These little guys grow fast…the leaves are now bigger than my hand and we’ve got the start of some blooms. Originally I was worried about over water with the heavy rain we’d been getting, but it turns out the more water you give them the faster they grow.

 
Back before our little heat wave I did a lot of baking, and every time I started I’d stop to think of just how badly I really need to buy an apron. Without fail opening the flour canister is asking to be over taken by a furious cloud of flour. While originally amusing, I wanted to do something about it, so I hopped on etsy and started looking around and found these incredible aprons (1, 2) by boojiboo.
 

 
If these aren’t the cutest aprons ever I don’t know what would be. Too bad they didn’t have full skirts. I’d totally wear these out for a night on the town.

Trash Fashion by ~stasha-pistachio on deviantART
 
Another day of record breaking heat and I’m ready to call it quits. It’s just too hot to do much of anything. The weather service says it was 95 at the hottest point yesterday, but the temperature display across the street read 99 at about five last night. Thankfully it’s a bit cooler inside, but I’m wondering how miserable this summer’s going to be if this keeps up.
 
I haven’t gotten anything planted outside yet, I’m worried about the heat killing the seedlings off. It’s hard enough to keep them watered when they’re sitting inside on the window sill.
 
On the etsy front things are going better. I’ve been having a lot of fun browsing through all the new summer stuff and I’ve been pumping out the paper. Who knew cold paper pulp would feel so good. I’ve gotten quite a bit behind on all my blog reading though. I’ve been keeping up with crunchy chicken and burbanmom, but nothing on the etsy side of things. As soon as it cools off I’ll be powering up the laptop and totally binging. I miss all the funny stories and the crafty inspiration.

A couple of the little guys that have been poking up on a regular basis.
 
 

 
 

 
Time flies when you’re having fun, that’s for sure. I started an entry on Saturday, but I never got around to finishing. The nice weather was calling to me.
 
I’ve been doing a lot of cleaning. I packed up and shipped out a lot of stuff to local charities and finally got around to recycling all the paper little old packrat me had saved. It’s nice to have the space to store the stuff I’ve started collecting, especially the glass jars, wicker baskets, and ceramic bowls.
 
I also helped clean out a couple of the flower beds outside, although we’ve still got a bunch of work to do. Hopefully we’ll get most of it done by the time I’ve managed to coax my seedlings into plantable size. Which as of now is still quite plausible as nothing has actually sprouted yet. I keep hoping I’ll wake up to little green shoots, but that might be a while off.

matted 4X12 orange creamsicle triptych by phoebec
 
 
Well I’m long overdue for a post. I’d love to say I’ve been off crafting up a storm, but things have been pretty quite on that front. I did do up a couple of scarves, and a few more of the mini-notebooks, but other than that it’s been a lot of cooking.
 

 
I made up a bunch of crepes last week Monday and was pleasantly surprised with the results. The recipe was easy; flour, eggs, and water, and they went perfectly with the strawberries I had on hand. What was most exciting for me though is the fact that it’s another recipe I can add to my local foods list. Now all I’ve got to do is wait for strawberries to come into season. Which is going to be hard. I’m all for local food and fully support the 100 mile diet but it’s so hard to resist when you walk into the supermarket and see a whole display of California strawberries and prepackaged shortcake. The farmers’ markets should be opening soon and then it’ll get easier, until then I’m trying to make little concessions; strawberries from California instead of blackberries from Chile or Mexico.

 
Now we’ve heard of what a big problem peak oil is, and we know all about global warming, but what do we do? Is going green going to be enough? How many false starts are we going to have before we find something that works? I’m not sure that any of us know. I’m not sure it really matters.
 
This isn’t about changing the world. It’s about changing your life and those around you. It’s about people putting down roots and knowing that they care enough about that place they’ve chosen to stay, that they’re willing to do everything they can to save it.
 
People ignore the issue, plug in and tune out. No one wants to admit that most of us don’t know the first thing about really providing for ourselves. We live in an industrial nation with cars and grocery stores, people don’t need to grow their own food. Energy’s limitless so why conserve it? Only that’s not the whole picture, but now that you know what do you do?
 
At the talk that I went to, the presentation started out with a painting of two boats falling off the edge of the world, Columbus’s story. In a way, this is the same thing. We can’t see it so it must not be there. It doesn’t exist because it challenges out preconceived notions of what the world around us is.
 
That’s perhaps the biggest issue, no one wants to hear bad news, especially something they can’t do anything about. One person can’t fix it, so nobody tries. We’re so caught up in the consumer culture that most of us aren’t aware of how much it controls our lives. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s nice to have what you need when you need it, but it can be an issue. When consumerism turns into apathy we’ve got a problem.
 
It’s gotten to a point where we’ve got to stop living through someone or something else and start being citizens instead of consumers. We’ve got to reconnect with the earth and see where it takes us. It’s not a pretty picture, but we can change it.
 
Start small, community gardens, timber frame raisings on main street. Take something fun and turn it into an educational experience. Children building birdhouses teaches them valuable skills and the pride that comes with making something for themselves. Try having a clothing swap at the local community center, start up a monthly potluck.
 
This isn’t about saving the world it’s about building communities. It’s about caring about the people around you, learning from them and letting them teach you. When you’ve got a friend to tell you a story or a garden to tend with your neighbor you don’t need that movie that was on sale last week at the local supermarket, or that new pair of shoes that you bough to wear out to dinner.
 
As things change, and distances suddenly grow to size, it won’t be the end of the world, but a new beginning. Life won’t be about keeping up with the Jones’s it’ll be about community and caring. Now that’s not such a bleak picture after all.

 
Shut Down Day is this Saturday May 3. There’s still time to join in if you’re interested.
 
I know for me it doesn’t seem like a big deal until I try and do it. What’s a day without a computer? It’s something about voluntarily giving it up that makes it so hard for me. Sure if I’m too busy or if I’ve got something better to do it’s not an issue. Staying off the computer on an unplugged night isn’t usually much of an issue either, but staying off for a whole day?
 
It’s going to be interesting. Especially since it’s on a weekend this year. It’ll be me, my camera, and my ipod for most of the time. Maybe I’ll even get around to finishing Kitchen Literacy.
 
And while we’re on the subject of unplugging, there’s a great article over at electrolicious (the home of 52 nights unplugged) on etsy, the alchemy feature, and a jacket.

I ended up going to the talk on peak oil like I’d wanted and I’ve got to say it was so much better than I had hoped. The focus, at least for me, in this eco-movement has for the most part been on global warming, on climate change and on sustainability. However, for the most part, I’ve ignored the inevitability and consequences of peak oil. Sure I knew what it was, the theory, the implications, I wasn’t about to deny that it was important, but nonetheless I mostly ignored it. I focused on changing my life and tried to encourage others to do the same. I didn’t spend a lot of time on the how’s and why’s and what if’s.
 
Until last night. Sitting there this little light bulb went off in my head, one that showed just how interconnected this all is. I’d always just assumed that peak oil would come and go but it wouldn’t matter because we’d all be dying in a hazy fog induced by global warming and pollution. I never stopped to think that the end of suburbia and urbanization means a lot of the problems we’re dealing with on the climate change front would be solved. What it means is that they have the same solution, and while we can’t stop the global warming that’s underway we can definitely stop it from worsening just like we can cushion the effects that peak oil will have.
 
But I’m getting ahead of myself, because you can’t understand the possible solutions until you understand the problem. Peak oil is the midpoint in oil production, meaning it’s the highest possible amount of oil that can be produced at any given point. After that point oil production decreases, producing less and less as time goes on, and in a world highly dependent on oil, this is a problem.
 
There’s a lot of controversy over when oil production will peak. Has it already occurred? Is it occurring now? How far in the future will it peak? No one knows, and in all reality, I’m not sure that it’s all that important. It’s going to happen, we know that much, and we know that right now oil production’s no longer meeting demands. As was said last night, “translation, surplus nations are drawing down their reserves”. Oil’s going out faster than it can come in, and that in and of itself is a problem.
 
One third of the top fifteen oil-producing countries are past their peak. Production’s declining, and eventually expansion’s going to have to stop and contraction’s going to set in. But what’s the big deal? You’re asking yourself. We’re investing in alternative and renewable energy, and with people going green maybe we’re cutting down on our energy consumption. That’s what I thought too, but it’s not that simple.
 
Oil, natural gas, and coal, our main sources of energy, are particularly energy dense. They create a lot more energy than it takes to produce them. Switching to something less energy dense is impractical not only because we’re used to using forms of energy that yield more power but also because many of these sources take more energy to produce than they create. Sources like ethanol and hydrogen take a massive amount of energy and infrastructure to produce. Hydrogen gives a negative rate of return, you can’t find it anywhere, you have to create it, and that’s inefficient. Ethanol faces a similar problem even as it’s being toted as the wave of the future. Furthermore, most alternative and renewable sources of energy make electricity, not the liquid fuel most of our economy is used to running off of.
 
What does this mean in the end? It means we’re headed for an energy crisis. We can already see it happening in places like Haiti with the food riots, in Mexico with the tortilla riots, and in the airline industry. It’s our warning signal that globalization’s not as efficient as we think; large economies of scale are impractical in a world with rising energy prices. It goes without saying that life’s eventually going to go a lot more local.
 
Conservation and community are going to become our main focus. We’re going to have to rebuild a collective understanding and begin to value life. We’re going to have to unplug and face who we’ve come as a species. We’re going to have to take a hard look at where our food comes from and what that means to us. We can do it but it’s going to take change, and a lot of it.

 
I attended a really interesting talk this morning on EFW (energy from waste) in this case they take solid municipal waste (the stuff you put out at the curb) and burn it to create steam that powers turbines to make electricity. It turns out to be a really great alternative to landfills (the process doesn’t create methane and takes up less space), and is a really great source of alternative energy. It’s hard to believe but for every ton of of garbage that’s burned it saves a ton of oil.
 
I know that this is old news in a lot of the EU, but it’s something that’s done on a relatively small scale in the states. Which is kind of sad considering we produce 25% of the world’s trash with only 5% of the population.
 
What I really liked about the presentation, was the fact that even though they (Covanta) rely on the use of our solid waste they really emphasized finding other forms of renewable energy and they put a large premium on recycling. Something like this doesn’t eliminate our waste problem, it just helps take the edge off of it.
 
What did kind of upset me was that although they did talk a bit about the three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle). They didn’t really stress the second one at all, although given the fact that most people skip the first two I was surprised to hear them talk about reduction of waste. For the most part it was more of a overall reduction in packaging and the sort of stuff that can be done on a business level as opposed to a personal level, but it was still nice to hear.
 
Overall it was a really interesting talk. It was a nice reminder that all this stuff we’re buying ends up in those ugly methane-producing, toxic landfills and that we really do have to do something about that. Even as I’ve tried to cut down on the stuff I buy and reduce the impact I have on the environment I tend to forget about that part of the picture. I guess I always just assumed that it went away and that suddenly even though I felt guilty about throwing stuff out that somehow it all got taken care of. Well that’s not exactly true and hopefully I’ll remember that.

There’s another talk tonight on peak oil so hopefully I’ll get to go to that. If not I’ll probably be here reading Kitchen Literacy since I’ve got to get it back to the library in two weeks and I only got it this morning.