Your Daily Crafting Community

Starting now, the Poetry Fishbowl is open! Today's theme is "World Cuisine." I will be checking this page periodically throughout the day. When people make suggestions, I'll pick some and weave them together into a poem ... and then another ... and so on. I'm hoping to get a lot of ideas and a lot of poems.

I'll be soliciting ideas for cooks, fusion chefs, immigrant cooks, eaters, farmers, foragers, food scientists, inventors, recipe writers, famous figures in food history, cooks of disadvantaged groups who should have become famous, superheroes, supervillains, failure analysts, ethicists, activists, rebels, other people active in the food world, cooking, gardening, harvesting, foraging, preserving, writing recipes, discovering things, decolonizing diets, building or using kitchen equipment, conducting experiments, observation changing experiments, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cooperating, bartering, taking over in an emergency, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, kitchens, restaurants, food trucks or carts, campfires, barbecue sites, laboratories, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, picnics, grocery stores, farmer's markets, roadside fruit stands, U-pick farms, gardens, food forests, other places where people make food, world cuisine, ethnic cuisines, cookbooks, online recipe archives, permaculture, heritage diets, climatarian diet, traditional foodways, culinary archaeology, food sovereignty, drought-resistant crops, trial and error, ethnic spice sets, weird food, fusion food, secret ingredients, supplements that turn out to be metagenic, new ideas in cuisine, alternate agriculture, lab conditions are not field conditions, ethics of food, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Currently eligible bingo card(s) for donors wishing to sponsor a square:

National Crafting Month Bingo Card 3-1-26

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

An Army of One has to figure out how to feed a diverse, far-flung group of people who sometimes have special dietary needs.

The Bear Tunnels introduces modern principles to people in the past, including some aspects of food science.

A Conflagration of Dragons has the Six Races (plus the dragons) who all have different diets.  This often poses challenges for the refugees.

Daughters of the Apocalypse has people trying to find and prepare enough food to survive, when city libraries are out of reach.

Fiorenza the Wisewoman uses herbs and healing foods to care for her village.

Frankenstein's Family features two scientists running a valley in historic Romania.  Igor enjoys cooking and has gotten at least one of the werewolves curious about cooking the human way.

Hart's Farm is a community with food used as one of the popular bonding methods.

Peculiar Obligations combines Quakers and pirates in the Caribbean, among other groups and places, leading to a wide variety of foods.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all of whom need to eat.  Primal soups and high-burn soups often have special dietary needs.  Comfort food and healing food are also very popular here.  The Rutledge thread includes Kardal and his food truck Syrian Foods, along with references to Vermont, French, and hippie cuisines.  Pain's Gray, Shiv, and the Finns are all fond of cooking too.

The Wandering features old people who drift back in time, the first of whom lands in Goa, India.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

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Today I set up a new label for the Sharpie Oil Paint Pen Extra Fine that I bought recently. I also took some other pictures around the yard.

( Walk with me ... )

My willow cuttings have arrived! :D I will need to unpack them and set them up. My plan is to put some in water, which makes willow water, which can be used to root other things. I shall take cuttings from some dogwoods and other things here to see if this works. I also intend to put some willow cuttings in soil to see how that works. Since willows are pretty much the easiest thing to propagate from cuttings, and I have 3 of each color, I figure at least one of each should survive.

Willow is a keystone plant, supporting many other species. Early blooms feed bees. Birds like to nest in willows. Many species of insects, especially butterfly and moth larvae, feed on them. They also make great craft materials and, as mentioned above, spew out rooting hormones.

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Today is cloudy, cold, and damp. Last night it snowed a bit, then sleeted, and seems to have rained later. Now most of the ice has melted off.

I fed the birds. I've seen a flock of sparrows and a male cardinal.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 3/2/26 -- I transplanted snowdrops from the parking lot to the white garden.

EDIT 3/2/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I set up a label with the new Sharpie Oil Paint Pen (Extra Fine) and took pictures.

I saw a squirrel in the trees.

EDIT 3/2/26 -- My red curly willow cuttings arrived, as did my order from John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds. I have set up two of the willow cuttings in water, one in potting soil. I also took a cutting from the fishpond mulberry tree and one from a red dogwood, which I added to the water cups to see if the willows will help those root too.

EDIT 3/2/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 3/2/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

I've seen a male cardinal chasing a female, and a fox squirrel at the hopper feeder.

I am done for the night.

These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Clothes
National Crafting Month Bingo Card 3-1-26
Birdfeeding
Emotional Neglect
Today's Adventures
Bingo
Books
Food
Birdfeeding
New Year's Resolutions Check In
Philosophical Questions: Government
Books
Space Exploration
Moment of Silence: Neil Sedaka
Pinetree Garden Seeds Order
Follow Friday 2-20-26: Active Communities on Dreamwidth Winter 2025-2026 J-Z
Birdfeeding
Recipe: African Spice Cookies
Photos: Water Garden
Photos: Worm Bin
Photos: House Yard
Crafts
Vocabulary: Proforestation
Birdfeeding
Willow Cuttings
Community Thursdays
Vocabulary: Bossage
Linguistics
Birdfeeding
Cuddle Party

Safety has 50 comments. Food has 53 comments. Wildlife has 40 comments. Food has 67 comments. Robotics has 147 comments.


There will be a Poetry Fishbowl on Tuesday, March 3 with a theme of "World Cuisine." I hope to see you then!




marchmetamatterschallenge is running this month. See my tracking post and the first check-in post.


"The Struggle Against Overwhelming Odds" belongs to Not Quite Kansas and needs $34.50 to be complete. Raymond and Gideon get attacked on the way home from research.


The weather has been warmish here, though it got colder today. Yesterday it rained a bit. Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a large flock of sparrows, several starlings, a pair of house finches courting plus an extra male, two male cardinals, a mourning dove, and a fox squirrel. I saw a downy woodpecker in the trees. Red-winged blackbirds have been singing overhead. Honeybees are out, and finally found the flowers. Currently blooming: crocuses, snowdrops.

The March Meta Matters challenge is now active over on marchmetamatterschallenge. See the first check-in post here for introductions. Read the FAQ list, as there may have been some changes from previous years. See my entries from 2023, 2024, and 2025. Here are my How To list and my Meta list from 2024.

This challenge involves locating and copying over meta you've created to a second site in order to ensure its preservation. The fest recommends SquidgeWorld. There will be some prompts for creating new meta. Participants can post their goals for saving old meta and/or creating new meta. You can also collect, recommend, and save meta created by other people if it's not something you make yourself or yours is already up to date and saved.

Some canon-specific or author-specific websites have a section especially for meta about their fandom(s) to help new fans learn the canon(s), explore fandom in general, and to inspire fanworks. In particular, it used to be common for people to make fanifestos about a canon, its ships, major fanworks, etc. as guides to newcomers in hopes of growing the fandom; reviving this custom would be very helpful. Here on Dreamwidth, check out shipmanifestos. Another great type of meta is reviews; see communities such as books and book_love for those. If you know of more such resources, March is a good time to post about them so more folks can find them and make sure that meta is backed up.

An increasing issue of archiving is the decline of archival websites. Ghost barely works anymore. The Archive.fo cluster is iffy at best, and when one of its sites glitches, you can't even use your old links anymore. That was the site that used to have the best ability to archive almost anything, except PDF files. Wayback, formerly the most reliable, and the only one I found that would safe PDFs, has become increasingly slow and prone to outages. It never saved quite as wide a range as Archive.fo but now saves a lot less. It's maddening. Because every page that can't be archived is work that will be wasted when linkrot eventually kills the original.

On the bright side, Dreamwidth remains a great place to crosspost your content from other platforms as a form of archiving by duplication. This is increasingly a good idea at a time when many platforms are collapsing due to misbehavior, locking everything to members only, or disappearing altogether. goals_on_dw has a post for Full Content on Dreamwidth if this is your approach to sharing and archiving your work.


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