Civic Duty

Hello all you fine, friendly farmgirls! It’s finals week here at Alaska Pacific University, and because of that…I’m sleep deprived. It happens to the best procrastinators among us year after year, generation after generation. When some people say they are sleep deprived, they are probably surviving off of just a few hours of sleep here and a few hours of sleep there. Since I’m fairly child like, sleep deprivation for me means that I’m getting less than eight hours of sleep per night for several nights in a row. The least amount I’ve slept has been five hours, and I kind of feel like a zombie. I know, it’s rough. How can I hope to be a farmer some day if five hours of sleep leaves me feeling less-than-human? I don’t know, that’s a question for another day.

Anyway, I digress. One reason for this sleep deprivation is some forced civic dutiness I was assigned to complete for a graduate level environmental law class. We had to write and submit an official public comment to a governmental agency regarding our stance on some bill, act or other decision that is recently being decided upon. Of course, this had to be regarding something related to the environment.

Evan and I enjoying a spring ski. It should be a civic duty to enjoy state and national recreational areas on a regular basis.

Continue reading

The Greener Side of Life

It’s the winter that keeps on giving. Maybe it’s just the winter that needs the last word, when everyone is too caught up in the impending spring and summer to retaliate against the shoveling and plowing anymore. We just give in. We put on our boots and cram our heads into our hats and head out into the white abyss without a dismissive word about the darn winter or cursing the yet-again snow-covered porch. We’ve become complacent with the winter world around us.

The only animals that seem to be protesting are the chickens. They have left their coop exactly once per day for the last five days to eat and drink. Egg laying has all but ceased.

The spring tease a few weeks ago had me excited about sitting on the GREEN grass, hiking in the GREEN wilds and strolling through the farmers market, checking out the GREENS. Im supposed to start a new farming gig in a few weeks, and it seems like the season may be off to an extended indoor start.

To compensate for this lack of natural green, this Farm Girl has been taking in some green news. Some of it has been great, some of it has been not-so-great; but the most interesting of it has been GREEN.

Does a green filter make this shot (from April 6) seem any less wintery?…No. The answer is no.

Continue reading