Miscellaneous update

I have been too lazy to do good posts for the moment. There really needs to be more hours in a day. So here is a miscellaneous piece of my world right now.

-Gardening. How does our garden grow? Great! Unfortunately at this moment I am too lazy to put up pictures, but everything we planted is growing! We even have a bell pepper the size of a pea right now. We planted romaine, arugula, peas, green beans, squash, bell peppers, jalepenos, broccoli, cauliflower, green onions, shallots, garlic, potatoes, carrots. I also just planted some leeks and herbs this weekend (dill, parsley, oregano and chives). A big thanks to Charlie's cousin who gave us most of the seeds to plant. Charlie made raised beds out of cedar, and we made trellises last weekend because the peas and beans are already getting pretty tall. This is our first gardening adventure so hopefully everything makes it to harvest, but so far so good!

-Writing. Sigh. It is good that I am spending this much time writing my dissertation (I plan on defending in spring), because I dislike writing just as much as ever. And, I am still quite slow at it, that is if I'm writing well, and I still change what I'm going to say a million times. And did I mention that I don't really like it? Actually one of the reasons I started this blog was to like spending time writing, but really this does not translate at all into dissertation writing. Blog=fun, dissertation=fun part is over. double sigh.

-Job searching. I am also spending some time working on job searching skills, as at 28 years old I haven't really had jobs that have required that...Mainly I want to find a part-time job so that I have something to do besides write. Plus, right now while I am technically a student, at 28 I'd like bring home some veggie bacon at least! And if it lead to a full time job after I graduated, that would be excellent. Anyone hiring out there?

-Cats.Not really an update, though I think spending all day with the cats is making me a little nutty. We are trying with limited success to toilet train them, I still have dreams of not having to clean the litter box. The training process is pretty intense though.

-High school. My high school reunion was this weekend. I didn't actually go to it, but I can't believe it's been 10 years since high school! It is pretty crazy that I have been in school almost that entire time. Because I am lazy, I am posting this picture that was on my computer. It was the band seniors from 2000, the year I graduated. I spent lots of my time back then with the band and guard, although very few of the color guard were actually seniors when I was.

-Fun stuff! My birthday is in 2 weeks. Eek! Almost 29. In 3 1/2 weeks, we head to Hawaii. Aloha!

What will you do this year?

It seems to be the New Year's resolution, except it doesn't seem to matter when you start it. The first time of heard of such a thing was with the movie Julie and Julia-which I love.


But I've been hearing these type of pledges much more now-maybe a spin off of ideas from the movie.
For example, people pledging not to buy new clothes for a year-which is great, simplistic, environmental and budget friendly to go secondhand for sure. Taking it one step further is this blog New Dress a Day. She is buying used dresses from garage sales, flea markets, vintage stores and such, giving herself a budget of $365 and as much for materials for a year (btw where is she shopping? Even Goodwill still sells things for $5-10). She is getting  a "hideous" dress each day and turning it into something amazing! She is taking her commitment and wearing it! Good quality work here.

Then today I read on NYTimes about a composer who is writing a new piece of music every day for a year. From the article, it sounds like he is able to do this in a couple hours each day. I haven't listened to the music but is anyone else skeptical? Maybe it's not that crazy, people do improve music, although I will admit listening to the same person for awhile it sounds pretty repetitive to me.

Summary of all this-setting personal goals good, giving yourself time limits to achieve those goals, also important. But, completing a project every day for a year? Overkill? What about underkill? I think for some of these projects, it works really well. But did Julie in the movie Julie & Julia do a great job cooking the some 500 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking? My guess is no. Probably in slamming through the recipes, there was very little perfecting of the recipes going on. Something that I would argue, is pretty important to being a good cook. It took me baking oatmeal cookies about 10 times for them not to be too dry or too sweet, but the first time I made a lemon meringue pie it was a success. Sometimes it's weird what comes naturally and what doesn't. Anyway, my take home message here is I think this world would benefit by more people setting goals to improve something, not just finish something.

My goal for the moment? Starting an organic vegetable garden, and hopefully saving on groceries in the process (organics are expensive!). The garden will even take a little work each day. But the vegetables, they will take months to be "finished." And I like it that way.

Texas, it's time to give up your grass

Two weeks ago, I went to a free class at the Natural Gardener on maintaining a lawn naturally. I was hoping to find out great information on what I thought was pretty difficult issue in central Texas. It turns out there is nothing natural about trying to maintain a lawn in Texas. Sure, you can put on the nifty organic all natural products that they were selling and what not, but the manpower and resources involved are crazy. Lawns do not want to exist in central Texas, nor should they given what a waste of resources it is. The recommendation that really caught my eye was the recommendation of watering your yard twice weekly, and watering a full inch each time! I also got the impression that if you were outside the city limits and did not have water restrictions, they would recommend a third watering.

Thinking this must be a crazy amount of water, I did some searching to see what this would calculate to if you had even a modest sized yard. For example, if you had a 1/5 acre plot, you might have 30' x 40' in each the front, back of the house, plus a little extra on the sides. This would amount to 3600 square feet that needs watering twice each week. So I found out that 624 gallons equals 1 inch of water for 1,000 square feet (a 31 x 32 plot), so your 3600 square foot lawn would need 2,246 gallons every time you water! This is an average of 20,214 gallons a month. This would be about  160,000 gallons annually!!! (accounting for ~4 months of not water for dormant grassand rainfall). I mean, what is grass good for? Not much! The average household in Austin uses 8500 gallons of water each month, although this is more during the hot months. But my guess is if everyone followed the guidelines above, the usage would be much higher.

I guess the big question is what exactly is sustainable water usage? Some people have yards, others live in apartment complexes and can't harvest rainwater etc.,  although there are also rivers running through Austin. My opinion is that for landscaping, sustainable usage would be what rains down. So get a good rain harvesting system. Austin gets an annual rainfall of about 33 inches, although that is hardly evenly distributed through the year. Calculating that out for 1/5 acre that could yield a potential 179,000 gallons each year, provided you were able to harvest every drop of water that fell on your land. A more reasonable estimate might be a good cistern to collect water from the roof, this might harvest for 1600 square feet, or 32,900 gallons a year.  By this estimation maintaining a yard is absolutely not sustainable, since it would require 130,000 more gallons than you could provide. But maybe a small garden is possible. Or maybe native grasses like buffalo grass. Sigh.  I wish native plants were cheaper. I don't understand why they had to tear them out and put grass in instead.

See also:
http://www.examiner.com/green-living-in-austin/new-report-says-current-water-usage-not-sustainable
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/08/17/0817water.html