Purify bad air and modest sleeping

I like to keep plants around my desk area. I have five altogether in my bedroom. Feng Shui has taught me that one should keep an inviting image from the vantage of the doorway, so in the far corner there is a keyboard waiting for my fingers, artwork neatly filed against the wall, and plants in the general range of light from the only window. "Cozy" is the common utterance from every guest. Ah, yes.

Aside from the nice distraction, they also do a great deal of handling the air pumping out of my computer. I'm not too fond of this machine, granted it works well and I'm using it right now to conjure this entry, it's a strange and alienating entity that keeps me from living my dream of a perpetual nomadicism or complete, permacultural balance between myself and nature. Maybe one day I'll try it out.

I can't give you the numbers or the names of whatever these plants are doing for me besides cleaning some of the air and providing some interesting, psychological companionship, but I remember reading from somewhere that having a plant next to your computer counteracts the bad stuff it exhales. I'm very gullible and anything that touts the benefits of organic life has me jumping on the bandwagon.




Here's something else: I don't sleep on a typical mattress bed. Aside from potentially being incredibly comfortable, I find that they take up usable space. A friend of mine told me he had horrible back problems and that his chiropracter advised him to sleep on a flat surface. Enter the pallet.

I layer mine with several blankets, some thick and thin and one colored like a lucid dream, and I coccon myself in a few of those blankets depending on the season. It's not like sleeping in cotton puffballs or clouds in the sky, that is for sure, but after six months sleeping like this, I feel more upright throughout the day and have virtually no backpain. Plus, it rolls away so my room is that much more spacious.

The best sleep I ever had was on a pallet in a tent in Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. The gentle orchestra of insects lulled me to sleep and I awoke the next morning greatly refreshed to bird songs. I believe this is the direction we need to be going in as a culture, back to our natural roots and away from synthetic sound machines and shrill cries of alarm clocks. I've already taken note of my health in either environment, and I can say that waking up to anger and apprehension is no way to live. I want to keep enjoying my life as much as I do now, even if the "right now" isn't what life "should be."

Trashy Findings

So, I am a worm composter and have been since May of 2008. I enjoy the company of worms. They've complained only once when they were underneath my kitchen sink behind closed doors (yes, I was dumb), and so I've been very conscious about what environment they're in. Currently they reside in my parents' basement on top of a filing cabinet, readily available to display their secret makings. My inner child enjoys watching them stretch and wriggle through the stuff. They don't seem to mind that they're in a bin.




This is what I found in the kitchen trash. Oooh, yes, lots of little goodies. Egg shells, coffee grinds, potato cuttings, tea bags, unusable carrot pieces, and plenty of cuttings from the 40 or so houseplants that keep us forestlike. The paper plate was also in the same bin. Yes, I forgive my family for trying to sneak this stuff to the landfill (maybe I've been watching too much Wa$ted). I'm an avid green/eco/nature dude. I feel tremendous guilt when I take part in the general, careless doings of mainstream society. Then again, as I learned from a sustainability lecture last spring, we're all learning. Eventually we'll get to a point when we're consuming equally or less than can be provided to us. It's rather nice musing about how humanity is now in this movement toward a slower lifestyle.

Anyway, worm composting is great. I'd still like to have other composting methods to work with along with this one, just to keep things interesting and to constantly make OCD comparatives between the rates of decomposition, and so that my worm bin won't get overwhelmed.

Look for more random things like these to come up every now and then. I have a smorgasbord of interests. Boredom is the mother of creativity.