Composting

Whew! A busy couple of days. I went to the ball game last night with Dougie and Eric. We had supper at El Sombrero beforehand. It's really winter. Driving is tricky - even with Eric in his LARGE Ford pickup. Baby it's cold out there...

The high school basketball experience was quite fun...four or five sons of people we know...including several of our contemporaries from JDHS were on the team. YIKES! I will fucking freak-out the first time I see a GRANDCHILD of one of our contemporaries...but it's just a matter of a few years, I'm sure.

Today we played cards at Dougie's and Alison's and I actually emerged a winner. A good sign for the upcoming new year.

I just got home and was surveying the online news. Nothing remarkable - certainly not the renewed carnage in Palestine with the tit-for-tat stuff in Gaza - just the latest in an apparently endless round-robin of folly.

The only thing that caught my fancy was an article in Slate regarding household waste http://www.slate.com/id/2201176/ which prompts me to describe a heretofore unreported element of my morning chores at the elders.

As previously reported, mom is a card-carrying member of PETA. Her latest personal crusade involves providing daily winter sustenance to a squadron of ravens based at Raven Station Walmart which, as a raven flies, is but a brief sortie of no more than a minute or so from my parent's home. There are three squadrons (consisting of about 12 individuals each) based at Walmart. Similar bases exist at every other grocery store in Juneau in the winter. The A&P (formerly Foodland) Raven Base is augmented by several flights of seagulls and pigeons.

All squadrons can be scrambled immediately to deal with any opportunity that presents itself - like a moron leaving his groceries unattended in sacks in the back of his pick-up or some boob inadvertently dropping something on the way to the car.

In any event, my mom saves all table scraps and other organics for the ravens' breakfast and every morning I must deposit said breakfast on a big flat stone by the stream behind my folks' place. The ravens greet this offering with considerable enthusiasm.

Now, strictly speaking, I'm not sure if this is a "green" activity or not. I prefer to think of it as composting - with the compost simply being spread over the entire neighborhood via air drop as opposed to being spread via rake and hoe in the garden. What do you think?