Also saves me having to worry about all those fragile, young seedlings outside in my garden. They are getting loved on with all that rain.
Vulnerability: I am a moody one lately. After much pondering I have come to some big realizations about my job. I love where I work, but I am not feeling challenged these days. There is no part of my current job description(s) that has anything to do with what I love to do. I am not an administrator and that is all I am doing these days. I am an educator. I am a naturalist. I don't mind the administrative stuff as part of what I do, but here I am, fresh out of a zillion years of school to prep me for this?
Good experience I told myself. In the door it got me. Gone with the flow I have. Kudos to me for being so willing to do whatever and be flexible I've heard. Yeah, thanks. But now here I am not doing what I want. I have decided to advocate for myself. I will talk to my director this week and take some action toward change. I'm feeling it bigtime. Truth exaggerated by hormones. Go with it.
Now for my very time consuming spring project.
Shared Blog to Come: Me and two friends have made a promise to not buy anything new for a year. There are lots of exceptions making it not so, so hard core of course. We can buy consumables, services, and things we can't get used like a bettery or car oil, etc. My weddign is on the exception list, but with a promise to try as hard as possible with being sustainable. And our house remodel project aslo on the out list. I am not buying used skylights. Who gets rid of functional skylights? Anyway, even with all the exceptions it will be hard none the less...especially given our love for shopping. We'll be getting together and creating this blog some time this week. There we'll document successes and difficulties. I've already got a few.
My garden is a beautiful living breathing example of reuse/salvage/recycle. Sure I had to buy some things: compost and soil for one. Unfortunately the perfect sunny spot in our yard is also right near some creosote logs that hold my neighbors fence up. That and the fact that our soil absolutely sucks (is full of rocks and clay) led us to build raised beds and buy soil to put in them. Creosote in my veggies? No thank you. We also bought a few starts, the squashes (because the greenhouse at work was having trouble starting them), and some chives cuz i saw them next to the squashes and wanted them. I also had to buy deer fencing. Its possible that I may have been able to find something used for deer fencing, but truth be told I was getting it before I signed the contract and I needed to get it in super fast so I could proceed with getting things in the ground before it became too late.
Okay. Enough confessions. The beautiful and fun stuff I did is as follows:
1. Went to forest land just cleared for a horse farm by some folks I know and was able to get a bunch of cedar side cuts they
were about to chip to make 3 of our beds, our berry bed frame and our cold frame.
2. Took down a retaining wall in our yard and reused the concrete blocks to make 3 more beds.
3. Used the old ugly curtains that were in our house when we moved in for:
1. Barriers between the grass and the soil in our beds
2. Bed covers that protected the seedling when they were newly placed in the beds and to keep the soil from drying
out before the compost mulch was added
3. Stakes for securing the deer fencing into the ground.
It was awesome tearing up the curtains that seriously noone in their right mind would have bought from GoodWill to reuse. But even more satisfying was sitting with my needle-nose plyers and bending all the little metal z shaped peices of the curtain set into stake shapes (as shown in picture).
Trying To Get Around a Promise: With the successes comes the challenges. So, one of my coworkers gave me a brand new Kombucha mushroom. I am very excited and am vowing not to mess this one up. However, I needed a gallon sized glass jar with a wide mouth. Don't have one and don't live in Seattle anymore where I can easily go to some thrift stores and find some of these. Made the tea yesterday and had the day to find a jar while the tea cooled. Figured out that grocery stores get their olives and pickles that they use at their salad bars in these jars. They took my name and number and should have two for me by mid week. Shit! Can't wait that long for this batch. So I found one of those big glass jars with a spicket for making sun tea. Bought it with my tail between my legs knowing that I was breaking my contract. Decided I'd return it when these other used jars come through in a few days. Then came home and Pete wants to keep the thing for making sun tea. He'll buy it so its not on my conscience. IS this okay? Well, after a few mintues of considering I decided its not okay. That could snowball, I decided, into.."hey babe, can you buy those awesome new Danskos for me cuz I can't buy them myself". So, I know it still breaches the contract, but I have the $5.99 jar of tea (which kills me for a zillion reasons, biggest one being that bars and restaurants and delis around the country dispose of these everyday and I have to go spend 6 bucks on one with sunflowers painted on it for sun tea cuz all the used ones are disposed of). Not okay. Anyway, I am rambling here, but the bottom line is I am bringing the jar back as soon as they call me with a ready to use old olive jar. Conscience slightly relieved.
