Hogtown Homestead

Check out various experiments in urban homesteading at the Hogtown Homestead blog, run by my friends Johnny Rocket and Jessica Lancia. I contribute stories on food preservation, beekeeping, gardening, and similar things. There’s getting to be a very cool collection of information over there, and that’ll just keep growing over time.

New Web Site, New Twitter Address

I’ve now launched stacieboschma.com, a marketing site for my freelance writing projects, and have a new twitter handle @staciewrites. Follow along!

Notes on travels

This trip has been a little weird.

The slam master in Seattle didn’t apparently feel any urge to respond to our multiple booking inquiries, which is normal for him, so we went ahead and planned our trip assuming that Seattle was on our itinerary. He’s always a slow response, which always makes me nervous when I’m headed this way, but in the past he’s always come through in the end.

Not this time. So we ended up with a big gap between Vancouver (Monday) and Eugene (Saturday). I headed down to Portland to explore for a few days, crashing out at this rocking place called the Ace Hotel, wandering around various neighborhoods. Portland is a really well run city, full of a youthful exuberance that is entirely intoxicating.

It’s marvelously different from Atlanta. These people live in a gray, wet, cool world. We bake annually. They wear layers. We die a little bit four months of the year. It’s just different.

The plant life here is lush and green. South of Portland, they grow grass. Seriously. For seed, for sod. Grass farmers. I watched what I think is a grass-farming tractor take off across a field between Portland and Eugene. It looked like something out of Mad Max, a long, thin body atop three enormous, wide, smooth wheels.

It’s hard not to want to stay. In an hour or so, Lacey and I are doing the Portland Slam. Eugene’s slam was loving, warm, totally engaged last night. Really, one of my favorite shows ever. The energy from the crowd – a much bigger crowd than I was expecting – just popped through me while I on stage, and I found myself delivering pieces differently than I normally do, letting certain lines breathe in a way they normally don’t.

Portland’s got an edgier energy, more urban by far, slightly older. There are also more nationally-active slam poets here. I ran into Doc Luben outside the venue. One of Lacey’s friends recently moved up here from Phoenix, and they were chatting earlier. Performing for poets is different.

I haven’t washed my hair since Wednesday. I’m eager to get home, but this spate of shows at the end is really energizing. The long break in the middle of the week was tough, and had we known Seattle was going to fall through, we might have structured the trip differently. Lots of what ifs at this point, but where we are is beautiful and thriving, and I’m grateful to had the time here.

Pictures, almost

What I love most about visiting the Pacific Northwest is the vastly different climate, and the parade of plants that thrive here in the cooler, damper, younger soil.

I’ve been taking pictures, but haven’t quite sorted all my cords out yet. I spent last night in a small apartment in the Capitol Hill neighborhood with five other people (I’m in a cafe on Broadway right now) and between the time zone shift and their different lifestyles, I think my day ran close to 24 hours long.

When I woke up with the sun, no one else joined me, so I gathered what I could, washed up, got dressed, and headed out on foot to get some food and maybe explore (as things open up — it’s early Sunday morning).

I caught a glimpse of Puget Sound as I approached a cross street. I swear, from some angles, this city could be any medium sized fishing town. It’s gray and cool here, but I’m on vacation, just ate a free range turkey sandwich, and the coffee is endless.

I’ll start putting pictures up when I get settled somewhere low-density enough to allow me to rustle without disturbing the sleepers.

Seattle

The stress really just evaporated as I made my final arrangements to head off to the Pacific Northwest this morning. It was brilliantly sunny in Atlanta, and I did a lot of work with my seedlings, getting my Thai basil, sweet basil, and three types of peppers in the ground, plus two tomato seedlings complete with cardboard sheets as mulch. The rest of the tomatoes got either transplanted to bigger pots, or more soil to give them room to expand their roots.

I left for the airport three hours before my flight, and had a very calm time of it. I’m at Sea-Tac right now, waiting for my travel buddy to land in a few minutes.

On the plane I sat next to a young Army guy who mostly slept (somewhat wildly), but by the end of the flight we’d exchanged pleasantries. He’s from Virginia (because it’s some kind of rule that military folks come from the south) and despises his posting up here because they’re forced to do PT in the rain every morning. I can’t say I blame him. He’d boarded while having an argument with his girlfriend on the phone, and once we landed, his conversations with her continued to be strained. She eventually caught up with him at baggage claim and was standard blonde eye candy in a slinky dress. I understood why he puts up with the fact that they don’t much like each other, but my respect for GI Joe dropped considerably.

At the beginning of the flight, the attendant told us over the PA that there were 31 soldiers aboard who were heading back to Seattle from training, and asked us to show our appreciation. We all applauded. It is a testament to my incredible cynicism that my thoughts were approximately, “It’s a volunteer force. We pay them. We send them to college. We provide housing and healthcare. And they eat up three quarters of a trillion dollars of taxpayer funds every year.”

I clapped too. As boondoggles go, that’s one you have to admire.

Leaving for Seattle

Good lord. I get on a plane at 3pm and have a lengthy to-do list to accomplish before I leave. Including planting seedlings. There are not enough hours in the day….

I’ll be posting pics and so on. See you in the Pacific NW.