Pit Pot and Corn Cob Disassembly

Extracting further value from the delicious foods of summer and all year round is a simple matter of applying a little thought to what we toss.

The Pit Pot

Some items of kitchen waste are easily repurposed into gravel for your container garden. All you have to do is maintain a Pit Pot, or small container under your sink, into which to toss anything that is lumpy, solid and stolid enough to take up space below the dirt. For example:

• Pits: Apricots, olives, peaches, and so on. If they eventually sprout, there is no harm done
• Shells: Nut shells and egg shells should be o.k.; crab shells stink too much and artillery shells are too hazardous
• Corks: Either natural or plastic wine corks should be fine, since they're food-grade
  
• Crockery (broken): Broken clay pots are a traditional source of container gardening gravel, so you can mitigate the distress of breaking a plate by putting the pieces in your pit pot. However, don't even think of doing this for glass, unless the hands you use to garden with are immune to getting sliced open.

Things to avoid

• Anything that stinks or explodes (see "Shells", above)
• Anything sharp. Your hands will be working the soil, and you need to keep your blood inside the original container!
• Anything that is not food-grade. For example, packing peanuts may not be a good idea if what-ever they are made of may leach into your food.

Corn Cob Disassembly

Let's take the concept of extracting further value to the next step by looking at the summer favorite: corn on the cob!

What is tastier than roast corn? It's one of the few foods that are even better than I remember as a child. The only drawback is that most of the ear is waste but we can easily disassemble it as follows

• The cob can be broken up and tossed into the Pit Pot, above. While it will eventually biodegrade, it should function as gravel for a season and its byproducts should be relatively harmless
• The leaves can be chopped into mulch. I use kitchen shears to swifly reduce the ears to bite-sized pieces that seem to work well, but I speculate that whole leave may not be too bad as is
• The tassel makes a nice scrubbie. If you bunch the fibers together, you can scrub out a pot with them; they are pretty durable and like to stick together. When they wear out or get too skanky, just add them to the mulch!

Repurposing kitchen waste is not merely a small way to save money and improve our environment; it is a puzzle, it is fun, it is a mental challenge. Take the challenge!

We can never really throw anything away; we can only put it someplace else.

--- First Law of Thermodynamics

Not As Bad A Day As For Some

A fatal crash on I-90, not involving me, puts things in perspective.

Today I'd had a pretty decent day but, as usual, felt a little frustrated at not getting done everything I wanted to do. We had a lot of books to shelve at MITS, which is always satisfying but takes time; then I almost succeeded in avoiding the monthly volunteer meeting but, since my birthday is this month, I had to be there as they cut the cake (or I'd be a party pooper. I hate being a party pooper!) The meeting wasn't bad, as we learned some interesting things about the VOICE program which is one program our efforts support (hey, it turns out by shelving books I'm helping kids. Sweet!)

When they presented me with my Special Birthday Cupcake (shown in the photo, with my friend Head Book Lady Charlotte), Don announced I was turning 34, and I allowed as how there was a "4" in my age anyway (later I'd tell Sommer and the other students that I was 34, but in Martian years). I admired the cupcake but stowed it to share with Kris at home.

Unfortuately, this meeting delayed me so I didn't get to the library until late, where I printed off the minimum necessary, and then the internet access went down. The very nice library staff where hugely apologetic but what could be done? I was done for the day on Mercer Island.

I don't like add to the I-90 rush hour but at least, I told myself, the construction was over so I-90 should zoom!

Wrong!

Too late I saw traffic was backed up to the Island Crest Way entrance where I got on. The overhead sign (not visible from the entrance) read "Fatal Accident Midspan. Left 2 lanes closed."

This was distressing; I felt the obligatory regret for the deceased but, to be honest, I thought more about an hourlong trip home. Tere was nothing to do but listen to the radio and chill. I was pleasantly surprised to see how calm and polite everyone was; as you can imagine, there was a lot of merging and shifting to be done, and everyone was waving someone else in ahead of them. This couldn't help but make it all bearable.

When I got up to the bottleneck (all lanes closed except the shoulder) I tried not to gawk, but saw one car pretty badly rear-ended and spattered with what looked like beige paint. A little further on a car was being towed backwards, with no obvious damage. Past the bottleneck, traffic opened up very well but most of us stayed in the far left lane. I was closing in on an odd-looking vehicle in the middle lane; it was some sort of truck with flashing lights, that just didn't look right. It wasn't going very fast, but I didn't feel like I wanted to pass it on the right, or be near it at all. Suddenly, the image resolved into sense: a truck was hauling the remains of a smaller truck, probably a pickup full of odd bits, including a large metal box canted at an angle and spattered with beige. The whole thing was signalling to get into the right lane.

I slowed even more and got into the middle lane; the truck gratefully slid into the right lane and waved as I went by. Like I said, everyone was being cooperative.

Further on, a Very Large Towtruck had some sort of tractor-trailer rig, spattered with beige.

I don't know what it was all about, but it sure made my troubles seem petty. My day was much better than some's. The sun was out and I'm going home to my wife with a cupcake!

That's all. No lesson. Go home!

You Really Think They Will Re-Hire You?

Charmingly naive blogs about dealing with unemployment after a layoff, such as the delightful "Lords and Ladies of Leisure", often express then hopelessly positive attitude so well documented in Barabar Ehrenriech's "Bait and Switch" ... that there's another job coming, if you just put in your time looking for it.

Too often they think maybe the same company will hire them back.

Well, it could happen. After all, you were laid off because there was a shortage of work at your company and you haven't been hired elsewhere because there's a shortage of work in the entire industry. You reason that surely when the economy picks up, your company will need someone like you again, and who better than the proven succes: you!

Or perhaps you're thinking that they made a mistake when they let you go; soon they will recongize that mistake and bring you back!

Forget it. Buy a lottery ticket instead. I'm not saying people never rehire the ones they laid off, but it's damn rare.

I've seen both sides of the fence. When I was with Coleco, we went through an extended cycle of hiring, laying off, and then discoveing that management had screwed up and we needed more help. There were times when I was consulted as to rehiring staff that had been laid off; coupling that to my more recent experience with being laid off leads to a few thoughts you may apply to your own situation:

• You were laid off because you were less valuable to the company than every other person that they kept.
• If company politics had anything to do with your layoff ... you lost. Or your boss lost, and throwing you overboard was distasteful but necessary. Do you think your boss wants you back as a reminder?
• You know something in your gut that every person still working there does not know: those bastards will let you go when they screw up. Do you really think they want your former co-workers to learn that?
• Survivor's guilt is real. Your application for your old job, or anything in your old position, is full of negative emotion for the HR department.
• They had to make a case to let you go, and it's now in your HR file If a new HR person looks at your file, they'll see a long list of reasons why they're better off without you. Why would they take the chance?
• There is a natural suspicion among HR types that if you want to go back to a company that laid you off, you haven't succeeded in finding something elsewhere and that, therefore, they don't want you either.
• There are some companies that have a cycle of boom-and-bust, hiring and firing and re-hiring (....remember Boeing?) If that's the business you're in, perhaps none of the above will apply to you, but you need to consider whether this cycle is good for you.
• Business managers are not built to recognize their mistakes. Why should they, if they can cover them up by blaming someone else? They may well have figured out that letting you go was an error, but admitting it endangers their own career. It's much safer to insist that their decision was the correct one, and to hire someone else.
• Never make the mistake of thinking that management's priority is the health of their company or organization. You were not laid off to save the company; you were laid off to save your manager, plus whoever higher up in your manager's chain of command made the screw-up that lead your company to needing layoffs. Never expect them to admit this, since it would be cutting their own throats.
• The architects of America's greatest strategic blunder, the Bush/Cheney/Rice/Rumsfeld invasion of Iraq, retired wealthy and secure by means of simply denying they ever made a mistake. How can you hope to compete with a management model like that?

This Week In Sustainability

Wednesday was party day. Sustainable Belltown, SPU, P-patch, Seattle's Department of Neighborhoods, and others met at Centennial Apartments to chat up progress with container gardening in general and the big experiment at Centennial in particular. It was a lot of fun talking with experienced gardeners from Seattle Tilth and the P-Patchers, and people from several condos or apartment buildings interested in raising food on balconies or whatever.

We felt great pride in showing off our experiment ( the large containers mentioned in an earlier post.) There was a lot of discussion about replicating the experiment elsewhere, expanding it here, or in other ways improving local sustainability and general greenness. Success is motivating!
The ladies from Tilth were kind enough afterwards to have a look at our personal container garden on our patio. They seemed generally approving, and made some suggestions. Our tiny native raspberries cooperated, having ripened enough for all to have one. It's hard to describe how tasty they are right off the vine, produced by our own efforts!

Thursday was street fair day. Great City's Summer Street Scene took over Bell Street between 2nd and 3rd, challenging local groups to ur work, teams are invited to transform ordinary parking spaces along Bell St. into innovative, sustainable, and inviting places for people.
For our contribution, Sustainable Belltown gathered:

• 4 dozen red clay pots (slightly imperfect very inexpensive)
• Bags of potting soil
• Several kinds of seeds, plus garlic cloves and lemon balm starts (thinned from the local pea patch that morning
• Water, handtools et cetera.

We pitched the crowd shamelessly:

• "The pots are free
• The dirt is free
• The seeds are free
• Let My People Grow!"

I waved a sign "FREE!" in one hand and a flowerpot in the other. People got the message: there's something free here. All they had to do was pick out a pot, put dirt in it, add seeds and water, and walk away with the start of a container garden for their balcony or window ledge. This was fun! We gave away several dozens pots of food-waiting-to-be-grown, and got more than a dozen email addresses for our mailing list. It was fun and useful.

In the photo, Elizabeth Not-Campbell and Kris staff the table with elegance.

Friday was harvest day. I wasn't there, but reports say that we yielded over fifteen pounds of produce (lettuces, mixed braising greens, basil, sweet peppers and parsley) which was handed off to Northwest Harvest's Cherry Street Food Bank. The tomatoes et cetera are still going strong and, by my very amateur estimate, the greens tubs can be replanted in something (more greens, if nothing else) ready for another havest in another month. Sweet!

Saturday we talked about long-term plans. Eventually we will retire, and I think we can supplement our future pensions with a little urban farming. It won't make us rich (nothing will) but it'll make a difference, especially since we enjoy it anyway.

A Few Notes on our Plant Give-A-Way

• The No Spending Diet is a philosophy of trying to work into every project a way of getting as much as possible done without buying anything new. First suggested to me by my blogbuddy Smaller Footprints, Whether you do it to improve sustainability and love to save energy, or because you're cheap and love to save money, either way it was a consideration in developing our plant give-a-way. The seeds and the dirt we couldn't think of a way to get except new, but the clay pots we got free from people who were going to toss them, as they were slightly cracked or otherwise imperfect. (In my own containter garden, I like to ue obviously repurposed, e.g. an old coffee purcolator.) The lemon balm starts were thinned from a pea-patch. We provided pre-used bags for people who were carrying their plants onto a bus. All-in-all, we got quite a bit done on a "No Spending" basis but need to work harder on this aspect, IMO.
• We gave out literature leftover from the Wednesday program, promoting Seattle's many gardening assistance programs. Most popular was the business card of the gardening hotline; it seemed reassuring to people new to gardening.
  
• In addition to seed, we also had elephant garlic (you plant the individual cloves) and about a dozen lemon balm starts that some generous person had thinned from the local pea-patch. The starts were very popular; perhaps people enjoyed the instant reward! But we ran out of most seed types eventually so I'd suggest sticking with a mixture of seed and starts.
  
• The mint and mixed herb seeds went fast, probably faster than necessary because the seeds were so small that I probably gave out too many for each pot.
  
• Nasturtium seeds were very popular, and the radishes somewhat so. The lettuce was a good choice for those with little sunlight.
  
• No-one picked the chard, which is too bad because it's a really good food.
  
• No-one potted the sunflower seed, perhaps feeling it's too late in the season, but several people took some for next year.
  
• It was very helpful having several people at the table at a time; sometimes we had three groups of people asking question.
• I think it was important not to do too much for people. Having them fill their own pot with soil and put this seeds in themselves increased buy-in and general satisfaction.
• One very intent visitor was a homeless man with a lot of gardening experience but no access to a garden at the moment (as I said, he's homeless). He very carefully planted a garlic clove, showing me how to score the bottom to improve its chances of flourishing. Then, because he had no place to keep it, he left it for the next person to have. I was happy to have learned a little about growing garlic from him!
• For water, I used the two-liter containers we keep filled for disaster preparedness. This gave me the chance to pitch preparedness when people asked about the labels on them.
  

MITS Reality TV

At the Mercer Island Youth and Family Services Thrift Store, I volunteer as the Assistant Book Lady. It's a lot of fun; it's sort of like running a book store without the burden of having to worry about going hungry. Over the years, I've made a lot of friends there, and of course, it's for a good cause.

Two good causes, actually. Its main purpose is to raise fund for youth & family services on the island; although the city as a whole is prosperous, there is no shortage of families in need.

The other cause is making Mercer Island a little more self-sufficient, or "sustainable" if you prefer. Goods sold here are reused instead of being sent to the dump, thus efficiently extracting maximum value. What's not to like?

Every year or two we get a new crop of work-study workers. I'm not a central character on the crew, but from the sidelines I enjoy their stories, plans and hopes. I've also learned from them about gardening, music and new ways to recycle. I hope can sometimes chime in with something useful, mostly based on the stupid things I did when I was a student (I wasn't brilliant but I did learn some things that didn't work so perhaps the next guy through will do better!)

Last Friday one of the quieter ones, named Chloie, had a new story to share. You sort of had to pull it out of her with pliers (...whether humility or shyness who knows? Not everyone is a ham like me ...) but it turned out she'd had two notable experiences at MITS in one day. When her proud mother emailed various news outlets, a couple of camera crews showed up at the same time. (...I was disappointed that they didn't hold dueling interviews, as per Deliverance ... )

Here's the story:


It was fun to watch the filming while staying out of the way. We speculated what could be done with the footage; surely it would make fine Realty TV!

• Dramatic ("Inside this bin, something was waiting")
• Suggestive ("In this so-called 'dressing room', people take off their clothes!")
• Inspiring ("You think you feel used? Imagine how these shoes feel ... but we give them hope. Hope of a new life!")

Since I donated my TV a decade ago, I figured I wouldn't ever see the video. But then my friend Mel emailed that she'd seen it while visiting New Orleans, and then my sister up in Everett called about it; I felt I had no choice to but use the Google machine and find it! I'm glad I did because it's a good story and I enjoyed seening my buds get a little well-earned video time.

I hope Chloe enjoys the ride. Maybe she was just doing her job, but she did it and that's what counts. It really is an inspiring story, although perhaps the best part is her belief that we all would've done the right thing.

Make it so!

The Health Care Crisis: Letters from the Real World

Here's a free book you'll want to download:

"Sen. Sanders has put out a booklet of stories from around the country about health-care coverage woes, The Burlington Free Press reported.
"It is my intention to read some of these letters on the floor of the Senate. Every American needs to hear what's going on with health care in this country," Sanders said."

I can speak to the crisis from personal experience. I was part-way through a series of medically necessary orthodontia treatments when my job went away. Continuing health insurance was extremely expensive so I halted the treatments partway done. I had wires glued to my teeth for several years until I got medical coverage again, and the treatment completed. I was lucky; others are not so lucky.

Need more facts? Most bankruptcies in America are due to health bills ... even though most people in bankruptcy have what we laughingly call "health insurance".

It's time for a health care system like Canada's. My Canadian uncles all agree theirs works; ours does not.

If you need more stories, get the booklet. And call your Congresscritters!

Growing a Wig

People think I'm joking when I tell them I'm growing a wig.

But it's true ... and you should consider doing the same.

Until recently, I wore my hair very short. About once a month, my wife would buzz my hair all over with my electric trimmer; it's a very neat look and the trimmings enrich our container garden.

Then someone told me about "Locks of Love". According to its website

"Locks of Love is a public non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children in the United States and Canada under age 18 suffering from long-term medical hair loss from any diagnosis. We meet a unique need for children by using donated hair to create the highest quality hair prosthetics.

Most of the children helped by Locks of Love have lost their hair due to a medical condition called alopecia areata, which has no known cause or cure. The prostheses we provide help to restore their self-esteem and their confidence, enabling them to face the world and their peers."

Strip away the jargon: they make free wigs for sick kids. Who can't love that?

I had to try; since about the beginning of this year, I let my hair grow. When my friends notice, my reply is always the same, "I'm growing a wig." So far, no-one outside of my immediate family has asked for further explanation. The first few times this happened, I assumed that people were simply not curious, but since the response has been broadly consistent, I guess most people it's another one of my jokes. Hey, folks, I'm serious ... this time!

Naturally, I wanted my work to go to a bona fide charity, and an effective one too. I looked at its public IRS form 990 (summarized at GuideStar website and viewable detail at National Center for Charitable Statistics) which was encouraging but drearily technical; it was easier to read its entry on Charity Navigator. It seemed to be for real and reasonably effective, not terribly wasteful. Good!

While researching, I learned of Wigs for Kids, a similar organization with slightly different technical requirements (e.g. minimum hair length.) Naturally, I checked its IRS form, and it seems bona fide also. Which org should I go with?

Well, currently, my hair is about 5 inches long and growing about half-a-inch a month. I have until about this time next year to decide to whom to give my hair. Currently I'm leaning toward Locks of Love because it's reported on Charity Navigator and Wigs for Kids is not, but this time next year, who knows?

Either way: Growing a crop of hair is one of the easiest things I've ever done. Think about doing it yourself!

Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford and Newt Gingrich go into a bar...

... and the bartender says, "What'll ya have?"

Sanford says, "I'd like something imported."

Gingrich says, "I'll have whatever some other guy was having."

Palin says, "I don't care; I'm quitting early."

The Buddha in the Slug Manual

I enjoyed "The Slug Manual: the Rise and Fall of Criticism" by Jennifer James.

It begins with a great story:

"When a simpleton abused him, Buddha listened in silence, but when the man had finished, Buddha asked him,

"Son, if a man declined to accept a present made to him, to whom would it belong?"

The man replied "To him who offered it."

"My son," said the Buddha, "I decline to accept your abuse, and request you keep it for yourself."

What a great story - and the book is just beginning. The rest of the book is less cosmic, perhaps, but more everyday. It's a 56-page stapleback of examples of the "slugs" (verbal attacks) that people give each other to eat each day, and what to do with them.

Remember - just because someone hands you a slug, doesn't mean you have to keep it!