Cleaning my office: ahhhhhh!

At 3:14 on Friday, June 14th, I was cleaning up things in my office.  One of the wonderful things about the academic year is its rhythm: April is always a hurricane, May is always a myth (disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle of leftover tasks), and in June, things quiet down beautifully. I know why people have traditionally done spring cleaning, but for me, the timing seems to always fit better with June cleaning. Things accumulate, and then June rolls around, and then the open spaces in my schedule mean that I can create open spaces in my shelves again, and move other things to where they need to go, including "away".

 

This year, like last year, the cleaning is even more intense because of switching offices. The CSA vegetables that we pick up every week come in wonderful cardboard boxes – reusable, collapsible, durable. Pre-pandemic, we gave them back to the CSA every week, but starting in March 2020 for reasons that are obvious, the boxes were required to make a one-way trip to our house.  Because they're so durable, collapsible, etc., and because of one other special feature, they make excellent moving boxes. 

The "other special feature" is that they are slightly smaller than regular printer boxes, so they fit perfectly (!) in the trash-picked rolling shopping cart that I use to move things around. Isn't life wonderful that way?

At any rate, at 3:14 last week, I was cleaning up my Dean's office and finding lots of happy, empty open spaces.

Web working

Thursday June 23 at 3:14, I was in an IT (Information Technology) meeting talking about our new web pages. Even though almost everything on our campus is back to normal, thanks to massive vaccination and booster policies, and also a robust "mask – friendly" policy, we still met virtually, seeing one another as a little boxes in a larger screen. It was easy to see that many of the people were paying attention to email or other tasks as the conversation was going along.

Web presence is an interesting sociological phenomenon in its own right. On the one hand, it makes life so much easier: if I want to know a store's hours, or the correct spelling of the word "flouted" (o, not a), or figure out the title of a staff member on my campus, the web is a handy, go-to reference guide. On the other hand, it seems like we're always hiring consultants to design new web systems, maintaining a staff of experts to help support our web system, going through trainings on how to design and manage webpages, etc. The existence of the web has created a new, costly infrastructure burden that didn't used to exist, and that we can't shrug off.

And so, as I think about my dean-ly activities related to internal funding, external funding, and research compliance, I'm trying to figure out the best way to reconstruct or restructure a good web presence for us, to make other peoples' lives a little bit easier going forward.

Compost nostalgia

Kind of in response to a request from a friend, I've dredged up an old (2018) post of mine from a blog I had to shut down.   It's fun to revisit this: who doesn't love making dirt?

The one-year Compost Bin Experiment update

It was a year ago that I took down my old wooden-pallet compost bins and started a metal-fencing system.    And now, a year later, what do I think?  I think, two thumbs up.   Probably green thumbs up, in fact!

If you're as into compost as I am, here's the dirt (heh-heh) on how the first year of a new compost era has gone.

Basically, ever since I moved to this city about a quarter century ago, I've been honing my skills at turning plants into dirt.  I am generally much better at turning plants into dirt than the other way around, in fact (although as the decades pass, I have occasionally had success at the dirt --> plant version of this process).  The basic method for composting is (1) put plants and food scraps on the ground, and (2) wait.  That's about where I was, oh, 25 years ago, and you'd better believe that I was amazed at myself for having my own compost pile.  My three-year-old daughter bragged to my friends, "My mom has a PhD AND a compost pile!".  Yes.

Moving up a notch is having a structure that encloses the pile.  When my husband and I moved to this house, I built two wooden pens out of old fencing.   One pen held the "new scraps" pile, and one pen held the "cooking" pile --- at least in theory, that's how it worked.  Every so often, I'd head out with the pitchfork and "stir" the piles.   But "stir" is in quotes because compost is kinda heavy, so this was a lot more like digging ditches as far as muscle and activity goes.  When the plants-and-food-scraps had sufficiently decomposed---usually after about  a year---I'd  use more muscle to shovel the compost from the piles into a wheelbarrow and move the dirt over to the garden. 

But then my neighbor Morgan ---who has an actual certificate designating her a "Master Composter" --- recommended another method.  This uses portable circles of metal fencing: one circle for the active, lasagna-style pile, and one circle as a holding pen for leaves.  I clip the metal fencing into circles using binder clips, which makes removing the fencing from the dirt as easy as undoing binder clips.    THIS is the method I've been trying out this year, and THIS is a new level of composting awesomeness for me.  I tell you, I'm better than ever at turning plants into dirt now. 

My "active" bin, about three feet in diameter
and three feet tall. 
The compost-makings are about a foot high right now.

This picture on the right is the latest "active" bin, and if you look super carefully, you'll see an almost-empty "holding" bin behind it, with the leaves almost gone.  The bin in front has a bunch of food on top; I'm about to grab leaves from the holding bin and put them on top. 

So, what's great about this system?

First, the layering thing *really* works.  Food and green stuff goes in, and then I toss leaves on top.  More food and/or green stuff goes in, then I toss in another layer of leaves.  I never once stirred this stuff, and yet it happily decomposed down into dirt way more quickly than in the past.

Second, because I put the active bins right there in the garden, I don't have to use a wheelbarrow and muscle to get the compost to the right place.  Once I have dirt, I open up the circle, move the fence to another place, and the compost is right there, in the right place.  I've done this twice now -- twice in one year.   This is really almost like magic here!

A nearly empty bin that used to be full of leaves.
This is about 4 feet in diameter and 3 feet high.  

Third, I really like having a giant bin to hold all those leaves I rake up in the fall.  It's nice thinking of these leaves as "fuel" to add to the top of a pile of food.  Somehow, for my large yard, the ratio worked out beautifully; this holding bin just finally, magically, emptied out right now -- just as fall has started tingeing the leaves that are hanging on the trees in our yard.  We won't start raking again for another few weeks, but when we do, I have empty bins ready to hold those leaves to make the next round of compost. 


No matter what style of compost bins I use, I love the fact that composting reduces the amount of stuff we send to landfills -- less gasoline for garbage trucks, less stuff in the landfill overall.   I also appreciate that, because my food scraps go into the ground instead of the trash can, my garbage doesn't stink.  We can (and do) leave a garbage can in the garage for a couple of months, slowly filling up with stuff from our home, and we don't have to put it out at the curb early because of bad odors. 

Whereas compost piles, in contrast, are happy living places.  Squirrels, birds, and bunnies visit my compost piles more often even than I do.  I really love walking by these bins in the morning and seeing the flurry of activity happening there. 

And that's my October [now June!!!] homage to compost bins, with a thank-you to Master Composter Morgan for bumping me up to a new level, for cluing me into the notion that Fence Circles are the new Black Gold. 

3:14, Research Administration (oooh, sexy!)

Tuesday and Wednesday (the 21st and 22nd) at 3:14, I was doing research administration. We have an awesome new person person on campus who is just a delight to work with. Both of these days I was working with this person. We're digging into grungy little details of background information, planning and plotting ways to try to make bureaucratic procedures a little bit less cumbersome for faculty who have to go through them, and for the various offices that need to be looped in on them.

There's evidence that we're succeeding. For example on Wednesday, it wasn't just the two of us: we also met with a faculty member who is threading their way through the pre-proposal maze. At the end of this, the faculty member thanked us both for making their life easier. Go figure, and yay!

This is a picture of me working in our new hire's office space. It's mostly incredibly deserted right now, so I feel like I get to do a service to them just by showing up and hanging out there, and it's nice that they agree!

3:14 complaining

Monday, June 20 at 3:14, I was complaining. Oh, I know – I know – it's not good for my soul. And yet, complaining to a friend is irresistible. Especially when the friend keeps saying things like, "you're not complaining; you're just explaining how you feel!" Or when your friend keeps asking for more details about how this other person did you wrong.

I kind of feel like an alcoholic: I think just about every single night I come home and regret what I had said earlier in the day. I promise myself that I'm not going to do that complaining thing tomorrow, and I go to sleep devising strategies for ways to avoid it. And then the next day rolls around, and a friend comes along, and takes the first drink – or rather utters the first grumble. And then we're off, galloping along on a complaining binge, me thinking about the damage this does my immortal soul, and both of us nonetheless enjoying the airing of our shared grievances, the act of venting weaving a web around the two of us that binds us closer together in a shared, grumbly of friendship.

That's what I was doing; I was complaining. Oh, me.

Three 3:14's: cherries, power tools, and laundry baskets

Phew!  What a bunch of catching up I get to do this evening.   Here's three different 3:14's:  cherry picking, basement cleaning, and laundry.  What a glam life I lead!

Friday the 17th, I was on a three-generation cherry picking expedition.  

Stats:  Sweet cherries, 25+ quarts, $125 (sheesh).  

Last year, I made cherry syrup (which was supposed to be cherry jelly, but I wimped out on the sugar, so . .  syrup).  This year, I just pitted the cherries and hot-pack canned them in water, no sugar at all.   I canned up about 30 pints (one of which got a special label and will be a birthday present for this special picker below). 

I also (and I think this is super clever, if I do say so) canned up about two dozen one-cup jars of cherry juice.  Next year, when I have the Purple Dress dinner, we'll have our individual cups of cherry juice, beautifully labeled, ready to go.  Whoop!

With all these cherries canned up, I needed some place to put them.  Which leads us to . . . 

 . . . Saturday June 18th at 3:14 I was cleaning out the basement. As storage places tend to do, it had become a dumping ground for various kinds of clutter, and also increasingly disorganized. I had spent the morning canning cherries, and my canning supplies are all in the basement, and I think my morning trips up and down the stairs -- back-and-forth in the basement space -- had convinced me that it was time to shuffle things around. One of the last things I did was to saw up a chair that has given the family good service for 30 years but that we no longer wanted.

My basement workspace

I don't know if the wooden posts that were once legs (etc) will be something that I use in a new project, or whether I'll just give them to some friends who have a fire pit. Either way, it felt good to use power tools to break this into smaller pieces, and the space looks so much better not having chairs and other giant boxes full of unwanted odds and ends congregating like guests at a cocktail party, making small talk and dropping crumbs rom their hors d'oeuvres on the floor.

Sunday June 19th at 3:14 I was putting away laundry. The week before that, I had been emptying the dishwasher, and as I mentioned when I wrote about dishwasher emptying, this is a rare chore for me these days. Since my husband is the Lord of the Laundry, putting away my own clothes is not unusual, but actually using the washing machine is exceedingly rare for me. I did, of course, hang the laundry on the drying rack rather than use the dryer (naturally!).

The 19th marks approximately the midpoint of my husband's European tour, so with any luck, I won't have to do laundry again until he gets back – which means by implication that I probably won't touch the washing machine again for about a year. In fact, I probably could've made it a month without resorting to the washing machine if I had just had a somewhat larger stash of undergarments. I don't usually order things via the computer, either, but after putting away my clothes I did order enough knickers to tide me over if my husband hast to travel for an extended period of time in the coming year. Phew!

Quick(ish) Enoughsville update

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  I'm kind of caught up in work stuff, which is (a) why this update is a bit late, and (b) why this update will be a bit short.

Inkling headed out of town Wednesday for the square dance convention, and definitely wins the "cool photo" award.

Also, of course, attending live performances:

Ofsnough is at a vacation monastery with his friend the monk, his former Army buddy. I just love that. I love that there's such a thing as a "vacation monastery", kind of like timeshares for monks, but probably without the free polo shirt.  Around the same time that Inkling was leaving for her square dancing, Ofsnough was heading out of the vacation monastery for the Arctic Circle where he could spend summer solstice in 24-hour light.

Bodo Norway at 1am

Prewash is not traveling anywhere, and she's not caught up in work stuff, but she has been officially pronounced cured.  If you're at all interested in dog pee, here's the scoop on hers: "The pH is normal. No sign of blood in there. No bacteria seen, no increase in red or white blood cells on there or any crystals."  

And that's the (quick) news from (some of) our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.