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phriday photo

today we bring you…the state bird! Growing up, and not knowing much of the world beyond I-275, I thought that the cardinal was a great state bird: brightly colored, a harbinger of spring, and pretty common in Ohio. It was only later that I realized that it was pretty darn common elsewhere too — common enough that it’s the state bird of seven states (7!): Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky (oh, that’s why the University of Louisville stole our state bird for its mascot — it’s their state bird too!), North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia. As the official avian representative of seven states (7!), it narrowly nips the Western Meadowlark (6: KS, MT, ND, NE, OR, and WY) and the Mockingbird (5: AR, FL, MS, TN, TX) for state bird lack of originality — um, I mean, supremacy.

In all seriousness, I still love seeing cardinals - they are nice bright splash in the landscape and they still mean spring to me. As John James Audubon said of the cardinal, “Go where it may, it is always welcome, and every where a favourite, so rich is its song, and so brilliant its plumage.” I suppose it’s understandable that so many states were enchanted by its charms when selecting a state bird. We certainly shouldn’t blame the bird.

with 2″ of snow on the ground, the city virtually closes. when it rains, bike races are canceled.

i like that a bit of weather, or a suggestion of discomfort, or a hint of inconvenience, is enough for the city to send out a gentle warning: stay home. stay safe. take care of yourself. (it’s certainly different from the upper midwest, where you take your lumps and goosebumps and otherworldly chills and just bear it.)

such a benign view of life. and that’s no easy feat these days.

phriday photo

Here we are, on the far side of Cinco de Mayo (we had ground turkey tacos w/tomato, lettuce, avocado, cheese, and cilantro, and split a beer to celebrate, thanks very much), and I haven’t yet pointed out that May is officially Bike Month!

Hey folks! May is National Bike Month!

And thanks to a lot of good folks at (among others) Reser Bicycle Outfitters, the MoBo Coop, and Park + Vine, Cincinnati has a full slate of activities and events to celebrate all things velocipede. Check out the full listings over at Queen City Bike, and be sure to check back there for updates and more information.

Some of the highlights include:

Findlay Market Commuter Class (5/10 & 31) and Bike Maintenance Class (5/17 & 24) 10-11am. A series of free classes on getting started with commuting by bicycle (a fine idea with gas nearing $4/gallon) and keeping your bike running smoothly and safely.

May 15 - Confident City Cycling Workshop
6-8pm @ MoBo Bicycle Co-op, 1415 Knowlton Ave. Northside, 45223. Jim Coppock and Don Burrell –two esteemed long time cycling activists, instructors, and city planners who work to advocate for bicycling on a municipal level, present this workshop. Jim and Don will bring their years of experience to MoBo with this workshop focused around sharing the road, riding safe and riding smart.

May 21 - National Ride of Silence 6pm
The Ride of Silence led by the Cincinnati Cycle Club will convene at Fountain Square at 7:30 from three different locations. Visit queencitybike.com for complete details. For more information about the National Ride of Silence visit
www.rideofsilence.org. Free.

What’s the purpose of the ride of silence? (from www.rideofsilence.org)

  • To HONOR those who have been injured or killed
  • To RAISE AWARENESS that we are here
  • To ask that we all SHARE THE ROAD
  • ‘Nuff said.

    Now get on your bikes and ride!

    …or joggin’, or walkin’, or supportin’, or even just watchin’ the flyin’ pig yesterday morning, we decided it would be a great day for a bike race — specifically, my first bike race in over a year.

    so we packed up the car and trundled out to a blip on the map named springboro near lebanon. that’s leh-buh-nin, by the way, not to be confused with the mideast nation leh-buh-nahn — you know, someone should compile a book of local pronunciation quirks (maybe someone has?). it would include versailles (don’t even bring your ver-saiy ’round here, it’s ver-sails), indiana, of course, as well as a little burg in minnesota named for the uruguayan capital montevideo (mon-ti-vi-DAY-o) and called, as near as i could ever figure, mon-nuh-VI-dee-o.

    but i digress. it’s lovely rolling country, and i was eager to test my legs over four laps on the 11+ mile course. alas, it was not to be, at least not all of it. in races like this, the field is split into skill-level and gender categories, and in two of the other fields first-lap crashes required ambulance visits. the organizers and the police there to help out with the race deemed the course unsafe and canceled the rest of it. it was disappointing for many riders, but probably the best call.

    it was, however, enough to re-ignite my bike-racing bug, and i’m looking forward to a summer dotted with the occasional foray into (very) amateur competition. one of the more spectator-friendly events on the summer schedule is the hyde park blast on June 28, a set of criterium races at hyde park square. the blast features kids’ events, and running race, and a block party in conjunction with a day at the races. less locally, but more imminent (May 16-18), is lexington’s own bike race celebration, fittingly called bike lexington. for my money, the spectating would be best at the saturday criterium in the heart of downtown.

    just one more note on the flying pig, or rather, the coverage of it by our local rag: it’s a great event, with around 12,000 runners finishing the half (7300+) and full (4700+) marathons. it’s a marathon for regular folk, who work hard and train hard to complete an arduous event. and it’s structured to encourage those regular folk to run in support of charities and other good causes. why then, does our fear-mongering excuse for local print coverage have a giant headline today that reads: DRAMA AT THE BACK OF THE PACK (I saw this in a newspaper box while walking the dogs, so i may have the exact wording wrong, but this is the gist of it), with a sub-head “CPR saves stricken runner”? i get that this story is news, and that it’s very important to bobby edwards and his loved ones. and i’m certainly not suggesting that the lead story on the pig should be “flying pig reveals that cincinnati is best city in the universe.” but why oh why must our media try so very hard to make us so very afraid? of everything?

    people are polite.

    when i’m walking down the street most fellow-pedestrians will make eye-contact with me. most of those who make eye-contact will even venture a friendly word or two — “hey there,” “good mornin’” or “how’re you today?”

    but what really stands out to me are the folks who say thank you. say i’m trundling down the sidewalk with a toddler in a stroller and two dogs on leashes and we’re taking up every available inch of the sidewalk, and someone else is coming the other direction. maybe it’s someone out for an evening run, maybe it’s another mother with a kid in a stroller, maybe it’s just a regular person taking a regular ol’ walk. seems to me that in these situations i should be the one to get out of the way: maybe the person is nervous about running past two dogs … who knows? but i feel better about myself if i recognize that while i have every right to the sidewalk, it’s simply not nice of me to monopolize it. so off i go to the side — to a yard, or a driveway, dogs politely sitting and waiting — until the sidewalk is clear.

    the thing of it is, almost every person i move for looks me in the eye and says thank you.

    it’s just so damn nice.

    friday flowers

    earth day

    today’s the dire day, the pay-the-piper day, the render-unto-caesar day: tax day. it’s typically not a time for celebration — relief maybe, teeth-gnashing possibly, anxiety certainly — but not celebration. i mean, even if you’re getting a big refund, all that means is you paid too much to uncle sam during the year, and he earned interest on your money. and you paid all your taxes. it’s like tipping the government, which in my book of ‘things i like’ ranks somewhere between unanesthetized dental surgery and ritual disembowelment.

    but i digress — in a mere week there is cause for celebration, for earth day will be upon us. for almost 40 years, april 22 has been designated as a day to reflect on our place in the natural world, to assess our impact on the world’s ecosystems and species diversity, to commit to making earth a healthier place, and to just plain celebrate being outside in spring weather. for years it lingered on the hippy fringe of social consciousness, but in an age where global warming is acknowledged by all but the most extreme of head-burying ostriches, where mainstream media bandy about terms like “carbon footprint” and “green living,” and where the former vice president wins the nobel prize for his work on publicizing the climate crisis, the day has become a lot more central in our culture. ’bout time.

    ’round here, the celebrations have already begun: whole foods  in rookwood pavilion has events beginning last weekend and going through earth day itself next tuesday. park + vine is taking its show on the road, hitting a number of local events and hosting some too. and the big event, sponsored by the greater cincinnati earth coalition, will be held at sawyer point on saturday, april 19 (weekends are a little better for turnout than tuesdays).

    if you know of other events, please feel free to post them in the comments section. otherwise, i’ll see you out there — i’ll be the distracted-looking one trying to remember his canvas shopping bag.

    *edited to add 4/16* brianne stops by to point out that Live Green Cincinnati has also been tracking earth day events — and they’ve got a list of “countdown to earth day” tips for greener living. check it out!

    eat slow. stay slim.

    what little i know about the slow-food movement can be captured in fewer words than it has taken to write this sentence. it’s italian in origin. it’s good for you.

    and now i know it makes some damn fine eats.

    it’s not hard to guess at that last piece, since almost anything that any sentient person makes at home, from something reasonably close to “scratch,” will beat the taste buds off of anything purchased quickly and made industrially. and since i’m a girl who loves to grow her own food, and eat food that other local folks have grown in their own back acres, i know — and love love love — the difference between that sun-ripened tomato just picked off the vine and eaten while still warm and the hydroponically-grown tom that’s been warming on my kitchen window sill. but i didn’t know how much i didn’t know.

    and the truth is, i’m not usually a girl for movements of any sort — i’m the kid who is always left out of the clique. but i have a brand new appreciation for … hell, devotion to the slow food movement. thanks to slim’s.

    as a token of love for a much-missed child whose nickname was slim, we were given a gift certificate to this über-everything restaurant nestled on the corner of hamilton and blue rock in northside. i was in love the moment i realized it is right next door to shoetopia and directly underneath yoga ah!, and i had a brief existential crisis when i remembered that we chose to live in a different neighborhood. (what were we thinking?) slim’s is super-hip but also totally genuine — leave your snobbery and ‘tude at the door (or in the next-door alley), thank you very much. it’s laid out like an art gallery but lined with group-friendly tables. it’s the kind of place where happy people enjoy being happy and find themselves getting happier the longer they stay.

    but my real love affair didn’t begin until i’d been seated and was on my way to ordering.

    it took me a while to work my way through the prix fixe menu (just what is mofongo, anyway, and why is it only pequeño?) and it took a while for our menus, our water, and our server to all be present, simultaneously, at our table. but this was good, because it gave me time to settle in to the rhythm of the night: a three-hour long gastronomic tour through slow food, puerto rican style.

    yes, that’s right. it took us three hours to eat dinner. and i wouldn’t ask for a single minute of it back.

    some might complain that the pace of dinner is attributable to slow service. they’re not entirely wrong in that observation, but perhaps wrong to make that complaint. slow is the point. slow is so the point that slim’s grows its own greens — lettuces, watercress, etc. — just across the street. i had happy visions of my easy-going server strolling across the street to pick the watercress that arrived on my plate. i know he didn’t — i know because i watched for it — but he could have. it was all that delightfully happening-in-the-moment, so wonderfully slow.

    for the first time in, oh, maybe my life, i ate a salad slowly, amazed at how different a variety of organic greens taste — different from each other, i mean — when they have been picked recently and haven’t traveled 1500 miles in an air-conditioned truck. i thought i knew how good fresh food tasted. but good food, good fresh food, served so slowly that you’d be a fool not to pause between bites simply to relish the pure deliciousness of all — well, that i knew nothing about. now i know. it is heaven. heaven, i say. pure heaven.

    so head to slim’s. byob — several nearby tables had planned well and had brought coolers of wine and beer — and plan to relax. relax and enjoy. slow-food style.

    Eat Local

    We’ve subscribed to CSA farms for almost ten years now — first in Madison, WI, and later in St. Paul, MN. When we moved to Cincinnati last year, we were a bit late for a CSA share (May), and frankly, too busy to do much more than cursory research (which revealed … not much).

    This year, we resolved … what’s that you say? What’s a CSA, you ask? Oh, right, a little background. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. I’m not sure of the origin of the term, or where it got started, but it essentially works like this: non-farmers (like us) buy a share of a regional farm’s seasonal output; by paying up front, early in the season, they help the farmer(s) pay for the sowing and tending and reaping of the crops, and in return, the non-farmers (like us) get a weekly share of the bounty.

    csa_produce.jpg

    It can seem like an expensive proposition at first (share costs vary widely, depending on a number of factors, including the number of weeks, weekly volume, and how much or how little the farm transports the goods), but when you’re opening the fifteenth share in late August and munching on fresh sweet corn that was picked THIS MORNING, that money you spent in April seems like a mere pittance. And crunching the numbers can reveal that you’re not paying that much more (if at all) than you would for fresh, healthy organic produce at the market.

    There are other benefits, as well:

    • Participating farms tend to be organic, or even “beyond organic” (exceeding FDA standards for organic production and emphasizing sustainability) eliminating pesticides and genetic modifications from the equation.
    • They’re local, which cuts down on the carbon footprint of getting food to your door — even if you have to pick up at your farm, you’re using less fuel than if you go to your neighborhood grocery for produce from California and Chile. Many CSAs offer convenient pick-up locations somewhere between their farm and the population they serve, and a few even deliver to your door (our last CSA in St. Paul delivered our goods every week in an old ambulance that had been converted to running on vegetable oil — they called it the veggie-bulance, and you knew it was nearby when you smelled warm french fries in the air).
    • They encourage you to eat seasonally — you know, asparagus in the spring, when it grows, corn in late summer, and so on. This may not seem like such a big deal, but when you eat locally grown foods in season, they taste so much better than most of the out-of-season produce we can get so easily at our supermarkets.
    • They support local agriculture — personally, I feel better about giving my produce dollars to an Amish family in Hillsboro (like we are this year) than to a farm conglomerate subsidiary of a megacorporation in California; in addition, I like the idea that as CSAs proliferate and generate enthusiasm, more and more farmers will convert to a more sustainable model, and more and more consumers will benefit. Sort of an idealistic critical mass, if you will.

    Anyway, this year we resolved to get on the job of finding a local CSA earlier, and were pleased to find several options. This is a great resource for finding area CSAs; use the radio buttons on the upper right to select CSA, whether you want to subscribe online, then enter your zip code, and presto, you have a list of farms in your area offering CSA shares.

    Before I fall off my hobby horse, I wanted to point out a local blogging resource that I found the other day. It’s called Cincinnati Locavore (I know, I know, I’m late to the show — City Beat even named it one of the best local blogs for 2008), it’s run by valeree, and there you’ll find a wide range of topics on local food production, distribution, and consumption. valeree offers an extensive list of resources, including local food sources and restaurants emphasizing local foods, Cincinnati food blogs, and links to further reading.

    *edited to add* Thanks to Victoria for a link to a definition and brief history of CSAs.

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