Tag Archives: work

Organics for the Care for our Common Home

debs/ January 31, 2019

This semester I have the opportunity to formalize some of my past year’s gardening experience by taking the Organic Master Gardener online course through Gaia College. This weekend I had the privilege of attending Guelph Organic Conference. Both activities were mutually informative and are giving me a lot to think about (so much so that I have to write about it!) and I am so grateful that my employers would sponsor my personal and professional development in these ways.

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Field Notes from this Season of Vegetable Growing

debs/ August 30, 2018

In the days following our high school graduation, my friends and I sat in a circle on a patch of lawn beside the school’s science wing where so many memories were made, feeling the weight of going our separate ways and savouring the last moments of normalcy. One of us suggested that we go around the circle brainstorming/imagining each others’ futures–where would so-and-so be in 10 years time?  For some, we could unanimously envision specific accomplishments and lifestyles. Other futures provoked theory and debate, or teasing and banter.

My future? It drew blanks.

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Notes from this Semester of Human Becoming

debs/ May 9, 2018

Before it happened, I simultaneously (a) fantasized about and (b) dreaded finding out what kind of adult I would become.

(a) I fantasized because, observing the adult world had been a marathon of “I would never do/care/like that when I become and adult!” and now I FINALLY get to make my own choices and be the adult I have always told myself I would become.

(b) I dreaded it because, in amassing a list of mantras, faux-pas, instructions on how (not) to be an adult (dedicated to adult debbie, courtesy of childhood debbie), I imposed on myself the herculean burden of becoming the adult that my childhood self would have looked up to.

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Food Forestry in Gjøvik

debs/ March 2, 2018

Our first expansion project in Gjøvik was to help expand the Food Forest.

The idea of the Food Forest (or Forest Garden) is to look to a naturally occurring forest as inspiration for how vegetation should be organized in a garden. Notice all the diversity and connections that exist in a forest:  multiple levels of shrubbery, thick hummus that keeps water in the soil, animal life, perennials that grow deep roots in a forest.

Our permaculture peeps see the connections and positive feedback loops between all the aforementioned components and are inspired to replicate this system using edible plants. By intentionally planting layers of mutually beneficial, edible and non-invasive perennials, they hope to improve soil quality and create a resilient food system that requires less manual inputs over time. “Harvesting” would be more akin to “foraging” in a forest of food like this!

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Making shadow work work for me

debs/ December 5, 2017

“Shadow work is all the unpaid for labour done in a wage-based economy.”
Shadow work includes: commuting to work, doing the laundry, figuring out how to use self-checkout at the grocery store…

All this unaccounted for labour adds mental strain, called decision fatigue, to our already very exhaustive mental energy. Life hacks that limit shadow work are often circulated. For example, certain “successful people” wear the same thing every day to reduce the shadow work required to decide what to wear every morning.

While life hacks help you minimize shadow work, what if you can make shadow work work for you? What if there is a way to profit from it?

All this is basically a segue for me to show you some interesting money-earning and money-saving apps.

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4 days in Munich

debs/ November 18, 2017

Tourism posts are boring.

Every (western) city has the same building, per chance, with different architecture (Which we have already established that I don’t care about). Every city has some permutation of a transportation system. Every city has parks. Maybe some attraction that’s actually unique to the city, those are often over-crowded and swarming with tourists. In short, travelling to cities is pretty much my bane, but I would love for a chance to live in a non-Toronto city.

That said, this post is going to be one of those tourism posts. Slightly modified by the conference aspect, but mostly touristy none-the-less. Still, I feel like I need to give this leg of my trip some attention. After all, the conference is the reason I get to come here in the first place!

I promise, dear reader, this is the most boring post of the trip. Not necessarily because I was bored, far from it! I just don’t think it’ll be very interesting for you to read.

Enough dilly dallying, lads. Let us commence.

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Salutations!

debs/ October 18, 2017

“Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

If the internet is dark and damp room, then this website is a little nest I’ve made in the back-rightmost corner of that room.

I’ve made this nest at an interesting time. See, I am in a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Long long ago, when chickens had teeth, I was under the impression that work is mostly neutral, generally apolitical, and probably minimally oppressive. And so I spent my life up until now studying to find work I love doing. Two diplomas later, I’ve learned that nothing is neutral, nothing is apolitical, and that work I thought I would love doing is, by default, complicit in systems of oppression. Too bad it took putting all my eggs in the wrong basket to come to this conclusion.

Being neither trained nor competent to do work that might actually be worth doing, is it still possible to scratch out a living doing something that isn’t detrimental to the earth or the life on it? Or will I just chicken out and help some rich guy get richer? For now, I am incubating this little piece of the web and hoping that by brooding over it (read: flailing like a headless chicken) an idea will hatch… one that my bird brain hasn’t the imagination to dream of on its own. This, I pray.

Oh, why hello there, dear Reader. Why do you look as though you are walking on eggshells? Feel free to eavesdrop, snoop around, and make yourselves at home, but please take off your shoes before you come in. Afterall, the little segments of coloured yarn and meticulously placed twigs that form this nest were lovingly salvaged; only the softest and colourfullest yarn, only the twigs that most resemble dragons’ whiskers (well, to me at least) were selected. Welcome.