...err, Time. Ain't got no time. Not time that would qualify as both productive and free, at least, in the last couple months. And consequently there has been a total lack of blogging. Not that I haven't wanted to, or run a wide range of ideas through my head in draft form, but I've come to a time of transition once again wherein I hope to more consistently make time to write some nice little entries and eventually bring strife and controversy down upon myself (probably). After, all, this blog is for naut-y ideas, eh? Not just tasty fungi.
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| Mmmmmm |
My To-Do List as outlined a few months ago has seen some progress- I did go out and get a job almost immediately after returning from NOFA. Shortly thereafter, however, we had the surprise crisis of having to move in a hurry, in the middle of the semester in a little college town that's going through a rental cost bubble tied to the availability of hefty student loans and rising costs of on-campus housing, which of course means that it's entirely disconnected from what your average person who works a normal job would find reasonable. There are mediocre apartments here in Fredonia going for the same monthly rate (though payment is by semester) as some of the cheaper places in Brooklyn. We managed to get a place at the bottom of the market, which still costs enough to make the equation of benefit provided by "town job" a lot less friendly than it had been.
This has made progress towards that car a little slower than initially predicted, along with other factors like working nearly all the hours the DMV is open, having no time to go there anyway thanks to all the other non-work stuff to do, and generally never getting to sleep. But all this is on the cusp of change, as the business I work at is closing, my landlords sold the building (no worries about the lease), and the semester is ending. Even as a non-student, the level of busy in my life is generally tied into whatever is happening at the college.
So, it's time for me to get back to working in what I really want to do- farming. In about 2 weeks I'll be moving up to Roo Haven farm with the people who sent me to NOFA. I'll be working for them, working for a rancher and a carpenter here and there, and probably continuing in my recent role as a traveling bicycle doctor. Perhaps most exciting to me is that I've got a piece of land to work with, to grow whatever I may so choose.
So what to do with that? I have a good quantity of seeds, a bunch of groundnut tubers on offer, and a young fig tree named Stella who needs to get out of her pot and into the ground. Past that I've got mostly just a lot of pie-in-the-sky ideas, from experiments with a better drought-and-weed resistant low-tech water delivery system, to a poorly thought-out experiment with the hoped-for results of selling sustainably farmed trout at the farmer's market and turning our regional culture towards better stewardship of the lake (like I said, that pie is hovering way the heck up there). I am open to suggestions as to interesting things that could or should be done with a blank piece of arable land.
That's not really accurate, of course. None of the land up there is blank. It'll be interesting enough just to see what already grows on it, and whether some of the systems already present there could be coaxed into a productive food-bearing state.
In the meantime, I have two more weeks working in a restaurant before I get up there, and they are in danger of being lonely- this afternoon I saw my girlfriend onto a plane to travel around the west coast for a month (as I write she just texted me that she's arrived in Chicago for her layover). So I hope to channel that potential lonely-time into writing here and other projects.
There's plenty to write about. I do intend to finish my NOFA recaps but will also probably go way off the rails into the role of starch in early human diets, whether or not biology influences cultural gender roles and mythical narratives in popular media coverage of the Boston Marathon Bombings. Hopefully I'll persuasively ruffle some feathers, as ranting silently to myself on these topics is an activity with absolutely zero outlet of tension.
In the meantime, perhaps I'll go trim my yarrow-stache:
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| If you let it grow too long the fibers get too tough for most trimmers to handle. Trimming once per week is advisable. |
