New Beginnings

Yes, I am still alive and kicking. I'm amazed that I still have 'followers' after such a long absence from this space.

Basically, over the last nine months, I poured everything I had into a job, but even so, it apparently wasn't enough as I was fired last month-for the first time in my life. I've always been the star, the go-to person, and now, I am experiencing the other end of that spectrum. The only thing I can do is to move on and to learn from my failings, career and social. I've never been good at playing politics, sucking up to people. My emotions are always on my sleeve, which makes me easy to manipulate. Plus, I tend to think the best about people, even those who act like assholes and jerks. I make excuses for them in my mind, and try to block their influence and in doing that, I allow myself to be blindsided. They win influence, I don't. It is the story of losers everywhere, I suppose, that the victor's side of the story is the one recorded in the books. C'est la vie.

So in my quest of self improvement, I've decided to try to lose some weight and become more fit. This process began two and a half years ago when I stopped smoking after 27 years. I gained 30 pounds from that, and I lost that over the following 18 months, but now I am back on my pre-quitting plateau. I vowed to lose 50 pounds in 2010, and I have lost about 10 pounds with half the year gone. My BMI is close to 27, in the overweight range, but luckily under the obese marker. I just pulled out the Wii and weighed to make sure. I just weighed 199.5 pounds with a BMI of 27.8, up from last month by three pounds. That is where feeding your failure leads! Wii Fit states that my ideal weight should be about 157 pounds, which is where I would be if I lost the 50 pounds I intended with my New Year's Resolution. I have 43 pounds to lose in 6 months, 7 pounds a month, 1.75 pounds a week. That should be a safe loss rate and something I should be able to manage with diet and exercise. I've already given up soft drinks this year, and I am working on swapping out saturated fats for unsaturated fats. I don't believe in 'going on a diet', but I do want to make lifestyle changes. I've used a couple of calculators and figured that my Basal Metabolic Rate is about 2200 calories a day. I haven't been counting calories as to what I am consuming, but I will keep a journal for a week or so just to get an idea. If I can keep my intake between 2200 and 2500 calories, I should be able to exercise and burn off at least 1000 calories a day. One mountain bike ride around the 7 mile 'block' burns just over 700 calories and takes about 45 minutes, so I think with some stretching and a few additional minutes, I should be able to hit that 1000 burned goal. In addition, it is summer, and that means gardening-more calories burned. In a few weeks, I'll need to start splitting wood for the winter-more calories gone. So doing the math, If I consume 2500 calories and burn 1000 from exercise and 1000 from seasonal work, then my net caloric intake is 500, which is 1700 less than my BMR. If I ride my bike or exercise 5 times a week and spend 3 hours a day working, that is 8500 calories a week, equaling about 2.5 pounds a week. Of course, that will be the short term weekly goal that I strive for, not a given.

I want to pass along a few websites that I have found refreshingly useful.

http://www.everydayhealth.com/

From this link you can sign up for daily newsletters concerning topics that interest you. I've been receiving the Diet and Nutrition newsletter and it has a lot of informative articles (like choosing cooking oils) as well as a lot of simple, everyday recipes.

http://nutritiondata.self.com/

Nutrition data is just that, but I like this site because it gives you enough information to make balanced choices about food. They feature an Inflammation Factor chart which is helpful if you suffer from allergies or auto-immune disease. Also, there is a glycemic load chart for those who deal with blood sugar issues like diabetes. If you have a few minutes to check this site out, it will be well worth your time.

Going Green

My employer, a few months before I was hired, quietly initiated an voluntary environmental management system known as ISO 14001. This past Tuesday, after a week long audit, we have been recommended to be certified as ISO 14001. That is usually just a small formality-for the most part, we can say that we are ISO 14001 certified, or at least, we soon will be, but for the purposes of this blog, I will assume we already are.

We are now the only commercial flooring adhesive manufacturer in the US to be ISO certified. This is HUGE, and I am proud to say that I intend to play a more important role in this program in the future as anyone who knows me knows how much I care about the Earth, the interconnected nature of living things-Gaia, and environmental issues in general. Our environmental policy is straight in line with my personal belief set and green goals-conserving energy, reducing my footprint, becoming self sufficient and striving to live in harmony with nature. I also hope to become more active in the GreenBuilding community in the coming years.

http://www.usgbc.org/
http://www.usgbc.org/DisplayPage.aspx?CMSPageID=222

My dream home is a passive solar earth sheltered home in the back pasture at the ridge line. Green Building, rather, sustainable building, is not new to me. It is a rare find to work in a place where your personal ethics and environmental concerns are shared by upper management. One day soon, our company will be building a new lab and office. I saw the architect's plans and WOW, would you believe that the building will be a LEED certified passive solar building with louvers to control the light and other energy saving features?!? How cool is that?

For those who aren't familiar with ISO 14001, you can learn more from the links below, and hopefully, for the sake of our planet, you can convince your employer and/or your community to follow suit. It can make a real difference, both for your organization, and for the Earth.

http://www.iso.org/iso/management_standards.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_14000

To quote Wiki, "The aim of the standard is to reduce the environmental footprint of a business and to decrease the pollution and waste a business produces."

And this could only be the beginning. We, as a business, could go even further, making even more voluntary changes that would benefit the company's bottom line and the environment. In fact, one such program that we could probably benefit from is called Six Sigma. Motorola invented this strategy for consistent business improvement back in the 1980's, and since then, other large, successful companies like GE and Honeywell have developed Six Sigma programs. It is really all about statistics-(I really, really wish I had taken more statistical studies in college). The Greek letter sigma, "σ" or "Σ", is equivalent to our "s" or "S". Sigma is the mathematical sign for standard deviations and there is a mathematical model that states that if there are six standard deviations between the process mean(the average in a data set) and the nearest specification limit, practically no items will fail to meet specifications. It is a process, and if your business operates within the process, then you will make less errors, 3.4 errors per one million opportunities, to be exact. In other words, if you put a system like this in place, and you make a million products a year, you can expect less than 4 product issues as a result of production or business error per million units. It is actually pretty interesting how far math can take you these days. Who knew that statistics would ever be so important in something other than baseball? ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma
http://www.ge.com/en/company/companyinfo/quality/whatis.htm

It is an insane world. I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but it sure is nice to work for a company that morally and ethically tries to do what is right. They get it. In a world where no one can agree on the cause of global warming, whether or not it exists, and what should be done about it, if anything, I have found an oasis of green common sense in my workplace. It is refreshing. I only wish I hadn't wandered around in the desert for so long.

Ch..Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes

I survived my first week back in the workforce after a year of being at home. I did not have any real problem getting up for work(I know that surprises some of you!), but I am definitely feeling the job in my feet. I don't yet have a desk and have been mostly standing all week long. My computer came in Friday(it is a nice looking Dell), but without a desk or workspace, obviously I can't use it. I thought my foot was 100% healed after the surgery, but I have discovered otherwise. There wasn't too much walking to the job, and certainly no exertion, just standing.

The best part of the 'new job experience' is the people. My co-workers all seem competent and seem to have a good work ethic. I've seen no slackers, no idiots. That's a good thing as I can't stand to be the only one working while everyone else surfs the internet or plays games on their phone or makes personal phone calls, etc. That kind of stuff drives me crazy. It is a good group of folks to work with, and I think that can make or break any job. Even if you love your job, if you can't stand the ones you work with, you can be miserable.

This past week, I've been 'training' with the QC guy. Instead of filling a position, I'll be carving out a niche for myself in the lab. I'll start with taking over some of the more mundane tasks, clerical minutia, that are weighing down the other chemists-things like recording spec data and filing certificates, MSDS sheets, etc. I'll fill in for the QC guy and probably perform some testing for the R&D guys. I'll probably do more bench work as I gain more experience, but for now, I'm
just learning the products and their applications and specs. There are probably 65 or 70 formulas or more, many sold under more than one label, so it can be confusing. In addition, I'm not familiar with many of the raw materials, so there is a LOT to learn before I start mixing anything! I'm still not sure whether or not I will be working more in QC or in R&D, but there is always the possibility of doing both. The company is growing and I'll have options. It is SO much better than the last place I worked. They are like night and day.

On the homefront, I did not make it into the garden at all this past week, so this morning I had lots of beans and okra to pick and process. I got almost two gallons of beans, which isn't bad considering the fact that it is October. I made some fresh guacamole with the few tomatoes I picked, and sliced and froze the okra for frying later. I did take about 20 of the smallest pods and tossed them into a pickle jar. I had a hankering for pickled okra, but since the fridge is already full, I did not want to open a new jar. I had a jar of pickles that only had a few pickles in the brine, so I tossed the okra, some cayenne peppers and some garlic into the jar, shook it, and tomorrow I'll start snacking on the okra. In three weeks, I go back to get my cholesterol checked, and okra is a wonder food for lowering cholesterol. I'll eat a lot of it in the coming weeks. Tomorrow, I'll can a small jar of Anaheims and Poblanos for use in burritos or beans, and I have a 9 cubic foot wheelbarrow full of peanut vines to process. I'll remove the peanuts from the vine, brush off the dirt, and allow them to dry a few more days in the house. They have been in the wheelbarrow on the porch, which isn't ideal for drying and curing, but with the rain last week, it was the best I could do. I did not want to lose my peanut crop to mice, rats, or squirrels.

Skyguy spent the day bleaching and pressure washing the deck and the front of the house. He'll probably spend the better part of tomorrow finishing the job. We were going to try to wait until Spring to replace the kitchen window, but I'm afraid it won't last through the winter and I really think we need to replace it now. I think we can get energy credits if we do it before November, too. First is the pressure washing, then the window replacement, then the house gets a new paint job. Next weekend we have a 5 year NWGAA anniversary event here at the farm, and I really did not want our guests to wonder if the algea would attack them while they ate. The house and deck face north, and with all the rain this year, everything is green and slimy. The deck was a safety hazard.

Thursday, Skyguy and I celebrated (and I use that term loosely) 25 years of marriage. We had plans to eat out, but that night we were both tired and decided to just go home and have a normal evening. After all, it was 'Survivor' night, and we had to watch evil Russell scheme and plot his way to through the game. We decided that we would celebrate on Friday and would rent our 'Jacuzzi room' at the Hampton Inn. We started doing that years ago when we did not have TV and had limited water supply. It was nice to take a hot shower of unlimited length, enjoy heat without loading a log into the stove, lounge around in the Jacuzzi, and watch TV, hopefully some boxing or ultimate fighting or maybe a Formula One race. We would try to do that once a year, at least, just to relax and enjoy things that most folks take for granted. Even though we now have satellite TV and a new well so we don't run out of water, we still like to go to "our room"at the Hampton. So on Friday after work, we grabbed dinner at Ruby Tuesday's and went to the hotel to check in. As it turns out, 'our' room is no longer there. Apparently the hotel removed the jacuzzi due to a leak, and now the only room with a jacuzzi is actually a room where the whirlpool is in the bathroom and you can't watch television from the bathroom. It was disappointing, the end of a tradition, but we rightly decided not to waste money on that anymore, so we stopped by Home Depot and drove home where we were greeted by a couple of very happy dogs. I spent a few hours last night looking for another 'Jacuzzi room', and I did find a hotel in Dalton, but I just don't know. It is so tempting to just take the credit card and just buy a damned hot tub for the deck. With that, I never need to leave home. I have dreamed about that for close to twenty years now.

Late Summer Garden Report

I'm still pulling in 5-10 pounds of tomatoes every other day, but blight or magnesium deficiency is taking a toll here. The tomatoes probably have a few more weeks of life. I've got enough tomatoes, juice, and sauce canned, but I think I still need more pizza sauce. I'm thinking of perhaps trying to make some soup as well.

I'm still picking about 2 quarts of green beans a day, freezing most of it now. The Kentucky Wonder pole beans and the Blue Lake bush beans are going crazy, and I expect to still be in beans a month from now. The red field peas that I planted turned out to be half runner types, and the 10x10 area is now about 20x20 and the runners are taking over like kudzu. They've covered my bush cherries, and are threatening the pole beans. I've picked dry pods as I see them, but 98% of the crop is still on the vine. Interestingly, at least to me, the peas look more like what I would call white acre peas than the red field peas I planted. They are small and white. Odd thing.

Round one of sweetcorn was a disaster, so we replanted a short season sweetcorn in mid-summer. We are about a week from eating corn again, but I don't want to count my ears before they are picked. On this farm, anything can happen to corn, and usually does. The Bloody Butcher corn lodged from a downburst in a thunderstorm, but much of it is still alive, even if it is laying over. I decided to leave it alone as when I tried to stand the stalks upright, they broke. I have no clue as to how this will affect pollination. It was planted June 12, so it has a few more weeks as well. My goal for the BB is to get a few ears for seed, one or two ears to roast, and enough to grind for 1 cup of corn meal. It seems like a lot to ask out of what I have in the garden. Can anyone tell me how much corn-how many ears or pounds, does it take to make a cup of corn meal?

I'm nursing along a watermelon(GA Rattlesnake), but it just isn't growing the way I'd like. It is more round than oblong. Another odd thing. I've got squash everywhere, quite a few butternuts still out there(I already harvested 30# or so) as well as acorn squashes. The squash vines are growing on the deer netting, and it looks funny to see acorn squash hanging 8 feet in the air. A few of the hanging squashes have holes bored into them, as if some kind of wasp or squash borer drilled hole in the fruit. I took a few pictures for the blog. The summer squashes are done and gone. Peppers are still producing, and I've canned or dried as much as possible: Anaheims, serranos, banana peppers, poblano(ancho), etc. I've also made homemade salsa, of course. The okra is just starting to really come in strong. I've pickled a few jars of it, and will pickle more. I have taken a liking to pickled okra. Yum! I have sweet potato vines everywhere and expect to get 30-50 pounds of sweet potatoes next month. I never did harvest my Yukon Golds, but yesterday I went out with that intention and found a bunch of new potatoes, beautiful little yellow golf ball sized things. I decided to leave them as seed.

I had to reorganize the shelves and such to make room for everything I've canned so far. I made grape jelly and elderberry jam, elderberry elixir, horehound cough syrup, blackberry jam, fig preserves, and blueberry jam. We harvested over 50 pounds of apples a bit early to keep the deer from getting them, and I've made applesauce and apple chips. I have discovered that if you dehydrate the peelings and mix them with blackberry leaves, blueberry leaves and dried huckleberries and blueberries, it makes a great tea, so I have made a few jars of that to give as gifts. I froze about 5 gallons of blueberries, and gave that many away. We did not have any peaches, pears, cherries, or plums this year, but I still have peaches in the freezer from last year, which was a banner year.

I've planted lettuce for the Fall, but a rabbit mowed it down in one day, so I will have to replant. All the neighbors have noted that the rabbit population is exploding, so it makes me wonder if folks have killed too many snakes or too many coyotes. I have no idea of how a rabbit got inside my garden fence unless the gate was left open just long enough for him to get in, eat my lettuce and my only honeydew melon, and get out. I've also got a few broccoli plants in the ground, some Osaka Purple mustard, several brussel sprouts in the ground, a small patch of kale(I've never tried it so this is a grand experiment in taste) a couple of 15 ft rows of collards, a few cabbage plants, a 32 ft row of intensively planted snowpeas and English peas(both sides of the panel are planted, 16 ft of English peas and 16 ft of snow peas. I have both turnips and turnip greens, and have yet to plant spinach. I also need to decide where I will plant my garlic next year. I need to get busy with all that. I have also replanted carrots, radishes, and beets in my carrot bed. The carrots I planted in the ground did not germinate, but the board trick worked well in the raised bed and the carrot greens are about 5 inches tall.

The herb garden has been very productive this year, too. I've made several batches of pesto and froze that, too. I've harvested enough kitchen herbs like thyme and oregano to fill several quart jars, and I still have herbs drying in the kitchen. You might be a redneck if you hang your herbs to dry on your antler chandelier in the kitchen. :) Of course, I also use window screens and my truck as a drying oven, as well as two dehydrators, which are running right now(more apple chips today, onions tomorrow) Seriously, I've harvested and dried oregano, marjoram, thyme, sage, tarragon, savory, fennel, dill, lemon balm, chocolate mint, peppermint, 3 kinds of basil, nasturtiums, chives, violets, dandelion flowers, passionflowers, and horehound. I dried all but maybe 15 bulbs of garlic, of which I'm using fresh in canning and cooking. The echinacea did well, so I will be able to harvest that in a few years, too. This year, I planted beans in the herb bed to fill the gaps. Next year, we've decided that the herb bed will support chili peppers quite nicely.

The big plan for this Fall is to plant and grow more asparagus. We have decided to plant a 3x50 ft wide row of asparagus crowns as the little patch I have is 10 years old and just isn't enough now that Skyguy has decided he likes asparagus, too. If will take a lot of ground prep and double digging, as well as mulch to make this happen. Earlier this year, I planted a 8x15 area with Jerusalem artichokes-a gift from Rob(thanks again!)-and they are 9 feet tall and beautiful right now. The blooms are awesome. I'm not sure what the protocol is on digging the chokes, but I figure I will give them a few years, like I would asparagus, before I try to dig anything. I'm super psyched about that.

This year's garden has been the largest garden I've ever planted. I've tried to keep something going all the time. I will continue to do that, but I'm afraid that this might be my last big garden for a while. There is no way that I could have this size garden working full time. It saddens me. It is like giving up a part of myself. I guess I've been spoiled after a year at home. We all have to sacrifice I suppose. This is probably my last extensive garden update before I start working full time. :(

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Back to Work I Go

It is a done deal. I start back to work on October 1st at XL Brands as their 'Lab Coordinator'. XL makes carpet and flooring adhesives and installation systems. The people seem to be very nice, and it looks to be a well run operation. The lab is much nicer and cleaner than the last place I worked. My working hours are normal daytime working hours with no shift work and no weekends. The company is quite a ways from my house, almost 45 minutes away on the south side of Dalton, but I'm hoping that Skyguy and I can carpool some to take the edge off the gasoline bill. I don't trust gasoline prices to stay low.

XL Brands is a division of Textile Rubber and Chemical Corporation, a global chemical and manufacturing company that is headquartered right up the road in Dalton. The following quote comes from their website: "XL Brands leads the industry with environmentally-safe flooring installation products. We have introduced industry first products that are SCS Certified, (Scientific Certification Systems), and contain PCC, (Post Consumer Content). XL Brands adhesives also care the CRI Green Label Plus seal for indoor air quality." It is so rare to find an adhesives company that is environmentally conscious. That's important to me.

I feel very fortunate and honored. There are so many people out there who are pounding the pavement looking for a good job. I was not looking, and had given up on working again. It is a crazy world and I definitely feel guilty because I know so many people are desperately looking for work. While I had first interviewed with this company over a year ago, nothing became of that and I had written it off as a lost opportunity. Then in July, out of the blue, they called, and I went in for another interview. There have been a couple of other meetings over the last month or so, culminating in yesterday's job offer. I have yet to fill out a job application. It is odd how life can twist and turn. You just never know what might be around the corner.

This will allow us to hopefully pay off debt and complete some projects that have been sitting on the back burner. We will be able to regrade the driveway and fix the ruts; we will be able to replace the bay window in the kitchen before it falls out; we will be able to add insulation to the attic. If President Obama goes through with his Dollars for Dishwashers plan, or whatever he ends up calling it, we might actually be able to afford a new refrigerator this year! Woot! Mostly though , having an additional income takes stress off Skyguy as he changes careers. Money makes him happy. I'm generally not materialistic at all, but I have wanted a jacuzzi for the last 20 years, and I might finally get one. I think I deserve it.