Lists, Lists, Lists

Ack.

I began this blog with the intention of documenting my journey in moving my dual-bioregion lifestyle as much towards sustainability as possible. And today I’m feeling like I’m where the rubber meets the road in that effort.

Next week I’ll be more literally nomadic than usual as I plan to ride around with the DP as she checks in at all her various camps. This seemed to me the most practical way to spend time with her and I felt willing to “take a break” from my whole food/local food eating during that time period. Or I thought I did.

While quizzing the DP on her eating strategies I found out that she mostly just does without food — not an option as far as I am concerned. Secondly, when seriously not just abstractly considering it I found the idea of eating in cafes or fast food joints to be completely unappealing. Somehow I seem to have journeyed far enough down this one particular road that backtracking is no longer an option. I guess that’s a good thing. Although right now it feels like kind of a pain. My current plan is to bring along my camp cooking kit and figure out meals for us along the way. I’m not sure how that is going to unfold. But I know that the golden arches just aren’t going to darken my path again. Not even in greatest extreme.

Also, it’s high summer here and the rains have been bountiful. More good news. Except the combination is making the garden exceptionally balky about being put to bed. I’m going to be spending a good bit of the weekend food processing. I’ll pick the garden back as much as possible and hope for the best.

Finally, for this one week I don’t have the services of the X or the Kid to rely upon to keep things running at a minimal level here at the Piedmont house. They are off for their annual week at the beach, so there is no one to feed and walk the Dog or water the flowers or pick up the mail. I’m boarding the Dog and holding the mail. The flowers I’m going to set out on the deck in a big pan of water and hope for the best. They have been so successful, I’m sad to leave them. But since I won’t be in any one certain place this week, it would be hard to bring them with me. The herbs have to stay here this time for the same reason.

Ack.

Turning my thoughts northward

The Kid and I slept in this morning and I was about an hour late dropping him off to camp. Later today, he and the X will be driving to her sister’s house and then tomorrow they will all be on their way to spend the week on the shore at the family condo.

I am staying in the Piedmont over the weekend. On Monday, I’ll drop the Dog at the vet to be boarded for the week and then I’ll be headed up in the general vicinity of the CRV house. The DP’s schedule is varied and unpredictable now that camp is in full swing. So, rather than sitting tight in a particular location and spend 90% of my time alone, I’ve elected to tag along with her and grab the chance where I may to connect to the internet and get work accomplished. It will likely be quite a change from the mindful, aiming toward sustainablity life I’ve been trying to craft here in the Piedmont. But spending time with one’s partner is something that is very important to me as well. And for some reason, my relationship with the DP has always seemed to be about making those kinds of choices. I can live the life I think makes sense or I can be with her — but not both at the same time.

Even tho I won’t be technically leaving for a few days, dropping the Kid off this morning felt like the first leg of my journey. So, now my thoughts turn northward.

Beating the Heat

Last night, I managed the difference between the outdoor temperature (lower) and the indoor temperature (higher) by moving with my therma-rest and summer-weight sleeping bag out onto the deck. I thought bugs might be an issue but they were not. The night air was cool and there was a slight breeze that made things even cooler. I did not end up spending the entire night outside. When I needed to use the facilities around 2:30, I just headed into my regular bedroom rather than going back outside. But it’s an option I might try again.

Making Progress

So, pretty much when I first moved to the Piedmont house in 1992, I thought that it might be nice to have a brick walkway. The main entryway to the Piedmont house is via a short, covered porch that links the house with the two-car garage. Perpendicular to that is a little path that runs between the house and the garage to a garden gate in a wooden fence leading to the backyard. The area gets very little sun, but it’s a cozy nook of a place. There is a Crepe Myrtle tree planted next to the garage that overhangs it and spews out brilliant reddish-pink blossoms toward the end of summer. There are steps down from the porch and a pathway that runs lengthwise down the center of the space with two potential garden beds for shade-loving plants on either side. For years, all of the cats who thought this was a great location for their outdoor litter box sort of precluded the idea of using this space for planting any food crops but the last remaining feline met his gentle, natural end at age 18 this past winter.

For years I’ve weeded and mused on the spot. I thought the brick walkway would really anchor it visually. But I had never tackled a project like that and was intimidated. Then I spent an afternoon at the home of a friend of the DP’s. The husband of the friend happened to be re-doing a stone walkway outside his house. So while the DP and the girls sat inside and got caught up with their friends, I sat on the front steps and quizzed the husband on technique and eventually spent the afternoon helping him out on the project. I came back to the Piedmont with renewed optimism about my brick walkway project as I now had my first key component. I knew how to do it.

The second leg in the journey to a brick walkway happened when the X moved into a new house. She decided to have an old, disease-prone tree removed from the front of the yard. She had the stump removed and ground and in the process the brick walkway that had run beside the tree was removed. She replaced it with circular stepping stones. I eyed the bricks stacked neatly against the side of her house and inquired if I might have them. She told me sure.

Hauling those bricks turned out to be a more major project than I had anticipated. The thing about bricks is that they are heavy. I think it may have taken me close to a year to haul them by the trunkfull over to the Piedmont house. Usually whenver I would drop off the Kid, I would put a load in the car. Although there was a period of time when the project fell off my radar screen, which is why the elapsed time may have been a year. But finally I did get every last brick carried and loaded and carried and stacked neatly next to my potential garden path.

One summer, I proposed to the Kid that he and I tackle the project. I purchased several bags of sand, a wooden float, a cold chisel, and a rubber mallet. From previous projects, the Kid already had safety glasses and gloves. Here is a photo from our early efforts.

We worked on the project over a few days that summer but I think I ruined it for us by being a little too perfectionist in my instructions to the Kid. I’ve since learned that the way to approach a project with him is either to use some skill I’ve thoroughly mastered so that I can feel relaxed and flexible in sharing it with him or to embark on something totally new to both of us with the intention of learning it on equal footing. This project, I’ve since decided, was not a good candidate for working with the Kid as I knew enough to be nervous about it but not enough to effectively teach it. We ended dropping the work and I let the walkway languish. For a while I took a detour through the garage when going out into the backyard in order not to track sand into the house. Then I abandonded that approach and simply swept the sand frequently. I got to taking it as a given that a half-finished brick walkway was the look I wanted for that area. The weeds advanced.

Yesterday morning, I tackled that project anew. The weeds are still a presence to an extent, but here are the fruits of my labors.

Walking the Dog

One of the things I’ve been trying to do with my morning/afternoon outdoor work schedule is to be more consistent about taking the Dog for a walk.

Last summer, at 15 years of age, the Dog broke out of his chain link fenced yard, went a little nuts in a heavy thunderstorm and crossed a major road several miles distant from the Piedmont house. He was hit by a car, broke his hip in three places and almost certainly only lived because a couple of great people stopped and helped him almost immediately. He was lost as far as I knew for a couple of days. I found him at the local animal shelter. The people who picked him up had taken him to a vet and had x-rays done at their own expense (I later reimbursed them, of course) then the Dog was taken to the shelter and transferred to the emergency vet. Rather than just put him down, the docs at the emergency vet noticed that he seemed well-groomed and had a collar so they assumed he belonged to someone and gave him the care he needed that night. I found him and brought him home the next day. I boarded him at the vet for a week and then stayed home with him for another six weeks while he convalesced. He has a little stiffness and an odd bump on one hip where the bones didn’t heal back quite right but he’s remarkably agile. He has always been quite an active dog and I have a theory that just as human atheletes can recover quickly from major injuries the same may be true of dog atheletes.

The long term fall-out from this drama seems to be more psychological than physical. For one thing, it is absolutely impossible to keep this dog contained in any kind of fenced enclosure. I spent several months trying various combinations of things and finally resigned myself to allowing him free range outside and keeping him inside when I’m gone. Second, even tho he still loves to roam in the woods he will no longer venture into them without a human companion. So, while walking him isn’t a twice daily potty patrol for me as I can simply let him out for that it is something that contributes greatly to his happiness because it’s the only way he can get to the woods.

We are lucky in that we live adjacent to a several hundred acre section of private woods and are allowed access to that. So, it’s kind of like having a really, really big wooded backyard. Ever since I brought the Dog home as a puppy he and I have been doing the 1/2 mile circuit down to our creek and back. Lately, we’ve been doing it nearly every day and I’ve started taking my camera along. My goal is to take a photo of the creek each day from exactly the same spot to show changes over time.

This morning’s photo is here.

Market Economy vs Use Economy

This morning I was having a difficult time coming up with my topic for the day. Should I post a positive, upbeat report on my mom’s recipe pinto beans that I cooked up yesterday? The beans are great, but I’m not in much of a cheerleader mood this morning.

Should I continue the parenting theme by reporting on the Kid’s behavior at the birthday party of one of his friends? In the abstract I thought I had done well at equipping him with the practical, mental, and emotional tools he would need to get through what looked to be a difficult experience. In practice, his behavior broke down and in the retrospective light of morning I can see that I did not behave very well either. I was disappointed and angry. Partly with him and his behavior but partly because what I conceived as “my brilliant plan” fell so flat. But I didn’t really want to write about that either.

What really seems to be on my mind this early morning is a work meeting that is scheduled for this afternoon from 2-3:30pm. And the way I’m dreading it as if it were an appointment with a firing squad because it falls right in the middle of nap time. It seems I’ve gotten myself so set into my flexible, summer schedule that the idea of doing anything much — and certainly anything as inherently boring as a sit-down meeting — in mid-afternoon seems not only stupid in the extreme. It seems downright cruel.

And it strikes me that the conflict here is deeper than just a cranky, middle-aged woman who doesn’t want to miss her nap. It’s really one of the places where the use economy and the market economy collide. Something I think we’ll be seeing with increasing frequency in the years to come.

As I make changes in my life to try to live more sustainably on the planet, I’ve noticed that I’m venturing further and further into the use economy. I rarely spend money casually or thoughtlessly. And I just plain spend a lot less than I have in the past. Every project seems to rely more on me — in terms of thought, muscle or both — and less on buying my way to a solution at the local big box store. The new ways I’m incorporating into my life take time, but they are also often pleasant and meditative activities. And the schedule that accomodates them certainly leaves a space for an afternoon nap. In fact, the schedule that mandates early morning work and late evening suppers sort of depends on the ability to catch up on sleep in the hot middle of the day. It’s a schedule based on the weather and the work at hand. A schedule in accord with the world, the human capacity, with life.

Today, that schedule is smacking up against a world that is run by an arbitrary schedule without regard to the weather or human competence. We’re meeting mid-afternoon because that is when everyone who needs to be there could spare the time. We’ll discuss some details of a project that won’t be manifest for a year or two, take notes, leave. And I’ll figure out how to make it work because that market economy life is still largely financing this use economy life — especially the parts where I rocket across the eastern U.S. under power of fossil fuel.

But I don’t have to like it and I don’t.

Long Distance Parenting

So, if you read my Introduction, you are aware that I split my time between a home in the Piedmont of North Carolina and a home in the Connecticut River Valley. While I strongly discouraged criticism of that choice in my introductory post I didn’t really fill in the reason that I’ve made it.

The DP and I are on our second go at making a relationship work. We knew each other when we were in our twenties, broke up, lost touch, and then re-united in our 40s. So far, so good. But in those intervening years we had both made the decision to parent children with other people. Sadly, those people did not see a reason to pick up and move households when the DP and I re-kindled our relationship. So, I spend most of my time near the Kid’s other parent here in the Piedmont and the DP co-parents her two kids in the CRV. Since I have a much more flexible job than the DP, I do most (but not all) of the traveling.

Probably the hardest part of making this way of life work has to do with our relationship to each other’s children. Since the DP doesn’t make it down here very often, she has a pretty sketchy relationship with the Kid. He knows her mostly in terms of her generous holiday gifts and a few memorable trips. Likewise, the College Kid and I have more or less a nodding acquaintance as by the time the DP and I were seeing each other very regularly she was more or less out of the house. The Teenager is probably the one kid that we more or less have in common.

So, how do we regard these children? Are we a very weird blended family? Are her kids her kids and mine mine? Or what? We’re still trying to figure it all out. And sometimes that is easier than other times.

Shopping

This morning I felt a little bit like I was setting off on a military operation with a host of separate cloth bags and a detailed list of purchases for my four shopping stops — farmer’s market, weaver street market, lowe’s foods, and home depot.

I spent by far the largest dollar amount at the farmer’s market. There I purchased lamb and some potatoes. It’s my habit to buy my meat primarily from Fickle Creek Farm at the Saturday Orange County Farmer’s Market and buy most of my vegetables on Wednesday at the Carrboro Farmer’s Market. I like Fickle Creek and I like to support them, but they are primarily a meat provender and the selection of vegetables and fruits at the OCFM is still pretty thin. I’ve been learning to stock up on meat offerings when they are available as — unlike a supermarket — it’s not always possible to get pork, chicken, beef, or lamb whenever the mood strikes. So, this morning I plunked down just under $40 for four lamb chops and a nice leg of lamb. I probably won’t do roast the leg until the weather cools down some — but now I have it.

My next stop was Weaver Street Market where I purchased some organic dairy items, some whole wheat pasta, and some organic, bulk pinto beans. This week I’m going to use a bit of ham I found when I cleaned out the freezer to make up a pot of my mom’s recipe pinto beans and gnosh on them through the week.

From Weaver Street, I moved on to the Lowe’s Foods mainly to get dog food. When I turned in some reusuable glass milk bottles and got a “green point” cash discount, my total bill came to $5.72.

Finally, I stopped off at Home Depot where I purchased supplies to repair (and expand) the clothes line and some primer for the window sill project. Then, I came home, unpacked everything and used the fresh, organic yogurt from Weaver Street combined with a pint of blueberries from Frog Pond Farm to make my breakfast.

It is certainly more complicated to shop this way than to casually “stop off” at the grocery store on the way home and pick up a few items. But sitting here I can palably feel a sense of rightness about these transactions. I had waited to do all my errands on this particular morning. I knew exactly what I needed and where to go to purchase it. The majority of my food spending stayed right in my community either directly to the farmer at the farmer’s market and via my local co-op. I got just what I needed and nothing more. My freezer is starting to look admirably well-stocked. My pantry is getting thinner and thinner in terms of available junky food.

It’s a transition but I feel like I’m past some critical mid-point and going ever more quickly in the right direction.

Household Routines

Yesterday, I thought out a plan for my otherwise non-structured days that has me outside in the early mornings (before it gets too hot) and the late afternoon/early evening (when it starts to cool down). The reason this necessitated thought and conscious resolution is that it also entailed the idea of getting up at 5am and not even starting to prepare dinner until 8pm. On the first day, I stayed up until 11:30 (after vowing a drop-dead bedtime of 11pm) and didn’t have the gumption to set the alarm. Although I did wake without it around 5:30. So, I suppose I’m just half an hour off all-around. Still, it did not seem like an auspicious start.

For the first time ever my yogurt didn’t gel up and smell yogurty when I took it out of it’s baby-blanket-and-cooler incubation spot. I made it up yesterday during the day rather than in the evening. I don’t know if that was the problem, if it was that I hadn’t reserved enough “starter” yogurt or that it plain doesn’t work in a perpetual motion kind of way and needs commercial yogurt as a starter every few times. This was the first time I’d remembered to save starter yogurt (although I didn’t remember until I’d already mixed in the fruit) for more than one or two goes.

I think it’s no accident that the people who seem to be able to successfully pull off a sustainable lifestyle are full-time writers or full-time farmers — or both. Even with my incredibly flexible schedule it sometimes seems nearly impossible to figure out how to satisfy the requirements of my job and the increasingly time-consuming requirements of my life. I’ve heard a lot of discussion on how the price of organic and locally raised fruits and vegetables makes them an “elite-only” option. But it’s been my experience that the limiting factor isn’t money so much as time.

In the past, I’ve gone through periods where I ate out at restaurants almost exclusively. Even though I’m paying more per pound and item for the meats, eggs, dairy, dry goods, fruits, and vegetables I buy now — mostly at the farmer’s market with a weekly trip to Weaver Street and to my local Lowe’s Foods thrown in — I know that I’m spending less overall on food than when I dined in restaurants. Now that the produce from my very modest garden is starting to pour in that tab is only growing smaller. I know that dining out in decent restaurants and cafes most nights is also an elite option, but I think my food budget compares pretty favorably with that of someone trying to survive by dining in fast-food places. Those can be expensive too. So, I tend to think the price argument is more one about priorities. I remember when I first pulled $50 cash from the ATM to spend at one farmer’s market it seemed like a huge amount. But I thought nothing of swiping my debit card for that much or more in a typical trip to the grocery store. Gradually, I’ve shifted “normal” for me to spending the bulk of my grocery dollars at two weekly farmer’s markets (one on Wednesday and one on Saturday) and supplementing that with small, weekly re-supplies at brick and mortar grocery outlets.

But I do agree that there is a limiting factor to eating a locally sourced diet and that is time. It takes a mind-boggling amount of time to grow, process, and cook all of this good food. Simply cooking from scratch using ingredients from any source is a much more involved process than opening up a can of soup or heading out to McDonalds for lunch. Finding or growing the raw materials of dinner, bringing them in or home, figuring out how to make them into dinner or save them for another day. It takes time. It takes lots of time.

I enjoy it and I’m commited to it. I really think I’ve gone over some psychic line where darkening the doors of a McDonalds simply isn’t something I could ever do again. But when the yogurt doesn’t gell, the clothesline falls apart in a big storm, the windowsills get prepped as in all the paint scrapped off but not sealed as is primer applied and then the big storm thoroughly soaks all of that wood, when the natural cure for squash borers really works and all the sudden we are swimming in zucchini, when work deadlines loom, when the next trip to the CRV is only a week away — things can get overwhelming. And do.

Festival for the Eno

Where you live (if you live in the U.S. — and Happy belated Canada day, btw!), Independence Day may be celebrated with as Crunchy Chicken put it “gluttony, drunkeness and blowing shit up” but around this part of the Piedmont it is all about the Festival for the Eno.

I know the local minor league ball team does a fireworks display after it’s home game this evening. And I think there may be a formal, civic fireworks display in some local town. I’m not sure because in the 19 years I’ve lived in these parts I have never attended anything like that. But I have been a very frequent (although not annual) attendee at what folks around here call the “Eno Fest” or sometimes just “the Eno.” Everyone knows what you mean.

What you mean is a three day music and crafts fair held annually on or near the July 4 weekend along the banks of a local urban river that almost certainly would not exist in it’s current form without this festival and the dedicated folks who made it happen and keep making it happen.

The legend is that an individual woman — the wife of a local professor — lived with her kids in a rambling house alongside a minor river just outside a mid-size piedmont city. The city proposed to dam the river to create a reservoir. The woman felt this would negatively effect her quality of life and the quality of life of the critters and plants who also called this river their home. She got to work, organized like-minded individuals and got that dam project put on indefinite hold.

She was still worried, tho. Rather than stay vigilant to constant and myriad threats to the river, she conceived an idea which in it’s time was, I believe, pretty novel. Raise money and buy land. Buy land alongside the river. Both sides and a hefty margin. Protect and preserve a natural area through private ownership.

This was the genesis of the Eno River State Park (as these folks eventually donated their land to the state for the establishment of a park). The Eno River Association has to date placed 5,500 acres of natural area off-limits to development. In doing so, it has preserved a river and it’s habitat — with herons and turtles, bluegills and beavers — within very easy reach of a mid-size urban area. The park is used and loved and an oasis. It’s one of the coolest examples I know about of people getting together and doing something worthwhile.

The Festival for the Eno — now in it’s 29th year — is the main, fundraising event for the Eno River Association. The gate, t-shirt sales, and some of the food sales directly benefit the land-purchasing project. The local Whole Foods outlets donate watermelons at the festival and also 5% of their daily take to the ERA on the 4th.

Because I have been a member of the ERA, I know a lot of this history. But it may not be quite as well-known by the thousands of area folks who attend the festival each year. They go for the headline musicians, the juried crafts fair, the chance to wade with their kids or without in an urban river that would probably be a reservoir if it wasn’t for…..