Tag: Blogger

We Have a Fence!

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Other than the planning, my brother has done most of the hands-on work regarding the vegetable garden. I had overheard discussions about how to build a fence between him and mom, but had (mistakenly) gotten the impression that he was simply in the planning stages, unaware that this whole time he had already been hauling metal posts and wire fencing out to the garden.

Eventually he came back in the house and–get this–actually asked for help. This mostly just ended up involving me helping pull the fencing taut and then holding it in place, with the occasional help bringing more wire fencing panels out of the barn or scavenging them from fencing that was wrapped around the yew bush near the house.
We need to trim that. Anyway–
My mom came down to watch, after I brought a bench down so that people would have a place to rest while working in the garden, and she snapped exactly two progress shots. I think this one is the more flattering of the two.
As I write this, she’s helping to add compost to the garden. I’m hanging back because my meds make me heat intolerant and it’s pushing 90 farenheit. (I had to briefly dip into the house during the fence building, too. Once we got past the hottest part of the day I was good to go.) Even walking into the shady side yard to go investigate the sound of a tree falling was pushing my luck, because every second out on the field in direct sunlight to get there is brutal.
LiZiQi and them make it all look terribly easy. Working a remote call center job, while amazing for my sense of safety around covid, and while allowing me to actually have some energy on my days off, has made me horribly out of shape. I thought the fact that I sit on my ass during my free time was just me compensating for the fact that I have tended to work physical jobs. When I was unemployed (or at least just not gainfully employed–I do have some volunteer gigs) between March and June last year, even without a day job I was doing a fair amount of yard work, tidying and trying to keep after the house for my parents. And I was definitely more sedentary than the average person, but that’s always been the case any time in my life that I wasn’t playing sports. But with this sit-down job, and living with family again, I feel like I do an awful lot of nothing in my spare time. Even when I am doing business prep in some way.
More on that…whenever my cardboard deodorant tubes get here from abroad.
I would love to be able to to get into the habit of actually getting up when I wake up around 6am because the sun came up. I had it in my head that I could somehow train myself to get up at 6 without the lure of coffee and the reassurance that I wouldn’t be bothering anyone by puttering around. My brother manages to pull it off, but he also doesn’t talk loudly to dogs in the morning, which I do. I’ve also just never, ever been an early riser. It’s weird.
I’ve also never really been a self-starter. I’ve done random assistance jobs through, like, Stuff, or Shiftsmart, who are not paying me to mention their names. Getting myself to work on a schedule that someone else isn’t setting for me is inexplicably difficult to do.
Maybe it’s just my personality.
But if we can build a fence to thwart a deer’s insistence on eating our cornstalks–a not-insignificant part of the deer‘s personality–then perhaps I can build a metaphorical fence around my desire to loll about in bed until 10am.

oh my god I bought a scythe

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This is not even remotely unexpected of me and struck all my friends as hilariously on-brand, with probably the main surprise being that you can actually buy an Austrian scythe for what is not a totally ridiculous price. I paid like 150 USD after taxes at Lee Valley tools, which is a really damn competitive price.

Your jokes about Amish Paradise aren’t going to work on me, though, because I already dress like a metal Mennonite on purpose.

That’s an actual thing, by the way, though this is in Plautdietsch, and not Pensilfaanisch Deitsch:

But I can absolutely get on board with metal songs about needing to get your chores done and have a nice nap.
Anyway, I’ve wanted a scythe for a couple of years because I do kind of enjoy the process of mowing the lawn, but the electric mower gives out well before I do, and gas mowers are worse than cars as far as emissions.
And like, yeah, you can’t individually choose your way out of climate change, but considering we mow the lawn more than we drive, as a household with two people working from home and 22 acres to keep after…
The lawn at the other house, which I was taking care of before I moved to Philly and then to my parents’ farm, is getting overrun. Our neighbor keeps after the front lawn because it’s flat and easy, and it makes it easier for him to scan the property for fallen trees, which happens a lot, but I told him not to worry about the back. Too hilly, too full of trees. I wouldn’t dare ask him to deal with that. Especially since a lot of the ash trees have given way to emerald ash borer and are regularly snapping in half during storms.
And I’ve been…critical of a lot of tech for a while, especially when its selling point amounts solely to speed. And while I am not Amish (duh) I am appreciative of the metric by which Amish communities measure the suitability of technology–does this encourage interdependence? If not, it’s rejected. I am certainly less than thrilled with the way those expectations are enforced. But nothing is pro-social about a lawn, especially one being maintained with loud, dirty machinery. If I had my druthers I would buy the house off my parents and convert the front lawn into a community garden, but where I am going to come up with $300k is beyond me.
Maybe I can be like Jim Kovaleski and mow lawns with my scythe for cash. My WFH gig, while convenient, and while having a pretty good hourly wage, simply does not give me enough hours to suit my needs.
Then again, that’s what contemplating starting an Etsy store is supposed to help mitigate. We’ll see how that turns out. I’ve made a test batch of an anti-fungal salve and my brother and I have been testing it. Running around barefoot or in galoshes isn’t exactly kind to your feet, and I’ve had tinea veriscolor for years. The salve is based on an essential oil mix I saw some good results with, so we’ll see if it works in a beeswax and plant fat base. More on that story as it continues. I’m thinking of some conditioner bars and lotion bars next. And maybe lip balms since it seems like if I don’t wear lip balm for two seconds I’ll die.

Sprouts!

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Before any of the planned plants go into the garden, I like to check what volunteers come up. In my window box, which has never sat in a window despite being set up at 3 different addresses, I see these little guys that I can’t identify.

They’re too small to get a real idea, so I’m mostly just trying to see if I can accurately guess whether the soil it’s growing in ruins any edible plants that grow in it. I may have left it too close to the roof of the first house, and too close to the roof of the shed at the apartment in Philly. And I know that, rationally, foraging in the city is actually fairly safe, at least when it’s fruits. (Shoots and roots, not so much, as I understand it.) But we were only one building away from the road, and like, I still have OCD despite working very hard on managing my symptoms.

Anyway, could be beets. Could be lambsquarters. How beets would volunteer in this box is a bit beyond me, so I suspect not.

Plant ID is still kinda new to me, and I’m really only good with edible invasive plants–which is most invasives where I am, and that’s for the very simple reason that they were primarily introduced as food, seasoning or medicine. The time you spend hating garlic mustard or dandelions for existing is time that you could spend eating them and enjoying them.

I mean, yeah, rip out the roots, because they propagate extremely easily, and they’re still invasive plants without natural eaters to balance it out without intervention. But wash and prepare and eat them, too. Be the eater. Be ~the balance~.

Admittedly I’ve never totally understood the intensity with which people (and especially other white settlers!) hate weeds, or how arbitrary the designation of a weed really is. Even the “plant where you don’t want it” criteria is ridiculous. Why are you the judge of that? Why should your whims dictate the landscape?
Anyway, there are seeds in the garden, and they are sprouting, but I’m impatient and as soon as it made sense to start buying crunchy greens from the store again, I once again started eating lettuce by itself because I got sick of all the meat I was eating over the winter. My brother usually cooks dinner. He is a very meat and potatoes kind of person. I am not. I would rather have rabbit food. But I don’t want to wait for the carrots to finish growing.
But, in the spirit of being Punk As Fuck in terms of the whole “prefiguring the abolition of grocery stores through gardening” thing, obviously, you have to be DIY. Them’s the rules.
You will find, by the way, that acting on your anarchic values does have rules, kinda. Or principles, at least. Because you have to self-govern. The magic is in the fact that these are not rules made by some centralized authority that doesn’t know or care about you, so if you make up the rules, you can follow rules that are organic (astonishingly not an intentional pun) and that actually make sense.
Usually. There are exceptions, what with the whole OCD thing.
I might have violated my principles a little (a lot) by buying the 4-pound bag of mung beans off of ~the Zon~ but unfortunately ~the Zon~ has created a feedback of loop of being able to offer the best variety and sometimes lowest prices, and then doing so, furthering its monopoly.
And anyway, I think you can utterly despise a corporation or institution and still be stuck using it. That’s usually why you come to despise it.
So. Beans.
At first I had these little dudes in a jar. It was very aesthetic, and all of the moms on Pinterest would have loved it with a little burlap ribbon added to it, or something. Petit Trianon who? I don’t know him.
But I didn’t like the drainage situation–there was no drainage, basically–and I had a ton of plastic cookie tubs from Giant which I had been saving for sprouts, or microgreens, or maybe baby plants that couldn’t go out in the main garden yet. At first I was dumb and used a votive candle and a paring knife to try and melt holes in the bottom for drainage. The primary thing this achieved was just wrapping the tip of the knife in a very thin, form-fitting layer of burnt plastic that had to be scraped off with another knife and then scrubbed away with steel wool.
The upside is that I guess this inoculated me against the fear of stabbing my fingers. My next attempt involved two tubs, one for beans and one to catch drained water, and repeatedly jabbing holes in the bottom of the inside tub with a corn cob skewer. This scared my mom’s dog and I added an optional step of repeatedly tapping the plastic while petting her, to help demonstrate that the plastic cookie tub was not, in fact, going to murder her.
Someone might see those stray crumbs and assume that I eat in my kitchen. I’ll never recover.
It worked. Or the poking holes part, did. My mom’s dog was not really into the ERP session, though she did make a decent amount of progress. I ended up adding air holes for better humidity control to the lid, too, which does not show in that picture…because I had not done it when I snapped that photo. I’m way more comfortable with the humidity situation now that there’s outside air circulating through holes too small for most bugs to try and sneak in. Apparently sneaky bugs is a tradeoff you get with purpose-built sprouting lids. I think that’s not a good tradeoff for a household that spent about 30 years without air conditioning and just relied on making sure air was constantly moving. Bugs are just something you deal with.
I know sprouts have a reputation for getting people sick, but I’m a hardass about food safety–again, the OCD thing—and every time I check on them, they just smell like wet beans. I eat a lot of beans when I have the chance. This is a familiar and safe smell even if it’s a little weird.
Leaves are poking out now, so I think in a few days there will also be a little more air in the sprouting setup simply because all the little baby plants are going to start shoving each other out of the way.
I think I’ll make stir fry.

I Renewed my Domain

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I renewed the domain.

I let it lapse because I hadn’t updated since August, because I had picked up a job at a different grocery store after the first one’s response to covid was a letdown that was destroying my sanity. I wanted to focus on work in the hopes that this would be better.

It turns out that working in grocery, literally at all, will destroy your sanity. My transportation situation fell apart and it was costing me half of my paycheck to go to a job where customers were abusive and entitled, management didn’t give a shit about us, and I was coming home to my house being trashed by my anxious dog.

I left by mid-March.

I don’t know what it is about grocery stores that makes customers so nasty. I’ve been in retail for about four years, but grocery has been uniquely terrible. Consulting my coworkers, they agree that even before covid this was the case. During covid, I’ve been watching my higher-ups discuss the explosion in profit that the shutdowns provided, planning ahead to profit off of the state store closures which gave us a near-monopoly on alcohol sales, planning ahead for the Superbowl to sell for parties that shouldn’t be happening…

It destroys your soul. Nobody I answered to gave a shit about covid. Or us.

When I was at my employee orientation for my first grocery job they emphasized the narrowness of the profit margin for grocery as an industry. A few days after mother’s day, the beer and wine manager reported a daily sales number higher than I make in a year.

Over triple what I made that year, in fact.

Between March and June, I was home with my dog just about 24/7 except when I needed to run to the store, or taking him to visit my parents for a few days at a time with the rest of my family. They moved away in December and I was maintaining the old house (admittedly, not very well) until I moved to the city.

I hated city living. It was fun in June. By July I was starting to have problems. By August I was in a prolonged mental health crisis. It was nice to be able to walk everywhere, but the constant noise, the sense of having zero privacy, the lack of trees and wildlife, and the fact that there was simply no way to get any kind of relief became exhausting. I moved in October. Not willingly, but I’m glad not to be there anymore. I live out by Lancaster now, at my parents’ new house. We’re revisiting the idea of livestock and looking into chickens. Maybe mushroom farming. Maybe bees.

My dad and brother keep bringing up the possibility of a goat, but I’m really not into the idea.

I do have the rough layout for the crops we’re trying to plant this year. It’s just a matter of making sure I have all my seeds in order and waiting for it to warm up. Maybe getting heating mats. Maybe getting grow lights. With 11 houseplants, a growlight would be a nice to have on principle. If it means more success with vegetable gardening, even better.

Which reminds me of another thing that came up during my employee orientation when I was freshly hired by the first grocery store I worked at: home gardens and small farms are a legitimate competitor that cuts into a grocery store’s profit margin. People who grow food and share their harvests can and do interfere with the deathgrip that centralized food sourcing has on us. Not enough to upset the entire system, but enough to help people ease off.

And I think that’s punk as fuck.

I Hate High Efficiency Washers and I Want to Scream

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via IFTTT I used to get weird skin reactions if I washed my clothes in normal detergents, so I switched to some hippy-dippy goop from Costco that smelled like magnolias. I didn’t really think too hard about whether it made my clothes better or worse at the time, because my main priority was not having those random, itchy, swollen patches where detergent residue rubbed off on my skin.

And then I took a vacation with my cooler, better dad to Seattle and washed my clothes in soft water for the first time.
And when I washed them again, back home, all of my clothes felt disgusting and sticky. It turned out that the hippy-dippy magnolia-scented stuff from Costco, while definitely much gentler on my skin, was just as sticky as the normal stuff that doesn’t cater to crunchy granola chemophobes–if not worse. And I hadn’t realized how much it was leaving behind until getting my clothes properly clean in different water reset my expectations.
I can’t deal with sticky things. I hate finding residue on household surfaces or my hands. Syrup, oils, dust, splattered wax or bacon fat, any of it. Having my clothes come out of the washing machine all weird and gummy, when the machine’s sole function is to remove whatever got stuck to my clothes since last time, has been driving me batshit. When I fold my blankets after giving them what was supposed to be a deep clean before storage, I feel like I have to wash my hands between each one because all those little fluffy strands of microfiber cling to gunk. I am constantly stripping my laundry.
Stripping in hot water and baking soda helps, but it’s murder on my clothes. Especially because I feel like I have to constantly re-do it. And that doesn’t change that the washing machine isn’t cleaning my clothes.
After I swept out and scrubbed the basement to the extent that the clutter allowed (though I was inspired to do so because most of it had been cleared), I sat down in the basement and watched a quilt get cleaned on the quick wash cycle.
Don’t snitch on me to my grandmom, by the way, because if she knew I was putting quilts in a washing machine she might actually take a tone for once in her life, which I am not prepared for. Even though that advice comes from the days of washing machines with central agitators churning the clothes.
My high efficiency washer was barely using any water. Which it’s kind of supposed to do, but…it was barely using any water. As in, clothes were basically just getting damp, rather than properly saturated. That means that even with multiple rinses, any kind of detergent was not going to get washed out.
So no wonder I had been getting better results for a while, even with the detergent, using two large tubs and just washing by hand. But still not the desired results.
I ran the washer again, now on a delicate cycle. The wet quilt was heavier, so the machine gave me more water. Stopped and restarted. Now the soaked, heavy quilt tricked the machine into giving me enough water.
Which is to say that when you use water to wash your clothes, you’re going to need to use water to make the machine use enough water to wash your clothes. With water.
The easy way to do this is to start a cycle with nothing in the detergent and rinse drawers. Doesn’t matter what cycle as long as the temperature is acceptable. Let it add water and jiggle your clothes around a little.
Stop and start again when the first cycle switches from adding water to just agitating clothes. Let it repeat adding water.
When the second cycle switches from adding water, stop. Set the machine to your actual desired cycle, with baking soda instead of detergent, vinegar in the rinse compartment, lots of agitation (unless it’s delicates or a quilt) and as many extra rinses as the machine allows.
Then and only then can you let the machine do its thing and trust it to do the job properly.
This doesn’t actually defeat the purpose of a high-efficiency washer. It’s still using far less water. This is just about tricking the machine into using enough.

The Question Isn’t Really What Choice to Make

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I’d love the idea of being an impressively frugal extreme couponer, and being one of those people who’s so good at it that the store owes me money by the time we’re done ringing up.

But I’d also love the idea of living in a small space with the bare essentials, plus a few comfort items.

But I’d also love the idea of buying dry foods in bulk in my own containers, all of which has to be hauled and stored. But I’d also love the idea of riding a bike or public transport everywhere to save the planet. But I’d also love to grow all my own food, with enough land to do so. And this also requires storage. And distance. And in the current, very doomed system, a car.

At least dumpster diving hits a happy medium between frugality and waste reduction.

Am I allowed to have it all? If I am, is it even feasible to have it all? How do you go zero (or least) waste when everything you get a coupon for is brand name and in crappy packaging? How do you buy and store bulk in a tiny space? How do you store your harvest in a tiny space, if you’re lucky enough to have the land for it?

Is this what I’m even supposed to spend my late twenties figuring out? What with the world being on fire and all?

One thing I keep getting stuck on is that all of these approaches are distractions. None of them address the problems they pretend to respond to. They’re just reactions, adapted, made cute, made profitable. Put on pretty little monetized sites full of affiliate links to overpriced hosting.

And I just finally figured out how to get AdSense working on this site, so I’m certainly guilty, though I’m also recently unemployed because I dreaded the idea of continuing to work with the public after seeing mask compliance sharply drop off when the Yellow phase of reopening for my county started. I was not willing to risk my safety, and the safety of family that I’m living with, to find out how much worse it was going to get. Though when I went back recently to drop off my old handbook and uniform shirt, I did see just about the same amount of bare faces, even among employees, so I guess I can be comforted that I made the right choice.

To be clear, the current state masking guidance is “any time you go out in public,” and the store’s policy, at least in theory, is “whenever you’re on the clock and not on break.”

I do not miss the work, but I do miss working, so I guess I’m hoping I can fill the void and turn at least a small profit (which is literally any amount over $12) with this blog.

But I do not feel that I fit all that nicely into the “lifestyle” or even “aspiring homesteader” niche, because it is a genre of clean and pretty blogs advertising a lifestyle that is inherently dirty–whether that’s mud or blood. People are very proud of changing the way they get resources, without challenging or changing their relationship to those resources. It remains impersonal. Extractive. Colonial. Eco-hostile. Because it does not disrupt the systems these people claim to be disenchanted with. The homesteader aspiration is only a possibility because the “opportunity” so strongly associated with it, and which is so strongly desired by these homesteaders, is only a possibility as a result of forcibly claiming land with the specific goal of exploiting it. The pastoral fascination requires ignoring the historical exploitation of the people who traditionally worked the land solely to be the subject of ignorant fascination, requires ignoring land theft and genocide, requires ignoring chattel slavery and the momentum of generational wealth accumulated through all of this.

Nothing has changed.

The appropriate question is not whether we can have it all, or if we can make the best choice. The fascination with choice (or romantic notions of freedom) doesn’t concern itself with who even gets choices to begin with. Or at whose expense the comfort comes from, so that we can even worry about choices in the first place.