Melissa is planning Christmas dinner and thrashing about how to find local ingredients. She'd like to serve a free-range, grass-fed, organic, locally produced, locally harvested, sustainable, native, low-stress, low-impact, humanely slaughtered meat. Another NYT piece on Locavores will allow us some banana pudding for dessert by considering "the relative efficiency of different forms of haulage. If you look at fuel consumption per pound carried, an oceangoing vessel carrying thousands of containers (a single 20-foot container holds about 48,000 bananas) does relatively well, while a 10-mile trip to the local farm stand in a large car to pick up a few bags of vegetables seems, in emissions terms at least, downright destructive."

Knowing we'd be socked in today with a winter storm, we scurried around like crazy yesterday including a visit to a nearby alpaca farm where we got the complete tour. Note: bring carrots next time. Alpaca fiber is much warmer than wool and has no lanolin so few people are allergic to it. Surprising thing I learned: alpaca, like other herd animals, will mask an injury or illness in the presence of humans or other potential predators. So Robin and Corry have an alpaca cam where they can watch them unawares. Alpaca yarn is very expensive. I bought enough for a vest which Lynn, my office mate at work, has offered to make for me. I got skeins from Salsa and Hamilton whom we had just met and two skeins of an American alpaca blend.