Afternoon high: 81F
Tonight's projected low: 58F
Humidity: 94%
Wind: N at 0 mph
Moon: Waxing 70%
Overall: Much more cloudy today, and less sunshine probably means it will remain cool, barely exceeding 80F!
This Morning.
1. Helen's waiting - somewhat impatiently - in the hallway for me to decide which room I'm going to work in.
2. And finally I've decided, and she can get down to some serious lying down.
3. Helen... sad after having read Hamlet several timesd over.
Looking to the weekend.
1. M has several days off coming up, and so we're thinking through the Garden work that needs doing that we can best do together. Laying down more soaker hoses and mulch? Weeding? Fertilizing? I'm unsure just now.
2. For myself, I've remained busy keeping the Garden watered, the house clean, the laundry washed and hung out, Helen walked and happy, and the bread made. These past two loaves we made yesterday are by far our best yet.
3. On our two most current and intensive projects - the Garden Fence and Shed - I've made not an inch of progress. This points out, I believe, an irony implicit within a Homesteading lifestyle: as the number of things we do for ourselves each day increases - e.g., growing more of of own food, baking our own bread, cutting our own wood for our the Garden Fence, and so forth - the amount of time and energy we have for each particular project is reduced. This means that our days need to become more efficient and perhaps longer. The danger, of course, lies in creating a stressful environment, which is precisely what Homesteading is meant to avoid. The alternative is to really learn to go slowly, do the best job you can with everything you do, and let it all take time. This is probably why it took Helen and Scott Nearing (the founders of 20th century Homesteading) 17 years to build a stone wall around their Garden! I find it comforting to note how different this approach feels when compared to the ethics of the dominant culture, evident in a recent Home Depot commercial, in which two neighbors are mowing their lawns, one on a rider-mower the other behind a push-mower, each competing with the other to see who can complete their work in the least amount of time. The assumption, of course, is that "yard work" sucks, and that the "really successful" folks in our subdivision are those who can afford the most expensive rider-mowers, race back and forth across their lawns while not getting off their asses, and complete their outside work in minutes. I do not fully understand why this commercial bothers me so much. Perhaps it is because simple, outdoor work has a nobility that has all but been forgotten. No doubt that in a culture of massively over-worked, stressed out, over-weight, malnourished folks, such an attitude towards "yard work" is inevitable. Truly, a major re-alignment of our values, priorities, actions and daily lives will require, not a great catastrophe as some apocalyptic thinkers like to believe, but a Great Blessing that allows us all to get plenty sleep, eat very good food, take long walks by the fields, woods & streams, have heart-to-heart talks about what we really want to do with our lives in a context in which such choices represent realistic options.
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