Transplanting a Seattleite

Maybe now I can quit trying to figure out who knows what a CSA and who doesn't. It's really been getting hard. If I explain it to someone who knows, they're offended. If I fail to explain it to someone who doesn't, they annoyed that I would just assume everyone knows.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/us/10farms.html

ETA: I don't quite understand a lot of what I read in the buy-local context. People seem to be up against a profound learning curve on what it's like to eat out of a garden or small farm, and preserving (whether through freezing, canning, drying, whatever) food to eat out of season seems to be a relatively late revelation (altho to be fair, Kingsolver seemed to go into her year fully cognizant). This article fits right into this context. Is the buy-local/CSA/etc. trend the first time people have had direct contact with farmers? I've got relatives who still farm; I assume other people do, too (altho this may be yet another artifact of the weird-religion thing in my family; the farmers are, at this point, all Mennonite or ex-Mennonite).

I'm in the middle of re-skimming _The End of Oil_ and in the middle of reading _Cash for Your Trash_. There may or may not be other books I'm also sort of reading. It's been one of those weeks.

I weeded not too long ago (my books, not at the library, not in anyone's garden) and after screwing up at TitleTrader (got rid of a box of books, forgot to remove them from my inventory, belatedly discovered, removed from my inventory and updated the ones I _had_ available to trade) and as a result had built up a substantial point balance at TitleTrader, which I recently used to request some trashy novels (Nora Roberts, this one, SEP's _Natural Born Charmer_, etc.) and this month's BPL book group selection _Sky Burial_. Which with my luck will arrive after the book group meets.

_You Slay Me_ came in the mail today, just in time to read while sitting outdoors while T. went up and down the driveway on his tricycle (still won't peddle, but getting damn good at pushing up the slight incline and then coasting back down), stepping in and out of the kiddie pool and generally being a small boy outdoors. It was not excessively hot today and there were no bugs to speak of. Basically, a perfect day, which is kind of unusual in New England in the summertime and _really_ a first for this year. Nice.

This is a _very silly book_. Our heroine, recently divorced and somewhat implausibly on the hook for support payments to her surfer bum ex-husband, has a gotten a new job for her uncle Damian as a courier. She knows an awful lot about demons, and is delivering a ritual object to someone who lives on the Ile de France -- who is dead when she arrives. Oh, and there's a handsome dragon, er, man hanging about who insists he isn't the murdered and who steels the ritual object as the police (who he called) arrive. He also claims to work for Interpol. And this is the relatively straightforward part of the book. In short order, our heroine meets wiccans, mages, demons (one in dog form), dragons, wyrverns and assorted other supernatural critters and discovers she herself is supernatural. Her passport has been confiscated by the police so she can't use her plane ticket, which she gets refunded to fund the next few days in Paris, during which she attempts to learn a bit about herself, the dead woman, the ritual object, the various supernatural critters, their struggle for power (through other ritual objects), another murder, blah, blah, blah. Along the way, naughtiness ensues with the handsome man, er, dragon. This is the first book in a series, so MacAlister is in no hurry to finish up what she starts here.

So. Fantasy, check. Romance, check. Emotionally satisfying ending? More or less, check. Funny, sure. Worth a sequel? Probably. Worth several sequels? Hard to say. If only the next one were available on TitleTrader, but alas, it is not. Nor is the next one available as a kindle edition.

But it was an entertaining read.