The 5050 Routine: Parallel Projecting
When I got back from my bike trip I immediately dropped into a daily routine that is half structured, half unstructured. After a month and a half of fine tuning it now looks like this:
Wake up
Write for 2 hours
Put in 2 hours on priority projects
Do anything I feel like, inclusive of nothing
Evening hours: Work out > Dinner > Study > Yoga
(At first I tried jamming yoga and working out in the morning along with writing and priority projects, and it didn’t work well.)
In short, I do my ‘work’ first thing, usually finish by noon, and then I go outside and play. This is exactly how k-12 worked for me as a homeschooler; interesting…
I don’t like working on one project at a time. I prefer to spend 1-2 hours a day on 3-6 projects at a time. I read books the same way.
Projects: The Studio
I’ve mostly been getting the Studio up to speed. It needed some attention both to make it more enjoyable to spend time in, and to function better in summer and winter.
I stained the interior, chopped the legs off my desk, built out my south windows including a louver, installed more seismic bracing, repositioned Serenity, built a solar storm door, prototyped a shade sail for the west facade, dropped in the telephone poles for the outdoor room, and cleared a wider firebreak.
Chairs? We don’t need no stinking chairs… or mattresses.
The storm door is both for driving rain protection as well as evening sun relief.
Studying Permaculture Gardening
With the studio soon to be in decent shape I am turning my attention to learning permaculture design and implementing it here. I’ve got a lot to learn, having only kept an indoor fern alive for a few months once. Also my location is challenging: while the principles of permaculture are universal (that’s what’s so wonderful about principles), there are less examples to follow for a climate as arid as mine.
I had to chuckle when I read somewhere “…now, you’ll have to have a plan for in case you experience a drought such as four or even six weeks without rain…” Swap weeks for months and that’s my reality. Plants that say they need full sun need half shade here. Et cetera.
I’m studying Peter Banes The Permaculture Handbook to get oriented and am focused on creating a loose plan and vision that I can begin to execute by the end of summer or early Fall. I’ll document both my sources of learning as well as what I’m doing.
I see this as a long term initiative not unlike my ERE education: it is a discipline and a way of thinking that requires a large investment of attention and energy at the beginning, but as the system matures over time it requires less time and attention.
In fact, I really think ERE and permaculture are two manifestations of the same sort of thing, namely, applied systems thinking. ERE is systems thinking applied to lifestyle design with a front-facing emphasis on personal finances, and permaculture is systems thinking applied to physical environment design with a front-facing emphasis on food systems.
ERE collapses to FIRE. Permaculture collapses to organic gardening. But each is much, much deeper than those, and will reward dedicated study and practice for those willing and able to put in the time.
I suspect. I can speak to ERE but not permaculture since I’m at the foot of the path with it. The point is that I think ERE and permaculture make for extremely complementary bedfellows, and I hope that having a mature-ish ERE system running will serve as a sort of onramp to permaculture.
I might be naive about that. We’ll see. At the very least my ERE system means I’ve got buckets of autonomous time to dump at the project.
Renaissance Categories
‘Ecology’ is probably my weakest Renaissance dimension (technical social intellectual economic emotional ecological physiological spiritual aesthetic) and as such I think spending the next several years obsessed with permaculture and related disciplines will not only fix that weakness, but have ripple effects through the rest of my life system. What that might look like I have no idea. I’m putting it here as a prediction so I can pay attention as I go through it.