Black Gold

The Prime Geek stopped by my office door, watching in amusement as I spun myself from side to side on my swiveling office chair. He had heard me grumping from the next room and wandered over to see what had made me yelp “$270! Just because it spins?!?”

“Anything wrong?”

“Yes. They want $160 for the plain jane model, $250 for this one with the foot pump, $270 for the one that spins… and it looks like this one is $320 without the attachments… but they want another $40 to light it up!”

He just looked at me for a moment. I could see confusion, amusement, and touch of fear cross his face in rapid secession. Several sentences seemed to almost be said, but in the end he settled for the most basic first.

“What, and I realize I might regret this, are we talking about… exactly?”

“The ability to utilize undervalued post consumables and partially desiccated yard waste and…. Hold on, I lost the ad….. ah, yes. And transform them into highly valuable and irreplaceable black gold.”

The Prime Geek is an eloquent man. Well read, highly intelligent, able to not just keep up with the herd but to leave them shuffling through his dust. Even so, this particular bit of advertising verbiage was met with a simple “Huh?”

“Composters. I want to start composting our kitchen scraps and grass clippings because the dirt in the back is pretty sad stuff. Dad says if we compost now and spread it around back there we have a much better chance at having a garden next year. But, all I have found so far are a list of overpriced trashcans that all claim to do something remarkably spiffy to trash. All I want is a simple place to contain everything and let it rot without stinking up the neighborhood. These all seem designed to be backup units for the space station!”

The Prime Geek is not a gardening kind of guy. Frankly, I consider myself lucky that he agrees to do the heavy lifting portion of the yard work – tote a bag of mulch here, dig a hole for a rose bush there, generally make himself useful in all the ways that don’t involve him being responsible for keeping a small green thing alive. Once things are lifted, shoved, dug, or pulled - he considers himself done and scoots out of the yard as fast as possible. But he IS the mad scientist, and anything that challenges him to one up “the man” and do things on the cheap fills him with an amazing zeal for experimentation. I had apparently waved a red flag at his creative side.

“Scoot over. Let’s take a look at this……..”