Ever since watching Jesus Camp, I’ve been wondering why someone would teach a child that global warming is not real (aside from the pure politics involved). The National Arbor Day Foundation has released updated hardiness zones for planting in the US and, shock of shocks, it’s actually getting warmer in the US. The New York Times chimed in with an article on it earlier this week, stating in it that
Cameron P. Wake, a research associate professor at the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said that winter temperatures in the Northeast have increased an average of 4.3 degrees over the last 30 years.
That’s quite a bit more than the figure of 0.6 degrees that a future preacher was learning to memorize in Jesus Camp. Yesterday I was reminiscing about Christmas as a kid, and how my perfect Christmas involved a snowy night and a nice fresh blanket of snow to play in the next day. I think this last occurred in 1979 or so. M’s been asking where’s the snow and we’ve been wondering ourselves. This warmth might feel good and be good for our heating bills, but it is truly disturbing.
What would Ma do?
Lately that is the question I am asking myself whenever I am cooking. And, no, I am not talking about my own mother. I’m talking about Mrs. Ingalls, of course. Ever since I finished reading The Long Winter, I seem to be filtering many things through the eyes of Ma. Yesterday’s example: I had a package of blueberries in the fridge that were a good 3 weeks old. For some reason, they hadn’t gotten moldy. They were just mostly very dry and very shriveled. Now, there was a day not too long ago when I would have just thrown them out. But now, I find myself unconsciously thinking in my head, WWMD? She’d use them, of course! The blueberries weren’t really bad, and they were great for muffins. In fact, they were almost better than the plump, fat, new blueberries that I usually use because they didn’t make the muffins as soggy (I tend to have trouble holding back and just using the 1 cup of blueberries that the recipe requires - I always throw in an extra handful).
I think this new outlook is actually going to be a good thing. We’ve been trying to buy more local produce and be less wasteful. Those blueberries were not local, and had probably been shipped from quite a ways away. Throwing them out would have been quite a waste. Anyway, just look at how much J loved those muffins.
on 
