i'd love to see photos!

for myself, i have been an unproductive lump for weeks due to oppressive heat in my part of the world. and also laziness, and internalized pseudo-Protestant work ethic guilt, and other stuff. but i do have some plans. i live in the arid southwest of the USA (well, extreme western Colorado but it's effectively the arid southwest, climate-wise). i've got some potato plants that are growing which have largely been watered via a rain barrel i have set to collect water from our downspout in our backyard. i have three more such rain barrels which i plan to install.

my mother gave me a gift certificate to a local nursery, so we're going to plant native/xeric bushes and trees on the west side of our house which is currently essentially bare and exposed to late afternoon glaring, hot sun.

we're adding cellulose insulation to our attic in September, and once the heat has died down a bit we are going to finish covering out front yard in cardboard and mulch, hopefully in time to plant some winter cover crops. we also planted an apple tree last year that has survived the winter and the summer thus far.

lots to do, and little energy to do it with unfortunately. i'm feeling really depressed and shitty about climate stuff right now, which is why i made this post; i'm hoping i can get some secondhand positivity or enthusiasm to help me get going to actually do some of the projects i have in mind.

to answer my own question, i have planted two rows of potatoes this spring - my first garden that i've ever been involved with! and yes, two rows of potatoes is barely a "garden" but it's a start. i want to grow food i will actually eat, so we planted an apple tree last fall and potatoes this spring. i am hoping to also do a three sisters garden this year, but we'll see. i also potted a Scotch Bonnet plant that i bought accidentally online while trying to buy actual Scotch Bonnet peppers, ha! this will be great for the Nigerian-style jollof rice i make on weekends, and anything Caribbean inspired that i cook which calls for that specific flavor and heat profile.

i also started a Calibreserver based out of my home server setup, which will be accessible to the neighborhood i live in - i bought a domain name and am learning about what all is necessary to statically host a website. this is the first part of my dream to start being a community sysadmin for my neighborhood, where i can provide resources that are freely available to my neighbors, and we can all add content and features as time, skill, and desire allow.

finally, i have dusted off Laika, my old trusty two-wheeled steed. she belonged to a coworker's husband who never rode, so i got it for free last fall! I have not historically been a cyclist so I am working towards it. I bought a rack i need to add to the bike, and hope to get some different tires. add in a trailer, and you have a great errand-runner, which is my goal here.

that's a good question! my understanding is that praxis means the practical application of a theory; like, for example, if you're a socialist then praxis could involve sharing those ideas with friends/family, creating socialist spaces like community gardens or little free libraries/etc, or organizing your workplace. and it doesn't just have to be socialism, though that's the context i've heard it used in the most. for me, solarpunk is the theory and these practical application questions give me ideas about praxis. does that help? hope i don't come off as too mansplain-y!

for me, since i live in the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, i have hooked up the first rain barrel of the season to start catching moisture. my plan for this coming weekend is to lay down more cardboard and mulch on our front "lawn" to suppress weeds and allow for the growth of native cover cops we're planting. i also got a decent gift certificate to a local nursery for Christmas so once they open, soon, i will be excitedly acquiring a Mormon tea bush for my native pollinators garden.

on a different front, my wife and i are practicing living with one car. it should be easy for us, but we've never had to think about some of the implications of the single-car life until now, so we are trying a practical experiment in February and March, and if we can make it okay we plan to sell our second car in the late spring or early summer.

finally finished my compost bin - just three pallets in a U shape, but it worked! added PiHole and Unbound DNS to my home server setup to keep ads and other nonsense as out of our lives as possible. more to come!

from my wife and i: we relatively recently received some free bikes from a colleague of mine. i'm fixing one up myself to be an ultimate commuter, but my wife said she didn't really want the other one - so we're fixing it up to give to a fifteen year old we know who needs reliable in-town transportation. it should be done this week, and he's getting it on Friday. i hope he likes it!

also, we're decorating for the holidays but in a sustainable, old-fashioned kind of way. my wife is a really good fabric artist and has crocheted a long holly vine that wraps around our living room. it's well off the ground, and so that's where we hang our ornaments so our two energetic kitties don't succumb to temptation and danger. we did hook up house lights this year, powered by rechargeable batteries that i recharge using our Jackery and a solar panel. it's small things, but it's a start.

i've mentioned it before but we're still planning on our community building chili feast, we've just had to move it to January due to our schedules. and we still host weekly zazen (Zen Buddhist meditation) at our house. we have four folks outside our family who come almost every weekend, and last weekend we did our first all-day sit on Saturday, from 8am to 5pm. i just launched a website for our group, in the hopes that anyone in our rural western Colorado locale that searches for "meditation", "Buddhism", or "Zen" and our city name will find our site and, if they feel like it, join us.

To answer my own question, I'm working on restoring/modifying two mountain bikes I recently got for free from a coworker. I'm hoping to turn one into a sweet daily commuter for me!

I'm also a Buddhist and host weekly zazen at my house every Sunday morning. I feel like Zen/Buddhism and solarpunk go hand-in-hand - seeing the reality of interdepence, we can't keep killing the earth!

Finally, I'm also trying to get started composting again. I did really well last winter then got out of the habit when it got warmer (I have a thing about smells). I am hoping to get back into it now that it's cooler and maybe I can pay less attention to the smells for a bit.

nah, go for it; i readily admit to knowing only what i have googled so far about things. i'm using cardboard because it's what i have; i am also composting, but buying stuff is out of the realm at the moment. glad to hear that tilling isn't necessarily all bad; tilling = bad is what got me on the cardboard thing in the first place.

i do appreciate the heads-up!

basically we googled lasagna gardening/lasagna compost, and did some research on the soil in our area. once we got our head around the basics we just started using what we had on-hand.

this is the solar setup I was talking about, that I forgot to take a photo of until after dark, sigh.

that's a Jackery Solar Saga 100 solar panel plugged in to a Jackery 500, which is charging an Easy Motion Evo Cross ebike. the ebike is my primary mode of transportation during the week, and I am hoping it to make my forever primary mode soon.

to respond to my own post, i have set up a solar panel to charge a Jackery (mobile generator) that I am going to use to recharge my ebike when the charge runs down. photos forthcoming!

we've also got seven birdfeeders up and running on our property, and two bee hotels. it's been over 100 degrees F where i live (rural western Colorado), so we repurposed an old hummingbird feeder to be a bug waterer, and used our local Buy Nothing group to find one of those pet watering bowls that refills from an attached jug. we filled the bowl part with rocks so bees have a place to land and filled the remainder with water, so now our bee hotels are right next to a bee waterer, too!

here's a link to the image since i can't figure out embedding an image, embarassingly.

bee hotel and a hummingbird feeder: https://flic.kr/p/2oRYzjN