Introduction

Why the hell am I doing this? (No, not the blog)

This thought hit me more than once over the past year as I hauled compost from car to rooftop garden, spent a lovely afternoon pulling bales of straw apart and spreading it around tomato plants, or swallowed up an evening processing a few dozen pounds of summer squash into soup, zucchini bread, and bags of shredded squash to freeze for some barely-imaginable date in the future when I wouldn't be sick of summer squash anymore.

I am a man of projects. The day-to-day maintenance of a life interests me little. I can't stand laundry, or cleaning, or paying bills, or checking email at work. A new project, though, fills me with glee and excitement: inoculating soybeans and culturing fresh tempeh? scouring a mountainside for a hypothesized population of obscure salamanders? starting eight tomato varieties -- hybrids and heirlooms, all with fascinating back stories -- from seed? launching a podcast? This is living.

The problem is that I have too many projects. The day is finite. Twenty-four hours minus the day job and child rearing leaves precious little project time. I have big projects and little projects, but the little projects have a habit of sucking up the big-project time, so that I'm left with a lot of tomatoes and still no podcast.

In 2015 everything changes. This is my resolution: I will do less so that I can do better. I will embrace convenient living, the world of frozen dinners, takeout food, and simpler shopping that I have till now disdained from my socially-conscious, vegetarian, environmentalist, ethicurian pedestal. And I will fight the pull of the garden, that place and activity that can gobble up free time like no other. Follow along and see if I can pull it off.