CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Hero Fest!

Be Your Own Hero Festival Now Accepting Submissions

The 2nd Annual Be Your Own Hero (BYOH) Festival will be taking place in Wilmington, North Carolina September 27th and 28th, 2008. Submissions for workshops, info sessions, skill shares, and musicians are currently being accepted until August 15th, 2008. Volunteers are also needed to help out on the day(s) of the event and/or to join the BYOH Fest Planning Squad.

Please send workshop submissions to herofest@gmail.com with your name, email, phone, organization/collective (if applicable), proposed workshop title & short description, materials needed, and time needed. All other ideas, volunteer availability, and inquiries may also be sent to herofest@gmail.com. We welcome all subjects and we encourage all people to apply, especially those who do not fit neatly into the status quo!

In 2007, Wilmington NC was home to the first Be Your Own Hero Festival, an all day radical Do It Yourself (DIY) Festival held at the Soapbox Laundro Lounge. The Festival included a Really Really Free Market, potluck, workshops, info sessions and live music. 2007′s workshops included: DIY parenting (a radical concept), Basic Bicycle Repair, Truth in Recruiting / Promoting Peace, Social Activism & the Info-Radical, Radical Menstruation, Food Politics, Trans 101: Becoming an ally to transgender people, Unconventional Action: Organizing against the DNC/RNC, and DIY DJ Workshop. Bands included: The Brothels, The Nothing Noise, Gator Country, Prize Winners Collective, NED, and Ghost Mice.

For more information on the Be Your Own Hero Festival and Collective, visit www.beyrownhero.com or contact herofest @ gmail.com.

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Be Your Own Hero Fest Workshop Submission Form

Email to herofest @ gmail.com by July 31, 2008

NAME:

EMAIL:

PHONE:

ORGANIZATION / COLLECTIVE:

PROPOSED WORKSHOP TITLE:

DESCRIPTION:

MATERIALS NEEDED:

TIME NEEDED: choose from 45 minutes, or 1 hour and 45 minutes

On August 31st we leave Wilmington for the land in Silk Hope. The replacement produce manager has been hired on at Tidal Creek. Kristin is working out her work plans. Inspections for septic and electric are going on this week, and we hope to have final house plans in our hands by this Friday.

The plan is to live in part of the old house while we build the new house. We’ll work on parts of the old house in order that it is more livable for Danielle and Noel when they arrive in the winter. For now we are ripping out the water logged wall boards, fixing the leaky roof and generally making the house not so much of a mold and mildew factory. The hope is to make the place livable for friends and family in the future, so repairs need to be of pretty consistent quality.

I spent some of this weekend clearing some of the vines that had grown into all of the windows and parts of the roof. The porch roof is starting to separate from the house because the vines grew up between the house and the singles.

The roof on the back of the house has some bad leak issues. Some old fixes have no become real problems.

And siding is coming apart where water now runs into the house…

…exposing insulation and interior wood…

…providing great habitat for termites.

And the worst part is the unintentional skylight in the side porch’s roof. It really adds aesthetic value to the place. And the aesthetic smell of wet fiberglass insulation makes it a real keeper.

The inside of the house is another battle. From a neighbor’s description of the place, it is basically layer upon layer of fixes, cover-ups and DIY patches. Once I started tearing out some old paperboard, I could see what he was talking about. The existing roof is built over at least one other roof. I haven’t gotten far enough into to everything to see what else is involved. It is quite funny so far. How all the pieces of wood fit together is also great comedy. I felt like I was in a tree fort that a bunch of neighborhood kids put together out of scrap board and bent nails.

But all is not old. We received our first delivery of AAC block which will become the first floor of the new house.

While all this fixing up of the old house, building the new house and starting the new job is going on, we’re also supposed to be starting a farm. More on that soon…

The photo shows a stereotypical farmer, plaid shirt and overalls front and center. In the background, a table full of young professionals gathered around a laptop. Welcome to the new picture of a locavore…

An article in the New York Times details a growing trend in local eating, a trend that many would call the Lazy Locavore movement. More to the point, this trend is based on disposable income more than laziness, and injects an unneeded class distinction into local foods.

The article picks up the false argument that local food always costs more, therefore it should be in the realm of the upper classes to purchase it or have it grown for them. Installed gardens (with maintenance packages), home deliveries of pre-cooked local stews and personal chefs may unnecessarily become the new faces of local eating. Attempts to build community based, income-irrelevant food systems have to stay above the class divide and focus on ways to bring local eaters together and make local food attainable to anyone who wants it.

This post is part of the week long Eat Carolina Food Challenge where participants are asked to submit a blog post every day of the challenge. Posts from all the other participants are aggregated on the Carolina Farm Stewardship website.

I try and eat a pretty good breakfast during the work week, but the meal is often scattered over the course of a few hours. It isn’t until Sunday that I get to have a good sit down breakfast at a most unreasonable hour of the day (breakfast at noon?). Tomorrow I am looking forward to a big pile of pancakes, a pile of bacon, a pile of scrambled eggs with sweet peppers and goat cheese, a pile of blueberries, a pile of melon, a pile of toast and jam and butter, a pile or rice and honey — just huge piles of breakfasty stuff inches from my coffee rinsed eyes.

I didn’t always have a good relationship with breakfast. During most of my working life (read: most of my life) I have skipped breakfast entirely, preferring to start the day with a billion ounces of various caffeine shots. When I was an apple inspector for the USDA my breakfast was a Jolt cola and a half dozen cigarettes. When I packed trucks in a shoe factory, my breakfast was the yammering on of the forklift driver and a gallon of coffee. When I…well, you get the point.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I really started to get into breakfast as the basis for the day. I would start making rice in the morning and pairing it with various preserves or pour a big bowl of crunchy granola and top it with berries. Or fry up some eggs and potatoes and have at it.

On occasion breakfast became some sort of calming mechanism. Afterwards I’d listen to local morning radio or read a farming magazine or pet the cats. Then on to work in a relaxed state of mind.

Breakfast changed my life so much that I kind of like to eat it for dinner sometimes as well. “Breakfast for Dinner” is a pretty well used phrase around here, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So yeah, I’m looking forward to breakfast tomorrow…