An entry I typed up yesterday morning, on food.

This house is so full of delicious food. Good lord. The fridge is like, Grant's homemade marshmallows (plain and chocolate), jambalaya, and chicken chili, and my leftover (AMAZING) soup, roast chicken, and iced lemon green tea. Loaves of banana bread on the counters. I love it when we can actually accumulate some leftovers - it's almost impossible to make enough of anything for that to happen, anymore, just based on the logistics of our stock pot, wok, roasting pans, etc, so we have to make two meals. One for right then, and one to store. Last night we had zucchini pasta and stored the chili.

I seriously spent like 2 straight hours washing dishes Saturday evening and at least an hour cumulatively, yesterday. Our dishwasher has been broken for years and we haven't replaced it since there's an electrical issue in the wall behind it that has to be fixed beforehand.

I really love when we can eat things from out in the yard. We've been eating mangoes off our tree every day for weeks, and that's gonna continue for awhile. There are bananas ripening on the deck and more on the tree. All the tomatoes Grant put in the jambalaya were off of my plants and about 4-6 of the eggs we eat each week are from our chickens.

It's a drop in the bucket of what we need and use, foodwise, but it's nice. I'd really like to add more stuff to the list. We got a carambola (star fruit) tree at the latest Adopt a Tree event, though it's just a struggling baby for now. Expanding the chicken coop and flock seems like the simplest way to actually get a return on investment and put a teeny tiny dent in the grocery budget.

Robin Williams, perspective, HONY

I, like millions of other people, am really sad about Robin Williams dying. Facebook feels like a neverending one-two punch of drama and comedy that undoes me. It'll be one post quoting him on hope, love and beauty, followed by a still from Aladdin saying, "Genie, you're free!" Then a plea from a depressed friend to support each other, followed by somebody going, "Nanu nanu."

I, like millions of other people, feel like I had some kind of personal relationship with Robin Williams and that he was somehow a part of my life specifically. I know better, mentally, but the feeling is still there. He was a present fixture from infancy, when my Dad and then later my sister were into Mork and Mindy. Our youth group leader had us watch The Fisher King. What Dreams May Come and Patch Addams were my favorites, in the couple of years after they came out, in a very awestruck and teary eyed way.

I felt like Robin Williams was honest and relateable, when he said his favorite word was "pussy". I quote him regularly about how Episcopalianism is "Catholic lite." Just last season, he was on Louie, and Louis CK is pretty much my hero - that show makes me laugh and cry all the time. There's just nothing else like it. On the Robin Williams episode, they promised each other that whoever dies first, the other will go to their funeral.

This NPR link is as good as any; it has 4 minutes of audio, a decent slide show and a video of RW talking about addiction and comedy.

Shane Koyczan said on facebook, We never expect to hear about death. We never wake up knowing someone will have died today. As we busy ourselves with all of the lovely distractions that life offers us... we push death away... like some unwanted vegetable on the dinner plate. But every once in a while, death enters our periphery and reminds us that it's still there. Not to scare us... not to terrorize us... only to remind us to cherish each bite of the meal put before us. Like it or not we will be made to eat our vegetables. My deepest gratitude for the man who reminded us to play with our food. Au revoir, Robin Williams.

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That quote makes me think even more than I already was, about how strangely we perceive things in the news. We, in this case, being middle class Americans, I guess. Spoiled first world consumers? The point is, I felt the same level of distress when I saw a headline about ISIS beheading children that I did when I found out John Green was in the hospital. Somehow, those two news items equaled a worrisome evening for me, as though they are in any way equal. They're not equal, not at all, OBVIOUSLY, and yet one is familiar to me and one is almost impossible to comprehend. I've been mentally distressed at times, about Syria and about Israel vs Hammas and the state of the Gaza strip, these past months, but...I didn't cry about them. I cried about Robin Williams.

It's understandable, we're more worried for things we actually care about because they're close to us and seem to be part of our own lives, but I can't help but feel that there's a lesson here. About the importance of familiarizing people with victims and people in conflict zones, so that they'll actually take action to influence change.

The Humans of New York guy is doing something like that, now. He's been in Iraq instead of NY for awhile and honestly, silly as it sounds, shameful as it is - I have found myself thinking, wow. I don't normally picture Iraqi people as Dads in dress shirts taking their little girls to buy fruit. I don't imagine them going swimming or hanging out at malls, lamenting that they might be too bad at math to be doctors when they grow up.

The sight of this little girl, playing outside in the street, makes me kinda gasp and just LONG SO HARD for her to always be ok. Just, oh my God little girl be safe. She looks like spun glass in a hail storm, to me. She's in the same country where this guy lives.

So yeah, silly, shameful, but WHAT HONY IS DOING IS SO IMPORTANT because, truly? It's made me care. Not just on some intellectual level where my conscience tugs at me that I SHOULD care, but in the pit of my stomach way that my children matter to me. We get so upset when we lose a Phillip Seymour Hoffman or a Maya Angelou because they're real to us. And that is valid. But everyone is real.