I have not posted in nine days. My apologies. Tonight I will get you all caught up with my life.
First things first, we need to clear up to the answer to my last trivia tidbit, “What substances can be composted?” Leslie and Edwin were both right. All organic substances can be composted. However, some organic materials decompose more quickly than others. On the farm, all of the materials in our compost decompose in three or fewer years.
Antigone Wanders’s Eighth Trivia Tidbit:
How many liters of water does the average human being save annually by switching to the Navy style of showering: turning off the water when they apply soap and shave, and only using water to get wet and rinse off? Extra points go to commenters who identify the ancillary benefits of using less water.
And now for the scoop:
Lately I have been busy amassing documents required for my Ecuadorian visa and searching for a summer job. Ecuador has very strict visa requirements. So far I have had to obtain a copy of my police record (rather a document indicating my lack thereof) and get an HIV test.
Like me, the farm has been busy. Last spring, our barn burnt down. Today we held a barn raising. Contrary to my expectations, our barn raising did not include any construction. We waited for the contractor to come and then watched in awe as a crane removed lumber from a truck. The festivities attracted a reputable crowd, including a television reporter and a State Senator.
After the “barn raising,” I finished my new favorite book: THE NINE: INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF THE SUPREME COURT by Jeffrey Toobin. The Nine is a popular press account of recent Supreme Court case law. As I read, I relearned cases and precedents that I had forgotten, and discovered once again why I am a law nerd. There is something special about the logic that progress from the Constitution, to opinion, to opinion. It is also amazing to think about how each Justice’s philosophy and personality affects his interpretation of the Constitution and approach. Every time I think about Constitutional law, I smile. It might hold my future.
-Antigone Wanders
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Gap Year Reading List
- Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (Muhammad Yunus)
- Candide (Voltaire)
- Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)
- Equus (Peter Shaffer)
- Full Circle: A South American Journey (Luis Sepúlveda) (also known as Patagonia Express)
- Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu (J. Maarten Troost)
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (JK Rowling)
- Hija de la Fortuna (Isabel Allende)
- Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri)
- Life, the Universe and Everything (Douglas Adams)
- Little Pink Slips (Sally Koslow)
- Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Barbara Ehrenreich)
- Sexo en Nueva York (Spanish translation of Sex in the City) (Candace Bushnell)
- Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder)
- Symposium (Plato)
- The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
- The Glass Castle (Jeannette Walls)
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
- The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
- The Lost Continent (Bill Bryson)
- The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (Jeffrey Toobin)
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Douglas Adams)
- The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Christopher Hitchens)
- The Witches of Eastwick (John Updike)
- Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations One School at a Time (David Oliver Relin and Greg Mortenson)
- Tunnel Vision (Sara Paretsky)
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2 comments:
I don't know enough about shower dynamics to answer that question without cheating.
And I thought they needed a little hand truck just to move your police record around. :P
The Constitution? I hear its pretty great. But seriously, that book sounds interesting. The Constitution is open to interpretation and hearing the justices views sounds intriguing. Although these days things seemed to have diverged from the constitution a great deal. I pick my side I am a constutionalist.
Dear Antigone:
Some technical glitch must have kept my last trivia answer from appearing. For what substances can be composted, I said 'dead things'. You have to kill something to compost it, and anything you can kill, you can compost. Sorry to be so morbid, but that's life, pardon the pun.
How much water saved showering like a sailor? My guess: a sh!tload, or shipload, as a sailor would say.
And why? Conservation matters most in areas where water supplies are limited, where water is drawn up from aquifers or wells, and where potable water needs compete with hygienic uses. There is an energy cost to almost all delivery systems, as well as waste water processing and treatment.
In Chicago and the New York/New Jersey areas where we've lived, I've never really felt guilty about taking long showers. We've been fortunate that our water sources have been plentiful surface water diversion systems: pumped into our homes from reservoirs or standing bodies of water (i.e. Lake Michigan), and the 'post-consumer' water is 'processed' and then re-enters the natural downstream flow.
The sailor shower system doesn't necessarily reduce the pollutants in waste water, but it does reduce the volume of waste water, and smaller volumes are easier to manage, which would reduce water pollution.
That's what I think. But I still like long showers.
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