going vegan

   For a long time now, Alex has kept her ear to the rantings on the internet about the quality of our food. Before I knew her, she had tried dieting, fasting and purging to help improve her life with apparently satisfactory results since she was successful in attracting me as a mate. Now that she's succeeded, she's still not satisfied. Now, it seems, she wants to keep her mate in tip-top shape for ever and ever. That's very flattering, but the trouble is, I have to change my habits, which I fear may change what she saw in me in the first place. I'm worried because I might become a little grumpy and her grand plan could backfire.
   Today for lunch, I put a cover over my lentil salad saving it for later. At supper time, we were served garden snails to top our whole grain spaghetti. I'm not sure this is pure 'vegan,' but it may be an abstract contribution to the success of our vegetable garden which will one day contribute to our "vegetable-based, whole foods" diet. In a previous post I have already mentioned bird seed as an important contribution to our youthful complexions. Every morning we get a heap of ground up flax seed on top of our soy-milk muesli. One thing is certain: I remain a lean, mean, fighting machine.
    It's easy to say it all started with a movie called "Forks over Knives," but that's not really true. The movie is just the latest in a long string of reinforcements to the conclusion that what the grocery stores are selling isn't that good for us. Prior to watching the movie, Alex read a book called Fats That Heal, Fats that Kill. The book drags everyone through a first year study of biochemistry, before concluding that veggies are good and meat is bad. And flax seed meal is really good. Full of fresh omega-3s. Now we are moving on to the the writing of Colin Campbell, first his distillation of data in the China Study, and then on to Whole which I have a feeling will promise me an old age of worn out teeth.
    Parallel to this, I accidentally discovered the TED talk by an outrageous English thinker, Aubrey DeGray. His fast-paced argument proposes that my children may be faced with the prospect of immortality and that we need to get our "shit together." I've long wondered that the whole Darwinian thing of adaptation through natural selection is hopelessly old fashioned in the face of modern medicine, birth control, genetics technology, and wealth distribution. After all, we haven't been naturally selecting our food stocks for quite a while. George Bush and the Catholic Church may have interfered with embryonic stem cell research but the delay was brief. In Japan they have figured out you don't need embryonic cells, in fact, you don't need stem cells at all to clone to your heart's content. According to Nina Tandon, replacement body parts built from your own data is only 10 years away. It's nice to know that I no longer need to consider evolutionary improvements to myself, I feel pretty happy with myself as I am. Or do I?
    There is this other podcast (BBC's radio discussion 10 Billion) that's troubling me. Stephen Emmott writes that the global catastrophe is just around the corner. We don't have enough water and we have demonstrated that we have no intention of dealing with it. Apparently it takes four litres of water to produce one to drink, and 100 to produce one cup of coffee. With a growing population and shrinking ability to produce food, due to climate change, we're all going to die. But wait a minute, if we start living forever and stop having babies, maybe we can hold out till .... we're imortal!

permission granted

    26th August, 2013. I pinned to the wall, as required, our notification to the world that we are making

improvements to this little relic of history. It's been a long and costly grind, and is in fact our second permit it the ten years of working on this property.
   After 10 years you'd think there would be something to show off. That's a long time. But, sadly, there's not much to show. Most of it is under the building or hidden in the walls. But, time does allow evolutionary improvements through 'environmental selection.' A ten year record rainfall has demonstrated leaks in the basement and flooding in the garden, which we've been dealing with all summer. After years of observing the changing seasons, the prevailing winds, the path of sunlight, and traffic patterns around the house, we have made numerous changes in our approach to the final layout of land, rooms, doors and windows. The result improves with time.

'photo-shopped' concept of east elevation

    For example, in our main sitting room on the ground floor, I discovered that the east windows described in our original plans wouldn't work. They made some sense on paper but when it came time to plan wall demolition and construction of reinforcing elements there just wasn't any room for all this. Further, one of the windows would be so close to the corner of the building it would threaten the integrity of the wall. Not only did it violate common sense, it violated the building code. Knowing the inspectors were only keen on external changes that improved symmetry, I began to imagine replacing the two windows with one 'door.' The room already has two exterior doors and another large window so the light appeared sufficient, especially considering the ratio of glazed area to floor space, however the openings were all on one wall. Illumination was coming from only one direction leaving dark shadows everywhere and giving every face a dark side. I made a couple of re-touched photographs to illustrate the idea to all the doubters (which included everybody) and eventually I convinced our 'geometra' (architect/inspector) Ettore to submit a new design incorporating the changes.
   We needed to submit an extension of the permit anyway (for more time) and we had decided to move the

project from our old geometra to Ettore's office where we felt much more comfortable. Ettore speaks english, is young and well educated and has a keen affection for old buildings. What we didn't expect is that to accomplish all these changes, we were better off submitting an entirely new project requiring a whole new set of drawings, a repayment of filing fees, a new design review, and subjected us to a new set of anti-seismic laws following the earthquake in Aquila.
    It's a great relief to be back on the job (digging in the foundations felt like a serious reversal of fortune), but the job has gotten even bigger with the requirement of steel reinforcements. We have contracted our steel framing and Giles and I are having fun making a great big hole in the wall.