Upon reaching the unfortunate “1 year of trying to conceive without success” milestone (it’s closer to 1.5 years on the calendar but interruptions like gallbladder surgery messed with the schedule), I started doing some self-evaluation in addition to testing. One of the things that I realized was that I had gotten distracted in this process and had been neglecting myself. I suppose this is in general a problem for many people, and mothers especially, but when trying to get pregnant I’d guess it is counter productive. I’ve been so focussed on house stuff and financial matters, and the intellectual side of trying to become a good baby-host, that I kept procrastinating the stuff that was just for me. After years of being pretty good about monthly massages, I got ONE massage in 2011. After a few years of being good about monthly clothing purchases I bought a pair of jeans and some socks in the first 10 months of 2011, and both of those were almost-emergency purchases (translation: I had 7 pairs of socks left, and jeans with an impending hole). I don’t remember if I did any home facials all year, most weekends involved fairly extensive to-do lists and attempts at productivity, and I can’t remember the last time I cuddled up with a good book. It’s not that I didn’t do anything fun, or that I wasn’t taking care of myself in the basic sense, but that I wasn’t taking care of my emotional/mental self.

As my friend also pointed out, I usually approach everything in life with a rather spiritual/emotional perspective, but so far have been largely intellectual on the trying to conceive front. I’ve focussed on reducing external stressors, eating right, maintaining my exercise routine, charting, taking supplements, and house-projects (nesting). Yes, I was doing some visualization, and trying to deal with internal stressors, but entirely unsuccessfully.

It is time for that to change. I am re-committing to myself. One of my personal golden rules is that I am the most important person in my life, and I need to live by my own rule. February has been a good month to get that started with two massages (courtesy of a gift certificate), a hair cut so that I like the person in the mirror for the first time in over  a year, and a consistent visualization practice. I created a daily invitation/prayer to my future child, and am doing myofascial release treatments in the pelvic region to release stored tension (the pelvic region is the seat of the second chakra, which deals with relationships and sexual function among other things). Maybe the most important thing is mentally putting my foot down on the recent habit of putting the house first, and the inclination to be busy. It’s hard since there’s so much I’d like to do, and I enjoy doing it; but it creates internal stress and pressure to do-do-do-go-go-go. Internal psychological pressures are a bear! Especially for those who could be described as planners, or people who love to have multiple “projects” going on at any given time.

Some of this stuff is considered luxury by many even if it isn’t: like monthly massages, hair cuts, or clothing purchases. On a spiritual/emotional level taking that sabbath-time for a massage, even just one hour a month, has a huge effect. No, your muscles will not stay loose, but the benefits of a release of surface tension, break from mental stressors, and possible release of stored tension will last longer when it is a regular practice. And believe me, not liking what you see in the mirror or dreading getting dressed in the morning because your clothes are worn out or you have to wear the same things every week, has an incredibly negative effect on a persons psyche.

Valentine’s Day is one of my favorite holidays. Of course I have the unique perspective that it’s the day after my birthday, and as a kid it was essentially “birthday, day 2″. As a result of that perspective, though, Valentine’s Day has never been a romantic holiday for me but a day to celebrate friendships. I still don’t celebrate it as a romantic holiday, and as an adult there are less opportunities for the easy celebrations with friends, so it is kind of a wistful holiday now. As I type this, though, I realize that that need not be the case. Is there any particular reason not to reach out to friends and say “thanks for being my friend, thanks for being in my life and making it so much richer? We have all kinds of “appreciation days” on the greeting-card-holiday calendar, but I don’t think there is a Friendship Day. Romantic love gets to be celebrated on anniversaries, but what about a day to celebrate the friendship love of the many other people that brighten your life? How often do we take our friendships for granted? One of the things that has been repeated many times in the JustFaith Engaging Spirituality program is the importance of gratitude and thankfulness in our spiritual lives, the importance of recognizing the blessings and gifts that we have received in our lives. I can testify that life has an extra shine on it when gratitude is regularly practiced in some way.

So I hereby pledge that starting this year, I’ll celebrate Valentine’s Day again my way: as Friend’s Day. And I think Facebook will make a convenient adult “Valentine mailbox”. Hey, I’m lazy.

Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

Steve Jobs

Apparently this winter is all about making changes to my compost systems. Last month I wrote about converting my failed 5-gallon bucket compost “bin” into a vermicomposter, and now I can write about transferring the Heap into a pallet composter. I guess the idea of using pallets to create a compost bin isn’t new, but either I just hadn’t seen it anywhere before or I just spaced it out until now. A couple weeks ago I went to a master gardener workshop and while wandering around afterwards I noticed some compost bins made out of pallets in the corner. Considering that I had a bunch of pallets sitting in my backyard, and they had been on my mind lately, I was immediately intrigued. The pallets are from a remediation system I am running at work that uses nutrients that ship on pallets. While pallets are valuable in bulk, when you are using 2 per quarter and they are exposed to the weather all the time, they end up just going to the dump. Unless, of course, you find a way to salvage them. Originally, I started bringing them home because I thought the wood would be great for a half-height fence in the front yard. I  soon discovered, however, that it is really hard to break down a pallet and they have been stacked in the side yard since then. Last weekend I switched gears and converted four of them into a compost bin, and then transferred the old compost heap into the bin. When needed, I have four more pallets to build into a second bin.

This seems like such a good idea because it is cheap (assuming that you can find free pallets somewhere), easy (all you need are four pallets, four hook-and-eye closures, and a drill), not ugly (at least not compared to just an unstructured pile of compost), and should really work. Since the pallet slats have space in between them, there’s plenty of aeration for the pile, and the inner volume of the bin should be large enough that the compost can actually heat up.

 

The Heap was actually working, but it was slow going. That is partially because I wasn’t trying to make it go fast, and partially because of structural problems. Without any support the pile couldn’t get very tall, so I don’t think it really warmed up properly. And of course the rose bush prunings that formed the base of the Heap were going to take forever to decompose. In the process of transferring from Heap to pallet bin, I removed all branches, so the process should go quicker now. The parts of the Heap that had kitchen waste were decomposing relatively well, and the parts of the Heap that were almost entirely yard waste were just a little moldy. Now everything is mixed up or layered in the pallet bin, and we’ll see if this really does work.

One of my goals set back in August was to cut my TV watching down to 2 hours during the week and 2 hours on weekends. That was the explicit goal. The implicit goal was to read more, and get to sleep on time easier. Well, I made the explicit goal easily; but missed the implicit goal by a long shot. How’s that? Well I gave in to a computer game itch. I have a somewhat addictive roleplaying game on my computer that I’ve been playing for the last 10 years. I found version 2 way back when and pretty much spent ALL my free time playing it. At the time I had an absolutely horrible job and was depressed, so the escapism it offered was a relief. Even playing it for hours every day, it still takes several weeks (months?) to finish a game. Version 3 came out and I played that for a while, but then I met Mike and life got busy. Eventually I found out that version 4 had come out, read the description and caved in to get it (these are cheap shareware games). I played it a couple of times and then set up a couple challenging scenarios that out-challenged/bored me so I stopped playing for a while (we also started househunting, which might have factored into the stoppage). The files were all still on my computer, but I was effectively ignoring them. Then this past summer I found out they are now on version 6. The itch started, and eventually I gave in a revisited those two challenging scenarios that I had given up on. One of them turned out to be pretty easy, but still has sucked up all my free time and not-so-free time since October. I only just finished the game.

Now I am faced with a dilemma. I cannot let myself get sucked into this game again after we start a family. It is not possible to play for 10 or 15 minutes, I’ve tried many a time, the minimum sitting is more like 30 minutes. And I know myself and my history: I get sucked in and neglect other things in my life. The obvious solution is to delete all the files from my computer, right? But what if I get the itch to play a game like this again? Can I trust myself to be strong enough for a couple decades to not give in? Or would it be better to leave the game on my computer with all my hints, guides, and notes so that I don’t risk starting something new from scratch? I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days and I’m going back and forth. I could honestly use third-party perspective on this.

But while I decide what to do about the time-suck that took my free time after cutting back on TV, I will enjoy playing with my reward for cutting back on TV anyway: a small electric chipper/shredder. After all, I did meet the explicit goal, and implicit goals only count if the explicit goal failed.

The November/December 2011 issue of the Green American (Green America’s periodical) is about plastics, including disposal of them. One of the sidebars is about TerraCycle, a company that recycles/reuses various hard-to-recycle waste like candy wrappers, cheese packaging, and Solo cups. I had heard about TerraCycle before and thought it sounded like a really great idea, but I hadn’t had a chance to use it until recently. Unfortunately, I still haven’t.

My opportunity was Bear Naked granola bags. A while back I started splurging on Bear Naked granola for my cereal when I got a coupon for it, because it isn’t sweet like most of the other granolas in the store and actually tastes really good. On the back of the bag it tells you not to throw it away because you can either send it back to them or recycle it through TerraCycle, so I kept the bags. All four of them. Unfortunately or fortunately, I transitioned to just putting chopped nuts and fresh blueberries or other fruit and don’t anticipate buying granola in the store for a very long time, if ever. Maybe I’ll experiment with making my own so that I actually like it and don’t find it too sweet or unhealthy. During my winter purge this past year I found the small pile of bags and decided that it was time to get rid of them. According to their website there are two options for “sustainable disposal”: sending them in to Bear Naked and getting swag in return, or recycling them through TerraCycle. For the size bag that I had, I was six bags short of being able to get a reusable grocery bag that I don’t need. So I looked into TerraCycle and ended up horribly confused. I guess you need to sign up with a brigade (or start a new one) and then you can send stuff in for recycling. But I didn’t want to sign up to join something just to get rid of four bags. I guess the minimum amount to send in is actually 5 bags, according to the blurb in the Green American. I would have loved to find out who has a brigade and I would have happily sent them my bags in order to support their organization since they can get money back from turning in items. But I couldn’t find that information without signing up, and again, I had no interest in signing myself up for something for this one-time exchange. So apparently TerraCycle is a great idea…if you are or know of an organization that can collect items to send back, or if you go through enough of the items yourself to justify signing up. Unless of course I’m not understanding the process.

Sadly, my four bags ended up in the garbage. It’s unfortunate since the sustainable packaging program, along with the granola not being really sweet, is why I bought the Bear Naked granola in the first place.

 

Alternative title: When other people insist that something is stressful, but you don’t think so.

This past week we went to the doctor for a fertility consult and are starting to do some testing since we’ve passed 15 months of trying (technically 12 months + 3 months off due to gallstones/gallbladder surgery) to get pregnant. In addition to discussing testing options, the doctor suggested that while it has been very helpful that I’ve been charting so that I know I’m ovulating, I should stop because it is stressing me out. Apparently it happens all the time that people stop charting and then get pregnant because the charting is “stressful”. When we walked out of the office, though, I told Mike that I have no intention of stopping charting. I think it would be WAY more stressful to not chart than it is to chart. In fact, the month that we moved into our current house I didn’t chart and it was incredibly stressful for me because I felt lost in my own body. It was like someone had taken away one of my senses, and I didn’t like that experience. Am I missing something here?

I got introduced to Natural Family Planning/Fertility Awareness Method by my friend, and started charting more than a year before we started trying to get pregnant. I was immediately hooked! The self-knowledge and self-understanding that comes with observing fertility signs is an incredibly wonderful experience to me, and I intend to continue charting through menopause. So observing my fertile signs and charting is just as much a part of my day as brushing my teeth, and occupies about as much of my mental state. Taking my temperature in the morning doesn’t require any more thought than to roll over and stick the thermometer in my mouth when my alarm clock first goes off. (It’s a zen alarm clock, with chimes at increasing frequencies following the golden ratio). Checking cervical fluid is just a matter of observation throughout the day. Sure, there’s a little bit of stress related to timing sex during the fertile phase. However it seems to me like it would be more stressful to do so without  observing fertile signs and having no idea when your body is at its most fertile. And I also question the idea that I experience more stress around the time when I might get my period than someone who’s not charting. It seems like we’d be going through the same emotions regardless since most women have a sense of how long they usually go between periods.

This is probably partially a personality thing, after all I am definitely an engineer and someone who wants to be intimately knowledgeable about/involved with myself and my health and wellness. Maybe there’s also a difference that I didn’t start charting when we started trying to get pregnant for the purpose of trying to get pregnant. This doctor was not the first doctor to suggest that charting may stress me out as my naturopath suggested the same thing about a year ago. Unless I’m in total denial or completely missing something, though, I do not feel that observing my fertile signs and charting is causing stress in my life and interfering with my ability to get pregnant. Is it possible to have other people tell you that something is stressful for you and yet not experience that thing as stressful? I think so, obviously, but I’d love feedback.

Even though I had declared the 5-gallon bucket compost experiment to be a failure back in May, I never emptied the bucket into the compost heap. I had no plans for the bucket; what can you do with a hole-y bucket? So it just sat there, and functioned as one of the edges for the compost heap for the last several months. No longer.

I’ve really been wanting to start vermicomposting, aka, composting with worms.  A while back I had managed to talk the man-who-doesn’t-like-anything-that-doesn’t-have-four-legs into letting me vermicompost as long as it was in the garage and not the dining room like I originally wanted. I’ve heard that if properly managed there’s no odor, and the closer to the kitchen the easier to use, but since I can’t convince him that the worms aren’t going to escape it stays in the garage. However, a worm bin, even one made of plastic storage bins, is pretty far down on the house wish list, and I didn’t have any suitable containers to make one for free. Or so I thought!

Then at the Green Festival in November I acquired some worms for free! I went to a vermicomposting workshop where the presenter was giving away a few containers of worm castings. She had collected the worm castings in a hurry so they still had a few baby worms in them. When I got back home I put the bag aside and wasn’t able to get to it for over a week so I thought I’d probably killed the worms. Lo and behold, though, when I peaked in there were a few full sized worms wiggling around in there. I punched a couple holes in the container and threw in an old piece of lettuce. Fast forward a month to around Christmas and I peaked in again to realize that the lettuce was gone and the worms still alive. But they couldn’t stay in a clear plastic snack-food container forever, they needed a home upgrade.

That’s when it occurred to me that the 5-gallon bucket with holes in it could work as a worm bin. I hope. The original holes are quite large so I’m hoping that I don’t lose my few worms through them. The hole-y bucket has holes on the bottom and sides, and I drilled a few more (much smaller) holes on the side to make sure there will be enough ventilation. I grabbed another then-unused 5-gallon bucket to use as the moisture collector. The outer bucket is wider than the hole-y bucket so I didn’t need to drill ventilation holes in it, but if it had been the same dimensions I would have drilled a row of ventilation holes in the sides below where the bottom of the inner bucket would be. Instead I propped the inner bucket on some scrap plastic bits and there’s a narrow annular space between the buckets. I put a really thick layer of dampened hand-shredded newspaper on the bottom since I didn’t want the worms to fall through the drainage holes, added a few rotting lettuce leaves, strawberries, tea leaves, and a well crushed egg shell (or as well as I could crush it), and dumped the castings container and worms on top. I don’t mind sacrificing that worm gold fertilizer if it means I’ll get a head start on creating my own. After topping it off with some more hand-shredded newspaper and another good misting, I created a lid with a peace of plywood we had laying around.

Now I just have to remember to check on them occasionally. At this point they’re not going to create much fertilizer since I’m starting with just a few worms, literally. It’s more of a test run to see if I can keep them alive before I actually order my first pound of worms. I’m really excited at this.

Shalom

Shalom doesn’t just mean “peace”. Look it up, Google it, or Wikipedia it. Shalom means so much more than the English word “peace”. Shalom means wholeness and wellness as well. Shalom encompasses individuals, nations, and the entire universe.

Happy New Year to all.

Shalom

Several years ago in my quest for a way to have beautiful/interesting gift wrap that does not waste resources I stumbled upon the idea to use old calendar pages, and I have to highly recommend this. They don’t work for every gift, but it is part of the “arsenal” of gift wrap. Arsenal may  be an odd choice of words, but I think that it is appropriate since different types of gifts/gift giving situations require different strategies for wrapping. My arsenal contains gift bags, newspaper, butcher paper (from buying things online), tissue paper, calendars, paint, stamps with colored and metallic inks (although I haven’t used them in a couple years so they may be dry), ribbons, and various silk flowers and leaves from my old bookcase decoration. Oh, and this year there is one particularly large box that will be covered in a sheet as a visual shield since nothing else will work.

I gather from reading comments this year on various Facebook posts and blogs that lots of people just can’t stand the idea of not wrapping gifts with a roll of wrapping paper. I’m  not going to say that using wrapping paper is horrible for the environment and no one should do it, because that’s just not true or helpful. One could easily say the same thing about buying wall calendars or sending out Christmas cards, but for me the spiritual satisfaction of those things is enormous. Besides, I totally understand the desire to make gifts look beautiful. I spend quite a bit of time on the quest myself. The idea to use old calendars to wrap gifts came about because I love a good calendar and a pretty gift. At the end of the year I always felt bad tossing a calendar that I thoroughly enjoyed into the recycle bin. It occurred to me that many calendars have images that make for good/fun gift wrap. And there’s something that I like about using my husband’s old pirate or Darth Vader calendars to wrap gifts for him, or wrapping my mom’s gifts in old goddess calendar pages. It’s more personal than a generic roll of gift wrap that is the same for all of the gifts. For those who object to the look of newspaper or plain paper wrapping, a calendar page can also be used on just the top/front of the gift to spice it up a bit.

There is one type of person who should probably not try this strategy, though, and that’s the person who needs to get every edge and corner perfectly folded and match the patterns at the seam. Calendar pages are heavier than typical wrapping paper, so it can get difficult folding corners sometimes. They do have the hole at the top of the page and the torn edge at the bottom, and depending on the situation these may end up visible. Sometimes the best part of the image is in a corner of the page, requiring some creative wrapping to frame the image on the gift as desired. To me it is worth it and the act of wrapping the gift has become part of the gift itself.

For all that I recommend old calendars as gift wrap, I also have to recommend being more open-minded about gift wrap. Simplicity is ok. A few years ago I went to a few gift exchanges with gifts wrapped in plain paper with a nice ribbon, and I noticed that my gifts were the last to be chosen. It was almost like people expected plain paper to house lame gifts. I am rather offended by that notion, especially since I put effort into every gift and I find plain wrapping to be simply beautiful. Simplicity can be very beautiful.