Farm in truck.

I happened to glance out the window of the Max and caught a glimpse of…What was that? The Max had sped by, but I kept watch in hopes that the object would catch up at the next stop and indeed it did.

It’s a truck farm!

The plants were planted in dirt and the rows were covered in burlap, I assume to keep the dirt from blowing away. There was even a trellis for peas. I read about truck farming specifically the movie Truck Farm, but this was the first one I have seen.

20MPDC Check in 4/19/11

4/13 and 4/14 were eaten up with gardening.

4/15. Spent more time reading about knife sharpeners. I didn’t put anything on Craigslist because I’m out of town for a day. I did have a nibble on an item, which if followed through (only an “if” for Craigslist as people are flaky) I will have an extra $5.00.

4/16 Craigslist guy did come thorough and I’m $5.00 richer. I now have grossed $8.00 which is nearly one first-run matinee movie. Or two second-run movies plus a box of Jr. Mints. But more importantly, it’s a tiny step toward the knife sharpening gear I need to implement the knife sharpening business.

4/17, 4/18 & 4/19. Apparently busy with other things.

Can people read this well labeled recycling bin?

I spotted this fancy new recycling bin on the way to my bus stop.
As you can see, it’s very clearly labeled. But can people follow directions?

I spy a potato chip bag (neither newspaper, nor magazine) plus two cups in the top section.

In the “plastic bottles and metal cans” side I see two plastic bottles, but three cups.

In the “glass bottles” side I see one glass bottle and one metal can (but no cups.)
As you can see, just writing on the object what you want it to be used for does not always work.

20MPDC 4/12/11

Wednesday 4/6/11
Evening meeting left me with little time, certainly not 20 minutes. I took a picture of an item to put on Craigslist and that was it.

Thursday 4/7/11
I posted an item to Craigslist and took a picture of another item. I spent the rest of the time reading tutorials on SharpeningSupplies.com and I watched a video. The tiny amount of research I’ve done over the past few weeks has me confident that I can learn how to sharpen knives.

Friday/Saturday 4/8-9
Nothin!

Sunday 4/10/11
I took another picture and posted another ad on Criagslist. I edited my Harvest Helper flyer and watched a few sharpening videos. I want to purchase a stone set, but I am resisting until I do more research.

Monday 4/11/11
Picture? Taken. Item? Posted. Harvest Helper? New blog created. WordPress explored a bit.

20MPDC Check in 4/5/11

3/29. Finished blog post about 20MPDC. With the minute remaining, googled “how to be a professional knife sharpener” and discovered that more people search “how to be a professional knife thrower” than “knife sharpener.”

3/30. Made flyer for harvesting business. Not sure of a good name for the business. Am letting it marinate. Read up on knife sharpening on a web site and found another good source of information and supplies (which are not cheap!). Briefly contemplated taking a picture of items for sale and rejected that idea.

3/31. Took pictures of five things to sell on Craig’s List. Will upload the photos with the usual weekly photo upload. Spent 11 minutes reading about knife sharpening. The Paper Wheel system seems in my price range. Will keep reading.

4/1. Spent the entire time reading about knife sharpening. I learned to fold a paper corner to show me the primary edge face and the secondary edge face. April and May will be used to read about sharpening so that I will have a good idea of what would be the best investment of my money.

4/2, 4/3 Busy with other things

4/4. Forgot to write down what I did, but if memory serves, posted an item to Craigslist and spent the rest of the time doing something that I cannot recall. Ah, it’s coming back to me now. I was looking for a detail map of the Kenton neighborhood and got distracted on the library web site.

4/5. Sold item on Craigslist and am now $3.00 richer! What an excellent boost of confidence for this project! I have decided to take a picture of something to sell every day and post something to sell every day. I posted a new item and spent some time reading Leonard Lee’s Complete Guide to Sharpening. I read the chapter on kitchen knife sharpening. Leonard Lee is pretty funny and reassured me that sharpening kitchen knives is easy! Example: “Most kitchen-knife users seem to be satisfied with the condition of the knife as long as the cutting edge is keener than the back of the knife. The tolerance for dull knives is amazingly high in most kitchens.”

In the few minutes remaining. I checked out WordPress as I am thinking about having a web site for my harvesting business.

Well done, me!

Is this rude?

I attended a professional development workshop today about brain-based math learning. This woman was on her computer the entire day. Well, the entire part of the day she was there, as she left early. At first I thought she was taking notes, but I soon realized she was spending her time online shopping. So my questions are 1) Why did she even come as she was not at all paying attention and 2)Is this rude, or just an acceptable modern use of time under the guise of “multi-tasking”?

Poem for March: Wild Geese

Read the poem by clicking somewhere on this sentence.

After somewhat dogging on the Mary Oliver book I read last month, I, of course, decided to memorize one of her poems this month. This poem is on the side of my friend Deborah’s refrigerator. It is also Responsive Reading #490 in the Unitarian Hymnal Singing the Living Tradition. I really like the first five lines, as they are good reminder for modern life.

Books read in March

Wow! Only two fiction books this month? What’s going on there?

Read
Twelve by Twelve
William Powers
Powers’ reaction to the twelve by twelve cabin upon first sight surprised me. He was disgusted by its tiny size, weirded out that someone might actually live there. This reaction from a NGO activist who had lived and worked in many developing countries? Was he living in palaces? (Apparently, we learn later, his housing was a bit fancy.) I’m all for living in a tiny space, so I had trouble with his trouble. Powers is a good writer, which is good because it makes his descriptions of life in the cabin interesting. The book can feel a bit navel gazing at times, but was otherwise interesting.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
Read for Kenton Library Book Club, March 2011.
I loved this book. I have recommended it to several people and my description (A French concierge! Who is an intellectual! But hides it from people! And a very smart twelve year old girl! Who has decided that life is silly and that she will kill herself! It also has a lot of philosophy! It’s very awesome!) tends to give people that “sounds horrible, what is she thinking?” look in their eyes.

So my description won’t do it justice. But the book is very funny and I identified with both the characters throughout the book, and the book club was in agreement about this. Though some in my book club weren’t the raving fan I was, many enjoyed the novel more than some of the books we’ve read. A quick glance at Goodreads reviews shows a number of one star designations, so you might not like it. But I’m not interested in intellectual pursuits, philosophy or suicidal girls and I greatly loved this book. Or at least 19/20ths of it as I was not at all thrilled by the ending.

Bicycles: Love Poems
Nikki Giovanni
I came by Nikki Giovanni via the 2011 “Everybody Reads Selection” of the Multnomah County Library. The author of the selection, Wes Moore, has a sister named after Nikki Giovanni and I figured that was good enough reason to check her out. I found a lot of these poems a bit too “early relationship happy/sappy” for me and am interested in reading other poems by this author that are not specifically about love. My favorite poem was “Christmas Laughter” (which can be found by searching the title) which warmly reminded me of my shrinking family.

Sweetheart
Chelsea Cain
Book two of the Gretchen Lowell has much less torture, which I welcomed. It was another fun romp through Portland, Oregon with Archie Sheridan and Susan Ward.

The Arrival
Shaun Tan
Read for sporadic book club.
Beautifully illustrated and fantastical. Graphic Novels aren’t my genre, but I loved this.

The Last American Man
Elizabeth Gilbert
I think Elizabeth Gilbert’s talent shines in this book. She paints a portrait of a fascinating man who, as Matt so delicately put it, is “kind of an asshole.” Yet Gilbert supplies enough details about the man himself and his upbringing that I found myself rooting for Eustace Conway, even as I cringed at the way his complete inflexibility brought him a ton of success, but kept him from what he really wanted: a wife and family.

180 More Extraordinary Poems for Everyday
Billy Collins, ed.
Just what the title says it is, most of these meet my poetry requirement of “not too long.” However, my favorite was one of the longer poems in the book: David Kirby’s “A Cowardice of Husbands” which can be found right now by googling its title. Is it just me or does it feel wrong to be able to access the contents of the book and read it online? Shouldn’t we have to DO something to get our content?

Started and did not finish
A Separate Peace
John Knowles
Every time I took this book out in public someone noticed and made the comment, “Oh, I’ve read that book!” This book seems to have been part of high school curriculum across the nation. I however, have not read it, though I made it more than halfway through. I didn’t like the increasing sense of foreboding and I wasn’t a fan of either of the main characters, so I put this down. Interestingly, aside from the person who lent me the book, no one who had read it followed their statement of recognition with some form of “that was a great book!” so I think I’m in good company.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories
Annie Proulx
I just made time to read Brokeback Mountain which was lovely in its sadness.

Career Renegade: how to make a great living doing what you love.
Jonathan Fields
An impulse grab at the library that I dipped into. This is written by a guy who was a lawyer who liked personal training and quit his job to open a fancy gym where he made a lot of money. Then he sold that and managed to make a bunch of money from yoga. His theme seems to be “don’t think like everyone else, think big.” I wasn’t in the mood to think that big, so I gave the book back. Perhaps I’ll pick it up again when I’m feeling bigger.

The backyard homestead
Ed. Carleen Madigan
This is a good general overview. I really liked the schematics for what could be produced on varying lot sizes: standard backyard, quarter acre, half acre, full acre.

Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden
Gilbert L. Wilson
I looked at the pictures. This goes back on my to-read list.

20 minutes per day.

I’ve discovered a local blogger, Tammy Strobel of Rowdy Kittens, whose blog promotes social change through simple living. While flitting about on her blog, I found a reference to a 20 minute per day challenge which is something apparently thought up by Michael Nobbs of Sustainably Creative. The idea is to spend 20 minutes per day doing something you want to do.

I have just recently finished all the coursework for the Graduate Certificate in Middle School Math and now have more time on my hands, so this is a perfect time for the 20 minute per day challenge (hereafter referred to as 20MPDC). But what to do with my 20 minutes? I thought about it over a few weeks and came to the conclusion I want to use the 20 minutes per day to increase my income streams.

I came by that idea from Trent Hamm of the blog* The Simple Dollar. He has a free ebook titled Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance on Just One Page. The book itself is actually 49 pages, but those other 48 pages just explain more in detail what he is talking about on the one page. According to his one page of Personal Finance, I’m doing pretty well, although in the “earn more” category I don’t have many income streams. These are handy for adding a little extra to your coffers. I’m not talking a second job here, just twenty bucks here and there to pad things a little.

So here are my three ideas for increasing my income streams:
1. Harvesting service. I myself am not always good at harvesting what I grow. I get busy, the things get ripe, I don’t make it out to the garden and suffer from massive pangs of guilt which make it that much harder to get into the garden. I will create flyers to advertise my harvesting service. The way it will work is as follows: If someone in my neighborhood contacts me about an item needing harvesting, I will trot over to their yard and pick it, leaving half for them and taking half for myself. They get fresh produce and can stop feeling guilty about the food going bad in their yard, I get free food. This will not bring in actual money, but will provide me food for free, allowing the budgeted food money to go elsewhere. To start this service I need only to create flyers (which I can do during my 20 minutes per day) and then distribute them in the neighborhood (which I can do on my morning walks.)

2. Knife sharpening service. I would like to have a trade of some sort. When thinking about the kinds of trades I could possibly have, knife sharpening was the one that appealed to me the most. I love having sharp knives and rarely spend the time (and money) to get them sharpened. I can advertise a free pick up and drop off service in the neighborhood, sharpen them at home, and sharpen my own knives when I am doing theirs. I get sharp knives, a skill and a bit of extra cash. After I make my flyers for the harvesting business, I will learn about how one goes about becoming a knife sharpener. Are there trade organizations? Classes? I have no idea.

3. Sell my stuff. I have stuff to get rid of. What usually happens is that I pile it in a place in the house intending to put it on Craigslist for cheap, but never get around to taking the picture, putting it on Craigslist, etc. and end up giving it to Goodwill. Why should they get two dollars for my stuff when, with a little work, I can cut out the middle man and keep the two dollars for myself? I will find a quick, streamlined way to sell my things on Craigslist and make a buck or two.

Reporting. Michael Nobbs says the reporting is the most important part. I will check in each Tuesday with a brief update of how things are going.

*I don’t feel like I read a ton of blogs, but this post is making me think otherwise.