Ch-ch-ch-changes

One of the nicest things about unpacking is coming across stuff you used to spend a lot of time with but for whatever reason, put away and never took back out again.  Like, oh, a huge-ass binder with pages upon pages of 90% Reduction stats.  Back before school and the CSA took over my spare time, I was engaged in a mortal struggle to reduce our household’s consumption by 90% from that of the average American.  I’m not back to the point of wanting to spreadsheet all of our usage, but I am interested in going back to the frame of mind that the more we reduce, the better.

Quite happily, young Miss Lucinda is constantly nagging me for us to start making our own *everything*.  Soap, lotions, medicine, you name it and she thinks we ought to be doing it ourselves.  She has spent the better part of the morning poring through herb books to determine what we should plant in our garden so that we maximize our ourself-making potential.  So when I got a message from my cousin asking if we had tried going shampoo-free, it seemed only natural to ask Lucinda if she was game.  And oh, she is!

So while we are waiting for our first batch of seeds to get here (container strawberries, basil and purslane–I’m just anxious to grow purslane, we can’t sow it until after the last frost) we are going to give no poo a try.

 

Low-hanging Fruit

I find myself, after an absence from blogging for the past year, missing this outlet for some of the randomness that rattles around in my brain parts.  At this juncture in my life, I find myself struggling with having to once again go after low-hanging fruit in many different areas.

We recently relocated into a house we renovated, which means that we are once again faced with the need to go through the very basics of sustainability–changing light bulbs, playing around with heat settings.  Being in a house, I can finally look at how we use water and heat, but being in a house, we have more square feet to account for.  The backyard means I can start to plan food planting in a meaningful way, but this also means that I have a steep learning curve when it comes to learning what grows where, deciding what we should grow versus rely on getting from the CSA, and most of all examining our options for composting and potentially rain water catchment.

In school, the low-hanging fruit is, unfortunately, my degree.  I find myself dissatisfied not with my courses or professors (I have been continually pleased with the materials and quality of instruction), but with the caliber of some of the discussion.  I am, this semester, unmotivated to participate and I am afraid I will need to just put my head down and plow through.  I am ready to be finished with school so that I can decide what I want to do about grad school.

It’s a little frustrating, to be honest.  I absolutely recognize the value of low-hanging fruit, not only in and of itself but as a stepping-stone.  It is, in some ways, like learning addition before multiplication or the alphabet before trying to read.  I have trouble with stepping-stones, building blocks, anything that slows me down.  I joked on Facebook a week or so ago about having a to-do list for my leisure time but the truth is, I have Big Plans and sometimes I forget to slow down long enough to make sure I am not being over-ambitious or perfectionist (and thus will actually get things done instead of getting frustrated halfway through and giving up).  Focusing on the low-hanging fruit should, in theory at least, keep me busy enough to feel like I am not slacking while keeping me from putting the proverbial cart before the horse.