Project Pan 2019 - Update #3

As predicted, this quarter has been a very slow one, not helped by the fact that I've been wearing make up a lot less over the last few months.  That being said I have still managed to get through the couple of items I had hoped for in the last update.  Of the products left two are going to be difficult to actually track progress on as it is difficult to see through the packaging.  So it looks like I'll just have to keep using them until nothings seems to come out of the packaging.  Fingers crossed that happens before the end of 2019.  

Starting with the products I've finished, the Urban Decay x Gwen Stefani lipstick in 714 was the first to go.  If there was going to be a red lipstick I would make myself then this would be it.  It's exactly what I want with the right shade, blue undertones, and a matt finish.  It also has really good staying power with very little transfer.  It's basically the perfect red for me and Urban Decay is cruelty free.  However, having spent many years wearing lipstick all the time I am wondering if that's really something I want to bother with anymore and, once my lipsticks are done, I'm going to go without to see how that goes.  If I do decide to carry on wearing lipsticks I'm probably going to go for more natural ones any way, so it's unlikely I'll be buying this again.  But I would definitely recommend it if you are looking for a red lipstick.

The next thing to go was the The Body Shop lip liner in Hot Date.  I actually liked this product a lot more than I thought I would, probably because tea rose is one of my favourite lip colours.  It's also very creamy and easy to apply, though that does mean that it's staying power wasn't the best - at least on the lips.  I have regularly just used it on it's own as a lip colour with some lip balm and have also tried putting it on my cheeks as a bit of a stain (it actually worked really well as a cheek stain so definitely give that a try is you have it).  The end of this lip liner is actually the end of all my lip liners, which I am very happy about and I don't intend on buying anymore lip liners from now on.  If I do get any lip products in the future it will just be a lipstick or stain that I can just use on it's own.  The Body Shop is cruelty free (though it's parent company isn't) and I would recommend this liner is you're looking for something that has a creamy texture to it.

The Body Shop black liquid eyeliner is one of the products where I really have no idea how far along I am.  There is definitely less product coming out on the applicator then when I first started using it (which is actually making it easier to use but does mean that I have to dip the applicator back in more often), but there's no real sign that I'm close to finishing it.  I may just keep using it until the recommend shelf life is up and then stop for hygiene reasons, but I'll see how it goes.  Now that I've got used to using this I actually quite like it and the look it gives.  It does need a couple of coats to make it properly black and it does begin to flake off a little bit by the end of the day, but the applicator makes it very user friendly and it's definitely one of better ones I used in all my time wearing makeup.

Then there's The Body Shop Matte lip liquid in Tahiti Hibiscus, which I have finally got into wearing this quarter.  It's definitely a lot redder than I was expecting from the outer packaging and I quite like it.  When it comes to staying power the Urban Decay x Gwen Stefani lipstick definitely beats it and I did find the lip liquid on my teeth a few times (always attractive), but it is very comfortable on the lips and doesn't seem to dry mine out at all.  This is another one where it difficult to tell how far a long you are and the only indicator I have is that I now have to wiggle the applicator a bit more to get any product out.  I may have to just do the same thing as I'm going to do with the liquid eyeliner and use it until they recommend you chuck it for hygiene reasons.

And lastly the NYX Powder Blush in Taupe and The Balm highlighter in Mary-Lou Manizer.  They are both finally beginning to show signs of progress and I can see where the products are beginning to go down.  I still don't think I'll actually see pan by the end of the year but it's good to know I am going through these products, especially as so little is needed with each application.  They will probably both be rolled over to what I hope is going to be my last project pan in 2020.

That's it for this update with eight products gone and four left to go.  Obviously I would have hoped that I'd have been further along than this but it's still pretty good progress.  I'm already looking at what I have left in my stash for next year, which I think is actually going to be more of a year of testing things out and deciding what I want to keep rather than a panning project, but more on that later.  The Body Shop liquid eyeliner and liquid lip are the two products I'm really going to be concentrating on now and, fingers crossed, they'll be done in the next three months.

Goals for 2019 - Update #3

 
I wish that I could say that I completely turned around my goal achievements this quarter and am now on the road to completing all my goals by the end of 2019.  This is, of course, completely untrue. 😂 To say that I've been a little preoccupied would be an understatement and some of the goals I had set for myself have drifted off to do their own thing.  Needless to say, the outcome hasn't been particularly healthy or good for me and I now have one more quarter to finally get them on track.

Healthy Eating

On the whole my eating has gotten healthier this quarter, with me putting even more vegetable into my diet and, overall, reducing the amount of gluten I've been consuming.  I've actually lost a little bit more fat and, more importantly, my body feels much stronger than it did before.  This is most definitely helped by the work I do, but a good diet is really important to keeping your body healthy when working it hard.

Where I've fallen down on the healthy eating is with my usual nemesis, sugar.  I haven't really been paying attention, but when I actually started keeping an eye on what I was eating this last month I realised that I had definitely fallen back onto having quite a few sugary treats.  Not just that but it was happening more often and the amount of sugar each time was increasing.  You might think that, with the very physical job I do, this extra sugar wouldn't really matter too much, especially as I'm still losing fat.  But sugar does more bad things than just help you put on weight and I know how important reducing my sugar is to increase my bodies general well-being.  So, I'm going to give reducing it yet another go again this quarter (if at first you don't succeed and all that), but might need to bring in some helpers again in the form of fizzy water (totally ridiculous I know) and crunchy snacks. 

I'm going to let myself be a little bit more relaxed about it over the weekend, but I don't want to slip too far the other way and just binge on sugar for two days a week.  Time to start showing some real restraint.  I know I can, I've just been being lazy and let the little sugar monsters reign in my brain.

So, I failed on my mini goal for this quarter, but I'm going to roll it on to the next.  Sugary treats only on two occasions a week.

Reducing Waste

On the whole I have managed to reduce my waste quite a bit these last few months, and that's predominantly due to me doing even less shopping than before (if that's actually possible).  The one place in which I am still struggling, which surprises me a little, is food shopping.  My diet is predominantly plant based and you would have thought that that would have meant that there would be almost no packaging at all in my basket.  However, in a number of shops I've been to there is plastic wrapped around every vegetable.  I don't really understand why this has now become the case and I really don't understand the hygiene argument a lot of shops give seeing as you wash your veg before you eat them anyway.  

Co Op seems to be the worst offenders of this at the moment, which is frustrating as it's one of the shops I end up having to go to most often.  I have been keeping an eye out for farm shops as I travel around, but these mainly seem to only sell meat and eggs with not a lot of vegetables, so they haven't been the help I was hoping they were going to be.  

Whilst I did try to carry out my mini goal for this quarter there is definitely more work needed as it didn't exactly work out.  I'm going to keep looking for other options and possible solutions to help reduce the amount of waste I produce, but if you have any suggestions please let me know.  They would be greatly appreciated.

Learning New Skills

Work

I took the dry stone walling course in July and have already written a post about it, which you can find here.  It was really interesting and gave me a good insight into a different way of using stones to build structures.  It is definitely a future job I would like to look more into, but as it requires a lot more training than I have time for at the moment it'll probably be something I come back to later on.  

As before, trying to learn the names of different flowers is something I keep coming back to whilst at work.  This is a slow process, especially as it can only take place during breaks or the walks to and from the work sites, and will probably take a while before I feel really confident about it.

I have also found someone who may be able to help me with having a refresher on my navigation skills, and I'm going to contact them and see what they say.  I figured this was a much better option than just winging it on my own in case I'm making some very serious mistakes that might need rectifying.

Mini goals is definitely a tick for this quarter and I'm planning on getting the navigation skills sorted for the next.  Then this goal at least will have been a success.

Home

I now have a new, well second hand, laptop which means that I now have the software I need to carry on doing my BSL learning.  It's been great getting back to learning this again and I've been enjoying it, despite the fact that we've now moved onto more complex, scary stuff like stringing a sentence together.  This does mean that I am having to learn a new form of grammar, which I have to admit is freaking my brain out a little.  But it's all part of keeping your brain active and healthy.

My mini goal here was to try and do one BSL learning section a week, but I've actually managed do more than that and have noticed a difference in the amount I've managed to take in.  My mini goal for the upcoming quarter is to finish this course and I've put a timetable in place, as if I was back at school, which makes it pretty likely I will achieve that my the end of the year.

So, the learning new skills goal has gone pretty well so far, but the other two not so much.  I'm trying not to be negative about this as it won't help and I still have three more months to ensure that I get back on track.  Whilst the sugar goal is probably going to be the most difficult personally, the reducing packaging goal is probably going to be the most frustrating as it is the one least under my control.  However, my aim is to end this year on a high note and I'm now more determined than before to do that.  Onwards and upwards.

The Concept of Shifting Baseline Syndrome

I have a very specific memory from the beginning of this year which keeps cropping up in my head.  It's the memory of the strong feeling I had when I had finished working in a beautiful Caledonian pinewood and started work in an area of land that is managed for grouse shooting.  The conspicuous contrast in the amount of life you could see and hear in these two habitats was very evident  and made me think about the other moorlands I drive and walk through a lot in Scotland.  Knowing as I do that Caledonian pinewoods used to cover large areas of Scotland before cutting, burning, and grazing depleted them to just 1% of their original extent, it's made me realise just how 'unnatural' a lot of the Scottish landscape actually is.

And yet many people don't see it as unnatural at all.  They see it as rugged and wild, untamed and one of the last natural places in Britain, completely unaware of just how managed it is.  I know this as I used to be one of these people and it made me wonder about how it is that we can be seeing a landscape so falsely?  How are we not seeing nature as damaged as it actually is?  So I did what I always do when I have questions and started researching, and during my research I came across the concept of Shifting Baseline Syndrome.

The idea of Shifting Baseline first appeared in a landscape architect's, Ian McHarg, publication 'Design with Nature' in 1969 when he was comparing modern landscapes with that in which ancient people used to live.  Shifting Baseline Syndrome was then coined by a marine biologist called Daniel Pauly in 1995 when writing about the fact that fisheries management scientist tended to use the population size of fish populations at the beginning of their careers as the baseline for stock management rather than at its untouched state as the baseline for stock management.  This meant that inaccurate advice was then being provided as the baseline was much lower then it should actually be.  

However, this is not just confined to fisheries management but is actually a common problem when it comes to how people view the natural world around them.  As we believe that what we remember from our childhood is when nature was at its normal, most natural state, we pay little attention to what we perceive as a slight loss unaware that it was already depleted in the first place.  This new level of depleted wildness then becomes the new baseline for the next generation.  A good example of this is the lost of a rare species.  When they go extinct it is taken as a sad but unsurprising loss, the population size was after all already small.  However, they are forgetting that the population size of many of these species actually used to be quite large, but declining with each generation.  This decline was so gradual that we basically sleepwalked into the situation.

This concept is now being increasingly recognised as one of the fundamental obstacles faced by conservation organisations when trying to address the wide range of global environmental issues we face today.  Trying to get individuals to care about an issue when they only see a relatively minor change is difficult and education is greatly needed to help people see just how far the baseline has shifted, even within a few generations.  Then we can have a more realistic eye opening conversation about the problems we're facing and the actions we need to take to solve them.

Don't get me wrong, I still find the stark Scottish scenery beautiful, but this beauty is tempered by the fact that I know I should also being seeing large woodlands in that scenery.  And I have to admit, in my eyes at least, it would be all the more beautiful for it.

Mini Film Review: Sustainable

Based in America, Sustainable looks at the economic and environmental instability of agriculture in the US.  It looks at issues such as soil loss, pesticide use, fertiliser run off, and climate change.  The narrative of the documentary mainly looks at a seventh generation Illinois farmer called Marty Travis who, after seeing the affects of big agribusiness on his land and local community, transformed his former wasteland into a profitable business and started the sustainable food movement in Chicago.  They also interview other farmers and individuals from the food movement (including chefs and bakers) to find out how they are trying to make the food sector in America more sustainable and to keep, or sometimes build, the community that used to be a common part of farming.

There were a few things that I found particularly interesting in this documentary.  The first was the fact that the farmers do not have to pay for the cost of the fall out from their activities, such as clearing up the nitrate problems that occur in the water ways from fertiliser run off.  This completely separates this sector from the true cost of the type of farming and also means that there is no real incentive to make any changes.  It is left to the individual to make that decision purely on personal conviction.  

The second is that the system is not geared towards providing food and future food security to the nation, but towards making money for a few organisations.  This can be seen by the fact that seeds are sold which are all genetically identical (genetically diverse crop are not economic for seed sellers) and sterile, and that any problem that a farmer comes across is promoted as only being fixable by using a bottle of chemicals.  But research shown in this documentary showed that genetically diverse crops are much more resilient as a whole and much less susceptible to disease.  It also showed that high biodiversity on a farm also fixes many of the issues, such as soil loss and lack of nitrogen in the soil, faced by farmers today in a much cheaper, long lasting way.

Perhaps the most interesting person on this documentary to me wasn't actually Marty but an Amish farmer called John Kempf, who you don't actually get to see as his religion will not allow it.  The founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture he has been promoting an alternative way of farming called Regenerative Agriculture.  This is a holistic land management practise born from the experience of farming in his Amish community, which looks at ways of improving soil health and nutrient density in a much more natural way, making the plants healthier and allowing their own immune system to look after the crops instead of the chemicals usually used.  Crops looked after in this way become more resilient and the soil is not only healthier but more able to store carbon.

Whilst farming in Britain isn't as large as that in America, it is just as intense in many cases and there are the same issues of genetic monocultures, soil loss, and the perceived need to use large quantities of chemical fertilisers and pesticides.  The affects on our surrounding ecosystems and the possible threat to our food security are very much the same, and this makes this a very interesting documentary to watch about the possible alternatives we could bring here and to other countries.  With changes that will definitely be coming to our shores due to climate change, even if we are able to curb the temperature rise to 1.5°C, building resilience in our crops and farming practises as a whole is something we do need to be looking into. Definitely worth a watch.

Path Work - August (Glencoe)

To say that August has been a wet month is probably a big understatement, we've rarely had a day that it hasn't rained on us.  We have had some beautifully sunny days, but we've also had some absolute down pours, usually when we're already at the site pretty high up the path.  Still on the Coire nan Lochan path, the two sites we've been working on in August have been at the bedrock at the top of the path where it begins to disappear and half way down the path at one of the scree sites.

To begin with we finished off the stone pitching we had been adding onto of the bedrock to help make it a lot more accessible and easier to walk on, taking people away from the sides which are much more difficult to navigate than they look.  

We then carried on the stone pitching above this slab of bedrock where the water running down the hill had produced a large, slippery gully, fitting the stones in between the bedrock and tufts of vegetation that was left.  

Here a lot more work was needed than we had initially thought, including a revetment, but thankfully we were able to find the amount of stones we actually needed to complete the work.  

As a rule of thumb you always need a lot more stones (and I mean A LOT more) than you might think for stone pitching. 

Due to the amount and speed of the water that flows down this section we decided to add a double water bar at the top of the stone pitching to help move as much of this as possible off path.  Later my work colleague added a very large ditch to help catch an amazingly large amount of water from the side of the hill and channel it through this water bar into the gully below. 

And then there was more stone pitching to a section that was also just another deep, slippery gully.  This took us over the last bit of bedrock we were needing to work on and onto the much flatter final section.  It's interesting watching people now walk over this section of path.  Before it was more of a scramble, with people often having to use their hands to help get up over the top.  Now they walk up with relative ease, though the path is still pretty steep and unfortunately we can't really do anything about that. 

Once the bedrock section was finished, including packing, landscaping, and adding surfacing, we moved onto the last upper section of the path.  A couple of step rises were added just below a water bar that was already there from previous work to help hold the surfacing in place and then we needed to work on this original bar.  

The ditching on either side had become overgrown and was no longer properly channelling water both to and from the bar.  This meant that is was just flowing back onto the path.  The ditching on both sides was re-dug and made much larger, hopefully increase the amount of time before it became overgrown again, and we did get to see our handy work on a very rainy day.  There's a lot of water now being caught by those ditches and not now heading down the path - always satisfying.

Before

After

After

The water bar was then turned into a double water bar to help hold the surfacing back, reducing the chance of the bar become clogged again (especially as it took us a while to find the original liners after quite a bit of digging).  A small revetment on the hill side attached to the water bar meant that we could channel water coming from an upper section of peat into the water bar as well.  

Then it was more step rises and stone pitching until we came to the point where the path began to disappear and people are able to make their own way to the upper paths.  This was probably the most satisfying section to build as we were needing to find very specific and unusually shaped stones to fit the space we had.  It's always good when they all fit together, like they were meant to be, and look like a natural part of the rocks surrounding them.  Many probably won't even realise that these stones have been added.

Finally we added a revetment with a large end stone to help navigate the water off this section of path and into a gully which led to the original water bar we had already been working on.

And then we started heading back down the path, carrying out final bits of landscaping and tidying as we went.  I also added what is probably the worst made cairn ever (note to self - definitely need practise on this) to help navigate people up the bedrock at one of the easiest routes.  Thankfully a work colleague redid the cairn and it's now much better - the photo is of my one so I wouldn't judge it on that.

Back down the path we are back at one of the previous scree sites which has already been showing signs of damage from the sheer amount of water we've had falling here recently.   The large amount of rain had led to channels forming on the path, removing surfacing from some of the step rises we had placed and increasing the size of the gully in the path just down from this area.  

The first thing we did was move some more larger stones down to the path to hold back more of the scree on the hill side which was being washed onto the path.  

Then a double water bar was added just above the previously built step rises, made relatively deep to catch the amount of water travelling at this point.

Finally, now that we had channelled most of the water off the path, we added some step rises to the section just below the scree site where the gully was forming.  This was to raise the path again and to help hold the surfacing in place, reducing any future erosion.  

Because this gully had also begun to undermine a revetment previously built on the hill side we also had to add another row of stones below the previous ground level section to hold it all in place.  As with all of the built features, this section needed to be packed, landscaped and surfacing added.

Not a bad months worth of work when you add in the fact that we had quite a few days of high winds and heavy rain battering against us.  A couple of times the wind has been so strong it's made it difficult just to stand up let alone get some actual work done.  But then it wouldn't be Scotland, and certainly not Glencoe, if you didn't get some really bad weather followed by some glorious periods of warm sun which you enjoy, suspicious of what's coming next.