Appalachian Mountain Dreams

Building Communities

For some reason, it always amazes me to stumble across someone who understands the internet (or at least the way I think it should work). Dick Eastman, who writes online genealogy articles, pointed the way to Burr Morris of Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks and deserves the thanks for this find. After reading Dick’s post I wandered on over and discovered

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George F. Will – Full Esteem Ahead – washingtonpost.com

Is it jut me or is George Will seeming a bit testy over blogger? Have too many bloggers (both us amateurs and the his professional colleges) called him to task over his reporting on the Webb and Bush “conversation”?  Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor, says, “Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger” and “Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona

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Research Links Obesity to Mix of Bacteria in Digestive Tract – washingtonpost.com

For those of us who are weight challenged, this could explain why eating salads for ever don’t make a big difference in your weight…  Obese people have more digestive microbes that are especially efficient at extracting calories from food, the researchers said, and the proportion of these super-digesting organisms ebbs as the people lose weight. Moreover, when the scientists transplanted these bacteria

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Monday Morning Muse

Reflections from a weekend past… Friday afternoon I made a run south to the Brazoria NWR, I left the house about 3pm in sunshine and scattered clouds, by the time I arrived the fog was so thick visibility was down to under a quarter of a mile. In all of the fun this weekend I haven’t even downloaded the photo’s

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10 Reasons to Buy Local Food

 This morning’s email brought the latest issue of Ladybug Letter from Mariquita Farm. A little exploring on their site led me to this article. I was going to extract the list headlines but it made more sense to just publish the list entirely… Locally grown food tastes better. Food grown in your own community was probably picked within the past

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Thursday Morning Coffee

I find myself sitting here with my coffee, already through the mornings emails and nothing caught my interest enough to comment on. I’ve already visited my morning blogroll in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I followed Marie and Harley on their Christmas excursion to the wild Christmas Tree Farm. Checked in with Fred to see if he had recovered and was

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Kitchen Gardeners International

If you’ve never tried the site, check out Kitchen Gardens International…  Wendell Berry on the “industrial eater” “The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical… We still (sometimes) remember that

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Floyd County Naturalist/Photographer’s Weblog Published as a Memoir of Place

Fred’s getting some good press these days. They are even offering the book through their on-line store.  (Floyd, Virginia) Some of us long for belonging to the land, for roots in particular and special places where, for reasons usually beyond our knowing, we resonate with the landscape. For those like Fred First who have lived other places and then been

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