Backyard Science Part II

Composting is SO COOL!

That's not even sarcasm. It is really the neatest, dorkiest thing ever. Maybe it wouldn't be as cool if I wasn't so into science, it's hard to say. It's been four months since we started composting and the shear weight and volume of material that has been diverted to our backyard compost bin is pretty incredible. I haven't been keeping a tally of exactly what's gone into the bin but I do know that we have filled it to bursting at least a dozen times. (Total volume of the compost tumbler, 37 gallons.) I'll be pushing material in and thinking to myself "okay, this is it, we're going to close it up soon and let the last material in decompose." Then I check it a week later and half the volume has disappeared into thin air. So, some adventures from the last four months.

Adventure the First.
I've become that person. The person I said I wouldn't become. The one who brings a spare plastic container to work so that I can bring home my orange peels or apple cores and compost them. After four months of composting, throwing things like that out just doesn't sit well with me anymore. My husband rolls his eyes but is reasonably good-natured about it.

Adventure the Second.
Having guests over. Sometime, back when this all started, my husband and I had a conversation that went something like this:
Husband: You're not going to compost at parties are you?
Me: Of course not! That would be a ridiculous pain!
Well. That went the same way as "of course I won't bring compostables home from work." I spent the first party we threw after the compost tumbler was set up cringing at food waste going into the trash. Now I set out three bins at parties: compost, trash, and recycling. And our friends have been fantastic about it.

Adventure the Third.
But won't it smell? I often ask guests to the house if they would like to come out to the compost with me. Often this is because guests mean extra food, which means that I need an extra set of hands to carry everything. This invitation is often met with a concern over the smell. No one wants to hang out with smelly stuff. I sure don't. That's okay though because the compost doesn't smell. It's pretty incredible but a well balanced compost is pretty unscented. We had one incident early on when the compost was getting a little too dry. I added moisture and then we entered rainy season. I'll admit that it smelled for a while then. I had to start scrounging for carbon sources to add, which leads me to...

Adventure the Fourth.
Importing other people's compostables. Leaves are a great source of carbon for compost. That's awesome and easy if you live in someplace where leave drop easily and often. If you live in southern Texas though, there just aren't enough leaves to keep up with our food trash. Especially in the rainy part of the summer when everything is hot and wet all the time and nothing dries out ever because the humidity is ridiculous. Paper is another great carbon source but it composts quicker if it's shredded. We don't own a shredder so I now import shredded paper from other people. We keep a whole cabinet of it on hand to add when we add another batch of kitchen waste.

Adventure the Fifth.
Mushrooms. Oh my goodness the mushrooms. I thought at one point that the compost was molding. That does happen sometimes and is a good indicator that we are not adding enough carbon or that it needs more oxygen, or both. Some vigorous tumbling and a little poking around though (with a long stick) proved that my compost wasn't molding. It was growing the largest mushrooms I have ever seen. Coincidentally, the mushrooms of doom started appearing about three weeks after a batch of mushroom scraps made their way into the tumbler. Go figure. A composting friend says that these are called "volunteers." She recently had some volunteer cantaloupes come out of her compost. I did not cultivate my mushrooms. No problem though, they are organic (very, very organic in this case) and simply decomposed once the temperature of the pile heated back up.

I really wasn't sure how the backyard science experiment in composting would go. We still haven't harvested any dirt, though we could if we needed to. So far though, it's just really cool. Sometimes I take food out and just spend a little while poking in the compost with a stick to check out how quickly different things decompose. Yes, that does make me pretty weird. That's okay. My parents assure me that the Oscar the Grouch "I love trash" was my favorite as a kid. I'm sure they especially loved me singing it in public, which I was apparently pretty fond of. So maybe this whole composting thing was pretty predictable after all.

Heads or Tails

As in, things I cannot make heads or tails of.

After struggling to keep up with yard care over the summer, we finally bit the bullet and decided to look into hiring someone. My husband was meeting with one potential business owner when he had a conversation that neither of us knew what to make heads or tails of. The lawn care provider asked some questions about us, which was pretty normal. Somehow our different last names came up. Suddenly the conversation took an abrupt left turn.

"Around here, I can see why she wouldn't take your last name. That would make getting hired really hard."

Wait. What?

My husband then tried to explain that it was a personal choice. That it was partly because of my doctorate and partly because of a family legacy that is dear to me. The guy wouldn't hear anything of it though. He was sure it was because I was afraid of reprisal, of racism.

The guy had no idea that way back in college, I nearly broke up with a guy who said he wouldn't marry someone who wouldn't take his name. (Ironically, he later did just that but that's the sort of thing love does to a person.) He didn't know anything about us at all but he was sure he did.

The whole thing was surreal and weird and discomforting. Most of all though, it had me worrying that maybe other people felt the same way that that guy did, that they made the same assumptions. And regardless of anything else, making sure that that possible assumption doesn't stand was worth a blog.

Something about 30

I had planned a great 30th birthday blog- 30 things about being 30. I knew it wouldn't be universal but I thought it would be fun. I had spent days in the car driving to or from work, thinking up things to include in the list. Then I sat down to write it and everything flew right out of my head. And not by way of my fingers and the keyboard. Oh well.

The truth is that being 30 feels just like being 29. Twenty nine felt a lot like 28. And so on. That's not to say that 30 feels anything like 13 but the differences are small, fluid, and ever changing. I remember being baffled as a kid when I was asked how it felt to be a new age. I never felt any different. It would almost definitely be more accurate to ask how I felt after a life event. For instance, my grandmother died between my tenth and eleventh birthdays. Any growing or changing that I did that year was far more altered by that than anything to do with my age.

Speaking of my Grandmother, I think the single biggest change I can point to between twenty and thirty involves her. I remember my 20th birthday. It was preceded by a rough year and a lot of uncertainty. At the time, I had a healthy sense of "well, what now?" I had no idea, no particular sense of direction, and was still working out who I was as a person. I can't say that any of that is untrue now but I also have a sense of working towards becoming something that I did not have a decade ago. I'll always be me but if I could grow to be some of my Grandmother too, I'd consider that a huge success.

Lazy Posting

That love your spouse challenge is going around facebook right now. I'm enjoying all the cute pictures that I get to see of my friends and at some point I was nominated by a friend. I'll pass on nominating other people but decided to dedicate a blog post to the challenge instead. Looking through pictures was fun and I set myself the additional challenge of trying to find as many photos of myself and my husband as I could that show us but not necessarily our faces. Somehow, to me, those can convey all the emotion in the world, often more honestly than when someone asks us to smile for the camera. There were a great deal more that I could have chosen from but these seven span our first summer of dating all the way to last fall. We're in all of the them, I promise!

Eleven months

Eleven months makes a huge difference. Give or take eleven months ago, I was camping on my own up in Copper Harbor, MI. The weather was fantastic- all except for that last day when it poured and I discovered that 20 year old tents cannot necessarily be successfully re-waterproofed anymore. Aside from when I was mountain biking, it never felt particularly hot and there was Lake Superior just a stones throw away to cool off in afterward.

Fast forward eleven months to my husband and I camping with two of our close friends outside of Austin, TX. Just take a minute to mull that concept over. Camping. In July. In Texas.

I'll start off by saying that the weekend was fantastic! I returned happier and calmer for having been outdoors so much (and not the kind of being outdoors that involves weeding, mowing, tree trimming, or any other form of house maintenance). But wow was it hot. It was the kind of hot where you purposefully take a cold shower and feel better for all of two minutes afterwards. I was entirely unprepared for this type of camping. My trusty sleeping bag, which has weathered November nights in the Blue Ridge Mountains without a sleeping pad was 100% useless in the Texas heat. My little tent, which is great for staying warm, suddenly felt like a sauna. Our friends were a lot more prepared.

I was, admittedly, baffled when it was suggested that we drive two cars. I looked at our pile of gear, taking up barely half of my car trunk, and wondered what on earth I was forgetting. My first ever camping trip (way back when I was maybe 8) was a backpacking trip and, while lots of my trips since then have been car-camping, I still tend to pack like I'm backpacking. Because why not? Texas summer is why not.

Our well prepared friends pulled out extension cords (the campsite had power), portable air conditioning units, and fans. I was torn between laughing hysterically and being incredibly jealous. Their much larger tent could fit an entire queen size air mattress and, when you're sleeping in 95 deg F heat, that has to be more comfortable than sleeping bags. This kind of camping was something I had trouble wrapping my head around and I bemoaned the fact that my husband will never ever want to go camping "my way" again. That said, that cup of freshly ground coffee before our early morning hike tasted delicious and we did not turn down the offer to borrow a fan for our tent. It's safe to say that I got a little spoiled too as I traded my usual camping food (oatmeal, GORP, PB&J, apples) for the containers of fresh cut fruit and vegetables that our friends were thoughtful enough to bring along and share.

Eleven months makes a big difference. I'm already looking forward to our next camping trip with our friends though and we brought back books of the Texas state parks to start our planning with. Maybe the next time it will even be cool, or, as cool as it seems to get in Texas.

Someone Else

A few weeks ago I was talking to my Aunt and mentioned that sometimes I wished that I had a different personality, that my hopes and dreams for life were different ones. I'm not sure what answer I expected but the one that she gave rang so true that it has been bouncing around in my mind in the weeks since. Be who you are.

Jenn, she reminded me, if you are the class clown then that's who you are. If you aren't that person and you try to be them anyway, you will just end up unhappy. We talked about plenty of other examples too but that one example stuck with me. I thought back on my attempts to be someone I wasn't when I was younger. I wanted to be the class clown, the kid who was goofy and could get away with it. That just wasn't me though. Adults knew that I knew better and I usually ended up embarrassed for my own attempts.

The advice was so simple. I can always keep improving as a person, as a friend, as a wife, as a daughter but, at the end of it all, I am who I am. And apparently that person is a little quirky. My Aunt told me something else that resonated as well. When you are being the person you are supposed to be, you are a happier person and other people can tell. Maybe I knew that already but sometimes you need to be reminded.

Happy July Fourth all!

Pick Me Up

Last week was a lousy one. By Saturday I really, really needed a win.

Despite wanting to sleep the entire weekend away, midday Saturday found my husband and I in the local mall having some Chik-fil-A for lunch and running some errands. The lousy thing about being an adult (besides having to pay taxes) is that you don't get to put life on pause when lousy things happen. The house still needs groceries, you still have to show up at work, and things still need to get cleaned. So there I was, waiting for food at Chik-fil-A and feeling awfully rundown.

Out of nowhere there was a tap on my arm. Standing next to me was an older woman, walker and all, and her husband, wearing a WWII veteran hat. Before I could say anything the woman smiled up at me (and let's face it, I'm not that tall) and said "I just wanted to tell you that you have fantastic legs, really beautiful." Message delivered, they wandered slowly off, clearly watching people shop more than shopping themselves. I called out a wobbly, stunned "thank you" after them. And immediately started wondering if the whole 30 second interaction had just happened.

I pinched myself. They were still there, in my line of sight, smiling serenely and chatting. For the first time in a few days, I smiled.

That woman didn't know me from a hole in the wall. I'll never be able to tell her how much I needed a win in that moment. I'll never be able to thank her husband for his service. (I wanted to and was just a few steps too far on the side of shocked as hell to put it into words.) Somewhere out there though there is a fantastic person who did a small, unexpected thing, and gave me the win I needed.

So go ahead, do the unexpected. Go out of your way. Lift someone up. Because maybe they need a win too.