to them in their community.

But this only marked the start of the harvest season for us. We brought home a bushel of heirloom tomatoes from the farm to preserve and after a few hours had jars of yellow, green, orange and red tomatoes. Their seeds have also been saved for next year. We have since canned another bushel of roma tomatoes, including our annual batch of ketchup. Still on deck are plans for salsa, pickled roasted red peppers, a batch of pumpkin beer, and saving a few more tomato seeds, enough to keep us busy to the more official harvest party: Thanksgiving. With all this on the go the past couple of weeks I’ve slacked on my Gumboot writing duties and decided instead to share a few pictures.

Home brewing has been around for as long as beer. Like a lot of things it has really only been in the last couple of centuries or so that brewing started moving from homes into factories. And like a lot of things, mass production of beer resulted in consistent, efficient but also bland and boring products. But as already mentioned in a few previous posts, beer is seeing a revival started in the States but now quickly spreading north. Jim and I along with our friends Val and Rod, have been customers of a u-brew place for years, have been actively seeking out great ontario craft beers, and even went on a beercation to New York City at the end of last winter. Home brewing was something we’ve been talking about for a while, seeming a natural extension of our beer-education. (And a step closer to turning our running joke of a brewery-back-up-plan for the two academics into a reality if academic jobs don’t pan out).

The steps to home brewing are pretty straight forward. Below is a summary and some pictures of what we did. There are lots of resources out there to fill in the details, including the books Beer Craft that explains the steps to brewing really clearly and Radical Brewing that has amazing looking recipes.

Sanitation – it isn’t as much a single step as an ongoing process for the duration of the brewing and is critical for everything that the beer touches after the boil

Mash – this is soaking the malted and milled grains for at least an hour at warm temperature and is the first step to beer. We used the brew-in-a-bag method that is popular in Australia and cuts out the step of Sparging and some of the most expensive peices of home brewing equipment.

Boil – the mash is brought to a boil for an hour to concentrate the liquid and to add hops at at least 3 intervals for bitterness, flavour and aroma.

Cool – dropping the temperature serves a couple of purposes, settling out the sediment and making sure it isn’t too hot for the yeast. It is pretty easy to make a chiller DIY with stuff from a hardware store

Fermentation – once the future beer is cool enough adding yeast will start the fermentation. Since it will produce carbon dioxide creating an airlock lets gases out without contaminating the beer with natural yeasts or anything else that might make the batch go off

We’ll be bottling in the next few days. To get carbonation in the bottles, we’ll reactivate the yeast with a bit of sugar and wait another week.