I've Not Been Posting Because

I know this will shock everyone, but I broke my digital camera. It was on a high shelf and I bumped it taking something else down and kaboom, it's broken. Plus the only craft I've really been doing is my christmas stocking cross-stitch and updates on that aren't very frequent (or interesting).

I'm currently reading Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende, which I picked up at Goodwill (goodwill on 51st ave is my current my favourite thrift store).

In 19th-century Chile, a baby girl is left at the doorstep of Jeremy Sommers, director of the British Import and Export Company, Ltd., and his spinster sister, Rose. Rose raises Eliza to marry well and is understandably nonplussed when as a teenager she falls passionately in love with a poor clerk in the company. Eliza possesses all the feistiness and passion that Rose herself has suppressed, and when her somewhat indifferent lover heads north to San Francisco in search of gold, she follows, pregnant, disguised as a boy, and assisted by Tao Ch'ien, a Chinese doctor forced to work as a cook on a ship captained by John Sommers, brother to Jeremy and Rose. Not surprisingly, Eliza has some trouble locating her lover, but through a host of richly detailed adventures, she does find something more precious: freedom.

You can read an excerpt here. So far I've enjoyed reading it.

I am currently listening to Barbara Kingsolver's (author of The Poisonwood Bible) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life on CD. At first I thought it was a bit exaggerated and I was rolling my eyes a bit when she was talking about how disconnected we are from our food and that people don't know where or how it grows (literally, how food grows) and she gives examples of a chef friend of hers not knowing that potatos have green plants that grow above the ground or kids thinking spaghetti grows in the ground. But as it went on I realized that what I would think most people would know is knowledge I've likely taken for granted having grown up in houses with gardens and having farmers in the family. The book is along the lines of current reinterest in people growing their own food and buying food produced locally. I'm not ready to give up bananas and fruit that isn't canned in the winter, but it's an interesting read. She and her family move from Arizona (where she notes all their food and water is pretty much imported) to the Appalachian mountains to try and feed themselves off their land and with local food.