It's dinner time, although my body feels more like it should be getting ready for bed. The wh*** family is a bit jet lagged but happy to be back stateside for the first time in awhile.
Being a digital nomads of the 1st order still means dealing with the body's traditional expectations of a geographically rooted life.
By now the guerrilla gardening and food punk movements in the US have gone from being cool, to being over-hyped, to again return to the underground passions. The more pragmatic (or older) eschewed the trends and simply traded their suburban, water-guzzling backyard lawns for gardens
ala the Obamas. With post-peak oil causing unpredictable prices and transportation delays at grocery stores many turned to local gardens make up the gap.
Of course, all the travel means that my family isn't really in a position to raise our own. We made that mistake a few summers ago - got everything planted, saw it green through June, and then we left it in the hands of a younger relative for a month when we were called away. We came back to find a brown mess of dry husks and blooming weeds. This is the same relative that says she likes the unpredictability at the store as it "forces her to try new things". I wish I could have that same adaptability but, having grown up in an age of anything and everything being available only a few blocks away, I have different - some say outdated - expectations.
I double shake my mobile and set it on the table top. The faint red outline of the
infrared keyboard appears and the soft glow of a command prompt
is projected against the near wall. While we haven't been stationary enough to grow a garden,
growing information is not tied to any location. A couple of queries using some geolocation and seasonality info and I've identified three community food exchanges within a bike ride - two of which appear to be using an older version of a ranking and comment engine I recently open sourced. I tag a to-do to send the administrative contacts a friendly reminder to update and do a meta search for
strawberries.
One of the exchanges is food-for-food only and I abandon that query thread - there may be a time for arbitrage trading after we settle in but my wife, two kids, and I are too hungry (and sleepy) to haggle. The other accepts equivalent energy or carbon credits. This is good as I still have a few carbon credits around from a summer spent
no-till farming with my father. There's never been enough left over to invest in the peer-to-peer lending markets. But for a light dinner of greens, strawberries, and Greek yogurt it'll be more than enough.
A quick transfer of funds, phone call to confirm, and a ten minute bike ride later I've got dinner. It may not be bringing home the bacon in the same way my father and his father did. But its sure a hell of a lot healthier.
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