Bucket Progress, Final Acorn Results
Hey all! It's going to be another short one this week, because it's my birthday tomorrow and I'm celebrating by slacking off on my self-imposed community duties 🤣 Here's the top news for this week:
Acorn Season Results
We hit the "plenty of flour for a while" point on the acorn project, so I'm declaring the season officially over. Flour has more surface area than larger acorn chunks, so it's better to leave them un-ground if they're going to be sitting in the pantry for a while. Here are the final stats for the season:
- ~2 gallons of ready-to-use flour, which will go into muffins and pancakes at events throughout the year.
- ~4 gallons of un-ground leached acorns, which have been vacuum sealed with dessicant packs for maximum shelf life. They'll hang out in the pantry until we start getting low on flour, at which point I'll pull out the flour mill again.
- ~1.5 gallons of unleached fine particles, which don't work as well with the cold-leaching process we use for the bigger chunks. I think I might be able to use a hot-leaching process to turn them into a sort of porridge, so Nate and I will be experimenting with that over the winter.
- ~3 gallons of concentrated acorn tannins, two jars of which have already been passed along to friends who are going to experiment with using them to tan rabbit hides or dye fabric. I have some dye experiments of my own planned, and I'm excited to have finally figured out a concentration and preservation method for them that works.
I'm really pleased with the progress we made with the acorns this year. We figured out a lot about the logistics of getting the public involved, and our best estimate is that around 120 people learned at least a little bit about the acorn flour process. As usual, I did a much better job of documenting the early stages of the process when I was fresh and enthusiastic than the later stages of the process when I was tired and cranky, but it's still a lot more data than we had before the season started 😂 Every season is a new opportunity to practice iterative design, and I'm sure that in ten or fifteen years we'll have the whole thing running like clockwork.
Updates on the Emergency Food Bucket Project
Now that I've got the contents of the food buckets figured out, I got started on making labels to go on the individual bags. My first few design attempts were trying to be visually engaging and fun, but in the end I decided that making the important information easy to find was more important in this case. So the labels are simple and a bit boring instead 😆 I do still have some blank circular labels that have been sitting around for 10+ years because they're hard to fit much information on, so I might use those to make some decorative/encouraging stickers that we can add to the bags to jazz them up.
In more significant news, I was able to connect with Jeff at City Hall and reserve the City Council chambers for our first bucket-packing day. It's going to be on Tuesday, December 2nd, from 12-8pm. You can sign up for a shift here. Our goal is to get around 25 buckets done, and to work out the bugs in our packing process before we do a more widely-advertised workday in January. Speaking of which, this is my first time trying TallyCal for event signups, so let me know what you think.
Artisan Market:
Nate and I got to sleep in on Saturday for the first time since the Artisan Market opened in May 😂 But it wasn't an entirely Market-free day. The Holiday Walk is coming up this weekend, and participants are required to decorate for the holidays. Since Nate and I aren't big holiday decorators, and we didn't want to buy a bunch of plastic we were only going to use for two days, we decided to try our hand at making a garland. I pruned some branches off an evergreen Box bush that was getting too close to the house, and we used trial and error to work out a method of staggering the branches and tying them together into a workable continuous "cord". We aren't going to be quitting our day jobs any time soon, but we were pleased with the way it turned out.
You can come see the garland in person, as well as check out the new baskets, notepads, and gift boxes we have in stock, by swinging by the Artisan Market between 2-8pm on Friday and 10am-4pm on Saturday. As our Holiday Walk promotion, we're offering a free dog toy to any dog who comes to say hi 😉
Recommendation Corner:
My recommendation for this week is the Alt-Right Playbook series by Innuendo Studios. It's a series of relatively short animated explainers that expose common internet debate tactics that right-wing trolls use to radicalize people online. The creator is a video game journalist named Ian Danskin who saw these tactics evolve during the Gamergate movement in 2014-2015. Gamergate was a loosely-affiliated group of influencers and troll communities that convinced thousands of young white men to participate in the online harassment of women and racialized people within the video game industry, as well as to try to take down any gaming media outlets that criticized the movement. It never got much mainstream media coverage, but for those of us who participated in online video game culture, it was impossible to ignore. When Danskin noticed Steve Bannon and other mainstream right-wing figures using the same rhetorical and recruitment tactics that Gamergate had relied on, he decided to explain how those tactics worked so that people could learn to recognize them in the wild. The videos do a great job of explaining patterns quickly and accessibly, and they're funny to boot. You can watch them on YouTube at the link above, and you can find more of Danskin's work on the Nebula streaming service.
This Week's Nails:
You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! I went with high contrast and glittery this week, mainly because I really like the yellow/gold glitter polish with the black flecks and I wanted to keep finding excuses to use it 🤣
Have a good week! Don't forget to unhook your outdoor hoses and get your storm windows into winter mode. I'll see you back here next week.