singingbarista

I’ve lived in apartments and such for 17 years, but this was my first year in an honest-to-goodness house.

Huge back yard, so I picked up a copy of Square Foot Gardening and set up a large bed. Amost immediatly, I realized that I was swimming in cherry tomato plants. I grew stevia, sunflowers, and attemped carrots. I harvested 2 pears, some cherries, and have a sugar pumpkin on the way. Millet. A grape vine is confused. The herbs exploded in tastiness.

I ended up feeding a whole bunch of birds, some bugs, and a sigh family of raccoons. I learned about halfway through the summer that cocoa shells keep cats away. Aphids took over all the salad greens, until I brought in a fleet of ladybugs. Then I found out that a tree on our property was a hazelnut tree. Squirrels started burying nuts in my mint.

It was fun, and I had a blast trying to figure things out. Next year will be great!

I realized that I will never be done messing with my portfolio. I finally took a bunch of pieces, scanned them, turned each one into a .pdf document and wrote a blurb for each about what the client wanted and who was involved and what I learned from the project.

Like my resume, I now customize my portfolio for every job. When I field a potential client, I choose 5-10 pieces that I think would be best for them to see, compile the .pdf docs and put on a cover that lists all the blurbs for the pieces. Then I put it into a reusable snazzy binder. Piecemeal rocks!

It’s awesome, because I can change my mind. And every time I have a meeting, I feel great because it feels like I have a brand-new, perfect portfolio. Clients like it too, because they see only what they are interested in, rather than searching through everything I can do.

We started off with the tour, and then explored a bit on our own. We had two headlamps and an LED lantern. I wished we had rented the big Coleman lantern from the shop. It’s worth it. The tunnels just absorbed all our light and it was hard to watch our step.

Few people went to the end of the lower cave, so it was full sense-deprivation when we turned the lights off to get the full effect.

Of course, then some kids bumped into us in the dark, and we all freaked out. :) Good times.