I do have more posts with content in progress - the start of the school year always scrambles my brain and my free time a little, but I’m getting back into the swing of things this week.

Much thanks to Cat over at MetaPagan for including me on her list of favorites! The way this goes is:

1. Put the logo on your blog.
2. Link to the person from whom you received the award.
3. Nominate at least 7 other blogs.
4. Put links to those blogs on yours.
5. Leave a message on the blogs nominated.

I read a number of blogs. Several of those I’d otherwise include on this list - Pandora’s Bazaar, The Wild Hunt, and of course, MetaPagan itself - have already been tapped by this. So, here, a few others (in no particular order but my whim and the order I pulled tabs up.)

1) Dianne Sylvan’s Dancing Down the Moon. I’ve known Sylvan online for years now, and always love reading her stuff, no matter what she’s talking about. Her posts range from a current series on runes, to the struggles of life, to all sorts of other topics.

2) Sia over at Full Circle News does a great roundup of information and topics currently of interest to the Pagan community - I look forward to her thoughtful comments in my RSS reader.

3) Donald Engstrom’s It’s the Journey, not the Destination. Many people know Donald through his work as a teacher in Reclaiming, but I got to know him through his relationship (and now marriage) to one of my tradmates. I adore talking to him: even though there are things we don’t always agree on, I always come away having learned something, or seeing something differently. Also, I adore conversations with people who are passionate about what they’re doing - and Donald definitely qualifies!

4) Lupa’s Pagan Book Reviews provide great thoughts (and details) about the good and bad of Pagan books. (I like her other writings, too). She’s starting grad school, so her time to post may drop off a bit, but they’re worthwhile gems.

5) Dw3t-Hthr’s Letters from Gehenna: The World on a Slant . This blog, from a friend since college, always makes me think. She’s also hooked into different parts of the blogosphere (and from different angles) than I am, which I find very healthy for my perspective. As she says: “I do all my weird normally and all my normal strangely. My blog is a repository of a variety of pontifications, on a variety of subjects including, but not limited to, religion, sex, BDSM, gender, sociopolitical neepery, the hell is wrong with people nowadays, and the art of living in the world one wants to bring into being while acknowledging that we’re not there yet.” Good description.

6) PostSecret is pretty widely known, but I didn’t start reading it until around this time last year. PostSecret is an art project wherein people send in postcards with a secret on them - which are then posted in the blog (and sometimes included in the printed books.) I read every Sunday, because there’s such a huge range of perspectives and stories out there, even when some of them are very painful.

7) Finally, for a professional note, The Feel Good Librarian is a rarely updated blog these days, but well worth the archives. It’s written by a librarian at a public library - and she talks about why we do what we do, and what kind of difference it makes for people. I reread it to remind myself why my job is a good thing, and also that what I think is a single, simple act can have a huge effect on someone else.

My father was a university professor: our family vacations ran on his schedule.

Then there were my years of pre-school, elementary school, junior high, high school, and boarding school (a new and different schedule, that, but still, in principle the same.) College.

Working for my college for the year after graduation. I had very little to do with students, in general (I was doing web and project design for faculty), but you could still feel the ebb and flow of the school no matter what else happened.

I moved to Minnesota, for one year *not* working for a school - but in graduate school myself part time.

And then I began my current job, where I’ve been since fall of 2000, working in an independent day school. There are many things I love about it.

One of them is how often I get to pause and reflect on how much I love it. Every year, the last week teachers are around, there’s a parade of special lunches, ceremonies, in between the meetings. Some of the process gets a little tedious - but many of them help me remember just how fantastic the people I work with are, how neat the kids are, why I enjoy getting up almost every morning. (Almost. I *am* human, after all.)

And then there’s the part we’re in right now. The beginning of the year.

It’s unusually exciting this year. We’ve moved my desk (in the hopes being in the office will make noise-distractable me a) less stressed and b) more productive). We’ve negotiated some new duties that make my salary manageable, but that give me some significant challenges. And we have new carpet (the original, from the early 70s addition, was in place until last week) and a little new paint.

We come back a week before the faculty (who will be here next week.) They’re already trickling back to look at rooms and have initial meetings with colleagues, and it’s hard to go an hour without someone stopping by to chat about their summer (always too short!) and what they have in mind.

I’ve been sorting magazines (we get about 50), a process that always brings the news of the summer back in rush. Later this week, I get to start updating our patron database (something that has to be done manually.) And next week, we’re back to meetings and faculty gatherings. The week after that, students.

All of them remind me of cycles and new beginnings, and new possibilities. I love that.

But it’s also sometimes a little weird: it’s obviously (and for some historical reasons) off kilter from the traditional agricultural busy points. Just when my religious life is telling me to go be introspective and reflective, my work life is getting hectic with major projects. Just when my religious life is telling me to work hard on goals and projects, my schedule drops out from beneath me, and I often find myself somewhat adrift as summer vacation hits.

Now, there are advantages to some of this: four of the eight Sabbats fall in my vacations generally, so it can be easier for me to prepare in an unhurried way for ritual. I get a natural sense of ebb and flow to my schedule: things build and then diminish. I’m constantly turning from project to project as cycles shift and different things become easier to work on. I’m never bored.

But at the same time, it does give me a strange perspective on the Wheel of the Year. And one I think I’m never going to quite shake, even if I eventually end up working somewhere that isn’t a school.

My background:

First, a quick note on my background. As I mention elsewhere, I’m a relatively recent Master’s in Library and Information Science graduate (I finished around this time last summer!) with a strong interest in online interaction, freedom of information access, and in particular, how libraries can better support minority communities (and in particular, minority religious communities) despite limited resources.

I don’t link my common usename (Jenett) online with legally identifying details, but if anyone’s actually in need of verifiable details for some reason, I’m glad to provide them privately. (’some reason’ is basically anything beyond curiousity: if you’d like to re-use some of my comments here for a discussion elsewhere, for example. Or if someone reading this would like me to come talk to other librarians about this issue, or something like that.)

Among other things, my work in these areas has included

- Classes in Public Library History and Theory (with a particular focus on how the Library Bill of Rights affects information access issues) and on Information Policy (including how we design information policy to protect access to information and deal with censorship requests)

- Projects in grad school about providing library resources of interest to Pagans, and a project I’d like to get back to on how Pagans actually use library systems, and how libraries could do better with this. (I have a lot of theories to test, but am stuck at the ‘figuring out how to do data collection’ stage.)

- Presentations to three different classes at other schools (and two as part of school projects) about providing fair and equivalent information access to minority religious members, and how to find resources that represent the community, not from outside the community. In all three cases, I got a lot of “This is fascinating and important!” feedback - everyone in those discussions was very supportive of the need to provide service to everyone, not just majority religions. I love my profession, sometimes.

My current workplace (an independent non-religious school) has a firm policy about filtering: we don’t. Period. (We do log where both students and staff go on the web, but these logs are only checked if there’s an actual problem. Quite honestly, who has the time to read through every teenager’s Facebook and MySpace URL? Also, I think schools are a somewhat different issue than public libraries: we also occasionally use these logins to block access for students who abuse online access or use it for harassment/etc.)

What are filters, and why are they there?

Many public libraries and schools have filtering software installed on their systems. Why, since the American Library Association thinks they’re firmly against the Library Bill of Rights?

Simply, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This act was intended to give libraries and schools some financial help and relief in bringing technology (computers and internet access) into these spaces.

Nice idea, but one of the requirements of the related Children’s Internet Protection Act (passed in early 2000) was that all systems that took advantage of the Internet Access or Internal Connections e-rate funds (or some specific grant money) had to make use of filters.

Many libraries and schools have turned down these two areas of funding, in order to keep control over their own systems. Some places, though, are working on severely limited budgets, struggling to keep afloat, and simply can’t afford to turn down (fairly significant) funding options that will bring a lot of good to people.

12 years later, we are, however, still stuck with some issues. There’s currently a decent Wikipedia article on content-control software (their term of choice) that highlights some of the other issues and concerns and history. (As always with Wikipedia, apply grain of salt and keep reading beyond the site.)

What’s the problem with filters?

1) They don’t work.

Really. They don’t. Every filter out there misses some stuff it really should catch, and catches stuff that is totally legimate. There is no way to do this kind of filtering manually (especially now, with the number of blogs, free hosting sites, and other resources out there.) All of the filters use various methods - keyword matching, searches of text or images on the page, etc.

Plus - and this is the one I note at work when talking to parents - an intelligent teenager can find ways around at least 90% of the pure technology solutions. Sometimes that’s as simple as using the computer at a friend’s house.

When I was in college, a then-teenager named Bennett Hasleton started an organization called Peacefire specifically to focus on freedom of access issues for the Internet among teens. While I’m not sure how active the organization is currently, they did do a tremendous amount to get the basic issues recognised (including testifying as an expert in Congressional hearings), and their site highlights some of the basic issues with filters.

I particularly like this quote from the CIPA FAQ I already linked to: “It is important to note that the law states that filters must protect against visual depictions outlawed by the legislation. The filter does not have to prevent access to all such depictions. (No filter is 100% effective in preventing all such access.) In developing the CIPA regulations, the FCC declined to further define the filter requirements or to adopt any type of definition or certification on how effective a filter must be, beyond the very general protect language of the law. Thus, there is no such thing as an FCC certified CIPA compliant filter.” (a little less than 2/3rds of the way down the page)

2) On many - probably most - filters, you don’t get to see the specific sites filtered.

In some cases, you can choose categories. Pagan sites, for example, often fall into either the Occult/Esoteric category, or sometimes into others. On these filters, a library or school could decide to enable the entire category.

But on some filters, there’s no category control, no individual administrator override, or a process that only removes specific challenged URLs from the filter. The problem with the last one, of course, is that it doesn’t do anything about similar sites blocked by the same filter.

3) Whose values are we talking about?

One other problem is that a number of the filtering companies - not all, but enough - come from specific backgrounds that often feel it’s appropriate to limit some kinds of information (which has included sites about non-Christian religions, sexual health material, political groups they don’t agree with, etc.)

These choices are not required by the clauses in CIPA (which is pretty much only concerned with minors seeing obscene content within some definitions) but if you don’t know what’s in the filter, how can you tell what’s getting blocked?

What to do?

1) Individual disabling:

In most cases - as is true for the particular library that got me talking about this - the library policy will mention that the filter can be disabled on request for any adult. (Sometimes computers in the children’s or teen’s area are filtered all the time.)

I’ve had this done in the past - LiveJournal caught the filter at the St. Paul public library a few years ago when I wanted to print some stored information off my journal there: I couldn’t log into the site until I got someone to disable the filter.

This works great for an immediate answer, though it doesn’t answer either the issues of ‘what about people who feel intimidated/don’t know they can ask’ and the issue of what happens to teens who are looking for legitimate info (teen-appropriate sexual health content, religious content, etc.) who don’t have the option to have it disabled.

2) Look at the library’s policies.

In this case (and again, not mentioning the library directly), they did in fact have a quite complete set of library policies linked from the library front page. Many parts of it would have been held up as excellent policy examples in many of my classes: it’s clearly that library staff have given a lot of thought to dealing with censorship concerns, and have put policies into place to minimise problems for their patrons.

But it was also clear from skimming it that it’s a library struggling with financial stresses, whose physical collection was less than they wanted it to be, and who were probably dealing with both cost-of-provision issues, and quite possibly staffing issues. (How can I tell? That’s a question for another post, if anyone’s interested.)

3) Talk to the library:

Why do your research first? Because if you come in saying “I really care about this access, and it’s clear from your policies that you take freedom of information issues seriously.” you’re going to have a much more pleasant conversation than if you start with “You’re censoring me!”

I’ve done my time answering really upset people about policy issues (mostly in a non-library setting: I was on the Abuse/Terms of Service team for LiveJournal for about 18 months). The people you’re talking to are human, with a bunch of stuff on their minds. As humans, they’ll do better if they don’t start on the defensive. And they’ll probably be willing to give you a lot more useful information that can help both you and them, if you’re pleasant to deal with (even if you end up disagreeing.)

(I could go into a long theory of how this also plays into the magical concept of ‘act as-if’, but due to length, am just going to handwave at it here. Will expand on request.)

Also, on a purely practical level, it is probably not the reference librarian who set the policy. It’s almost certainly not the circulation desk person. It may not even have been the library director (who may have been overruled by their board on some point, though at least they have more input.) Getting mad at people who can’t actually change something doesn’t usually help, on a purely practical level.

4) Be aware there may be invisible practical concerns:

• As already mentioned, the filter chosen may not allow the library to turn off specific categories or unblock specific sites.
• Many filters work on a yearly subscription model: the library may not have funds to change filtering services until the next budget cycle.
• It may take a couple of days to get the right combination of people in the same place to talk about a longer-term fix for an issue, especially if the library has multiple branches. (Librarians also have vacations, sick days, and varying schedules to contend with.)

5) What’s your actual request?

Consider volunteering a little time to help: it’s obviously going to be a larger amount of a problem if a filter blocks a wide range of sites (a wide range of religions, not just Pagan ones, political candidate websites, health websites, etc.) than if the blocks are few and far between.

Your local library is probably understaffed. Consider seeing if you can volunteer to run some further tests for them on what’s blocked and what isn’t, or asking what else you might be able to do to help them make a better case for different options for their filters.

Part of this might also be asking what their policy is for book donations: libraries have different policies about this for a wide range of practical reasons, but one way to get more material from a wide range of viewpoints available is to donate it! Arranging a book donation drive of books on less common religions might be a great way to help out a lot of people in the community at once.

Some final notes:

I know there *are* religiously biased librarians out there - but honestly, I have yet to run into one. Everyone I’ve talked to about Pagan materials in libraries has been thoughtful, engaged, and interested in the practical issues, regardless of their own religious beliefs.

However, it is important to note something many people don’t realise. There’s a difference in the profession between those people who have a Master’s degree (generally considered the ‘entry level’ degree for professional jobs) and those who don’t. The two common degrees are a Master’s of Library Science or a Master’s of Library/Information Science.

The MLS/MLIS degree includes information on professional ethics, freedom of information issues, providing library service to diverse communities, and other topics related to privacy of information and freedom of access. People with the degree generally have responsibility for collection development (what items are included in the library), setting policy, and managing the collection and staff.

In a public library setting:

• The library director probably has a Master’s.
• Ideally, so do the reference staff - though due to budget issues, this is not true in all libraries.
• Circulation staff, shelvers, and pagers may have extensive experience with the library, but they probably haven’t gotten the professional ethics training described above.

Small libraries (especially in very small communities) often hire a librarian who does not have a MLIS: this is largely a financial decision (though, honestly, it’s not like jobs with the MLIS necessarily pay all that much more.)

Especially in small isolated systems (not a branch of a larger system) it can happen that the library and librarian forgets about smaller parts of the community, or they get a lot of pressure to go along with the majority view on some issues. Unfortunate but true, but something I file in the “humans are humans” category: libraries are supposed to respond to their communities, and the line between appropriate response and going too far is sometimes a little hard to tell when you’re in the middle of it without direct professional support.

I spent Friday at our local IKEA, picking up various items to help with that, which leads to my post today.

Background:

One of the things my covenmate asked me, back when I sent her the Role of the HPS post, what I thought the role was in regard to the covenstead: is it automatically the place where the HPS lives. I have some philosophical thoughts about that I’m still trying to sort out into words other people might understand, but I do know the practical thing it kicked off for me: a desire for my home to be a place where I can say “Sure, come right over, I’ll be here.” A place I can host (small) group ritual in. A place I can teach in. A place I can have friends - or group members - over and be hospitable.

There’s just one trick.

I live in a tiny little house - 400 square feet, the size of a studio apartment, though it’s divided a little differently. There are many things I like about it.

• It’s the amount of space I actually need for me and the cat.
• I can clean it thoroughly in about 2 hours, if I have to.
• It’s far more private than an apartment - there’s at least 15-20 feet between me and the next building.
• It requires me to think very carefully about how I live, and what I bring into my home.
• It fits my budget, and a larger space wouldn’t right now.

But there are also challenges. Now that I’ve lived here for a year, I have a much better sense of what they are, and which ones I really care about dealing with.

Some of them are just about the space: the tiny house dates from the mid-50s, and has at various times had tenants who did not take as good care of it as might be hoped. Plus, there’s an elderly gas stove and heater (they work fine, but they are not elegant or shiny or new.) There’s some cosmetic damage to the kitchen floor, a few places where the front room floor is splintering slightly (easy to throw a rug over), and so on. My landlady is aimable about fix-up work I want to do, like painting the bathroom, but money is a limit (on both sides!)

There’s also some limits for group work. My front room is about 8×11 feet, and has 3 bookshelves in it. It will fit 6-8 people, we think, if people are friendly about it (it requires a little moving around during circle casting, etc.) which is around the limit of what we want for the group anyway.

However, to do this, everything in there except the shelves have to be moveable. And yet, I need to make sure there’s enough seating that 6-8 people could potentially sit around and chat and eat after ritual. there’s still a question of seating.

(I should note here: L and I are rotating who hosts ritual: she has somewhat more space, and substantially more outside space. On the other hand, doing things at her place means affecting her partner’s schedule. He’s very amiable about it, but at the same time, we want to keep things balanced.)

Some solutions:

As of this weekend, I have two hard kitchen chairs, a computer chair, and a stepstool that people can sit on. The idea is that these would be easy to move around, but more comfortable seating for conversations and teaching. I also have plans for more floor pillows (something the cat approves of.)

The last thing I want is one or two ottoman footstools (padded, but square and portable) that can be used for seating, and otherwise live in the corner. I’m also considering 2-3 TV trays that can be used for portable tables (or quarter altar space) but I’m still considering where I’d store them.

So, what happens for ritual?

• The harp is moved into the bedroom alcove, along with any other furniture we’re not planning on using.
• The computer gets moved from the desk (in the front room) to my dresser (in the alcove). It’s an iMac, so this is fortunately pretty easy.
• The low bookshelf in the west (usually my personal altar space) is cleared, and used as the west quarter altar.
• I just got a set of narrow shelves that live by the computer desk (used for the east altar)
• A flat-bottomed chair and a stool get used for north and south altars, respectively.
• The desk can also be used to eat around after ritual, with a little planning.

The only part of this that is particularly tedious is moving the computer (and even that is only about a 5 minute process).

There is one other thing I’m considering, which is creating fabric drapes to go over the tall bookshelves, so that people do not need to look at my book selections during ritual. (I’m thinking that light but opaque fabric held on with strips of velcro would do nicely, and other people have suggested that this should work, but I have not yet gone fabric shopping or put them together.)

Inside my head:

But there’s also what it means for my own habits: it means training myself to put things back neatly on visible shelves. On keeping the books down to what *can* be shelved. On keeping on top of dishes and other such things (so that not only are they not distracting, but we have dishes to eat out of afterwards!) The rest of my week is getting devoted to doing a chunk of this and getting things lined up so that I can maintain them when I go back to work.

I grew up with a mother who was very particular about house-cleaning - and I was *not* naturally neat as a child. Naturally organised, yes: I knew where in a pile of stuff things were. But not tidy.

I’ve been learning tidy as an adult (and am currently in a weird place where I strongly prefer things to be tidy, but don’t quite have the habits ingrained to keep them that way even when I’m tired/out late/got lots of other demands. I’m working on it.) I intend to talk somewhat more about this at some point, but some of it is complicated by chronic medical foo (asthma can affect cleaning for me, and as of yesterday, we appear to be having late-summer pollen allergies kicking in: traditionally my worst season. This means I’ve got less energy to spare, and it takes me longer to get moving in the morning.)

When I say cinnamon, I actually do mean cinnamon. However, most stuff sold as cinnamon in the US is actually cassia, a closely related tree that’s less expensive to harvest. I tend to prefer actual cinnamon.

I buy almost all of my culinary herbs from Penzey’s (http://penzeys.com, but I’m lucky to have two stores within easy driving distance.)

They’ve got the advantage of being a remarkably inexpensive pick-me-up. Not only is just walking into their store space is a fantastic experience of scent (all of their stuff is available in smellable test containers), but their prices are such that I can walk out with 5 or 6 different small bottles of things for under $20. (And since I’m only cooking for myself, usually, this goes a long way.

While they’re not necessarily organic, they are very good about marking sources (and about indicating clearly what’s in mixes.) And their herbs and other items are consistently high quality, flavorful, and enjoyable to work with.

Currently on my herb storage shelf:

• Ceylon cinnamon (ground, since I usually use it in bread.)
• Dill weed (which I adore)
• Rosemary (my current bottle is from Spain, and powdered, which I like in bread at times.)
• Sweet Basil (French, as opposed to Californian: I like both, and tend to alternate.)
• Cardamon (Guatemalan ground)
• Orange peel (dried)
• Nutmeg (West Indies, ground - yes, I know, really, I should grind it myself, but in practice, I never manage that.)
• Tellicherry Black Pepper
• Parsley
• Spearmint
• Powdered wasabi (lovely in a little dusting in the center of onigiri.)

I also like several of their cheese mixes, and go through vast amounts of their Green Goddess dressing mix (which goes *very* well with a yogurt base: it makes a very nice dip. It does have a little sugar in it, however.)

I’m currently out of - but should get more of - their freeze dried onions, shallots, and chives, all of which are great when I want a little bit of something, but don’t want to make an extra trip to the store.

A couple of years ago, I began baking bread. I do it for ritual, I do it to eat at home. I bring it to potlucks (as I mentioned, it’s a money-cheap way to bring something people will love for potluck).

Here’s how I do it, with some links to some other options. Note that these are optimised for my particular preferences and needs (and I talk about what those are, as we go along). Adjust as makes sense to you.

Things that affect my baking:

• I am short: I hate kneading on the counter because it’s totally the wrong height. I knead in a mixing bowl, sitting on the floor so I can put my upper body into it. This is admittedly weird. Knead on the counter/table if you prefer.
• I live in a little tiny house. It has a little tiny oven (just big enough for a standard baking sheet, one rack, etc.) I am not fancy about my baking.
• I have very little storage space: I do not own a baking stone, fascinating other baking tools, or a mixer: I just don’t have space for them. This is the fairly minimalist version.
• I am aiming for ‘good bread’, usually, not the ‘ultimate best bread ever’. Those usually take more time than I realistically have.
• My preference for bread is a lighter (less chewy) crust, and reasonably dense. Your preferences may vary - the resources section has some other places to go learn more about variations.

Tools:

The basics are:

• Something to mix your dough in/with
• Something to measure ingredients with
• Something to bake on
• Something to cool on.

My choices:

• Large (6-8 quart) stainless steel mixing bowl. Used for mixing dough, for kneading, and for rising.
• Silicon spatula: used for initial mixing. (I find them easier to clean than wood.)
• Measuring cup for liquids
• Measuring cup for flour, and a tablespoon measure for other dry stuff.
• Tablespoon and teaspoon measures (until you get the knack of it. )
• A metal baking sheet
• Either parchment paper or a silicon baking sheet (goes on the metal one)
• A cooling rack (otherwise the bottom of your bread will cool oddly.)
• You probably want an oven thermometer - hangs off the wire rack - unless you are absolutely sure your oven produces reliable and consistent temperature.
• Something to cover the bread with while it’s rising to keep it damp. Plastic wrap that covers your bowl works, but I prefer a damp cotton dish towel.

Parchment paper is less of an initial investment than the silicon baking sheet (and you can generally reuse a sheet a couple of times), but I also like my silicon one. Both help make cleanup much easier, and mean you don’t need to worry about the loaf sticking to the baking sheet.

If you want to bake loaves, you’ll also need a loaf pan. Either ceramic or metal work fine, though they brown and cook slightly differently.

Ingredients:(for one loaf)

Flour : 3 cups (plus a little extra for kneading)

I suggest starting with white bread flour, but you can easily use all purpose if that’s what you have. I find wheat harder to work with, and am slowly adding it into what I make. (If you want to try whole wheat, try starting with 1 cup whole wheat to 2-3 cups of white.)

Water : 1 cup (plus a little extra for kneading)

It should be warm - comfortably warm on the inside of your wrist - but not too hot. Heat kills yeast.

Yeast: 2.5 tsp, or about 1 TBS

I buy my yeast in bulk from a local co-op and keep it in a small container in my freezer. Much cheaper and easier than packets. (You can also buy a pound of yeast at a time, in a brick: I don’t go through it that fast.) Note that quick rise yeast and regular yeast behave somewhat differently. In practice, I haven’t had any problems in this recipe using either, but they rise differently.

Honey : 2-3 TBS

I just pour some in until looks right: consider this a guideline. You can either mix it with your yeast and water (in proofing, see below) or put it in with the flour. Sugar in bread helps it brown and caramelise, and does such nice things to the flavor.

Salt : 1-2 TBS

Salt helps control the rise, and it is also a major flavor builder. You don’t need much: a sprinkle or two goes a long way. Note that salt will help kill yeast, so you should keep them separate until you start mixing together.

Oil: 1-3 TBS

Not something I use every time, but oil or fat in the bread helps keep it from going stale. You don’t need a lot. If you’re doing an herb bread, you can use infused oil, instead of or as well as dry or fresh herbs. You will want a little olive oil for the rising bowl, even if you don’t put any in the bread.

Herbs and additions:

I generally use dried herbs, and I am very generous with my proportions: a small to moderate handful per loaf, of whatever combination I pick. Particular favorites:

• Dill
• Lavender and dried orange peel (reconstituted in a little water, first.)
• Herbs de Provence (a common herb blend that includes lavender)
• Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
• Basil (or even a little pesto)
• Dill and onion (start with about 1/2 white onion per loaf, diced fine)
• Cheese - cheese is a little tricky. Small diced pieces work.
• I also have the ultimate winter spice blend, which involves a little bit of maple syrup instead of the honey, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamon, and orange peel. (This is the one that gets me huge rave reviews.)

I find my additions run seasonally: in the spring, I’m all about dill, in the winter, it’s spices, and I really like other cooking herbs in the summer and fall.

The process:

Proofing your yeast (optional, but reassuring)

‘Proofing’ involves getting your yeast going first - mix the yeast, your cup of water, and at least some of your honey together (I do this in the measuring cup or a mug) first, and let sit for about 10 minutes. If you have yeasty-smelling foam, you have good yeast. Dump the whole mixture in where it says ‘Add water’ below.

Mixing:

Mix the flour, salt, yeast (if not proofing), honey, and any herbs in your mixing bowl. (You can add more herbs later, if you like, but they’re easier to mix here.) Add the oil, if you’re using it.

Add the water, and mix with your spatula until the dough starts forming a large ball that’s pulling off the side of the bowl as you mash it together.

Once you have the large mass of dough, start kneading it - push it flat against the bottom of the bowl, fold it over on top of itself, push down and flatten again, and repeat, turning the bowl around every time you fold over (equivalent to 5-10 minutes on a clock). Add extra herbs if you like.

The idea with kneading is that you are folding air into the dough, and encouraging the gluten to stretch and extend. Ideally, you knead until you get a ‘windowpane’ of dough, where it stretches and becomes translucent without tearing. I have a horrible time with this - I normally knead for 10 minutes, and call it good, and my bread is fine. You can knead in a heavy-duty mixer, like a Kitchen Aid, if your hands won’t take it. Some people use the knead cycle of a bread machine, then bake the dough manually.

Flour holds variable amounts of water. If you are like me, and live in Minnesota, some of this is seasonal - I add more water in the winter, less in the summer. You may need to add extra flour (if everything is way too sticky) or extra water (if it’s way too dry.) If you do too much, add a little of the other one, and knead in and try again. Give it a minute or two between adding things: sometimes kneading will redistribute and the dough will start behaving properly without more additions.

First rise:

Now, take your dough, and dump it on the counter for a minute and clean out your mixing bowl entirely. When it’s clean, pour a little olive oil in the bottom and run it around the edges (all the way up: the dough is going to rise. Feel free to use the dough to spread it around the bowl, too.) Otherwise, you can spray with an olive oil spray.

Cover it lightly with something that will help keep it damp - like I said above, I prefer a damp cotton cloth, but plastic wrap works. Stick the entire bowl + cloth somewhere warm: near a heating vent works in winter, or in an oven you’ve turned on low for 3 minutes and turned off again. I do mine on the stove: my pilot light burns fairly hot, so it gives off some heat right above the stove. (Make sure it’s not *too* hot: you’ll bake your bread. Somewhere in the 70-90 degree range is about right.)

Let it sit until it’s roughly doubled. This usually takes 60-90 minutes. Go do something else.

Shape:

Take your dough and punch it down, deflating the risen bread. Take out your baking sheet (and parchment or silicon baking sheet) and set them up. Form the bread on top of it

You’ll get the best/most rounded round loaf if you pull around from the top to the bottom, pulling all the extra bits on the bottom of the circle, sort of like a hot air balloon: this increases the surface tension of the dough. However, there’s all sorts of other options - you can shape the dough into a braid, a spiral, a loaf, or many other options.

I particularly like the instructions in Peter Reinhart’s The Breadbaker’s Apprentice book, but the website The Fresh Loaf also has some great tutorials and commentary under the shaping keyword.

Once it’s shaped, let it rise again for another 30-60 minutes. If the shape I’ve chosen suits this, I usually cover it with my upside down mixing bowl - it helps keep the dough moist, and avoids trying to pull a clean cloth off the dough.

About 15 minutes before you’re ready to bake, turn on your oven. I bake at about 375, usually, though some kinds of bread need different temperatures.

Baking:

Stick your bread in the oven. My loaves bake for 25-35 minutes usually, and I check them half way through. In some ovens you may want to turn them at this point, so they bake evenly.

Your bread is done when it ’sounds’ right: if you take the bread out, turn it over, and knock on it (like you would on a door - but gently, because after all, it’s still bread), it should sound more hollow than solid. After a few loaves, you’ll get a sense of how long you need in your oven.

Finishing:

Stick it on a wire cooling rack (otherwise, the bottom will compress weirdly) and let it cool.
It’s ready to eat within about 15 minutes, but you can also let it cool all the way.

Storage:

Homemade bread does not have the preservatives of store-bought. This is a bonus, really, but you need to be prepared to use your bread or have it go stale.

• I normally store my partial loves in the fridge in a sealed plastic bag. People’s opinions on this varies, but I’ve found that for my home and set-up, it seems to work best.
• I slice and freeze anything I won’t use in the next 2-3 days. Freezing bread stores it indefinitely: slicing it before you freeze it makes it easier to just pull out what you need. A sandwich-thin slice will defrost on the counter in 20-30 minutes normally.
• Stale bread can be excellently used for breadcrumbs, croutons or various Italian bread salad recipes (among other things.) You just need to catch it before it goes moldy.

Resources:

I got started with Peter Reichart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice which I like for several reasons - it’s got fantastic photos, he talks a lot about different ingredient choices and what they mean, and he’s got a wide range of interesting recipes, so you can try things out. Most of his recipes, however, are a two-day process. You start by making some kind of starter (a sponge, poolish, etc.) and then let it sit overnight. This produces great bread, and I do it when I can, but it’s not the approach I take here.

(I’m particualrly fond of his cranberry-walnut celebration bread, the cornbread recipe, and the pain l’ancienne recipes.)

The Fresh Loaf is a website and community all about bread. Seriously, you have questions? They’re answered there. With photos. I use the Pita Bread recipe from here, and found it very useful in troubleshooting how to get my pita breads to puff properly. Check out the Lessons and FAQs sections.

Getting there:

Obviously, besides gas to get there, it’s going to take you time to get to where you’re meeting. My current driving time is 0 (for things I host) to about 30 minutes each way (heavy traffic, right after work) at my covenmate’s. More normally, it’s about 15-20 minutes. At 2-3 trips a month, that’s 40-90 minutes of driving time. Pretty reasonable.

In my former group, the drive was a bit longer - more like 35-40 minutes, and sometimes worse. When I was doing 8-10 trips out there a month, I was spending at least 4-6 hours in the car. This was slightly less fun, especially with later evening events and getting up early for work.

Preparation:

If I’m hosting, I need to spend about 2 hours preparing in advance. I live in a little tiny house (more on which in a future entry, because I want to talk about how I’m thinking about what a covenstead is), but 2 hours is plenty of time for me to do a thorough cleaning, sweep, do all my dishes, move the furniture that needs to be moved in advance of ritual, move the computer, and so on.

The good news is that much of this is work I should be doing anyway (general housekeeping) and I can keep on top of it fairly easily, or split it up over 3-4 days. The ‘day of ritual’ preparation (stuff that must be done that day) takes about 20-30 minutes, mostly moving furniture and computer and sweeping afterwards.

Ritual bread baking (for use in ritual) also takes time: the basic recipe I use means I need to be home for about 3 hours. However, most of that time is rising time: I can be doing things on the computer, cleaning, petting the cat, or working on a hobby for all but about 20 minutes.

Ritual:

Ritual takes as long as it takes, but generally, we plan on 2-3 hours (including setup and food after) for a moon, and generally longer (4 hours, sometimes more) for a Sabbat, because what we’re doing in ritual is often designed to take longer.

Discussion:

We schedule our discussion nights for a worknight, and I get up early (I start work at 7:30, so get up around 5:30.) So far, we’ve been finding that a 6-9 or 9:30 discussion works really well for us, and we’re trying to do 2 a month. 7 hours, give or take.

Classes:

In my former group, classes were twice a month, once for around 3 hours, and once for 4-6 hours. In the new group, I want to leave it somewhat more open ended, with the idea that student and teacher should be seeing each other twice a month (because this helps build connection, and keeps things on track) but that times can be variable.

Class preparation time, now, that’s a tricky one. With an existing curriculum, like the one my former group had (where teachers for a specific class had notes to work with), preparation is mostly reviewing the material, and teaching - pretty quick for most of us. For the new group, I’m redesigning from the ground up, so of course, it’s taking hours and hours and hours for each class, plus a bunch of time for the overall structure.

(This is what happens when I work in an excellent high school for years: there are all these educational theories I’ve seen in practice that I want to make some use of.)

Personal work:

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I believe that the foundation of good group work is personal work. Yes, this is hard. No, I don’t always manage to do it.

My personal goal, these days, is 5-10 minutes of moving meditation work in the morning, 5 minutes or so of devotional work as I begin my day, and ideally 10-15 minutes worth of meditative or astral work in the evening. I’m trying very hard to add 10-15 minutes of musical work each day, too.

It’s a goal - I usually manage two of the three on a good day.

I also spend a fair bit of time (probably an hour a day) reading material that directly impacts my religious life - online Pagan discussions, books, magazines, and so on. I also spend time on a regular basis writing material - posts in those discussion, entries on this blog, posts on LiveJournal, and so on. (This probably comes out to half an hour a day, but there are days I’m writing for 4 hours, and days I do none.)

Now, obviously, I have one set of experiences: the numbers below are not going to reflect everyone’s experience. But I do want to put some concrete numbers out there (along with where they come from) so that other people can get a general idea of some patterns.

(This gets very long, so you click on to read the details)

Some assumptions:

Before getting into details, I want to lay out some basic assumptions.

Number of group events:

My guess is that most members of groups will be at 4-6 events a month most months (an Esbat, a Sabbat, a few classes or social events.) Group leaders may have more - I was averaging 8-10 while doing leadership work in my former group, between initiate classes, leadership meetings, as well as teaching some of the student classes and being at ritual.

My personal situation:

Currently, my covenmate and I alternate who hosts, thus splitting the driving. We’re meeting on average once a week for scheduled coven things (though I also see a lot of her socially, so there’s also a lot of random other conversation.) She lives about 5 miles from me, so 10 miles round trip.

My car gets about 28 miles to the gallon (though I round down to 25: it makes the math easier), and I’m already paying insurance, etc. in order to get to work, so I generally only consider the gas cost in terms of what it costs for me to get other places.

General Group Work:

Getting there:
Public transit is a good option in some areas, but it doesn’t always work. For example, my former covenstead is not very bus accessible on weekends (the closest buses involve a 2-3 mile walk, and run irregularly.)

Bus or light rail fares here run from $1 (disability) to $4 (rush hour) for a round trip. People who are frequent bus riders probably have a monthly pass that help with costs as well (and means that ‘additional’ trips beyond what someone was already doing to get to work, etc. don’t cost any more than they were already paying. For 6 trips, that’s somewhere between $6 and $24, and I think more likely somewhere in the mid-teens.

Driving: (again, based on the assumptions above)

To and from my covenmate’s is 10 miles.

• At $4 a gallon gas, each trip is about $1.60.
• 4 trips is $6.40 a month. 10 trips at $4 a gallon is $16.
• If gas goes up to $5 a gallon, those turn into $8 for 4 trips, or $20 for 10.

Bear in mind that we’re rotating where we meet, so in practice, I’m looking at 2-3 trips in a month. (for coven work, not social outings) a month, rather than 6+, even if we get together a lot. Call it $5 in practice, maybe less.

To my former covenstead, about 15 miles from my current home (30 miles round trip)

• Each trip comes out to about $4.80 a trip.
• Four trips is $19.20, and ten trips is $48
• If gas goes up to $5, that becomes $24 for four trips, and $60 for ten.

(And yes, there were months in which I was doing ten trips up there.)

This, yes, is a lot more: ten trips would be better than half my current gas budget now, and if I were still going up there all the time, I would have needed to find ways to work something out - probably fewer trips. Six would be doable, in ways that 10 is really pushing it. On the other hand, there’s always looking at other alternatives: for example, my move last summer (out of that covenstead) reduced my drive to work from 15 miles to 5: the money saved that way went back into paying higher fuel costs when I was going back out there.

A long drive:

Someone driving 90 miles, with $4 a gallon gas is looking at $14.40 one way, or about $30 for both ways at current gas prices. And yes, that is a lot. However, if you can figure it out so that you’re doing that one weekend a month, or split the cost with someone else on the way, there are ways to get the costs down.

Food:

Part of many ritual groups is bringing food for potluck. This doesn’t usually happen at every event, but in the group I trained in was common for post-ritual time (say, twice a month) plus sometimes for longer class days.

I’ll be honest here, and say that one of the reasons I got into breadmaking is that it is a *very* cheap potluck food, once you make fairly minimal investment in supplies. (I plan a post about breadbaking as we get a little closer to Lammas, with photos.) Each loaf runs about $1.50 to $2 to make, plus some time.

Pasta salad, hummus, veggies and dip, fresh fruit, and some soups can be done very inexpensively. Stews, sandwich makings, or interesting things to drink can get pricier, but there are ways around those. Deli salads are a great option for people who can’t cook in advance, and run $5-8 for enough for a potluck contribution.

Obviously there’s a huge range here, but there are plenty of options for under $10 per potluck.

Group costs:

There are a number of costs that go along with group work (and they’re outlined below.) This doesn’t include costs for teaching (which is a whole other complex discussion I’m not going into here) - think of this as ‘group incidental costs’.

Some groups ask for donations to help cover these. Some have a specific number that covers these expenses. Many groups will have some option (often extra work towards group events - the tedious stuff no one really wants to do like basic cleaning or collating photocopies of something) for people where money is a real issue. Common numbers I’ve seen are in the $5-10 a month per person range, but this can go up quite a bit if space is rented for group events.

Tools and supplies:

Over time, you’re going to want to accumulate your own personal tools. You’re also going to have some expenses for ongoing personal work - candles, incense, personal offerings, etc.

The costs here range enormously - but I’ve got to say, the only item that cost me more than $20 that’s a working tool on my altar is my athame (and it took me 5 years to find one I really liked. Yes, it was $180, but averaged over the number of years I expect to use it, that’s nothing.)

Tea lights and incense can run quite a lot if you use them all time. But a bag of 100 tealights is under $5 if you get them at Ikea or a few other places. Incense can be inexpensive, or pricier, but several of my favorite makers run $6-10 for 10-20 sticks. (I don’t burn incense very often due to allergies: I can’t handle it every day, so I don’t go through mine very fast.)

Finally, you are probably going to want to buy books every so often. You probably want to buy any required reading texts for a group, but there will be other things that catch your eye or meet a specific need or interest. Book prices, again, are all over the place, but you can find many copies used.

I’d say that you can probably do quite a lot with $10-15 a month, $25 if you want to buy a new book every month or two. This includes things like notepaper and other basic office supplies.

Special events:

Finally, there will sometimes be special events you may want to be at. Sometimes this is a lecture or workshop by an outside teacher. It might be a concert or performance that’s related to something you’re interested in.

There are also things like celebrations. For example, in my former group, everyone went out to eat somewhere after an initiation at a mid-range restaurant (TGIFriday’s or Appleby’s etc. since they were often the ones open late enough after we finished ritual and got changed and so on.) Again, these are not extravagent expenses, but can come to $15-20 an outing.

(Why go out? Eating after that kind of energy work is a good idea. However, everyone was busy enough preparing for the ritual that having someone try to plan to cook didn’t make a lot of sense.)

Running a group:

Running a group has its own costs - some of which are obvious, some of which are not so obvious.

Ritual supplies (candles, incense, wine, bread)

None of these things are huge expenses, but they are consistent ones.

• Quarter candles: We use tealights, which are 5 cents each, or 20 cents per ritual.
• Deity candles: My preference is for beeswax, which takes a long time to burn, but is pricier. (3×3s start around $10 and up, and we need four for our altar set-up: I’m currently using cheaper paraffin candles but will swap to beeswax when these burn through.) This comes out to 30-40 cents per hour of ritual per candle, or $1.50 or so for four per hour. Figure 5 hours of candles in a month with a Sabbat, and that’s $7.50.
• Incense: Again, $6-10 for 10-20 really good quality sticks. One per ritual, or about $1, so $2 a month.
• Wine: We’re very happy with the $5-10 dollar bottle range, honestly: there’s a number of good inexpensive wines available in our area. Call it $15 for two rituals a month.
• Bread: $1.50 or so for a loaf that will be both ritual bread and post-ritual feast food.

This comes out to about $28 a month, although candle and incense purchases happen in clumps (with the remaining $18 being wine and bread). My covenmate and I currently split those - mostly, she buys the wine, and I make the bread, although she’s also a baker.

Altar tools:

We obviously have our own personal tools, but there are times group tools are useful. There are rituals in which the use of the sword is preferable to the athame, or where you want a larger cauldron. In many cases, there are viable alternatives.

It’s obviously very hard to put a price on this - these items tend to be fairly expensive, but they’re also one time costs that might be used for decades. I’m therefore not putting a number on this, more leaving it as a discussion point.

Currently, as a new group, we’ve invested about $30 in quarter candle holders (carved stone), $35 in a basket (storage and carrying of group tools), and contributed various other small items (candle holder, bowls, chalice) from things we already had. We have plans to make altar cloths this summer, which will have a fabric and dye cost - probably about $90 total, split between two people. We’ve also split the cost of the table we use for an altar in my home ($15 each)

Teaching supplies:

Another area of wide variation. Teaching supplies might use consumables (incense, candles) used for circles cast for class or teaching, but they also include photocopying of handouts, or small items used in teaching (simple pendulums, for example, or supplies for an ‘make your own incense’ class.)

On average, I’d probably say $1-5 per student, per month.

Personally, on the handouts, I’d rather provide them electronically, and people can print them as they wish: this both saves paper, and gives a backup copy for people who, like me, tend to lose pieces of paper.

Special items:

At times, groups may want to provide tokens as part of a ritual, or supplies for a ritual working. For example, our Beltane working involved making knotted bracelets out of embroidery floss, so we wanted to have a good selection of colors to work from. We asked everyone to bring a few colors, and I went out and bought about 15 general colors as well. We have quite a lot left, too, but floss is so inexpensive.

Other items might be more of an investment - for example, in our tradition, there’s a pendant given to each new initiate (and a new one given to 3rd degrees). Again, one time expense, but more substantial.

Space rental:

This is the trickiest one. Groups may rent spaces for some rituals, or no rituals, or all rituals. In the Twin Cities metro, there are a few free options (but with some fairly severe limitations, like not being able to dim/turn off lights, or use candles or incense) and there are some more expensive options ($50 and up for a park permit, and usually around $100 for a 4 hour segment in various other spaces.)

Otherwise, you have the living room option. I’m going to talk more about this in my upcoming discussion on what I think a covenstead is, but there are obvious limits - other people who live there can need to alter plans, you have limited space, and living rooms only hold so many people.

Conclusion:

I’m not going to try and do some kind of grand total because there’s so much variation. But I do find looking at the numbers really interesting - some of this I’d broken down before, but some of it I hadn’t.

The most recent was a few minutes ago, on one of the local email lists for the Pagan community in the Twin Cities (Minnesota) area, where someone was posting because she can’t find anyone near her to work with.

There’s a reason the Twin Cities are sometimes referred to as Paganistan.

We have a large and active community, especially given our relative size. There are public rituals, classes (free and otherwise), reasonably local festivals, and three local stores focusing specifically on the Pagan community. Last year’s two day Pagan Pride weekend had 35 workshops or discussions, 5 rituals, and a wide range of entertainment, vendors, and informational booths from groups in the area. (I’m on the board, I get to be pleased with this.)

I can drive most places in the Twin Cities I might need to in about 20-40 minutes outside of rush hours. (Maybe twice that, if you’re going from one suburb to another on the opposite side of the metro.) It makes getting to religious events around town a few times a month pretty feasible, even with gas prices where they are. (I have in mind a post about the actual costs of group membership, but this is not that post. Soon, though.)

If you don’t have a car, it’s a little trickier - a number of groups, including my former one, meet in homes which are not easily bus accessible, or not bus friendly on weekends. (In the case of the former covenstead, the nearest buses run about every 2 hours, and the closest stop is a serious walk away - not something I’d suggest after a demanding ritual.)

There are ways around that, though, with a little thought. Getting rides from someone, or getting a ride back to the nearest reasonable bus stop are both options people have used at various points. It often works out - and one of the reasons I regularly give friends rides is that I love the one on one time talking in the car, so I benefit too.

There are also a large number of resources for finding out about groups. I’ve already talked about many of these elsewhere. Witchvox is the most obvious, but there are the bulletin boards in stores, and various other online resources. I happen to know there *are* several groups that meet more towards her side of town. It’s not always obvious from the Witchvox listings (because several groups list themselves as Minneapolis or St. Paul, rather than the smaller suburb they’re in).

It is more clear if you go and look at individual group’s websites or more detailed descriptions, something that takes a couple of hours maybe, but is totally doable with a little investment of energy. (How do I know this? I went through every group listing on Witchvox a few weeks ago as part of sending out programming emails for Pagan Pride.)

There is also the other question: we’re talking here, at least in terms of Wiccan traditions, about small groups of people with a specific focus. Chances are good there *isn’t* going to be the perfect group for you right down the street. But if your life is generally in good order (as it should be if you’re looking at initiatory training and ongoing group work), you should be in a place that you can figure this out, somehow.

It may not be easy. It may take some sacrifice. (And I say this as someone whose ‘fun spending money’ for the past few years has been on the order of $20-40 a month to cover all non-necessary expenses.) But there are ways for determined people to find some solutions.

Not in the urban areas?

I have far less experience with more rural areas - I’ve lived all my life in either cities (as an adult) or first ring suburbs (my childhood) or second ring ones with reasonable transportation (college). The simple fact is that when there are fewer people, you’re probably going to have fewer and harder choices.

This is true whether you’re looking for Wicca, for a really good music teacher, for a less common sport, for a particular hobby, or whatever else: it’s a simple factor of numbers. The good news is that the methods that work for those things often work for Wicca - maybe it means coming up once a month for the weekend, instead of 4-6 times over the course of the month. Maybe it means doing some work over the phone or online (the stuff that can be done that way.) Maybe it means working out something else.

My former group had someone who drove about 90 minutes to get to us, from the middle of Wisconsin. Yes, it was a long haul. Yes, there were things she missed - she was up usually for two things a month, not more. Yes, there were times the weather was horrible, and she didn’t show up (and around here, that can be snowstorms, or it can be thunderstorms. Both are bad times to be driving.)

But everyone made it work for almost two years, before her focus shifted, and the group’s focus shifted a bit. That’s long enough for someone to get a solid base for personal practice, and to get connections to the rest of the community if they want to pick them up in future, which are excellent things.

The real question:

How badly do you want something? How much do you want to change your life to make this fit? That’s the question that *every* new interest or hobby or desire brings to us. It isn’t something new or strange or peculiar to being a witch.

Every new thing we want has challenges. If we want to do it well, we’re almost certainly going to have to invest in learning - time away from other things, money (to get to where we need to be, if nothing else), focus and attention to learn that come from other activities. We may give up time with our loved ones, hobbies, casual interests.

Witchcraft traditions just take it a little further. How much do we want this? How much do we want to invest in having a life that’s stable enough that we can take on the challenges (and joys) of initiatory work? Are we willing to work slowly towards a goal that might take two years, five years, ten years to fully achieve? Are we willing to wait for the right place, not the one down the street, or the one that looks easiest?

If we are, then it’s sometimes easier to step back and figure out what it takes to get there - what practical steps we can take now that will make it easier a few years down the road. But the patience to get an idea what we’re truly seeking is critical.