Well, I've never liked long poems. I wonder if he didn't gain some new happinesses. I like his 'use it or lose it' rule. I've gone through periods where I forget to keep some of my pleasures present in my life. Always a feeling of homecoming when I realize that and bring them back. Though sometimes my enjoyment does change because I've changed in the interim.

My apologies, mealy was an incorrect term to describe the offending tomatoes :-) Although, as noted, due to our lackluster growing season last year, there may have been mealy tomatoes harvested as well. Variety keeping ability when ripe on/off the vine is the information I meant to ask for. If I'm too busy to pick them at the proper time or if they sit more than a day or two on the counter, are there certain varieties known for loosing their taste/texture more quickly than the norm? Last year, I grew more plants and about 10 different varieties than the previous couple of years. Since I wasn't available to do much of the harvesting last year, I couldn't keep tabs on individual performance so that part of the great experiment was a wash. But, I did have a couple of tomatoes that tasted really bad and were really mushy within a 2-3 day period of being picked---something I had not encountered in previous years. Unfortunately, for all I know, they could have been past peak long before they were picked. However, if someone were to tell me that e.g. Stump of the World had a very short shelf life, on or off the vine, I might, correctly or not, attribute the bad tomatoes to that one variety.

carmen, you are right, my dozen fat red hens cost more to feed than I can ever get out of the eggs, so I just have enough for the family and don't try to sell any. Here in Michigan they could free range all winter and they'd both starve AND freeze. I put them inside for the winter, they still get the table scraps and scratch grains, there are no bugs or seeds to find anyway. They have constant access to an outdoor pen, wire on both top and bottom to keep the neighbor's dogs, the local coyotes, skunks, raccoons and whatever else out. I give them fresh water every day but they seem to prefer to just peck the snow. I did raise a couple dozen ducks, but by the time I bought the ducks, fed them for 10 weeks, bought fencing for their pen, tubs for their water so they could submerge their heads, etc., and a couple of bucks each to slaughter and clean, they cost about $9 a duck. They cost more than that at the local Evil Empire, but not much. And that's before you factor in my time.... People want cheap food and many (maybe even most) are not willing to pay extra for better food. Plus, in my area, a lot of people already raise their own, so they aren't going to buy it from me. Some things, like turkeys, are cheaper to buy from the Amish than they are to raise myself! Annie

Lars, I'm so sorry! I didn't mean that at all! I wasn't addressing only the women or lumping the men in with the women. I only meant that the proportion of women plumping for the raw size of rare was unusual to me. The men's responses seemed to be a normal or unremarkable spread. In the linked discussion, I could have said "people", but I said women just because I know about women's cooking behavior, both now and from my grandmother's age, as well as what I've read in old diaries and cooking articles. I don't know enough about men to say, though I have heard lectures about the kinds of implements that women used in the past, while I can't recall anything on the subject about chuckwagon cookies or other male cooks. My only memories of a being in a kitchen with a man making a reduction are by an astronautical engineer who is more precision oriented. I wasn't excluding men, per se, just didn't have any relevant information on how they do things so didn't speak for them. If something should like that should happen again, please chime in! There are some posters whose genders/gender identities aren't known to me, but I promise you I don't mean to marginalize men, and I certainly didn't mean to make you feel uncomfortable. This is not a women's group, nor do I regard it as one. I have belonged to a women's group whose mission was to give women roles and authority, as well as a feminine voice, in what was otherwise a very traditional, traditionally male field, but even then men were welcome to participate so long as they didn't try to take over. This is not such a group and the only one I can remember belonging to which was 100% women only was the girl scouts. Neither textiles nor cooking are womens' fields (nursing babies is, though there are some men with acquired (rather than experiential) knowledge on the subject), nor does gender of any kind have much to do with them. While there are some sociological and biological differences in tastes, they're not prominent. That is something that desired meat temperature speaks to, however, which is why I made the remarks at all--it was a beside the way difference that I found interesting and educational.