A Hectic Week

This past week has been rather hectic. Not only am I adjusting to being in graduate school, but I started my new job on Monday. I’ve been in training all this week. Today is my first day off and I intend to spend it getting caught up on housework and homework. I need to bake bread as well. I haven’t even had the chance to do that!

The weather here has been extremely unusual, like just about everywhere else. It finally got cold, but it can’t seem to STAY cold. The winters have been getting shorter and shorter ever since I moved here five years ago. Old-timers shake their heads and talk about how we used to have snow and ice every winter. I’ve never seen snow down here, and we’ve only had two icy days in the five years I’ve been here. Most people can’t make the connection, but the older folk realize something has gone wrong with the weather. Climate change is finally being felt. One of my profs has connected the dots and is acting in her own way –by building four “distance learning units” into the semester, so that all of us and she will not have to drive up to the school that week. She calculated how many miles would be saved (roughly of course) by each day we didn’t physically meet and then gave us as many of the distance learning days as the school would allow. That’s pretty awesome.

My broccoli plants are doing a little better. Some of them died, and they are all extremely leggy. I finally realized that maybe they weren’t getting enough light and started turning my office light on for them. They are slowly doing better. I’ll have to remember that when it comes time to start the other seeds!

I came across an article the other day that was rather disturbing. I’ve copied the link below. The number of service workers in the world is higher than the number of farmers. Basically, this means there are more cooks, waitresses, and bus boys (among other things) than farmers –in the entire world! This is disturbing for many reasons: Peak Oil, Overpopulation, the energy crisis, the unsustainability of industrial farming. If this trend continues, pretty soon there will be hardly anyone in the world who actually knows how to grow food –and when the industrial system collapses, what will happen then?
I think growing a garden is a better idea than ever.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070125/un_global_unemployment.html?.v=3