New garden made of junk

The Man and I found a bookshelf while walking today. He went back to get it once we got home. It was made of boards, two boards deep. He cut the bookshelf in half so now it was only half as deep. Then he stapled wire mesh and fabric to the bottom and put wooden feet on the bottom to raise it off the ground. He put these new planter boxes on the roof of the garage where it is sunny all day.

We filled them with soil and now I have my own little square foot garden. He is very proud of finding garbage on the street at 10AM and turning it into a garden by 4PM.

So far I have planted rapini, cabbage, chard, shallots, lettuce, spinach and basil. I transplanted some of the plants that had sprouted in my buckets. I'm not sure what they are. I'm soaking some chinese pea seeds and will plant them tomorrow. I still have the other planter to fill. I feel so lucky to live here. When other people are watching snow cover the ground, we are planting cool-season crops. Soon it'll be spring (although the native plants think it already is spring) and we can start planting the warm-season plants.

I finally have a real victory garden. Victory over the tyranny of a fully corporatized needs hierarchy.

A new label is needed

I need a new label to apply to all these posts I've been doing lately. I'm not sure what I'm doing, but I'm striving to find my new place in the world since the big hike. It's like a continuation of the journey, but without a clear destination.

I keep putting my posts under boring news or consumerism, authentic life or maybe adventure, but I need a new label that better describes this process. It's not really news, and it's sort of related to anti-consumerism, but too vague for that. It is a process of finding authenticity in a world that forces us to behave so much like the plastic that chokes the environment, but without any real definition, it's hard to define as my authentic life. It's not that adventurous, but it is my next big adventure. I don't know what I'm doing or what to call it.

Scavenging, foraging, canning, gardening, not going back to the cubicle, being frugal, learning about portable living, examining life and my world after two summers living in the forest. Is there a word for that?

City foraging

This morning, The Man and I decided to walk to our favorite coffee place.

Along the way, we noticed pecans falling furiously from a tree in the neighborhood. Birds were busy pulling off the pecans and dropping them to the street. I looked closely to see the birds and saw a green head with a red patch of feathers appear. The tree was full of Lilac-crowned Amazon parrots! It is a well-known wild flock of parrots that lives here.

Since this is the best time of year for foraging food for our own parrots from the neighborhood, I had remembered to bring a plastic bag with me. We grabbed the pecans as the parrots were throwing them out of the trees and put them in the bag. The pecans are green and unripe, but I remember eating unripe walnuts as a kid. There used to be walnut orchards where our housing development was built, and some walnut trees remained. We would eat them green as kids. They were quite tasty. The flavor reminded me of lettuce. Since the birds were also eating them green, they must be good to eat this way.

As we walked away from the pecan tree, we noticed macadamia nuts on the ground. We grabbed a few of those, but our parrot has a hard time opening them. So do we. The only way we have found to open macadamia nuts has been with a C-clamp. And that is only marginally successful. Crows like to drop some kinds of nuts in the street and wait for cars to run them over. I'm not sure that cars are able to open macadamia nuts. Usually, the macadamia nuts lie uneaten and unbroken under the trees.

We walked to the coffee place to have breakfast and then walked home. We are both sore from a 15 mile endurance hike yesterday. On the way home, we walked along a street with a lot of magnolia trees. A few years ago I had seen crows eating the magnolia pods so I started collecting them for our parrot. She likes to eat the red seeds inside. We collected fallen magnolia pods until our bag was full.

We also noticed a wooden bookcase left discarded on the side of the street. The wood is rough and unfinished, but it looked like good wood. The Man plans to remove the rose bushes that are not doing well and put in a long, thin area for gardening. We can use the wood from the bookcase.

City foraging can be fun.

I'm going to need a new job soon

I'm going to need a new job soon. The trouble is, I don't know what kind of job to do and I don't know where to find a good job.

I read the ads on Craigslist and hardly ever do I see anything that I would really like to do. I wish I could meet someone who would know of a good, low-stress, decently-paying job who could put in a good word for me. It seems like the best jobs come word-of-mouth anyway.

The low-stress jobs that seem to suit me best usually involve some kind of domain of arcane knowledge that needs to be mastered. Lots of little details. A bit of creativity thrown in puts me in heaven. Add some repetitive, mindless work, either physical or not, and it adds up to the perfect job for me. Examples:

• Flower shop. Lots of little details about every kind of flower. Lots of mindless work processing the flowers. Creativity arranging the flowers.
• Web production. Lots of little details about HTML, browser bugs, scripting languages. Lots of mindless work assembling web pages. Creativity writing good code.
• Mental Health. Lots of little details about medications, side effects, diagnoses. Lots of mindless work helping people clean their homes. Creativity solving problems, trying to help people.
• My whale job. Lots of little details about what sounds like a whale and what doesn't. Lots of mindless work locating whales. The only creativity is in looking at the pretty colors of the screens, but my mind is free to think about things.

I would not mind if my next job was temporary. All jobs are temporary anyway. And part-time is also good because I would like to take classes. Entry-level in a nerd field would be lovely, too, because I love working with computer nerds. Even though I've had jobs in nerdy fields, I don't mind entry level all over again because it is more fun to learn and grow than it is to move into management or be bored doing things I have already mastered.

I was thinking about the plight of workers as we age after I spoke to my sister on the phone yesterday. She asked me how The Man was doing these days.

He goes through these phases where every day he trudges off to work certain they are going to fire him. He'll be working almost 24 hours a day and he'll be under a ton of stress and miserable and then something will go wrong and he'll feel full of dread that he'll be fired. Eventually whatever the issue is blows over and he's not fired and everything is fine again.

It's a terrible, stressful way to live and yet he feels stuck in it because he is over 50 and doesn't feel like there are any other options for him. He believes this is the last high-paying job he will ever have. Once this one tosses him out, it's all over. Wall-Mart or Home Depot will be the best he can ever hope for after this because the world has no use for men his age. And once that happens, he believes he will lose everything. His house, his retirement, the works. I hate watching him live in constant fear like this. It doesn't seem like the money is worth it.

I'm almost at that age of being considered worthless myself. Our world is set up so that you better do everything you can between the ages of 25 and 50 to make as much money as possible because it's downhill for most people after that. Maybe even before the age of 50.

During the years you are capable of working, this is what I think you should do:

• Save all of the money that you can. Live super frugally.
• Don't buy lots of stuff except maybe for stuff that will last a long time and truly enhance your life. For me that might include things like a good musical instrument or a trusty bicycle pr even a pick-up or a van, but not include lots of electronic gadgets or a vehicle that you could not live in or use to haul stuff.
• Don't go out much, or if you do, do it cheaply.
• Don't put stuff on credit cards that don't exist long after you pay for them. That means meals out, fashionable clothing, entertainment. Only use credit cards for convenience and pay them off completely. If you have to use them to buy something you can't afford to pay off, whatever it is better be really good and long-lasting.

Save up all your money up because the first 20-30 years of work have to be stretched to cover the last 20-30 years of your working life. I'm not talking about saving for your retirement. I'm saying you have to save for your later working years. That's how bad it is. You will work for 40-60 years but only half of those years will make you a good salary.

I think I've kind of blown my good working years pretty much because of going on the hike. This gap in my employment may have shut me out. The gap may have advanced me 15-20 years to where I have to find jobs that old ladies in their 60s will do. What do they do anyway?

Anyway, with my good earning years possibly over, I feel like my fate is sealed. Poverty forever. Now I just have to figure out a way to manage within it. Unlike Tony, I don't worry so much about losing everything because I don't own anything. I just have to figure out how to survive with nothing. It seems there are ways to do it, and since I've lived on the trail, I think I can manage some of those ways if it comes to the point where Tony has lost it all, or kicks me out, whichever comes first

So, I'm looking for a low-stress job that can be part-time, temporary or full-time. Preferably above minimum wage. And I'm also looking for opportunities to meet other people who can lead me to such jobs.