We took a great big giant stride into spring this week. I halted any full-scale spring cleaning for a while because it was pointless to do while all the dust and debris was being tracked into the place, and blown around with all the vicious wind we've been having lately. It's hard to scrounge up energy for it also after runs in such wind. The absence of puddles and road slush finally got me ambitious enough to fix up my bike. I accidentally destroyed two inner tubes getting it done (due to a tire defect), but it's done. I'm so much happier to finally see some green grass peeking and poking up above the dead mulch. I also gleaned a small profit in refunds since the thaw started.
I have a ritual, once spring thaw comes, of being proactive with doing something about some of the litter that's exposed once the snow recedes; as a winter's worth of evidence of morons rambling through the neighbourhood gets revealed on the sidewalks, the streets, the alleys, and the nearby parks. Waste and litter (and those who pitch it) sicken me. I wish there was a solution getting rid of these ghetto-scum idiot culprits with the stupid and lazy mindset that perpetuates all this, but that will have to be a topic for another entry. I could bitch and moan about the problem, or I could turn the lemons into lemonade. I clean up some of it. It's just a passive and casual thing I do when I walk the dog in the morning and evening. The pitched coffee cups we find are reused for cleaning up after my own dog during the walk, and are disposed of properly, and we collect the bottles and cans we come across for recycling. This habit started back in the days when I tended a garden space on another property I was living on, I would do the same ritual every spring and throughout summer. This spot was in the centre of the "party district" in town, so there was always a substantial enough mass of strewn-about recyclables left behind. Enough such that after I collected and took all this junk to SARCAN, our provincial recycling outlet, I got enough from the refunds to use for purchasing my seed stock, and other gardening supplies; the amount from the refunds always completely covered the costs for doing all of that.
From the commercial side of the alley, I reclaimed the wood from broken and discarded shipping pallets, and built composters and bedding frames from them. It all yielded to me some fresh homegrown organic produce in the fall, and I even had enough of a surplus a couple times that some was donated to the local food bank. I called this activity 'Operation Green Justice'. Even now, if someone were to play a random word association game with me, my automatic response to "plastic bottle" would probably be "tomato seedling". The upside is that it's an effort of being a good steward to the community and the environment, I didn't need to join any special club to give me license to do it, and I learned and applied a useful hobby like gardening. The downside is that I'm probably often looked at, by those who witness me doing this, as some sort of vagrant scrounging around for enough of a refund to fritter away on booze, smokes, or on some other confection for sin and vice.
Using my energy this way to convert trash into nutritious produce won't serve to build me any sort of fortune or empire soon, but it is an effort to transform negatives to positives, and I'd like to think that it will somehow create some sort of better karma later on. My motives are still purely selfish.
I don't really have a garden to tend anymore. Since I've been living here, my effort to do some container plantings on my deck has been all in vain. I never had a substantial yield of anything. I tried to set up some passive hydroponic experiments, but to no avail; there were just too many shortcomings to allow for it. There are also no bees around to pollenate the plants properly. Even with setting things up to have hanging planters and growing things vertically, the space is too limited; and I have no convenient outdoor watering system. I'm pretty much limited to producing a few pots of fresh herbs and that's it. I think it's more worth my while to retire from the gardening, and thus re-purpose the SARCAN money for another noble pursuit. . . probably another couple of fermentation projects. The refunds I collected so far amount to enough for a couple of beer kits: that's 46 litres worth of beer (132 - 330 mL bottles, or 22 six-packs); in which the expenses for it don't really come out of my own pocket.
I guess, like some vagrant, but in a more indirect way, I'll be using my money for confections of vice after all. The difference is that I won't be giving any extra money away for sin taxes. A cleaner park and street to look at as I sip my homebrew from my balcony is ultimately the reward for doing all of this. I'm curious as to what else I could 'seed and grow' with any other surplus of this can money: both for me and the common good.
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