alexandra_thorn

That was a lot of hoops to jump through, but I finally got Signal set up without a smart phone.

If you have my phone number, and use Signal, it'd be awesome if you can drop me a line so I can get you into my address book.

---

For anyone else who wants to do this, there are several pieces that you need:
* a phone number you own, and access to the phone during setup
* a computer that you own that is connected to the internet, and onto which you can install software
* signal-cli (https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli) - a third party utility for running Signal on the computer from the command line
* the Signal desktop app (https://signal.org/download/)
* a tool for resolving QR codes into text (e.g. https://zxing.org/)

Steps I took:
1) I installed the Signal desktop app (https://signal.org/download/). I'm using Debian and I was kinda uneasy about the fact that the official Linux app (billed as being for all distributions) has "Xenial" in the name, but it seems to work.

2) I installed signal-cli (https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli) using the Debian/Ubuntu packages listed here (https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli/wiki/Binary-distributions)

3) I used my package manager to install signal-cli-jre from the repo I used in the previous step. I'm not sure whether I made a mistake that caused it to not install at first, or if that step is somehow not in the instructions.

4) Registered my phone number as an account. This is where things went a bit off the rails, because the confirmation process assumes that you'll be using a smart phone to resolve QR codes. You have to circumvent that process by instead pasting the confirmation string into the signal-cli command line tool. This is covered in the Usage section of the signal-cli page, but it doesn't quite lay things out in terms of how to get the code to paste into the command line. Eventually I found this tutorial (designed for Windows) took me through the correct steps, although I needed to adjust the instructions a bit for Linux (https://deinalptraum.iwr.sh/p/how-to-set-up-signal-messenger-via-landline-number-on-windows/).

Relevant quote:

To proceed, open the link mentioned in the error message and complete the Captcha. The site will ask for permission to open the Signal app; Decline this. Below the captcha box, there should be a clickable “Open Signal” text. Right-click this, copy the link and paste it into a text editor.

I actually was able to paste the text directly into the command line tool without editing it in a text editor. Not sure why that worked.

5) Tested that signal-cli was working correctly by running the "receive" command.

6) Linked my new account to the desktop app, again modifying the Windows instructions section on "Link Signal account to app": https://deinalptraum.iwr.sh/p/how-to-set-up-signal-messenger-via-landline-number-on-windows/

This last step is where I needed to use the QR code resolver tool (e.g. https://zxing.org/).

Quote from the Windows instructions:

Now install the Signal app on your computer, if you haven’t already, and open it. The app should show a QR code and ask you to pair the instance by scanning it with your phone.
But we’re not gonna do that.

Parse the QR code by e.g. cutting it out via snipping tool and uploading it to zxing.org, or use a QR code scanner on your phone and send yourself the parsed code.

(emphasis theirs)

The parsed code then needs to be pasted into the appropriate signal-cli instruction.

---

So, that was a headache. But it seems to work? It would help if I had people to chat with so I could test it out. One friend seems to have noticed my registration yesterday and sent me a greeting (which I saw the first time I successfully ran the signal-cli receive command), and I've sent him some replies, but I haven't gotten a response back to confirm that they went through.

I'm a little hazy on how identity works on Signal. I think it comes down to phone numbers, but the Windows instructions I found for setting up Signal with a landline include this caveat:

"Note that, if you ever need to switch to/add another device, you can do so with the addDevice command from above. But for this you’ll need this specific signal-cli instance as far as I know… so don’t delete it! Though you should be able to recover it using your landline number for voice confirmation again, if you really need to."

That sounds a little confusing. Having control of both the computer with signal-cli installed and the account's phone number seems safest?

It's been a hell of a week. Given 1) my values, and 2) my understanding of history, I am naturally appalled by the outcome of Tuesday's presidential election. Like many others, I am also seeing this as a call to action.

There are some ideas I'd had a few years ago about better ways to engage with people that I never followed up with, and now I really wish I had. So, I'm going to try to pursue those now. Alongside everything else.

Small conversations for support and strategizing

My idea centers on community-building through small-group conversation, working toward identification of shared values and areas for action. I'm realizing now that another piece of this is to understand what others' needs are in order to help set priorities. A third goal is to start to build up mutual support structures, so that we are all less alone.

I want to start just by starting to have some one-on-one semi-structured conversations, possibly working toward and intentional conversations in small groups about values and what matters to each of us. I've started the process of finding people interested in these conversations, and am currently thinking through what kind of structure I will want to use. Probably a handful of guiding questions and let the conversation go where it will from there.

Let me know if you're interested in participating in something like this with me. Also feel free to reach out if you have similar ideas and want to bounce ideas off of each other.

Thoughts on conversation structure: values, safety, and feelings

As I've started to think through what the guiding questions should be, I'm realizing that there are several interrelated layers that need to be considered. Values are central to what I'm hoping to do, but safety is central to everything, and I think basic assessment of safety is going to need to be part of the conversation. Meanwhile emotions pervade everything: emotional safety is part of safety, feeling safe or unsafe strongly affects emotions, values inform emotional reactions, and emotions can magnify or distort feelings of safety and unsafety, potentially warping sense of risk.

Positionality, risk, and risk perception

There *are* real risks in the world today and will be more in the years head, but it isn't necessarily true that everything that scares us poses a genuine risk to our safety. And risks are different for different people. Social position matters. Race, wealth, connections, language, gender, gender history, citizenship status, ability status, physical health etc. all affect the magnitude and immediacy of any dangers.

Our reactions to events are affected by the behavior of those around us, and there is a natural tendency to cue our own behaviors off of the behaviors of those around us, but in reality our needs are different. The needs of---and dangers to---people with chronic health conditions are not the same as those to people in relatively good health. The needs of parents are different from the needs of people without children. Age matters. Religion matters. Marital status matters. Career and employment status matter. And the relative visibility of differences matters too.

The upshot is that some of us have more urgent reasons to take personal protective action than others. Some people have more critical needs than others, and also the thing that is most urgent for one person might be different from the thing that is most urgent for another. Is the highest priority to stockpile medication? To speak out? To take cover? To leave the country? Those answers won't be the same for everybody, and the ability to triage our *own* situations can help to make things safer for those whose critical needs are different from our own.

Time scales

It's also important to think about time scales. The world *feels* different right now, but political leadership won't change until the new year. Some concrete things are happening now in preparation for that change, others won't occur until the political transition, some of which will take time and others of which might not happen at all. And there is additional complexity because certain future events occur or not depends on the actions we take now and in the months ahead.

I've been thinking about these issues as a process my own feelings following the election. ( A personal story )

Depending on how things progress, it could become extremely important to continually ask ourselves whether we are in immediate danger. Sometimes we might be, and it will be important to notice. Secondary questions are whether danger exists in the near term (or longer term), and how definite it is.

Circles of care

With all of this in mind, I'm realizing that an important part of the semi-structured conversations I'm hoping to have could be to think about concentric circles of care. We can't attend to issues that matter to us in the broader world if we don't attend to our own immediate needs. Only then can we attend to those in our immediate vicinity, and to the people closest to us, and ultimately to society and the broader world.

So I think before trying to dig into questions about values, I'll want to ask people about their immediate situation. This might be as simple as a question of "how are you doing?", but trying to make it clear that this is not just as a courteous formality. I've heard a lot of talk in the past several days about mutual aid, and I think that tuning in to what is going on with others is part of this. If our goal is to help one another, then a part of that needs to be understanding what kinds of help others might need---to do what we can to ensure that it is safe to talk about what's going on with each of us.

A useful conversation structure might parallel the "loving-kindness" meditation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitr%C4%AB#Mett%C4%81_meditation), which prompts us to first direct compassion and love at ourselves, and then toward those closest to us, working our way out to the world in general. I think it will also be useful to think about the "comfort in, dump out" model of circles of grief / ring theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_theory_(psychology)). We all have work to do, but depending on our situation, the most important work might be simply to get through the day, or to ensure medium-term stability for our own households.

Navigating this space can be messy. It may be very important for those of us with relative privilege to do various kinds of advocacy work, and it might also be easier to do that work when we do it together with members of our communities so building those communities is crucial, but it's important that calls to action not put undue pressure on members of our communities are highly vulnerable, or who might be in chronic pain, or who are already doing a lot of work to support others. I've occasionally posted calls to action on social media with the unintended result of causing people more vulnerable than myself to feel guilty about not doing more. It wasn't my intention, but unintended consequences matter. It's important to be able to support one another's self care.

Ultimately, I think it has to be up to each individual to assess what kind of work they want to do and how much they are capable of.

Conclusions

Ideally, I'd like to structure conversations in a way that helps to identify both 1) what people need---how they meet those needs, and what ongoing or future changes worry them---which can help to clarify what kind of work is needed in the world, and 2) to help understand each person's values and priorities, how those values are reflected in their everyday lives, and any changes that they might want to make.

I think I'll be formulating questions that start with each person's immediate situation ("how are you doing") and that of their loved ones, and then proceeding to questions about values, hopes, and worries, and how we enact our values. Somewhere in there I'll want to also talk about responses to ongoing and anticipated change. It's all a bit of an experiment, but I think this is my starting point.

Please disregard.

I've found that my experience of Mastodon is rather different from other social media I've tried. The people I follow on Mastodon are generally people I'd never met or heard of before. In that sense, it's almost the exact opposite of Facebook, which I think primarily provides a way of finding and connecting with people you already know.

The question, then, is how have I discovered people worth following. When I first joined cybre.space, my account was automatically subscribed to the admins of the server, and I think that's a pretty standard practice on Mastodon servers. That gives some exposure to content, and on some servers the admins have a standard practice of boosting introductory toots by new members, which can also help. All of the above relies on network effects, but there are a few other discovery tools on Mastodon as well.

Hashtags

I believe the primary discovery tool on Mastodon is hashtags. As a reaction against some of the more toxic dynamics on Twitter Mastodon intentionally does not provide tools to search the regular text of toots, but does provide a search interface for finding hashtags used in profiles and toots that your server knows about (users on that server, content on other servers that users on your own server have boosted or faved).

Hashtags are a pretty standard tool on Twitter and other social media. Any text string without spaces becomes a hash tag if you add the hash/number symbol ('#') in front. In Mastodon, when you do a search for a hashtag, you get back a list of tags that contain the search string, along with a bit of information on how much they are being used:



A low number of hits doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't people discussing a topic---not everyone uses hashtags, partly as a stylistic thing, and partly because many Mastodon users don't want to be found at all---but it can be a great starting point for seeing what is out there. Often you can use search to start to find discussion threads of potential interest, from which you can pivot to finding users with common interests and/or discover related tags to search for.

If you want people to be able to discover your account and posts, hashtags are a great way to help that to happen.

Databases and curated lists

There are also a number of people who have started to put together curated lists of users with particular interests. In general, Mastodon subcultures are big on privacy, so these lists are generally only of users who have requested to be included, people who are actively trying either to be found or to find people to connect with.

I've found a number of interesting users through Trunk: https://communitywiki.org/trunk/

People can use the form here https://communitywiki.org/trunk/request to request to have their accounts listed on Trunk, and specify what interests they want to be listed under. The Trunk admins then review the accounts which have made requests, screening for anything that looks like it might be a fake account or otherwise a bad actors.

There's also a directory of users, organized by the hashtags in their profiles, available here https://fediverse.info/explore/people. I haven't used this one as much, and it appears not to be curated.

At the other end of the spectrum, the user fedifollows@mastodon.online posts about interesting accounts to follow, and has recently put together a curated list of users organized by interest (https://fedi.directory/).

Themed instances

Some Mastodons have subject matter themes or serve specific communities or subcultures. This can be another way of finding interesting people. The way this has worked for me is that, having discovered users through searches or by pivoting through social networks, I'll sometimes notice that a bunch of users with common interests or who are posting to the same threads on the same server. Often there's a clue in the server name for what the theme might be.

Sometimes when I've noticed a lot of users with common interests coming from the same server, I've followed up by visiting the server's main page and looking around. There's generally a "rules" or "about" page that gives information about server policies and the mission / intended audience. And there's generally a users or "explore" page where you can see a list of users on the server.

Here are some servers that I've discovered in this way, together with a short quote from their about page:
* https://scicomm.xyz/about/more - "This instance is aimed at scientists, science students, science communicators, future-scientists, or anyone with a rational mindset wanting to interact with each other and to help share your perspectives with the wider Fediverse."
* https://sunbeam.city/about/more - "Sunbeam City (or SBC for short) is a young cooperative of individuals whose mission is to promote what we believe to be the values of the solarpunk movement."
* https://scholar.social/about/more - "This is a queer-friendly general-purpose federated Mastodon instance. You may use it as a personal account, but the focus is on academics. Scholar Social has been described as 'The teacher's break room of the Fediverse.'"

Exploration examples

Back in May 2022, I made a post on my locked Dreamwidth, asking people for possible search terms / communities that folks I know might look for on Mastodon.

Here's some themes that came up in that discussion:
* Autism
* Brewing
* Fanfiction
* Fermentation
* Gardening (https://communitywiki.org/trunk/grab/Gardening)
* Homesteading
* Native plants
* Permaculture (https://communitywiki.org/trunk/grab/Permaculture)
* Polyamory / Consensual non-monogamy (https://communitywiki.org/trunk/grab/Consensual%20Non-Monogamy)
* Seed saving
* Tango

For topics that are listed on Trunk, I've added a link to the relevant Trunk user list.

Some of the above topics either 1) are emotionally charged and private (e.g. autism, polyamory), 2) cover technical information that I'm not sure I would be able to filter effectively (e.g. fermentation), or 3) just generally encompass too many subtopics (e.g. fanfiction). So for demonstration purposes I'm going to do a bit of poking around in the general areas of gardening/plants and tango.

Gardening

At the time I did the search for #gardening, 65 people were speaking about the topic. Right-clicking on the "#gardening" hashtag and selecting "open in new tab" gives me a full page view of the active discussions of gardening:
https://social.coop/tags/gardening


Many of the posts that came up are intro/bio posts, and I could click through to explore the users. This also gives me the option of discovering related hashtags that I might not have thought of, such as #harvest:
https://social.coop/tags/harvest

(I zoomed my browser out a bit to get more food images into the screenshot. It all looks delicious!)

Note that the above is the link to the #harvest tag on my own instance (social.coop). If I instead click on the tag link on the post where I saw it, I get a different collection of posts:
https://mstdn.social/tags/harvest


Tango

When I first tried searching for #tango on Mastodon, I was a little concerned that I'd have trouble finding actual content on Argentine tango as opposed to what I'm sure are gazillions of commercial products that have adopted the short, charismatic, punchy name "tango." (My parents even have a car that is "tango red.")

That turned out not to be a particular problem. On the other hand, most of the hits are (unsurprisingly) not in English:
https://social.coop/tags/tango


Still, if you scroll down a bit, there are a few people posting about tango in English, which could be a starting point for finding an English-speaking tango community on Mastodon.

There were also some other hashtags incorporating the text string "tango" that came up in my initial search:


In past searches for other terms I've had some luck clicking around on similar hashtags, but in this case it didn't turn up much. I also tried doing some searches from other servers, but the content seemed about the same as from social.coop, so there might truly not be that much out there (at least in English).

Summary

I hope this post has given a decent overview of some tools for finding people on Mastodon. Some communities are better represented than others, but it's hard to know what's out there until you look. As I've remarked to a friend, Mastodon is full of iconoclasts. Lots of alternative lifestyles and alternative politics are well-represented. Some mainstream groups/activites are not as well represented (or at least are harder to find).

And of course, there are some things that are so mainstream as to be almost unavoidable...

We're coming up on the end of two weeks of travel, first to Florida to visit my family, and now in Virginia visiting my spouse's family. It has been really good, and I am sad that it is coming to an end.

Meanwhile, the world is threatening to tear itself apart and so many things are big and scary. The things that keep me grounded are being in nature, one-on-one connections, and doing things with my hands. That last one is particularly important, especially when it comes to crafts.

My parents' yard in Florida is overgrown with a bunch of plants that I don't know the names of, which is a bit disorienting when I'm used to living eating, weeding, and making things from familiar plants in Massachusetts. I still don't know most of them, but was able to successfully identify cat's claw vine (https://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/pestalert/2021/01/22/cats-claw-vine-florida-invasive-plant-added-to-state-noxious-weed-list/), which is classified as "Category 1" invasive. There were actually only a few of the vines around in the yard, and---given that it is actually native to Central and South America and the West Indies---I get the sense that maybe its presence in Florida is part of a natural range expansion with climate change, and that perhaps the biggest concern about it is as an agricultural pest, but I decided that its invasive status was a good enough reason to pull the vines I was able to find and try making a basket out of them (see my previous post on crafts with invasive plants: https://alexandra-thorn.dreamwidth.org/55068.html).

The cat's claw vines are very slender but very nice to work with. As is my habit, I just pulled the vines and worked with them green. Here is the little basket I made:


Here in Virginia, my mother-in-law, who is an avid potter, coached me through making a mug. I am very happy with the result:


I've also been wanting for a while now to see what the notoriously invasive kudzu is like as a basket-weaving material. My spouse and I went on an expedition to the Rivanna River to find some, and located a large patch just as we were about to give up. The hike was pretty disheartening in a lot of ways. For a good quarter mile along the river we found no kudzu but lots and lots of oriental bittersweet and porcelain berries (not grapes, which we initially mistook them for), as well as catbriar and invasive yams. I think the only native vine we did see was poison ivy. There was also a lot of Japanese knotweed, ailanthus, and invasive roses. TimMc made a remark about coming through with an herbicide sprayer, and I said yes you could spray everything except the poison ivy, and then someone else will come by and spray the poison ivy and then this will look like a moonscape. The whole venture was a good case study in why it won't always work so well to just pull the invasives, that in this kind of space it really would be necessary to clear patches and work on getting native plants established there, and then work along the edges.

When we finally found the kudzu, it was growing on top of a patch of Japanese knotweed, because of course it was. It also turned out not to be what I was expecting (for some reason I thought it was woodier), but we gathered a few coils of the vines for me to play around with.

Back at the house, I spent some time in the woods pulling bittersweet vines. I gathered a bunch that had covered significant horizontal distance by coiling around a dead log. Interestingly, these horizonally-growing vines seemed much more flexible, more uniform in diameter, and generally easier to work with than the bittersweet vines I'd pulled off of trees previously. Perhaps something about growing in shade while the plant tries to cover distance.

In the end, I made a rather large basket mostly out of bittersweet, with the kudzu as just a single band of the weavers (shown between the two white bands of bittersweet with the bark removed). There are a number of clumsy aspects of the final basket, but it was fun to make something really big... facilitated by the rather long straight bittersweet vines I pulled:


To round-out our travels, yesterday we went to an artificial beach on Chris Greene Lake. We spent a long time playing around in the water and seeing how close we could get to the fish that hung around the swim area. Toward the end, I had some fun arranging pebbles from the beach:


All of this has been good and much-needed grounding. Islands of sanity in a world of growing chaos.

This summer I've taken up basket-weaving with invasive plants, and it's been a lot of fun.

My inspiration has been a series of posts by a Mastodon user in the Pacific Northwest, who goes by Sun. In the post below, she shared a bunch of YouTube videos on uses for invasive plants in her region: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106224053654975394 [*]

The top video on the list, on splitting English ivy to make baskets, caught my eye and I ended up watching a couple of Christi York's videos on processing English ivy for basketry (Christi York's channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPYoF83WiuwfWf94R6n5hXw). The videos were pretty cool, but I was actually most attracted to the "rustic" basket she held up as an example in one of the videos, so I decided to take a shot at basket-weaving with unprocessed green English ivy.

The conventional wisdom in basketry is to first dry and then the soak materials, which is supposed to result in less shrinkage and distortion of the final product, but this sounded more complicated than I wanted to deal with, and my partner, TimMc, who had taken a basketry class when he was in high school, encouraged me to just go ahead, saying that basket-making is very easy and it's not really necessary to soak the materials. I'd learned a little bit of basket-making theory in Tom Brown's Tracker School many years ago, but it hadn't seemed easy then, and it wasn't something that I ever pursued.

English ivy baskets

English ivy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedera_helix) is a popular ornamental plant with dark-green foliage. Its popularity as a ground-cover might have something to do with its effectiveness at excluding other plants, and will also grow up trees and walls. The aesthetic appeal is easy to understand but it poses real problems for native plants here in North America.

There's a ton of English ivy in our next-door neighbor's yard, and we've been given permission to spend time in there and the neighbor is appreciative of TimMc's willingness to pursue landscaping projects back there (he's gradually working toward his goal of recreating the Appalachian woodland ecosystems of his childhood here in the city), so it was very straightforward to wander over, rip out a bunch of English ivy, and get started. Two days later, I finished my first basket:



( More English ivy baskets )

Black swallow-wort cordage

Making cordage has been a sort of idle hobby for me for ages now, basically since I first attended Tracker School. My favorite materials have been milkweed and dogbane, though I've also worked with basswood bark and tulip tree bark, and I made a really nice cedar necklace cord while actually at Tracker School. I tend to make pretty fine, tight, cord, and generally accumulate about 2 feet of cord before I get sidetracked.

My usual materials are obtained without harm to the plants, from dead milkweed/dogbane stalks in the fall, or from fallen tree branches. Last fall I idly pulled up a dead stem of black swallow-wort, and quickly concluded that the stem fibers were stronger than milkweed and possibly as strong as dogbane. The disadvantage is that the stems are a lot skinnier, so you get a lot less fiber per plant. When I started thinking about uses for invasive plants this year, I started to wonder whether cord could be made from green stems of black swallow-wort that I weed around the neighborhood.

Black swallow-wort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincetoxicum_nigrum) is an escaped weed species that has become naturalized here in the Northeastern U.S., and according to Wikipedia is classified as an invasive in Massachusetts and New York. The Wikipedia article mentions that it is specifically a threat to monarch butterflies because of its tendency to crowd out milkweed, but evidently, it is also a "trap-plant" for monarch larvae (https://hhltmaine.org/monarch-butterflys-nemesis-black-swallow-wort/). Because black swallow-wort is a cousin to the milkweeds, monarchs will sometimes lay their eggs on it, even though the plant is toxic to the caterpillars.

This information turns out to have been a great way of getting the kid interested in removing invasives. Monarchs are her favorite butterflies, and she was not pleased to learn that this particular plant hurts them. When she sees black swallow-wort she immediately asks me whether it's okay for her to start pulling it out.

Here is a photograph of black swallow-wort crowding out three milkweed plants, which I took last weekend in the wild area across the street from Waltham Fields Community Farm:


(TimMc and I did our best to free these milkweed plants of the vines, but it was delicate work and a couple of the plants ended up a bit mangled.)

Earlier this summer I set aside some of the plants I'd weeded from around the neighborhood to see what I could do with the fibers after they'd dried. Here's a short cord I made with the fibrous outer layer from three partially dried plants:


The cord is pretty strong but stiff and kind of scratchy. At some point I'd like to try a retting process to see if I can separate just the fibers, which would give a softer cord, though possibly not as strong.

Oriental bittersweet

Oriental bittersweet is another invasive vine in the eastern U.S., introduced to North America in the late 19th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celastrus_orbiculatus). The ecological role of Oriental bittersweet is complicated by the fact that there's a closely related native bittersweet species with which it can hybridize, and it's actually quite difficult to tell the two species apart. Lots of birds will eat the berries too, which points to it not being entirely harmful to local ecosystems. On the other hand, the birds do a great job of dispersing bittersweet over long distances, where it can wreak havoc on native forests.

Bittersweet can grow as a low shrub but is most visible (and harmful) in its vining habit. It tends to form rather elegant helices around trees and other plants:


To my eye bittersweet is a really very beautiful vine, but it can girdle, overwhelm, and kill a tree in a matter of years. Shortly after I got started making English ivy baskets, I mentioned to TimMc that I thought Oriental bittersweet would be a great basketry material, but he wasn't sure. A few weeks later he pulled some out of a wooded area at Waltham Fields and offered it to me. I experimentally bent it and saw what he meant: the stems are quite brittle, and it doesn't take much bending to cause them to snap and splinter.

But... when we were visiting TimMc's parents a couple weeks ago, I was suddenly without an easy source of English ivy, but there was a massive supply of bittersweet (which is much more difficult to eliminate) in the woods behind his parents' house. I decided to take a shot at weaving a small basket out of only the slenderest portions of bittersweet vines:


( More adventures with bittersweet baskets and cordage, including some successes. )

Addendum: Reflections on uses for invasive species

Following our discovery about the strength of fibers from the inner bark of Oriental bittersweet, TimMc joked, "Bittersweet is useful. I don't think there's enough of it in Boston[***]. Maybe I should bring some seed back with me."

We would of course never do this, but the impulse expressed is real. When you get into growing and using plants, and learn a little bit about plant propagation, there's a powerful urge to cultivate anything that seems interesting or useful. TimMc grew up helping out with his father's seed company, and is the one who taught me that a large portion of the produce section of supermarkets can be used to propagate food plants. He often carries small containers with him on walks, so that he can gather seeds from interesting plants he might encounter.

On this most recent visit to TimMc's parents, we also delighted in harvesting invasive wineberries from the woods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus_phoenicolasius). TimMc pointed out to me that we should really be pulling those plants out as well, and yeah, we really should have. Granted, wineberries have formidable spines, and we really wouldn't have wanted to touch the stems without some heavy duty gloves, but it was also quite a bit harder for me to work up enthusiasm for bringing gloves into the woods, knowing how delicious the berries are. Instead we made a miniscule impact on the plant by taking a few berries that might otherwise have been dispersed by birds. Maybe next time.

Last Indigenous People's Day, I attended a virtual discussion of food sovereignty with a showing of the movie _Gather_. Afterward, I asked the guest speaker for her thoughts on how I, as a privileged person with high access to quality food and farmers markets, should feel about having harvested acorns that could have gone to feeding someone else. The speaker responded that she thinks it's really important to use the plants on your local landscape, and that the plants will feel better and grow better knowing that someone is using and appreciating how important they are. The response was a little bit of a puzzle, but definitely made a kind of sense, and I think it speaks to this urge we humans have to care for the plants and animals that we use.

Back in April, I wrote a Twitter thread exploring whether and when using a species helps or harms the species being used: https://twitter.com/AlexandraThorn9/status/1382336052757692418

With all of this complexity in mind, for those reading this who might be motivated to look at the other side of the equation---what plants to encourage for their uses---I'd like to close by mentioning some native alternatives that can be used in place of the above invasive plants:
* For baskets, encourage native grape species (https://eattheplanet.org/the-native-grape-vines-of-north-america/) or other native vines
* For cordage, encourage native milkweed species (https://blog.nwf.org/2015/02/twelve-native-milkweeds-for-monarchs/) or the closely related dogbane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocynum)
* Instead of wineberries, encourage black raspberries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus_occidentalis

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Footnotes

[*] Here are some of the cool things Sun has been working on this summer:
- Blackberry cordage: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106214882043038437
- Iris leaf rope: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106406742591109568
- Dandelion stem basket: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106416392932480263
- Japanese knotweed rope: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106432827933760971
- She's also trying to figure out whether she can make a bug hotel (typically made of bamboo) out of Japanese knotweed: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106263854951444607

[**] A basket can be made in a matter of hours, but $20+/hour would add up quickly. TimMc points out that if I pay myself $15/hour then I could charge $30 for a 2-hour basket, which people might be willing to pay, and which would pay better on an hourly basis than my old community college teaching gig (officially the college pays over $25/hour, but they only count classroom hours, which is a joke in terms of labor put into teaching; I laugh so that I don't cry). But my sense is that realistically a professional craftsperson needs to budget something like half their time to marketing and related endeavors, and I think if I were serious about making these for sale I probably wouldn't be working with green vines, which would add a bit of processing time.

[***] Seriously, there is more than enough bittersweet in and around Boston, presumably mostly the invasive species, although it's hard to tell. The stuff is absolutely everywhere that is even slightly ungroomed. Around here, if you see a tree with a vine coiled around it, that coil is bittersweet. In a lot of places you'll also see sawn off vines left behind by caretakers trying to keep the stuff at bay. Really, it's everywhere.

At this point, it's pretty clear that the big keys to managing the pandemic are masks and ventilation. Promising vaccines have been developed, but we're probably looking at about a year before they're widely distributed. Meanwhile, here in the northern hemisphere, winter is rapidly approaching.

Masks are inexpensive and do a lot to cut down infection risks, both individually and at the population level, but they aren't perfect, especially if you need to spend extended periods indoors. Because of the risks of being indoors, a lot of us have used outdoor spaces to meet with friends, and restaurants (where for obvious reasons masks can't be worn continually) have worked to stay open by relying more on outdoor seating. But that was in the summer. How are we going to get through the winter?

"Just stay home" is one solution, but not very appealing, especially after the past 8 months. Restaurants are experimenting with heating partially enclosed outdoor spaces, but even partial enclosure reduces the ventilation benefits of being outdoors dramatically. Lots of public buildings are hurrying to retrofit their ventilation systems for better filtration, but we aren't there yet.

If we're going to be seeing other humans outside of video calls at all this winter, I think it's time to think about winter clothing. A lot of the way we dress these days is geared toward centralized HVAC systems. Most of us can get by without older technologies such as long underwear. We don't go outside much, and when we do we tend to be walking or otherwise engaged in a physical activity such as bicycling. If you're going to be walking briskly, throwing a warm coat on over one or two layers of cotton is usually sufficient. That doesn't work as well if you want to sit down and have a long conversation.

To look for clothing solutions, I think we need to look at situations where people sit around outdoors in cold weather. Basically we're talking about winter camping. Fortunately, there's a ton of good information out there on dressing appropriately for winter camping. Here's an example: https://www.campingforfoodies.com/winter-camping-clothes/

The basic principles are pretty straightforward:
* Dress in layers
* Avoid cotton and other plant-based natural fibers such as linen and hemp
* The bottom layer should be a wicking layer (synthetic fiber or silk is recommended)
* Use middle insulating layers made of wool or synthetic fleece (EDIT: as was pointed out to me elsewhere, down is also a fantastic insulator as long as it doesn't get wet)
* The outer layer should be a windbreaking "shell"
* Wear a warm hat

For sedentary activities in particular, I think it's especially important not to neglect the lower half of the body, which tends to be kept warmer when we are walking around. So, all three layers (wicking, insulating, and windbreak) should be considered for pants as well as upper layers. Appropriate footwear is crucial as well.

When you're alternating between active and sedentary (going for a walk with a friend and stopping to sit and chat), it's also important to pay attention to how your body is doing and remove layers if you're feeling too hot. Being drenched in sweat is no fun in cold weather, especially if you stop moving and cool down.

Being outside in the cold isn't everybody's thing, but it doesn't have to be miserable experience if you're willing to layer up appropriately.

A while back, the kid discovered _Phoebe and Her Unicorn_ (https://www.gocomics.com/phoebe-and-her-unicorn/2012/04/29) at the library, and later on we began checking them out. Marigold and Phoebe quickly became characters in our regular make believe games, and when I was playing Marigold, I particularly relished the opportunity to strike a pose (with one front hoof lifted) and say:



This kind of became a thing outside of make believes too, and it was kind of driving the kid crazy for a while, but when we returned to Phoebe and Her Unicorn more recently, she has embraced it and has started doing it herself.

One day I asked the kid what she wanted for lunch, and she tossed her head and answered,


"I'll see what I can do," I said.

"Wait... what do you mean?" asked the kid.

So, here's what I did:


And of course, now *this* was a thing, so a few days later...


My spouse said I had to photograph that one, but I think that was mostly because he'd imagined that I'd somehow made it out of a single piece of bread. He was a bit less enthusiastic about the weirdly shaped pieces of bread I'd left in his bread bag...

Later:


And most recently:


Note the oregano sparkles. Also, because my partner's reaction to the previous bread unicorn was obviously a *challenge*, this one actually is from a single slice of bread.

Meanwhile, we've developed a whole mythology around the various stages of eating one of these things.

For example, when nothing but the horn is left, it is Lord Splendid Humility (https://www.gocomics.com/phoebe-and-her-unicorn/2013/02/23). Horn + ear equals Lord Spendid Humility failing to properly conceal his magnificence.

When just the head is present, it is Marigold in a box that is larger on the inside than the outside (https://www.gocomics.com/phoebe-and-her-unicorn/2019/12/25). And the front half of a unicorn, then, is obviously a unicorn stepping through an interdimensional portal (https://www.gocomics.com/phoebe-and-her-unicorn/2020/03/16).

I have also learned from the kid that a unicorn without legs is a narwhal, although this lesson came not from food but from this toy: https://www.michaels.com/unicorn-wooden-3d-puzzle-by-creatology/10602147.html.

And now you know.

I finally figured out a recipe for an actually tasty gluten free bread. One variant calls for eggs, the other is vegan, using flax eggs instead.

I do all the mixing by hand.

Dry ingredients
• 1 cup millet flour
• 1 cup tapioca starch
(corn starch or potato starch also works, but I have friends who are allergic to either corn or potatoes)
• 1/2 cup quinoa flour
• 1/2 cup brown teff flour
• 1/4 cup sorghum flour
• 1/4 cup fresh ground flax meal
• 1 Tbs xanthan gum
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Wet ingredients
• 3 eggs
(NOTE: for vegan variant can substitute 3 flax eggs;
1 flax egg = 1 Tbs flax + 3 Tbs water, mixed and chilled
in the fridge for 10 minutes or longer)
• 3 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoon maple syrup
• 1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar

Yeast-proofing ingredients
• Just under 1 cup hot (110-115F) water (I pour 1 cup and then remove 1 Tbs)
• 3 Tbs maple syrup
• 2 1/2 teaspoons dry active yeast (instant yeast seems to work equally well)

Equipment:
• Baking sheet
• Candy thermometer
• Cooling rack

Steps:
1) Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl and mix
2) Combine wet ingredients in a smaller bowl and mix
3) Combine proofing ingredients and let proof for 7 minutes (set a timer)
4) After the 7-minute proof, mix all ingredients until uniform, shape into a loaf on an oiled baking sheet
5) Start oven preheating to 375F
6) Let loaf rise for 30 minutes in a warm place (I use the stove top so that it gets the oven heat from the vents; if your setup is different, you might need a longer rise)
7) Bake until center of loaf is 200F to 210F is great (about 55 minutes)
8) Allow loaf to completely cool on cooling rack before slicing

Notes:
* Like most gluten free bread, this will come out pretty crumbly. It slices better with a chef's knife or other non-serrated kitchen knife than with a bread knife.
* I've had pretty good results coating the outside of the loaf with the residual contents of the wet ingredients bowl
* The dough is a bit wetter and stickier when real eggs are used than when flax eggs are used
* I once tried the real egg version without xanthan gum; the result was a liquid batter, which I poured into a loaf pan; the result was satisfactory, and was actually less crumbly, but it was not as sweet as usual, which suggests to me that the fermentation went further. NB: if you don't have xanthan gum on hand you *need* a loaf pan

(This recipe is modified from: http://www.allergyfreealaska.com/2012/03/12/gluten-rice-free-multigrain-bread/)

When I needed to drop wheat from my diet as part of the low-FODMAP diet, it was a strong motivator to figure out how to make my own granola.

The goal was to have something that provided more than just starch, was tasty, made with relatively unprocessed ingredients, and was not *too* high in sugar. I don't have an electric mixer, so I do all mixing by hand. With some trial and error, this is the recipe that I've come up with, adapted from the granola recipe in _How to Cook Everything Vegetarian_ by Mark Bittman.

The below is a double recipe relative to Bittman's recipe. I go through single recipes too quickly!

Ingredients:
* 2 lb rolled oats
* 4 cups nuts and seeds (I use two heaping cups of pecans, which I chop up, one cup of sesame seeds, and one cup of pumpkin seed pepitas)
* 2 cups fresh ground almond butter
* 1 cup pure maple syrup (you can substitute a simple syrup if price is an issue)
* 2 cups sweetened dried cranberries (make sure that the sweetener is low-FODMAP, e.g. sugar or pineapple juice)
* 34 g (~1/4 cup) unsweetened chocolate (I use Pascha brand 100% chocolate chips, but you can also chop up your favorite baking chocolate)
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Supplies:
* Two large mixing bowls (life is easiest if one is at least 2-gallons; I suppose you could make do with one 4-gallon mixing bowl)
* One small (1 quart or larger) mixing bowl
* Two 12x16 cookie sheets (you want the kind with a lip so the granola doesn't go anywhere) or equivalent area in baking pans
* Nice big spoon for stirring with

Steps:
1) Combine all nuts in one bowl, including any chopping you need to do, and set aside.
2) In small bowl, combine almond butter, maple syrup, salt, and cinnamon. Stir to a uniform consistency.
3) Put rolled oats into one cookie sheet on stove top across two burners on low, low heat.
4) Heat oats for 4 minutes while stirring to keep the oats above the burners from burning.
5) Add nuts to oats, and heat for another 4 minutes while stirring.
6) Turn on oven to pre-heat to 300F
7) Transfer oat-nut mixture into the 2-gallon mixing bowl, and pour on almond-butter syrup mixture. Stir until uniform. Beware of pockets of dry oats that sometimes hide in the center of the bottom of the bowl. This is a fair amount of stirring. It will look like granola by the time you are done mixing.
8) Spread out the granola mixture on the two cookie sheets and bake for 20 minutes.
9) While the granola is baking, prepare the two mixing bowls by adding half of the cranberries and half of the chocolate to the bottom of each.
10) Immediately after the the granola is finished baking, scoop the granola from each cookie sheet into one of the prepared bowls, and mix until uniform. The heat of the cooked granola will melt the chocolate so that it mixes into the granola.


Notes:
* Using nice large containers really reduces headaches, because there is a lot of stirring involved and granola has a tendency to go flying.
* The original recipe, which is *not* designed for a low-FODMAP diet, also calls for 2 cups of shredded coconut, added during the stovetop step, two minutes after the nuts. I think coconut granola tastes great but it is also a source of FODMAPS (see https://www.fodmapeveryday.com/is-coconut-low-fodmap/). Don't add it unless you are sure it is consistent with your diet.
* The recipe is pretty forgiving. Most ingredients can easily be dropped, and it works just as well with different dried fruits (chop the larger ones; and note that many fruits are high-FODMAP) or different seeds and nuts. However, in my experience it doesn't stick together properly with less than 1 cup of syrup. If you're trying for something lower sugar than this, you'll need to make additional modifications.