Spring Sustainability

Since the last update, which seems like eons ago, a lot has happened and spring has sprung on Louisville. All of the trees have blossomed and many of the flowers have come and gone, and now the trees are getting a full head of smallish green leaves. We've actually had a few days I would characterize as "hot," meaning that my 3rd floor apartment has gotten uncomfortable in the heat of the afternoon. We've had a few pleasant spring days, though it was kind of an extended winter this year and then didn't waste much time getting into the warmer weather. I was using my little space heater up until a couple of weeks ago but now I've got windows open most of the time and even some fans running if need be. This is the great time of year when the weather is so agreeable that you don't need any kind of artificial heating or cooling, I just wish I could stretch these weeks out into months and months. This weekend is the Kentucky Derby, I guess they picked a nice time of year for it. (NOTE: I wrote this a couple of days ago, now we're in a damn cold snap and it's currently 38 degrees outside, go figure!)

A lot has happened since I last wrote, at that time I was very embroiled in thoughts of politics with my heart heavy...I can't say I've forgotten about any of that, and I'm still voting for "None of the (3) Above," but it hasn't been consuming me in the same way and I'm spending less time reading about and getting drawn into the farcical spectacle of US politics and more time trying to affect positive change in my own little corner of the world. To that end I'll talk about what I've been up to these last couple of months...

A few months ago I somehow got signed up for the Louisville Natural Building Meetup, which led me to a "meeting" at Derby City Espresso where nobody showed up...but I did manage to get a postcard about an upcoming Strawbale Building workshop, and also found out about a "Greening Your Home" event that same day at Rainbow Blossom (a local healthfood store). So Lindsay and I drove out to that event, milled around a bit checking out the various info tables, and caught the latter half of a presentation given by Matt Martin on reducing your home energy consumption, and also tangentially about strawbale construction. It turns out Matt was the one hosting the upcoming workshop and we were quite impressed by his presentation, so I decided in fairly short order that I wanted to participate (and fortunately Lindsay is a great sport and has a good head on her shoulders, so she was in too). Since the workshop wasn't set to begin for a month or two, I picked up some great books on green building and strawbale construction in anticipation of the process.

Fast forward a month or so, books have been pored over, websites have been visited and Matt has set up a BBS forum called Growing Louisville Green for folks to exchange all kinds of info about green things going on locally, nationally and worldwide. The forum is off to a somewhat slow start but there are a handful of great quality folks posting some really good info, so it's a becoming a nice little resource for us. Lindsay and I were excited about the workshop and blocked out the four successive weekends on our schedules (which caused me to miss the Cincinnati scooter rally, which was a bit of a sting since I'd been the last 3 years straight and would've loved to have seen a lot of old friends there) and we were ready for it. We volunteered an extra weekend in advance to help dig the ditches for the foundation, it was good hard work and we even unearthed a few nice antique glass bottles! So for four weekends after that we happily gave our Saturdays and Sundays over to manual labor and a wonderful, really fun learning experience under the tutelage of some skilled carpenters who specialize in "green" construction. The folks who participated in the workshop were from a variety of backgrounds, many were veg*n; all were interesting and made for good conversation. The host of the workshop made us delicious vegan-friendly lunches every day and some great connections and relationships were forged. The building isn't totally completed yet (though the workshop is over, it ran a bit behind schedule) but it is the FIRST strawbale building in this county and one of only a handful in the whole state. Bravo to Matt, Rider and Mark of Alternative Green Solutions for putting this together, we were inspired and hope to help out with more projects like this in the future. If you don't know about strawbale construction (and are having thoughts of Big Bad Wolves), read more here: strawbale overview.

I/we are seriously thinking about buying a vacant lot in the city and building a strawbale house, you can build one for FAR less than conventional construction; I could build a very decent little house for around $30K plus the cost of the lot ($7-20K), so I've been doing a lot of research and scouting around at potential places to build. How amazing would it be to have my own custom house for about 1/3 the price of the average new home? It's really exciting and if it happens, it will be a very eco-friendly, low-energy structure incorporating passive solar design, rainwater catchment, energy-efficient appliances, a composting toilet and other green marvels. Strawbale buildings can have an R-value of 45+, which is about 3x better than the average new home, so they can be super-efficient with regard to heating and cooling.

The other thing I'm really excited about is that this is my first year of gardening! I've never had a green thumb at all, the few plants I've ever had I've managed to kill somehow, but I've been doing a lot of research on gardening (container gardening specifically), have all my seeds and soil, many of my containers, have compost cooking in a beautiful pest- and odor-free tumbling compost bin, and am totally into to watching the seedlings coming up in flats indoors. At the moment I've got about a dozen varieties of vegetables growing indoors; I'll have 25 or more by the time they're all planted and my rooftop will truly be "alive!" I got most of my seeds from Seeds of Change, I think on Rene's recommendation, and so far so good. I've also been given a few types of seeds by a local permaculturist named Ray. Even if I manage to screw almost everything up, I should still get some vegetables out of the deal and it will be a priceless learning experience no matter what!

In other recent news, Ryan Simonson drove down here to spend his Spring Break week in Kentucky, and we were all lucky to have him here, even though he wanted to go out every single night under the banner of "I'm on VACATION!" We had some good times out with college pal and brilliant fellow artist Kathleen Lolley. Perhaps the finest part of these meetings was borne in the fruit of collaborative drawings, mostly between Ryan and Kathleen (and usually on Field Notes, represent!), where one started it and then passed it to the other. Both are outstanding draughtsmen and the results were hilarious and usually involved creatures with large/misshapen/extra genitals, breasts, farting asses, costumes, and other staple "fantasy art" motifs. I'll scan and post some of them just as soon as I find the misplaced Field Notes booklet... Here's my pitch for the Fall 08 ad campaign --
FIELD NOTES: Perfect Size/Color for Getting Lost.
Or,
FIELD NOTES: Look Just Like The Other 25 Copies of Field Notes Floating Around Your Life (That You Haven't Managed to Lose Yet).

I think they need to print them in a rainbow of cover stock colors, everything that French Paper does in a cover weight. Support America! Anyway, Ryan and I also went down to Mammoth Cave, I haven't finished posting the pics from his visit but it was indeed Mammoth in proportion to lesser caves.

On the work front, I had the distinct agony of doing my own taxes (really "awesome" when you're self-employed), and naturally I owed a goodly sum since no taxes are withheld from my freelance-basis work. I got some books from the library to help me understand some of the basics and spent the $30 on decent tax prep software, which was fairly thorough in guiding me through things and making it somewhat less confounding, though I still spent about 14 hours doing the taxes with the software. Remarkably, the KY state form was nearly as hard as the Federal one; everywhere else I've lived you just go down the list, fill in the blanks with stuff from your Fed form and are done in about 10 minutes. No such luck in KY, the goddamn thing was 4+ pages and so convoluted that my head was spinning. Probably spent a good 3-4 hours on that one alone, even though my Fed form was done and ready. Bonus info: when you're self-employed, you get to pay an extra 15% tax, for the Medicaidre and "Social Security" normally paid by employers (which programs, incidentally will have long vanished by the time I get there, supposing I live that long). The news: I didn't make that much last year (probably about half of what I would've been making now if I'd stayed at my last job) and didn't save any money. Not a huge surprise, since my work isn't always steady and my hours vary. Working on your own is kind of a pain, but I do enjoy the freedom and flexibility of my schedule, and I have been able to pay my bills. I don't believe humans are meant to sit at desks in front of computers for 40-80 hours a week!

Almost forgot, my Kucinich graphics were featured in the Spring 2008 issue of Redefine magazine, a music and art publication out of Seattle. They were doing a piece about independent artists who had taken it upon themselves to create work to support campaigns they felt strongly about; I was right there next to Shepard Fairey, whoo! Check out p. 46 for my writeup. Interesting that the only stuff they could find was for Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, nobody else had really inspired anyone to pick up a pen, surprise!

So overall my life is good, I'm happy in what I'm doing and learning a lot as I go. I'm probably going to sell my black Vespa (it needs some work to be a reliable everyday scooter), as I don't need two, and want to start riding my bicycle more anyway. Let me know if you're interested, I'd probably let it go for $1,400 or so as-is. The scooter runs fairly well but has some electrical issues (taillight doesn't work consistently, and I'll probably take the Prima exhaust off since I can't seem to get it jetted right). The brown Stella is running okay, had to weld up the HPC coated Sito Plus exhaust on account of it rotting from the inside-out, bummer. Hope all is well on your end, sorry to those folks who I owe an e-mail, a card or phone call to, I'm not the best at keeping up on those but rest assured you are in my thoughts!
PJ