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On Thursday I was interviewed by Peter Sachs from our local paper the Bulletin for an article on the local blogging community, and today the article showed up—on the front page, no less! Here's the link to the online version.

I didn't get my picture in it this time (unlike the last time, a few years ago, that we bloggers were profiled), but—allow me to gloat a little—I did get the first quote. Which was a total surprise to me; I actually figured I was more incidental this time around, since there were a bunch of other people that were talked to before me.

On a similar note, I was invited by Anna Johnson, Public Communications Coordinator for Deschutes County, to serve on a media panel on blogging and the media late in April. I accepted, and as that approaches, I'll probably have more to say on it.

Fun! Maybe there is something to this blogging thing after all...

Over on The Brew Site today, the topic is "Organic Beer" (it's The Session, which is a net-wide beer blogging event where anyone with a blog—not just beer bloggers—can write about the given theme) and while I was writing a review of Deschutes Brewery's Green Lakes Organic Ale, I had originally inserted a bit about "organic" and what it (as a term) means to me.

However, it felt a bit out-of-place over there, so I'm reprinting it here instead, largely because I like what I wrote well enough that I didn't want to lose it, and also because it fits in better with my "Growing Up in Central Oregon" series that I sporadically write here on this blog.

Here's what I wrote on the topic of "organic":

With respect to people like Chris [O'Brien, of the Beer Activist blog hosting The Session this month] who are genuinely trying to make the world we live in a better place, if I'm being totally honest, I tend to take a suspicious view of things labeled "organic." Not that I think organic is bad, or denotes something lesser than "normal"... rather I think it's because nowadays it seems to have been co-opted as a marketing term, which is opposite of the way I grew up.

When my parents moved here to Central Oregon back in the mid-seventies (I was three), they wanted to live as self-sustainingly as possible. To that end they bought five acres of rural land upon which large vegetable gardens were grown and cows and chicken were raised. We had fresh milk and eggs every day, beef and chicken that we raised and butchered, fruits and vegetables grown in the garden, and all of it was done completely organically—no chemicals, no hormones, nothing like that. Only manure and compost for the gardens, locally-bought hay for the cows (along with what grass we grew in the pasture), natural foods for the chickens, all like that.

In a word, organic.

Only we never called it "organic" or had to verbalize it—it just was. Growing up like that shaped my view of things, and to this day the "organic" way of doing things is, to me, just the natural, logical way these things should be done. Having to refer to "organic" as a special designation therefore just seems to me to be... well, backwards, I guess.

Honestly, I don't intend to sound high-and-mighty on the subject, and it's very possible that I'm speaking from some fundamental ignorance on the movement.

But there you go. To me, labeling something "organic" as a special designation somehow actually seems more artificial. Or maybe more contrived... either way, I may have just opened myself up for a flaming.

This is one that I started years ago and have yet to finish. It's definitely a draft revision, rough and cringeworthy in parts. I've recently given thought to rewriting it (and finishing it) from a different viewpoint—largely because of my vast ignorance in the hows and whys a State Police Detective would actually get about in a story like this.

Current running word count is about 7,288.

As usual, this is freely available and copyrighted under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

With a clatter, Roberta Marvis picked up the used dishes from the table and began scraping the scraps of food into the grimy steel sink. Bits of corn, chicken bones, crumbs of bread splattered into the stained basin with tiny splashes into what brackish water there was. The chicken bones floated, small chunks of torn flesh still attached. Muttering under her breath, Roberta flipped a limp strand of mousy hair back out of her eyes and stacked the plates and soiled silverware on the counter. She could clean it up later; right now she drifted from the drab yellow trailer kitchen toward the minuscule living room and her husband and daughter, from where sounds of "Wheel of Fortune" were emanating.

Four hours later the drab yellow was a dull grayish in the lack of light when Roberta went back to clean up the dishes. The corn scraps' heady aroma wafted up from the sink, but Roberta scarcely noticed as she cleaned the dishes with a lot of clattering and went to bed. Only later did she remember that the chicken bones that had been floating in the sink water had disappeared.

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