I went out to mow the lawn Tuesday with the reel mower and saw some strange, unidentifiable objects in the yard. I moved closer to them and it seemed as though they were GIGANTIC mushrooms. I tapped one with my foot and, as I suspected, they were hugely gorgeous mushrooms!! They were bigger than a human head, and were absolutely magnificent. One of them looked like a giant butt, haha!!

In the event that you’ve not noticed, I’m obsessed with mushrooms. I’ve actually toyed with the idea of trying to grow edible ones in the house. I’ve always loved psychadelic-looking mushroom kitsch from the ’70s. I even have two neclaces that I got in Charleston that are polymer clay mushrooms. So, in honor of my love affair with the ‘shroom, I’ve decided that my next tattoo will indeed have to be a psychadelic mushroom…so, now, I must find some pictures to take to Sarah so that she can draw something up for me and I can continue my love affair with inking significant things on my body.

Here I am, loving a giant, psychadelic mushroom…

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the whole frugality vs sustainability thing. Sustainable, eco-friendly living is my ultimate goal, clearly, but I think that I may be setting myself up for failure by overwhelming myself with information when I’m not in a position to take action on certain things. That may not have made sense……to illustrate: I’ve been reading all summer about everyone picking their organic produce, canning, freezing and dehydrating, filling their cabinets and freezers with wonderful, super-local and safe food to eat all winter. I didn’t plant a garden this year…and, quite honestly, I probably won’t be able to do anything on a large scale next year either (at least until I can develop some skill and not watch everything die and rot). I can’t afford to buy all-organic food….it’s too expensive, and quite honestly, there’s so many loopholes to declaring something “organic” that I’m not entirely sure I’ll be getting something that’s much better than the conventional option. So, I start to get defeated and feel like a failure, which then leads me to give up on the entire idea and forget about it, which is no progress either. Because of the way Joey and I need to live to be able to pay for school, I think that our major focus for Fall and Winter of this year needs to be the areas where frugality and sustainability meet:

In short, we’re going to relax our large-scale focus on sustainability for now, recognizing that we can’t let ourselves feel defeated because we can’t make every change at once. I guess for some, that may make us “posers” or mean to them that we’re not entirely serious about the sustainability movement. This is not so…we’re just at a point in our lives where we need to focus on the small changes that we can make instead of being overwhelmed because we can’t completely overhaul our lives at once.