Transportation plan

As a student, I’ve been fortunate to have a bus pass included in my tuition for $50 a semester.  It’s been handy, to say the least, and I feel like I’ve made very good use of it.  In fact, I suspect that the bus pass is a significant reason of why it’s been possible for me to be car-free for as long as I have.

Sadly, at the end of April I will no longer have a bus pass.  While I could buy one, it would cost far more than it’s probably worth.  I don’t think that my budget will stretch that far, especially that I’ll now also be paying more for my non-student extended health plan.  Honestly, though, I don’t know that a full bus pass would be worth it anyway, given the amount that I actually use the bus.

While I’ve considered bus tickets, I find myself a bit hesitant for two reasons.  First, I’m trying to keep the budget tight.  While a few bus trips a week probably won’t break the bank, $3 per trip can add up over time, and I’d really like to keep the transportation spending as minimal as possible.  Second, I keep talking about getting in better shape an better health.  While I can do this when I get home from work, it makes more sense to me to incorporate it into my day for activities that are already necessary.

And so, as I’m apt to do, I hatched a plan.  The plan (such as it is) is focused largely on walking and biking.  As soon as the weather’s nice enough here (ie: manageable levels of snow and preferably no ice), I’m going to start walking and biking to campus and other places I’m likely to go.  Heck, I’ve already started doing this on nice days.  In truly terrible weather I’ll likely take the bus, but the rest of the time I plan to suit up and people-power myself to campus.  Heck, I even have an underused bike trailer for farmer’s market shopping trips.

This might take a bit more planning as I lead up to the age of no bus pass.  True, I have a bike, and shoes, and various other necessary bits and pieces.  And I could be wrong, but I still feel like there’s a difference between going for a walk or a ride where I get to come home afterwards and do my thing, and one where I wind up teaching or in meetings.  I’ll need extra time to get to campus, and probably extra clothing for when I get there.  I’m going to need to be properly dressed, which should be mostly manageable from my current wardrobe, although I’ve found myself considering the addition of one or two pieces of more waterproof outerwear.

As with so many other things, it will be an interesting challenge.  I think it will be good for the budget.  I think it will be good for my health, and I’m hoping it will help me get rid of this lingering 10 or 15 pounds that I seem to have acquired in the last year of dissertation work, especially after I was told that I had to stop running until we figured out what’s wrong with my hip (for the record, we still haven’t figured out what’s wrong with my hip).

But overall, I also think it could be good for my well being.  In the times that I’ve walked home for campus recently, I’ve gotten some exercise and fresh air, but also some good downtime to think, relax, and unwind.  With any luck, building this into my routine more regularly will help to increase these benefits even further.  Goodness knows, I can use all the help I can get sometimes, and there’s something infinitely satisfying and reassuring about taking a bit of time to regularly maintain that connection with nature and community through moving a bit more slowly and a bit more intentionally through the world.

Roots and leftovers

Before heading home for Christmas, I’ve been trying to use up those things that need to be used up in the back of the fridge and lurking in corners.  Given that much of what I have left is local root vegetables that have been hanging around for awhile, I decided to make a simple root veggie soup for lunch today with primarily local ingredients for the Dark days challenge.  It was also a really simply, really easy meal to make in the middle of a long day of editing, and provided a really comforting lunch when all was said and done.

This soup is basically root veggies with some onion, celery, corn, and tomato sauce.  The carrots, parsnips, potatoes, sweet potatoes, celery, and onions are all local, as is the salt.  The corn is not, and that I have no excuse for, other than I didn’t get around to freezing corn this summer and this frozen stuff was lurking at the back of the freezer.  The tomato is actually leftover canned sauce from last night’s dinner.  I have frozen local tomatoes that I could have used, but it seemed like a better idea to not waste the remaining few tablespoons of last night’s leftovers and use the tomatoes later on.

It was delicious, if I do say so myself.  There’s something about root vegetables in the winter, and a few combined in one dish create a remarkably complex taste in what’s really a very simple dish.

Even better, I’m sure the leftovers will be even tastier tomorrow.

Practical, not pretty

I’ve always liked pretty.  Not flowers and lace and frills, so much (really not my thing), but I’ve always liked for things to look at least somewhat nice.

It turns out that with all of this storing, food experimentation, and preservation – and the fermenting especially – a lot of the pretty’s gone straight out the window in favour of the practical.  Now, when I walk into my kitchen I see a big jar of good-looking pickles topped off with an old ziplock tortilla bag.  Next to it is an old pyrex bowl with sauerkraut topped off with a mismatched plate on which is sitting a crock with “utensils” written on it in Danish that is in turn topped off with an old yogurt lid cut to size and a mason jar filled with water.  Prior to today it was filled with another old bag filled with beach glass that I’ve had for years.  It is, in no uncertain terms, not the prettiest thing I have going on around here.

I can’t say that the pile of dirty gardening shoes and rainboots by the front door is anything to write home about either.  Or the jars of ginger beer and sourdough starter, especially when they’ve been sitting for a few days.  Or the toppling pile of wool blankets, the box of mending and fabric scraps, the laundry hanging to dry wherever there happens to be room, and the bags of rice and beans stacked up in the kitchen.

Rather than spending money, I’ve been using what I have.  This is a good thing, of course.  The bank account is happier and I’m using things that otherwise would have been garbage or recycling.  In the last month I’ve reused bags, ice cream lids, soda bottles, and mason jars in ways that I never would have expected even a few months ago.  I take real pride in this.  It gives me pleasure to make do with what I already have, or to only need to pick up a small used thing here or there that I need, even if the results aren’t exactly pretty.

There’s something to be said for pretty, I think, or at least for things that are aesthetically pleasing.  I love to decorate, and to rearrange the apartment.  I keep things around that I think are beautiful – art on the walls, lovely blankets, nice dishes.  There are some places where I’ve let this ideal slip in the last year or so, though, and where practicality and frugality are simply winning out even when they’re not the loveliest of options.  I’m realizing more and more that my apartment is a place to live, not a showcase.  I’m more concerned now with how it functions and what it lets me do than how it looks.

Sometimes, in my idealized and romaticised world, I imagine having the perfect, well-made, very beautiful tool for every task (and a lovely, well-kept house to keep them in).  Maybe one day, when I know that they will definitely get used well and when I have room for them, I’ll buy some proper crocks for fermenting and arrange them on a wooden bench, stand up a well-built drying rack in the corner, and get some nicer jars for starting food in. Then again, maybe I won’t.  There’s value and even some pride in being practical, and in making do.  I’ll certainly consider getting things that I need, but often it turns out that the things that I need are right here, it’s just a matter of looking for them.

Waste not, want not

I will admit that I have a habit of buying food, getting busy, and then eating a week’s worth of easy meals only to wind up with a fridge full of food that, while it hasn’t gone off, is definitely past its prime.  Since I hate waste, and food waste especially, I’ve been trying to amend my ways both by planning better, and by finding ways to use things that aren’t quite as good as they could be.

Yesterday, I drained the water out of a few tomatoes that didn’t look like they’d last much longer and boiled them down into sauce along with a few that I’d frozen through the year.  The sauce will be used on homemade pasta tomorrow.  The bits that I cut off were taken out to the worms (which, happily, seem to be reproducing out there).  The tomato juice was used in today’s lunch of mushroom miso soup.

I also took the ginger beer starter that I made a week ago, bottled it with water and sugar, and let it sit to ferment for a few more days.  The starter will be reused in the next batch that I make.  When I had leftover tea from the afternoon I put it in a bottle in the fridge to drink with some honey today, and added the loose leaf remainders to the worm bin.

Tonight, I used the remainder of the rhubarb to make some rhubarb syrup for drinks.  The remainder of the stewed rhubard is in the fridge, ready to go on tomorrow’s steel cut oat breakfast.  While that cooked I also took some stale bread that I’d dried and ran it through the blender in order to make breadcrumbs, which is my standard treatment for stale bread.  And them, when I found the forgotten and now rather wilted broccoli in the fridge, I tossed it in a pot with some seasoning and a few potatoes to make a thick soup for lunch tomorrow.

None of these tasks is earth shattering by any stretch.  They’re ordinary acts.  None really took that long.  Ideally some of them wouldn’t be necessary because I’d plan better and get to the tomatoes before they got soft, or eat the bread before it went stale.  That said, I’m pleased with my gradually improving ability to see these things which aren’t always at their prime or that need to be used up quickly and finding uses for them.  Like I said, one of the things I hate most is food waste, so anything I can do to make less waste and eat a bit more of the food we come home with is a good thing in my books.

Leftovers rule

Well, leftovers can rule (day-old lasagna and pizza are personal favourites), but this is really about my new rule about leftovers, which I guess gives this post a bit of an almost-double meaning.

One area of waste around here tends to be leftovers.  They get put in the fridge – or, worse yet, not put in the fridge, because sometimes I get more lazy than I would really rather admit to – and then forgotten about until they’re not exactly edible anymore.  The tends to make for food waste, which I hate (really, I hate waste in general, but wasted food really gets me going).

The problem was compounded by our eating habits.  There were usually only enough leftovers for one small meal, which meant that they weren’t good for dinner the next day and certainly wouldn’t feed two people.  Because of the foods we tend to eat at dinner (very mixed-together one-pot creations), they also didn’t mix all that well with other foods, so just tossing them into something like a casserole wouldn’t work very well.  We’d never really plan for leftovers either, so there was never anything that specific to do with them.  And so the leftovers just kept not getting eating and we wasted food and money as a result.

The answer was surprisingly simple (simple enough that I feel kind of dumb even writing this).  I made myself a rule: if there were leftovers, I had to eat them for lunch the next day.  My lunch preferences tend to be sandwiches or wraps, and at lunch I frequently have cravings for particular foods or flavours – usually spicy.  I’d eat what I wanted rather than what was available and needing to be eaten.  Now, no matter what my preferences or cravings, if there is leftover food from the day before, that is what my lunch will be.

Writing this out, it kind of sounds like a bit of a hardship, or a draconian rule in which the leftovers must be eaten even if they’re not tasty or even exactly what I want on a given day.  That’s hardly the case, though.  Dinner is always something that I like, and the leftovers are always good and worth eating and usually something that I’m in the mood for.  More than anything, we just tend to forget that they’re there, or we don’t have anything to do with them.  And so, when there are leftovers, now they get eaten.

It turns out that this was surprisingly easy to adjust to.  It also means that I no longer have to make decisions around lunch, or spend much time preparing it – what’s there is what I eat, plain and simple.  If the leftovers are small, I have those and then have some extra veggies, some soup, or maybe a sandwich to round things out.  We now have less waste, and we buy a bit less food every week at the grocery store.  Seems simple, but it works surprisingly well.

Now, I’m considering a similar rule for food that looks like it’s on its way out for dinners.  If it looks like it won’t survive the next two days, it gets eaten that night.  I think it’s a good challenge, although I might have some creative meals in my future.

Open

(This post is one that was originally written for and posted on my old blog.  As May starts, I think it’s a good reminder to myself to be keep these things in mind, though, so here it is again.)

With the state of the world, and I suppose also the state of my life (really, really not so very bad, but next year’s work situation shook me a bit, and still has me somewhat anxious), I’m feeling a little like shrinking away.  It’s not a great feeling, probably because it’s a survival mechanism, and I’d like to get away from the shrinky feeling now and out into the world again.

But, sometimes if you’re not open, I think life can pry you open.  I’m not so sure I’m up for prying right now, though, I think that giving in and opening up, rather than trying to get smaller and and further away and more closed off is the more productive way to go (and quite possible the most interesting and useful as well.  So instead of shrinking, I’m trying to be open.  It’s not always easy – sometimes it’s downright hard – but I think it will be worthwhile in the end, especially after this odd initial feeling passes on through.

Open means a few different things here, some of which are easier than others.

It means…

Open to opportunities other than those that I initially expected – smaller contracts, other cities, new countries.

Open to new ways of living – more frugality, less consumption.

Open to challenges – finding the best ways to manage in somewhat uncertain times.

Open to gratitude – looking for the positives anywhere I should as well as anywhere I can.

Open to being open – I’m rather fond of control, and being open can be…well, a bit of a stretch.

No telling what will happen, I suppose, but I’m looking forward to trying this openness out a bit more and seeing where I wind up in the end and what happens when I work on being a bit more open to where I am now.  After all, if not now, then when, and if not here, then where?