Some favorite things

Steal­ing a page from inspired by Mrs. G’s blog posts of her favorite things, here are a few of my favorite things:

Ted­die Peanut But­ter, nat­ural super chunky. I grew up in the town where it’s made, and there is noth­ing like the odor of roast­ing nuts, waft­ing out of nowhere.

Dr. Bronner’s organic laven­der liq­uid soap. Never per­fumey, always herby and fresh. Vegan. Organic. Family-owned. And before my eye­sight got com­pletely shot, inter­st­ing read­ing in the shower.

Mole­sk­ine large ruled note­books. For jour­nalling, poems, draft blog posts when I’m on the road, notes from my doctor’s and ther­apy appoint­ments, ideas for photo series, inter­est­ing phrases I’ve heard oth­ers say, names of books, poets and authors to look up later, my life, in short. They are more expen­sive than a sim­ple note­book. But to me, they are worth it– the weight and feel of the paper, the spac­ing of the lines, the way it lies flat, the sub­stance of it in the hand– because they make me want to write. The large (not the extra large) size is not too big for a medium-sized purse, and still leav­ing room for a mass-market paperback.

Dinah Wash­ing­ton. Bil­lie Hol­i­day, Bessie Smith and Ella Fitzger­ald are all won­der­ful, too, but for bell-like clar­ity of tone and enun­ci­a­tion, breadth and vari­ety of cat­a­logue (includ­ing some won­der­ful raunchy love songs that you could never play on the radio) and emo­tional expres­sive­ness, Dinah can­not be beat, except maybe by Aretha.

Col­lege ruled com­po­si­tion note­books for larger projects. I keep one for my online life, and use it for: dia­gram­ming my site redesign, ideas for recur­rent posts, ideas for Real Men­tal posts, not­ing ideas for design and con­tent from other blogs, keep­ing track of trends and data from SiteMe­ter and Google Ana­lyt­ics and Word­Press Site Stats, and now for blog post ideas, though not usu­ally the drafts them­selves. I write “Done” on the top right cor­ner of pages when a par­tic­u­lar aspect of some­thing is done, and I use a red pen to check off tasks so that I can take a quick flip through to see where things stand.

Amore tomato paste, pesto, and anchovy paste in a tube. Fresh, and no half-used cans to open. Their whole line of prod­ucts is great, although I can’t speak to the gar­lic paste.

Sue Hubbell. My dad gave me A Book of Bees years ago. Aside from the mar­vel that is Hubbell’s abil­ity to express sci­en­tific and tech­ni­cal prin­ci­ples with Aha!-level sim­plic­ity, the snip­pets of her own life that worked their way into her account of being a bee­keeper in the Ozarks were addict­ing. She is unsen­ti­men­tal and clear-eyed, with­out ever being unkind to her­self or oth­ers. All her other books are also won­der­ful, but A Coun­try Year is another one I’d espe­cially recommend.

Bogle Petit Sirah. If I had to pick one “house red” to drink, regard­less of whether it matched my food (this is a BIG wine, but not tan­nic like Caber­net), this would be the one, Big, juicy, chewy tan­nins, and smooth. It’s $9.00 at my local Trader Joe’s, but tastes like it costs a lot more. Ray Isle at Food & Wine Mag­a­zine also likes their Old Vine Zin­fan­del, which comes at a sim­i­lar price point.