das loft

Argh.. gotta love that sunstroke. I thought I could stand a few hours on the white tarp shoveling dusty grain under the hot sun without a hat yesterday like everybody else. But it seems my body is used to more sheltered conditions these days. How I wish I didn't have to be working inside on a komputortron all day. I'm still recovering today.

Last weekend was great, though. Friday evening I helped the crew bunch carrots, while Rocio prepared us authentic Mexican margaritas. She and Heather, both volunteers, left us Saturday morning. Heather is heading for an ecovillage in Missouri, apparently related to Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. She plans to stay there for a couple months. It sounds really exciting.

Saturday, I spent the morning helping everyone harvest spinach, carrots, cukes and zukes. Everdale's carrots are wonderful! Very sweet and crisp. Plus they're really easy and fun to harvest. Then Chris, a new friend of mine from Burlington, came for a visit. We spent the afternoon touring the nature trail and my campsite and then running for shelter from the rain.

And then Moonmama took off Saturday afternoon for uni for a while... Moonmama! Get back here now. Have you ever thought of dropping out? Heheh... (just kidding)

Saturday evening Andy and I began puzzle #2, The Queen of Hearts. It's a symmetrical jigsaw puzzle, donated to us by a big puzzler who lives around here. Diabolical, no? We then watched Open Water with Jeff and Tarrah in her comfy trailer. I wouldn't recommend the film.

The next day was puzzle and grain day. It all started early in the morning when Andy made three loaves of banana bread and a dozen or so banana muffins. We worked for hours at a time putting together puzzle #2, taking breaks with Jeff every so often to rake the grain so it would dry out more quickly. And then we finished puzzle #2 yesterday morning.

Yesterday evening was breadfest. Two bakers, one of them clearly quite high, made quite a few loaves of bread, while Andy and I got started on puzzle #3. But by then the sunstroke from the afternoon was starting to take its toll on me, so I ended up just going to bed.

Last night wasn't the most comfortable experience, mostly due to the sunstroke, but also due to the mysterious field revelers who burst out in laughs and birdcalls every few minutes or so until at least 2am. I thought it was some of the interns at first, but apparently not, because I was the only person who heard them. Very mysterious... I can only conclude that they must have been the seldom-mentioned faeries of Everdale.

In other news, I highly recommend at least a brief visit to Evan's fabulous new website, AmazingChallengers.com. Way to go, previously website-design-incapable Evanston!

[ 4 comments ]

Argh. :) I had to come to Toronto today to help George Brown resolve their last remaining issues with the locker program. Jeff kindly drove me to Georgetown in the morning, and I took the train from there. He'll kindly pick me up from Georgetown this evening.

I find it funny how much people working in offices goof off instead of work. They goof off discreetly. They quietly read the news, send personal e-mails, or check the weather every hour or so - all the while pretending to be doing "office work". I knew that I did this all the time when I worked in an office. In fact, I was pretty bad during most of my co-op work terms, sometimes spending all day writing code for my own personal projects, or editing that film, Walk Away: The Story of Jac.

But I didn't have to be very loyal to my employers since I was only working there for four months, and I was only doing it so I could get some money, spruce up my resume, and get out of university. Right now I'm thinking about how much I'd love for oil shortages to destroy the infrastructure of Toronto and see huge cutbacks in the IT department of George Brown as a result. (They're not the most fun people to work with, I have to say.) I'd be laughing all the way to the farm. Wow, look how evil and self-righteous I am today.

Farming rules. Jeff has instilled this in me now.

[ 5 comments ]

Ooooh... stormy day! I had to come inside in the middle of the night for fear of getting hit by lightning. My tent is perched at the top of a hill underneath a tree - not exactly the safest place to be during a thunderstorm. Soon after I got settled on the couch in the Round Room I was joined by Heather, another camper, and then by Mika, a Japanese volunteer, who said it was raining inside her tent.

Ah, the coziness! I'm warm, in the office trailer, beside Carolyn on my wireless laptop. I couldn't stand the flies inside, so I tried sitting at a picnic table underneath an umbrella, but then the lightning started. So I have to resort to the little office. At least I feel well protected here. Some of the interns are bunching carrots in the harvest house. Rosio set us up with hot chocolate in advance, so I think we're all happy.

Aimee Mann is playing from the harvest house.

[ 3 comments ]

It's finally the next day after my 35-hour day. I was up from 9am on Sunday until about 8pm yesterday, working on George Brown stuff. But I got done everything that I had to get done - I met the deadlines for the CD-ROM and the locker stuff. It wasn't hell or anything. Just being able to do that work here at Everdale made it a lot less stressful. This place can be just like an organic restaurant with super-friendly service, if you need it.

Red Skies was a blast last weekend. It's too bad none of my friends I invited could make it out. There was lots of organic food, drinking, dancing, and pretty amazing performers. Nathan and Tarrah performed their violin-accordian gypsy pieces, and Jon, Alex, and Andy performed some last-minute Snoop Dogg on the sax, bass, and drums, respectively. I didn't get drunk.

A German girl with a really nice accent is spending some time here volunteering. She came from Plan B farm, another organic farm in the region. I think it's similar to Everdale in spirit (though she claims it's quite different). There's also a Mexican girl who'll be volunteering here for a couple more weeks. Jon (not our beloved Jonny, a different Jon) is still here volunteering since I was last here, but he's leaving Tuesday. He's going to be missed.

[ 3 comments ]

[ no comments ]

"U.S. gasoline demand has been running at a robust 1.4 percent higher than a year ago over the past four weeks, despite record high retail prices at the pumps -- a sign the economy is holding up against soaring energy costs."

I prefer this wording, though:

"U.S. gasoline demand has been running at a robust 1.4 percent higher than a year ago over the past four weeks, despite record high retail prices at the pumps -- a sign the world is still completely oblivious to peak oil."

Wouldn't it be nice if you saw that in the mainstream press? Alas...

[ 2 comments ]

I sometimes wonder how many of us will eventually "get it" about peak oil. It's so easy to explain oil price spikes by other reasons. For instance, on the cover of the Globe today, under the section "5 reasons it's happening" about the high prices, the closest they come to the topic of peak oil is their last one, and still far from the point: "OPEC's 10 members are pumping oil near their limit to curb prices, which have gained by half since the beginning of the year."

Maybe we'll just never see it mentioned in a big way in the mainstream media... or maybe I'm just too impatient. That's probably it.

Mmmmm. Another beautiful morning, and smog is in the air.

[ 2 comments ]

Alas.. busy with another George Brown project, while the other one is still keeping me very busy. I'm having to use Flash for this current project, a CD-ROM for new 2005 students. Boy, is our schedule ever off for this. It's due on Wednesday, and I only seriously got started yesterday. It's not really my fault; the graphic designer I'm working with didn't have anything ready for me until this morning. It's pretty insane.

And how grateful I am to be using Macromedia Flash once again! What a pristine program. It seems to crash simply as a result of its overcomplexity. It seems as if it was built piece by piece, feature hacked onto feature, each time getting more and more needlessly fragmented and complicated, like some pseudoscientific nightmare. No wonder it's so easy for a user to confuse the poor program until it crashes. You know, I'm sure the authors did huge amounts of QA for the product, but there's just no way they could find every bug in this dish of spaghetti the way it's so sloppishly designed. They really should start it again from scratch someday. Or someone should. I think it could be a beautiful thing if done right.

[ no comments ]

Some of these comics, as stupid as they are, are actually kind of funny...

[ 2 comments ]

Here is an encouraging article on peak oil, for a change. It draws parallels between PO and Y2K. Very nicely written, I thought.

Read some of the comments below the article too.

[ no comments ]