Making Progress But Not Enough.
While I am doing fine and have stuck towards my savings goals for the year, a year in the future, I’m really noticing how difficult it can be to save for tomorrow. I do put a lot of money away each month, and certainly my retirement savings has grown significantly, it still often feels like I’m treading water, barely moving the needle. Goals take time, and as this past year has shown, time goes by much quickly, and there never really is enough time.
My new job was a bit of a leap, it’s a bit scary jumping into the unknown, and there are definite tax disadvantages to me. But I’m working hard, and trying to do what’s best for my organization, so I can make new connections and fine ways to better myself. It gets tough to squeeze more out of my budget, but I can still definitely find ways to earn more money, and save more for tomorrow.
Saving alone won’t get me there, but it will help open options for better tomorrow. I need to continue to read and learn, think and expand my knowledge. I need to keep an open mind, always be focused on my future, and think more about what my options are. I have a lot more opportunities then many, and ultimately a lot of my future will be defined by what I choose.
The Smells of the Geenese Valley
A few weeks back I was in the Genesee Valley at Letchworth State Park, poking around some of the little farm towns. The Genesee Valley has long been the joke of little kids and remarked upon by the authors of books for the smells of the dairy business – the sweet smell of the chopped silage and freshly cut hay, the sour smell of spoiled silage and cow manure, being stored than returned to the fields to bring nutrients back to the land.
The Genesee Valley and even some of the uplands around it are some of the great agricultural regions of our state. Once the bread basket of the nation, wheat blight and the Great Plains replaced it as did the high cost of living, leading to specialization largely in the dairy industry. Cows have to be fed year round and dairies produce milk and year round by carefully planning calving so there are always calves and milk being produced. That means farm families get milk checks year round from their processors.
The valleys and areas with the best soils have the biggest and most modern farms, often with hundreds of not thousands of cows complete with modern free stall barns and slurry holding tanks that allow the farms to apply manure only when it’s most likely to be uptaken by crops and not washed away as pollution.
It’s easy to root for the small marginal dairy up in the hills with a hundred or so milking head. The truly small business with a tie stall barn that has old fashioned gutter tracks and hay storage up above. But the truth is that the large dairy, run by a family and their employees probably is a better stewart of the land with their scientifically driven CAFO plan – even if the kids yell our – what’s that smell.
I really didn’t spend all that much time in the Genesee Valley, heading back to Allegany County hills where most of the farms are small. Where the occasional smell of petroleum from the century old industry, still stripping a little high quality oil from the land remains, often situated on the same farms that produce the crops that feed the cows that produce the milk I like to drink.
Red Creek – Dolly Sods
Strip Mine Along Cooridor H
Just driving along Corridor H, aka US 48 passing by some coal strip mines outside of Bismark.
Replacing plastic for glass and metal is a bad idea
There are some who want to replace single use plastics with single use aluminum or glass containers, noting the greater recycablity of both materials. But I think it’s a bad idea:
- Glass and metal, once produced last forever in the environment.
- A glass or metal object doesn’t just rot, it also doesn’t doesn’t burn. A discarded plastic bottle may be incinerated, burned in a burn barrel or campfire or be destroyed by a wildfire
- Plastics, especially outside of a landfill have a much shorter life than metals or glass thanks to the combustible nature of hydrocarbons
- Metals and glass discarded can lead to cuts in children and adults when they step on the glass, are working in the woods or swimming in the creek
- Metals and glass discarded can puncture car tires both on and off the road
- Metals and glass discarded can get into pasture and cause painful death from hardware disease in cows and other livestock
- Traditional deposit for recycling programs do increase recycling rates but still don’t eliminate litter or even ensure most of the material is recycled
- Recycling is great but even with glass and metal which is said to be 100% recyclable, material is lost when the metals and glass are melted down for reprocessing
- Glass and metal makes a lot more sense with true rewash and reuse programs – like milk delivered by a milk man
- Milk in glass is colder and purer
- As would be other beverages such as soda or beer produced and distributed in reused growlers
Walk in the Woods
