Bucket Project Progress

Hey all! We had our first snowfall this week, so it's definitely feeling like late fall. Here's the news of the Commons this week:

Emergency Food Bucket Project

More progress on the food buckets this week, to the point that I think we'll be ready for our first packing day soon. I was able to bag up enough samples of the foods we'll be working with to get a sense of how many mylar bags we'd need in each size, so I went ahead and ordered enough for the first round of buckets.

Meanwhile, Lisa Near organized some friends to buy us a full round of 50 buckets with lids from a local reseller. She dropped them off before the protest on Friday, and our garage has been pleasantly fruit-filling-scented all weekend 🤣

Once we had so many buckets ready to go, it seemed like a shame not to move up the time frame a little. Montague Foods is still tracking down some wholesale sources for us, but in the meantime Nate and I took a trip out to Whispering Pines in Fremont, and then to the 🎉new Costco in Muskegon🎉 to pick up a big load of bulk beans and grains. It should be enough for a first round of 25 buckets or so. We're still missing a few things like powdered milk and potato flakes, but I've got an order in at Whispering Pines and we should have them in a week or two.

The next step is going to be finding a venue for the first bucket-packing event, which will probably be the week of December 1st. I've got feelers out to City Hall and to the Library, but if you're in a position to offer us a meeting hall, community room, or even a large living room as a backup plan, let me know. We're expecting a turnout around 5-8 people.

In the meantime, I'm going to be working on a zine that will go in the buckets along with the food. The working title is "So you have to eat the Bucket Food..." It's going to include cooking instructions and recipes for the staple foods we're including in the bucket, as well as practical survival tips, information about local emergency resources, and general encouragement. If you'd like to submit a recipe or other info for the zine, let me know.

Artisan Market

We had a nice time around the firepit this week, but what we didn't have was any customers 🤣 So we're going to skip the market next week and focus on getting ready for the Holiday Walk on the 21st and 22nd. I'm hoping to be able to introduce a couple of new products, including re-usable wrapping cloths and gift boxes.

Recommendation Corner

Cory Doctorow's Enshittification is finally out in book form! Doctorow is a long-time open source and digital freedom activist whose work I've been following since the early 2000s. He coined the term "enshittification" a few years ago to describe the way that so many Big Tech platforms go from free and useful to expensive and harmful in pursuit of shareholder profits. His analysis really meshes with my experience as an early adopter (and early discarder) of platforms like Etsy, eBay, Facebook, and Google.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! My goal this week was to capture the current leaves-falling-on-snow point of the season, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Have a good week! Keep an eye out for slippery leaf/snow combinations, and I'll see you back here next week.