Jen reminded me the other day that this is the year anniversary of our move to the new house. To celebrate, I’m going to share some information with you about greenhouses that I collected last night while trying to hunt down replacement sheeting plastic. Here’s a link to 3 mil greenhouse plastic sold by the roll, which would be cheap and easy to install for the winter. Here’s another link for 4-year 6 mil plastic. Then I got to thinking about overwintering our plants and retaining the heat, so I looked into dual-wall polycarbonate sheeting | link 2 , which would take a lot more work to install (and a lot more money to buy and ship.) All this leads me to the subject of sustainable growing, something I’d love to be able to accomplish—install solar panels, collect energy, and heat the greenhouse without using outside electricity. I found a few articles on sustainable greenhouse farming. And, of course, some articles from the fringe. All of this is food for thought.

Parking Lot. Nate hosted a showing of Heavy Metal Parking Lot in his cube yesterday, and I spent the rest of the day reliving my high school days curled in the fetal position under my desk. No, I didn’t wear acid-washed jeans or Scorpions concert T-shirts, but I lived in a town full of metal-lovin’ burnouts just like the folks in this movie. Seeing the crowds of shirtless, scraggly delinquents leaning against their Novas chugging Natural Light brought me back to the confusing, illogical years between sophomore and senior year. (We had moved from a very WASPish town in Conneticut to a blue-collar town over the border in New York. The distance between the two towns, geographically only miles, could have been universes in my experience.) This was a town which, before the current boom in building, was still in the sticks, scant years beyond rolling pastureland. A town where, after the roller rink was closed (mercifully only a year or two before we moved there), the evening’s entertainment consisted of drinking and driving to the 7-11 for more beer, then hanging out in the parking lot and waiting to hear about the nearest kegger. Where the local Barney Fifes were during all this, I’ll never know.

As the member of a small, persecuted minority, I lived a pretty quiet existence, preferring to live in the fringes than invite ridicule, scorn, and pain upon my skinny body. I remember overhearing earnest, serious discussions at the lunch table over who was more “Metal”—arguing the merits of guitar speed or vocalist (usually Hammett vs. Tipton or Halford vs. Ozzy, ending with a sentence like, “Duuude, Priest RUUUUUULLEES!” punctuated with the Holy Metal Horn Salute); being threatened with bodily harm because of the Police and R.E.M. stickers on my binder cover; laughing under my breath at the gaggle of burnouts huffing Marlboros under the roofed “smoking lounge” outside the band room door; and, upon spying a magazine titled “Metal and Leather”, featuring the singer of Judas Priest, knowing the score with that dude immediately.

I can now look back on those days and laugh, because not only were most of the burnouts skinnier and in worse shape than I, but because I’ve run into some of them since those days and they haven’t changed. I’ve been through Glen Burnie—where several of the HMPL subjects called home—and they still have that same Monte Carlo. Up on blocks in their parents’ front yard. My irrational fear of them was unfounded—it would have been easier for some of them to finish a full year of school than to beat my ass. (Understand: I was 125 lbs. fully clothed in high school, so the spectre of iminent beat-down hung heavy over my head at all times.) Luckily, I got out of there and went to art school, where that group of antisocial wackos got switched with a whole new bunch. But that’s a different story. Interesting side notes: the ‘featured subjects’ in HMPL are from the suburban towns in and around Baltimore, and the only thing worse than a burnout with a proto-Brooklyn accent is a burnout with a heavy Maryland accent. Words cannot describe.