The Art of Zen Living

Go to a farmer’s market.

Check Local Harvest or the Eat Well Guide. Another resource that is still under construction (but has a bunch of interesting information) is Food Routes.org.

Buy “low milage” food.

Start small if you need to, and select foods that are from closer to you if you aren’t quite ready to eat local. Every mile food has to travel means more air pollution, water pollution and higher prices for fossil fuels. Agriculture and food distribution accounts for over one fifth of our consumption of fossil fuels. Your food may seem cheap, but don’t forget you’re also paying for it at the pump!

Not sure where someplace is? Check Google Maps.  Make a game of it with the kids and turn shopping into a fun educational experience!

More tips and tricks inside!

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Wednesday, I went to a class on worm composting at the Eco-living Center, at Rutenburg park.  It turned out to be a lot of fun, and on top of that I learned how to build a bin for worm composting.  I’ll tell you a bit about what happened, and then share with you what I learned about making a worm bin, and some of the benefits of Worm Composting.

Worms eat plant based organic waste, and excrete highly concentrated plant food.  Organic waste includes food scraps, leaves, newspaper, junk mail, sawdust, cardboard, seaweed - if it was a plant but now it’s garbage, the worms will eat it.  If you’re a gardener, the benefits are obvious.  It’s also a great project if you have kids.  Or if you fish, you’ll have a steady supply of worms.  You may also just like being kind to random plants - seeing as how they keep us provided with oxygen, it can’t hurt to drop a little extra grow juice on them from time to time, even if it’s just in a random manner!

*The picture is of a sculpture in front of the Eco-living center, called “climb every mountain”.  It has no relevance to this post other than being a pretty cool picture.

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It’s been two weeks since I first piled up my clippings, yard waste, and some kitchen scraps, sprinkled it all with a bit of (crappy) Florida dirt, soaked the whole thing in water and went away and let it sit.  And sit it did!  It didn’t seem to be doing much of anything.  Well, that’s not completely true.  I learned that you really can’t put bread into a compost pile unless you soak it in water and puree it, then dump it on when you water the pile.  If you just tear it up and think burying it in the middle of the pile will keep the birds from finding it, you’d be wrong.  I still don’t know who was more startled - that poor blue jay that popped it’s head out with a big crust of bread and saw me hovering over him, or me, when that head popped out wings all a flapping and beak all a squawking.  Suffice to say it was a rather unique moment, and I felt very much in the now.  I also screamed like a school girl.

I digress.  Two weeks yesterday I set my compost pile up at a total cost of about $4.25.  3 tomato stakes, about 7 feet of a 50 foot roll of plastic fencing, and a few twist ties.  A little American ingenuity, a little America frugality, and we were ready to go.

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Recently, I mixed up a batch of laundry soap.  This isn’t really a “how to” post - Trent has already done an excellent one of those over at The Simple Dollar, as has Crystal over at The Family Homestead.  My method was kind of between what they did, and it gave me some ideas to try next time.  Based on what I’ve seen and read about making home made laundry soap, it’s a bit on the bulky side of things, and sort of a noodle soup consistency.  This was my experience as well.  As long as you stir it around a bit before scooping it out to use, this isn’t a problem.  Still, I wonder if there isn’t a way to improve the recipe a little, and end up with a smoother mix that could be packaged back into old laundry bottles for easier storage?

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My sister looks at things differently than I do, and often will see things I don’t.  We were talking about how sustainability fits into frugality, and she asked why I wasn’t posting about my bread baking experiences.  She made an excellent point that home made bread is not only frugal and healthy, it’s also one of the very basic tasks that we no longer do for ourselves.  Two months ago, I couldn’t have baked a loaf of bread - my sister still can’t bake one.  I’ve learned to bake regular bread, a nice “no knead” bread that has sort of an artisan texture to it, and Irish soda bread.  I’ve been having a blast trying new things (as an example, my basic bread recipe seems a little dry for my taste, so my next loaf is going to include a bit of olive oil for moisture) and learning different baking tricks.  My sister suggested I do a series of articles on my adventures with bread - her reasoning was that if I could do it, then anyone could.  Sometimes I think she sees me as kind of a big, sweet semi-trained chimp.  I’m not sure she wouldn’t be mostly right.

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I’m considering dropping cable TV after the spring season.  There are only 2 shows I watch on cable channels that I consider “must see” - and both of them are ending this season.  There are plenty of good shows on the major networks to keep me entertained.  There is a post coming about limiting TV period, or cutting it out all together, but this is not that post.

So I started looking around for an antenna for my TV.  I was a little shocked by the wide selection (and the prices!  $25 to over $100???  For an antenna?).  I suspected that since the “HDTV” antenna was sitting right next to regular old coax cable marketed as “HDTV READY!” with a fair markup, there may be some hype going on.

Back to the internet to do some research before I spend “dumb money”.

As it turns out (as I suspected), an HDTV signal is broadcast over the air in the same manner that TV has always been broadcast.  The difference is in the tuner, not the antenna.  Something else I learned is that there are a lot of people making their OWN antennas.  Hmmm.

So I grabbed a basic design, and decided to go “all out”.  I bought the screws (98 cents) the washers (88 cents) and the UHF/VHF Transformer (sounds impressive, doesn’t it? $3.79 at Lowes).  The board, wire coat hangers and cable TV cable were all “reclaimed” or “found”.  Total cost to me was under $6.  That’s a savings of $14 over the cheapest “store bought” rabbit ears I could find, and given the nature of rabbit ears I have no doubt that this works far better (just take my word on the engineering techno mumbo jumbo, K?  THX!)

I used this design (video). It took me about an hour while watching Reaper yesterday afternoon.  Hooked it up today, and get a BETTER picture than Comcast for the local HD stations.  I pick up about 24 stations total, although 6 of those are “regular” and “HD” versions of the same station.

I’ll get some pictures up later, but I’m quite pleased with myself.

This is just a temporary post while I work out some of the kinks with the website. I’m tagging it “make it yourself” because I’m making the website myself.  So far, it’s been a fairly steep learning curve.

Once we’re up and running (and by “we” I mean “me”) here at The Art of Zen Living, I’ll cross-post a few entries from my old blog that seem relevant, just to get things started. More » »