The Urban Pantheist

People keep asking how the chickens are. They're doing well--we moved the coop away from the pine trees in case the blizzard knocked branches down (it didn't). They are still giving us the occasional egg, and we are feeding them lots of extra grapes and cracked corn to keep them fat and happy.

Today I'm taking a personal day because my coworker got to work before 5 this morning and texted me saying she had it under control. We just have the mystery animals to take care of, and the zoo was going to send us home early any way. It's been snowing since before I woke up and is supposed to keep going all day, piling up to a foot or so. This winter--hell just this past 2 weeks--has been enough to make us shop for a new place to live again. We aren't serious about it, but we are very tired of snow.

The dogs have cabin fever. We let them out to run in the tunnels we dug in the snow, they eliminate, get cold and want to come back in. Then they whine and bark to be let back out. I think they want us to fix the situation. I wish we could.

Anyway, happy midwinter! Anyone who puts a groundhog above ground today should be prosecuted for animal cruelty. Only 46 days 'til spring.

Downsides:

1. Housing, fuel, other things very expensive.
2. 150 years overdue for massive earthquake that will kill =/- 2000 people and throw the area into chaos and misery for weeks if not months (it will be like Katrina but with fire and collapsed buildings and Mad Max style street battles for fuel).
3. Frequent fires (no bonfires in the back yard anymore).

The boss' office in the Tropical Forest.

In Other News, we are moving. Like really moving. How do I know? In about a half hour we'll be unplugging the router from this apartment, bringing it to the Dedham House, and waiting for the installers to come and set up internet over there. No more internet in Brookline, which diminishes the appeal of this place considerably. We set up the new bed last night, which along with internet, was the last thing holding us back from really feeling like we lived there.

Of course, we also need to move the video game system over, and the many pieces of rock band equipment. Television isn't vital to us, but we need them to play video games and watch DVDs (computers will work for these purposes in a pinch, I understand).

Enough snow melted yesterday that we had a 15 by 15 foot square of bare ground to stand in, under the big pine trees. That alone made me so happy--here we bought this house for the giant yard, and for the first month and a half or so we've been unable to really enjoy it. (In fact, it's been a real negative, as we've shoveled twice as much snow as usual just trying to keep a dog run open--not that I'm complaining.) I don't even really want to do anything with it right away, just sit around with space all around me. And I keep saying I'm going to do this 100 species in my yard project (2 a week, and I'm 7 weeks behind) but I haven't settled into the place really. Now it begins. I'm terrified and excited!

Well, okay, I'm a week late posting my snapshots. This is from Monday the 24th, a message from Alexis that she was in the Lawyer's office closing on the new house.

( Dusk Bookends: )

Yesterday we were sent home early from work. I got home at 2, took this shot at 3, when I had about 10 feet further to shovel. The snow was soaked and heavy, and people had already flattened a lot of it down to ice with their footsteps. I will not miss shoveling the sidewalk.


Earlier, Alex' sister Jessica came to visit. She lives in L.A., so she was a little cold after a 2 mile walk in the 25 degree weather.

In moving news, the impasse appears to be over, and by next weekend we should be living in our new house. Yay. (I have a cold and have had two purely medicinal Dogfish Head beers, so my enthusiasm is muted.)

We slept in again, to the almost unconscionable hour of 8:30. Alexis can go without breakfast (in fact, she rarely eats it, claiming her appetite just isn't there) so I had a couple handfuls of nuts and some expensive Mexican blackberries before we set out. The world was eerily foggy, so we headed to Franklin Park; the fog was caused by warm air reacting with the snow (or something like that) and Franklin Park has lots of open fields where that happens a lot. I tried to restrain myself from taking photos, since I always overdo it, I have no daily photo project (except the snapshot), and Alexis would be taking pictures anyway. I still took some.

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After a lunch of eggs with ham and avocado (gain weight now! ask me how!) I went to the used record store to get rid of a bunch of singles and ten inches, while Alexis set off to the laundromat (our dryer is broken).

I was kind of surprised that the used record store was still open, and it seemed like they hadn't changed much since the last tie I had been in there 10 or 15 years ago. They had added shelves of DVDs but kept tons of VHS tapes, as well as audio cassettes (relegated to the back room) compact discs, and the backbone of the place: vinyl records. The guy (possibly the owner) looked at my records and said, "I don't know, what do you want for them? I can't tell if they're worth a dollar or a hundred dollars." I told him honestly that I had no idea how much they were worth (I kind of expected him to be the expert telling me how much they were worth and offering me a fraction of their value; I used to work in a comic book store, I know the routine.) I probably spent 200 dollars on them originally; I accepted 30 dollars in trade for them, then had to try to find something I actually wanted to bring home.

I didn't even look at any of the music, except for a bin of expensive recent releases, on super-thick vinyl for record nerds. Since I'd gone in the place to dump a bunch of music, I couldn't see bringing any back with me. I looked through all the DVDs and found some things that I was kind of interested in, but kept telling myself that I could watch them on Netflix and not have to store the thing forever. I found the place where the TV shows on DVD were, and that was even worse. Someone will buy a DVD of "Survivor?" I was looking for something that I know I would watch over and over again, like the Simpsons, and had a hard time seeing anything I would want to watch once. The whole experience was depressing me really heavily--at one point I caught a whiff of dusty old record jackets, and the smell made me so sad I wanted to run away. I ended up with season 6 of the Simpsons, in the stupid novelty case that looks like Homer's head, and a copy of "Kingdom of the Spiders," since I defend it so often I feel I should own it.

Until the next time I move and just give all this crap away.

Lunch at iHop, in between two important meetings about the new house.

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Alexis goes through the paper photographs; some into albums most into the recycling.

Amazing. Alexis posts that she has stuff to give away, and her friends actually want it! Well, it IS Hello Kitty stuff.

We did the first cut of knick-knack items, and filled one box. It was surprisingly easy to look at items that I once considered indispensable enough to put up on a shelf to gather dust and dispense with them. Even the Simpson's stuff! Anyone want any Simpson's stuff?

I also brought one box of books and one box of CDs to the library and left them on their loading dock, per their instructions on their website. Also surprisingly easy, considering I spent good impulse internet money on many of those books from Amazon.com. You may ask, why don't I sell them back on Amazon, or Ebay, or half.com or whatever, and those are one good question split into many, with one disappointing answer which is I am terribly lazy. The more effort I put into dispensing with my things, the more depressed I get, and with winter and the horrible xmas holiday essentially upon us (they are upon us, go to a store and see) I don't need any other reasons to be depressed. Especially considering my life is pretty excellent and I have no reason to be depressed, except for, you know, the brain chemistry thing.

I have several more loads of books to dispense, and since I've tried arranging them by who might want them, subject, and size, and different times, they are completely random. Wicca, natural history, humor, photos of the earth from space, you name it, the usual kinds of stuff people get rid of when they move. Or are planning to move at an as-yet undetermined time in the probably near future.

So if you want anything I used to own, let me know. Let me know especially if you live in the area and are willing to drive by my house and pick the stuff up off the curb, because that's the level of effort I'm willing to put into this. Or if you want any of my old books or CDS, just check them out of the Brookline Library.

I'll be doing this once I have space to do it, but I'm writing it down so I'll remember, and so you all can try it too: Grow mushrooms on junk mail.

Oyster mushrooms are usually cultivated on sawdust or cereal grain, but apparently do well on office paper. The scientific study in that link determined that under the right conditions you can get a greater than 100% production of edible mushrooms from paper. Meaning (I think) from 10 kilos of paper you could grow, say, 14 pounds of oyster mushrooms. The secret ingredient is water. I'm not sure why more isn't being done to encourage growing food on waste products (though some marketing savvy would be needed to make that sound less gross to a public that wrinkles its nose at brown mushrooms and apples with spots).

I'm going to use junk mail because I hate it so much and there is so much of it in my life, and it would be nice to see it rotting and something good coming out of it. Giggling Wizard should try it on his farm, using soiled cardboard crates or old newspaper or something. Sustainably grown gourmet food!

I suspect the difficulty might be in growing the right kind of fungus--if the oyster spawn didn't take, you might end up with a big barrel (or bag) of dark gray slimy gunk. But that's a risk I'm willing to take, once I have room to keep the barrel away from the house.

Mushroom cultivation link!
Buy spawn here!
Or buy spawn here!