A Series of Questions I'm Having Trouble Answering

We finally saw An Inconvenient Truth this weekend. (I know, welcome to 2005. I was busy.) By about the 30th minute, I was already agitated to see Al Gore in all those planes. And limos. Ummm...1000 lectures is a lot of fossil fuels. Which I would have figured out anyway but to then acutally watch him on all those planes well nigh drove me crazy. So, question 1: what was he thinking?

Question 2: Am I the only one who grew up in a hippy-dippy-ish enough town to have learned by junior high that there was a huge likelihood of oil running out in our lifetimes, and if not ours, then our children's? I absolutely remember looking at population graphs, graphs of oil usage, and estimates of how much oil there is at all, and how much oil there is that is at all accessible (using late 1970s technology). There was a big gas crisis then, too, so it was on people's minds. And then...what? We all got stupid? A friend of mine has a husband who is an economist with a big energy company. I laughed when I learned this and said, Oh, so you knew $4.20 gas was coming and were stockpiling, then? And she laughed too and said no, but pretty much everyone in his company has been saying for a few years that by 2020, alternate fuels will have to have come of age because oil will be so prohibitive. I smiled but was blanching inside, thinking of my friends in the computer industry, preparing for Y2K (remember that?), and finding things in 1962 manuals saying things like, "Of course this program will only work until 1999. But really, we can't imagine anyone will still be using this technology in 1999 so we didn't create a workaround." And so there were my friends in 1999, creating a workaround. Point being, no one seems to have a decent workaround here, and I'm thinking I'd better fly to California this summer before it's not even a possibility for us anymore.

Question 3: What do I do with garlic scapes? These charming things came in my CSA box a week or two ago. And the New York Times seems to have served me well once again, as did my friend who splits our share with us (she roasted hers with potatoes...yum).

Question 4: Where is this blog going? I was devolving in to a not-at-all interesting food blog. And I'm trying to figure out what to do next.

Though it must be noted, speaking of food blogs, that I tried the Smitten Kitchen Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble and it rocked my world.

And while I'm rambling in to "update" territory, my composting continues, though I was so grossed out by the contents when I tried to lift the whole Earth Machine to fix it once and for all that I just slammed the top half back down in horror. I am now thinking that the woman I read about somewhere who just had an old blender she used to chop her scraps of compostables every night and just dumped it in her garden as is had the right idea. And I'm sure I will uncover an old blender around here somewhere as we keep going through stuff. OrgJunkie would be proud of us this week as we donated 10 pieces of furniture, I forgot to count how many bags of clothes, passed on lots of the baby stuff to my sister-in-law, and recycled two station wagon trunk-fulls of paper and cardboard. Alas, there is no discernable difference in my house from all this. Which is not inspirational. The idea was to get the basement in shape as a playroom. It's closer, but it still houses all our currently un-hung posters, a huge stereo, circa 1967, and about seven boxes of records, from both sets of grandparents as well as my parents' and my own. Which leads to...

Question 5: What does one do with a lifetime collection of records? Particularly if it is not my own lifetime? I have so many genres, known and unknown, it's been hard to find someone interested in everything, and I am not interested in going through each one to figure out which are Motown and which are something else. And my recycling little heart won't just let me chuck them.

Question 6: How am I going to get my suddenly-obsessed-with-the-Yankees son in to Yankee Stadium before it closes? (I know, they'll build a new one and he'll never know the difference. But I will.) Stupid books, getting him interested in places that are hard to go.

Question 7: How do I deal with the petty nastiness of sibling rivalry? I had no siblings and am grateful every day I watch and hear my sons have pointless arguements and lunge for things they forgot they owned but now covet above all else because my brother is holding it. I cannot remember the last time I fixed myself a drink from nerves, but last night I made mojitos. Which brings me to ...

Question 8: Did you know that rum does eventually go bad? And when it does, it smells like industrial strength disinfectant? I was under the impression that alcohol lasted forever. But apparently the Bacardi from my trip to Puerto Rico with my mother in 1991 for the first MLK Holiday weekend ever was ready to give up the ghost. And right when I really wanted a drink, too. I suppose I should check the other liquors in our cabinet since many of the bottles are leftover from our wedding. (That's 1995 if you were wondering. I certainly was; I just had to take off my ring to check. I thought it was 1996. Really, it's been such bliss it doesn't feel a day over 12 years.)

Meanwhile, I was gasping for air from laughing reading Finslippy's labor post, and the one that inspired her to write it. Note: if you have not actually labored yourself, I don't know that you will find a bit of entertainment. But if you have brought a child out of your body, I'll be shocked if you don't laugh at something in these posts. And on the less funny side, a shameless plug for Anjali's post, here, which is really staying with me.

As Jon Hodgman twitters, that is all.