Food has gotten complicated in the last fifty years. Additives and chemicals and by-products have slipped into much of our food supply without notice and with a number of side effects that don’t seem to be working out well for our health. But however you eat, whatever you eat, whether you are vegan or vegetarian, into macrobiotic or into GAPS, into eating locally or organically or consider yourself a real foodie, I believe that the most important element of our food choices is consciousness. Putting some thought into what we eat and learning to listen and respond to our bodies is always a good idea.

I was a health-conscious eater before getting pregnant, and Peanut has only exacerbated the tendency. And yet there are still days when I am too tired to cook more than a bowl of ramen. This made me feel guilty at first. How could I eat such packaged crap that barely deserves the name “food”!?! How could I know what I know about packaged crap food and still eat it?! And while pregnant??!! But sometimes exhaustion wins out over perfect nutrition and just managing to get by is enough. When I realized that despite the occasional ramen lunch or frozen cannelloni dinner I eat pretty damn well, I managed to let go of that guilt. Perfectionism is over-rated.

As many of you have landed at Click Clack Gorilla through real food blogs, I wanted to have a conversation about real food and pregnancy and to share a fairly successful real food day in the life. A warning and an apology to all my vegan and vegetarian readers—this post contains a lot of dairy and meat—though I have to admit it’s not emblematic of my eating habits at the moment, but rather during my second trimester. These days I only find myself craving meat once or twice a week, and instead have been chugging milk like I’m getting paid for it. I generally feel my best when I’m eating heaps of vegetables, both raw and cooked, and I seem to be back in that pattern now.

keeping it real: pregnant and hungry

Breakfast: Oats, sunflower seeds, and grapes in raw milk, with a glass of raw milk on the side. (Now in the third trimester, I’m up to a liter of milk a day. Whoa.) Real food faux pa: Hardcore raw foodies soak (or sprout) grains before eating, if they don’t cut them out of their diets completely, because of the phytates and enzyme inhibitors present in them. Soaking grains (and legumes) beforehand is said to maximize their nutritional value. With variations in the fruit, this is my staple breakfast.

Lunch: This is one of my favorite “fast food” meals: Savoy cabbage, bacon, and eggs, all cooked in bacon fat with a little butter. During my second trimester I craved meat constantly, and I satisfied the urge, more often than not, with bacon, it being so quick and easy to prepare.

Late afternoon snack: I love onions. I love them so much that I have one tattooed on my leg. And I love this variation on spring onions best of all, when it comes to a side dish or an afternoon snack. Preparation is easy: cut off onion roots and any dead leaves, place them in a hot pan with a thick layer of olive oil, brown them, add a few splashes of water and brown them some more. Sprinkle in a bit of salt and pepper to taste and mmmmmmmm.

Dinner: After onions, savoy cabbage may be my favorite vegetable. Beside it I have an ear of corn and a salmon filet baked beneath a heap of onions, butter, garlic, and a dash of soy sauce. (Though I believe soy sauce is probably another real food faux pa.)

And a cob snail for dessert.

What have your pregnancy diets looked like? Any easy real food suggestions for the expecting?

This post was featured on Monday Mania at The Healthy Home Economist, Real Food 101 at Ruth’s Real Food, Make Your Own! Monday at Nourishing Treasures, Fat Tuesday at Real Food Forager, Healthy 2Day at the Humbled Homemaker, and Works for Me Wednesday at We Are That Family.

I had been dreaming of a new terrace for months. One slightly bigger than what I had fronting my abode—with a roof and an outdoor sink for washing hands and doing dishes out in the green during the warmer months. I had it mentally planned out to the last detail, but I needed to wait. No need to build it before we moved my Wagen to it’s new spot. I am not very good at waiting.

But, as always happens with time passing and waiting, the day arrived at long last. We moved my Wagen. We put my old terrace/steps construction (wow, remember when I built that? feels like a hundred years ago, which apparently translates to “about a year and a half”) in front of our sleeping Wagen to replace the wobbly pile of stumps that had served as steps before. They had gotten dangerous. I had fallen off them twice, which is not fun at the best of times and is really upsetting when your body is pumping with prego hormones and you were running out the door to throw up.

Once my Wagen was in its new spot and propped up off its wheels courtesy of the lovely Frau Doktor, I was itching to build my terrace. I had a big pallet, and scrap wood left from a dumpster diving excursion at the building supply store. But I couldn’t actually lift the pallet or bend down to screw on the leg supports. (This is the kind of thing I mean when I say things like “and pregnancy has rendered me pretty useless, physically.”) I needed help. I don’t particularly like asking for help—for weeks I used a chair as a temporary step instead—but when I finally did, two of my buddies agreed to do the job. So while I ran around fetching tools and screws, they put together this sweet little number for me. Aren’t they awesome? I feel lucky to have friends who will build me a terrace while I haul this baby and its water cave around in my abdomen.

So: the project:

First they put four leg supports on the pallet (which was a bit complicated on the right side because of the mini hill there). But the pallet was a little unsteady, so they screwed a flat peice of wood on top of it to add more stability. All the wood was dumpster dived.


Messing with the height of the support legs:


The “can it hold a human adult or is it about to break” test (preceded by the “will it break if I dance on it test”):

And the finished project, complete with lucky black cat:

It’s not entirely finished—as you can see there is no roof (well, not one big enough to cover the whole thing) and no outdoor sink. But those can wait for spring when I have my body back to myself and I can lug another pallet home to extend the terrace further in the direction of our sleeping Wagen (making the path between our two Wagens shorter), put on a bigger roof, and install the outdoor sink.

This post was featured on Farmgirl Friday at Dandelion House.

At my first birth preparation class my midwife (who teaches the course) mentioned that in October she had assisted with five home births.

“PLANNED?!” A women with short dark brown hair and glasses blurted out. Her eyes were huge.

“Four of them were planned,” Midwife replied. “One of them wasn’t.”

“People PLAN home births?!” She could not believe that there were people in the world planning home births. Her tone implied that she thought anyone who would do such a thing might be missing a few cards from the proverbial deck. From what the others have said, I seem to be the only one in the class who is not planning on going to the hospital when labor starts.

“I would be happy if every woman I assisted wanted to give birth at home.” Midwife didn’t elabortate, and the subject quickly drifted back to the plastic model pelvis bones she held in her hands. But I remembered her telling me a few appointments before that hospital births were always more stressful than home births. More running around. More noses being stuck into rooms, decisions, and vaginas. More beaurocracy. More pressure, and women who were far less relaxed.

“I don’t understand why people want to go to the hopsital to give birth,” I had said, though it’s not entirely true. Intellectually I can understand the desire for security in the case of an emergency, the fear of making a mistake that will harm the new life for which you are responsible. But—I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—I feel more secure in my home with an experienced midwife among trusted friends who know me, my quirks, and my preferences. In the case of an emergency the next hospital is five minutes away (our hospital of choice is ten), so even at home I have the security of hospital access. This is the beauty of home birth in the western world in this time and place. We really can have it all.

“Most women just don’t trust themselves to be able to give birth at home,” Midwife had replied, leaning in the frame of the red Wagen’s door. “They get scared. They don’t believe they can do it. And if women don’t believe they can give birth without a hospital, eventually they won’t be able to.”

So much knowledge is already being actively (intentionally!) forgotten, lost. Doctors are no longer even taught how to deal with a breech birth (ie a baby who is butt down instead of head down when labor starts). Strike that. They are taught how to deal with them. They are taught to reach for the scalpel. Despite the fact that a breech baby can be safely born vaginally. Though probably not with a doctor who hasn’t been taught how.

plans

Alongside my midwife, I’m planning on having two birth partners with me for the labor. The Beard will be my main support. But since the baby is due in February, I want a second set of hands to tend the wood stove. (Or to run for more water or snacks or to take pictures.) I also want a second set of hands there to support me if the Beard needs to go take a nap or a piss. Though you never do know—maybe I’ll be overwhelmed by the presense of so many people and send everyone away so I can labor alone.

The Birth Partner by Penny Simkin—a really excellent book for expecting mamas and anyone who might be attending a birth—hasn’t been translated into German, so the Beard is ploughing through it in English. Meanwhile, Frau Doktor has a German copy of Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth (German title: Die selbstbestimmte Geburt) to prepare her. Who knows if they’ll make it to the two birth classes to which partners are invited—they are the last two classes in the series, and they fall two weeks and five days, respectively, before my 40-week due date.

The rest of my plans are fluid. The Beard knows what I want if we end up in the hospital with him advocating. We even have a code word for pain meds so that I can curse and rant without anyone coming at me with a needle. The midwife will also know what I want—though we haven’t had the detailed conversation about it yet—and whenever she talks I feel like my birth philosophiy is coming out of her mouth.

I can’t rave enough about how happy I am to have found this woman. Someone who I can actually trust and believe if/when she says, “Sorry Nikki, it’s time for a C-section.” Sitting on a red yoga mat in a room full of watermelon bellies and listening to her talk about birth in class, I have to stop myself from shouting “WOHOO YEAH RIGHT ON LADY!” and running up for high fives every time she makes a statement. She believes women’s bodies are made to give birth, she is against the over-medical-management of birth, she keeps her ladies at home for as long as possible (those planning a hospital birth that is), she won’t induce a birth a pre-determined number of hours after the waters break, she waits longer than hospitals do after the due date before giving labor a push, and she has assisted almost 4,000 babies into the world.

I’m not using her name here for the sake of privacy, but if you are reading this, live in the Mainz area, and want to get in touch with her for your own birth, send me an email and I’ll be happy to get you in touch.

UPDATE! Had another midwife’s appointment before last night’s birth class and SHE’S TURNED!!! Good bye breech position, hello head-down-and-ready-for-launch position! I am giddy. Just hope she doesn’t decide to turn back. Particularly because she was just doing some serious gymnastics in there. My stomach looked like a stormy sea for a good five minutes.

I don’t like to cram more than one post into a day, but Katey Sleeveless, whose music I am constantly recommending on this site, just had an awesome article about touring with an infant go up on Offbeat Mama, and I wanted to tell you all about it.

Current favorite part: “Other parents we meet will say, ‘You’re very brave.’ People who don’t have kids often remark, ‘I thought life was supposed to be over when you have children.’ They also say, ‘It’s good to know it’s not.’”

Here’s to becoming parents NOT being the end of life. Because that is a myth that needed to be stomped out yesterday. And I know I can’t wait to see what it’s like to bring our own babe along the next time that Black Diamond hits the road.

Read the article here. Go Sleeveless go!

One hundred and ninety seven years ago Sunday Andrew Jackson and company defeated some British folks in the final major battle of the War of 1812. What they didn’t know was that a peace treaty had been signed in December, and the war was already over. And so is life without instant digital communication technology. Sometimes you just keep fighting wars that have been over for weeks because no one has gotten around to telling you yet.

Two years ago Sunday the Beard and I got married at the Mainz Standesamt. You see, in Germany you don’t get married all at once, with the legal and spiritual/preferred bits glued together. You always go to the Standesamt first. Then you can get married in a church or a pretty beach-side castle later. Sort of takes the wind out of the second celebration though, in my opinion. And since we weren’t getting married for the usual reasons, we figured we’d have at it in one go. We told all our friends that the theme would be “exaggeration” and to come to the Standesamt wearing the most ridiculous costumes they cared to be seen in in public.

The result was a sight to behold. Our Platz-mates built us two shopping-cart chariots, which we brought with us in the bus on the ride into town. (We had been planning on taking the tractor, but a few legal details about driving tractors with trailers full of people proved too big an obstacle.) There were sequins and wigs and fake noses and silver wings and big hats. There were even four members of a Clockwork Orange crew, complete with jock straps and baseball bats. The people at the Standesamt didn’t seem to know what to make of the sight so early on a Friday morning (did you know it costs extra to get married in the afternoon?!).

I wore a borrowed, thrifted dress that my cousin mailed to me from the United States (she has a lot of neat dresses, so she showed them to me on skype, and I picked out my favorite), and the Beard’s entire outfit came from a free box. Except for the top hat, the goggles, and the doom stick; those were borrowed too. We both had long red sash/cape/scarf things that had been Mama Beard’s curtains in another life. I wore no make up, did my own hair, and the night before the ceremony we went to the sauna for a bit of that after-sauna glow. There was no planning to speak of, there were no invitations, and the only money we spent was on the paperwork fees required by the State for the event. My bouquet was made of dumpstered roses, garlic blossoms, and parsley. Oh and I think I bought a new package of pink hair dye.

The ceremony was…amusing. The man on duty for marriages that day really didn’t know what to make of us. It was hard to tell if we were pissing him off with the freak-show atmosphere or if he was having a hard time not laughing himself, but he treated us to an extra-long speech about togetherness and the sanctity of marriage. It was hard not to laugh in his face, which is evident in most of the pictures of the Beard and I during his harangue. “Try living with seventeen people and then get back to me about togetherness,” I muttered to someone during his speech. Maybe he was just a sadist.

The funny thing about getting married in another language is that I never said “I do,” which to an American-grown brain is slightly strange. Because I hadn’t spent my whole life seeing weddings in Germany on the tv, I didn’t even register the final question as THE question. “Ja ja ja,” I think I said, just trying to hurry him through his spiel. Whoops. The Beard had the foresight (well, native-speaker advantage) to make his yes a bit more theatrical and climactic.

After the ceremony we all poured out onto the street for confetti throwing and (further) champagne drinking. Someone who knows us very well even threw a couple of spring onions in place of rice. We mounted our shopping cart chariots and were pushed off into the cold of a January noon. A police car followed us for a while as we passed the train station and headed up the path towards the university, but eventually decided we were harmless and continued on their way.

Somewhere along the path leading up the hill to home, an elderly gentlemen stopped to ask us what the fuss was about. When he heard that we’d just gotten married he turned to me and wished me many healthy children. I told him to fuck off. I hate the assumption that the decision to get married and the decision to have children have anything to do with each other. It’s bad enough that we maintain a cultural tradition requiring the State’s stamp on love and committment, but to act as if that governmental stamp is a permission slip to reproduce? Not my bag. He walked away, confused.

Back home and packed into the house at the front of our Wagenplatz, several people got behind the bar (these are the moments when being involved in an autonomous space are incredibly convenient), speeches were made, and three vegan cakes were served (among other things that I no longer remember—all the food was brought potluck style and without prompting). I put on a 20-pound, sequined white wedding dress (courtesy of another friend and the flea market) for twenty minutes to round out the whole bridal experience before changing for a third time so I could spend the next fourteen hours dancing to rock and roll. It was the best party of the year, and by the next morning we’d both lost our wedding rings.

And for your viewing pleasure (don’t mind all the swirls and blank spots, the Beard likes a bit of privacy):

Before the wedding and just after cracking a wedding weizen beer while getting ready:

Trying to be serious in the face of a ridiculous speech from the master of ceremonies:

Official marriage smooch:

On the way home on my wedding shopping-cart chariot:

One of our three cakes, baked by friends, with a dumpster-dived marzipan coating:

Ah yes, and if you want to read something else I’ve written about our wedding, take a look at this: “tangled up in blue”. And furthermore, that title is from a song about the Battle of New Orleans, which I have had stuck in my head since I began writing this post.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about magic. Everyday magic—that is, the tiny miracles so intrinsic to our lives that we barely notice them. I don’t believe in Gandalf abra cadabra hocus pocus Harry Potter something-out-of-nothing magic. But I do think that cooking can be magic. Or gardening. Or the way a shot of garlic, lemon juice, and chili powder can cure a mild cold and the way positive (or negative) thinking can dramatically change our grasp on a situation. It may not be magic by your definition, but it is by mine, and calling it so is an important part of my personal celebration of the beauty I find in the cracks of this fucked up world.

Everything about baby building feels surreal, like the realization of the impossible. (Build a nervous system at home in nine months with no training! Call today!) And the more I read about babies and baby making, the more I am sure that it is one of the few realms in which we—particularly mothers—have not entirely forgotten how to practice magic.

Take for example the fact that a laboring woman’s progress will often stall, slow, or stop until the moment when the partner she had so hoped to have at the birth walks in the door. There are a lot of examples of this kind of magic, though she doesn’t call it that, in Ina May Gaskin’s books about midwifery and birthing, so if you’d like to read more I will quietly defer to her own reports.

Take for another example the way that breastfeeding mothers will feel their milk coming in and/or wake up just before their babies begin crying for a meal. (Or the way that the contents of breast milk change according to the current needs of the baby drinking it. Dude. How fucking magical can you get?) It seems proof that humans are capable of interacting with each other, communicating with each other, on a hormonal level that we tend to scoff at out in the modern world. But if a mother can communicate with her baby in this way, what’s to say that we can’t all communicate with each other in similar ways? That there aren’t levels of human connection and communication that we have either forgotten how to read or forgotten completely as we bury ourselves beneath scientific skepticism and the exter-cerebral communication channels that technology has popularized?

You could call these things magic or telepathy, but if those are words that make you twitch then, shit, call them something else. No matter what any of you decide to call them, today I’m calling them everyday magic and staring at the universe in awe through their lens.

PS Ten points if you can name the song the title is stolen from without googling…

In our little community we go without a lot of things that the majority of folks in the western world consider standard. Running water in our kitchens. Bathrooms attached to our main living spaces. Dial-controlled, low-maintenance heating systems. Doing without these things makes our particular community possible, and I rarely miss them. But every once in a while, I’ll get a well-it-certainly-would-be-more-convenient-for-my-lazy-ass-right-now pang. The only thing I’ve never missed is having a dryer.

Line drying is awesome. In the summer you’ve got as much space as you’ve got yard, with the added bonus that the sun will bleach your whites and, allegedly, disinfect really gross, dirty travel punks’ socks. Problem with line drying when you live in a tiny house is that in the winter, you don’t have the space. Sure, you might be able to squeeze one rack (usually fits exactly one machine full) in somewhere, but you’ll spend the next couple of days tripping over it and cursing its space-hogging presence in your little abode. With massive amounts of baby laundry on the horizon (we’re cloth diapering, in case you hadn’t heard), the problem of drying space was becoming more urgent.

As we have a house on the front of our community’s property, we all can sometimes set up our drying racks in the house—but only during semester breaks when the vokü (vokü=cheap, volunteer-run, vegan or vegetarian cafe, like Food Not Bombs with less dumpster diving) isn’t running. The garage/addition area is usually up for grabs too, though it is a pretty musty area and your laundry will end up outside, rain or shine, if you forget to move it before the next scheduled concert. And since sometimes people smoke in both of those places, neither make for a good baby-wash-drying solution.

So the Beard grabbed two old sides of a wooden baby crib that I had dumpster dived years before and been planning to use as kindling, added hinges, screwed them to our ceiling right above the wood stove, and solved the problem in a matter of minutes. Wha-la:

Two loads of laundry fit on them, and the hinges allow them to swing down just far enough so that I can reach them. The best part is that their position over the wood stove means that our laundry drys in a matter of hours instead of the days it sometimes takes in the sometimes-damp, never that warm garage area. Dumpster-dived baby bed turns into tiny house laundry rack. Yes and yes.

Are you dryer free? How do you deal with line-drying during the winter months?

This post was featured on Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways 9 at Frugally Sustainable, Simple Lives Thursday at gnowfglins, DIY Thrifty Thursday at Thrifty 101, Homestead Barn Hop at The Prairie Homestead, Frugal Tuesday Tip at Learning the Frugal Life, and 2nd Time Around on A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.

In my dreams I give birth and miss it. Baby in my arms, I wonder how I could possibly have missed/forgotten the entire labor. I would call it wishful thinking, but I’m not sure that’s it. I’m really excited about the birth. Excited to finally know what a real contraction feels like; to be in our Wagen (fingers crossed) going through labor with the Beard, Frau Doktor, and the most badass midwife of all time to help; to finally meet Peanut. It’s going to hurt, it’s going to be intense, and maybe everything will go wrong and I’ll end up being shipped to the hospital in a mad panic—yet, I’m still looking forward to it. I’m sure a number of you are already mentally banishing me to the looney bin as you read this, but I’ve always loved diving into the kind of intense experiences that change you, that make you feel like a superhero for having managed. Even if those experiences aren’t always pleasant at the time.

The dream appears to be a common one among the pregnant. My guess is that our brains, pre-first-child, simply can’t fathom what labor and birth will be like. Or maybe they are protecting us, making sure we don’t get too scared and assuring us that once it’s over we’ll barely remember anything about the pain at all. Because we’ll be totally in love with the little wrinkley bundle we’ve created and released. And we all know that falling in love is one of the best ways to inspire amnesia, to dim all the background noise that would otherwise be distracting us with everyday pettiness.

My anxiety dreams have remained singular—there has only been one. Once again, Peanut arrives, and once again, I miss the birth. But laying on a couch with Peanut I suddenly remember that I haven’t pre-washed the cloth diapers yet, the diapers whose instructions say to pre-wash three to six times before use. Nothing else happens and the panic isn’t as bad as that of the nightmare that follows (make the room I’m sleeping in too hot and I’ll always have a nightmare), but upon waking I finally sorted the diapers out of the meter-high pile of baby stuff on the bed in my Wagen and put them in the machine. Now all the fodder for the anxiety that remains is the folding changing table/shelf combination that I still haven’t built in the red Wagen. Anybody want to drive me to the building supply store?

I’m curious: All of you who have been pregnant, what sort of dreams did you have during your nine months? And to the never-been-pregnant (including the dudes) have you ever dreamt that you were? What do you think the missed-birth dreams mean?

Gorillas unite! If 2012 is really the end of the world then all bets are off! Throw caution to the wind! Live like you died yesterday! Root in muddy inspiration! Do something that the civilized world would consider insane!

As I was plodding through the internet yesterday, I came across the lovely image above, a brain and hand child of fellow artist gorilla Rima Staines. An image and words with a poetic current that pulled me right in. And because Rima created this image to be shared and spread and celebrated, I wanted to share it with you. I won’t attempt to recreate her poetry in my own description of the whys behind it, but will leave that up to her. Consider it a sort of guest post—at first I attempted to create a post based only a few quotes from her description, but it just didn’t live up to her own. (You can read the original here.) So in Rima’s words:

“I had a dream a few weeks ago in which several symbols appeared before me. They had no context, just were there. One of them remained with me upon waking, and I became determined to discover its meaning. It was a rune-like sign, made of straight sections, and looked like this: (CCG note: couldn’t get this image up, so you’ll have to visit Rima’s original post to see it…sorry about that, but her site is worth a look around anyway, so off with you!)

“I’ve been paying more attention to my dreams recently, and this sign seemed to need deciphering. I went first to the runes for a meaning, but though my symbol was very like a rune, I found none like mine. Then I searched amongst the Ogham alphabet. At first I thought it must be the Ogham cipher for birch which is made up of a vertical straight line, a shorter horizontal heading out to the right from the centre and at the base (as begins or ends all Ogham letters when written alone) an inverted V, making two legs. This was the symbol most like mine I could find, though it wasn’t quite satisfactory – my symbol had three legs and a diagonal stroke to the right.

“For a while I sat with birch trees and wondered, until one day I found the answer in my sketchbook. I was drawing ideas for an image I’ve had sitting on my shoulder for a while; as the imagery came out of my pencil in rough scribbles of ideas, I spotted the symbol hiding in amongst the sketching, and it gave me impetus to carry the idea through to a finished design.

“For some time I have wanted to make an image with which to start a quiet revolution on the backs of service station toilet doors, on the billboards behind carparks, over the screens of insidious train-journey advertising. In deep hatred for the feeling I get when I am forced to enter motorway service station cafes, shopping malls or toilets, I wanted to rail against all that is bland and homogeneous and commercial and life-suckingly chrome-and-concrete and spreading un-refuted like a disease across our land. I imagined planting little seeds of hope and solidarity in the form of a beautiful and rousing image which I would stick between the scrawlings of desperation and ugliness in the perfumed, disinfected cubicles made for us to shit in whilst we are not at home. The backs of public toilet doors are a fascinating melting pot of honest expression, dissent and advertising; it feels like there’s a communication between strangers played out there in this, the most private of rooms, and this is the way I wanted to communicate: liminally.

“I suppose I wanted to plant my revolution-seed in the dirt in the cracks of the pavements, in the dirt between the formica and polyester, in the dirt pushed to the edges of millions of touchscreens, in the dirt underneath escalator rails and hygienic hand-dryers. Like the gargoyles and marginal grotesques of the middle ages, I wanted to coax beauty in once more like a stranger to the citadels of public ugliness we all have become so used to. I wanted to surprise and unnerve and delight and disedge all the lovely human beings who have grown so unseeing in the unbeautiful subway of their daily rush through these places. I wanted ivy to grow over all the chrome and adverts, its clinging rootlets ruining the L’Oréal shine with their ancient, living patination, and its roots grinding escalators to a twisted halt. I wanted green silence to toll through the noisy claustrophobia of shopping malls and for the shoppers to break their ankles on huge ancient roots, which had crept in past the security guards (notwithstanding hoodies and ASBOs) to smash up the shops. I wanted to grab them by the hand, and run with them (limping) to the dark woods and remind them that they are powerful.

“And so I made this drawing for you – Rise & Root – a symbol perhaps, a waymarker for the Zapatistas of suburbia. As I drew the rooted tree-people raising their fists, I realised that they were the embodiment and representation of my dream-rune: raised fists to the fight, and roots in the earth. I give you this image to do with what you wish: download it, reblog it, print it, photocopy it, make it into stickers and take them with you in your bag to stick on the backs of public toilet doors, on supermarket conveyor belts or over underground advertising screens; make it into a poster, a projection, print it on bags and T-shirts, paint it large on the sides of petrol stations, pavements, parliaments.

“Or take the rune as a symbol we’ll all recognise when it’s chalked on our doorsteps, and tattooed on our foreheads. I want this image not to be for sale – take it freely and use it, let’s make it spread unrelenting from the edges, appearing everywhere, but not obviously authored. I will not make a website about it. It is rough, and black-and-white as a badly photocopied pamphlet. It is yours. A gift to our revolution for Two Thousand And Twelve. Take it and run.”

Welcome to 2012. If the Mayans have it right, the last year of the humans. I hadn’t done any research into what the 2012 end-of-the-world people have been saying about it because it sounded more ridiculous than the year-2000-catastrophe theories did, so I asked around during the champagne and fireworks portoin of the night on December 31st. Apparently every many-thousands-of-years the poles switch to a new spot and that is going to happen in December. Seems pretty guess-y math to base a huge thing on. But, hell, what do I know?

As has become our tradition, we spent New Year’s Eve in Leofels, a teeney tiny village in the Swabian Alps. Last year I wrote about our visit and posted a lot of wood stove porno pictures, which you can see here. This year was very similar. We went in the sauna, we ate until we were all on the floor moaning, we drank (we minus the me), we played games, and we didn’t make it to the torture museum in Rothenburg. The same procedure as every year, as they say. It was pretty glorious.

And now we are back in Mainz, and it is a rainy 10 degress Celcius. When we got home last night it only took about an hour of wood stoving to get things more than comfortable, and now it is noon—sixteen hours after we last had the wood stove on—and it is warm enough to ignore the wood stove and sit inside in just a long sleeve shirt. While I’m enjoying the break from wood stove maintenance, it is a strange state of affairs. Maybe the world is about to end.

Did you celebrate the coming of a new calendar year?