The time has come to say goodbye.

Newsflash: I have too many blogs.

I've decided that this one has outlived its usefulness. From now on, general-life-stuff writing will be posted on the combined blog, OK, all together now! That's the one y'all are all reading anyway. I've come to a point in life where things need to be simplified, and 13 blogs is at least one too many. (Some would argue that it's about 12 too many... haters.)

Anyway, hope to see you over at OK. There is of course also the vegan blog, the wedding blog, the subway blog... you'll find links to them in OK's sidebar. What can I say? I'm bad at consolidation. ;)

Just sayin' that my office needs, to close, aright?

... WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT TO 6 AM EST THURSDAY...

A WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT TO 6 AM EST THURSDAY.

SNOW IS EXPECTED TO DEVELOP LATER TONIGHT. THE SNOW MAY BECOME HEAVY AT TIMES ON WEDNESDAY... BEFORE SLOWLY TAPERING OFF WEDNESDAY NIGHT. SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 8 TO 13 INCHES ARE EXPECTED. AT THIS TIME THE HIGHER AMOUNTS ARE EXPECTED ACROSS THE NEW YORK CITY METROPOLITAN AREA AND LONG ISLAND.

AS THE STORM INTENSIFIES... EAST TO NORTHEAST WINDS WILL BECOME STRONG AND GUSTY DURING THE DAY ON WEDNESDAY... AND THESE WINDS CONTINUE WEDNESDAY NIGHT. GUSTS OF 35 TO 45 MPH ARE POSSIBLE... ESPECIALLY ACROSS COASTAL SECTIONS. THIS WILL CAUSE BLOWING AND DRIFTING OF SNOW... WITH NEAR BLIZZARD CONDITIONS AT TIMES ALONG WITH POSSIBLE POWER OUTAGES.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A WINTER STORM WARNING FOR HEAVY SNOW MEANS SEVERE WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW ARE FORECAST THAT WILL MAKE TRAVEL DANGEROUS. ONLY TRAVEL IN AN EMERGENCY. IF YOU MUST TRAVEL... KEEP AN EXTRA FLASHLIGHT... FOOD... AND WATER IN YOUR VEHICLE IN CASE OF AN EMERGENCY.

Gotta love the NWS with its all caps style and grace.

Is the NWS right this time? Will I finally be snowed in so that I can get some rest?!

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN UPTON HAS ISSUED A WINTER STORM WATCH... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM TUESDAY EVENING THROUGH LATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT.

SNOW IS EXPECTED TO OVERSPREAD THE REGION FROM STARTING LATE TUESDAY EVENING. THE SNOW MAY BECOME HEAVY AT TIMES ON WEDNESDAY... BEFORE SLOWLY TAPERING OFF WEDNESDAY NIGHT.

THE POTENTIAL FOR 6 TO 12 INCHES OF SNOW EXISTS. AT THIS TIME THE HIGHER AMOUNTS ARE EXPECTED ACROSS THE NEW YORK CITY METROPOLITAN AREA AND LONG ISLAND.

AS THE STORM INTENSIFIES... EAST TO NORTHEAST WINDS WILL BECOME STRONG AND GUSTY DURING THE DAY ON WEDNESDAY. THIS WILL CAUSE BLOWING AND DRIFTING OF SNOW... WITH NEAR BLIZZARD CONDITIONS POSSIBLE.

The best bake sale ever.

This will just be a brief post, to be followed by a much more substantial one later in the week (with pics!).

Yesterday was the NYC Vegan Bake Sale for Haiti. The main organizers were the Vegan Etsy Team's Lisa of Panda with Cookie and our good friend Dayna of the awesome blog Seitan Said Dance; I played a distant third fiddle and MANY others contributed very significant help, like the amazing Janice who designed our flier.

Well, to put it lightly the event was a raging success! A completely astounding number of wonderful people baked a ridiculously delightful array (and quantity) of baked goodies. People came out en masse to volunteer, buy, eat, purchase raffle tickets, donate, and generally support the cause.

Thanks to this outpouring of awesomeness, we were able to raise approximately $4600 in a single day, every penny of which will be sent directly to Doctors Without Borders to help fund their current work in Haiti.

To everyone who was involved in this and all of the other Vegan Bake Sales for Haiti that have been happening and continue to happen all over the world - collecting over TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR HAITI to date!! - thank you, thank you, thank you.

A time for reflection - ooh, goody! Reviewing this year, looking forward to next.

Here we are, then, on the eve. I'm home from work with a migraine, and while the head pain waxes and wanes the nausea is a constant, punctuated by the sharp shots of a sciatica flare-up. Snow is falling outside - the second real fall this December - and I won't go out for fear of falling. Ah, life.

I am sad to say that this year has been one largely defined by my health, or really, the problems therewith. Perhaps my body knows it's actually in its thirties now; maybe that's why my condition has taken such a dramatic nosedive. I cannot do what I could do a year ago. That's an odd thing to have to say - in my mind I still feel young.

Even so, I want to say that good things have happened this year. I just have to dig them out is all. They're not big and flashy. They're more the kind of thing you learn to appreciate because it's foolish to take them for granted.

For one, Jonathan and I moved. And while the move itself was difficult, overall it's been a good thing. It strengthened our relationship and gave us a more comfortable living space. It let me have a christmas tree! It's much more quiet here, which makes it easier for me to rest when I need to. And since we're now on the second floor, and in a house instead of an apartment building, I feel much safer. These things have a real impact on quality of life.

For another, I managed to get through another year at the office. It's killing me, but it's important to our survival. Is that contradictory? We need the income, and heaven knows I need the health insurance. And the fact is that the longer I'm there and the more senior and indispensable I am, the more power I'll have to negotiate if I need to, say, work part time or go on medical leave.

Then there are the dozens of micro-achievements that make daily life worth living: the blog posts that people enjoyed, my work with the Vegan Etsy team, the couple of zines I've managed to write, the Etsy sales I've made and positive feedback I've received, the train rides I've taken and blogged about. There was some pure enjoyment as well: reconnecting and spending of time with cherished friends, visiting my former homes and actually taking a real vacation for once, and just exploring the city with my baby like we do. And, you know, the eating.

It's been a hard year for many people in my life, but always there are spots of hope. One of my dearest friends became a mother this year; at this very moment she is doubtless curled in the warm glowing love of her new baby girl, just two weeks old. It's good to know that such happiness still exists in the world. Another friend has gained an ever growing acknowledgment of her craft and design skills, each day getting a little closer to fulfilling her dream. Yet others will be a rock star, a professional photographer, and a famous author any minute now, despite it all. Maybe this is what my wildly diverse group of friends and I have in common: no matter what life throws at us we just continue to strive for... whatever the hell it is that we can't live without.

So, next year? 2010, the year sci-fi movies are made of? (Where is my jet pack? Where is my hovercraft? Where is my homicidal supercomputer?) It's hard to say. As of my doctor's appointment yesterday, I am coming off of the Savella. That will be a somewhat slow and possibly sickening process, but I'm trying not to psych myself out over it. Once I'm off of it... Well, I have some real fears. I began the medication because I was rapidly approaching real disability. Unfortunately, while it helped the fibro somewhat, the side effects have made it hurt more than help. So off of it, I really just don't know where I'll stand. (Or hell, if I'll be able to stand at all, ha.)

Once I'm weaned, we may try Cymbalta, another medication in the same class. It may help, it may not, it may make things worse. There's a lot of guesswork and wait-and-see in this process. It, um, sucks. But there's nothing for it but to keep trying, because I'm not just going to go, oh, OK, well I guess I just don't function anymore. That's not really my gig, you know?

Of course I'll keep up with the chiropractic and all of the other things I do as well. I've never once believed that medication is the complete answer.

2009 was the year I got worse; maybe 2010 is the year I get better.

And I'll keep writing. There is so much that I want to write. Maybe 2010 is when I get another short story published - hopefully somewhere where someone might actually read it this time. It's almost a sure thing that I'll be having some blurb-ey, short expositive writing bits published in the Zinester's Guide to NYC, scheduled to be put out by Microcosm this coming summer. Don't want to say it's definite, because who ever knows what'll happen, but let's say it's supposed to happen, and at least for that I'm excited.

Will I make visual art? Probably. I can't help it. I just comes sometimes, though not as often as I'd like. Meh.

And, oh yes, I'll get married. I'll be Mrs. Breedlove. I'll spend a day dashing around in a big blue dress, and at the end of it I'll have a husband; I'll be a wife. It's really an intriguing concept. I'm quite interested to see how it turns out.

It will be a year, composed of 365 individual days. I intend to do my best to make the most of each one - whatever my "best" might be on each of them. Because honestly, what the hell else would I do?

Eating Animals: Hiding / Seeking - the fourth chapter of the new book by Jonathan Safran Foer

I'm wearing black in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. There are surgical booties around my disposable shoes and latex gloves on my shaking hands. I pat myself down, quintuple-checking that I have everything: red-filtered flashlight, picture ID, $40 cash, video camera, copy of California penal code 597e, bottle of water (not for me), silenced cell phone, blow horn. We kill the engine and roll the final thirty yards to the spot we scouted out earlier in the day on one of our half-dozen drive-bys. This isn't the scary part yet.

Thus begins the fourth chapter of Foer's book, the chapter entitled Hiding/Seeking. A lot happens in this chapter. As you may have gleaned, it begins with our hero pretty much breaking into a factory farming facility. He does so with a woman we call "C", who seems to do such things on a fairly regular basis. But she is not radical or extremist. We actually get to know how she feels about it, because it is in this chapter that Foer begins to use the device of personal narratives - that is, short segments actually written by various people he interacted with while writing the book (rather than just about them). Whereas his description of the event has the subheading, "I'm not the kind of person who finds himself on a stranger's farm in the middle of the night", her section, which immediately follows, is titled "I am the kind of person who finds herself on a stranger's farm in the middle of the night." {Emphasis added.} Get it?

Unlike the black bandanna-wearing members of the ALF that you sometimes see around NYC, chanting things like "We will drive the final nail!" (sorry guys, but what does that even mean?), C seems like a person you could comfortably take into your living room.

I am not a radical. In almost every way, I'm a middle-of-the-road person. I don't have any piercings. No weird haircut. I don't do drugs. Politically, I'm liberal on some issues and conservative on others. But see, factory farming is a middle-of-the-road issue - something most reasonable people would agree on if they had access to the truth...

It's crazy that the idea of animal rights seems crazy to anyone. We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a hunk of wood and extreme to treat an animal like an animal.

Well said, C. (But, you know, it's so convenient to treat them like hunks of wood.)

Foer, somewhat needless to say, is moved by his experience of witnessing conditions at the factory of animals. But what disturbs him most is the difficulty they have finding a door to the animal sheds that isn't locked.

We spend several minutes like this, looking for an unlocked door. Another why: Why would a farmer lock the doors of his turkey farm? It can't be because he's afraid someone will steal his equipment or animals... A farmer doesn't lock his doors because he's afraid his animals will escape. (Turkeys can't turn doorknobs.)... So why? In the three years I will spend immersed in animal agriculture, nothing will unsettle me more than the locked doors. Nothing will better capture the whole sad business of factory farming. And nothing will more strongly convince me to write this book.

The next section, surprisingly enough, has the heading "I am a factory farmer." Reading this is sort of like talking to a rational republican. You think, Well, I see what you're saying, and clearly you've thought it through. But I think you may be missing some things... For example: "Sure, you could say that people should just eat less meat, but I've got news for you: people don't want to eat less meat." No, many people do not want to eat less meat. People also don't want to go to school, work eight hours a day, pay rent or a mortgage, follow driving laws, have their teeth cleaned, go visit grandma in the hospital, clean the house, take the trash out, or pay their taxes. There are plenty of things that people don't want to do. But in order for society to function, and for individuals to remain safe and healthy, they do them. It is part of being a responsible adult on the planet earth which has an ever-increasing population. What am I really saying here? Sorry folks, suck it up. Your 99 cent cheeseburger has just got to go.

The chapter goes on to say a good deal about chickens. Given that an estimated 99% of chickens come from factory farms, they become a good icon for this system of creating food animals. (I have seen this number cited in numerous places, but unfortunately I can't find you an unbiased reference for it.) "As described in industry journals from the 1960s onward, the egg-laying hen was to be considered 'only a very efficient converting machine', the pig was to be 'just like a machine in a factory', and the twenty-first century was to bring a new 'computer cookbook of recipes for custom-designed creatures.'" *shiver*

The last segment of this chapter is one called "I am the last poultry farmer." It is written by a man who raises turkeys, and loves them as if children. Except, of course, that he eventually kills them so that people can eat them, which most people will not do with their children. He is, however, the first of the contributors to give a name: Frank Reese. He doesn't support or want to have anything to do with factory farming methods.

Not a single turkey you can buy in a supermarket could walk normally, much less jump or fly. Did you know that? They can't even have sex. Not the antibiotic-free, or organic, or free-range, or anything. They all have the same foolish genetics, and their bodies won't allow for it anymore. Every turkey sold in every store and served in every restaurant was the product of artificial insemination. If it were only for efficiency, that would be one thing, but these animals literally can't reproduce naturally. Tell me what could be sustainable about that?... What the industry figured out - and this was the real revolution - is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit.

As you may have guessed, he raises what are now referred to as "heritage birds", rather than the genetically adulterated birds generally raised for commercial uses these days (i.e. for the past maybe 50 years). His birds can fly, and jump... and have sex. Frank makes a statement in his diatribe that I strongly agree with: "If consumers don't want to pay the farmer to do it right, they shouldn't eat meat." There's that 99 cent cheeseburger again.

Just the other day, one of the local pediatricians was telling me he's seeing all kinds of illnesses that he never used to see... Everyone knows it's our food. We're messing with the genes of these animals and then feeding them growth hormones and all kinds of drugs that we really don't know enough about. And then we're eating them.

Couldn't have said it better myself, Frank.

And people still wonder why I'm vegan?

Eating Animals: Words/Meaning - the third chapter of the new book by Jonathan Safran Foer

As an author, Foer likes to play. In his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, he played with time and the sharing (or not sharing) of space. In Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud, he played with images - specifically, visual and cognitive perceptions of the world from unusual viewpoints (such as those of a nine year old boy struggling with incomprehensible loss). In his latest book, Eating Animals, Foer plays with language: both in the meaning and sound of words, as well as the physical presence of letters, words, and shapes printed on a page. This is present throughout the book in the chapter headings - pick up a copy and you'll see what I mean. But nowhere is it more expressed than in the third chapter of the book, "Words/Meaning."

This chapter reads as a highly editorialized series of unusual encyclopedia entries, which are indeed listed in alphabetical order. The device allows Foer to address a wide range of issues without leaving his central exploration of the food industry. At times the "definitions" reference each other; many flow brilliantly from one to the next (Bullshit -> Bycatch, for instance), though each stands on its own.

Michael Pollan, an author who has become one of the best known food journalists at least in western culture, takes his knocks in this book. This is unsurprising - many in the vegetarian / vegan community feel that Pollan has all of the information directly in front of him, and yet draws all of the wrong conclusions from it. For example, Pollan has taken the position that becoming veg is the wrong way to go about combating factory farming, and that it is in fact much better to buy meat and animal products from real family farms instead. In 'Discomfort Food', Foer makes the following fabulous point, more or less in direct response to Pollan's argument that vegetarianism is a barrier to 'table fellowship':

Imagine an acquaintance invites you to dinner. You could say, "I'd love to come. And just so you know, I'm a vegetarian." You could also say, "I'd love to come. But I only eat meat that is produced by family farmers." Then what do you do? You'll probably have to send the host a web link or list of local shops to even make the request intelligible, let alone manageable. This effort might be well-placed, but it is certainly more invasive than asking for vegetarian food.

(Is he trying to imply that pasta with marinara is easier than chicken from Joel Salatin? Pish posh.)

Foer's definition of "Free-Range" is priceless:

Applied to meat, eggs, dairy, and every now and then even fish (tuna on the range?), the free-range label is bullshit. It should provde no more peace of mind than "all natural," "fresh," or "magical."

Followed by "Fresh":

According to the USDA, "fresh" poultry has never had an internal temperature below 26 degrees or above 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Fresh chicken can be frozen (thus the oxymoron "fresh frozen"), and there is no time component to food freshness.

Food labeling conundrums are really Marion Nestle's ball of wax, but they're always good for a (terrified) laugh. Other definitions of interest include "KFC" "PETA," "Sentimentality,"

In this chapter, Foer briefly addresses the problems that have arisen in the kosher food industry due to the industrialization of the slaughter process. He asks this difficult question of his own Jewish community: "Has the very concept of kosher meat become a contradiction in terms?"

Living in New York City, I have made many friends and acquaintances who keep kosher. One of the things we have in common is our "restrictive" diets - we tend to understand each other on that level in a way that people who aren't so conscious of food do not. I've had many conversations in which the "two sets of pots and dishes" situation comes up, particularly among people who are dealing with roommates who do not share the same habits. And admittedly, more than once, I've brought up the idea that by going vegan those kosher friends would only need one set, ha.

While here less of a story is woven than in other chapters, it is no less compelling - in fact, given the variety and content of information presented, quite the opposite.