Shrimp Pimp

Frozen, pre-cooked shrimp is like magic!

You just defrost it, and add it to whatever dish you're making, and it's instantly fancy.  Mexican rice?  Add some shrimp and call it a gumbo.  Fettucine Alfredo?  Add some shrimp and you're in an Olive Garden commercial.  Ramen Noodles?  Add some shrimp and it's Vietnamese.

By liberally adding shrimp to our past two dinners, I have gotten about 5 servings from a $6.50 bag.  Considering that the ingredients for the rice and the pasta were about $.50 per serving, and with adding a few vegetables at about $.75 per serving, I achieved a delicious, creative, colorful, filling, and fairly healthy meal for about $2.55 per person.  This number is actually high because I have leftovers.  All in all, it is cheaper than splitting a five-dollar-footlong, and much more rewarding.

Although the seafood may not be fresh (I'm landlocked), I have discovered that what rings in my head as a luxury is actually a recession friendly ingredient.

Snack Time

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Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper, and Oven

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AkA

Never From a Bag Again.

Well, maybe sometimes.

Salt Creek

 Karma Wolf.

Ripple Weaver

 Winter branches are good for a teepee.

 Plenty'a sojournin' ahead.

 this is how we know we are in Nebraska.  Been eatin' that corn.

Find yourself a walking stick and walk on.

through the desert on a horse with no name

When I feel blue I imagine a field with wildflowers. I am wearing extreme flare light colored jeans and a blue polo. My belt has fringe hanging off the end. I'm running through in platform shoes. My olive green army jacket catches pockets of wind. There are camels with navaho-made blankets on their humps, ready to ride into a spring sunset. Blaring from the sky are all the greatest hits. Cream, Neil Young, the Turtles, the Doobie Brothers, Bob Dylan, all the rest of 'em. The psychadelic folk rock swirls around in perfect surround sound. Wolves howl along with the harmony. There's Cripple Creek lining the forest that begins after adequate space of plains. Towards that topographical line is a small cabin tucked in by some tall weeds and an orange tree. We got a garden too. It's where we live with our 5 flower children. It's the seventies, the time before the future got started. Sitting on the edge of what's next, afraid of the wars, damning the man, mistrusting the system, a dark tone in all our happy songs. One last pure moment of revolution. All turtle's heads raising out of the capacity of the shell, sub-culture taking over, ink tatooing itself, men tucking long hair behind their ears. Groovy.

well received wake up

domestic diva on the range wants a buffalo tatoo

I love the buffalo in its gentle-giant strength, its American flavor. Its species history is entwined with that of America. The intertwined relationship between the Buffalo and the Indigenous Americans is a beautiful one of respect. I love being American in a very basic way. "Freedom" is a loaded pop-politics catch word in our media. Freedom can very easily be just a word politics use to get a crowd aroused, and yet very easy to not notice. Despite that, it remains a vital part of our domestic lives.

So many people on Earth, now, and throughout history, can't be reverent towards their god. They can't be irreverent towards another man or woman's god either. Not without threat from their government or lack thereof. I usually enjoy a unique blend of reverence and irreverence each day I spend here, home on this range. I discuss the governments failings peacefully without reproach. I also freely fantasize about the seemingly glorious benefits of other governments without fearing accusation of treason and without resonable need to exile myself to determined seemingly glorious location as free health care seems great but its all relative and it would mean giving up my American freedom, which I adore. In even somewhat "westernized" countries, there remains a constant battle for freedom and scars from past battles, issues occupying the lives of its citizens which I have never even contemplated having. In Iran, they must wear the headscarf. In universities in Turkey, women cannot. I wear my scarves however I please and the only police I worry about are the fashion police. And they aren't even real.

As messed up as our economy is, as blood-curdlingly awful as decisions to blow places up are, as freaky as right-wing fundamentalist conservatives are or as lunatically amped the lefty liberals get, our grievances we openly voice, without fear. We actively pursue equality, and compared to the rest of human history, we have the luxury to deeply contemplate our very concept of freedom. I'm "proud to be an American" because I'm jazzed about the great social experiment our ways of doing things originated from. I'm so stoked that we stood up to the monarchy and made our own way with our own ideas. It is a path we can now take as individuals. We have a government system that recognizes our innate right to ever attempt to make sense of our own life. I am proud to freely wear the buffalo in ink.

When you mix Native American ways of life, respect for nature, and their style and fashion with our founding father's ideals, you get something worth carving into the skin. I'm not proud of what "white man" did to our land's indigenous people, and also our indigenous buffalo (though our attempts through reservations and an "American Serenghetti" are being created to restore them) and I'm also not proud of the Jersey Shore and Snooki as American icons, but my freedom to choose to not be that way is golden.

Because I'm free to adopt the practice of tatooing from other cultures tribes into my own, and because I'm free to love my American identity or hate it, and because Bison are Boss, maybe I just will get the image of one injected into my skin. Our skin is temporary, and our nationality is too. I believe, though, that everyone's soul can be free.

Christmas Breakfast

The fuel we need in case there are buffalo to be herded this Christmas...