We had rain overnight and expect more today. The temperatures should turn colder but not mid-winter sub-freezing cold. I hope the predictions are right because I think I saw some leaf buds on the clematis which I mulched as much as a large pot on a cement patio can be mulched. I am only about a week away from starting the tomatoes, peppers and eggplant. Yikes!!! I have to get the planting space cleared so I can do that. We are still sorting and rearranging stuff. That has been an ongoing project this month that is now ending. The last two days were spent in errands and other tasks that needed doing but today--with one minor errand--we will go back to the sorting and rearranging.

I have seen several stories of people trying to cut plastics out of their lives. Queen Elizabeth is even getting on that bandwagon banning plastics in the tourist concession areas of her palaces. Recently I saw an article in a UK paper where a reporter was challenged on how easily he could remove plastic from his life. (Sorry I didn't save the link and can't find it now.) He thought it would be easy since he, himself, didn't use much plastics having shifted to a metal water bottle for his jogs and took his lunch in a non-plastic microwaveable container and taken other measures to replace plastics. But that was only part of his life. The other part included a family with two children under three--one in the process of toilet training and one still in diapers (plastic lined nappies as he called them.) Getting rid of plastics in the family sphere would have been very difficult. Nimue Brown has a nice post on the subject and comes to a similar conclusion: removing plastic from her life would be difficult and expensive. We have discovered the same. Almost everything comes plastic wrapped or in plastic containers--and most of that is single use. We have a collection of canvas bags and have reduced the plastic bags we accumulate  and those we use to line trash cans and for the spent cat litter. We use far few plastic containers and those we use till they are totally unusable. But we still put out, when we aren't clearing up and sorting out, one trash tote for pick up every three weeks to a month. and most of it is that so convenient plastic.

Capitalism colonizing time? The article on Naked Capitalism makes a good argument that is exactly what has been happening. We are reduced to two modes: wealth producers (though not so much for ourselves) or wealth consumers (which takes what little we make and puts it in someone else's pocket.) Time for anything not fitting those categories is increasingly squeezed out. I would add a point: time spent producing for our own consumption is marginalized. First, finding the time for it in today's economy is difficult and, second, our economic calculations minimize its value. Last summer we bought 2 25lb boxes of canning tomatoes (one box per week for two weeks) and canned them for our own use. Those boxes yielded 23 quart jars for about six hours of work for the two of us. Those jars are (approximately) the equivalent of 50 cans of commercially processed tomatoes. Those 50 cans cost around $3.00 each or $150. The boxes cost a total of $24. Our time hardly enters the calculation since both of us are retired no one pays us for our labor. But, the 50 cans of commercial product would have added $150 to the GDP while our home canned added only $24. The same goes for the herbs and veggies I plant in our small garden. Only the seeds or plants we buy and other purchased inputs enter the economic calculation. The mature herbs and vegetables don't because we consume them here. At the highest pay I ever earned I would have had to work 3 days to buy those commercial tomatoes. We live in one of the "cracks" in the capitalist/industrial system but we do so only because we are retired. When I was still slaving away at low paid jobs and desperately trying to find a way out of them, it was almost impossible to see around a system of working for a pittance producing profits for someone else and spending that pittance to consume what ever it took to continue producing the profits someone else enjoyed. I have often said that our system expects us to work ourselves to death to not make a living.