House Work

Chores:

Done on a rotating basis.
You and your partner work together on each chore for one week.

Kitchen: Clean kitchen thoroughly by Sunday evening each week. Wash counters, dishes, dry and put away dishes. Wash top of stove. Clean out spoiled food from fridge and freezer. Sweep floor. Wash table (once we have it). Clean at least once a week and as needed (when kitchen is dirty and when it is needed for an event).

Living room: Tidy living room, screen porch and back porch thoroughly by Sunday evening each week. Put away games, books, art supplies, tools, and anything else. Adjust couch cushions, compost wilted flowers, and sweep floors. Tidy table tops and floor space where junk accumulates. (You may need to spend 5 minutes per day on this throughout the week.)

Garden: Varies week by week. Includes, compost duty, watering, mulching, building, planting, and weeding. Talk to Kate about what needs to be done.

Love and Joy: You and your partner do something nice for everyone else in the house.

Meeting: You and your partner must speak with each member of the house before the Sunday house meeting to find out what needs to be discussed at the upcoming meeting. Put together an agenda together. One person will lead the meeting and the other will take notes and post the notes on the blog by Tuesday night.

Programmable Thermostats!

Hello all,

I am just writing to encourage everyone to speak to their parents about installing programmable thermostats in their home. Me and my mom recently convinced ourselves that it was necessary, after about three years of discussing it as something that we ought to do. It cost forty dollars, and took about twenty minutes for us to install ourselves. I think it would be great if we could all commit to having one in our home, as well as making sure we do something similar at the Green House? 

The programmable thermostat that we purchased has an EPA energy star program on it (you can also make your own program.) The EPA program is as follows for the summer: From 6am to 8 am it is set at 78 degrees. From 8am to 6pm it is set at 85 degrees. From 6pm to 10pm it is set at 78 degrees, and from 10pm to 6am it is set at 82 degrees. There is a different setting for Winter months. I'm sure it will save us the forty dollars it cost us within a few months. I hope we can do something similar in the Green House?? Or just go sans air conditioning entirely.

I am soo soo excited about coming back to Sewanee in a few days!!

The Family Creative Workshop

I just wanted to let everyone know that on Monday morning i purchased the complete Family Creative Workshop 24 volume set. These books are so great. the titles are as follows:
#1 Acrylics to Batik
#2 Beachcombing to Bottle Gardens
#3 Boxes to Card Tricks
#4 Carryalls to Confections
#5 Cosmetics to Egg Decoration
#6 Embroidery to Lace
#7 Glass Working to Hibachi
#8 Hooked Rugs to Lace
#9 Lamps & Shades to Maps & Pathfinding
#10 Marmalades and Preserves to Mosaics
#11 Music Making to Paper Mache
#12 Parades & Festivals to Pinatas
#13 Pin Striping to Puzzles
#14 Quilting to Rope Knotting
#15 Rosemaling to Scrimshaw
#16 Sculpture to Silhouettes
#17 Silversmithing to Sprang
#18 Square Dancing to Sugar Shapes
#19 Sundials to Tatting
#20 Tea to Toys
#21 Knitting to Vegetable Dyes
#22 Vinegars to Winter Sculpture
#23 Wire Sculpture to Zoetrope Toys
#24 Index

There is so much stuff in here that will help in practical tasks for the Greenhouse (like marmalades, preserves, and Tea) as well as impractical things that will just be really fun to do! (like bonsai, glass cutting, square dancing, parades and festivals). The volumes are arranged in alphabetical order, so there are so so many things in between what the titles say. I am excited and you should be too.

If you want to know where you're living,

check your e-mail.

New House!!

Hey guys,

Bentley mentioned that he was going to bring some stuff from home to outfil the NEW ECOHOUSE!! Yay!!! I think this year we should make the house really unique, colorful, artsy, and beautiful, make it a place that is inviting and tasteful. So, while most everyone is home maybe if you have a picture, rug, bric-a-brac you don't really want anymore, or like Bentley, old kitchen stuff. You could add a comment onto this post so we can keep track of what all we have so we don't get 50 log cabin shaped bottles, for example.

Personally, I am bringing a ton of food that my mom was going to throw away and some old calender pictures that might look nice framed or collaged, some curtains, and probably some other stuff that I'll find and throw in.

This house is going to be amazing!!!

Goals to consider

Yesterday I gave veggies from our garden to Dean Hartman and Kay Brown and
talked to Dean Hartman for a while. We spent much of the spring telling
Dean Hartman what we want
and what he could do for us, so I asked what we could do for him.
Here's what he said:

1) Think about and talk with him about what students like us
want from college.

2) Share our ideas for programs and projects with him.

3) Think about how to make Sewanee a healthier place.

4) Work towards making the drinking scene less dominant
and overpowering.

5) Think about our house as a model for future
student residences, especiallythe student research house.
If we had a budget, how would we want it to be spent:
programming? technology? infrastructure?
is this representative of what other similar houses would need?

6) Keep the house and grounds looking nice.

7)Work with the Living Learning communities,
esp Our Planet, to make theLLCs a viable living learning situation.
Some people think that the LLC's "aren't Sewanee".
Let's help to make them "Sewanee".

8) Make our lives a "transparent living experience".
If a regent who owns a coal mine wants to know what sustainability is,
our lives should be examples of that. 
Everything we do should be perfectly visible and easy
for people to understand. Hartman described it as a pop up book.
What we do differently that makes our life and house sustainable
should be so obvious no one can miss it.
No one should have to ask: "What makes the greenhouse green?"
Think about what the tour guides would say about our house to
explain what we're about and how we live to people who have no
experience or understanding of the idea of sustainable living.

I think the last two are especially important. 
We need to bring the LLC folks over to our house
and get them to keep coming for our programs. I want to take a
trip to Keener's farm early on with a big group of students. 
The "transparent living experience" can be helped some
simply by putting up signs and notes about what we do.

Send and post your thoughts.

Meet Spunky

Wotcher!
(That is a highland cow who I meet on my walk everyday. I named him Spunky)

Here are some pictures of the farms I have stayed at recently and/or visited. To my left, you can see a thatched roof chicken coop.
That's right, that is for chickens.

Next, (this is for Helen) there is a bike electricity generator, being used as a demonstration piece for the Earthship house I went to near
Edinburgh. The house was completely self-sustainable, made out of bottles, tires, cans, and earth mixes, taking care of its own water, electricity and sewage. Surrounding the house were gardens, greenhouses made out of bottles, children play areas made of reused materials and willow sculpting, and a really scary scarecrow.

To my right, there is the wall that I helped to render (which is like cob but made with less straw and more clay and sand, and is put on in layers). There were two families that had four kids in total who were running a small box scheme and building their straw bale house using very few electrical tools or nails, so I got to learn how to mix up cob and apply plasters to walls. Very educational.




The next picture is from the large box scheme farm I stayed out right next to Edinburgh. This shows the walled garden. There was a large raspberry, tayberry and strawberry patch where we could eat as many berries as we wanted (which we often took full advantage of)

Also, 10 points to whoever can identify this cathedral (hint, its in England, not Scotland and the columns are a dead giveaway)
















Hey! It might be fun to have a slide show from all our summer adventures - remember when Angie did a powerpoint on Old Mill Farm?

Tasty Veggies

Hello Everybody,

Here are some pics of some delicious vegetables consumed right out of the garden. Look at me, I'm about to eat that garlic! Elspeth is all like, "woah, check out this carrot. this is the biggest carrot EVERRR!"

Wouldn't you like to know, Jonathan?

I've made a draft...but it's not official till we hear res life's two cents. Which I hope will be this week. Suffice to say, it's pretty close to the rooming plan we made last spring. Look, I promise I'll tell you soon, but not till after I've talked with Nicky Hamilton and Eric Hartman.

So Elspeth, any thoughts yet on who's rooming where/who's rooming with who?

i check this blog every day and theres hardly ever anything new anymore. thus, i will write a post. i hosted a yard sale for emily last saturday in order to raise money for eric's quest for $20,000 and we did pretty well. over 400 dollars well. emily got a bunch of people to donate stuff to the sale, and they brought it over to my house the day before. this gave me ample opportunity to rummage through the rubble and buy what i wanted before the sale happened, and i was quite pleased with what i found. in my living room was a 1960's Smith-Corona Super Sterling Typewriter in pristine condition!! i picked it up and i could tell that somehow it was smiling at me. i knew that we were meant to be. since then my mother has teached me the in's and out's, and the half-ways between in and out about using a typewriter. needless to say, i have used it nonstop for the last 2 days, and i would have used it to type out this post, but i was afraid the keys striking my computer screen might have damaged it, so i will type it using this new-age computing device instead. after discussing it, emily and i decided that on april fool's, or just whenever i wanted to, i had to go to the ATC and tack away loudly on a paper or some notes or something. And yes, i will be using it in the house, and yes you will probably get very annoyed, at which point i will go to the attic(which i discovered has a crudely carpeted floor/room, unless they removed it during construction) and finish(out of earshot) the beautiful poem or letter i am typing, maybe even for you, the person who expresses their annoyance. And then won't you feel bad about expressing that annoyance. that's right, being annoyed should have been a sacrifice in exchange for a beautiful gift, but you bastardized that gift in your unwillingness to be annoyed for a few measly hours. that is going to be great, and i hope all of you are looking forward to that in a month. i also purchased a bottle in the shape of a perching eagle, which i will be drinking water out of at the dinner table. and i also have a bottle that is shaped like a log cabin, if anyone would like to join me in that endevour. maybe we could have a club in which you have to drink out of an oddly shaped bottle at the dinner table, but then it just becomes so common and everyday that we forget it's a club. that would be cool. These are just some of the things you all can look forward to with longing, anticipation, maybe even groaning in the pains of yearning. i know i already do.
love,
jonathan