landing in athens for four days then a ferry to naxos. maps, whatsapp, and a hotspot for a second phone.
does 15gb last that week if we are not streaming? and does vodafone hold on the ferry or should i download maps first? better to start unlimited for the island week?
i grew up around here but haven’t been back in a long time. i’m visiting family for the week and have a few afternoons to kill.
i’m mostly into thrift stores and old-school antique shops where you have to dig a little. furniture, books, weird kitchen stuff, whatever. back in ohio i have a couple places i check pretty regularly, so i’m missing that routine while i’m here
my sister remembers there being a decent place somewhere near the center of quincy, but couldn’t remember the name
i’m staying around wollaston and have a car, so anywhere in quincy is fair game. i’d also drive a little outside the city if it’s actually worth it.
not really looking for the polished vintage boutiques with $40 ashtrays. i want the messy places where you might walk in for books and leave with some completely random thing you didn’t know you needed
what spots should i check out?
been container gardening on a windowsill and under a grow light for about two years now. apartment, no balcony, suburban ohio. the light situation is rough in winter and i have maybe four feet of counter space to work with before it becomes a problem.
peppers have been the most reliable thing i've grown. compact varieties, a decent pot, and they just do their thing. tomatoes were a disaster the first time around because i underestimated how much root space they actually want, even the dwarf ones.
green onions are basically foolproof and i keep a pot of them going year round. they don't ask for much and they actually get used.
the thing i keep coming back to is that most container advice assumes you have a patio or at least a window that gets real sun. a lot of us don't. curious what people with similar setups are actually managing to grow inside, specifically edibles, and whether anyone's had luck with anything more interesting than herbs and lettuce. i've been eyeing compact pepper varieties i haven't tried yet and also wondering if dwarf corn is actually worth the container space or if that's just for people with more room than i have?
most books about woodworking or making things fall into two categories. technical manuals with diagrams and lumber dimensions, or coffee table books where someone photographed their beautiful workshop and wrote 300 words about slowing down and connecting with your hands. neither is what I'm looking for.
I do small projects, nothing serious, but I've been curious whether there's good nonfiction that actually grapples with craft as a subject. The history of how people learned trades before there were YouTube tutorials. The way knowledge about making things got passed down, or got lost. Why certain tools or techniques survived and others didn't. The relationship between the person and the object they're building, not in a spiritual way, just the practical reality of it.
I've seen Matthew Crawford's name come up in other contexts and I know he's adjacent to this territory. Curious if people here have read that or anything else that treats craft as something worth thinking seriously about, rather than either a hobby lifestyle brand or a technical curriculum.
I work in a small apartment so my projects are modest by necessity. That's not really the point. I'm more interested in the ideas than in scaling up my setup. If you've read something in this space that felt like it was actually written by someone who makes things, drop it below.
picked up an old wooden crate at a thrift run a few weeks back and put together a rough twobin setup that lives on the balcony. not pretty but functional. the issue is i'm getting decent breakdown on kitchen scraps but anything woody or cardboardheavy just sits there longer than i'd like. space is limited so i can't let it go six months and forget it.
the scraps situation is steady since i'm hauling fruit odds and ends home from the classroom most weeks. the ratio thing is what i keep secondguessing. i get a good pile going and then it stalls and i don't know if it's moisture, surface area, or just the wooden walls not holding heat the way a tumbler would.
curious what people have found actually speeds things up in a noninsulated bin sitting outside through ohio winters and cool springs. i turn it, i keep it damp but not wet, i chop stuff up before it goes in. still feels like it's moving slower than it should given the input volume. wondering if the wood itself is pulling moisture out or if that's a nonissue and i should be looking at something else.
Alt titles: outdoor wooden bin on a balcony, what actually moves the process along | small twobin setup stalling out, not sure if it's the wood | balcony compost bin in ohio, getting consistent breakdown without much space
i teach fourth grade and spend a lot of time thinking about how information actually gets into a person's head. not in a buzzword way, the whole learning styles thing got debunked years ago and half the education books out there are still running on fumes from that era. i mean the actual mechanics of it, how knowledge gets built, why some explanations work and others don't, why people forget things so fast or hold onto the wrong idea for decades.
i've read some cognitive science adjacent stuff but a lot of it either gets too technical too fast or oversimplifies to the point where it's not useful. there's a version of this topic written for academics and a version written for people who think teachers just need more positivity and neither one is what i want.
curious if anyone has hit a book in this space that felt like it was written by someone who actually grappled with the problem instead of just summarizing studies. history of education, cognitive science, philosophy of knowledge, any of that is fair territory. the through line i care about is how humans actually come to understand something. if you read something that shifted how you think about that, what was it.
I’ve been container gardening on a balcony for a few years, and I keep running into the same problem: I never seem to have enough decent compost without buying bags of it. About six months ago I started a small worm bin in a spare-room closet. So far it’s working, and it doesn’t smell, but I still feel like I’m one bad feeding away from upsetting the whole thing.
I have a pretty steady supply of fruit and vegetable scraps, so the feeding part isn’t difficult. What I’m less confident about is knowing when I’m adding too much. I add shredded cardboard regularly, keep citrus pretty limited, and try not to let the bedding get too wet.
For people who actually keep vermicompost indoors long term, what matters most for keeping the bin stable in a small space? Feeding rate, moisture, bedding, airflow? I’m especially interested in the little things you learned after running one for a while that aren’t obvious from beginner guides.
been reading more nonfiction lately and keep running into books about agriculture or gardening that are either written for people with acres of land or so dumbed down they say nothing useful. i grow things in containers on a small balcony, which is basically nothing in the grand scheme of agriculture, but i got pulled into a book about soil biology a while back and it sent me down a rabbit hole.
curious what books this sub has read that deal with plants, growing, ecology, that kind of territory. not looking for howto manuals. more the kind of thing that explains why something works the way it does, or the history behind how we think about plants and land. science writing that actually respects the reader.
i teach fourth grade so i spend a lot of time thinking about how information gets communicated to people who don't already know things. good nonfiction does the same thing. a lot of gardening books fail at this badly.
if you've read something that changed how you think about plants, soil, ecosystems, whatever adjacent thing, drop it. even if it's older.