lummi island wine tasting winter solstice ’21
Winter Hours: Open Friday 4-6pm
Happy Holidays!
We will be open this Friday, Dec 22 for wine tasting and sales, then closed for the holidays and reopening January 12.
We are anticipating a change in bread orders from every week to every two weeks. Stay tuned for details!
Friday Bread Pickup This Week…
Sweet Corn & Dried Cranberry – Made with polenta and bread flour, then enriched with milk, butter and honey for a soft and tender crumb, then loaded up with dried cranberries. Has great corn flavor but is not a traditional quick cornbread. A delicious bread that makes great toast — $5/loaf
Italian Breakfast Bread – A delicious sweet, but not too sweet, bread. Made with bread flour eggs, yogurt, a little sugar and vanilla as well as dried cranberries golden raisins and candied lemon peel. Perfect for breakfast as toast or even better for french toast on Christmas morning – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Cranberry Muffins – Inspired by a well known coffee shop’s cranberry bliss bars these muffins are made with all the traditional muffin ingredients: flour, sugar, eggs, buttermilk and butter. A generous helping of fresh cranberries, toasted pecans and topped with a brown sugar streusel finish them off. Yum! – 4/$5
Island Bakery has developed a lengthy rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before Wednesday will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Go to Contact us to get on the bread email list.
This week’s wine tasting
Argyle Brut Blanc de Blanc Oregon WA90pts $29
Not only does this little Oregon winery make great pinot noir, it also has earned a reputation for producing terrific Old World style sparkling wine. This blend of chardonnay and pinot noir displays a bouquet of brioche, pear, apple, and white peach. Crisp, balanced, and lengthy, it’s an outstanding value.
Garzon Petit Clos Marselan ’19 Uruguay
Intense red color with carmine reflections; elegant nose of red and black fruits with finish of eucalyptus and mint; Palate of integrated tannins, mineral and subtly saline notes that reflect its exceptional terroir.
Taylor Fladgate 10 yr Tawny Port
Deep brick color with amber rim; rich, elegant nose of ripe berries with a delicate nuttiness and subtle notes of chocolate, butterscotch and fine oak; smooth and silky on the palate with persisting ripe, figgy, jammy flavors on the long finish.
Economics of the Heart: Politics and Karma
Life is like a giant Ouija board. Every living being constantly has a hand on it. The game goes on and on and on, as every hand exerts its little pressure in some direction, and each moment carries the collective impacts of the individual forces to the next moment.
We are each constantly engaged in the business of staying alive, and that requires cyclical sequence of four kinds of activities: 1) recognizing our needs, 2) taking action to satisfy them, 3) savoring whatever nourishment results, and 4) enjoying a moment of satisfaction and rest. Every activity has varying degrees of success or failure; and most of us are better at some elements than others.
A typical day in our lives is a constant repetition of these activities, from getting up in the morning, eating, working, playing, resting, sleeping. Every activity by every player in every moment has a role in creating the initial conditions for the next moment. Karma is the process by which our own actions and our collective actions in this moment determine initial conditions for the next moment— some 80,000 times a second according to some ancient texts.
While everyone plays some tiny role in the collective karma of the entire system, most of us impact only a relatively small number of others. Only leaders at various levels are in positions where their everyday decisions can have significant and lasting impacts on many people’s lives. Ideally such leaders take care that their decisions result in the greatest benefits to all who are impacted by them.
However, this has decidedly not been the case with egocentric dictators. The twentieth century saw two devastating world wars started by such men, at the cost of vast destruction and millions of deaths. Those impacts set the stage for a never-ending series of indirect “proxy wars” across the world in which “great powers” fought for dominance in less-developed countries rather than confront each other directly, including American combat adventures in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and now Ukraine and Gaza.
All of this was bad enough under leaders who at least knew the game had limits: insurgency, counter-insurgency, small gains and losses, lots of political posturing, all involving years of death and destruction against local and innocent populations. The best thing we can say about it is that it was carried out with a general unwritten agreement that it was a substitute for direct confrontation in which everyone could lose more than they could possibly gain. At the same time, it killed or maimed tens of thousands of people around the world. And at the end of the day it is hard to see how anyone anywhere benefited from any of it.
At this moment in time our nation is a year away from a major election, and despite his indictments for several major crimes, the Tweetster is still the favored Presidential candidate for what remains of the Republican Party. This man is the most publicity-driven person most of us have ever seen in our lives. He craves it, needs it, is addicted to seeing himself in the news, constantly creating controversy and chaos to dominate media headlines. He lives for it. Every day, as he travels among his many indictments, he tells the world his dream of being America’s first dictator, tearing up the Constitution, jailing his enemies, and looting our economy.
The point of our Ouija board analogy is that the karma of global civilization is affected by every living entity in every moment. But only a handful of individuals are in such positions of power that they can, by their actions, destroy the ability of our planet to support any life at all. Whether by intention or oversight or stupidity, at present only one seems completely capable of all three. He is an existential menace and under no circumstances can he (or any disciple) ever be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again.
Btw, a very relevant perspective for dealing with this deeply disturbing set of circumstances is explored in , by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder (formerly Judt’s student). It is Snyder’s assembly of a long series of conversations between the two as Judt was dying from ALS a decade ago.
Judt’s reminiscences make connections between political and contemporary discourse, explaining in detail the profound impact of two world wars and the Great Depression on subsequent politics, philosophy, communism, fascism, and the role of social democracy and Keynesian economics in bringing liberal government, broad-based growth, and social equality to the post-war world…all stuff we will need to survive.
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2072 Granger Way