Rick & Christy's Sustainability Adventure: Easter Weekend Part III (Sunday)

Durham, NC

What a difference 8 hours of sleep makes. That coupled with being able to stretch out diagonally in bed - sorry Christy - makes all the difference. Adrian and Keith are awesome hosts. They're so accomodating and I just thoroughly enjoy myself whenever I visit. So today is Easter Sunday and my mom, Ron, brother Roney, his wife Beatriz, and kids Parisa, Bianca & baby Micah will be joining us for dinner. This will also be the first time I see Micah who was born a few weeks ago.

Adrian and I ran a few errands during the day. While out and about we saw this woman with rain barrels in the back of her truck. We pulled up beside her and asked where she got the barrels. She gave us the name and number of her source and so we called and made arrangements to meet the guy selling them. Adrian and Keith had already installed one at their house and wanted a couple more. So we ended up purchasing 4 - two for A & K and two for Christy and me. The guy who sold them modified them himself. Two of the barrels were formerly used for olives from Argentina. It looked pretty easy to modify so perhaps we can do so in the future. I'm envisioning Christy and me having a water collection system in excess of 500 gallons. Consider this, for every 1" of rain falling on a 1000 sq foot roof, 600 gallons of water can be captured. That's incredible! So after one inch of rain fall one could fill 12 50 gallon barrels. We don't have to suffer the consequences of a city imposed restriction on water use if we all collected our own rain water.

Before dinner, Roney had taken the girls to a nearby park. I ended up joining them for some tennis. On the way back to the house I borrowed the soccer ball Bianca was holding and kicked it up ahead of us. The ball did a Beckham bend and ended up hitting the driver side of a car in which a woman was sitting. She turned to look at us and immediately drove off. I couldn't believe it. Here I was feeling so guilty and expecting to have to apologize and she simply drives off. I guess she felt a little intimidated by the girls presence.

Dinner was enjoyable as always at A&K's - a baked ham and roasted vegetables followed by a homemade velvet cake my mom made. All was delicious as was the company.

Afterwards I did a little demonstration on how to put together a hot batch compost bin.