You see, I’ve got a north facing backyard with very few hotspots. One of those hotspots is the back corner wall of our shed which is right near the back gate, meaning I can’t widen the garden bed there without impeding access to the yard from the alley. So I’ve been thinking of vertical garden possibilities there for awhile, and it turns out that yesterday was the day for action.

$70 worth of lumber and two hours later I had accomplished this:

What is this you ask? It’s a frame that will hold 4.5 inch deep rain gutters which will be filled with dirt and plants. Made from 2×6 and 1×6 cedar boards, and balasted by stakes sunk into the ground – I am thinking that I might attach some hooks to the shed to chain the top half of the structure up and ensure it can’t fall when loaded with dirt and plants – it is sturdily standing at the moment however. My priority – besides providing lots of space between laters – was to ensure that it did not sit *on* the wall because that can cause damage to the building – but create a framework in front of the wall that would mirror the existing bed.

In a couple of weeks I will attach some cheap PVC gutters to the frame and mix a suitable planting blend together for container plants. Because this is such a warm and light spot, I’m planning peppers, eggplants, vining cucumbers (in the lowest rung) which are things I normally have difficulty growing in my not-so-sunny yard. It’s an experiment, really – who knows if it will work?

In the meantime, I am stitching together grow-bags out of landscape fabric to attach to this alley-score door:

This is in a less-sunny part of the yard, and I’m thinking pansies, lettuces and perhaps a hanging fuschia from the top will at least create a spot of visual interest if nothing else.

As you can see from the shots here, the yard is still a bit of a fright, with just the earliest of signs that the light is returning in the tips of fruit tree growth and the bulbs pushing up some green. My next building project involves that box to the left of the door where I will build a new pea-trellis on two sides to replace the old one that was falling apart and looking a bit motley. Plus, my boxes are short of soil – and that will neecd to be rectified sooner rather than later. So many things to do, I’ve got a list that I add to every time I go outside – but new projects and experiments are exciting. I’m hoping that my vision can be as beautiful in reality as it is in my head!

What’s good right now you ask? Well, generally we’ve been having awesome social time with lots of different friends. Our friend Red Chris moved back to town and in with his sweetie Clare (who is a month away from having a baby!), our friends Chris and Carla have been coming over every two weeks for dinner and games, I am developing good friendships with some of my fellow-grad-students, the writing group I am involved with is meeting semi-regularly and I even managed to get a crew over to play music last weekend. Plus! We’ve had lots of great dinner invites out of the blue – including one tonight for Raclette which I’ve never had before.

I’m writing extensively for school, reading like a madwoman, attempting to reformulate the Flying Folk Army for an early spring gig, and getting started in the garden. I’m feeling energized for the first time in months, which I attribute both to my naturopath and the returning of the light. And, I live in an awesome community where people organize events like last night’s movie showing of Queen of the Sun and Saturday’s Light, Water, Drums festival.

What’s not so good?  The federal government, for one thing. Although layoffs have started out as a trickle, the expectation is that after the spring budget we will be flooded with pink paper since this government is so hell-bent on reducing its workforce. What that means for me is a lot of work as a union rep, but I am not immune to layoff either and like every federal worker right now the underlying stress is great. Will it be me? Will it be them? If it isn’t me, do I want to stay in a decimated and demoralized workplace?

It’s a little intense, and especially for someone like me who identifies so strongly with the world of work, and was raised with a lot of fears around joblessness. On the other hand, getting laid off would pretty much force me to change my career trajectory which I’m not altogether happy with at the moment. The worst part about it all is that we’re all to keep doing our jobs as if nothing is happening – planning for the future, purchasing new software for projects down the road, getting committees for next autumn set up – all with the knowledge that we may have to walk away mid-bounce.

I’m a bit bogged down by it at the moment, and tense for the worse which is yet to come. People keep telling me how great it is to have an experienced union rep around, how lucky it is that I haven’t found other employment yet (cause everyone knows I’ve been looking) – and I do feel a sense of obligation on that front, for sure. On the other hand? It won’t matter one bit what I do for anyone right now if this government is hellbent on its path of destruction. We’ll all be picking up the pieces for a long time to come.

Now, what I have going for me is an awesome partner, and a great social community that I am feeling really engaged with lately – not to mention some creative and intellectual outlets. If it wasn’t for all of those things, this whole downsizing situation would feel a lot worse. Even though I have a slow anger burning beneath the surface, I can honestly say that I feel generally very satisfied with my life right now – which seems incongruous, but life, you know? Sometimes it’s very weird.

Next goals are to get back to the gym and start doing more stuff outside as the weather improves. A little more exercise would go a long way right now. We’ve got at least another month until we know for sure what’s going on with that damned federal buget and I need to work that angst out!

Whatever the future may be, it will be digital. The present is a time of transition, when printed and digital modes of communication coexist and new technology soon becomes obsolete. Already we are witnessing the disappearance of familiar objects: the typewriter, now consigned to antique shops; the postcard, a curiosity; the handwritten letter, beyond the capacity of most young people, who cannot write in cursive script; the daily newspaper, extinct in many cities; the local bookshop, replaced by chains, which themselves are threatened by Internet distributors like Amazon. And the library?

It can look like the most archaic institution of all. Yet its past bodes well for its future, because libraries were never warehouses of books. They have always been and always will be centers of learning. Their central position in the world of learning makes them ideally suited to mediate between the printed and the digital modes of communication. Books, too, can accommodate both modes. Whether printed on paper or stored in servers, they embody knowledge and their authority derives from a great deal more than the technology that went into them. They owe some of their authority to authors, although they commanded respect long before the cult of the author took shape in the eighteenth century. As book historians insist, authors write texts, but books are made by book professionals, and the professionals exercise functions that extend far beyond manufacturing and diffusing a product. Publishers are gatekeepers, who control the flow of knowledge. From the boundless variety of matter susceptible to being made public, they select what they think will sell or should be sold, according to their professional expertise and their personal convictions. Publishers’ judgments, informed by long experience in the marketplace of ideas, determines what reaches readers, and readers need to rely on it more than ever in an age of information overload. By selecting texts, editing them, designing them to be readable, and bringing them to the attention of readers, book professionals provide services that will outlast all changes in technology.

Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future

***********************

(By way of explanation – I am attempting to start a new practice with all non-school books I read, which is to document anything relevant or interesting to me from the book on my blog. I read far too many things which slip away from me and I would like to keep a record of that which intrigues me – or may prove useful to some academic venture, some time – thus Book Notes.)

• An interesting essay about the Gutenberg-E book experiment of 2000-2006 which underscores the difficulty in bringing down the price on books that have a limited audience – academic monographs – owing to the huge amount of institutional and editorial infrastructure which goes into any publication. Cheaper distribution in the form of e-texts doesn’t make for larger audiences which is not Darnton’s point but ultimately what strikes me as the fallacy about e-books being cheaper in a non-mass-market setting.
• A Paen to Paper gets in the whacky world of attempting to save every bit of printed paper ever produced which Darnton seems to support. I suppose it makes sense, because he is a historian, but I fail to see that any institution will ever have the storage/space capacity to keep every newspaper, magazine and book ever printed on its shelves ad infinitum. Miniaturization and now digitization give us real tools to making this history accessible in a way that warehouses of old newspaper never could. It seems to me that most things that have survived history, did so because an individual or institution hoarded or shepherded that thing and passed it on – it was precious in some way – the daily newspaper and O magazine would just not pass that historical test.
• In The Mysteries of Reading a lovely discussion of what the tradition of the Commonplace book can tell us about the minds and attitudes of some of our historic figures, or just about the age in which the individuals who kept them lived. The Commonplace book is a book of quotations taken from reading in snippets and copied into a journal to be easily referenced. Often these snippets were accompanied by droll comments or observations. I like the idea of creating a commonplace book on the web. There are now social media venues for this like Quotista, but any half-built social media startup is bound to fail before these records could make it into anything like posterity.