A very bikey Christmas
Bike to Work Pants from Cordarounds on Vimeo.
I ought to also mention that Mr. A and I created the Yule-timate Celebration of the Bike this Christmas by giving each other mostly bike-related gifts. The product in the video above was not one of them, but it's a cool idea, no? Work-ready pants with built-in reflective technology! Maybe next year.
It feels good to be all stocked up on lights, tubes, lube, chain, tools and other various bike-related gear. The best thing, or at least the most immediately useful thing, was a pair of warm wind-resistant cycling gloves, to replace the pair I lost one of sometime over the summer. The coldest weather I've ridden in here was only in the low 40s, but that's still pretty cold – and the regular gloves I wear the rest of the time (for example, while working in my freezing cold office) just don't cut it when the wind is blowing freezing rain onto my hands.
We've also been planning ahead for next summer's garden, first and foremost by reading this book titled, most appropriately, "Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times." The book's main point is that the high-fertility, high-intensity small-space gardening that has become so popular over the last few decades is only really possible when both water and soil amendments are cheap and abundant, which they are fast on their way to not being anymore, what with peak oil, climate change, and the global economic crisis. For people who are not hobbyists but hungry folks in need of real food, he recommends a return to climate-specific plants grown by older methods that require much less water and fussing with soil, and much more room – the idea being that when plants have plenty of space to develop the root systems they need, they can more consistently withstand a wider range of stresses and yield vastly more nutritious food.
His ideas mostly make a lot of sense to me, and we'll be adapting them as best we can on our hard-scrabble scrap of a garden, which is basically a 3-foot-deep box backhoed out of the boulder-choked alluvium that is our lot, and filled with soil and compost from the building materials yard. The sad fact is that even though we have plenty of space (about three acres), we have very little actual soil, and we'll probably never be able to have the kind of garden here that we both would like to grow. I was thinking today that rather than growing vegetables we might be better off fencing off part of the back field and putting a few goats back there, or sheep ... but meat is still relatively cheap, and livestock are more work than I really want to commit to right now. At most I'm still thinking about getting a few chickens again, sometime this spring.
I'm also starting to casually peruse the offerings of the various colleges and universities within a reasonable distance of home, with the half-formed thought that this might be a good year to finally get back to school and finish my master's, or start a new one, or complete some kind of certification for something. What that might be I still don't know. Living in this very small town, and feeling more or less committed to staying here, and to trying to make a living here rather than commuting – this has severely limited my options, to say the least. To the point where I'm sort of starting to think maybe I ought to at least consider changing my mind about one or more of those prerequisites.
Because really, what am I gonna do for a living in a town like this? Especially given the additional requirements that I must work for a company that offers health insurance (since I am excluded from being able to buy my own as a self-employed person, even if I could afford to), AND that I must also avoid at all costs any endeavor that requires networking or work-related socializing of any kind? That last requirement, I suppose, I will need to ease up on, though it throws me into a sweat just to think of it.
Maybe all I need is a good girdle, or a really beautiful suit. Some kind of business-person disguise that I can put on and pretend to be the kind of person who loves to mix & mingle & talk shop with aftershave-scented acquaintances.
But back to the idea of school. There must be something I could do in this town that would be more interesting and satisfying than what I'm doing right now. Something that would allow the use of my mind, and that would not require that I become a totally different person – though I'm willing to work outside my comfort zone, within reason, understanding that the zone will tend to expand as I spend more time at its edges.
I could also consider working outside the valley again, though that would require me to buy and maintain a car, which means the new job would have to offer more than just a little bit more money than I'm making now. Public transit is not really an option; I looked up the route to a job I was considering in a town just ten miles from here, and found it would take me two hours and a four-mile bike ride each way just to get from my house to the office – a trip that takes about 20 minutes in a car. No wonder nobody uses the bus around here.
Nobody's said anything about hours being cut again at my main job, but the first few months after Christmas are historically the slowest of the whole year, and this has already been the worst year in the 130-year life of the company. I'm thinking I need to be ready to hit the ground running if necessary, or at least have the beginnings of some kind of plan.
One of these days I also need to figure out if there's any way to keep what's left of my investments from disappearing down the drain along with the rest of the sinking economy. Must call broker ....
Just rambling now.
I ought to also mention that Mr. A and I created the Yule-timate Celebration of the Bike this Christmas by giving each other mostly bike-related gifts. The product in the video above was not one of them, but it's a cool idea, no? Work-ready pants with built-in reflective technology! Maybe next year.
It feels good to be all stocked up on lights, tubes, lube, chain, tools and other various bike-related gear. The best thing, or at least the most immediately useful thing, was a pair of warm wind-resistant cycling gloves, to replace the pair I lost one of sometime over the summer. The coldest weather I've ridden in here was only in the low 40s, but that's still pretty cold – and the regular gloves I wear the rest of the time (for example, while working in my freezing cold office) just don't cut it when the wind is blowing freezing rain onto my hands.
We've also been planning ahead for next summer's garden, first and foremost by reading this book titled, most appropriately, "Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times." The book's main point is that the high-fertility, high-intensity small-space gardening that has become so popular over the last few decades is only really possible when both water and soil amendments are cheap and abundant, which they are fast on their way to not being anymore, what with peak oil, climate change, and the global economic crisis. For people who are not hobbyists but hungry folks in need of real food, he recommends a return to climate-specific plants grown by older methods that require much less water and fussing with soil, and much more room – the idea being that when plants have plenty of space to develop the root systems they need, they can more consistently withstand a wider range of stresses and yield vastly more nutritious food.
His ideas mostly make a lot of sense to me, and we'll be adapting them as best we can on our hard-scrabble scrap of a garden, which is basically a 3-foot-deep box backhoed out of the boulder-choked alluvium that is our lot, and filled with soil and compost from the building materials yard. The sad fact is that even though we have plenty of space (about three acres), we have very little actual soil, and we'll probably never be able to have the kind of garden here that we both would like to grow. I was thinking today that rather than growing vegetables we might be better off fencing off part of the back field and putting a few goats back there, or sheep ... but meat is still relatively cheap, and livestock are more work than I really want to commit to right now. At most I'm still thinking about getting a few chickens again, sometime this spring.
I'm also starting to casually peruse the offerings of the various colleges and universities within a reasonable distance of home, with the half-formed thought that this might be a good year to finally get back to school and finish my master's, or start a new one, or complete some kind of certification for something. What that might be I still don't know. Living in this very small town, and feeling more or less committed to staying here, and to trying to make a living here rather than commuting – this has severely limited my options, to say the least. To the point where I'm sort of starting to think maybe I ought to at least consider changing my mind about one or more of those prerequisites.
Because really, what am I gonna do for a living in a town like this? Especially given the additional requirements that I must work for a company that offers health insurance (since I am excluded from being able to buy my own as a self-employed person, even if I could afford to), AND that I must also avoid at all costs any endeavor that requires networking or work-related socializing of any kind? That last requirement, I suppose, I will need to ease up on, though it throws me into a sweat just to think of it.
Maybe all I need is a good girdle, or a really beautiful suit. Some kind of business-person disguise that I can put on and pretend to be the kind of person who loves to mix & mingle & talk shop with aftershave-scented acquaintances.
But back to the idea of school. There must be something I could do in this town that would be more interesting and satisfying than what I'm doing right now. Something that would allow the use of my mind, and that would not require that I become a totally different person – though I'm willing to work outside my comfort zone, within reason, understanding that the zone will tend to expand as I spend more time at its edges.
I could also consider working outside the valley again, though that would require me to buy and maintain a car, which means the new job would have to offer more than just a little bit more money than I'm making now. Public transit is not really an option; I looked up the route to a job I was considering in a town just ten miles from here, and found it would take me two hours and a four-mile bike ride each way just to get from my house to the office – a trip that takes about 20 minutes in a car. No wonder nobody uses the bus around here.
Nobody's said anything about hours being cut again at my main job, but the first few months after Christmas are historically the slowest of the whole year, and this has already been the worst year in the 130-year life of the company. I'm thinking I need to be ready to hit the ground running if necessary, or at least have the beginnings of some kind of plan.
One of these days I also need to figure out if there's any way to keep what's left of my investments from disappearing down the drain along with the rest of the sinking economy. Must call broker ....
Just rambling now.
1 Comments:
From my niece's blog, Zstitches, this link: http://www.spoonflower.com/welcome
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