Friday, June 26, 2009

TGIF baby! (Update)

Big plans this weekend, and I am so excited it's Friday, it's a little ridiculous...

Tomorrow me and R. are going to set up our compost bin, set up a recycling center, hit up another local nursery to try and find some edible flowers/vegetables-we-don't-have, and we're also driving up Monte Sano to go do some serious Thoreau-type camping with nothing but some munchies, notebooks, and possibly a sketchbook or two. At some point we also have to make a guest appearance at my company picnic tomorrow evening, but given the breadth of things we plan to do, we probably won't be staying for long.

We got a bunch of transplants last weekend - the lettuce and spinach and onions are officially gone, replaced by peppers of all stripes (jalapenos, chilies, cayenne, cowhorns), tomatoes (cherry, regular), and cucumber. The latter we planted around the stub of what used to be Monster Rose Bush(tm), heroically cut down (AGAIN) last weekend by R. Our little plantlings were shocky and wilted the first couple of days (didn't help that we had a heat wave) but a dose of sugar water and some TLC brought them around just fine.

We now have no TV, no cable, no video games, no media center to speak of. All of our media comes from the Internet, and most of it at this point is news and current events. Our living room has been taken over by art supplies and its walls are covered with quotes which inspire us (ex. "My country is the world and my religion is to do good" ~ Thomas Paine). A large part of our vegetables now come from either the garden or the farmer's market - we are almost quasi-locavores. We have cut our electricity consumption back to a minimum, using an electric light ONLY in the room we currently occupy (if that).

I personally am learning to enjoy the tranquility of silence again; I believe the lack of television has been one of my favorite transitions so far - I definitely have missed it a LOT less than I anticipated. Instead of listening to the boob tube quacking away from the moment we get up, we sit in the quiet and drink black coffee, smoke cigarettes, make small talk about politics/whatever, or play with the dog. We do dishes by hand (even though we technically have a dishwasher) and listen to Alicia Keyes - not on the honking huge three-CD changing stereo we had in the living room before, but instead on a radio/CD the size of a small melon. Despite cranking up our thermostat to 80, the apartment is dark, cool, and spacious.

I'm lovin' it.

1 comment:

  1. We gave up all but local channels about 4 years ago. We thought we would miss it -- NOPE! It freed up so much time to actually DO things! It's great!

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