This morning, I woke to several notices: steam-cleaning costs for our (immensely dirty) area rug are too expensive for my housemates. A friend somewhere is having girl trouble, wants me to call and advise. And my alma mater is having Mountain Day.
It's the last one that gives me a small smile. Mountain Day goes like this: everyone spends two weeks before Mountain Day speculating when it will be. Some of these speculations include weather reports, campus activity schedules, whereabouts of the school president, professor's schedules, and possibly calculus. One section of campus stages a riot in the form of a giant food fight, then marches to the president's house and demands Mountain Day.
On Mountain Day, presumably, the school president wakes up, sees that it's clearly one of the last truly beautiful days of autumn, and spontaneously cancels classes for the day. She does this by having all the bells rung - there is one chapel, and two churches bordering campus. Students wake up to hear the bells, and their housemates running up and down the halls yelling "It's Mountain Day!" and go back to sleep. Some of them will get up later, go for a hike, go apple picking, or, as my house generally did, took a road trip to the Brattleboro Food Co-Op to stock up on all the fair-trade goodies we somehow thought tasted better in Vermont.
I suppose I'm really a grownup, because I'm going to work today, after I bake my third loaf of sourdough (the sourdough experiments are going well, though my loaves are still coming out denser than bricks. I'm trying a different baking approach with this loaf, involving a really hot bake, and a cooler one, to get the inside. We'll see how that goes. It's a rosemary-peppercorn loaf.)
Last night, we had an all-kibbutz meeting to decide if we want to incorporate as a nonprofit, or not-for-profit organization so people can make tax-deductible donations to a legal entity (as opposed to writing a check to Joel Rothschild, and trusting that it'll support the whole community.) It would mean a whole lot of work that I'm not convinced we're ready for - the committees we made back in August have yielded very little, so how am I to believe that we can handle the work of full-scale incorporation? We voted, as we usually do, to "find out more information." I wonder what's going to happen.
2 comments:
hi daneleh! remember last year that i taught the daughter of the folks who run the sourdough bakery in williamsburg, ma, bread euphoria? i begged some starter from them (before i was a glutard) and asked for baking tips, because my loaves were also turning out very dense. they said to add a little yeast with the starter and flour and other ingredients when you're making your loaves. apparently that's not cheating, it's common practice. rosemary sounds delicious! remember the rosemary olive oil bread from hungry ghost? yummmm.
Everything *does* taste better from Vermont. Especially the co-op.
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