Life's little surprises

Just for the record, I love my husband. I don't moodle much about him because he's a private kind of guy. Last week he surprised me by taking me to see the newest pretty little pedestrian/bike bridge in town near Fort Edmonton. We had a lovely Sunday afternoon walk and coffee shop stop, just the two of us. That hasn't happened in ages!

Yesterday, he surprised me again. I arrived home from my presentation at the Social Justice Institute rather tired, and as I turned into our driveway, the garage door came up to show me... my birthday present, which my darling man spent all day building while I was gone!

In case you don't know what it is, it's a three bin composter!

Yesss!

Now before that blows all previous romanticism out of the water, let me explain what this means to me, even though you'll probably think I'm rather strange. I am very excited about my present because:

1) I love composting, turning organic food scraps into organic matter/fertilizer for my garden. Nature gives me so much; it's only right to give something back.

2) My old composter wasn't terribly efficient, took a lot of back-breaking effort because it wasn't built for the kind of composting I do, and it was also a health hazard. It was falling apart, with rusty nails sticking out of it in all sorts of dangerous places.

3) I had blueprints for this new three-bin system for four years, and looked forward to making them reality, but it just wasn't happening somehow.

4) My hubby gave me something wonderfully useful that I will enjoy for years to come, and

5) he gave up an entire Saturday, his day off, to build it for me! If that's not love, I don't know what is (though he did admit he enjoyed the process of building something real for a change).

It's a beautiful thing, my composter. The front wall has wooden slats that can be removed to make shoveling from one bin to the next easier, and our old compost sifter (that we made three years ago when I was working with the too-large single bin) fits inside the last bin of the three just perfectly.

I start my compost in the far bin. Plant-based kitchen scraps, leaves, dirt and other compostable stuff gets mixed in there. After the pile has had some watering, stirring and time to heat up and shrink down, I'll flip it into the second bin and let it do some more composting in there (with more watering and stirring). Then I can sift it (or not) into the finishing bin, and leave it until it's cooked a little more, and voila, black gold for the garden!

And those three bins wouldn't be if my husband didn't love me. I've told other peoples' love stories on my moodlings, and it dawns on me now that maybe I could tell a few more of my own. But as I said before, my man's a private kind of guy. I love him, and his little (and not-so-little) surprises. I'll leave it at that.