p.s. garbage patch research voyage

remember the humongous floating garbage patch i mentioned some time ago?

check out the ship2shore blog about a research voyage (going on still? three weeks starting september 9) into the heart of the garbage patch.

Ten Year Plan

start 11:04a.m.

i haven't been one to make up "goals" or lists of things to do before i die. i don't believe that i am the things i accomplish. somehow, even with my desire to control things and my fears of change, i tended to go with the flow and follow where my life led me.

my life led me to a place of environmental concern. now i feel like i have a basic underlying premise to living. a framework in which to continue. it feels like a foundation and a place to push off of at the same time.

so, i've developed a sort of ten-year-plan that may take more or less time than that. my dad has always encouraged me to continue in higher learning. until this point, i was "on leave" from school since having completed my bachelor of arts degree in december 2004. i didn't know where to go. i didn't have anything i wanted to study enough to make a graduate school plan around it. slowly, slowly, my interest in growing food sustainably has... taken root and grown in my mind. i'm not at a point where i am certain of the path ahead of me, but i'm looking into the requirements for grad school and the options in terms of agriculture/horticulture programs of study. i'm not entirely convinced that grad school is where i want to head. maybe a bachelor of science degree... maybe coursework and study outside of a school environment. but i'm thinking about it.

another factor in the ten year plan is property and a homeland. zane over at lichenology had a passage about the idea of homeland that i really liked, and i may find it again and link to it. i want land that is home. i have an idea of where i'd like it to be (western new york state), and i have an idea of what i'd like it to encompass: large garden, perennial food plants/trees, and a house that i've built with my own hands. to the final point, i've been considering building with cob, which uses the land itself to fashion a very... earthy home. i want to live on the land as i build. i want to build compartmentally, starting with the main room of the house and adding rooms as they happen. in this way, once the main room is built, i could conceivably live in the house as i'm building it. (note, i say "i", but maybe i should substitute a "we" instead? i just don't want to speak for erin, even though she is very excited about the land-and-home idea.)

twelve minutes.

here or there?

is it better for trash to lie on the street or for trash to be carted to a landfill where it will be deprived of air and thus fossilize in a ginormous mound?

i can't decide. i can't wrap my mind around the idea that putting all our trash in one place (especially with the state of our landfill problem*) would be any better than leaving it on the street.

but is leaving it on the street really better? a "clean" city is more pleasant to live in than one that has trash all over. enviro groups do clean-ups of their favorite natural places... but where does the stuff they remove from "nature" go? to the landfill, eh?

then the issue becomes, what does it mean to throw something "out"? is there any way to safely remove our unwantables away from our living areas without destroying someone else's living areas?

exceedingly tough questions considering how much of our trash these days is NOT part of a natural cycle of decomposition and re-earthing.

i just don't know.



*entirely vague statement with no citation to back it up ;)

surprise!

this morning we stumbled into the homegrown fair in union square (put together in conjunction with farm aid this weekend), and as we got there, daryl hannah was introducing the ditty bops, who i'd heard OF but never actually HEARD. yay! plus there were tons of tents including groups like just food. very exciting! we listened for a bit but chose to move on because we needed to get food and man was it HOT and SUNNY out!

stepping out

an important part of using less is relocalization of my life. that means not only eating local and "buying american" (which there was a fun article about in the ny times yesterday), but also building a community structure where i am. while i know my neighbors by name and all, it would be nice to expand my people-base and make some more personal connections outside of my small section of 71st street.

to this end, i have a couple of new groups that i'll be exploring in the coming week. the first is a contra dance on saturday with the country dance new york group. i haven't been to a proper contra in a very long time, and i miss it. i miss the music and the dance, and i think i'm at a point where i could do the socialization a bit better, too. the other one is a peak oil meetup group that i joined yesterday whose monthly meeting is this coming wednesday. exciting!

oh, how i love my chocolate and sugar addiction

when i was a kid, i wanted to be a grown-up. why? because grown-up people could eat candy and sweets anytime they wanted to.


that's still the best thing about being an adult, as far as i'm concerned.

mmm... chocolate.

so far today i have eaten:

2 slices of homemade whole wheat bread with organic peanutbutter
4 itty bitty toblerone bars (decidedly not local :/ )
organic coffee with local milk
less than organic coffee with less than local milk
a fig grown in brooklyn on a co-worker's tree
cucumber and tomato salad with (non local) feta
peach, blueberry, grape salad
organic echinacea tea (not local)
cucumber slices
tap water

random sunday updates

today i baked. i baked 4 loaves of very pretty bread, and also 11 blueberry muffins with cinnamon crumb topping. the muffins aren't as pretty as the bread, but they're tasty.

if you haven't seen, google is showing off it's black version (blackle.com) and counting up the kwh it's saving by not having a white background.

i finally jumped in and tried washing my hair with baking soda and apple cider vinegar. i was actually surprised at the results from the first go. my hair didn't seem at all greasy the day after i washed it. i took 1 tablespoon of baking soda and mixed it with 3/4 cup of warm water. i poured that over my hair a little at a time, starting at my hairline/forehead and working my way back, massaging it into my scalp. then i rinsed in warm water to get the baking soda out. after that, i mixed 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar with 1 cup of warm water, and rinsed that through my hair starting at the tips and working my way forward to my forehead. then i rinsed THAT out with warm water. so far so good. my hair does not smell like vinegar.