Oh no

Guess who is having a meltdown? It is me!

"Okay, what is going on over there?" asked my officemate, watching the books arrive in shipment.

I hauled out the stack of preschool registration forms, vital record order forms, fee forms, tuition forms, aftercare forms, insurance forms, immunization forms, pickup authorization forms, debit enrollment fee forms,  and uniform order forms.

There is a bit of narration in The Gods Must Be Crazy that has stuck in my head like a fork since the first time I heard it.

Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment; instead, he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery, and he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But somehow he didn't know where to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10-15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. 

And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment. For instance, if it's Monday and 7:30 comes up, you have to dis-adapt from your domestic surroundings and re-adapt yourself to an entirely different environment. 8:00 means everybody has to look busy. 10:30 means you can stop looking busy for 15 minutes. And then you have to look busy again. And so your day is chopped into pieces, and in each segment of time you adapt to a new set circumstances. No wonder some people go off the rails a bit.

Then we watched Babies over the weekend, which is a beautiful documentary with the same take-away, and I threw the remote and ran outside with my knitting. "I'm doing a Henry Thoreau! Civilization is a sham! Money is imaginary! Population is isolation!" Zenny was the only person home to hear me ranting, and she came outside to water her seedlings and check on the chickens while I cast on the sleeve for a sweater that Leif will never need. "You know, mom," she said, "If we are not using devices, you should turn off your phone." 4 year-olds, you guys. "This is the Beatles. They don't count." But I turned the Pandora station to Celtic folk music, as a sort of compromise. Fiddles are natural, being made of wood. Although the Beatles are also natural, being made of people. 

Mini-farming, then, while my resources are tied up with complicated self-created environments to make life easier. I would probably be better at growing plants if I didn't get defensive and take any soil-quality suggestions as personal criticisms. You're going to want to mix the cinder and check the acidity of your soil by - LALALA MIRACLE GROW. It is not a helpful trait to have in oneself. 

So far my mini farm consists of a lychee tree, a lilikoi vine, an impossibly huge oregano bush that has gotten out of control, a banana tree with six tiny bananas on it, three broody hens who won't get out of bed or lay eggs, and a scabby blind plague chicken. I'll hammer together some raised garden beds out of leftover lumber*, and maybe build a quarantine coop for this diseased chicken that persists in surviving. I'm rooting for the little thing, but I can't even post pictures of it because it is very ugly and people don't like seeing disfigured baby animals, as a rule. It should recover in a few weeks, if all continues to go well. Here is a very flattering drawing of the little thing - minus the weeping eye pus and crusty red scabs. 

Will report.

* And we don't even need to buy dirt, because I stopped raking and declared the back yard a compost pile. That is called urban sustainability.