Suburban Flight

Last night I was in a funk-attending 2 funerals in a week will do that. Doubtless it says volumes about me, but I went to the coffee shop to steep my solemnity in Arabica instead of whiskey at the local watering hole. Sitting down, I picked up Friday’s issue of USA Today and was pleased [...]

Future of Farms

I have blogged at length on the future of farming. I see it vividly every week at the Madison Farmers Market and at our local CSA. I saw it in depth at Michael Field’s Institute when I worked there a few summers back. The future of farming is smaller and more intimate-I think of a [...]

21st Century Man

I’ve been churning over the 45 second conversation that I had with Michael Perry Thursday night. One of the things I expressed to him was my thanks for writing that it was OK to be one part Red-neck, one part Car Guy, and still enjoy growing leeks, browsing seed catalogues, and going to poetry [...]

Thursday

Thursdays aren’t really your Top Shelf kinda day. They aren’t part of the weekend-heck they can’t even claim Hump Day status. Here in Johnson Creek they are noteworthy mostly for their status as garbage day. And this Thursday was the first in a month that I actually remembered to take our the garbage. Missing [...]

Mending Wall

“…And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance:‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’We wear our fingers rough with handling them.Oh, just another kind of out-door game…”-Robert Frost, Mending Wall
Sometime during my June spent digging up sod along our Back 40 (OK [...]

Someday’s Today!

Today was The Day: the point of no return with our small business venture. That’s right… today we picked up the trailer. Of course it wasn’t just the trailer, we needed a hitch. Oh, and the wiring harness. And I am swamped so I paid to have it all installed. [...]

Why We Mulch

With the coming of winter and the dying back of the perennials we chose to capitalize on the relative openness of our beds and re-mulch them. Last month I had stopped and talked to a father/son tree trimming service (AJ’s Tree Trimming) that was cleaning the neighborhood up after a wind storm and in addition [...]

Nuclear-dealing with the Devil.

Time for my fourth response to the Sept Sci Am issue on Energy’s Future. Today I will be commenting on John M. Deutch’s article “The Nuclear Option”. Again to put things in perspective, we need to think about Princeton’s Carbon Wedges of Inconvenient Truth fame. We are freeing carbon way, way faster than Gaia can [...]

Clothes Make the Man

So 8 months ago when I sold my Evo 8 and bought an Insight my life hiccuped a little. In many ways the Evo had been the thing that had anchored me in the real world of normal American Society. I knew things would change-and they did. Slowly at first, but the changes came. I [...]

Ecomunicipality Update

October’s Green meeting was last night. The agenda was long, but we had some big items up. first of all we got the Stormwater Mapping Grant! This will give us over $100k to hire a consultant to map the historical water flows of the village, as well as the current flows. This will give us [...]