Welcome to the Friday open thread for the Living Simply group. If you are not familiar with our group, the basic idea, from our profile, is:
A group to explore and share sustainable, simple living ideas among fellow progressives. For the urban, rural, or wannabe homesteader, this is a place to share information to simplify everyday life. Sustainable skills such as gardening, food production and storage, do-it-yourself projects for the home or farm, and backyard chickens and other livestock, as well as eco-conscious philosophies such as cooperative living, eco-cities, the Slow Food movement, and being a mindful consumer are but a few potential topics of interest here.
Happy Friday, folks. If you've missed anything published to the Living Simply group, here's a rundown of some diaries that you might want to check out:
Cordgrass's excellent weekly series on moving toward zero waste are full of great info and have fostered great discussion on reducing waste and living more simply. If you haven't seen them, check them out--here's the last three week's diaries:
Living Simply: Zero waste is a journey
Living Simply: Zero waste is a pain in the butt
Living Simply: Zero waste is Old School
Recently republished to the group was citisven's How Hot Soup is Making the Planet Cooler and boatsie's Bonn Talks: Hope in a Stalk of Grain. There's some great reading here, so even though these diaries may be a bit older, they're definitely worth the click.
And another thanks to la motocycliste, who posted last week's open thread in my continuing intermittent access to a computer! This week's open thread is brought to you by a borrowed laptop, one which makes me realize that I really miss my Firefox and its automatic spell check. Forgive me typos and misspellings, please!
This weekend I am headed off to a farm sale/farmers market with the hopes of selling a good quantity of this year's young chickens. I only keep a relatively small amount of the birds I hatch each year, and by selling the extras I'll hopefully make enough to feed the remaining ones for the next few months (and maybe build a few new pens). My chicken ventures definitely fall into the hobby category--I can't even pretend that they are a self-sufficient endeavor--but they do pay their own way often enough for me to justify my little operation. The fact that they also make us breakfast is a definite bonus.
We've also been realizing that our new single-income (my husband was laid off a month ago, and the job search continues) way of life hasn't really required all that much adjustment. By living as sustainably as possible, we can get by on very little money. It's still a bit scary--the health insurance is gone--but living simply has been a safety net of sorts. We feel secure in our ability to live, for the most part, just the way we always do. We have had to tighten the grocery budget, as food is where we're most likely to splurge, but that just means we cook good food from scratch. No complaints here!
The open thread is yours. What are you doing to live more simply?