I found out about Mark Bittman from a friend of mine. I was a single mom with little to no cooking skills and she showed me his book How to cook everything. I bought it from a book club and showed it to my partner, a self-professed loather of cookbooks. His claim was that they were all written for people who already knew how to cook. They used odd lingo (chop, dice, mince, etc) and refused to define it. The worst culprits were church cookbooks, which his mom loved. So the first thing he did was show how this cookbook would be no different.

He randomly opened the book to a page and started reading. Early on he came across lemon zest. Ah! Some cryptic thing! So he flipped to the back to the surprisingly large glossary and lo and behold there it was. And not just a definition of lemon zest, but what it was used for and a reference to the "kitchen gadgets" section which explained what a lemon zester was and how you could get by without one.

He was sold.

On Wednesday, September 5, U of M AFSCME workers went on strike for the 2nd time in 4 years. I was on strike with them 4 years ago; I have since gotten a different job outside the union. This time all 4 of the AFSCME locals went on strike so it is my partner/SO who is walking the picket lines this year.

The strike rests solely on the issues of wages. The University is offering a 2.25% cost of living increase. The workers are asking for 3.25% (3.5% for the Health Care workers). The U of M spin is that they're really offering the workers much more than that because the workers also get a "step increase" ever year. The whole language behind the step increase sucks, but essentially a step increase is a merit/quality increase. Union workers don't get variable merit increases, they get steps.

I don't have much to add here, but I thought that many people here would be interested in this.

There's a diary on DailyKos about Womeninc, a bimonthly magazine geared toward, but not exclusively, to women in south-central Minnesota and north-central Iowa.

This is the 2nd in a series :) [Check out part 1 if you missed the story of Ben coming to live up here this summer)

So. The last few months have been hard.

Ben came up from his dad's with few social skills (though he's always struggled there), plenty of depression and anxiety, no study skills, behind in English (like barely able to write a sentence beyond "it is bloo.") and thrown into a world completely different from the one he had lived in for 5 years.

Note: This one is harder to thread chronologically, so it's more of a stream of consciousness.

Last week Slate started an education/action series with treehugger.com called the Slate Green Challenge

For the next eight weeks, Slate, in collaboration with eco-Web site treehugger, invites you to consider your own individual contribution to global warming--and challenges you to go on a carbon diet. The goal is to reduce the amount of CO2 that you put into the atmosphere by 20 percent. If you're a carbon glutton who doesn't bother to turn off the lights when you leave the house, you may find this diet pretty painless. (And just think of the fringe benefits--lower heating bills, poorer oil barons.) But even if you're already a svelte recycler or a carpooler, there's a lot more you can do.

Thursday, August 24th, 2006 was a great day. We celebrated big that night. We went to one of our favorite restaurants and splurged. We had planned to take the next day off of work anyway so we stayed out a little late and really enjoyed ourselves.

The long battle wasn't officially over, but really all that was left was to negotiate the terms of the treaty. Friday would not be a day in court. Friday would be the first day of an all too fast ramp up to our new lives.

It's a long story, but if you have a bit, please join me on the flip for the story of my success.

Got a long weekend coming for the 4th? (US folks only I suppose...) What are you doing?

Yesterday my son Ben (15) got his first job. Sure, he's mowed lawns for the neighbors; he's done pay jobs around the house for us. But yesterday he got his first application filling out, interviewing, social security paying, away from home job.

He ran home the last block to tell us and gave me a huge hug with a face splitting grin.

WOOHOOO!

Ok, I guess it's about that time.

Time to write my introductory Diary. :)

I go by jakyra here and on DailyKos (where I heard about this site) I live in Twin Cities, MN.