Here’s a fun hint if you find you missed the Farmer’s Market this week and would like to know what produce might be from local suppliers.

I just found this out from the Produce manager at Woodmans West, my “local” supermarket:  Explaining to me that it would be really difficult to put signs up telling us what produce might be from a local farm – the main reason being that this week lettuce be local, next week it might have come from California (because nearby farms didn’t have enough supply) – but, he said, you can tell what we’ve bought from local farms: Read more »

One of my favorite nieces was married last weekend. (Note: I have many nieces, and they are all favorites.) The family and I travelled from Wisconsin to Vermont to celebrate this event with the rest of our rather large extended family, and we expected that this would not be an ‘ordinary’ wedding. Nor were we disappointed. Read more »

Great Nurse Shark - (Flickr Creative Commons License)

As you can imagine, my job has me reading a lot of disturbing reports about all aspects of the environmental crisis.  Though I do my best to keep things upbeat here on Our Father’s World and in my presentations, sometimes a story will sneak  up and grab me from behind.

Like this one:

In Canada, scientists said Atlantic cod in the Gulf of St. Lawrence are becoming skinny because they are having more trouble finding reliable sources of small prey like capelin. In Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, striped bass are turning up emaciated because of shrinking supplies of herring and anchovies. Read more »

Drive about forty-five minutes northeast from Madison Wisconsin to the town of Columbus. Then go northwest out of town on State Highway 16 and you’ll come to Fountain Prairie farm. Pull into the driveway and park between the house and the barn, step out of your car, and take a look around.

You will quickly realize that this place is different from other farms. You have been driving through farmland for an hour – mile after mile of rows of corn and acres of soybeans. Here you are standing on grass. Grass pasture and prairie stretches from border to border. And you’re looking at some of the most interesting – and beautiful – cows in the state of Wisconsin. Read more »

[Almost anyone who has spent time in Pakistan or parts of India recognizes the term 'neem hakeem' - means a doctor who isn't quite up to par.  Thus one of the most popular folk proverbs in the area:  A 'neem hakeem' is a danger to your life...]

Today’s ‘Neem Hakeem’ lesson is via a story on NPR over the weekend.  People are dying – literally – because of their headphones.

Strangled by the cords as they doze in class, maybe?  Victims of brain cancer because of electromagnetic radiation?  No – run over by buses, trains and other large and noisy vehicles:

Lisa Carolyn Moran, 20, a University of North Carolina exchange student from Scotland, was listening to an iPod while jogging when she stepped into the path of a bus in Chapel Hill last May. Joshua Phillips White, 16, was wearing earphones and walking on a train track in Cramerton, N.C., last November when a freight train hit him from behind, killing him; police said he apparently didn’t hear the locomotive approaching. Alan Eaton-Chandler, 17, was killed under the same circumstances just last Tuesday when he was hit by an Amtrak train in Comstock Township, Mich. And Vicky Baker, 39, was talking on her cell phone when she was struck and killed by a train in Albertville, Ala., in December.

There’s more than one lesson here:

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