The City Mouse in the Country

This is the "personal" piece that I didn't plan on writing at all. I keep this blog to help me sort out the jumble of thoughts and emotions that are always bouncing around my head and for the sake of history.  For example, I knew I suffered from depression when I went back and read my personal journals; noticing how I was always bitching about the same things but never doing anything to change it.   The old saying about repeating the same pattern and expecting different results is very true.  Once I broke out of those patterns (with help from a mental health professional) my life got a whole hell of a lot better.  Thus it sort of pains me to see me considering going back into a career that I never expected to be in the first place. Call Centers/Customer Service have been what I've done for the majority of my life.  When the pandemic came, I was able to work form home, and I got used to sitting around in my PJ's drinking my coffee and answering call after call abou

Even though we are nearly two weeks away from the New Year, I've decided to try and write what has traditionally been the last post of the year now.  For me it's always been a brief review of what I've covered, accomplished and achieved in the past year.   Like the above meme says....I made it through. Maybe it's due to seasonal depression, maybe it's due to my writing this blog for slightly over three years and my audience is still in the hundreds, not the thousands like previous blogs have been but I think this blog may be coming to an end. Although the low readership that I have could be due to the blogging platform I use, which is neither supported by nor promoted by Google anymore.  However I love the ease and simplicity of this particular platform and see no reason to change it at this time. This lack of comments and low readership are making me wonder if it's worth it.  Plus, if I'm being honest with myself, this blog has lacked focus as I seem to be

  I don't have a photograph of her. That's what I remember thinking when I learned she had recently passed.  I'm sure somewhere in the boxes scattered throughout my life here in Western Pennsylvania is a picture of Teri and I.  We were married 10 days after September 11th, 2001.   I still remember the day of our marriage, as we scrambled to make sure that we had a back up best man and a back up "father to give away the bride" just in case my best man, who was in the Air Force at the time; and her brother (Navy) were called off to active duty. It was a wonderful open air wedding with great food and lots of dancing and seemed like a great start to our lives. Two young people ready to take on the world.   Needless to say, the world won. Our relationship started off well but by the economic collapse of 2007/2008 we started to show signs of stress.  Sadly I lost my job and fell into a deep depression, I often say that I was "frozen" as I seemed unable to tak

I've started and stopped this article several times now as I assessed my mental state over the last couple of weeks.  However I did not publish anything because all the previous drafts made me think that I was whining. Part of that "whining" was deciding to leave my job as of September 5, 2023.  It's easy to blame someone else, and the company I left does have some serious issues that they simply are not addressing, but the final responsibility for leaving is mine.  I just felt like I had nothing to contribute nor was the company addressing my needs and wants.    Money really isn't everything. I quickly interviewed for several jobs, but in the end decided to take something "completely different" for a bit.  I can always go back into insurance and banking...but my needs and priorities have changed.   In fact, I was offered a "Green" job with an energy company that really excited me.  However when I stopped and thought about what I would be doin

  Without going into to much detail, I decided to leave my job at the beginning of September.  There are many reasons for this but for some time I've been feeling that my current position has not been the best fit for either the company or myself.    I did not feel like the company was listening to my concerns nor do I feel like they really cared for their employee's; despite a killer benefit package that I'll never see again.  Their technology was at least 20 years behind everyone else and  I believe that they really didn't have the best interests of their customers at heart. It's not all their fault.  I'm to blame too as it seems that I've not been living up to their goals and needs for the last year, and this is one of the reasons it's taken me so long to write this blog post. In addition to trying to find a new job before the end of the month, I've been dealing with anxiety and a mild case of depressio n.  Writing a blog that deals with nature,

I started this blog for a few reasons and I never intended it to serve the purpose it does now.  I'm trying to pass on information in a variety of ways to help others.  I'm trying to help others learn from my mistakes. While my blathering may seem trivial.  It's not, for we have to put ideas and concepts out into the world so that they are be built on, improved, discussed and debated.  That's how we make progress.  That's how we build a better world.  Currently I'm still recovering from one very bad day when deer rampaged trough my garden and ate or destroyed roughly two-thirds of it.  I had invested a bit of money into it when it came to soil, fencing, containers and what not; only to lose part of that investment to deer. To deal with the deer, I'm going to have to possibly invest more and buy electric fencing or a variety of chemicals. I'm reminded of William Alexander's semi cautionary tale of gardening from his book The $64 dollar Tomato . It

“ None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.” ― Allen Ginsberg   The weatherman stated that we have not had any significant rainfall in over two weeks.  Nor did he see any relief in site. We are not in drought conditions yet, we are just unusually dry.  Interestingly enough, Pennsylvania should be getting warmer and wetter in the future if the climate models hold true.  If we narrow that down even more to my home town , the picture becomes even more interesting.   Solar Punk Pittsburgh For now though, I was worried about my garden.   It is not that big, I basically have a variety of containers around where I am maintaining lettuce, leeks, tomato's, peppers, strawberries, grapes, sunchokes (which I was really interested in growing) and a few other things.     Every garden needs to be watered and I played around with the idea of a r ain water collection systems before, we even had a simple one in Florida.  This water could be used in the garden