mandarine

The forest is burning. All the animals are staring blankly at the blazing fire, paralyzed with stupor, watching their world come to an end. Alone, the little hummingbird is flying relentlessly back and forth, each time sipping one drop of water from the river and spitting it over the flames. One of the animals finally says: “your efforts are useless; you are much too small to make any difference.” The hummingbird replies: “I know, but I am doing my share.”

Maybe not everybody is conscious about it, but our world is coming to an end. Runaway global warming in a few decades; peak energy in a few years; economic collapse in a few months. Nobody can deny that most things we’ve grown used to will stop. If this is true, why hold on to our little habits and carry on our little routines pretending, and then watch the world fall apart, aghast and helpless?

I will be putting all my efforts in my community, starting a Local Exchange Trading System, so that we have a local, social and economic safety net, as all I am seeing from our governments is bailout plans and unconditional support to the very system which brought us here. I hope they succeed in slowing down the fall. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and I believe I should devote every minute of my free time to this project (while I am gradually stepping back from my wildly funny, unjustly well-paying, and insanely useless job of inventing space machines which will never fly).

Maybe I’ll be back in a couple of months/years, when my project is up and running and I see the end of the world is not as near as I had thought. In the meantime, it is au revoir everyone.

Amicalement,

Mandarine

Charlotte has tagged me for some sort of bread-making/donation challenge to alleviate poverty in Africa. Part of the rules is to publish the recipe.

So here you go: the simplest sort of bread, the one I make every other day now, because it tastes much better than the one from the local (i.e. 7 km away) baker, and I can make it with organic flour (bought in 25-kg bags).

1 kg hard bread flour (organic)
20 g salt (knowing what we dump in the se, I doubt there is such a thing as organic salt)
42 g dehydrated organic levain (find it here)
600 ml warm water

Mix all ingredients with your (clean) hands, then knead for fifteen minutes. I put the dough on my bench and sit on the bench with my legs on either side to lean on the dough and have more kneading power.
Leave the dough to rise under a damp cloth for half an hour (room temperature 22°C or one hour if your room is at 18°C like mine yesterday).
Knead again and shape your breads. Then leave to rise for one to two hours.
Bake in very hot oven (250°C) for 20 minutes. Do not forget to put a bowl of water in the oven so that the hot air is saturated in moisture. For a thinner and crispier crust, you can wet the breads with your fingers before baking. Oh, and you have to make cuts with a rasor blade so the dough can expand nicely while baking.

Et voilà. Bon appétit.

Compliments are a good investment, and nobody should keep his/her admiration for someone else hidden: ever since I wrote this dithyrambic piece about Emily’s blog, she has been consistently checking here for new material, commenting on every other post, and sending blogging awards my way. Apparently, the effect has still not worn off, because she just confessed she loved my blog. That means I have to name at least seven blogs I love, in an exponential series of compliments.

Unfortunately, I have been too busy recently to make new blogging friends, so the list will have to revolve around the usual suspects.

I’d love to put Emily’s Telecommuter Talk on top of the list, but apparently, the rules require that I name seven other blogs, so here we go:

Charlotte’s Web is where I go first when Emily fails to post for two days in a row. I love the sense of humour, the writing, the family anecdotes, the viewpoints on Germany (I have been to Bremen, Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, Nürnberg, Darmstadt, Würzburg, but apparently, Charlotte will only write about Berlin and Mannheim) and the rest of Europe, and above all the pieces on her South African upbringing (Charlotte, any clue as to when your award-winning I am From post will find its way to the audio world for real?)

Tai’s Aerophant is a collections of quotes, aphorisms, short musings, accompanied by an unexpected picture or otherwise graphical material. Very refreshing. Sometimes absurd. Always contemplative. And she’s a writer too.

Healingmagichands’ The Havens is the blog of a dream garden (and an indimidatingly romanesque life), by a woman from Alaska that the other woman from Alaska would probably have burned a few hundred years ago (did I hear ‘magic hands?). Forget the other woman from Alaska and read what Ellie has to tell us. As we French people say: she does not keep her tongue in her pocket.

Cori’ Pirate’s Library is outside the usual suspects. Her blog revolves around all her magnificent Librivox projects. If you are looking for free audio versions of classic works, go to Librivox advanced search and enter ‘cori’ as the reader’s name. You will certainly not be disappointed.

Smithereens is almost a professional book review blog. Apparently, I am not the only French person out there reading books and writing blogs in English, but she’s much more assiduous than I am at writing down about the books she reads. Unfortunately, as with most bloggers who publish often, I have fallen behind in the past few weeks (months?). I will try to correct that.

What we Said is nobody’s blog in particular: that’s where we bloggers write about everything feminism. Please have a look, and if you want to join as an author, we’ll be flattered. And for those like me who have not written in a while: what are we waiting for?

And then there’s always BlogLily - but as she’s been very busy with real writing, we have been missing her a lot lately.

This mosaic is on the wall next to my bathtub. This time of the year, while floating idly in warm water, I can contemplate the rising sun bringing extra orangeness to the hues. And I am proud. Because I know we made that mosaic. We made it with leftovers from the terracotta tiles once the bathroom floor and bathtub wall had been tiled. It took us two days to complete, deciding on the design, cutting the little dice, sticking them on a fiberglass netting with tile cement, fitting the net on the wall while filling the joints with lime mortar.

The net result is that it cost us two days of fun work (the materials were virtually free) for an endless supply of pride (and compliments when visitors happen to spot it on their way to the bathroom). I do not count the capital gain because I cannot imagine that I will ever sell this house.

This mosaic is already three years old, and to me it has become a symbol of my house and of my life : hard work, lazyness, and pride.