What I'm playing right now: Eagles of Death Metal, 'Chase the Devil Tonight' (check out the cool sketches drawn to accompany the music.)
Told Frannie and Lisa I was gardening. They both went into a panic.
First marriage, now this. Next thing you know, they said, I'd be knitting and taking cooking classes.
Not to worry. This is the kind of thing that happens when the guy who moves into your house for the rest of your life spends half of his time on a book about how we are nearing the point of no return on climate change (the point beyond which it doesn't matter what we do to fix it; it's already too late) and the other half talking about how the people who DO get it have to set living examples for all of the people who DON'T get it.
There is a lot of work involved in this, because almost no one on our block gets it. It has been opening a few eyes.
We were the first to not only go completely solar for our electrical power, but also to have batteries for storage and for power outages and brownouts. People noticed that during our last temporary blackout, when the whole neighborhood was dark...except for our house.
Almost everyone pays someone to do their landscaping. You know, mow the lawn, trim the hedges, cut those neat edges around the sidewalk and the walkways. They also pay tons of money for gym memberships, so they can have some really cool place to workout.
We're also in a drought here in California, the worst one I've ever seen. (Yeah, we know: no money, no budget, huge $24 billion deficit and, now, no water either). But still, every morning and night, people are running their yard sprinklers, and doing a great job of irrigating their concrete walkways and driveways.
We've turned off the sprinkler system and installed a drip system instead. It works as you might imagine, dripping water, and only where it is needed, instead of the mini-monsoon thing the rest of the neighborhood is still doing.
We dropped the gym memberships, except the brand new YMCA downtown where Jules can swim. We fired the gardeners. They were pretty bad anyway. No sense of fine touch at all, like their last gig was maybe burning out the Brazilian rain forest or something similar.
We've ripped out the lawn ourselves, and oh my God the work involved in that was amazing. We're down to a little part of the front yard that remains to be done. It's like the lawn is this sentient thing trying desperately to remain unrooted by holding on with millions of little fingers. I now think that the guy who invented velcro was someone who had to dig up his lawn, and wanted some payback.
The back yard is all garden. Everything is organically grown. No pesticides. Only the side yard on the south side of the property is still grass, to give Jules and Roy and Jules' friends a place to play catch or whatever.
The front yard is all fruit trees or fruit bushes like blueberries and blackberries. And it's been really quite amazing to walk out into ther garden, barefoot, feeling the cool soil between my toes, and see that things have grown...by huge amounts.
When I was pure geek, building my first computer, I took pictures at the end of every work session, so I had this photo library of the building process.
This is completely different. I don't know how anything is going to look. And, like snowflakes (still remember those from college in Ohio), everything rising out of the ground is unique. No two things are alike.
So, we have eliminated most of the cost of gym memberships, the cost of gardeners (who were always using those awful gasoline powered trimmers and blowers anyway), cut our grocery bill, reduced our electrical bill to zero, cut our water use by about 75%. And we're feeling like we are at least doing our part and living by example.
But the most amazing thing is something else.
As a critically pale Irish American girl who uses Sunblock 900,000 and usually goes straight from white to burn in less than 60 seconds, with no tan in between, it's a little hard to believe.
I actually have a tan.
Spend as much time in the yard as we have and even someone like me, who uses a sun tan lotion that also blocks x-rays, gamma rays and nuclear radiation, will get a little brown.
I have proof, from my man with the leg and foot fetish.
At least it's MY legs and MY feet that he's crazy about.
Wowzers.
A tan. Yeah, I know, as far as tans go, this isn't exactly very deep, but it's the best one I've ever had.
Now, watch me start to peel like an onion starting tomorrow just cuz I bragged about it.
