Blog Round Up

Here's a quick review of the blogs I'm involved in producing...

Organic Gardening Blog. I've been gardening organically for most of my life, and blogging about the experience for many years now. I offer organic gardening advice, products, best practices, and more.

Internet Marketing and Organic SEO. I make web sites get higher search engine rankings, and I blog about how to do it so you can learn for free what to do to your websites to get higher ranks.

Free Desktop Wallpaper and Computer Backgrounds Photography. We've been posting free desktop wallpaper on our sites since we started Supak.com in 1996. We have cityscapes, high resolution nature photos, Hawaii pictures, and more at the Photog Blog.

Hawaii Blog. Hawaii vacations information and all the latest on everything Hawaiian that we post on any of our sites. Occasionally features guest bloggers from Hawaii.

Satan Wrote the Bible. This blog is written by a friend of mine and is full of Bible commentaries that serve as thought exercise for people who are so sure about what one cannot, by definition, be sure about.

Bush Treason Blog. That's right: I believe George Bush and many of his administration committed treason when they ignored warnings of an impending 9-11, pulled out of Tora Bora and let Bin Laden go, and lied us into a war against a country that had nothing to do with 9-11.

Los Angeles Catering Blog. Culinary Delight Catering in Los Angeles provides delicious food for any event at a reasonable price. No matter how fancy or simple the festivities, they can provide exactly the right catered food or craft services, including organic.

Grass-fed Beef Jerky Blog. We've started a small-batch, hand-made, grass-fed beef jerky business, and we now have a blog about grass-fed jerky and why eating grass-fed beef is better for you, the animal, and the planet.

Food Centric

Seems my life has evolved around food. Not sure why, really. My family wasn't all that big on food. My Dad liked to make his specialty things, like award winning chili. But there weren't any restaurant workers in my family, until I got my first job as a dishwasher at Le Mirabelle, a French restaurant in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where I grew up. I managed to work my way up to salad chef, and did the deserts for a while.

Then I worked at Mikes, a beer joint on the south side of the tracks, where I cooked hamburgers and served beer in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I went to college. That was an experience worth forgetting. So, I got out of the food service life, until I met my wife, who was a cook in Hawaii before she started slinging beers at the 326 Bar in the Farmer's Market in LA, next door to CBS Television City, where I was working as a stagehand.

The rest is history.

Our vacations to New York and points east were always based around food, not the least of which was always a few days at the house or Robin's cousins, Cathy and Eric, owners and operators of Woodstock Moveable Feast, a Hudson Valley catering company. Staying at their house was always a culinary adventure! The picture above is from their website.

When I became disabled and couldn't work as a stagehand anymore, we moved back east to be near Robin's family here in Cherry Valley, where our brother-in-law, Clem, runs The Rose and Kettle, a gourmet restaurant near Cooperstown, and he has a delicious food blog. He met his wife, Dana Spiotta, when they both worked at the Giorgio's of Gramercy, a great place to eat in New York City.

Once we moved up here, we started looking for business projects. Since farming and ranching is so big up here, we thought we'd team up with a local grass-fed beef outfit to make Robin's gourmet beef jerky. Robin met Sonia, who along with her partner Dave, run Nectar Hills Farm, which grows grass fed and pasture raised meats, including the naturally low-fat Highlander Cattle (they have less fat because they have hair, as you can see in this picture), the top round from which we make into naturally healthy and delicious gourmet grass-fed beef jerky.

My friend Mort Mather, who lives (happily) up in Maine, and I converse regularly about organic gardening, which he does for his son's southern Maine restaurant. He and I go way back to the early days of the internet when I published his organic gardening articles at my organic gardening web site (which was one of the world's first).

I've started gardening again (albeit lazily due to my physical limitations) and it seems my food friends will never let me fade away from the culinary life: My Los Angeles caterer client, Emma, now has a LA Catering blog. Even my Maui bed and breakfast client often writes about the delicious tropical fruit she grows in her garden.

Oh, and then there's the organic Kona coffee farm that I used to do the web site for, back when Dr. Faust ran it. He sold it to Mike, who now, because times are tough, pays me with the best coffee on earth, because he's not making enough money to pay me with cash. And that's fine, because, well, it's organic Kona coffee!

So, somewhere out there someone's going to be reading this, and they'll think, hey, this guy's all about food! Let's contact him! Since we gave up eating pork almost two years ago now (for ethical and environmental reasons), and we try to eat only grass-fed meat, and we grow a lot of our own food, and we try to stay away from fast food, and we are the very definition of a slow food family, I just hope that person is Michael Pollan.

I Wrote it on the Calendar: F'ing Snow!

That's right. We couldn't afford a calendar for this year, so I print a new month from the free printable calender site. New month comes along, as they tend to do like trucks engine breaking down the slope approaching the big hill near here, and we recycle the old one. So, yeah, we'll only see the words "F'ing Snow" written on the 16th of this month for two more weeks. And then, of course, it will be November, and there will be snow on the north edges of the house that will stay there till March, and October 16 will slowly get forgotten, like all the 110 degree days back in the California desert are just reports we here from our daughter occasionally.

But there it was this morning, a little spotty dusting of snow, kind of pitiful by upstate standards (less by weight than GW Bush's lifetime blow total), keeping the radicchio nice and cool until the sun could come up and thaw all the greens out enough to keep them alive for another day. Gardening in this big walk-in fridge of a summer has been challenging (see the last few posts at the Organic Gardening Blog). But, hey, it's something to do... Saves a few bucks, tastes better than the store's crap, and gives me something to think about besides the lack of TV, the constant calls from bill collectors, and the pain.

All the latest evidence suggests that we're nearing the end of our experiment in poverty, stress, and depression. Well, at least poverty. Thanks to Obama, there are new administrative law judges being hired, and my Social Security Disability appeal hearing happens around Thanksgiving, a full year earlier than we would have expected under a President McCain. Ask any SSD lawyer what one of the biggest differences is between R's and D's, and there's your answer. R's don't give a shit about people who are hurt and disabled. Let them eat what they can grow.

So, with that hearing coming soon, and the lawsuit back in Cali winding it's way to some inevitable ending that has been pre-diminished by Governor Arnold's shiny new corporate sponsored worker's decompensation laws, there is actually a chance that we could get some back money to stop these damn calls, and enough monthly to put us solidly back in the lower middle class, where like the scattered white trash of snowy spots this morning that melt as fast as the sun can find them.

Of course, there's still a few months to go before that triumphant return, and there's still the possibility of another welfare Christmas, but there's hope. Which leads me to the two endings I can't avoid here. One is a joke from the bonus features on the last disc of the Dr. Katz series that we just watched from Netflix (our equivilant of TV now): Dr. Katz's bar friend Stan tells Julie the bartender this joke:

I don't eat free-range chicken; I can taste the hope.

And then there's the welfare Christmas bit, which is from Everclear.

New life. Yeah.

Busy Spring Gardening and Making Friends

Well, as you can tell I haven't been posting to this blog. That's because when I'm not working creating new web sites, or working on other people's sites getting them higher search engine ranks, I'm in the organic garden which I had to build, since this is our first year up here near Cooperstown NY.

I just finished making a site for our new friends who raise grass-fed beef and meats at Nectar Hills Farm. I've also been putting in a smaller garden for the Rose and Kettle Restaurant in Cherry Valley. Plus, Robin has been making grass-fed beef jerky from the Nectar Hills Farm highland cattle, both of which are delicious. We're selling the grass-fed beef jerky at the Nectar Hills Farm store in Cherry Valley, and at the Cooperstown Farmer's Market. We're hoping it will be available in a few other places soon!

Those of you subscribed to this blog's feed know that I often post things to that feed through delicious. I'm not sure how to make them appear here (which is odd, because I should be able to figure that out), but if you subscribe you'll be treated to all kinds of fun posts in your reader.

Organic Gardening And Blogging About It (again)!

Back in the cave man days of the internet, I created one of the world's first organic gardening web sites. We lived in the mountains north of Los Angeles, and I had a great backyard garden. Then we moved to Hawaii for a year, and we had a banana tree and a small tropical garden. Then we moved back to LA, and for over 10 years I just didn't have enough room or soil to grow anything but a few flowers. So, I got a little out of practice.

Because of my recent disability retirement from the stagehand world, we moved to upstate NY, and now I'm gardening again, blogging about it in the Organic Gardening News Blog, and loving it. The fall garden of greens, peas, lettuce, spinach, and, of course, arugula for election night are all doing great, despite the four frosts we've had already. Every day is another day of fresh, local, solar powered food before a long winter.