Adapting in Place

It's that time of year again....

2011-12-15T07:44:00.000-05:00

Time for the annual posting of my favorite holiday story! I hope you enjoy it! I'm not ashamed to say it makes me tear up every time I read it.

VISIONS OF SUGARPLUMS
by Margaret Morrison

Five minutes before the Winter Solstice circle was scheduled to begin, my mother called. Since I’m the only one in our coven who doesn’t run on Pagan Standard Time, I took the call. Half the people hadn’t arrived, and those who had wouldn’t settle down to business for at least twenty minutes.

”Merry Christmas, Frannie.”

”Hi, Mom. I don’t do Christmas.”

”Maybe not—but I do, so I’ll say it.” she told me in her sassy voice, kind of sweet and vinegary at the same time. “If I can respect your freedom of religion, you can respect my freedom of speech.”

I grinned and rolled my eyes. “And the score is Mom - one, Fran - nothing. But I love you, anyway.”

People were bustling around in the next room, setting up the altar, decking the halls with what I considered excessive amounts of holly and ivy, and singing something like, “O Solstice Tree.”

”It sounds like a...holiday party.” Mom said.

”We’re doing Winter Solstice tonight.”

”Oh. That’s sort of like your version of Christmas, right?”

I wanted to snap back that Christmas was the Christian version of Solstice, but I held back. “We celebrate the return of the sun. It’s a lot quieter than Christmas. No shopping sprees, no pine needles and tinsel on the floor, and it doesn’t wipe me out. I remember how you had always worked yourself to a frazzle by December 26.”

”Oh honey, I loved doing all that stuff. I wouldn’t trade those memories for all the spare time in the world. I wish you and Jack would loosen up a little for the baby’s sake. When you were little, you enjoyed Easter bunnies and trick-or-treating and Christmas things. Since you’ve gotten into this Wicca religion, you sound a lot like Aunt Betty the year she was a Jehovah’s Witness.”

I laughed nervously. “Yeah. How is Aunt Betty?”

”Fine. She’s into the Celestine Prophecy now, and she seems quite happy. Y’know,” she went on, “Aunt Betty always said the Jehovah’s Witnesses said those holiday things were pagan. So I don’t see why you’ve given them up.”

”Uh, they’ve been commercialized and polluted beyond recognition. We’re into very simple, quiet celebrations.”

”Well,” she said dubiously, “as long as you’re happy.”

Sometimes long distance is better than being there, ‘cause your mother can’t give you the look that makes you agree with everything she says. Jack rescued me by interrupting.

”Hi, Ma.” he called to the phone as he waved a beribboned sprig of mistletoe over my head. Then he kissed me, one of those quick noisy ones. I frowned at him.

”Druidic tradition, Fran. Swear to Goddess.”

”Of course it is. Did the Druids use plastic berries?”

”Always. We’ll be needing you in about five minutes.”

”Okay. Gotta go, Mom. Love you.”

We had a nice, serene kind of Solstice Circle. No jingling bells or filked-out Christmas Carols. Soon after the last coven member left, Jack was ready to pack it in.

”The baby’s nestled all snug in her bed,” he said with a yawn, ”I think I’ll go settle in for a long winter’s nap.”

I heaved a martyred sigh. He grinned unrepentantly, kissed me, called me a grinch, and went to bed. I stayed up and puttered around the house, trying to unwind. I sifted through the day’s mail, ditched the flyers urging us to purchase all the Seasonal Joy we could afford or charge. I opened the card from his parents. Another sermonette: a manger scene and a bible verse, with a handwritten note expressing his mother’s fervent hope that God’s love and Christmas spirit would fill our hearts in this blessed season. She means well, really. I amused myself by picking out every pagan element I could find in the card. When the mail had been sorted, I got up and started turning our ritual room back into a living room. As if the greeting card had carried a
virus, I found myself humming Christmas carols. I turned on the classic rock station, but they were playing that Lennon-Ono Christmas song. I switched stations. The weatherman assured me that there was only a twenty percent chance of snow. Then, by Loki, the deejay let Bruce Springsteen insult my ears crooning, “yah better watch out, yah better not pout.” I tried the Oldies station. Elvis lives, and he does Christmas songs. Okay, fine. We’ll do classical—no, we
won’t. They’re playing Handel’s Messiah. Maybe the community radio station would have something secular humanist. ”Ahora, escucharemos a Jose Feliciano canta ‘Feliz Navidad’.”
I was getting annoyed. The radio doesn’t usually get this saturated with holiday mush until the twenty-fourth.

”This is too weird.” I said to the radio, “Cut that crap out.” The country station had some Kenny Rogers Christmas tune, the first rock station had gone from John and Yoko’s Christmas song to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Silent Night,” and the other rock station still had Springsteen reliving his childhood.

”—I’m tellin’ you why. SANTA Claus is comin’ to town!” he bellowed. I was about to pick out a nice secular CD when there was a knock at the door.

Now, it could have been a coven member who’d forgotten something. It could have been someone with car trouble. It could have been any number of things, but it certainly couldn’t have been a stout guy in a red suit—snowy beard, rosy cheeks, and all—backed by eight reindeer
and a sleigh. I blinked, wondered crazily where Rudolph was, and blinked again. There were nine reindeer. Our twenty-percent chance of snow had frosted the dead grass and was continuing to float down in fat flakes.

”Hi, Frannie.” he said warmly, “I’ve missed you.”

”I’m stone cold sober, and you don’t exist.”

He looked at me with a mixture of sorrow and compassion and sighed heavily. “That’s why I miss you, Frannie. Can I come in? We need to talk.”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to slam the door on this vision, hallucination, or whatever. So I let him in, because that made more sense then letting all the cold air in while I argued with someone who wasn’t there. As he stepped in, a thought crossed my mind about various entities needing an invitation to get in houses. He flashed me a smile that would melt the polar caps.

”Don’t you miss Christmas, Frannie?”

”No.” I said flatly, “Apparently you don’t see me when I’m sleeping and waking these days. I haven’t been Christian for years.”

”Oh, now don’t let that stop you. We both know this holiday’s older than that. Yule trees and Saturnalia and here-comes-the-sun, doodoodendoodoo.”

I raised an eyebrow at the Beatles reference, then gave him my standard sermonette on the appropriation and adulteration that made Christmas no longer a Pagan holiday. I had done my homework. I listed centuries, I named names—St. Nicholas among them. “In the twentieth century version,” I assured him, “Christmas is two parts crass commercialism mixed with one part blind faith in a religion I rejected years ago.” I gave him my best lines, the ones that had convinced my coven to abstain from Christmasy cliches. My hallucination sat in Jack’s favorite chair, nodding patiently at me.

”And you,” I added nastily, “come here talking about ancient customs when you—in your current form—were invented in the nineteenth century by, um...Clement C. Moore.”

He laughed, a rolling, belly-deep chuckle unlike any department-store Santa I’d ever heard. “Of course I change my form now and then to suit fashion. Don’t you? And does that stop you from being yourself?” He said, and asked me if I remembered Real Magic, by Isaac Bonewits.

I gaped at him for a moment, then caught myself. “This is like ‘Labyrinth’, right? I’m having a dream that pretends to be real, but is only made from pieces of things in my memory. You don’t look a thing like David Bowie.”

”Bonewits has this Switchboard Theory.” Santa went on amiably, “The energy you put into your beliefs influences the real existence of the archetypal—oh, let me put it simpler: ‘in the beginning, Man created God’. Ian Anderson.” He lit a long-stemmed pipe. The tobacco had a mild and somehow Christmasy smell, and every puff sent up a wreath of smoke. “I’m afraid it’s a bit more complicated than Bonewits tells it, but that’s close enough for mortals. Are you with
me so far?”

”Oh, sure.” I lied as unconvincingly as possible. Santa sighed heavily. ”When’s the last time you left out milk and cookies for me?”

”When I figured out my parents were eating them.”

”Frannie, Frannie. Remember pinda balls, from Hinduism?”

”Rice balls left as offerings for ancestors and gods.”

”Do Hindus really believe that the ancestors and gods eat pinda balls?”

”All right, y’got me there. They say that spirits consume the spiritual essence, then mortals can have what’s left.”

”Mm-hm.” Santa smiled at me compassionately through his snowy beard.

I rallied quickly. “What about the toys? I know for a fact they aren’t made by you and a bunch of non-union elves.”

”Oh, that’s quite true. Manufacturing physical objects out of magical energy is terribly expensive and breaks several laws of Nature—She only allows us to do that on special occasions. It certainly couldn’t be done globally and annually. Now, the missus and the elves and I really do have a shop at the North Pole. Not the sort of thing the Air Force would ever find. What we make up there is what makes this time a holiday, no matter what religion it’s called.”

”Don’t tell me,” I said, rolling my eyes, “you make the sun come back.”

”Oh my, no. The solar cycle stuff, the Reason For The Season, isn’t my department. My part is making it a holiday. We make a mild, non-addictive psychedelic thing called Christmas spirit. Try some.”

He dipped his fingers in a pocket and tossed red-gold-green-silver glitter at me. I could have ducked. I don’t know why I didn’t.

It smelled like snow, and pine needles, and cedar chips in the fireplace. It smelled like fruitcake, like roast turkey, like that foamy white stuff you spray on the window with stencils. It felt like
a crisp wind, Grandma’s hugs, fuzzy new mittens, pine needles scrunching under my slippers. I saw twinkly lights, mistletoe in the doorway, smiling faces from years gone by. Several Christmas carols played almost simultaneously in a kind of medley.

I fought my way back to my living room and glared sternly at the hallucination in Jack’s chair.

”Fun stuff. Does the DEA know about this?”

”Oh, Frannie. Why are you such a hard case? I told you it’s non-addictive and has no harmful side effects. Would Santa Claus lie to you?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. We looked at each other a while.

”Can I have some more of that glittery stuff?”

”Mmmm. I think you need something stronger. Try a sugarplum.”

I tasted rum ball. Peppermint. Those hard candies with the picture all the way through. Mama’s favorite fudge. A chorus line of Christmas candies danced through my mouth. The Swedish Angel Chimes, run on candle power, say tingatingatingating. Mama, with a funny smile, promised to give Santa my letter. Greeting cards taped on the refrigerator door. We rode through the tree farm on a straw-filled trailer pulled by a red and green tractor, looking for a perfect pine.
It was so big, Daddy had to cut a bit off so the star wouldn’t scrape the ceiling. Lights, ornaments, tinsel. Daddy lifted me up to the mantle to hang my stocking. My dolls stayed up to see Santa Claus, and in the morning they all had new clothes. Grandma carried in a platter with the world’s biggest turkey, and I got the drumstick. Joey’s Christmas puppy chased my Christmas kitten up the tree and it would have fallen over but Daddy held it while Mama got the kitten out. Daddy said every bad word there was but he kept laughing anyway. I sneaked my favorite plastic horse into the nativity scene, between the camels and the donkey.

I came back to reality slowly, with a silly smile on my face and a tickly feeling behind my eyes like they wanted to cry. The phrase ”visions of sugarplums” took on a whole new meaning.

”How long has it been,” Santa asked, “since you played with a nativity set?-“

”But it symbolizes—“

”The winter-born king. The sacred Mother and her sun-child. Got a problem with that? You could redecorate it with pentagrams if you like, they’ll look fine. As for the Christianization, I’ve heard who you invoke at Imbolc.”

”But Bridgid was a Goddess for centuries before the Catholic Church-oh.” I crossed my arms and tried to glare at him, but failed. “You’re a sneaky old elf, y’know?”

”The term is ‘jolly old elf.’ Care for another sugarplum?”

I did.

I tasted gingerbread. My first nip of eggnog the way the grown-ups drink it. Fresh sugar cookies, shaped like trees and decked with colored frosting. Dad had been laid off, but we managed a lot of cheer. They told us Christmas would be “slim pickings.” Joey and I smiled bravely when Mama brought home that spindly spruce. We loaded down our “Charlie Brown Christmas Tree” with every light and ornament it could hold. Popcorn and cranberry strings for the outdoor trees.
Mistletoe in the hall: plastic mistletoe, real kisses. Joey and I snipped and glued and stitched and painted treasures to give as presents. We agonized over our “Santa” letters...by now we knew where the goodies came from, and we tried to compromise between what we longed for and what we thought they could afford. Every day we hoped the factory would reopen. When Joey’s dog ate my mitten, I wasn’t brave. I knew that meant I’d get mittens for Christmas, and one less
toy. I cried. On December twenty-fifth we opened our presents ve-ery slo-wly, drawing out the experience. We made a show of cheer over our socks and shirts and meager haul of toys. I got red mittens. We could tell Mama and Daddy were proud of us for being so brave, because they
were grinning like crazy.

”Go out to the garage for apples.” Mama told us, “We’ll have apple pancakes.”

I don’t remember having the pancakes. There was a dollhouse in the garage. No mass-produced aluminum thing but a homemade plywood dollhouse with wall-papered walls and real curtains and thread-spool chairs. My dolls were inside, with newly sewn clothes. Joey was on his knees in front of a plywood barn with hay in the loft. His old farm implements had new paint. Our plastic animals were corralled in popsicle stick fences. The garage smelled like apples and hay, the
cement was bone-chilling under my slippers, and I was crying.

My knees were drawn up to my chest, arms wrapped around them. My chest felt tight, like ice cracking in sunshine. Santa offered me a huge white handkerchief. When all the ice in my chest had melted, he cleared his throat. He was pretty misty-eyed, too.

”Want to come sit on my lap and tell me what you want for Christmas?”

”You’ve already given it to me.” But I sat on his lap anyway, and kissed his rosy cheek until he did his famous laugh.

”I’d better go now, Frannie. I have other stops to make, and you have work to do.”

”Right. I’d better pop the corn tonight, it strings best when it’s stale.” I let him out the door. The reindeer were pawing impatiently at the moon-kissed new-fallen snow. I’d swear Rudolph winked at me.

”Don’t forget the milk and cookies.”

”Right. Uh, December twenty-fourth, or Solstice, or what?”

He shrugged. “Whatever night you expect me, I’ll be there. Eh, don’t wait up. Visits like this are tightly rationed. Laws of Nature, y’know, and She’s strict with them.”

”Gotcha. Thanks, Santa.” I kissed his cheek again. “Happy Holidays.”

The phrase had a nice, non-denominational ring to it. I thought I’d call my parents and in-laws soon and try it out on them. Santa laid his finger aside of his nose and nodded.

”Blessed be, Frannie.”

The sleigh soared up, and Santa really did exclaim something. It sounded like old German. Smart-aleck elf. When I closed the door, the radio was playing Jethro Tull’s “Solstice Bells.”

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Pie Crust Confidential

2011-11-21T10:56:00.000-05:00

This was actually a comment on Sharon Astyk's post "Pie Crust Chronicles". I claim that I only posted it because I love her, and while this is true, I love all of you as well! No one should have to suffer through difficult crusts when there are tricks to be had. So here you go, with a sincere hope for a happy thanksgiving with you and your family & friends:

Only because I love you, I will pass along my very best secret weapon for pie crust making--vodka. No, not as in "drink it until you don't notice how bad the crust is", but as in an ingredient. I actually got this from Cook's Illustrated (who certainly can err on the side of fetishizing things). You see, the big tension with pie crusts is getting them to come out tender and flaky at the same time. Flaky isn't too hard (non-fully-incorporated butter is the key), but tender is tricky, because the water wants to combine with the flour to make gluten, which makes things tough. That's why all recipes say to add barely enough water to make it come together. But then it's hard to roll out, and you end up overworking the dough, which makes--heyhey--gluten! And you're right back to tough.

BUT, vodka doesn't make gluten when combined with flour! Woo hoo! So we keep some in our freezer (nice & cold), and substitute about half of the water for vodka in the recipe. You can then add a reasonable amount of liquid, making the dough more workable (and less stress-inducing), and gives the cook more wiggle room on adding water, while maintaining tenderness. The flavor bakes out, as does most of the alcohol (and really, we're talking 2-3 TBSP of vodka for an entire pie). Works a treat!

Occupying: now with more (or less) focus

2011-11-11T16:09:00.002-05:00

On my last post, I mentioned that I've been involved with the Occupy movement in our area. I got the following comment:

"Honestly, my only problem with the Occupy movement is a lack of focus. If they were a little more unified and had actual goals I think it'd be easier to understand. But I think the majority of the people out there are more lost than not."

I've found this to be one of the most common criticisms of the Occupy movement, at least by those who are at all sympathetic to it. I find this criticism to be both fair, and deeply flawed at the same time. That I can think something like this means, among other things, that I am an incredibly frustrating person to argue with. =) But no matter. I also think that this criticism, and why it's flawed, is incredibly important, so I begged the commenter's patience for me to be able to respond in a full post, rather than just in a comment. Since you know how often I post here, and now I'm writing a second post in under two weeks, you must know that I think this is important!

Okay, in essence I have three reasons to think that this criticism is flawed. They are all independent of each other--which is to say, I think that any one of them would function well on its own, even if the other two didn't pan out; or to put it a different way, they don't depend on each other. That said, I think they're all also consistent with each other--they don't cause each other problems. (And so ends today's brief lesson in critical thinking.) I do think there's something of a natural order to the responses, so I'm going to go through them one by one.

1. Reports of our lack of focus have been greatly exaggerated.

I've certainly seen any number of news reports, man-on-the-street remarks, newspaper editorials, etc., complaining that they can't even tell what we're protesting. Yet if you look at the signs, read the stories of the participants, see the posts on places like Facebook and others, I think it becomes clear that there is a basic nexus of issues. Almost all of the protests boil down to issues about the disproportionate sway of money over our government, the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots, and the betrayal of our public by the government in collusion with the banks for the bailout. And really, even these issues all boil down to one broad point--crony capitalism of the worst sort. We are protesting our near-complete loss of power, and a system that reinforces this loss, concentrating the power into fewer and fewer hands. Really, that comic above sums it up pretty well.

The problem here is that the real issues don't sum up well into 10 second sound bites, which is all that makes it onto the news anymore. The issues are complex, and the various slogans dreamed up by us placard-painters are only pointing to them, not stating them outright. So things look far less focused than they really are, and the media doesn't seem to be eager to correct this perception.

Having said that....

2. Gauge your strength before choosing your target.

There is a very genuine sense in which OWS has not chosen its targets, or made its demands, and there is a specific rationale for this. Occupiers--all of us, not just those in NY--need to be able to get a clear assessment of the real strength of OWS before issuing any demands. If this movement proves to be very strong, as I hope it will (and I think it's headed that way), then we don't want to sell ourselves short by demanding--and maybe getting--some token concessions, essentially blowing the power it has with very little to show for it. On the other hand, OWS needs to be careful not to overshoot and make demands that it does not have sufficient power to fight for, which is another way to blow what power it has. It is very tricky to gauge this, and even the best process could screw it up. The process that the GAs of OWS have decided on will be to convene a congress next year (no, of course I can't remember when) to formalize a list of demands to which they expect the President and Congress to respond. The current threat of power (as of the plans right now) will be to form a third party if the current parties are unwilling to engage with OWS to achieve our goals. This could change between now and when the congress convenes, but this is the most updated version I've seen so far.

But all of that pales before....

3. No demand is big enough.

This reason comes from this piece from Charles Eisenstein, reposted variously across the interwebs, called "Occupy Wall Street: no demand is big enough". I can't possibly do justice to his eloquence, so I hope you'll follow the link and read it, but I will excerpt the core part for my purposes here:

"Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for its lack of clear demands, but how do we issue demands, when what we really want is nothing less than the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible? No demand is big enough. We could make lists of demands for new public policies: tax the wealthy, raise the minimum wage, protect the environment, end the wars, regulate the banks. While we know these are positive steps, they aren't quite what motivated people to occupy Wall Street. What needs attention is something deeper: the power structures, ideologies, and institutions that prevented these steps from being taken years ago; indeed, that made these steps even necessary. Our leaders are beholden to impersonal forces, such as that of money, that compel them to do what no sane human being would choose. Disconnected from the actual effects of their policies, they live in a world of insincerity and pretense. It is time to bring a countervailing force to bear, and not just a force but a call. Our message is, "Stop pretending. You know what to do. Start doing it." Occupy Wall Street is about exposing the truth. We can trust its power. When a policeman pepper sprays helpless women, we don't beat him up and scare him into not doing it again; we show the world. Much worse than pepper spray is being perpetrated on our planet in service of money. Let us allow nothing happening on earth to be hidden."

And finally, I'll throw in one fourth reason, which doesn't really stand alone, but is often operating in the background of my thoughts on this--at least now, people are starting to pay attention. You know, I've spent the past 5-7 years of my life trying to get people to think about the sustainability of our institutions, of our economy, of where this is all going; for the past two years, it's even been my job to do so. And I will claim with certainty, and some humility, that all of the work that I, and everyone who reads this blog, and everyone we read, and everyone who works on this in any capacity--all put together--have not had as much success getting people to pay attention to these issues as OWS has in only two months. I'm glad we've been doing all of this work for the past few years, because finally people are coming and starting to learn about it. I credit OWS with this. Sure people might have come around on their own, or all wandered over to us eventually, but how wonderful that it is finally starting to happen en masse. And I will stand on a cold streetcorner all winter, every chance I get, if I can keep that momentum going--to just get people to wake up.

Let's define some terms, shall we?

2011-11-07T17:10:00.001-05:00

I've been AWOL again. Seriously, some of you should probably try to tie me down and chip me or something. But a thank you to PatriciaLynn for kicking my butt (gently, kindly). =)

What have I been doing? Mainly working, gardening, organizing a co-op, and Occupying. Funny how in my case, all of these are significantly interrelated. Makes for a good life--nice and consistent.

Being that I've spent a fair amount of my recent life involved with the Occupy movement, I've heard a lot of the pros and cons about what we're doing. Maybe as the days go on, I'll try to talk about them. But there's one criticism of Occupy Wall Street in particular that I am really, really worried about, because it demonstrates how far down our cultural lack of understanding of our whole financial system goes. The criticism goes something like this:

"It's not the financial institution's fault that the economy went ka-bloey a couple of years ago. People took out loans that they couldn't handle. If you take on a debt, it's your job to pay it off--it's not the fault of the banks that these people have no sense of personal responsibility. You should either pay off your debts, or you shouldn't take on the debt."

Now, there's obviously a lot going on here, and many ways to unpack this criticism. We could discuss fraudulent behavior on the part of both the borrowers and the banks, or the wonderful "exotic loan instruments" or the fact that even Dr. Nouriel Roubini (the nobel *ahem* prize winner in economics) said that he couldn't understand the loan documents for his own mortgage. We could also discuss people who bought way more than they could afford, and who just didn't care or think about the consequences, and the relative lack of personal responsibility on the part of all participants.

But that's not where I want to go here.

The core problem I have with this argument--and I think that this problem is desperately important for everyone to understand--is that all of those loans made cannot be paid back without more debt. Lemme repeat that: all of those loans CANNOT be paid back without taking on more debt. This isn't some deep social critique about the psychology of a borrower or the American point of view, this is a simple mathematical truth. It is Not Possible for the current loans to be paid back, with interest, without more people taking on more debt, because there will not be enough money to do so without more debt.

Huh?

Um.... what does someone else going into debt have to do with me having enough money to pay my loans off?

Everything.

The monetary system we currently have is designed to ensure ever-increasing debt loads, and in the absence of this, ever-increasing defaults. Or, to put it a different way, the system we have now is custom-designed to screw us all. I am not exaggerating here. This isn't a matter of personal responsibility, it's a matter of structural impossibility. It's like demanding that someone draw a triangle that has 5 sides--it's not a criticism of the artist if she looks at you like you're a nutjob, it simply isn't a possibility.

I might be able to do a decent job of explaining why this is the case--I've got a pretty good handle on it--but other people have done a better job than me, and in video form! Here's the shortest one I've seen so far, at ~20 minutes:

The Fractional Reserve System from Greg Stuessel on Vimeo.

This is the core of the story, though hardly all of it (and it's a little heavy on the scare-tactics, which I find wholly unnecessary--the system itself is scary enough). For more context, check out the link to "Money as Debt" in the sidebar. And for a very comprehensive, complete understanding of how this fits into our overall economic, energy and environmental system, watch "The Crash Course" also in my link-list on the right.

I wish I could make every person in America learn about this, somehow. So please, please--if you were with me I would actually be begging you, possibly on my knees--you care enough about the things I do that you read this blog. Take the next step--watch this video, it's only 20 minutes long. If you hate it, disagree with it, or whatever else, fine, you're out 20 minutes. But I'm betting you won't. I'm betting that quite to the contrary, if you didn't already know what was in this video, you will be very shocked indeed.

Once you've watched this video, I invite you to think about a few things. (I'm stealing this from the Crash Course.) Did you know that for the first ~300 years of our country's history, from around 1660 to the mid-1900's, we had no inflation. None. Think about that. Imagine saving $1,000, putting it in a box and burying it, and then your great grandchildren digging up that box and having the same purchasing power that you had when you buried it. Inflation is not a law of nature, it's a construction of our current monetary policy, which is in fact a very recent invention (broadly from 1913, more literally from 1973). What does it mean that anything you save becomes worthless? What does that do to our livelihoods? Huh.

But honey, think of the property value...

2011-07-22T21:27:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about the recent "vegetable felon" cases. I'd be surprised if anyone reading this blog hasn't heard about them, but the ones I'm familiar with are the "Julie Bass in Oak Park, MI" case, the "Compassion Farm" case, and the "Terrorized by CEDA" case. The cases are all a bit different, and go to different extremes (i.e., threat of three months in jail, six months in jail, and the property being seized by the city and demolished, respectively). But no matter how psycho the aims of each are (property demolition, srsly?), there is a common thread underlying all of them--no one wants to see your veggies.

From here on out, I'm basically only going to talk about the Julie Bass case, partially because it's the one I'm the most familiar with, and partially because the other two are so off the deep end crazy that it will only obscure my ultimate point (yes, this post has been brought to you today by an actual point). So here's the basic scoop: the city dug up her front lawn to do some needed sewer/drainage repairs--cool, thanks for that. Then she needed to repair her front lawn because, well, it was big piles of dirt. The family decided to put in a vegetable garden (after, they thought, obtaining permission from the city). Ordinance violation citations followed, and now the City of Oak Park is the preferred internet pariah for their Stepford Neighborhood goals (apparently the Casey Anthony thing finally ran its course).

Basically up to speed now? Good, because I'm going to say something very surprising, that I doubt you would expect to see from my fingertips--I sympathize with the surrounding homeowners. Please note that I did not say I agree with them, but I do have sympathy for them. How not? They're a product of their generations, their society, their upbringing. Look, I'm a trained philosopher. One of the real downsides to this is that I am pretty good at seeing both sides of an argument. It does a great deal of damage to otherwise wonderful rants of righteousness. (But woe betide the world when, after careful consideration and seeing both sides, I still have enough venom for one side to launch into a rant.) So unfortunately for me, I can understand the surrounding homeowner's positions. They bought their houses with certain expectations about the nature of the neighborhood, its look, and the probable nature of their property value. And they're concerned that the vegetable garden in the front yard will do harm to some or all of these.

Furthermore, they're right. The vegetable garden probably will affect the character of the neighborhood, the look of the neighborhood, and will likely harm their property value. [NB: did you see what I did there? I only claim that one of those three will actually do harm. Sneaky am I.] And this brings me, circuitously, to my point. We now live in a society where being forced to see food growing nearby is considered harmful. I don't think anyone seriously believes that if those garden beds had been filled with flowers, that Julie Bass would currently be in the media, or would be enduring harassment by anyone. Besides, the citations specifically cite the vegetables as the problem.

I was mulling this fact over in my head while working in my own garden tonight. And yes, it was hotter than Hades, let's just get that out of the way right now. What is so offensive about vegetables? I mean, there are many things that will lower a neighborhood's property value: the presence of crack houses, the installation of a waste dump, the house collapsing or being obviously derelict and falling apart, etc. I totally get why any reasonable neighborhood wouldn't want that sort of thing, and why there would be ordinances to assist in preventing or dealing with those situations. Is "seeing food growing" on the same list as "waste dump"?

Yes, seeing food growing is indeed on the same list in a great number of neighborhoods in our country. And honestly, I think that this fact all by itself goes a long way towards explaining the mess we're in as a nation right now. What hope could a country have that can no longer endure the sight of food in its natural state? What is the worth of a citizenry that thinks so highly of itself that not only does each individual feel that he/she does not have to stoop to the level of farmer, but that person can actually bring the law to bear on anyone who forces them to have contact with farming or gardening or food growing in any form. You see, I might have some sympathy with those poor, benighted neighbors, but I've lost all sympathy for the culture that spawned them.

At root, I think this is a class issue--most things in America are anymore. What is wrong with seeing food growing? The same thing that's wrong with seeing laundry hanging to dry, or chickens in the backyard, or any other of the myriad potential offenses that HOAs across America decry. It's not that it looks unseemly, it's that it looks poor. We associate growing food with poverty, and thank god we don't have to grow our own food anymore because now we're RICH! We can afford to make other people do it for us! (And pay them poorly, and make sure we never see them, and often bring in slave labor to make sure our prices are acceptable.) And we can afford machines to dry our clothes for us! And chickens?! O.M.G., those were from, like, the depression days or something. No one in their right mind would want to do anything like that again! Well, except for those folks who were too dumb to become investment bankers or interior designers. They can still do those things, but *ahem* Certainly Not Us.

So I guess my take-home message here, for what it's worth, is that this isn't about an insane property inspector in Oak Park (although that doesn't help), or about an abusive city government, or a freedom fighter woman defending her land (god bless her for it, though). This is far more systemic than that. It's about a society that is so deeply, fundamentally broken to its core that it can no longer endure sight of the most basic things that got us out of the trees and made us human beings in the first place. We've become totally and utterly ungrounded as a nation and a society.

So just imagine how hard its going to go when our economy finally does bite it.

Have a happy weekend.

No flogging!

2011-07-10T20:48:00.000-04:00

HA!

HAHAHAHAHAAAA!

I got my whole list done--DONE, I SAY! And I was having a record-breaking crappy weekend. Crappy enough that today at church, various kind people approached me quietly to make sure everything was okay. Well, no, not a bit actually. But nothing is wrong that I'm at liberty to discuss (and yes, that includes here as well, sorry). And having that list of stuff to do hanging over my head did wonders for focusing the mind--sort of like the hangman's noose. It actually provided some respite for the tormenting thoughts I was otherwise having.

So what did I accomplish? Let's review:

temporary chook pen: done and done. It is the definition of the word "kludge," but that's where my DIY skills max out, so it's just as well. I'll try to get pics soon. The baby chicks are now happily installed in their new homes, protected from outside evils like raccoons, owls, and the adult hens eyeballing them through the chicken wire. The interior of the pen is a bit difficult to access--I did mention that it's a total kludge, right?--but otherwise, it's all good. And though it was designed to be temporary, I might keep it up as an isolation area, in case I have a sick chick, or a bully that needs to get taken down a peg or two. Of course, if I do, then my next weekend list will have to include "paint roof of temporary chook pen."
I made the new waterer with the chicken nipple, and gods alive, they figured it out! I ended up using the "put jam on the nipple to encourage them" method, which was just the trick. The babies now have fresh and clean water in an easy-to-refill setup. And the hens have taken notice since they've been outside. I think I'll make another one and hang it on the outside of the pen, near where the baby chick's one is, and see if the old hens can be taught any new tricks. (Wondering what the hell I'm talking about? Click here.)
I made a wheel of Wensleydale. I'm not sure how it will turn out, though. I might've been too rough with the curd during several of the milling steps, and it's also really quite hot in our house. I think the combination of these two factors might have created a "catastrophic butterfat loss" situation--it was leaking out everywhere. Ah well, we won't know for another 3 weeks when it comes out of its cave. My guess is that it'll be good, but very crumbly rather than smooth and creamy. Live and learn, right?
Garden paths: weed-whacked. And I totally deserved the flying object right in the eye, since I couldn't be bothered to take an additional 5-10 minutes tracking down my safety glasses. No harm done, but it was a good warning shot.
Blackberry brambles are as back under control as I'm likely to get them this year. And some of the blackberries are neeeeaaarrrrllllyyyyy ripe. Mmmm, blackberries...

So I'm digging this whole "public accountability" thing--I got more done this weekend than I have in a long time. On the other hand, that's just about the maximum I can get done in one weekend, and I really didn't have any time to relax or enjoy myself. True, I do enjoy doing much of what was on my list, but a bit of time to kick back, read, spin some yarn, whathaveyou? Yeah, that didn't happen. Maybe I'll get some spinning done tonight. I've got some lovely suri alpaca roving gifted to me by my dear friend Dave, and I've been itching to get to it (and he's been needling me, too). Pretty soon I'll be getting my niece's adopted llama's fleece to process, which he'll be helping with, so I'd better clear this other roving out of the way first, right?

Right??

This weekend

2011-07-07T21:09:00.000-04:00

Okay, here's the deal. I am going to very, very publicly proclaim Those Things What I Will Do This Weekend(tm). You, in turn, will publicly shame me until I actually accomplish at least half of what I list. No, you do not get to shame me until Monday. Yes, flogging is approved (but only with wet noodles). But I draw the line at being put in the stocks--how am I supposed to finish my list then?!

So, here's the list:

Finish the temporary pen for the new chooks. (No, I'm neither British nor Australian, I'm just a snob and I like that bit of slang.)
Create a new water-feeder for the baby birds using the water nipples (damnit, one set of birds is gonna figure this thing out if it kills me).
Make a new wheel of cheese--my husband has selected Wensleydale (Hi Wallace!!!). I shall be following the method a la Monsieur Gavin, my new favorite cheese blog. Okay, my only favorite cheese blog. But if there were more than one cheese blog out there, and even if lots of them were my favorites, I think that Gavin's would still be my most favorite.
Weed-whack the garden paths. Again. (Godsdamned crabgrass.)
Get my blackberry canes back under control.

I pulled my first potato out of the ground today. Lunch tomorrow!

And hey, did I tell you guys that I've made my first Cheddar? It's true! At least, I really hope it's my first Cheddar. I guess we won't know until we actually try it. It might be my first, "Dear, I'm not sure this is Cheddar." (Sort of like "I can't believe it's not butter" but ... well ... not.) Right now it's in a little cooler in front of a fan, sitting on top of a plastic thingy of ice, developing a rind. I'm then going to vacuum seal it (unless my mom gets me cheese waxes for my birthday, in which case I'll wax it), and put it into *da da daDUM* The Cheese Cave. What's with the cooler? Well, it's like 85*F in our house right now, which is well and truly too warm to be letting a cheese sit out to develop a rind--it will start leaking oil everywhere. So I've tried to put it somewhere that it will stay at least in the mid-70's. And the cheese cave? What, do you think I did major excavation on my house last week? *snort* If you haven't figured out how much I suck at DIY yet, you haven't been around long. I scored a sweet little dorm fridge off of Craigslist for $30. I just plugged it in and set it at its warmest setting, and we'll see where that leaves us. Cheddars should age at ideal temps of around 50*-60*F, which I sorely doubt the fridge will achieve. I may put it on a timer and only run it for a few hours a day, see if that works. If I get both desperate and dedicated to cheesemaking, I may spring for the $75 external thermostat. And if I get dedicated to cheesemaking and my husband gets re-dedicated to beer & soda-making, we might spring for a full-sized fridge for our basement (which is also about 70*F).

Hm. There were a lot of "and"s running around that last paragraph. In italics, even.

I'm having a great deal of fun at work these days. We've got a great group of new interns who are all completely keen to learn whatever we have to teach them. We'll be doing farm field trips, breadmaking and cooking workshops, environmental philosophy seminars, spiritual direction meetings, and oh so much more! I'm completely psyched!

And, in my final story for the night, I'm reasonably sure I've been given approval from my boss to become our resident herbalist. SCORE.

Our 10th Anniversary trip

2011-06-22T10:12:00.001-04:00

Recently, my parents graciously took our children to Walt Disney World. We decided that would be the perfect opportunity to go on our 10th Anniversary trip, even though it was a bit early (our anniversary is technically August 11th). We decided to go to Mexico City, and had an absolutely amazing time. I cannot recommend it highly enough, and if you ever want to go, I've got the perfect recommendation for your stay (Casa Comtesse!).

Below should be a link to some pics we took while there. We aren't crazy picture takers, so there aren't tons, but enough for us to keep our memories alive and to share them with others. I've captioned some of them, since I can't sit down with y'all and tell you what's in each photo. I hope you enjoy!

10th Anniversary

New chickens

2011-06-19T21:59:00.001-04:00

As most of you know, I live on a pretty regular city street. You know, a double-lot, which is 60'x140' (yeah, I know, long & narrow). Lots of neighbors, who generally all love my chickens.

Except for one neighbor, for whom I just didn't know one way or the other. One day a chicken got loose in their yard, which may have freaked them a bit (and totally fairly, I might add). I'm reasonably sure one of their dogs got loose and killed three of our chickens, but seriously do not know for sure and never made any accusations. So I was a bit in no-man's land with them, and they're right next door.

That is, until about 3 weeks ago, when they showed up in our yard with their own 9 baby chicks. Okay, I guess that answers that question.

BUT, they were the classic Rural King suckers. The lady got lured in by the adorable cheep-cheeps on chick day and bought 9, with no other obvious long term plan, like having a feeder or living situation or anything. So they offered some to us, and I said I would take up to three of them once they were a bit bigger.

Now they're a bit bigger.

So here are some of the things I'm gonna need to do, or be aware of, soon:

Get back out the old brooder, to keep them in isolation for awhile
Wait until they're big enough to be able to hold their own in the main chicken yard
Construct a makeshift pen in the chicken yard, probably right off the side of the current run (that's my thinking anyway. Probably a metal post & chicken wire affair, with a "whatever I can find that will work" roof system.
Spend roughly the next two months letting the chickens either grow or get acclimated to the other chicken.
Wait with baited breath to see if I got myself any (any at all) roosters. If so, I'll have a few options:

See if my other neighbors were serious about preferring the sound of a rooster crow to an alarm clock.
Bite the bullet and learn how to butcher (um.. but where?!)
If I have more than one rooster.... sh*t, that's bad luck.

Honestly, I'd rather like one rooster. I think the girls would be happier, and they're good defense for them (damnit, I hate how unliberated hens are!). But I have serious doubts about my neighbors truly enjoying the call of the wild at the crack of dawn. I understand that roosters aren't any louder than dogs, but no one likes to hear dogs barking at the crack of dawn, either. We'll see how this plays out.

The Seasons of the Year

2011-06-16T21:50:00.000-04:00

(This is a post I wrote for work and decided I liked enough to post here. Yes, I'm double-dipping.)

We were all taught the seasons of the year when we were kids—winter, spring, summer, and fall. And we were taught these seasons regardless of where we lived, or if we really experienced those seasons. Whether you lived in Missouri, Alaska, Nevada, or Florida, everyone cut out tulips in May (even if there is still snow on the ground), and drew pictures of snowmen in December (even if your orange tree is still producing).

Most of the time, we don't think much about this, except as a joke. When I lived in northeastern Ohio, we joked that we had four yearly seasons—"not yet winter, winter, still winter, and road repair." Personally, I found that this captured the movement of the year far more accurately, while also reminding you that it didn't matter what time of year it was, you were still going to have problems on the roads.

Gardeners in particular operate on a very different set of seasons. We understand that non-gardeners don't really get this—it's more like a secret gardener-language. We invoke completely different seasons that the Standard Four, like "last frost date," "as soon as ground can be worked," "midsummer," and "mulching". In the Midwest, at least, we have as many different gardening seasons as the Inuit have words for snow.

I've been working on cataloging (as best I can) the various seasons we experience here at WVC, and I thought I'd share my observations with you. I think, when I started this list, I really meant for it to be helpful; I'm no longer sure that's the case, but I do hope it's still entertaining. Enjoy!

The Seasons (starting in calendar month January)

"Seed catalog" season: technically this season opens in mid-December, for the particularly astute seed purveyors who realize that gardeners are now seriously garden-deprived and increasingly irrational, making the Christmas gift-giving season a potential goldmine for them
"What do you mean you haven't gotten your first shipment of potting mix in yet?" season: roughly late-January to mid-February in our area. Later in the year we realize that, in general, this is really saving us from ourselves since it is still way to early to start those tomatoes
"No, really, it's still frozen" season: what the gardener's spouse/significant other says to us when they see us out there, jumping up and down on the spading fork in some desperate attempt to turn the soil. Or, February.
"Favorite nursery reopens for the season!" season: better than Christmas. The smarter of the gardeners open savings accounts in October to offset the damage done this weekend. Mid-March.
"*Gasp* It's so beautiful!" season: when you finally do manage to turn that first spading fork of soil. 5-seconds in late March.
"*Sigh* It's so wet" season: immediately follows "It's beautiful!"
"Planting" season: runs roughly from late-March until June, and depends on a couple of variables, like rain, dryness, late frosts, rain, swampiness, work interference, rain, slow seedlings, rain, and rain.
"Weeding" season: from mid-June until the day you die.
"Canning & preserving" season: runs concurrently with "weeding"
Midsummer, or "Fall seedling starts"
"You threw away those old windows?! Those were for the coldframes I was finally going to build!" season: self-explanatory
"No, I don't rake leaves, they're mulch for the garden" season: October
"Next year I'll do everything right" season: November.
"Early seed catalog" season: December.

And then we begin the cycle again....

The SOTG

2011-05-09T14:49:00.000-04:00

And now, folks, it's time for the annual State Of The Garden (SOTG) Report.

The State Of The Garden is: "good"

Actually, so far the garden is going well this year. Last year was, as you may know, a pretty unqualified disaster. Actually, wait, you probably don't know. Why don't you know? Because at some point (I'd call it late July) I just stopped talking about it altogether. But it was bad. I got completely overwhelmed by my new full-time job and a garden that was really conceived of and planned like a full-time garden. I did do some things to try and mitigate the problems, like using plastic mulch, but eventually, it just got entirely out of control.

Now, here's the interesting thing--thanks to the plastic mulch I used, the beds themselves were pretty okay. Those mainly suffered from poor planning, not planting on time, etc. No, the disaster areas were the paths in between the beds. Chocked full of crabgrass--absolutely awful. And I had no practical way to get rid of it. Our mower doesn't fit between the beds (yes, maybe that's bad planning, but nothing for it now), and you can't weed it out, since it's completely packed down by walking. Finally, at the end of the season, I found a used electric weed-wacker for $10 at a garage sale and I completely went to town on those suckers. And in fact, I think I obliterated a lot of them--cool stuff. They don't seem to be coming back this year, I think in part because the whacked weeds formed a pretty solid mat, partially because I whacked them right down to the ground, and partially because the chickens ate everything that was making an attempt.

Here's my garden in some detail, with design layout.

Here's what's gone on so far:

We freecycled our kid's old swingset (they hadn't used it for at least two years), and reclaimed that area for two new 2'x10' strawberry beds.
I interplanted the remaining strawberry crowns into the asparagus bed. Now we have two 15' rows of asparagus that are 5' apart, with maybe 15 strawberry plants running down the center. No, I haven't figured out how I'm going to harvest the strawberries, why do you ask?
Several of my new grape vines got kacked by hail recently, so my vines are now lopsided. I'll have grapes growing on canes on one side, and a new vine growing on the other. Ah well, c'est la vie, n'est-ce pas?
Asparagus beds and strawberry beds have all been thoroughly strawed.
Potatoes (white and yukon) are up in two 4'x4' beds. I've mulched in one of the beds, and I'll be putting down straw in the other, to see which works better. I've also aggressively covered the plants with netting, in case the chickens try to get at them. Potato plants are toxic, you know.
Just planted my sweet potato slips, which have all taken nicely. Sweet potato greens are not toxic, but I still don't want my chickens eating them (they're mine, damnit).
Pole beans are planted around, well, poles (duh.), and I've got wire mesh 1.5' high surrounding each pole, with branches stuck inside, as chicken defense, making the whole thing look like some kind of twisted Guantanamo for beans.
MY ONIONS ARE DOING WELL! Yes, that does deserve to be in yellcaps, cause I'm freaked out. I've been trying to grow onions for five years now, and this is the first time it looks like I might actually have some success. I started them from seed on Feb. 15 (which was later than I'd wanted), got them into the ground at the end of March, and have been fertilizing pretty aggressively. So far I've got a lot of nice, fat greens coming up. We'll see if they bulb properly now. Garlic is doing well, too.
Lettuces have all recovered from a hideous chicken attack (look back a few posts for more on that one).
Broccoli is doing well, but no sprouts yet; cabbages are limping along; carrots & beets similarly.
Pepper plants are in self-watering containers on our back patio.
Many new herbs in the ground--we'll see if I can keep them alive.

A lot of my gardening methodology has changed this year. First, I've really changed my goals--I have a lot of potatoes & onions in the garden, which are comparatively low maintenance. My family just doesn't eat many tomatoes or peppers, and they're PITAs to grow, so why bother? That's what the market is for. The other main thing I've been learning is Extreme Chicken Defense. So far, the chickens have managed to get into and somehow harass nearly every plant I have, but in almost all cases it was because I'd not properly secured some covering or other. A lot of the garden I've just blocked from the chickens entirely, but some of it they still have access to, so we'll see how it goes.

I am still planning on having a 10' pool for the kids (and me) this year. We don't use our A/C, and you really would not believe how nice a pool is to jump into. It cools you right off, and really it keeps you cool even once you're out. This does take a big chunk of space out of the middle of the garden, but I think it's worth it, and we just don't have a better place for it.

I have lots of other things to update, but I'll go ahead and post this for now, otherwise even I wouldn't make it all the way to the end of the post, and I wrote it.

Hmmm, not good.

2011-04-27T22:37:00.000-04:00

No, seriously, this could be a bad bad thing:

Loading Folia gardener badge...

But being bad sometimes feels so goooood. It's Ravelry, only for gardening.

Or, to put it more bluntly, it's crack for Robyn.

Oh lord.

My 15 minutes of fame...

2011-04-25T14:40:00.000-04:00

Or really, more like 2:33 of fame, but whatev.

So, have you always wanted to meet me? Well, here's your chance:

http://mywabashvalley.com/fulltext/?nxd_id=183717

Yup, thas me (no, not the well-coiffed woman at the desk, the scruffy looking one walking around her house). My family was recently featured on a local station for Earth Day for our sustainable lifestyle. They wondered who would be a good representative for this topic, and came up with me. Seriously, I have no idea how they did that, either. That's not false modesty--I think I'm a halfway decent choice, I just have no idea how they arrived at my name.

At any rate, I was relieved to see that the piece was not a hatchet-job, as I have seen happen to others. In reality, I was never really worried that our local news station would do something like that to me, but I had seen national media do some truly awful things to people that I respect and care about, so I was a bit hesitant. Also... um... I was more than a little worried that they'd get to my house and go "I thought you would be all hardcore, candlelight and a campfire in the living room, and instead I see your son playing the Wii!" But they were kind to me and my family, and somehow even made our house look nicer than I think it really does on the outside (did they photoshop out the peeling paint?! Thanks!).

They did leave out some of what I felt were *ahem* some of my better moments *snort*, but they did leave in the bit about cooking, which was good, since I think that's really important.

And can I just say that I've never gotten so much gardening work done this early in the season, as when I was panicking about a fricking camera crew in my house and garden. Man, that's motivation for you. Brian had the house spotless, too. And then--this is exactly the way things happen, too--not 15 mintues before the cameraman is due to arrive, I peek outside and my chickens have gotten under the netting of the lettuce bed and utterly demolished it. Four chickens scratching away like lunatics in a 4'x4' bed. AAARRRRGH! It was a beautiful bed, too. And it's making a solid recovery, but not within the 15 mintues before WTWO showed up. They also filmed and showed a lot of the recently-planted strawberry beds, which look essentially like two big, 10' long walled-in piles of mud. Ah well. Probably the nicest looking thing in the garden at that point, to tell the truth.

But anyway... so there I am. Hi everyone!

Chickens + compost = WOW

2011-03-13T19:48:00.000-04:00

(Fair warning, this post comes to you via my iPad, and I'm not a thumb-typing prodigy, so I'm vagely concerned that this will end up on "damn you autocorrect!". But my husband has our main computer, and besides, I'm outside...)

I redid the fencing for the chickens yesterday, giving them access to the compost pile for the first time. Oh, what I wouldn't give for before and after shots! When they started in on it, the pile was essentially a fermenting mass of ick (that through some miracle, didn't smell). But they joyously scratched, pecked, scraped, and just generally partied down right through that pile. When I returned, the pile was a lovely, crumbly, black humus--almost exactly what the textbooks tell you it should look like. True story, today I put some of this gorgeousness out on one of my garden beds, and I didn't even screen it. (Mostly due to laziness and the fact that I don't own a screen, but still, it worked.) I actually had to put the fourth wall slats back on, since the pile was now such loose crumbliness that it wasn't staying put anymore. This, incidentally, required that I put the top brace back on to hold the sides together, which makes a lovely perch. The compost pile is now my chicken's most very favorite place to be.

I've got a day off tomorrow, since I've been working 10-14 hour days for the past week with a group of Spring Break Service Trip kids, which was awesome. I probably got too attached to them, given that I knew they'd only be here for a week, but ah well. They did such a great job and worked so hard. I think they genuinely absorbed our message of a faith-practice focused on care of creation.

Oh, and along those lines, we're also running a pilot version of Lent 4.5 both at my work and at my church (Unitarian Universalist--yeah, tell me you're surprised). If you have any inclination to a faith-based ecological perspective, I heartily encourage you to look into this program, its vey good stuff.

MWF seeking advice from Blogger population

2011-03-12T12:22:00.000-05:00

I have a reasonably well-established garden in the back of our little lot. (This is not to say that I will not utterly upend that at some point, but for now, this is what I'm working with.) I've got the beds pretty well under control, vis-a-vis weeds, but the paths. Oh my lord the paths. Nothing I do seems to get rid of the crabgrass in the paths, which leads to, well, a messy-looking garden (and it does re-seed the beds, of course). I keep seeing all of these gorgeous pictures of weed-free organic garden paths, and I'm dumbstruck.

Some prior attempts:

Just walking all over it (TOTAL fail)
mulch (partial fail)
newspaper and mulch (pretty good, but weeds grew back)
landscaping fabric (worked, but only did a small portion)

My thinking this year will be to let the chickens at it, keeping the beds themselves covered in bird netting to protect the plants. I tend to not get ginormic projects like landscape-fabric-ing then mulching the entire garden, but maybe that's the direction I should go in.

At any rate, I am actively seeking advice from y'all. What do you do/have you done that works? Or doesn't work (so that I don't waste my time)? If you have suggestions for my herb garden, that would be nice, too. There, I'm actually thinking about doing two layers of cardboard, landscape fabric over that, then pea gravel (I tried one layer of cardboard and mulch, and the *@$#^$ star of bethlehem grew STRAIGHT THROUGH IT).

Under the wire

2011-03-07T23:13:00.000-05:00

Ha! Got my urban homesteading post in just under the wire for the Monday Day of Action. Score.

Today, my post will be short, but poignant.

FIRST EGG!

(I took pictures, but they were all blurry & awful. Don't know what has happened to my macro function. Grrr.)

A brief word from your sponsor...

2011-02-27T13:34:00.000-05:00

I WON THE RAINBARREL! HOLY SH*TCAKES!

No, seriously, I'm freaking out over here. Rainbarrelrainbarrelrainbarrelrainbarrel!

Wooooooo!

Go HERE for to see it! So pretty... my precious....

Have many blog posts floating around in my head (if you're a blogger, you know exactly what I'm talking about). I'm hoping to say some interesting things soon about education, and raised beds, and french fries. Stay tuned!

I am an urban homesteader!

2011-02-21T07:00:00.007-05:00

[If you're reading this post on Feb. 21, 2011 (or thereabouts), and you do not instantly know why I'd be posting this today, then please click here to go to the Facebook page "Take Back Urban Homesteading" and see the (perfectly absurd) backstory.]

I am an urban homesteader. Er. Well, sorta anyway. Um. Okay, so where I live is only urban in the sense that the USDA does not consider it rural (barely, too--in fact, I haven't seen the recent census numbers yet--mayhaps we're rural now!). We live on a city street, though, with a double-sized lot, which gives us around 60' x 140' total footprint. On that footprint is our house, a detached garage, and a fairly sizable concrete patio/driveway in back (hey, it wasn't our fault, it was like that when we bought it). So do the math yourself if you want to, but I don't think we even manage to crack the 1/10th of an acre. So I'm calling it urban; or at least, sure as hell isn't 40 acres and a mule!

And we homestead. Of course, most people wouldn't consider what we do homesteading, but I think that's the beauty of urban homesteading. It bends the concepts of homesteading into a huge panoply of shapes, and really demonstrates the inherent diversity in such a term.

The core of homesteading, to my way of thinking, is self-reliance. So are we self-sufficient? Hell no. Are we aiming for self-sufficiency? Not on a bet. In fact, I don't even think it's a particularly desirable goal. Urban homesteading forces one to confront the simple fact that, unless you live on a piece of land that has enough room for all of your food crops, food animals, a salt mine, some iron ore & a forge, maybe a way to create baking soda, etcetera, you are not, were not, and will never be truly self-sufficient.

Self-reliance simply must mean something other than "can meet all of one's (or one's family's) needs without external aid", and by extension, homesteading--particularly urban homesteading--must mean something other than this, too. Given that we will probably never even meet our family's food needs on our own land (much less things like medical tape, cookware and shoes), what distinguishes what my family does from anyone else who gardens and, perhaps, keeps some animals for food?

I think the core for urban homesteaders is not the method one uses, or the end results (i.e., how many animals you've crammed into your life, how many pounds of produce came out of your 4'square bed, how solar-heated your water is, etc.). Rather, it is the emphasis--the whys of what you do. Why garden? One perfectly reasonable response is "Because I enjoy it." Another is "Because I want to make sure we have organic vegetables." A third is "Because it tastes better when it's fresh from the garden." Those are great answers! But those aren't urban homesteader's answers (or at least, they will be only part of the urban homesteaders answers). I think an urban homesteader's answer looks a little more like this: "Because I want to use the land/space I have in productive ways that help support myself/my family." Obviously there are lots of ways one could express this, but the core (to me) is that we are moving ourselves back into the role of primary food provider and householder.

Years ago most people, and especially ones in the cities, ceded the various roles of householder to others--farmers and food manufacturers and grocery stores and housekeepers and accountants and electric companies and so on. We stopped being the ones who grew our food (any of it), or cleaned our houses. We relied exclusively on various power companies for heat and light, and trucks to bring us nearly everything we want. We stopped being the ones who did and made, and started being the ones who paid others to do those things for us. (And, often, started being the ones who did these things for others so that we could be paid so that we could pay others to do those things for us. It's like the frickin' capitalist circle of life.) Urban homesteading is the conscious act of taking some of these roles back. Maybe not all of it, and often not even half of it, but that isn't the essential feature of urban homesteading. It's saying "I can play a role in being a primary provider for my family, even if it's just some hot peppers and tomatoes from my garden boxes on the patio, and line-drying our clothes." We are moving ourselves into the role of producer.

Of course, this also makes one very aware of one's dependence on others. I think urban homesteaders have an even higher awareness of our dependence on others than those who really do have a higher dependence on others--who wouldn't know how to grow a tomato if their lives depended on it and who have no idea what to do when their dryer punks out on them. And we are aware that this dependence is necessary, and probably desirable. Working together in community to maximize one's own self-reliance (as it were) is part of the core methodology of urban homesteading, and that's convenient, because we urban homesteaders have a lot of community around us to deal with. Why cut oneself off, trying to do practically everything by oneself? Maybe you live on land that can't grow tomatoes for shit (ahem) but you have a lovely flock of laying hens. You have a neighbor with prize-winning tomatoes but no eggs. There's an obvious solution here. And so you rely on each other, and build ties, and now both of you are more secure due to this relationship. That's nice, and you aren't wasting 50 square feet trying to grow tomatoes for yourself on your limited ground.

Most people regard urban homesteading--if they regard it at all--as either an eccentricity or an oddity. Some probably think it's deviant. But anyone who's here has probably already started to realize that those attitudes are shifting. So think about your own role in how you manage your household and family. Can you move yourself into the role of producer, even just a little? Can you do it consciously? Can you commit to producing some of the food you eat, saving some of the energy you use, strengthening some of the community you live in, with an aim of using your land/space in productive ways? Then claim the title proudly, and tell others. It's hard to think of an activity as deviant or eccentric when you are friends with the person who does it. (Okay, in my case this isn't strictly speaking true.) Put a face on it for others, let them see what the lifestyle is like. Give them exposure to the many ways that one can be involved in the sustenance of one's household, and tempt them down the same path, just from your pride in accomplishment. And know that, come the zombies, your community will be better off for your work.

The best Valentine's Day song evah

2011-02-14T15:15:00.000-05:00

Enjoy, and then spend the rest of the day humming it, driving your partner/SO/spouse/friend/fwb/neighbor/passersby nuts.

My family "celebrated" Valentine's Day yesterday, mostly by fixing a special meal and then proceeding to enjoy it around the table--as opposed to our more normal dinnertime shenanigans (that involve a lot of saying "stop doing that and EAT.") My youngest son has a special girl, for whom he made a special valentine's card, complete with extra heart insert. It would seem that this is requited, as he got an early, equally-handmade valentine from her on Friday that said, and I quote "A kiss for you". They. Are. In. Kindergarten.

*sigh*

Hope everyone enjoys the day, and remembers the most important advice ever given, from Harris Telemaker: "There's someone out there for everyone - even if you need a pickaxe, a compass, and night goggles to find them."

2011-02-14T13:36:00.001-05:00

Uh oh... Robyn's been messing about with her design settings again...

A glimpse of plate

2011-02-07T15:12:00.002-05:00

Near the end of last year, I was careening towards a colossal case of burnout. I had so many things to do, so much to remember to do, so many things that I cared about doing, that I could no longer keep it all straight. Things that matter to me--really, really matter, like the co-op and our cowshare--were falling through the cracks. Every time I received an email about the co-op, I wanted to cry or hide under the couch, even if it was a simple question like "So, when do you think you'll be opening?" Very reasonable requests were being unfulfilled--hell, they weren't even being remembered. I was doing more damage than good to the things I care about. I was putting my job ahead of my volunteer activities, which is fine and right in many ways, but I had nothing left over. I tried to keep space for my family, and while in the most technical sense I succeeded, I can't help but notice that even when I was home, I wasn't really there. I was glazed-over, and not in the good way like honey-baked chicken. I needed a break! But no break was forthcoming.

I didn't really need a break, though. I needed to let go of some of these duties. And so, for the past month, I have been steadily doing exactly that. Fortunately, I work and volunteer with some of the best, most understanding, and above all tolerant people in existence, and I think they could all see that Robyn was going to break soon if something didn't give. So I put out a plea of "help!" and many, many people stepped up to the plate.

And then yesterday it really happened. I got the email that said "Nope, it's already done, you don't have to worry about that any more!" I told my husband, and he said, "You just got your first glimpse of plate." Huh? "Plate. You know, your plate? Which has been far too full for far too long?" Oh! Yes! I can see a bit of plate!

Of course, this has been slowly happening for some time now, but it's only hitting me just how much I have managed to clear off. Here's a short list of things that I used to do that now other people do:

tracking and placing cowshare orders
collecting cowshare payments, making deposits, and paying all relevant people
writing the co-op newsletters
maintaining the co-op website
maintaining the co-op member list
ordering, picking up, and distributing print jobs for the co-op
compiling mailings for the co-op
managing the email list for the co-op
running the Children's Religious Education program at my church

That's what I can remember off the top of my head. And do you know what else this means? It means that I am surrounded by wonderful people who are willing to share the burden of doing this stuff, because this stuff matters as much to them as it does to me. Lucky, ain't I?

I still have a pretty full plate, and naturally I keep refilling it. But my refill looks a little saner, I think. Like, caring for the chickens, or starting my seedlings (two kinds of onions, leeks, cabbage, broccoli, and kale, all in their little plugs ready to sprout!). I think a month or two of a drastically reduced volunteer load will help me regain my balance a bit.

Of course, my job is also in mega-ramp-up mode. Next week I start a marathon battery of intern candidate interviews, quickly followed by hosting an alternative Spring Break troup from an Ohio university, then it's on to the Earth Day Celebration (which is a Big Deal(tm) out here), before we get full swing into planting season, shearing for the alpacas, and our 15th Anniversary Farm to Fork benefit dinner. So please don't misunderstand me, I'll be busy. But with some of the volunteer tasks spread out more amongst others, I think I might be able to hack it.

Now if I could just kick this bloody cold....

The big problems #'s 1 and 2

2011-01-27T15:28:00.003-05:00

So I'm sitting here thinking about what the big problems our household will have transitioning to a low/no-energy future. I'm trying to think mainly about things that will be large structural issues, and ones that we can plausibly do something about. So, for example, how we will heat our house is something we have control over, and that we don't have good solutions for. Maintaining a public school system, on the other hand, is really not something we can personally do much about (though you'd better believe I will fight for it whatever ways I can).

Big Problem #1 = heat
The first thing that comes to mind, and what was rolling around in my head and eventually turned into this blog post, is heat. Right now we have no way to heat our house without our furnace or, at least, an electric-powered infrared space heater (which is really cool [er, hot] but not relevant right now). If for any reason we don't have access to gas or electric, we will get cold. Fast. I believe our furnace relies on electric power, too, so even if we still have gas, we don't have heat. But hey, how often do we have power outages? Oh... yeah, often. Right. But not extended power outages! Surely that will never happen! Oh... um... fine.

What are our options here? Well, we have a chimney, but it's been walled over in our house. Also, the chimney itself is in fine shape, but there is no lining or anything--it's just brick. So one of the most obvious options would be to have the chimney lined ($2500), access the chimney on the first floor, and install a wood stove (woodstove = $500-1000; guestimate for the construction = $1500). Naturally, this creates some new problems:

the fridge in the kitchen butts up against the wall that houses the chimney. Now, in fairness, if we're in no-electric-world, a functioning fridge won't be much of an issue. But I expect that we'll at least have electricity for some time, and that time will overlap with periods where we would like to use our stove. And even if we don't use the fridge with electricity, we might still use it as an icebox, or for "cooler" storage. So the fridge might need to be moved, or at least insulated around; that's more money/remodeling.
A source of wood. Okay, now, in fairness, I personally manage over 300 acres of classified forest for my job, so I could probably kill a day or two with some friends thinning trees. But really, that should stay here on the property of my employer (even if I offered to pay, they'd probably prefer to have the wood, since they have a biomass heater themselves). We do live in a wooded area, so I expect we could find a source, but we certainly don't have one right now, and nothing particularly nearby.
Type of fuel. Maybe it would be better to get a pellet stove? I mean, damn they're cheap. Except... where the #$*% would I get pellets once The End Is Nigh? Okay, maybe no pellet stove.

What other options are out there right now? There's geothermal, but that's still dependent upon some source of fuel--electricity or gas. Solar in winter sucks around here. Wind, too, ain't a great bet. If we could bank enough energy from solar in the summer to use in the winter--maybe that would work? We'd have to convert to an electric furnace, which would probably cost more than all of the work putting in a wood stove would cost anyway, and the cost of the solar installation makes my head spin. I'm not thinking of anything else. Suggestions? Blessedly, even in the absence of a heat source, our house tends to stay over 40*F, which is certainly livable, if uncomfortable. But I would loooove to purchase and tear down the house to our south! Ooo, that would make our house much warmer right there! (And would also cost more than everything else I've suggested so far, with far less return on investment; ah well, so much for dreams.)

Big Problem #2 = cooking
Okay, so the connection between problem #1 and #2 is pretty obvious. Unlike heating, we do have a few ways of cooking in the absence of gas or electric. We have a camp stove, to start with, which is a good short-term solution. We can cook for a few days or even a few weeks on that. There are also rocket stoves, which I've not made yet, but think I could, and we can cook over those. (Hey! Rocket mass heaters! That could also be a heating solution! Hmmm... will mull that over.) There are also solar ovens, which we could use in the summer and MAYBE in the winter here (big ole maybe). These are all great, but have some problems:

Other than the camp stove, we don't actually have any of these things (yes yes yes, I do see those things over there on my To Do list, why thank you for noticing).
The time we're most likely to lose power in a short-term fashion is the winter; all of the above cooking items must be used outside for health and safety reasons, and in some cases (solar oven) may not work for crap when it's cold. We need a way to cook when it's cold that won't cause us to get frostbite or die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

So what would be a good fit here? A wood cookstove. Duh. Did I quote $500-1000 for a woodstove? Silly me, make that $1500-3000. But still, could be worth it, yah? If we went that direction, anyway. Does anyone know if you can cook on any part of a rocket mass heater? Hmmm...

Okay, those are some thoughts. Probably more thoughts to come. I spend a lot of my time thinking.

2011-01-01T13:34:00.004-05:00

Dear Blog Reader,

I think this is the first time in quite awhile that I haven't told the previous year not to let the door hit its ass on its way out. 2010 wasn't too bad, maybe it was even good. More good than bad happened for our family, by a long shot. There's so much I want to say in this post, but my brain just isn't fitting itself properly around it. When all else fails, try a silly metaphor, right? So, I'd like to summarize this year with the following photo:

Let's allow this humble bobbin of homespun to represent a lot of what has gone on in our home this year. Please, allow me to elaborate.

Well, first, it's just awesome. The fiber is from a little local dyer named Dyeabolical Yarns in St. Louis, near where my mom lives. When I saw this colorway my heart totally melted and I sent my mom one of those "PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE CAN I HAVE THIS FOR CHRISTMAS PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE?!?!" emails. The colorway is called "Little Bo Peep". Sounds like me, right? *snort* But it is awesome. I haven't even plied it yet. I'm calling it my "Yearlong Yarn" since I started it on Dec. 30, 2010, and finished it on Jan. 1, 2011 (at 1:30am).

Anyway, I digress. First, I should refer folks to my post on spinning and my own personal mental state, and point out that I am still happily spinning away. So there's that.

Also, this represents my new job, which I've prattled on and on about elsewhere. A lot of my job is about fiberwork, since we have alpacas, and hence, a sea worth of alpaca fiber. So my homespun often reminds me of my day job, and since my day job is so awesome, that's okay. Some folks here will remember than in January 2009 we were finishing up 9 months of unemployment, and were quite literally one month away from "Uh... I don't know what to do now, actually." I got this job in the middle of that month, and I cried when I accepted. The job has provided monetary and mental stability, which is worth more than a King's ransom. Considering I work for the Sisters of Providence, I cannot help but at least consider that there was a Providential hand in all of this....

The homespun also represents our family's ability to remain true to our values of homemaking and homecare. This is somewhat because my salary is decent, but also because our lifestyle is much more frugal than most, and because I have a husband that is willing to buck accepted social norms in order to stay home and learn how to manage our household, which is not easy. I am more blessed than I have any reason to deserve to have a husband like Brian. Not just blessed--straight up lucky. Becoming a homemaker is hard for a woman in our society, but at least it's still socially acceptable. A man as a homemaker is becoming more common, but still isn't considered appropriate. It is so bizarre to me how much we have devalued the most important of careers--home & family care, teaching, farming. It's insane. But screw society. Having one adult at home, at least part time (by preference, full time) has always been important to us, and we're lucky to be able to keep to this value, no matter what anyone else thinks. Oh, and ginseng. Never underestimate the value of ginseng in a family with depressed individuals--seriously.

And also on the homemaking front, let's not forget the chickens, and our expanding ability to be more self-reliant. Now, we don't delude ourselves that we'll be able to become fully self-sufficient on our little under-1/10-acre lot, and frankly I don't even think that this is desirable. I would vastly prefer working together with my neighbors to create a more self-reliant neighborhood, and working with local businesses to create a more self-reliant community. But we can live as much of the values as we can, and get better and better about it as we go. We can be one of the families that helps others see how a different, slower, lower-energy life could look, and that really it's pretty cool. AND, to that end, we will hopefully be scheduling an Urban Chicken Open House this spring! Woo-hoo! (My husband said it was okay--really!)

One of the frustrating things this year has been the relative lack of progress on starting our local foods co-op. We continue to grow in membership, but we are not bringing in the investments and member loans we need to really get off the ground. But we have an amazing team of leaders who, somehow, remain dedicated to this, and a membership that is being patient and forgiving and, hopefully, will soon begin to really step up and make our store a reality.

There's just so much else to say, but no way I could fit it all in here. I didn't even come close to finishing the "To Do 2010" list, since most of 2010 was spent adjusting to our new lifestyle. But hope springs eternal (as my boss loves to say), so I will rename that list "To Do 2011" and maybe even add a few things to it. I've got posts rolling around in my head already for the upcoming year. I hope you'll stick around, and share your wisdom with me whenever you can. Y'all have been invaluable to me, and I wish each of you the best of New Years, with prosperity and happiness in everything you do.

Sincerely,
Robyn

Why I believe in Santa

2010-12-24T08:52:00.003-05:00

I believe in Santa. Yes, I'm serious, I really do. I have a lot of reasons for this, and maybe someday they'll all spill out onto this blog. But for today, Christmas Eve, I don't see any reason in belaboring the point more than necessary, when Terry Pratchett got most of it exactly right in he best book, Hogfather, in a conversation between Death and his granddaughter (trust me) Susan.

Susan: Now tell me what would have happened--
Death: If we hadn't saved the Hogfather? The sun would not have risen. A mere ball of gas would have illumined the world.
Susan: Alright, I'm not stupid. You're saying that humans need fantasies to make life bearable.
Death: Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
Susan: With tooth fairies? Hogfathers?
Death: Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
Susan: So we can believe the big ones?
Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
Susan: They're not the same at all.
Death: You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some, some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged.
Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what's the point?
Death: You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?

URL: http://able2know.org/topic/108529-1

Merry Christmas, Happy holidays, and joyous New Year everyone!

And now I'm mad.

2010-12-13T10:40:00.003-05:00

When did it become unacceptable to spend money at Christmas? What the hell happened? Yes, I get that plenty of people do not have jobs or money to spend. Really, believe me, I get that--if you don't believe me, just look back about one year's worth of posts here. And I get that Debt Is Bad. Yes it is. But if you do have the money? If you've been saving it up just for Christmas? If you *gasp* want to spend money on your friends and family? Why is it that I now have to defend myself because I do plan to spend money--more than average, too, the horror--on my family for Christmas?

When did it become a badge of honor to spend as absolutely little as possible on the people you care about, as if reducing your final spending is the only goal. I see people preening themselves all over the eco-blogosphere right now over how tiny their Christmas bill will be. Or congratulating themselves that they don't really get anything that they wouldn't otherwise, like PJs or a rainbarrel. Or that all of their gifts are handmade, and never purchased from anyone (who, you know, might've done a nice job and could've used the paycheck).

You know what I don't see in all of these self-congratulatory posts? I don't see any discussion of fun, or of happiness, or of joy. I see self-satisfaction oozing, no doubt. And I'm sure these people get a wonderful, healthy eco-smug glow on Christmas morning as their family opens their gifts, carefully selected to ensure that they are all in line with anti-consumerist zeitgeist.

Well you know what? F*ck that. I do have a job, and we saved specifically for this, and I'm gonna spend money that I never would on stuff that I never would and I'm gonna have a blast doing it. I'm gonna get things that we ordinarily never would--often things we need, sure, but also things we want. And I'm gonna get my kids some Hex Bugs. Why? Cause they're completely stupid and AWESOME! And a blanket fort kit! Why a kit, of all things? Cause it's AWESOME! And some roving for spinning yarn. Why? Cause I love it and I can't usually afford it and I'm gonna sooooo love spinning it into some yummy yarn! And maybe some shelving for various things, cause it'll make our lives a bit easier. And super-keeno things for my husband that I can't put here because he is NOT to be trusted when it comes to discretion. And I'll make some gifts too, not because I want to bask in the eco-glow, but because I enjoy making things for people, and I think that the gifts I make will in fact make these people's lives better, rather than because they have some crazy stamp of approval. And we'll have cookies and family and brunch at home and too much wrapping paper everywhere and popcorn and FUN! Because Christmas is supposed to be FUN!

I get the fact that our culture goes crazy-overboard on buying stuff. And I'm as sickened as anyone by the commercialism of Christmas. And no, I do not think that going into debt-slavery for Christmas is a good plan. But I'm also trying not to throw out the baby with the bathwater here. There is a reason that Christmas got commercialized--because it's the time of year when we collectively think about what we can get for others, or do for others, that will be appreciated and enjoyed and just generally will make our lives a bit nicer. And it has gone too far, when we buy stuff unreflectingly, just to be able to say that we bought something for someone.

But taking the goal of a tiny Christmas bill is the same sin as aiming for a huge bill--it's the wrong goal. I like the goal of buying things, making things, doing things for others that will bring joy and happiness into their lives, within the means of the giver (both in terms of money, materials, skills, and time). The point is to think of others, and how one can make those other's lives better, even if just for a little while. If you lose sight of this goal, then you lose sight of the joy in the season, and that's a real shame.

It's that time of year again...

2010-12-05T16:41:00.002-05:00

We finished celebrating my youngest son's birthday, which means that the Holidays have OFFICIALLY BEGUN. And that means it's time to post my favorite holiday story. Just try and read this without tearing up, I dare you.

Merry Chanukwanzmas, and a happy Solstice, too! (And all the other myriad holidays, those're good, too!)

VISIONS OF SUGARPLUMS
by Margaret Morrison

Five minutes before the Winter Solstice circle was scheduled to begin, my mother called. Since I’m the only one in our coven who doesn’t run on Pagan Standard Time, I took the call. Half the people hadn’t arrived, and those who had wouldn’t settle down to business for at least twenty minutes.

”Merry Christmas, Frannie.”

”Hi, Mom. I don’t do Christmas.”

”Maybe not—but I do, so I’ll say it.” she told me in her sassy voice, kind of sweet and vinegary at the same time. “If I can respect your freedom of religion, you can respect my freedom of speech.”

I grinned and rolled my eyes. “And the score is Mom - one, Fran - nothing. But I love you, anyway.”

People were bustling around in the next room, setting up the altar, decking the halls with what I considered excessive amounts of holly and ivy, and singing something like, “O Solstice Tree.”

”It sounds like a...holiday party.” Mom said.

”We’re doing Winter Solstice tonight.”

”Oh. That’s sort of like your version of Christmas, right?”

I wanted to snap back that Christmas was the Christian version of Solstice, but I held back. “We celebrate the return of the sun. It’s a lot quieter than Christmas. No shopping sprees, no pine needles and tinsel on the floor, and it doesn’t wipe me out. I remember how you had always worked yourself to a frazzle by December 26.”

”Oh honey, I loved doing all that stuff. I wouldn’t trade those memories for all the spare time in the world. I wish you and Jack would loosen up a little for the baby’s sake. When you were little, you enjoyed Easter bunnies and trick-or-treating and Christmas things. Since you’ve gotten into this Wicca religion, you sound a lot like Aunt Betty the year she was a Jehovah’s Witness.”

I laughed nervously. “Yeah. How is Aunt Betty?”

”Fine. She’s into the Celestine Prophecy now, and she seems quite happy. Y’know,” she went on, “Aunt Betty always said the Jehovah’s Witnesses said those holiday things were pagan. So I don’t see why you’ve given them up.”

”Uh, they’ve been commercialized and polluted beyond recognition. We’re into very simple, quiet celebrations.”

”Well,” she said dubiously, “as long as you’re happy.”

Sometimes long distance is better than being there, ‘cause your mother can’t give you the look that makes you agree with everything she says. Jack rescued me by interrupting.

”Hi, Ma.” he called to the phone as he waved a beribboned sprig of mistletoe over my head. Then he kissed me, one of those quick noisy ones. I frowned at him.

”Druidic tradition, Fran. Swear to Goddess.”

”Of course it is. Did the Druids use plastic berries?”

”Always. We’ll be needing you in about five minutes.”

”Okay. Gotta go, Mom. Love you.”

We had a nice, serene kind of Solstice Circle. No jingling bells or filked-out Christmas Carols. Soon after the last coven member left, Jack was ready to pack it in.

”The baby’s nestled all snug in her bed,” he said with a yawn, ”I think I’ll go settle in for a long winter’s nap.”

I heaved a martyred sigh. He grinned unrepentantly, kissed me, called me a grinch, and went to bed. I stayed up and puttered around the house, trying to unwind. I sifted through the day’s mail, ditched the flyers urging us to purchase all the Seasonal Joy we could afford or charge. I opened the card from his parents. Another sermonette: a manger scene and a bible verse, with a handwritten note expressing his mother’s fervent hope that God’s love and Christmas spirit would fill our hearts in this blessed season. She means well, really. I amused myself by picking out every pagan element I could find in the card. When the mail had been sorted, I got up and started turning our ritual room back into a living room. As if the greeting card had carried a
virus, I found myself humming Christmas carols. I turned on the classic rock station, but they were playing that Lennon-Ono Christmas song. I switched stations. The weatherman assured me that there was only a twenty percent chance of snow. Then, by Loki, the deejay let Bruce Springsteen insult my ears crooning, “yah better watch out, yah better not pout.” I tried the Oldies station. Elvis lives, and he does Christmas songs. Okay, fine. We’ll do classical—no, we
won’t. They’re playing Handel’s Messiah. Maybe the community radio station would have something secular humanist. ”Ahora, escucharemos a Jose Feliciano canta ‘Feliz Navidad’.”
I was getting annoyed. The radio doesn’t usually get this saturated with holiday mush until the twenty-fourth.

”This is too weird.” I said to the radio, “Cut that crap out.” The country station had some Kenny Rogers Christmas tune, the first rock station had gone from John and Yoko’s Christmas song to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Silent Night,” and the other rock station still had Springsteen reliving his childhood.

”—I’m tellin’ you why. SANTA Claus is comin’ to town!” he bellowed. I was about to pick out a nice secular CD when there was a knock at the door.

Now, it could have been a coven member who’d forgotten something. It could have been someone with car trouble. It could have been any number of things, but it certainly couldn’t have been a stout guy in a red suit—snowy beard, rosy cheeks, and all—backed by eight reindeer
and a sleigh. I blinked, wondered crazily where Rudolph was, and blinked again. There were nine reindeer. Our twenty-percent chance of snow had frosted the dead grass and was continuing to float down in fat flakes.

”Hi, Frannie.” he said warmly, “I’ve missed you.”

”I’m stone cold sober, and you don’t exist.”

He looked at me with a mixture of sorrow and compassion and sighed heavily. “That’s why I miss you, Frannie. Can I come in? We need to talk.”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to slam the door on this vision, hallucination, or whatever. So I let him in, because that made more sense then letting all the cold air in while I argued with someone who wasn’t there. As he stepped in, a thought crossed my mind about various entities needing an invitation to get in houses. He flashed me a smile that would melt the polar caps.

”Don’t you miss Christmas, Frannie?”

”No.” I said flatly, “Apparently you don’t see me when I’m sleeping and waking these days. I haven’t been Christian for years.”

”Oh, now don’t let that stop you. We both know this holiday’s older than that. Yule trees and Saturnalia and here-comes-the-sun, doodoodendoodoo.”

I raised an eyebrow at the Beatles reference, then gave him my standard sermonette on the appropriation and adulteration that made Christmas no longer a Pagan holiday. I had done my homework. I listed centuries, I named names—St. Nicholas among them. “In the twentieth century version,” I assured him, “Christmas is two parts crass commercialism mixed with one part blind faith in a religion I rejected years ago.” I gave him my best lines, the ones that had convinced my coven to abstain from Christmasy cliches. My hallucination sat in Jack’s favorite chair, nodding patiently at me.

”And you,” I added nastily, “come here talking about ancient customs when you—in your current form—were invented in the nineteenth century by, um...Clement C. Moore.”

He laughed, a rolling, belly-deep chuckle unlike any department-store Santa I’d ever heard. “Of course I change my form now and then to suit fashion. Don’t you? And does that stop you from being yourself?” He said, and asked me if I remembered Real Magic, by Isaac Bonewits.

I gaped at him for a moment, then caught myself. “This is like ‘Labyrinth’, right? I’m having a dream that pretends to be real, but is only made from pieces of things in my memory. You don’t look a thing like David Bowie.”

”Bonewits has this Switchboard Theory.” Santa went on amiably, “The energy you put into your beliefs influences the real existence of the archetypal—oh, let me put it simpler: ‘in the beginning, Man created God’. Ian Anderson.” He lit a long-stemmed pipe. The tobacco had a mild and somehow Christmasy smell, and every puff sent up a wreath of smoke. “I’m afraid it’s a bit more complicated than Bonewits tells it, but that’s close enough for mortals. Are you with
me so far?”

”Oh, sure.” I lied as unconvincingly as possible. Santa sighed heavily. ”When’s the last time you left out milk and cookies for me?”

”When I figured out my parents were eating them.”

”Frannie, Frannie. Remember pinda balls, from Hinduism?”

”Rice balls left as offerings for ancestors and gods.”

”Do Hindus really believe that the ancestors and gods eat pinda balls?”

”All right, y’got me there. They say that spirits consume the spiritual essence, then mortals can have what’s left.”

”Mm-hm.” Santa smiled at me compassionately through his snowy beard.

I rallied quickly. “What about the toys? I know for a fact they aren’t made by you and a bunch of non-union elves.”

”Oh, that’s quite true. Manufacturing physical objects out of magical energy is terribly expensive and breaks several laws of Nature—She only allows us to do that on special occasions. It certainly couldn’t be done globally and annually. Now, the missus and the elves and I really do have a shop at the North Pole. Not the sort of thing the Air Force would ever find. What we make up there is what makes this time a holiday, no matter what religion it’s called.”

”Don’t tell me,” I said, rolling my eyes, “you make the sun come back.”

”Oh my, no. The solar cycle stuff, the Reason For The Season, isn’t my department. My part is making it a holiday. We make a mild, non-addictive psychedelic thing called Christmas spirit. Try some.”

He dipped his fingers in a pocket and tossed red-gold-green-silver glitter at me. I could have ducked. I don’t know why I didn’t.

It smelled like snow, and pine needles, and cedar chips in the fireplace. It smelled like fruitcake, like roast turkey, like that foamy white stuff you spray on the window with stencils. It felt like
a crisp wind, Grandma’s hugs, fuzzy new mittens, pine needles scrunching under my slippers. I saw twinkly lights, mistletoe in the doorway, smiling faces from years gone by. Several Christmas carols played almost simultaneously in a kind of medley.

I fought my way back to my living room and glared sternly at the hallucination in Jack’s chair.

”Fun stuff. Does the DEA know about this?”

”Oh, Frannie. Why are you such a hard case? I told you it’s non-addictive and has no harmful side effects. Would Santa Claus lie to you?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. We looked at each other a while.

”Can I have some more of that glittery stuff?”

”Mmmm. I think you need something stronger. Try a sugarplum.”

I tasted rum ball. Peppermint. Those hard candies with the picture all the way through. Mama’s favorite fudge. A chorus line of Christmas candies danced through my mouth. The Swedish Angel Chimes, run on candle power, say tingatingatingating. Mama, with a funny smile, promised to give Santa my letter. Greeting cards taped on the refrigerator door. We rode through the tree farm on a straw-filled trailer pulled by a red and green tractor, looking for a perfect pine.
It was so big, Daddy had to cut a bit off so the star wouldn’t scrape the ceiling. Lights, ornaments, tinsel. Daddy lifted me up to the mantle to hang my stocking. My dolls stayed up to see Santa Claus, and in the morning they all had new clothes. Grandma carried in a platter with the world’s biggest turkey, and I got the drumstick. Joey’s Christmas puppy chased my Christmas kitten up the tree and it would have fallen over but Daddy held it while Mama got the kitten out. Daddy said every bad word there was but he kept laughing anyway. I sneaked my favorite plastic horse into the nativity scene, between the camels and the donkey.

I came back to reality slowly, with a silly smile on my face and a tickly feeling behind my eyes like they wanted to cry. The phrase ”visions of sugarplums” took on a whole new meaning.

”How long has it been,” Santa asked, “since you played with a nativity set?-“

”But it symbolizes—“

”The winter-born king. The sacred Mother and her sun-child. Got a problem with that? You could redecorate it with pentagrams if you like, they’ll look fine. As for the Christianization, I’ve heard who you invoke at Imbolc.”

”But Bridgid was a Goddess for centuries before the Catholic Church-oh.” I crossed my arms and tried to glare at him, but failed. “You’re a sneaky old elf, y’know?”

”The term is ‘jolly old elf.’ Care for another sugarplum?”

I did.

I tasted gingerbread. My first nip of eggnog the way the grown-ups drink it. Fresh sugar cookies, shaped like trees and decked with colored frosting. Dad had been laid off, but we managed a lot of cheer. They told us Christmas would be “slim pickings.” Joey and I smiled bravely when Mama brought home that spindly spruce. We loaded down our “Charlie Brown Christmas Tree” with every light and ornament it could hold. Popcorn and cranberry strings for the outdoor trees.
Mistletoe in the hall: plastic mistletoe, real kisses. Joey and I snipped and glued and stitched and painted treasures to give as presents. We agonized over our “Santa” letters...by now we knew where the goodies came from, and we tried to compromise between what we longed for and what we thought they could afford. Every day we hoped the factory would reopen. When Joey’s dog ate my mitten, I wasn’t brave. I knew that meant I’d get mittens for Christmas, and one less
toy. I cried. On December twenty-fifth we opened our presents ve-ery slo-wly, drawing out the experience. We made a show of cheer over our socks and shirts and meager haul of toys. I got red mittens. We could tell Mama and Daddy were proud of us for being so brave, because they
were grinning like crazy.

”Go out to the garage for apples.” Mama told us, “We’ll have apple pancakes.”

I don’t remember having the pancakes. There was a dollhouse in the garage. No mass-produced aluminum thing but a homemade plywood dollhouse with wall-papered walls and real curtains and thread-spool chairs. My dolls were inside, with newly sewn clothes. Joey was on his knees in front of a plywood barn with hay in the loft. His old farm implements had new paint. Our plastic animals were corralled in popsicle stick fences. The garage smelled like apples and hay, the
cement was bone-chilling under my slippers, and I was crying.

My knees were drawn up to my chest, arms wrapped around them. My chest felt tight, like ice cracking in sunshine. Santa offered me a huge white handkerchief. When all the ice in my chest had melted, he cleared his throat. He was pretty misty-eyed, too.

”Want to come sit on my lap and tell me what you want for Christmas?”

”You’ve already given it to me.” But I sat on his lap anyway, and kissed his rosy cheek until he did his famous laugh.

”I’d better go now, Frannie. I have other stops to make, and you have work to do.”

”Right. I’d better pop the corn tonight, it strings best when it’s stale.” I let him out the door. The reindeer were pawing impatiently at the moon-kissed new-fallen snow. I’d swear Rudolph winked at me.

”Don’t forget the milk and cookies.”

”Right. Uh, December twenty-fourth, or Solstice, or what?”

He shrugged. “Whatever night you expect me, I’ll be there. Eh, don’t wait up. Visits like this are tightly rationed. Laws of Nature, y’know, and She’s strict with them.”

”Gotcha. Thanks, Santa.” I kissed his cheek again. “Happy Holidays.”

The phrase had a nice, non-denominational ring to it. I thought I’d call my parents and in-laws soon and try it out on them. Santa laid his finger aside of his nose and nodded.

”Blessed be, Frannie.”

The sleigh soared up, and Santa really did exclaim something. It sounded like old German. Smart-aleck elf. When I closed the door, the radio was playing Jethro Tull’s “Solstice Bells.”

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

I wanna learn permaculture

2010-11-19T19:24:00.003-05:00

My chickens are doing wonderfully! They're digging on their coop, scratching up a storm in the run, and practically killing each other every time I pull up a dying kale plant to toss in for them. (OMG, they are seriously hilarious.) I must be in some kind of chicken nirvana, and we're not even getting any eggs yet. (And we won't until spring, so don't ask.)

But this whole chicken thing, paired with an article in the most recent "Urban Farmer" magazine, has pushed me again to want to investigate permaculture. I'd love to give you a brief discussion of the highlights of permaculture, or a quick glossing of its main points, but the simple truth is, I don't know. I do know that it has something to do with creating systems in your environment that reinforce each other, and I remember a nifty drawing I saw once of a permaculture garden where you could practically feed a family of four from the 30' diameter circle surrounding your family apple tree, but otherwise.... I know that I know nothing.

But my chickens are making me think. Chickens are fertilizer machines. Chickens love to eat grubs, bugs, and all manner of other things that I do not want in my garden. Chickens scratch and aerate soils. These things are good.

However, chickens also decimate crops. Chickens scratch up seedlings. Chickens eat an entire year's crop of lettuce. Chickens roost on my neighbor's car. These things are bad.

There must be a practical way to capitalize on the good, while at least minimizing the bad. I have heard and read stories of people with chicken-bearing gardens who only suffer minor heartaches, but I'm not sure how to make this happen here in my own backyard.

Yet.

I think permaculture might provide a key. A principled method for integrating the two in a way that neither destroys my crops, nor pisses off my neighbors. (Currently my neighbors are either quite happy that I have chickens, or quite blissfully ignorant--I'd like to maintain the status quo in this instance.)

So it's off to the library website to reserve a copy of Gaia's Garden. Other suggestions?

How this day went wrong: or, RESPECT THE FOOD, DAMNIT!

2010-10-21T19:21:00.006-04:00

I spent a very greatly huge amount of my day in a training session for work. And I'll be honest, it was, mostly, a very good one. It was about safety training, which sounds like some kind of psycho pseudo-phrase for "how to annoy employees even further," but it really wasn't. Or, at least, it probably will annoy employees even further, but if properly motivated, is actually a really good thing. So. Yes.

So what's with the yelling in the title of the post?

Well, for all of its good points, this meeting had one basic problem, and that was time management. First off, it was a scheduled 4-hour meeting. This was twice as long as it really needed to be. At the outside this training could've used 3 hours and still had time to spare. And nonetheless, the presenters managed to run behind schedule, telling us lots and lots and lots of anecdotal stories that, while nice, were mostly superfluous.

This, in turn, resulted in The Way Things Went Wrong(tm). It happened when the lead presenter said, "Okay, in about 10 minutes we'll break for lunch.... and can we make this a working lunch?"

screeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

This pissed me off. A lot. Enough that it surprised even me. But on reflection, I realized that this stepped all over some of my most dearly-held bits of food ideology. If you've read here at all, you know that I am nothing if not a minefield of food ideology. And this guy just started hopscotching straight through that field.

What was my problem? Glad you asked!

{begin rant}

I found this request--simple though it may have been--to be so incredibly insulting that I actually had trouble articulating the reasons why, there were so many of them.

The presenters were incapable of maintaining a presentation schedule, and so the attendees were put-upon to fix the problem.
It was insulting to the people who prepared the food for us--many of whom were in the room for the training--to force the room to essentially ignore the food they'd carefully prepared for us in favor of the continuous stream of lecture.
It was insulting to the food itself, that we were being forced to not pay attention to in favor of the continuous stream of lecture.
It was insulting to the participants, who needed a break from the continuous stream of lecture.
It showed a complete disregard for the act of eating a meal in community, which I consider a very serious breech of etiquette. The midday meal was treated as nothing more than a minor inconvenience that could be easily run over by a continuous stream of lecture.
It showed a complete disregard for the health of the participants, who were being encouraged (practically required) to eat our food mindlessly, without attention or care. We were not even given the option of actually enjoying our food.

Am I weird? Yes, I'm sure I am. Everyone there cared far more about the fact that, by eating mechanically without paying any attention to our food, we would get out of the training sooner (which, as it happened, was false, but no matter).

And I think that at the end of the day, it was not just the presenters making this request, but the overall "Sure! No problem!" attitude of everyone else that got to me. That didn't really piss me off, it just made me sad. I don't think it even crossed anyone's mind that we were giving up anything by working straight through lunch. Even the people who cooked the food probably didn't taste it as they ate it, and probably also didn't notice that they didn't taste it. People wonder why we have such a weight problem in America (myself certainly not excepted here). Well, if the attitude of most Americans towards food resembles the attitudes of my co-workers, then it's pretty easy to see why. Food didn't warrant our attention. It wasn't worth it. Just shove it in your mouth while listening to horror stories about gangrenous infections at the safety lecture.

No prayers were said (and, I should note, I work at a Catholic Motherhouse). No comment on the flavor. No thought about how the food was grown, or harvested, or prepared. No gratefulness was felt for what was given to us.

I did my very level best to not pay a whit of attention to the lecture while eating. I will admit, I probably enjoyed the food more than I would ordinarily have, because I was so bloody-minded about eating it slowly and with attention. But I also missed out on a rare opportunity to chat with co-workers with whom I am rarely able to interact. I missed out on a little bit of a recharge, which left me feeling like I'd been hit by a semi by the end of the meeting. I missed what it usually my favorite part of my work-day--I missed my lunch. Maybe I'm spoiled. No, I'm certainly spoiled. But every day at my work, we sit down and eat in community. And no one works. No one even has to answer their phones, even if they ring. We eat. We talk. We find out about what's happening in each other's lives, and tell stories, and laugh. I could have done that with a whole new set of people today. But instead, we worked. Because, really, that's far more important, right?

Well now, that couldn't have been more differenter.

2010-10-01T17:51:00.009-04:00

So here is where I spent Wednesday:

As before, this isn't literally where I was on Wednesday. This was taken at a Volunteer Fair in 2005 at some university somewhere else. But it was the same one that I was at yesterday (except we used laptops instead of CRT monitors).

As a purely academic exercise, flip back two posts ago--you remember, the one about psychic damage? Look at that photo, then look back here. Then back at the first post then BACK TO ME.

Er, whoops. Sorry. Slipped into an Old Spice commercial there.

*ahem* Anyway, there are a few instantly noticeable differences. No vortexes of black power suits and drool. Liberal use of color, smiles, and happiness. Heartfelt desire to use the time you have on this planet to make it a better place for everyone.

I got to slide into the volunteer fair because I recruit volunteers as well as interns, and my interns "count" since it's for a non-profit. And even thought it was at exactly the same location (to the building!) as the Career Hell I'd just attended, neither it, nor the recruiters, nor the attending students, bore any resemblance to each other. However, there weren't chair massages at this one, so it wasn't perfect.

Great gods, I felt like I'd come home. We got a home-esque cooked vegetarian meal before the fair opened. It was really good--even the eggplant casserole, which is just asking for disaster--although someone apparently mistook cayenne pepper for nutmeg on the apple crisp (no, I'm not making that up). The only thing bittersweet about it was that no such fairs existed (or were available at my college at least) when I was in school, except for volunteer opportunities at the school/in the city. Now, those are great, and I'm a fan, but we were recruiting volunteers for places like inner-city Detroit, rural sustainable farms (ahem), and villages in Paraguay. I was politely turned down by several people who were looking for a year or longer commitment (we typically have 3-6 month internships). I spent three hours talking to all manner of engaged, eager, happy, go-getter students who wanted to use their power for the forces of good.

It could heal one's soul.

And in entirely unrelated news....

MEET MY NEW PEEPS!

Here they were just 1.5 weeks ago:

And here they are today:

(OMG they've grown so much! Can you see the feathers on their wings already?!)

And here will be their home in about 4 weeks:

(This has now been painted an unsightly color of primer-white, but will hopefully soon be transformed into a more pleasing hunter-green).

Teaching Green

2010-09-19T14:57:00.002-04:00

I gave a sermon at my Congregation today about teaching environmental values in children's religious education, and the lessons I've learned about doing so. Since it's relevant to this blog, I'm copying it here. Of course, I would probably copy my sermons here even if they aren't relevant, so the relevancy is sort of a bonus in this case. If, for some incomprehensible reason, you'd prefer to listen to me give it rather than just read it, you can go to our podcast blog here, where it's uploaded.

Teaching Green Sermon

(Opening, transitional, and closing words all from Wendell Berry.)

OPENING "The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first."

TRANSITIONAL "We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world - to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity - our own capacity for life - that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.

We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
— Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

This sermon actually comes from a presentation I was supposed to give at the Green Congregations Conference earlier this spring. I was asked to do a joint presentation with Candace Minster from the White Violet Center; I would have been representing the UU perspective on teaching environmental values in children's religious education. If you picked up on the past subjunctives in the previous sentence, you already realize that this didn't happen. The conference was cancelled, another in a long string of events sacrificed to the imploding economy. Apparently our service associates got wind of all this, and felt so very badly for me that my presentation was not given, that they wanted to offer me an opportunity to do it here. This will be a fairly modified version of that presentation. I don't have Candace as a partner, and frankly I'm not really trying to instruct you on proper pedagogical techniques for youngsters. I'm interested in talking to you about my own experiences, and discoveries, while teaching environmental values to our kids in RE.

Both the opening and transitional words come from Wendell Berry (as do the closing words), an author I frequently use for my work, mostly because he is one of the very few people with whom I almost entirely agree. Berry asserts, and I think exactly rightly, that most of our assumptions about how to live in this world have been wrong. Understandable, perhaps, but wrong. We have spent a great deal of our human history, and for the past hundred years have also had a great deal of success, at fighting and subverting our worlds own processes, and ignoring its own inherent limits. That this couldn't last really has been lost on us until recently. We've started to hit up against creation's limits, and we've found that they do not give easily.

There are few places where this is clearer than when attempting to teach environmentalism to children, especially teaching it from within the UU tradition.

Teaching children's religious education in our tradition is, well, weird. It's not a lot like what you may have experienced growing up in a more mainstream religious tradition. As UU RE teachers, we aren't trying to bestow belief in crucial truths to our children. We don't think we have the right answers. We aren't trying to imprint our religion on impressionable minds while they're young, so that they will grow up strong in our belief system.

Teaching children's RE in the UU tradition is a lot more like "building your own theology". In keeping with the UU 4th principle of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, the methodology is typically a combination of introducing our kids to a range of religious traditions, beliefs, and paths, while also helping them to articulate their own intuitive sense of the divine (or lack thereof). It's much less about handing out truths as it is handing out TOOLS, which our children can use to begin creating a path that is right for them. There are a lot of ways that this can go wrong, and a lot of ways that it can work beautifully. When done poorly, we hand our children pre-finished wooden sculptures to play with. When done properly, we had our children a block of wood and the best tools we can find, and let them create their own work of art.

So how is this supposed to work for environmentalism, exactly? Can the same basic methodology for religion work for environmentalism? Just like religious education, shouldn't we be giving our children the tools they need to "find their own environmentalism"? How is that supposed to work?

The first problem you hit upon is that in our culture, we don't have many and varied environmental methodologies to teach the kids to give them some background, or framework from which to operate. Sure, we've got some turf wars--used cars versus new Priuses, paper versus plastic versus bring-your-own-bag, vegetarian, vegan, flexitarian, conscious omnivore, and so on. But none of these are from a different framework. They all come from the same basic place. And because of that, unlike with religions, we are very willing to be more dogmatic about things. Here's a list, a very typical list, of 10 things you can do to go green:
1. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
2. Use Less Heat and Air Conditioning
3. Change a Light Bulb
4. Drive Less and Drive Smart
5. Buy Energy-Efficient Products
6. Use Less Hot Water
7. Use the "Off" Switch
8. Plant a Tree
9. Get a Report Card from Your Utility Company
10. Encourage Others to Conserve
*sigh*

Anyone who knows me well can already see how this will go badly for me. I hold lists like this in the utmost contempt. Why I so strongly dislike these lists will become apparent (I hope) as I go. But suffice it to say, this was the core message of most of the available environmental resources.

You see, I just don't believe in those lists, or pretty much any variant of them that I've ever seen. And if you've ever tried to teach children, one thing you realize quickly is, to be blunt, children can smell a lie from 10 miles away. They may not call you on it, especially if they are particularly "well behaved", but you can see when you lose them. And I would be lying if I tried to teach this "shiny happy" environmentalism to our kids--and then they'd hold me in the utmost contempt. Yuck.

But why don't I believe in these lists? That actually has everything to do with teaching children. Is there anything really wrong with telling kids that they should use less air conditioning, or that they should drive less, or change their lightbulbs to CFLs? Well, no... and yes. You see, children actually have a much better grip on environmentalism than any adult I know. Environmentalism is nothing more or less that a justice issue--how can we all play fairly with Earth? We all know that kids just spank us on understanding injustice. They might not be the greatest when it comes to sharing with each other, but they get the clarity of injustice far better than any adult.

So let's say we're talking about global warming with the children in RE, and we're not sugar coating it. We're discussing polar bears, and refugees from Bangladesh. We talk about major seasonal swings making it difficult to farm, and making food too expensive for some people to afford. So they want to know, very reasonably, what can we do to stop this. And then I tell them "turn your AC up to 73*F". Really? THAT is the great message of the ages to save humanity--use less AC and drive less?

I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't do these things, not by a long shot. But saving the planet? Kids can tell this is nonsense. How? Because I think it's nonsense, and kids can tell. I suspect that, deep down, most adults think that this is nonsense. It is very hard to preach this sort of environmentalism to children if you're thinking at all seriously about the situation. I discovered that I had very little to say to the kids in the "conventional environmentalism" model that wasn't a lie, that I simply didn't believe.

I also discovered that I was under a double whammy with kids when teaching conventional environmentalism. First, as I already said, kids can smell a lie, so now you've lost their trust.

Second, and more importantly, I was staring in the face exactly the people who would be most harmed by my own complicity in this nonsense. I'm sure everyone's heard the Native American saying that we should think seven generations in the future when deciding how to act. And anyone who's tried this also knows that this is really almost impossible to do--I don't even know how to start that project. It's a metaphor, designed to encourage us to think about the future of our actions, but it's really not that helpful from a practical standpoint. Well, I can tell you what IS helpful is to look one of those future generations square in the face while trying to spin a yarn about how being "just mildly less comfortable than we're used to" is all we have to do to save the world. Once I realized that this is what I was doing, well, how could I continue?

Alright, so what should I do instead? I mean, I didn't want to abandon the project of teaching environmentalism, it's too important. But how? I'm not conveying the right message to our kids. What is the right message? Do I even know? Uh oh.

My own discovery here can be summed up nicely by Albert Einstein, who said "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." Remember how I talked about teaching lots of religions, but not really having multiple models of environmentalism to teach? That should have been a warning. It's not that there are no competing models of environmentalism out there; it's that we adults live very much engrained in one way of life, one way that things are supposed to be. Solutions to our problems, such as our received views on environmentalism and living green, need to conform to our lifestyle. They must fit the way we live, not so that we will be willing to adopt them, but so that we can even SEE them. There are alternative stories for how to live sustainably out there, but they're so far outside of our ken that we can't perceive them, or can't take them seriously when we do. To us, that sort of lifestyle is uninhabitable.

But, not so with children. There isn't a "way things are supposed to be" for them yet. They can get the real, and in some cases absurd, picture of our lifestyle and what it's doing to the world much better than I can.

• I try to turn my fridge up as high as is safe; kids wonder why we're using a fridge when it's 35 degrees outside, and frankly it's just silly to use electricity to do what is given for free for over a quarter of the year.
• I wonder about buying a more fuel-efficient car; kids wonder why stuff is so far apart that we need cars for everything, especially if this means there won't be any oil left for them when they're adults.
• I wonder how high I'll set my AC during the summer; kids wonder why I'm turning it on at all when we have Bangladesh refugees due to the effects of climate change, exacerbated by coal-fired electricity.

I could go through the whole 10-step list, or any other similar list you like, with similar results.

Now, I'm not arguing that children will lead the way here, or that any suggestions they might have are obviously right and should be adopted. But they CAN open our eyes a bit, and introduce us to paradigm-breaking ideas. Perhaps we can't all just ditch our cars, no matter how much we'd like to, due to the overall layout of our country. But maybe now we see a real way to try and change future planning, and choice of housing, so that we CAN ditch our cars in the future. And why do we use refrigerators when it's cold outside? It is almost beyond the pale to suggest that we shouldn't, but go ahead and try to justify it to yourself sometime, given the huge amount of energy--and coal firing and environmental damage--that goes with them. And I assure you, from personal experience, there are few worse feelings than discussing the devastating effects of climate change, only to have a child call you out for being in a room so cooled by AC that I was wearing a cardigan in July. No one had AC at all until the 1970's, but now our own comfort is clearly more important that the lives of people in far off countries, people suffering daily because of our choices, not in the future, but right now. Trust me, that hurts.

I have found, for myself, that when I'm considering lifestyle changes for environmental purposes, I like to put them through the 5-year-old test. I imagine explaining what I think of as the problem to a 5-year-old and trying to imagine what she would reply. If I can't come up with anything good or novel, I try to find a 5-year-old and ask them (okay, maybe a 10 year old, but no older). And failing that, I try explaining to the 5-year-old in my head what my solution is, to see how it fares. I suggest this method for everyone.

Children are the fastest path to learning to live within our limits, but only if we let them. If we listen, if we give them access to real information, and then take their responses to it seriously, we can see through the eyes of someone who hasn't been fully indoctrinated into our culture. They don't know how things "should" be, so they can tell us how things "could" be. If we stop trying to teach them, they can teach us a great deal. I will never teach environmentalism again, I have learned that lesson. But I will take whatever lessons our children will give me, or at least, the 5-year-old in my head.

In truth, I don't know the right answers here, and neither do 5 year olds. I've got my pet solutions, ones that have gotten the 5-year-old seal of approval, but I suspect that's not really much of a guarantee . I'm trying to figure things out, and will likely spend the rest of my life doing so. But I want to take these problems as seriously as I can, and I can't think of a better way to do that than to listen to the children on these issues. I invite you to join me. Put your choices past a 5-year-old sometime, see how it goes.

CLOSING WORDS "The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner."

Stunning levels of psychic damage.

2010-09-09T11:19:00.004-04:00

I must preface this post by explaining that I am writing this almost entirely for its therapeutic and restorative purposes. I hope to expel some of the evil from my soul, and regain a modicum of balance. I put this out there on the blogosphere partially to serve as a warning for others, but mostly because I suspect my readers are more like me than not and will get a sort of voyeuristic pleasure from reading this. Sort of like watching a train wreck (where no one is hurt, of course).

So.

Here's where I spent my day yesterday:

Well, no, not exactly there. This photo was taken at a Career Expo at some university somewhere in 2008. But it doesn't really matter, it was the same one I was at yesterday.

Take a moment to look at that photo. The first thing you need to get past is the fact that this was not taken at a goth club, and that all of the black clothing is actually power suits. What is not being clearly conveyed in this photo (I think mainly because they got a disproportionate number of students staring intently at their notes before talking to the next recruiter) is the heady, pervasive, almost tangible atmosphere of Go-Get-'Em-We-Can-Do-It-ness in the air. Or maybe that just doesn't photograph well, it's hard to say.

The Career Expo I attended yesterday was at one of the most prestigious private universities in our country. In the course of four hours, I saw hundreds of the absolute best, cream-of-the-crop, that this university had to offer, perfectly coiffed and immaculately turned-out, bright-eyed and face-forward, all falling all over themselves for the chance to spread their legs for the nearest corporate master. "Soul crushing" doesn't quite capture it, but I'm stuck for a better metaphor.

I was a recruiter. Or, to put it a different way, I was on the side of the forces of darkness. Now in fairness, I was recruiting interns for an organic farm, so you might imagine that I was a bit out of place there. In truth, I just sort of blended in. I mean, hell, I was between PNC and Deloitte accounting, both vortexes of black suits, tasteful eyeshadow and desperate drool; I'm not sure I was entirely recognizable for what I was. I felt a bit like I was behind enemy lines. Of course, these enemy lines did have a gourmet catered meal and free chair massages, so there is something to be said for it.

And then, about an hour into the pain, it happened. A bright young thing, in line for Deloitte (yes, a line. a long line.) looked at my banner and looked away. And then looked again. And then again, with a look somewhere between confused and hopeful. And then, lo though she had advanced mightily in her line, and was only 3 candidates away from getting her shot at selling herself to the biggest accounting firm in the U.S., she left the line and came over to me. Her first question was an almost pleading "Um... is your table really advertising what it looks like it's advertising?" When I said yes, we really are an organic farm, we really are taking apps for interns, and we really would welcome her application, she looked like she might cry. I think she was as scared of what she was seeing around her as I was. I was actually offering her an out, even just for a little while (maybe a few months, maybe just for the time we got to talk at the fair) of not having to be the person who will eventually get a job at Deloitte. I think in that moment that nothing could have made her happier; and honestly, I'm not sure anything could have made me happier, either.

In sum, I spoke with around twelve kids at the fair. A couple of them had even researched us before they got to the booth, and were looking to pad their resume with some unique experience in environmental service before graduating. Another few were interested, but were graduating seniors and needed to be finding a job (I suspect that once they realize what the job market is like, I'll be hearing back from at least one of them). And some of them were like that first girl, unaware of our existence, and falling all over themselves with happiness when they found us. One student grew up in the mountains of South Carolina, and just wants to come out to our farm and feel like she's at home again. One girl has a dual major in Anthropology and Chinese, and wants to work on environmental issues in China; the possibility of having on-farm experience for her was breathtaking.

Almost all of the kids I saw that day, not just the ones I spoke with, are good, bright kids with good hearts. And most of them genuinely believe that the best thing they can do with their lives right now is to land a good-paying job with Discover Card (across the aisle from me, next to Proctor & Gamble and Target Corporate). It makes me sad. But the kids that came and spoke with me--they make me happy. They will try to make a difference, even if they're working at Discover. Maybe they will make the world a better place. Maybe they'll end up out at my farm, or on their own. I don't know, but it was odd to feel some hope in such a place of desperate, corporate-black hell.

Goodness how one's life can change

2010-09-03T15:20:00.005-04:00

For anyone who's followed this blog for while (and for those who haven't--Hi there! Nice to meet you!), you know that our lives have been pretty upended several times over the past year. I'm hoping that now we're settling into some kind of pattern, but I know life well enough to understand that it just waits there in the corner, biding its time until you let your guard down, and then KABLAAMO.

Yes, that's a technical term.

Anyway, I thought I'd spend a post getting everyone more or less up to speed on where we are in our lives these days. First, with respect to this blog and its focus of adapting to a low/no energy lifestyle while in-town, we've doubtlessly backslid. In our defense, it's been a really, really, really, really hard year. And now that things are evening out a bit, my husband and I have gone through a role-reversal. This means that now I'm the full-time breadwinner, and he's the housespouse. But in practical terms, this also means that he's taking over a role that I had 5 years to work at and improve. He has a steep learning curve ahead of him, and he knows it, but he's also tackling things pretty well. So to be perfectly honest, a lot of projects I'd been working on have been pushed to a back burner. And that's okay. At least, I hope it's okay. I've been assured by Sharon Astyk that you've still got at least until Friday before the end of the world. Hm. Oh crap, that post was date-stamped Aug. 3rd. Maybe I'm screwed after all?? But aside from applying personal salve to my wounded deep-green ego, I must recognize that peak oil is no respecter of persons. Our world energy situation doesn't give two craps if we've been unemployed or not. So while I (like everyone else, I suspect) am praying for a nice, slow decline, perhaps it's time to start ramping up again. (Or is that ramping down? What's the appropriate metaphor here?)

Both of our children are now in full-time school, and both seem to be enjoying it. It may surprise some readers here that we do not homeschool, given the sorts of people we are and such. I've got no issues with homeschooling, just like I have no issues with goat ownership--as long as it's someone else doing it. (FYI, I hate goats. And they hate me, so it works out.) But I am grateful to live in a nation that, over a century ago, recognized the critical importance of having an educated populance for running a democracy, and instituted compulsory, universal education. I am further blessed with living in a pretty good school district, with teachers and principals that I very much like. In a more long-term, philosophical sense, I also have some grave concerns about the abandonment of said compulsory, universal system of education as a society, but that's a post for another day (and, just possibly, for a different blog). For now, I will quote my dear friend Kate, who once said, "I like to think of public education as a personal gift to me from my government."

My own life is now quite interesting and different. My full-time job is unlike anything anywhere else. I work for a Motherhouse (yes, the place where nuns live) in their eco-justice ministry (yes, that does make sense. Think it through, creation, god's gift to us, care for each other and the world.... there ya go.) This means I have done all of the following in the past three months: written a draft of a business plan; dehydrated over 40# of tomatoes and 20# of apples; created a new yearly budget; been named head of the Safety Committee; worked the farmer's market; scooped alpaca poop; written check requests; paid bills; planned an invasive species workshop; planned a workshop to introduce peak oil to Sisters; and wrote a proposal for getting chickens. All as a part of my job. My job rocks. A lot. A whole lot.

On a related note, my job has also done wonders for my posture. I must pass at least 5 seriously osteoparetic (is that an adjective?) sisters every day, and nothing says "stand up straight, girl!" like that does.

My garden did well in the early season, but now is in... shambles? No, not shambles, that's unfair. But it is DONE. And I planted out my fall crops too early, so the seeds all fried. Gonna try again, possibly this weekend. At the least I'd like some beets & lettuce, ya know? And, of course, there is the new CHICKEN COOP! But no chickens yet, alas. I will likely need to wait until next spring and get some chicks, which is probably the best way to do things anyway. I am also investigating various chicken + garden alternatives. We shall see what we shall see...

So, onward and upward, right?

Silence is golden.

2010-08-26T22:51:00.004-04:00

Oh dear, I seem to have 22 followers. Twenty-two of you are invested enough in what I have to say that you've bothered to add me to a feed? I'm both surprised and flattered. =) I suppose this means that I really ought be getting on with writing more stuff here, doesn't it? Well, it's past my bedtime now, so I won't do it just. at. this. moment.

Buuuut....

Teaser: I have a new CHICKEN COOP! (no chickens yet, though)

More soon.

Touch of grey

2010-06-05T10:04:00.007-04:00

(I seem to be on some kind of video-posting kick. Please bear with me, it's probably just a phase.)

You know, I don't know if I've spent enough time extolling the virtues of my readers (or musing over the incredible fact that I have readers). You guys really rock, you know that? I was, perhaps, a bit depressed in my last post. A bit, perhaps, melodramatic. A bit, perhaps, of a pretentious gothy snot. But you all took it in stride, commiserated with me, shared your own experiences, and generally talked me back off the ledge. I even got a lovely evening of knitting with good friends in the deal. Hm. Maybe I should whine more often? (/jk)

The shoe is on the hand, it fits // There's really nothing much to it // Whistle through your teeth and spit, cause // it's alright.
We will get by // We will survive.

But, as the estimable Jerry Garcia says, we will get by. In a lot of ways, that song sums up how I feel most of the time, admittedly more acutely at some times than others. It really isn't the case that "I think we're all doomed" (I didn't even think that during my last post). I do think our way of life is doomed--and good riddance, really, so that's not even very depressing to me. What depresses, scares, and just generally cranks me off, is that we are so screwing ourselves working through our not-quite-doomed-ness. There are good ways to transition our lifestyles to a healthy, sustainable culture. There are less good ways of doing it. There are tricky ways of doing it. There are outright bad ways of doing it. And then there's the way we're doing it, which as far as I can tell is edging up on worst-case scenario bad. Everything we need to do, everything that we'll have no choice but to do, is being made progressively harder and more traumatic by our collective attitude towards it. Even the people who are supposed to be at the forefront of the battle, the avant guard, as it were, find that they only fight just up to the point where it becomes mildly incovenient for them. And because of that, everything is going to go much harder than it needs to.

Every silver lining's got a // touch of grey.
Yeah, we'll get through this, I will gladly concede that, even though it's just gonna suck for a long while. So it's good to have reminders of how we're not totally doomed, and why we might be worth saving. You readers are part of that, reminding me that the ledge isn't really where I want to be. My friends & family, playing with the kids, the cat, all those things that will still be worth doing no matter what our dumbass culture goes and does next. The first Farmer's Market of the season, seeing people I hadn't even realized that I missed until I saw them. People who loved our two sons' new mohawk haircuts (!), and had worried all winter about if B and I would ever find a job (we did!), and wanted to trade bread for cherries.

During the worst of the Soviet Union collapse, when the only food to be had was via garden or barter, and no one knew what tomorrow would bring, people still celebrated birthdays. Weddings were held (and consumated!), and babies were born. Grandmas held grandchildren, and died peacefully, having lived a full life. Games were played, people laughed. There was pain, and agony, and starvation, and death. And there was joy, and happiness, and giddiness, and love. All things in balance.

We will get by. We'll return to your regularly scheduled blogging soon. Thanks, guys, and enjoy the song!

Sometimes you just gotta vent

2010-05-28T21:26:00.008-04:00

Today I found despair. Or perhaps I should say that despair found me, as I can honestly say I don't remember going out to look for this or anything.

I've always know, intellectually, that the project of "living green and saving the world" is in essence a total bullshit job. I know this partially because we've made a cock-up of the whole job of taking care of our planet and I'm dubious it even can recover. And partially because even if it could recover, it would take actual and genuine *gasp* effort on our parts, and probably a willingness to give up most of our God-Given Western Lifestyle, and well, call me crazy, but I'm just not seeing that on the horizon. We'll stop sucking oil & coal down with a straw when it's pried from our cold, dead hands (which, I rather suspect, is exactly what's going to happen). So I know this. Really. I'm not stupid, and I'm not pollyanna. I'm more pessimistic than just about anyone I personally know, and am probably in the running for Most Pessimistic Indiana (I've been barred from the "Doomer of the Year" award, since I've apparently turned pro). I don't think we're all going to die off, but I do think that we're not going to change our behavior until it is way, way too late and we have absolutely no choice left, and that will be the worst possible way to go about it imaginable.

But today I discovered that there is a difference between the simple intellectual knowledge that, really, we're fucked, and the cold, biting, clenching, gnawing despair that comes from actually feeling it. Today I really felt, for the very first time I think, just how totally impossible the project of changing the behavior of Americans will be. And it hurt. Physically. I almost got sick. Rage mixed with confusion just blew up inside me and then, just like a balloon, I totally deflated. I felt completely defeated. I don't remember knowing despair like that. I just sat and cried.

Ironically, perhaps, it was over something comparatively stupid--a triviality really. Certainly not something that will change the world, or even make a significant dent in our problems. It had nothing to do with the oil spill, or stalled climate bills in Congress, or anything that's actually important. Which is why I also feel really dumb having such a strong reaction to it--it was way out of proportion to the situation. But there was jack-all I could do about my reaction.

And no, I'm not giving out any details about the actual event, which is probably really frustrating to you readers, and for that I'm sorry. I've just got to vent, but the simple fact is, the specifics of the situation don't really matter. It could've happened at any time, with just about anyone, so I'm not going to single this event out. B'sides, I suspect that most folks who read this blog have either already had a moment like this, or perhaps will have one soon. When it hits you, right in the gut, just how hair-rippingly hopeless it all is. =(

Dancing Days are here again

2010-05-14T22:31:00.001-04:00

(Go on, indulge. It'll make sense soon enough.)

I've alluded in the past to how, during our time of unemployment (which stretched out Yea These Turbulent Nine Months--and was not fun), the work that we had done for adaptation to a low/no energy lifestyle was a huge help to us. But I've managed to not really discuss how, except for a lengthy diatribe about the importance of social services and how you really ought to be looking for them now. So while most of my computer's speed is being taken up downloading a video game off of Steam (hey, don't judge--it's old, cheap, and no packaging), I thought this would be a great time to finally delve into that particular project. This will likely be a multi-part post, because my attention span is only just so long ya know.

Some of the ways our low-energy adaptations were helpful should be pretty obvious. I mean, when you don't turn your A/C on at all for the summer, your electric bill is bound to be lower, right? But part of that was being in the right situation to pull that off. In our case, this means having the presence of mind (er, well, at least having a spouse who had the presence of mind) to see the value of buying an old house--other than the gorgeous interior woodwork. Our house was designed to not have A/C. It has high ceilings and lots of windows. I seriously doubt we could've pulled off the no-A/C thing in your modern tract house, or any house built on the assumption that you will cope with exterior temperature fluctuations by moving a little slide-bar on a box screwed to your wall. How did we actually do it, though? Several ways.

The Dance of the Windows
C'mon, sing it with me, you know you want to: "Dancing days are here again as the summer evenings grow / I got my flower, I got my power, I got a woman who knows". How does one dance with windows? Easy. Once the outside temps cool down to at least 65*F, you go around the house and open every window you can find. Leave them open all night. Then, the next morning, very first thing, close them all, pull the blinds, etc. If you have reasonably good insulation, and especially if you have high ceilings, this will do wonders for keeping your temps down.

Two problems with this strategy: first, it's easy to let things get away from you. Once you let your house warm up, then that insulation starts to work against you. So don't slack off! And start doing it sooner than you think you need to. The first time you think "Man, we should've opened the windows last night" it could already be too late. Constant vigilance! Second, summers around here eventually hit a point where even the nights don't go below 70*F. It's about this time that the temps in the house will go to, and stay at, around 80*F or even higher. Sleeping isn't too bad typically, if you have open windows and good fans, but during the day it can be brutal. At this point, other measures are necessary.

Fans
Duh.

Being outside
Yes, being outside when it's hot is better than being inside when it's hot. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. Sometimes it can actually be cooler outside than inside, so that has something to do with it. There's air movement & breeze, although with good circulation you can get that inside, too. But I think there's also a psychological thing in our heads that says "It shouldn't be this hot inside!" (which is, of course, nonsense--there is no normative "ought" about interior temperatures, except to us modern Americans). It's just "more okay" to be hot outside. Fine, whatever, go outside. Sheesh.

Pools
This is technically still in the "being outside" category, but is so significant I think it deserves its own heading. Last year I sprung (sprang? springed? Can I get a past tense on that?) for one of those blue pools, where you blow up the ring at the top and then fill it with water, etc. And you know what? That was the solidly, hands-down, no doubt about it BEST $50 I've ever spent. Period. To hot? Go sit in the pool. Bliss. And once you come back inside, it just felt cooler somehow, even once I was all dried off. And the kids loved it. Yes, you have to have the filter plugged in, but the electric increase was negligible (and minuscule compared to the energy it would've taken to run our A/C). Yes, you do need chlorine for it, and chlorine is a nasty thing (besides other issues, it makes me puke). I am very willing to entertain non-chlorine options for pool care, so if you've got 'em, throw 'em my way. But seriously, the pool is 10' across and 2' deep--we aren't talking chlorinating Niagara Falls here. Furthermore, it must've been of at least a mild enough concentration that, no matter how much got splashed on our lawn or, occasionally, the potato plants, it never killed or damaged anything. And the pool was deep enough to comfortably submerge oneself, and even stretch out a bit--very, very relaxing and cooooool.

Curtains
Remember those curtains I put up for winter to keep the heat trapped in certain locations? Well, they work the other way around, too. We put the curtain back up between the kitchen & the rest of the house to keep the heat in the kitchen. And you know what? Even a single-layer sheet makes a HUGE difference.

Acclimatizing, and letting your expectations go
Don't turn on your A/C. At all. No, not even to take the edge off. Your body will get used to the temperatures, but not if you keep monkeying around with them. Will it eventually be as comfortable as a 68*F room? No, of course it won't. But once you're acclimatized, you can be in a state where you're up & doing, and suddenly you realize "Hey, it's hot in here!" and then you just keep doing whatever you were and forget again. Given that I have an office job now (where I have no control over the thermostat, and would probably anger people greatly if I tried), I'm very curious how my body will react this year. And let your expectations go. Like I said above, there is no "ought" about indoor temperature. Or if there is an "ought", it's of the form "If it's hot outside, it ought be hot inside, too." Just stop thinking that somehow houses are supposed to only hover between 68*F & 72*F.

Isn't this dangerous? No, not in our climate it isn't (midwest). Can children and elderly handle this? If properly managed and checked-on, of course they can. I mean, crap, no one had A/C anywhere until the 1970's! Did everybody's granny and baby die each summer? No, they all had the skill-set to cope. Now, if people have a medical condition (and no, age is not a medical condition) that compromises their body's ability to self-regulate, or worse, their ability to identify when they need to get cooler (and here, age is a concern, both young and old), then you're in a different situation. If you have an elderly person in your home, especially if they're easily confused or disoriented, make sure they are doing okay, drinking enough, and have ways of staying cool. If they aren't doing well, take them somewhere cool to recoup. And if they've lived a long life and just cannot cope anymore without A/C in the summer (for whatever reason), maybe it's time to re-evaluate the no-A/C decision. For kids, watch them closely, make sure they're staying hydrated, and coming in to the shade to cool down occasionally. Kids often can't tell when they're overheating, so if you're in charge of them, that is your job. Do it.

Now, what could we have done to make things even better?

Ceiling Fans
Someday we're seriously going to install a bunch of these all over the place. As it is, we have a number of box fans around that do a reasonably good job, but ceiling fans are just more efficient and effective. But they're also more expensive and very high on the DIY scale, where I rank about a 2 out of, say 500.

Attic Fan
Big purchase time, but if we could afford one, wow would that be awesome. And our house has a great setup for one, too. Suck all of that hot air right on out of your house, pull in cooler outside air!

Moving Downstairs
We never actually moved downstairs to sleep at night. The discomfort of sleeping upstairs where it's hotter never seemed to outweigh the annoyance of setting up shop (kids & all) downstairs. But that might change this year. We now have a sleeper sofa (or, as my kids put it, a *gasp* TRANSFORMER COUCH OMGOMGOMG!), which is posh and in fact more comfortable than our regular bed. But will we be willing to put our bed up and take it back out every day? Hm. Kinda doubt it. We have been known to clear the dinner plates to make room for the breakfast plates....

What else can/could we do? Suggestions? Send 'em along--I'll be out in the pool. =)

(In other news, the State of the Garden is GOOD this year. Pictures and details forthcoming.)

On Earth Day...

2010-04-22T20:36:00.003-04:00

... please don't buy things packaged in ridiculous "100% compostable" bags & wrappers unless you actually have compost to put it in. Understand that throwing a 100% compostable bag into the trash/landfill is no different than throwing a 100% styrofoam box into it. Nothing biodegrades in a landfill. So stop it. Or better yet, start a compost pile. Or better still, start a compost pile and still don't buy those ridiculous products. Mm-kay?

The Great Chain of Lawnmowers

2010-04-20T20:55:00.009-04:00

In fact, this was originally a companion piece to Pierre de Chardin's foundational "Great Chain of Being", but his publisher had just ended an unhappy love affair and didn't see why anyone else should be having a good time. So, I'll present the basic outline of it here to you, with my own *ahem* embellishments.

You see, I have two lawnmowers, and both of them are broken. Here, let me repeat that, to let the absurdity sink in. I have TWO (?!) lawnmowers, and they're BOTH (!??!?!?!) broken. And in case you live in the mojave desert, I'll just let you know that lawnmowing season came upon us with a vengeance. No, not even that. I think it used some kind of tachyon-based time-field thingumy. One day I probably had two weeks to get at least one of our mowers fixed, and the next day I was already two weeks behind. My neighbors were starting to give us nasty looks. We were in serious danger of not being invited to the next neighborhood barbeque.

And so I did what any small town dweller with a deep-seated hatred of her lawn, but an even deeper-seated hatred of confrontations with her neighbors, would do. I borrowed a lawnmower from a friend.

Ah so. Perhaps the more astute of you can already see where this is going. I now have in my possession THREE lawnmowers, and they are all of different basic types. I am now in the unique position to be able to evaluate the variety of lawnmowers available to mankind (at least for under $300). Lo, as Prometheus brought Fire down from the Gods, I shall bring unto you the Truth about Lawnmowers.

The Reel Mower
Oh reel mower, what can I say about you that could convey how I love thee? You run silently, leaving me able to enjoy the sounds of nature or, better yet, my iPod. You have no noxious fumes to foul the air. You don't fling chunks of stick & rocks at my ankles or, occasionally, eyes, with lightning precision. You do not suck down anything non-renewable, except perhaps my energy. You are easy to maneuver, and when kept well-oiled, easy to push. I need not fear the dismemberment of my children when you are in use, and in fact can also hear when the children are attempting to dismember each other, thanks to the aforementioned silent running. You don't make my arms vibrate for hours after I'm done. You don't make my head hurt. Yes, it's true, if we fallible humans allow the grass to get too high, you may struggle mightily, and eventually even need rescue. But this fault cannot be laid at your feet--er, wheels, for surely it is only the weakness of humans and the allure of the Wii that allows such events. No, in this and all things, I find you flawless. Truly, you are God's Own Mower. In heaven, the angels use reel mowers.

The Electric Mower
(Warning: drastic change of writing style ahead.) This is the mower I borrowed from my friend. What can I say? It's certainly not as awesome as a reel mower, but when your reel mower is busted, and your grass is nearly one foot high in some places, it's a godsend. Upon reflection, though, its qualities are stranger than I'd originally thought. It starts up delightfully easily. It's not as heavy as a gas mower, so it is easier to maneuver than one, but it's still at least two, if not three, times as heavy as the reel mower. Dealing with the power cord was... well... weird. Not really difficult, just a minor nuisance, but it was just strange to have to constantly be yanking a cord back & forth out of your path. Originally, I was going to say that it doesn't smell terrible like a gas mower, but I realized that this is wrong. It's just a master at displacing its smell. Gas mowers run on gas (duh) but many people forget that electric mowers run on coal (unless you've had your house re-roofed in PVC cells, and you live in Phoenix). So that mower wasn't stinking up my yard, it was stinking up someone else's yard, so really that's okay, right? Oh, no its not, is it. Damn. But still, in the final analysis, I will take an electric over a gas mower any day, hands down, no question. Which brings us too...

The Gas Mower
Comes directly from Hell. Is part of the trials and tribulations assigned to mankind (how much more religious imagery do you think I can shove into this post?). The only, and I mean only good thing I can say about the gas mower is that by emitting a constant stream of brain-cell-killing fumes, you are at least reminded the entire time that your desire to make the land around your house look like a golf course is destroying the world. So there is that. Otherwise, those things can all die in a fire.

Okay, I admit it. I had way too much fun making that graphic.

Of course, I have not addressed my preferred method for dealing with the lawn, which is to get rid of more and more of it every year! I hate lawns! The only flora or fauna they bring are grubs; they take up space that food, or at least flowers, could be growing in, and you have to kill the planet to maintain it (or get a reel mower and be the envy of your neighborhood). The only excuse I can see for lawn is when it is more properly called "pasture." I did offer for my current boss to bring the alpacas over to mow the lawn, but she declined (there's a big, badly trained, dangerous german somethingorother dog a couple of doors down that makes her edgy).

So my current strategy is to fix the reel mower, and continue my quest to eradicate the lawn once and for all. Mwahahahaaa.

The Spinning Life

2010-03-21T09:32:00.007-04:00

This is my spinning wheel. Er, well, actually, it's a friend of mine's spinning wheel, but I'm thinking I need to make some kind of offer to her to change this fact.

Truth is, yesterday was the first time that my wheel had seen any use in well over 6 months, possibly a full year. It might seem that spinning yarn would be a calming, meditative exercise, perfect for those stressful days of unemployment. Yeah, funny how things like that never work out. You see, first, spinning is only calming and meditative if you're any good at it. Since I have only barely crossed that magical line between a non-spinner and "hey look, I think this is actually yarn!" I don't think anyone could fairly call me good at it. As such, spinning can be an exercise in frustration rather than zen if things don't go well.

However, that's not the main reason, or the one most relevant for my purposes, as to why my spinning wheel has been resting alone in a corner for so long. The real reason is that spinning your own yarn is an incredibly useless thing to do. Of course, that's wrong--it's a very valuable thing, a great skill, an enjoyable pasttime, a craft, and more. But not when you're unemployed. When you're unemployed, it's pretty hard to justify sitting around pushing on a peddle for hours to make something that you could've bought for $6 (or in the case of my yarn, could have gotten for free due to quality issues). Shouldn't I be out looking for a job? That's not guilt from others, that's guilt from right inside my little ole head. So it could be frustrating, and I felt guilty doing it.

And unlike other useless things that I persisted in doing to get me through the stress of unemployment, it just doesn't offer the same diversions. You can watch TV and just ignore everything else--there's a lot to recommend this. When I knit, I can either do something else at the same time (e.g., read, watch TV, etc.) or if the pattern is complex enough, I would be focusing on that instead. Great diversion! But spinning? There's not much else you can do and spin at the same time. It takes both hands and a foot, so reading is straight out unless you've got some kind of truly wacky setup. You can't really watch TV since you need to watch the fiber you're drafting out. But it's not a very intellectually engaging activity; it doesn't "keep your mind off of things". Nope, spinning consumes both all of your attention and none of your attention at the same time. Once you get the hang of it (i.e., you get past that whole "frustration" point), it really is quite meditative. It focuses your attention brilliantly inside your own head, where you can think. A lot. About stuff you don't want to think about. Like unemployment. Yay.

But you no doubt notice, dear reader, that the wheel is back! What does this signify? It's a sign that my mind is returning to being a safe place to be left alone in. I spun yarn last night for a few hours, perfectly happy. My thoughts were calm, not stressful. I reveled in the incongruity of listening to an iTunes Genius mix of the Urge, Dada, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, and the Catherine Wheel, while spinning yarn (and if you know who any of those bands are, then you were just as much of a geek as I was in high school!). I thought about my job, my family life, my house, my town, and all without hyperventilating. My life finally seems to be settling itself down.

So I'm going to enjoy this all while it lasts. Does this mean that I'm no longer preparing for the zombies? Au contraire! I feel like that's a project I can finally look in the face again, since it no longer feels like the zombies are already at my door. Also, while I am confident that my current job isn't going to disappear tomorrow, I don't really know what the long-term prospects are for a well-paying administration job in the field of eco-justice. I don't hold out much hope for the lasting viability of our current economy; the growth capitalism model of doing things just isn't sustainable. Will the economic crash (which I believe is still to come) spell doom for my job? Honestly, it seems likely. On the other hand, working in an eco-justice center is a pretty good job for doing preparation, learning and teaching everything I can now, to help everyone through it. So there's always that. But will these days of bliss last forever? Nope. Buddhism got that one right.

So I will embrace impermanence and enjoy this while I can. I will use the calm to reapply myself to things I was just too depressed to work on before. My garden is getting a MAJOR upgrade this year. When I'm done with the construction, I'll post pics (my regular State of the Garden reports). Seedlings are growing in my dining room and on my sun porch (which, despite the name, has almost no access to said celestial being). I'll finally build the vent box for our root cellar to help regulate the temps down there. Maybe I'll even finally build or buy a sun oven! Crazier things have happened. Depending on where we are in a few months, or by next year, maybe we'll finally invest in a wood-burning cookstove. Many possibilities are open.

But what this all really means? It means I need to overhaul the "To Do" list on here. But not right now, I've got yarn to spin! =)

Smell the air....

2010-03-11T20:03:00.002-05:00

It's getting closer, isn't it?

It really is....

You can smell it, even if you're not trying....

It's just under that vague scent of barbeque on the air....

Close your eyes.....

Inhale......

*sigh*

*grin*

Spring.

Getting through tough times

2010-02-08T13:21:00.004-05:00

Until recently, my whole working-aged family was unemployed, and in fact, although I have a new job (which OMGILOVEIT), we haven't gotten our first paycheck yet. And my benefits don't kick in for 3 more months, so we're still living kinda close to the bone. I was pleased to find, though, that the lifestyle towards which we've been moving was very, very helpful to our ability to cope with unemployment. I suspect I'll ruminate on this occasionally for many months to come. But here are some of my initial thoughts on the matter. [Edit: now that I've done a draft of this and am re-reading it, I see that this post has little to do with out lifestyle adaptation per se, but is still important info IMHO.]

First, to optimally prepare for unemployment, or any interruption in your regular income, having a year or more's warning is highly recommended. This is another way of saying that we had a really unfair advantage with respect to unemployment--I've never seen anyone with more warning than we had. Since my husband is an academic, and they hire on annual cycles, cutting his position was a known early on. Further, due to the wording in the standard contract (also a result of the annual academic hiring cycle not lining up nicely with the annual academic firing cycle) we had a little over a full calendar year to prepare. And further still, because of the way my husband's pay was structured, we were payed for two months after we had technically become unemployed (this included benefits). Even allowing for this, we were without income for six months, and we are still without benefits (except for our children, who are on state aid). So what's the message here? My take-home is that everyone pretty much needs to assume that you're going to lose your job, and plan accordingly. Let me be clear here--I don't think we would have been able to keep our house, stay in our town, avoid moving in with parents, etc., without the warning we had. If you have no reason to believe that you will get one year's warning (and crap, who could expect that?), the only way to cope with the situation is to assume you'll be fired soon. Sorry. (You probably won't be fired soon, so try to avoid the attendant fear and nausea that goes with imminent firing--compartmentalize, ya know?)

Second, find and USE every single state or federal benefit you possibly can. They are there for a reason. Too much pride? Swallow it. Maybe if it's just you, make your own decisions and suffer or not as suits you. But if you have a family, I genuinely believe that there is a moral question about how one will deal with a lack of income when your family may suffer as a result, and my response to this question is that pride can take a back seat (or get shoved in the trunk). Without sufficient income, children are at risk of malnutrition and all of the attendant issues, including behavioral and educational problems, which even mild malnourishment can bring. A lack of insurance can cause families to avoid needed doctor's visits, often exacerbating otherwise simple problems. And this is not just for the children--families are not improved by a parent being out of commission (or worse) due to an illness that could have been dealt with by early care.

There are also the penumbral problems of the stresses brought about by losing one's income. Can you stay healthy through the constant stress? How's your blood pressure now? How's your immune system--can it make it through the added stress? How will you deal with job-hunting when you are constantly getting sick due to an AWOL immune system fleeing from all the stress? Can your marriage or partnership survive near-nightly battles over money? Jobs? Income? Spending? Even if your partnership is very stable, a money crisis can spell doom--don't let it (or at least, do everything you can to not let it). Social safety net programs are there to help people keep from falling too low, and to give you some breathing room, so that you're not panicking every time you think about needing to buy groceries, or when your kid wants to go roller skating and you know you can't afford the soon-to-follow leg break and treatment. They help keep you and your family healthy and whole--not sick and divorced. Use them. And if someone gives you flack, tell them to fuck off, you are taking care of your family.

I would strongly suggest finding all of the programs that are even vaguely applicable to your situation now--yes now--while you still have a job and an income. Consider this just another part of the "assume you'll be fired" scenario above. Speaking for my own state, there is a morass of programs available, complete with attendant paperwork, all of which is very difficult to sort through. Don't try to do this when you're on the edge of losing a job, or worse, have already lost one. From my own experience, once we knew we were going to lose our jobs, I got very panicky and depressed. Panic and depression can lead to many places, but rational behavior is rarely one of them. So even though I knew we would soon need these programs, I didn't research them. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. And so I put them off and off and off until holyshitweNEEDthemnow--whatdoIdo?!?! That's not the best head-space to be in when attempting to navigate government bureaucracy. Really. So do it now, when the biggest part of your brain can truthfully say "Dude, I'm not actually getting fired, I'm just doing this as, like, an academic exercise--maybe in case one of my friends gets fired or something, so I can help them. Yeah!" I don't care how you have to trick yourself, but find a way to do this work now.

Don't believe me? Feel confident about how you would access aid programs? Okay. Do you know what the income cutoffs are for food stamps? What kind of documentation do you need from your employer in order to claim unemployment insurance? Does your doctor/family healthcare person take state insurance? Is there a medical insurance program available for adults in your state--and if so, what are the requirements? What are the requirements for WIC? What is WIC? Can you get both TANF and WIC at the same time? Which state departments handle TANF, WIC, unemployment and Medicaid? Are there prescription programs available to avoid interruption of needed medications? If you don't know the answers to these questions, you need to find them. It is too, too, too easy to miss out on an important program that could have genuinely benefited your family by just not being familiar with the offerings. And moreover, it is even easier to accidentally screw yourself out of one program by not knowing its details and either missing a deadline or putting something on an application to program A which would cause issues with program B. Oh, and by the way, all of this paperwork will take you at least a month to get through, even if you know what you're doing, so familiarizing yourself with this stuff now is really not a bad idea. Have you ever heard someone say "It's a good thing that I'm unemployed, because claiming unemployment insurance is a full-time job!" Well, that's not actually a joke.

True story: our state offers adult health coverage for families under a certain income level. After having been on unemployment insurance for months, with children on medicaid and making applications for numerous other programs, I had absolutely no idea this was available. Now, it's not the best insurance in the world--"cadillac" it ain't--but it's a damned sight better than my husband's leg going gangrenous because he refuses to go to the hospital for care because we can't afford it. Now, as it happens, we have not missed the window on this, and that's lucky for us. This is what comes of wading through welfare programs when stressed out--don't do it! Start now! Trust me!

Okay, for my next post on this, I will actually address how our lifestyle helped out. Promise! =]

See, I told you dreams come true!

2010-01-13T12:20:00.003-05:00

Um.... okay, I've never told you, or anyone else that. But nevermind! Sometimes they do!

As y'all have probably figured out, my family has been unemployed for several months now. We've been managing pretty well, all things considered (thank all the gods for Unemployment Insurance), but it's been hard. Not even so much making ends meet, which was hard but doable, but just the continuous stress of not having any real income. The situation itself is the problem, rather than just the particulars. I think that overall we've dealt with it pretty well--it hadn't been causing significant problems in our relationship (though it was causing problems with our self-relationships, I think), and our children don't really seem to have noticed that much has gone awry. Some of that, I think, is because the lifestyle that we'd been building even when we were employed was low-income, low-input, low-energy, homemade/from scratch, pantry-based, etc. So when we started relying heavily on that lifestyle, it just seemed like the norm to our kids. Score one for adapting in place, eh? =) Actually, that merits its own post, doesn't it? (Robyn makes a mental note.)

BUT....

All of that is finally over! (Whoa, okay wait, not the adapting in place part, don't worry.) I am happier-than-you-can-imagine to say that yesterday I not only accepted a job, but really THE job. The job in environmental and sustainable activism. The job that is working on helping families and communities learn to live low-input lifestyles. The job that is pursuing new ways to farm sustainably, that has a herd of alpacas, a working CSA and certified organic farm, that runs educational programs for youths on recycling, energy management, agriculture and more, the job.... omg, it's just THE JOB. And... and.... IT'S MINE!!!!

And, from a purely practical standpoint, it's a job that pays enough to be our whole family's income. So, unless something drastic changes, we are currently planning for my husband to become our house-husband, and I will be the breadwinner. As such, and this is the part I just find absolutely incredible, we can keep pursuing our home and lifestyle goals of adaptation in our family (led by Brian), while I will pursue the very same goals on a community scale at my job.

Holy shit.

This does mean that the posting on this blog will probably keep being sporadic. It might also mean that Brian will take over some or even most of the posts, since he will be taking over my old job at home, too, and so he'll probably have more to say about it than I. It might even be a fun ride to watch Brian learning the ropes of how to manage a home--it's certainly an acquired skill set, one I didn't have when I started either. But I do hope to keep this blog alive and kicking throughout, and let you guys out in InternetLand watch the transition as, effectively, Brian and I swap jobs. Should be good times!

Thank the heavens for a new Gardening year!

2010-01-11T10:35:00.003-05:00

Wow, didn't last year's gardening just suck? Well, ours did anyway. If yours didn't, you can just keep that to yourself....

So anyway, onward and upward, right? We learn from our successes and our mistakes, and remember that Mother Nature can be a right bitch, and that we will only only only purchase Certified Disease-free seed potatoes, we will not use saved seed potatoes from last year, and we will destroy any potato volunteers from last year, now won't we? Yes we will!

So anyway, I'm knee-deep in my Fedco catalog (what, you don't know what Fedco is? Oh good heavens, get thee to the website!) picking plants, daydreaming about how gorgeous my garden will be this year, and reading Thomas Keller's new "Ad Hoc at Home" cookbook, which is its own form of cruelty in these desolate, vegetable-less days. Sipping my husband's latest home-roasted Brazilian coffee. Small joys are key.

Part of my plan for this year is to finally embrace that a large chunk of my garden is almost unusable due to the nearby trees. It's not that they shade too much, since my garden is to their south (though at the height of summer there's a bit of cover, but this is probably a good thing). But a tree can out-compete my little seedlings for water & nutrients any day. Pair this with the fact that at least one of these trees is a black walnut, which will actually poison surrounding plants, and I've been fighting a Sisyphean battle here. So I am going to embark in a multi-prong strategy to deal with the situation.

The 6-ish wooden-sided raised beds I built last year? Yeah, those are awesome. I'm building more of those. Oh yes.
Tomatoes (the most susceptible to juglone poisoning from black walnuts) simply will not be in my ground-based garden. I can't fight that anymore, I concede. Instead, my tomato plants will all be in homemade Self-watering Containers, protected from poisoning and the vagaries of my own watering habits....
I am going to install some kind of barrier between the bottom of the northeast corner boxes and the sub-soil. Now, I must admit, this makes my earth-mother/permaculture/holistic cycles/soil-system side go batshit, but the simple fact is, the trees are taking all of my plant's food & water--these two entities are not playing nicely, and they need to be separated (I'd put the trees in a time-out if I could, but that hasn't proved possible.... yet). So, I will till up that section, move all the soil off to one side, and put down a barrier, then the boxes (which will, of necessity now, be about 12" high), then refill with soil.

And so, I come to the question and answer portion of this blog post. For all you gardeners out there, especially if you've done something like this in the past, what barrier method did you use? I know there are several existing systems that follow a plan like this--the latest edition of Square Foot Gardening does it, for example--but I don't have access to those books right now. In my ideal world, this would be a permanent (or at least mostly-permanent) thing--I wouldn't have to dig it all up and start over every year or two. And it will have to have some kind of drainage, so just a solid layer of plastic may not work (then again, maybe it will--I'm open to suggestions). My two best ideas right now are to either use some sort of permeated gardening cloth, but I worry that this will still allow too much passing back & forth between the boxes & the trees. My other thought is a good 2-3" barrier of large gravel. So what do y'all suggest?

Good Morning, Friend-Citizen. Welcome to the Informal Economy.

2009-11-16T09:19:00.005-05:00

Boy, I really do have a lot of catching up to do here, don't I? *pffff* It was nice to finally get back over here to write--quite cathartic--and I got lots of encouragement to keep doing it. And heck, my last post got picked up by Sharon Fricking Astyk (HOLYCRAPOMGWTFBBQ), so I'm feeling pretty good about myself right now. Believe it or not, I have been getting a lot done. Not so much things done on that list you see over on the right side of the page (ah well), but plenty of other things. As I said way back in my early posts, I feel that I am trying to prepare my family for two different basic events: a long emergency, and short-term emergencies. I'd thought there wasn't really any middle ground between those; if you're prepared for both, you've got the middle ground covered, right? Well, as it happens.... yes, that's right. Go me.

The middle ground emergency I'd not been figuring on (why I can't imagine, since I knew it was coming) is long term unemployment. By "long term" I pretty much mean over 1-3 months. I have no idea if that's the proper definition, or if there is a proper definition (of course there is). Who cares--my blog, my definition, over 1-3 months. There. Anyway. Both my husband and I are out of work, and received our last paycheck at the end of July (and had our medical benefits cut off at the end of August). My husband, thankfully, does qualify for a decent size unemployment benefit, and I'm working on it for myself. ($143/week, before taxes! Katy bar the door!) We do have savings, but without unemployment, we'd be drinking it through a straw right now. Blessedly, my children qualify for state medical coverage, so I no longer have to have panic attacks if they want to go roller skating or climb a tree. Overall, the process hasn't been too bad, although the unemployment process was designed by tripping bureaucrats who like to fondle their slide rulers. There's still a big, red "STOP! YOU MUST FILL OUT ALL INFORMATION ON THIS LINK!" sign on my unemployment homepage. I've followed that link at least 100 times, have filled out every blank I can find on it, and it won't go away. I've even called the office, and they said to ignore it (which I am just positive is the wrong thing to do). Fortunately, I've got a friend on the inside--er, rather, she's on the outside now but knows folks on the inside--and she might be able to help me out. Can you believe, she was laid off from the unemployment office? How's that for irony?

But I digress--quelle surprise. I've got plenty to say about what prep-work I'd done for us before unemployment hit, and how much good it's done us (read: one helluva lot!), but I wanna discuss something different. You see, today, or perhaps yesterday if you trust my Facebook posts, I officially entered the Informal Economy. Back in your dad's day it was probably called "under the table work", but that's so old fashioned, and has such interesting resonances now that we have more inventive porn movies, that I prefer the new moniker. You must admit, it sounds impressive, yes? The Informal Economy. And in fairness, it's also much broader of a thing than being paid under the table, or "off books", though that can certainly play a role.

The Informal Economy as I understand it (and do recall the discussion above about my blog, my definition--it's good to be the Queen) is basically the economy that doesn't show up on our GDP. It's a loose confederation of people, goods, and services, and their relative worth to each other, all chugging along blithely ignoring things like the DOW, or the Core Consumer Price Index, or reputable business attire. It's my baked goods that someone else wants, and who has lots of yarn and is willing to work a deal. It's my dairy class, that I can run in exchange for cash or services. Its my friend's hand-knit socks, which she is currently valuing at one week of cat-sitting. In college it was one hour of backrubs per double-A battery. Or, and this is the one where I've really taken the plunge, it's the eco-cleaning service you run because you have the time and flexibility (unemployment does confer some benefits) and need money.

You have friends, and they need something--a loaf of bread, a clean living room for the holidays, a hand-knit dead fish hat (of course I'm not making that up), some firewood. You have one or more of those things, and you need your computer devirused, or your car tuned up, or some cash, or your cats sat on. The informal economy exists in the space where all of these things meet. Slowly things bleed out, so that you're not just dealing with friends anymore, and that's fine. It maintains its own boundary conditions, just because if whatever you're up to gets too big, it becomes unwieldy and unmanageable, and you scale back (or, in some cases, politely dressed gentlemen from an acronymed government agency start asking hard questions about the street value of bread). So you keep it small.

It is both a delightful and a precarious place to be. It's liberating in its way--no doubt about that. Of course, it has nothing that looks like job security, either. And unless you are a very rare person indeed, you probably can't make ends meet just in the informal economy right now. Plus, the IE (I'm tired of typing it out over and over) puts its own demands on you, and you can lose out quickly. Didn't get that bread done in time? You just lost your 1-out of-5 bread customers, and more importantly, you lost their recommendation. Got a paying job that's putting constraints on you? Which one gives? If you're like most sane people, its the IE that takes a back seat.

BUT, for all that, it also offers jobs where there aren't any. Businesses don't have the margin to hire anyone, but their employees could sure use their living rooms cleaned while they're at work. Don't have the money to start a bakery? Of course you don't, who does? So you start a "bread share" with a limited number of folks, and add that to your minimum wage job and get by.

The IE is the natural response to a job market strained beyond the breaking point--it's water flowing over, around and under the dam. It's paradoxical in that it provides evidence for the libertarian notion of "the market will provide" but it does so by going outside of the Market because the Market is NOT providing. And it by no means covers all bases. I've yet to meet a doctor that is willing to barter open heart surgery for bread and a car tune-up (although I suspect "off book" surgeries are going to start happening soon). If The Economy does go pear shaped, there are probably a lot of goods and services that are just gonna go bye-bye. But even if it doesn't--and the Fed & Treasury are currently running neck and neck with biblical literalists in their willingness to do backflips to maintain their system--the IE is still there to take the strain off of the main economy.

So, as you can see, I'm just doing my part as a patriotic American to help our economy limp along until... um... something happens. So, anyone need their living room cleaned?

Just shut up and obey.

2009-11-13T13:11:00.006-05:00

Ah, long time, no post. Sorry for the radio silence over here. We're in the middle of a rough patch right now--same rough patch that either 9.6% or 17% (depending on your source) is in, so nothing unusual. We're jobless right now, which is both making it difficult to work on Adapting in Place, and at the same time making me very grateful that I have been working on Adapting in Place. More on that later, though. Right now, snark!

Currently, myself and many of my friends are on varying forms of state aid. Taking public assistance is a daunting thing to do, generally incredibly depressing, and just all around no fun. Many perfect strangers are happy to criticize you for your dependence, regardless of the fact that they have no idea what your actual situation is.

With this in mind, I've compiled a simple list of rules (or perhaps, "guidelines") to help minimize the embarrassment and discomfort of taking public assistance. This list has been created based on my own experience and the experience of friends. Please note that contravening any rule in any way does grant legal rights for every person who sees you to judge you (out loud or, if desired, in print) on any or all of the following: your lifestyle choices, your parenting, your personal hygiene, your laziness, your education, your intellect, your lack of patriotism/apparent Frenchness, your very existence as signaling the certain decline and fall of our entire civilization, or any other topic of choice. So please do be careful out there!

The Rules:

1. Don't be dirty. Present yourself in as hygenically-perfect a condition as possible. You should have no visible dirt on your person (including fingernails), clean and well-kept hair, freshly-laundered clothes, no rumples, etc. This goes double-extra mega for children. Any signs of uncleanliness in your children could be considered grounds for busybody supermarket shoppers to call DFS on you.
2. Don't be clean. But remember, you are poor. You shouldn't be able to afford things like shampoo, or fresh laundry, etc. If you're too clean, you are obviously wasting the taxpayers money on frivolities. Do nothing to breach the carefully-maintained prejudices of the public who believe that people on assistance are dirty, lazy slackers who really enjoy living on $250 per week.
3. Never engage in any luxury activity at all, ever. Remember, you are currently taking public aid, which means of course that you must never, ever, find any way to enjoy your life that costs any amount of money at all. Do not ever do any of the following: go to movies, rent movies, go to the theatre, go to a restaurant, take your children to amusement/skating/other fun activities, or anything else that might cost money. You are poor--you don't deserve a moment's enjoyment of life. If you did deserve it, you wouldn't be poor, right?

3a. In addition to money-costing activities, also remember that free activities that you might enjoy are also forbidden. Every moment you are enjoying yourself is a moment you are not spending trying to find a job, keep a job, find another job, or find a third/fourth job. Obviously this must be your only focus. As such, all of the following activities are also forbidden: walks in the park, taking children to the playground, having a picnic, sitting on your porch with friends, visiting family, going to parties, etc.

4. Never possess any item which could be construed as you spending money. This rule is a bit confusing, so examples might serve well here: do not let your SIL give you a manicure for your birthday, or fix your hair in any fancy way. Do not dress in business clothes, even purchased secondhand. Do not borrow your parents/in-laws nice car to go to run errands. Never dress your children in the expensive clothing purchased for them as gifts by loving relatives. Do not use public aid to buy your child a birthday cake and soda, which was the only thing they asked for for their birthday. Obviously, if an upstanding, tax-paying citizen sees you in a grocery store with nicely done nails & hair, driving a nice car, and buying a cake and soda, they are entitled to decry loudly (and post everywhere possible online) how abusive you are being of the system. Just because they have no idea how or why you have these things is no excuse--it is your responsibility as a poor person to never make taxpayers have to think about, well, much of anything.

4a. To maintain the personal moral indignation of the taxpayer to our situations, it is acceptable to on occasion breach rule #4 in limited fashion. This allows the taxpayer to continue with their prejudices, which is crucial for our status quo.

5. Only purchase things deemed appropriate by the surrounding consumers. Again, the guiding principle here is that you are poor, and obviously incapable of making educated decisions (otherwise, again, you wouldn't be poor now, would you?). You must only buy products that other tax-paying people think are appropriate. As this can vary somewhat sharply by area, it is often helpful to pass out a brief questionnaire to other shoppers before attempting to shop yourself.
6. Maintain an acceptable number of children. This number will vary between zero and 4, depending on your location--please find out what is appropriate for your own area. But the core here is that, as a poor person, and a person on public assistance, it is inappropriate for you to make childbearing decisions on your own. Poor people attempting to actually bear and raise children is considered an unconscionable affront in many places. It is immaterial that poor people are just as capable as taxpayers of raising happy, well-mannered, well-educated children. In our society, poverty is a sign of moral failing--if you can't buy your child a PS3, what business do you have raising children at all? If you need help paying the cost of children, no matter how loving and wonderful parent you might be, and no matter how unlikely it will ever be that you'll be in "an appropriate financial position" to have children, you must not do so. If you already have children, use various methods for hiding them while in public.

If you follow these simple rules, you should lead exactly the joyless, grinding, depressing life you are meant to lead, while simultaneously having any sense of self-worth or pride expunged from you forever. Remember, if you work very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very hard, you may be able to get a job that will allow you to pay taxes, and then you can decry all the other people on public assistance for not "taking every opportunity to get yourself out of that mess like I did!" If you work even harder than that, you might someday be able to afford your own health insurance!

Why I don't like horror movies

2009-07-03T16:53:00.006-04:00

Despite the title of this entry, I love horror movies. I always have. These days, what with all of the adapting and such going on, and of course with the children around, I don't get to indulge too often. But I've been a horror film fan for probably far longer than is really healthy. I remember watching the Saturday Night Shockers (on KTVI Channel 11--St. Louis!) when I was only 6 years old. Certainly not healthy.

So anyway, I love horror films. Real ones, too. Sure, the dippy "high school horror" flicks that were all the rage at the end of the 90's are fun (think Scream), but I love the atmospheric mind-f*cks. Jacob's Ladder, Blair Witch Project, Paperhouse and so on. Movies that make you question your grip on reality. I seem to particularly enjoy Japanese horror, and in fact my favorite video game series of all time is Silent Hill (man, that game will seriously mess with you).

Okay, so why am I discussing my apparent love/hate relationship with horror films on a blog about adapting to a low-power future? Bear with me, I'm getting there.

So for the past week, my parents have had the kids at their family farm. This has left my husband and I with more free time, and more ways of using it, than we are really used to. So, we decided that we'd have a horror-movie night! Yes! Great idea. All kinds of awesome horror flicks have come out in the past few years that we'd missed, now is our chance, right? So we rent The Ring and Sweeney Todd (okay, ST isn't really a horror, but you have to admit, it fits with the atmosphere).

The Ring is everything I love, or maybe "loved", in a horror film. Relatively little overt blood & guts, most of the real horror is left to the imagination. Surreal use of graphic effects, disjoint atmosphere, just general downright creepiness. Compelling villain. Interesting backstory. Actual plot. Real evil. Perfect. The adrenaline pumped. Gasps were had. Brief moments of pure fear, tempered by the fact that this is all happening on a TV screen. The film resolved in a fairly straighforward fashion, not answering all questions (by a long shot), but letting you off the hook for worrying about the protagonists, for the time being at least. When the movie was over, I had that classic, slightly strung-out, pleasantly jumpy feeling endemic to me watching decent horror flicks.

I hated it.

What went wrong? The movie was great, and right up my alley. I reacted to it in, more or less, the same way I always react to that sort of movie. Despite the movie's best efforts to break the fourth wall and make you confuse reality with the film, I had no delusions that what had happened in the movie had even a vague chance of happening in the real world. That is--I wasn't still scared, the scared part was done. So why hadn't I enjoyed this experience which, in my past life, I'd always loved?

At some point in the discussion of the film (as my husband and I are oft want to do--we are philosophers, after all), I realized what had gone wrong. It's true that I wasn't scared of what happened in the film happening in the real world. But rather, my physiological reaction to the fear in the film (the adrenaline, heart pumping, etc.) is the same physiological reaction I have to many horrors in my now-everyday life. Contemplating an end to cheap oil--and what that means to our society--inspires the same heart-pumping adrenaline shot. Thinking about how I will feed my children when the shelves are bare and the zombies are coming inspires a level of fear that even Paperhouse cannot attain. Thinking about my community, unprepared, breaking down at every level, leaving people with no net, no hope, brings nausea. These feelings pass; it's not like I'm constantly walking around in a state of perpetual fear. But when I take a moment to really think about these things, the fear is paralyzing, and the physiological reaction is predictable.

It's the same physiological effect I get when I watch horror films. Or, to put it in a more salient way, I can no longer disambiguate my physiological reaction to horror movies from my reaction to real life. Sure, I get that the movies are fiction, but they inspire the same sickening, clammy-skinned reaction I have now when contemplating my children's starvation. That's not fun. That's just no kind of fun.

I'm a little annoyed by this. I would really like to have my horror movies back, unmolested by associations with real-world poverty, real-world pain, real-world horror. I want to go back to my previous innocence, so that I can enjoy horror movies again. But I guess my life has become too horrific for me to be able to enjoy horror. Perhaps I'll go through a middle-aged goth period (similar to my early-20's one), where I sort of go straight through horror and came out the other side, able to enjoy it again, but in a cynical, cold, detached way. Not really the same thing.

Maybe someday I'll get my horror films back. But for now, I think that Sweeney Todd will have to be the farthest I travel down that road.

We have a cistern!

2009-06-18T13:51:00.003-04:00

No, for real, we do! It just amazes me what one can discover about the house one has lived in for almost five years now.

Actually, when we bought the house we didn't know we had a cistern. However, after a couple of years and idle chat about having one put in, we finally put 2 & 2 together (the first "2" = the big manhole-like cover of a hole in our basement with all the floors sloping towards it; the second "2" = well, just us being dense, I guess). However, for some reason I'd thought that the cistern had been filled in. Now, while it might be cheaper to just kill a weekend with a shovel & some rope digging out an old cistern than having a new one installed, it still wasn't my idea of a good time.

But today I went down to the deep freeze to grab out some stuff and actually looked at the hole (why had I never done this before?). The hole is very firmly covered and secured by thick wood--which is a good thing--but one piece of wood had come off and so I looked in.

No fill. Just hole.

Huh.

One of the big concerns we've had for some time is how to get water during emergencies, or for if/when our city can no longer afford the cost of water treatment. We're surrounded by water that we could always just go & get with buckets, but even on fairly strict water rationing, most families use at least 10-20 gallons a day. Average usage is closer to 100 gallons/day. Don't believe this? Do two experiments. First, if your kitchen faucet doesn't indicate otherwise, it's probably about a 2.5 gal/minute faucet. Do your dishes and time how long it took (if you're like most Americans, you leave the water running the whole time). Yeah. And that was just on dishes. Second experiment, go get your water bill and look.

So anyway, hauling anything between 10-100 gallons of water every farking day just doesn't sound like a good time either. We've got rain barrels, three of 'em actually, that each hold ~50 gallons and refill quite efficiently. That would probably keep us in water for a bit, assuming no devastating dry spells.

But. There's a hole in our basement, dear Liza, dear Liza. There's a hole in our basement, dear Liza, a hole!

So now, there are several things to do. First, determine whether or not we're even staying here. My husband has not yet landed a job (although it's still early in the teaching cycle, so we're not panicky yet--yet). Even without a job, we might try and stay and find make-work. Or we might give it up as a failed project and move out to the family farm. If we move, well, I'm not throwing $$$ into fixing up a part of our house that any potential buyer will likely regard as "a hole in the basement". Assuming we do stay, however, we would need to get the cistern inspected, and I suspect have it lined or cleaned somehow. We would need to create a way to channel our rainwater into it (this should be pretty easy, as our basement floor slopes down toward it already), and we'll need some way to deal with overflow. We would also need a pump. In an ideal world, we'd also have a way to get it into our hot water heater, but frankly if we're using the cistern heavily, I suspect the hot water heater will be a distant memory. We've already got a Berkey water filter, which can handle more or less any nasty thing we might put into it, so we're good for clean water.

This might actually be doable.

Our edible landscape

2009-05-17T21:09:00.004-04:00

Well, now that the whole "teaching thing" is done and over, I can get back to my life as a blogger--er, I mean, gardener and urban adaptionist (I just coined that term--it works, doesn't it?). I've noticed of late that my outdoor life is sliding steadily toward the "edible landscape" end of the spectrum. My basic criteria for planting something has always been that it must either (1) be edible; (2) be advantageous to those things which are edible; or (3) be in a place essentially impossible to plant anything edible in (e.g., the 3" deep built-in flower boxes on the north side of our house). But now this has taken something of a turn; I've begun to actively remove things that are already in place which do not meet these requirements, replacing them with things that do.

For example, let's look at the new blueberry bushes I just got (along with some landscape fabric, custom organic fertilizer and detailed planting instructions, all for $10 each bush--did I mention that I was completely taken for a ride on my first $30 blueberry bush purchase?!). These will be replacing the five boxwood shrubs currently sitting happily in front of our house. The boxwoods look nice, they are nearly no maintenance, and they fill the space and block the view of our concrete foundation. And I'm replacing them with a plant that is about as finicky as they come, with stringent pH requirements and watering & drainage needs, pruning requirements, and which will probably never block the view of the foundation. And I'm paying for it. And yet, this all seems perfectly logical, because at the end of the day, I will have blueberries. Well, at least, I will probably have blueberries, if I can keep up with the pH, water, drainage, and pruning requirements. Hmmm.

Blueberry bushes are nice looking, don't get me wrong. Or at least, they probably will be in a couple of years. Probably. The only reason I'm reasonably sure my neighbors won't hate me for destroying their property values are (1) at least half of them are currently racing me for getting chickens first; and (2) forces other than me have already done far more damage to property values than my wee little bushes could ever dream of doing.

I've also now planted three grape vines, and am struggling to learn The Art of the Grape Pruning. Why does every plant on the planet that needs to be pruned need to be pruned in an entirely different manner, with different tools, aiming at different goals? Is this some kind of subtle perverse joke on the part of the divine that we just haven't seen yet? Cut back only new growth; cut back only old growth; only allow two canes at a time; never cut back to fewer than five canes; cut mid-branch for shape; cut at the node for healing; prune in fall before dormancy; prune in spring before leafing out; prune in spring but not before leafing out. WTF, people? And don't even get me started on the apricot tree on our property. Whoever owned the house before us had the poor thing topped. It's now a hopeless mass of scraggly branches that cannot possibly support the amount of fruit it sets. Pruning of the most aggressive order might be able to bring it back into useful production, but I'm still over here struggling with my one-year-old grapes & blueberries, okay?

We are also approaching the Season of the Assessments. (And, judging by this post, we've also entered the Season of the Over-Used Capitalized Made-Up Proper Names.) Pretty soon things like berries and early greens will become available in mass quantities, which means canning, freezing and dehydrating, oh my! And that means figuring out how much to can, freeze and/or dehydrate. And that means figuring out how much I canned or froze last year (I hardly dehydrated anything), and if it was enough, not enough, or too much. Why buy a bushel of peaches when I still have half a bushel of peaches from last year's bushel purchase in the freezer? That's a clue that a bushel is too much, ya know.

I will also take this opportunity to look at our eating habits, and how they can be adjusted to eat more completely out of our stores, rather than out of the store. I might have some fairly impressive food storage going on here, but I still go to the store weekly. Why is that? What can I adjust to pare that down? So in my food storage assessment will be thinking about why I didn't use a full bushel of peaches. Could I have? Should I have? Did I make various desserts or jams out of things I bought from the store, when there were perfectly usable peaches right downstairs?

And, of course, I will be assessing the quality of my food storage. For example, the potatoes went beautifully. They're only now starting to give up the ghost. The apples, OTOH, were an unmitigated disaster. What happened? I need to figure that out. And where were my other root crops? Or winter squash? Gotta look into these things. Where were my gaps? What could I have done better? What methods of storage worked particularly well--or particularly poorly--with which veg or fruit? Yes, all this in more will be in store in upcoming posts.

I am becoming increasingly paranoid about the state of our economy. The behavior of the stock market seems to have taken leave of any reference to on-the-street economic conditions, or indeed with reality itself. As discussed in The Automatic Earth, there was an interview with a major stock analyst who said that he sees a recovery for our economy in late 2009-early 2010. Then, in the same paragraph, he said that he didn't have any particular ideas for what the engine of recovery would be. So what, exactly, is this belief in recovery based on? Pure faith? Tarot cards? What? I love me some tarot cards, but I try not to gauge the movement of world economies with them, ya know. And the useful economic data (i.e., not the stock market) is bleaker than hell. We're now well embedded in the deflationary cycle, which is the sort of thing that wakes up most economists in the middle of the night in cold sweats. So while I would love to have more time to prepare my family and my methods, I'm genuinely concerned that we're about out, and this is our last go. So let's hop to it, shall we?

New List Item--Blueberries!

2009-05-10T20:13:00.004-04:00

I just got in contact with a local farmer (who I know tangentally, and with whom I had once traded some extra strawberry crowns for some thornless blackberry canes). He has lots of blueberry bushes left, and at a killer price! I bought one bush at a local nursery for $30 (eesh, I cannot believe I paid that much for a plant). Aaron will sell me one bush for $12, or two for $20. Woot! So now, all five bushes in front of my house are going to be yanked, and replaced with lovely, nice-looking, food-giving bushes. Furthermore, by getting five bushes, I'm getting one of each of his varieties--early, early-mid season, mid, mid-late, and late. So probably 10, maybe even 12, weeks of blueberries. YEAH! So I guess I'll be putting those bushes in, what, after the cookies but before the new hot water system?

I'm really getting into this whole edible-landscaping thing. Can you tell? In other news, I've erected several... er... trellises? Trelliseas? Trellisae? Can I get a plural on that? ;-) Okay, back to grading!

The List

2009-05-09T21:30:00.002-04:00

Well, for those of you who know me, you know that I am currently adjuncting at one of our local Universities. I've got two classes worth of finals sitting on my couch right now, which is probably why I'm sitting here typing. I've noticed, over the past few days of grading, that I have an ever-growing list of "things that I'm gonna do once I'm done with my grading." It's worth mentioning that this list starts almost immediately after grades are due at noon on Tuesday. So far, it looks something like this:

Tues, 2:30: pick up Alex from school, make chocolate-oatmeal cookies (at the request of Alex & Ian--I'll just have to figure out what "chocolate oatmeal cookies" actually are)
Mulch in the entire side-garden for more medicinal herbs
Mulch the current herbs
Plant my new herbs from the local herb fair in pots (the ones that go in the ground are already there--I had to de-stress from grading, after all)
Sweep up the ghastly mess of little branches & rotting leaves that are all that remain of The Evil Gumball Tree. Put leaves in leaf mold pile (which I built a couple of days ago). Sticks will go... um... well, we'll figure that out later, now won't we?
Clean the ever-lovin' bejezus out of my house. It has been Far. Too. Long.
Finish up the rain barrels, which I've got mostly installed now.
Probably take some pictures of all of this for the blog.
Get some vegetable glycerin to make kid-friendly herbal tinctures. It's not that the kids would ingest so much alcohol if I just used vodka-based tinctures (probably no more than half a teaspoon for an entire formula dose). But something about sending my 7-year-old to school smelling of Smirnoff seems like a bad idea.
Bar-b-que. Yeah.
Look into making a really awesome solar water heater predicated on long loops of black hose slung up on my roof.
Finally write that "bug-out bag/bucket" post I've been swearing I'll write for so long now.

So that should get me through till Friday, right? *smirk*

My reaction to Swine Flu

2009-04-30T12:37:00.002-04:00

Well, everyone else gets to have a reaction to the current situation, so I want one, too! Here it is:

I think that there are some vast overreactions on both sides--in typical American form, we seem to only have two response options. On the one hand, there are people holing up already, stocking Tamiflu and face masks, and having nearly no contact with the outside world. At this stage, I think this is an overreaction (although I'll admit I'm not sure what my own criteria are for when this switches to a reasonable reaction).

On the other hand, I'm seeing lots of folks complaining that "it's all overblown!" and "we have the flu every year--shut up already!". They either don't understand, or don't believe, the various features of this flu being importantly different from other types of flu, and that they need to be tracked. By the time you know you have a pandemic on your hands, it's already too late. I've recently seen websites pointing out that one's own family is extremely unlikely to contract swine flu. Where this data is coming from I can't imagine, since currently no one knows how likely or unlikely anyone is to contract it. The last time a particularly virulent strain of this virus jumped species, it affected an estimated 20% of the world population. It's true that only .5-1% of the population actually died from this flu, but that hardly means that we can all rest easy that we're unlikely to be hurt by it. A flu with that level of virulence places a moral demand on everyone to do what they can to minimize it's spreading. We don't know if this new virus will be similarly virulent, but it is incumbent on everyone to pay attention and take appropriate precautions. "It is highly unlikely to affect me" just doesn't fly with infectious diseases, and I think it is a morally suspect position.

As far as I can see, this is a form of flu that has jumped species once before, but in a different form (where the previous jump was utterly disastrous). This makes two things very likely: first, because it's the flu, it's probably highly infectious (which it has now been shown to be). Second, because it has jumped species, it is unlikely that humans have evolved resistances to it. We may have some increased resistance left from the previous jump, which would be good, but it wouldn't take much of a mutation to render that fairly useless--note how it's already quite infectious despite any latent resistance, while currently having a fairly low fatality rate, possibly due to latent resistance.

To me, nationally/internationally, the only sane thing to do is to make people as aware as possible of the disease and what reasonable precautions one can take, while also carefully tracking its progress and any mutations; developing vaccines & better medications (which, one can only hope, will be made available to the poor who are likely to be hit disproportionately) seems sane, too. This is not overreaction--it is the sane and best method our medical community has for coping with a potential pandemic. At state/community levels, watch for signs of it in your own area, and change behavior as necessary. It is not only reasonable to quarantine oneself in the face of a potential pandemic occurring in your community, it may well be a moral requirement for the protection of yourself and others. The more people that contract the virus, the more chances it has to infect others, and the more opportunities it has to mutate into something truly nasty (if it hasn't already). If it's not in your community yet, taking standard flu precautions (i.e., good hygiene, staying out of crowded areas, minimizing handshaking, etc.) seems sane to me. For family level, not freaking out is probably good, but so is paying attention to what's happening and not pretending that it just won't affect you so you don't have to worry about it. Try to make sure that you've got food in the pantry in the event that you can't/shouldn't go to the store for awhile. Ramp up the handwashing/hygiene stuff. In my family, we've ramped up our echinacea & elderberry intake, and I'm trying to make sure that our kids get enough sleep. We're not really restricting other activities yet, but we might in the near future. OTOH, we rarely do things that would trip concerns--although B is planning on going to a party tonight.

We have a new strain of a potentially dangerous flu on our hands--one that was devastating in the past. We have a global/highly-mobile community that has essentially already spread it from one side of the globe to the other in short order. We also have incredibly effective communications & tracking abilities, and vastly superior immunological methods today. If we pay honest attention to the problem, I think we have a good chance of averting disaster. Of course, every disaster we avert makes the population that much more complacent, so maybe getting kicked in the pants (at least a little bit) would be a good thing.

Them's my $.02.

Robyn M. in Indiana--with one confirmed case of Swine Flu, but over 200 miles away

Hey all you Urban Gardeners!

2009-04-19T20:51:00.003-04:00

Get yer butts over to The Urban Garden Project and JOIN UP! Stand up and be counted! The only requirements are that you are gardening (and yes, containers on your balcony count) within the city limits, so get to it!

And, in other Adapting news, my neighbor and I are getting dangerously close to getting chickens. "Close" meaning that we've been emailing each other design plans for various coops.

What, you don't stick your seeds to toilet paper, too?

2009-04-16T15:54:00.005-04:00

Allow me to introduce you to a most delightful invention, the seed tape:

Okay, in all honesty, this is more of a seed "sheet" than seed tape, but the principle is the same. There is a real seed tape near the top of the photo, which is simply seeds in one row, rather than in lots of rows. Depends on how you want to plant, I s'pose.

Anyway, here's the idea: you take some kind of paperish product--something that will degrade very quickly--and you stick seeds to it. Then you put that in your garden, cover it with soil to an appropriate depth, water, and be done with it. As you see above, I've chosen to use toilet paper (unbleached recycled stuff), which will obviously degrade very quickly indeed. You probably can use regular paper, but I'd worry about if it's been bleached (which in all likelihood it has). Newspaper would probably work a treat, too. I stuck the seeds down using a thick mixture of flour & water. I've heard tell that cornstarch works well, too, and I even saw recommendations for Elmer's glue. Now, I doubt there'd be any problems with using actual glue, but something about putting that stuff in my garden put me off. So I went with flour.

Anyway, I stole one of my kid's watercolor paintbrushes and dabbed the flour-water mixture at appropriate intervals for the seeds I was planting. In this case, 1" intervals, as I was seeding carrots. I then dropped 1-2 seeds per splotch, continued till the whole sheet was covered, and set it aside to dry. If you want tapes instead of sheets, just cut them apart once dry. Anyway, when completely dry (and I do me completely--just imagine what would happen if the sheets stuck to each other! Disaster!), I rolled them up and set them aside until ready to plant.

Okay, so why did I do this? Well, partially because I have a perverse desire to have the only perfectly spaced carrots in the city. But mostly because, well, if you've ever seeded carrots yourself, you'll probably understand the appeal of the tape method. No hunching over a garden bed, achingly spacing eensy-teensy seeds 1" apart from each other for row after row after row after row after.... No one really makes it that far, either. Most folks get, like, maybe two rows into this hellish process before they just say F*CK IT and start sprinkling seeds down the rows. This leads to the obvious problems of overseeding in some patches, underseeding in others, lots and lots of thinning, stunted carrots, wasted space, broken back, dogs & cats living together... anarchy. Nope, anarchy must be averted--order will be imposed. I sat at my kitchen table, listening to a movie playing in the other room, no hunched back, and worked for a few hours on and off finishing my sheets. Planting them took like two minutes. Tops.

I don't think this process is worthwhile if you have larger seeds--like beet or bean seeds--or if you're planting small squares, a la Square Foot Gardening. But if you're planting lots and lots of fiddling teeny seeds in 1" spacing over 16 square feet? Well, f*ck that. I'll make a tape, thanks.

EDIT: Oh yeah, do notice that 1" spacing really is too close for fully-grown carrots. That's why you wait for them to start growing well, and then you thin out all the baby carrots, which are a yummy, yummy delight! So, no major veggicide (read: thinning; although if you seed two seeds per splotch you will have to do a little bit of veggicide), you get baby carrots, and the baby carrots you pull help loosen up the soil to let the remaining carrots penetrate more easily, preventing stunted carrots. Man, there is just no downside here...

Multi-media SOTG Report

2009-04-14T09:24:00.004-04:00

Yay! I'm finally at home, at the computer with the relevant pictures, and possessing at least a little bit of spare time. Or, to put it another way, there are lots of other things happening in my house right now, but they can be getting on without my help for the time being. Mostly anyway. So, on to the garden!

Here are the babies in their nursery. Fresh, new florescent lights go a long way towards having healthy, stocky little seedlings (rather than the spindly, pathetic-looking, falling-over hopeless seedlings I've grown in the past). The top pic are my spring broccolis; the second are all of my brassicas--broccoli, cabbage, kale and, um, celery. (Okay, celery isn't a brassica. Fine.)

Here's the beginning--my 4'x4' square garden boxes. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm trying this out for the first time this year, so I went el-cheapo on materials. I didn't want to sink $100 on a project I didn't end up liking very much, ya know? So these are all untreated 1"x8" pine boards which I banged together with some drywall nails I had laying around. Now that they are in fact being used, and have begun to warp slightly with the damp, I see that using a couple of screws would've been beneficial for a more secure joining, but I don't think it'll be a big deal this year.

Step two! The boxes are in, and the remaining beds have been made. The circular garden you see is my children's "pizza garden". They decided they wanted to plant carrots, beans, tomatoes, lettuce, and some flowers. Now, the weird paper & dirt things. That's my pathway lining. I put down layers of newspaper, and covered it with mulch. What you see in the above picture are just handfulls of mulch to hold the paper down while I was laying everything out (it was verra verra windy that day).

And here we see the garden in it's mostly finished state. Of course, not nearly all my plants are in yet--we've got another two weeks till the frost free date here. But there's a good number. The white sheets are floating row cover, or frost blankets depending on whom you ask. I have them covering my brassicas to protect them from The Evil Cabbage Worm. Broc & cabbage don't require fertilization, and the cover lets in nearly all the sunlight and rain, so I can pretty much leave the plants covered until it's time to harvest (except for weeding & mulching, of course). Oh, that big mass of branches? My neighbor next door had a tree cut down, and she is struggling to gain the upper hand on the remnants. =)

Here we see the latest additions to our garden: the patch at the bottom of the photo is Brian's potato patch, which is a 4'x8' spot with 8 potato plants in. Behind that are, for as much as you can see in the photo, 5 mounds of mulch. Growing out of those mounds are various bushes & vines: the three in the middle are grapes, and they are flanked by the blueberry bush at the far end, and the "mystery bush" on the near side.

And here we have the nursery again, this time populated by summer veggies & herbs like tomatoes (middle, right), basil, chamomile, borage, echinacea, blessed thistle, horehound, chervil, cillantro, and ... er... who really knows what else? I know there's some lavender and chives in there somewhere. I expect I'll be able to figure out which plant is which once they're bigger, right? And smiling down beneficently over all is the AeroGarden, currently housing lettuce.

The State of the Garden Report

2009-04-10T10:33:00.002-04:00

Okay, so I don't have pictures yet (they're on my home computer, and I'm currently at work), but they're coming soon. However, I thought before the Easter Break takes us into its grip that I would report on the current state of our garden.

I am pleased to report that our garden has enjoyed a steady growth rate in the first planting quarter, with the garden-share of our lawn increasing by approximately 5% over last year's end. This figure was carefully calculated by eyeballing the size of the garden, and then adding in the new additions, and then going "Yeah, that looks like maybe another 5% or so." But in more strict terms, we have reclaimed at least another 50 square feet from our lawn for the purposes of food and beauty.

Joining me in my gardening endeavors this year will be my husband Brian, who has finally let guilt drive him away from Civ IV and out into the fresh air and sunshine, which we have now conclusively established does not either set him on fire nor cause him to melt. Brian is not a natural gardener, but he is giving it a go this year by putting in a lovely potato bed. The bed itself is 8' x 4', and was dug out and planted by him yesterday. He'll be trying two different methods of potato propagation to see which one works better, since neither of us really know what we're doing with potatoes. Four of the potato plants are planted in standard 6" deep trenches, and will be hilled maybe halfway through the summer. Another four potato plants were also planted about 6" down, but after sprouting will be caged in chicken wire columns about 3' high and 1.5' in diameter, and then continuously filled throughout the growing season. This does mean that somewhere we're gonna hafta find a lot more dirt. Hmm....

Also, yesterday I put in two elderberry bushes, three grape vines, one blueberry bush, and one "mystery berry bush". I got the elderberry bushes from a friend's farm who was getting ready to pull them all anyway, and he said I could take whatever I wanted except the currents (curses!). I asked "What are those?" and he said "We don't know." "And those?" "Nope, don't know what those are, either." "These?" "I think these had something like a raspberry, except they didn't taste like raspberries." Okay, so I just chose one at random and dug it out. They're all edible, whatever they are. I'll try to post pics of the leaves for identification purposes later.

Otherwise, almost everything that can go into the garden now has gone into the garden:

cabbage
broccoli
carrots
beets
rutabegas
parsnips
spinach
onions
lettuces
chard

Other plants have been started, such as tomatoes, and lots & lots of herbs. Some of the herbs I bought, like evening primrose and echinacea, are direct seeded once the frost date has passed, but otherwise they're getting going in my house right now.

Also, if you look back at the old post that has my herb garden laid out, you will see a large tree on the right side labeled "Big Stupid Gumball Tree". Well, joy of joys!, that thing is coming down. Apparently tree service costs vary wildly from one to the next, but I found one who will take the whole tree down for $250 (including cutting it into pieces, but not hauling it away). That price is so low that I wouldn't trust it normally, except that this person just did extensive work for my neighbor and was perfectly good at what he did. So OKAY! Tree GONE! This will really open up my herb garden for planting, as well as help my main garden get far more late-afternoon sun. This is good.

My Current To-Do List

2009-04-04T20:41:00.005-04:00

Okay, first, I swear that posts on both "bug out bags/buckets" and a State-of-the-Garden post are coming. No, really! But I've gotta get a certain bizarrely expanding list of things done around home soon, and I thought, gee, wouldn't y'all like to know what's on that list? Sure you do. Besides, maybe if I tell y'all, you'll hold me to it:

~~Finish making seed tapes:~~ I suspect there's another post in here on this one--I even took pictures. This is the only civilized way to plant carrots, IMO.
~~Re-pot herb seedlings & nasturtiums.~~
~~Start remaining herb seedlings, and cast around for more herbs to get just in case (my feverfew didn't make it through the winter. Hmph.)~~
Make list of herbal thingumies I want to make, so that I don't keep forgetting what I'm on about. My first order of business is completing my herbal "home remedies" kit.
Finish planting peas.
Oh... start planting peas.
Get one more rainbarrel, and some tin-snips so that I can cut into my drainpipe and attach it to the barrel.
Get at least 8 more 5-gallon water jugs at Big Lots (if they still have them).
~~Get Brian's seed potatoes.~~
~~Get 2-3 grape canes.~~
~~Get blueberry bush.~~
Build a rocket stove--yeeeeaaaargh!

Today I finally got my garden squared away. All garden beds (in the main garden) that need to be built have been built. All compost has been distributed where it needs to go. All beds have been fertilized with my homebrew mix of stuff (that I've been sneezing out of my nose now for three hours). The only structural things left to do are to finish demarcating the "square feet" in each of my 4'x4' garden beds, as per the method in Square Foot Gardening, and to order in some bulk mulch so that I can line the paths between the beds (and finish mulching the asparagus bed). I'll also review the whole Square Foot thing once I've gotten more experience with it, but so far, so good.

Okay, I'm off to drink my lovely evening digestive tea (ginger, Angostura bitters, honey, plus some echinacea cause I think I'm getting sick, and some chamomile cause I like to sleep), and make some more carrot tapes! Wheeee!

UPDATE: Crap! I ran out of carrot seeds!

Adventures in Herbalism

2009-03-28T10:12:00.002-04:00

Hm. I seem to have found myself a new project. I have now thrown myself (somewhat violently) into medical herbalism. I have a lot of reasons for doing this:

Herbs are, mostly, cheap and widely available.
You don't need to have medical insurance to afford herbal cures.
I have a strong dislike for much of modern allopathic medicine. I recognize that it is incredibly powerful and useful in a lot of situations, and I'm certainly not going to spurn it altogether, but the basic methodology of it (single-cause ideation) seems not only mistaken but patently stupid to me. The methodology of herbalism jibes far more with my own sense of how bodies work than allopathic medicine does. For a lot more on single-cause ideation and the problems with it, check out my husband's post on same HERE.
Herbs are a good way to help keep my family healthy, rather than just treating sicknesses.
Some members of my family are experiencing problems that are better dealt with by herbs than more powerful medicines, at least for now.
Herbal knowledge could well become a tradeable commodity in the near future, especially as people in my country are increasingly unable to afford conventional treatments.
It gives me an excuse to plant even more herbs than I already have.

How did I get kick-started here? Leave it to the LDS people, ya know? ;-) One of my friends here is LDS; her church was having a "Back to Basics" event, and she invited me to come. Much of the stuff going on there I was already familiar with (e.g., whole kernel wheat storage, dry beans, cheesemaking, etc.) but it was still fun and I picked up all manner of little tips & tricks. But I got totally stuck at the herbalism booth--I monopolized the book she had for probably the whole time, and she ended up just loaning it to me. That was last week, and I've been spending most of my free time ever since working on it (except for when I was working on my garden or fighting with my plumbing). I located our local Herb Store (which is also our local Homebrew store, so I hadn't realized the stunning array of herbs & associated goods they carried) and bought a small supply of herbs to get started. [NB: I'm not sure my husband would call my supply "small".] I'm working through a few books, plus a nifty online course you can find at www.learningherbs.com.

Anyone who knows me knows that I go on kicks like this every once in awhile. Sometimes they stick, sometimes they don't. More often than not, my overwhelming enthusiasm wanes after a bit, but some changes stick, and some of my behaviors are modified. Our style of eating & food prep is a great example. I'll go on, say, a mega-organic kick, which will eventually wane, but some of my habits will have been permanently changed in the intervening time. I suspect the same will go here. I'll learn a bunch, and have a lot of enthusiasm for a few weeks, which will eventually wane. But some of my habits will be permanently changed, and probably some new herbal things will become permanent residents in our lives. These will likely continue to grow over the years, spurred on by other bursts of enthusiasm. So expect sporadic posts about new herbal stuff over the years.

Right now, I'm working on stocking a basic first aid kit, as well as investigating various long-term methods for dealing with depression. The first aid kit is a great place to start, because it will contain a representative of almost all of the basic preparations--salves/ointments, tinctures, oils, capsules, etc. I can learn the basics of making these, and then I'll have the preparations made for when we need them. For depression, I'm looking at various tinctures & teas that can be taken on a maintenance schedule, rather than on a "quick fix" schedule. Ginseng, which has been working very well, is an addiction risk--after a few weeks your body acclimates to it, reducing its effectiveness. So I need to find something perhaps not so powerful that can be taken indefinitely, and save ginseng for more acute episodes.

Anyway, so that's what I'm up to. I've now completed the Adapting in Place course, and I'll be putting together a "Where do we go from here" document for it before too long. Of course, I'm also gardening up a storm, and I'll post some pics from that soon. Ta!

Public Service Announcement

2009-03-12T10:30:00.002-04:00

My husband, Brian, now (finally) has his own blog! It's called "Self-Referential Collapse" and you can find it here:

http://selfreferentialcollapse.blogspot.com

His blog will mainly discuss some of the philosophical issues surrounding our current collapse (e.g., ethical, metaphysical, aesthetic, etc. issues). I think it will make a lovely companion blog to my own ;-)

What am I most concerned about?

2009-03-09T13:45:00.004-04:00

You know, when I answered this question as a part of the AIP class, I said the following:

Food.

Food.

Food.

And that is right, or at least not wrong. I think the reasons for this answer are pretty obvious--without food, bad bad things happen. Many of the other concerns that people have, such as personal safety and civil unrest, devolve to the relative availability of food. It is starvation that drives so much of these issues--when the zombies come, they will be hungry.

And yet, here at the homefront blog anyway, I'd like to offer a somewhat different response. What I am increasingly concerned about is.... education.

Huh? Isn't food more important than education? I mean, your degree is pretty useless if you've starved to death in a gutter, right? Yes, absolutely. Nonetheless, education is edging up, and maybe even taking over, my concerns about food.

Why would I be so bent out of shape about education? I believe that of all the things currently in place in our society, none are more important than our educational system. The free and compulsory education of our youth is a stunning accomplishment. Few things are as democratizing as a fully educated population. The very foundations of our democracy--the ability for the people to lead a country--rests entirely on having an educated population. An educated population cannot be easily controlled (it's obviously possible, but harder), nor can it be easily cowed. Compulsory education for all does not guarantee democracy--far from it (witness, oh, today for example); but without an educated population, the chances of a democracy thriving, or even surviving, will be slim.

I don't think it's an accident that as a nation we have been cutting back and back and back on education; I don't think it's coincidence that education and associated programs are almost always first on the chopping block when budget cuts roll down. There is little incentive for the power structures in our country to educate the population. The wealthy can pay for their own education on their own time, and a poorly educated public is, of course, easier to control and cow. And really, who cares about the poor people anyway? This is bad enough in and of itself, but that's not the worst. The worst is the plodding shift in our thinking towards devaluing education, of it being okay to cut education budgets.

Now of course no one wants to just do away with education. And no one would, except under extraordinary duress... which we are approaching rapidly. The level of our federal debt burden, including entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, coming due will eat the ability for our government to provide any other services--education, safety, military, etc. Under these conditions, how can we propose to spend money on education? It is already one of the first lines cut out of budgets, I cannot imagine it will acquire any new untouchable status in the near future. So I genuinely do worry that the wholesale abandonment of education is on the table; maybe not this year, but probably by 2017, at the latest.

Can't education just be outsourced? Is education really the sort of thing that governments ought, or even should, provide? I know many families who either send their children to private schools or homeschool for a variety of reasons, often the main one being that they object to government involvement in education at all. I would like to be clear here that I have no substantial objections at all to either private schooling or homeschooling--those choices are a-okay by me, and I'm glad we have them. But the position that the government should have no role in education, in my opinion, is seriously flawed. The shift from guaranteeing--with the backing of law--basic education for our entire population to one where education is stripped from our common responsibility as citizens would be seizmic in nature; it would change the landscape of our nation. We're already seeing the results of comperable policies in the form of budget cuts, which almost always hit poorer districts first, and the resulting power inequities between those communities and the well-off, well-financed communities. When common money is not applied in reasonably equitable levels to the education of our children, wealth and power disparities grow.

The pride of our nation is not that we're classless, which we certainly are not; it is rather that our classes are not codified--they are mobile. One can go from low, to middle, to even high class in our society, and similarly, you can fall from high right back down to low again (how's that working out for ya, Warren Buffet?). But a lack of education for all, at something like even levels, makes the mobilization of our class structure almost impossible. Even in our current situation, with compulsory but poorly-funded education in many areas, classes become set. It becomes a hopeless proposition to ever move beyond your current place. Private schooling is obviously beyond the means of these parents, and often homeschooling is, too--even afterschooling. Many of our poorest parents do not have the time, the resources, or the energy to provide the level of education enjoyed by the well-to-do children not five miles from them. The class structure, and the attendant power structure, becomes codified.

Of course, many would argue, these poorest of poor parents shouldn't have had children in the first place. Personally, I find this argument to be so repugnant as to not deserve a response, save one: moral worth does not dicatate economic achievement.

So let's call a spade a spade. The abandonment of free and compulsory education in our nation is the wholesale abandonment of our democratic society. A slippery slope argument? Yeah, probably. But I don't think it's far off the mark, either, although the slide is not inevitable. How we could maintain a true democracy, even a true republic, without an educated population is frankly beyond me. I don't think we succeeded at it in the past (before compulsory education), and I doubt we would succeed in the future, either.

I don't want a feudal society in our future--even a well-fed feudal society. Creating community solutions to education is one thing, and a valuable goal to pursue; perhaps setting up local, or neighborhood school cooperatives can help fill the gap left behind when our government funds run dry. But without the force of law (and without funding, how can it be? We tried that with the "No Child Left Behind" charade), this will be inequitably distributed at best, and probably short-lived at worst. We will have consigned our country to be governed by the un- and undereducated; or, contrariwise, we will have abandoned our power to those who can afford to educate themselves, thus ending our brief experiment in a democratically controlled society.

And now, to cannibalize my first "Adapting In Place" homework assignment for my blog...

2009-03-08T14:10:00.005-04:00

I mentioned briefly in my last post that I am now enrolled in Sharon Astyk & Aaron Newton's "Adapting in Place" online course. Yes, that is where I got the name for this blog, too (what, you didn't think I'd done something original, did you?). If you've not read Sharon Astyk's book "Depletion and Abundance: life on the new homefront" or her blog Casaubon's Book yet... WHAT?!?! WTF are you wasting your time here for??? Get thy butt over to her site ASAP! Seriously, it will be time well-spent.

Sorry, lost my train of thought.

Anyway, here's my first assignment for the AIP class: an overall household/lifestyle budget of what our current needs and uses are (maybe a "sources & uses" budget). This should tell anyone who makes it through the whole thing an awful lot about where we are now. =D The assignment is divided into basic areas: water, energy, communication, etc. Have a look-see! [warning: it's pretty long]

Water

According to our Indiana-American Water bill, our family of four used 75 gallons of water per day for the last billing period. According to the helpful graph at the bottom of the bill, I see that our water usage is completely level for the entire year, save a small upsurge in June (probably for garden). This tells me two things: first, I can probably generalize that our water usage averages 75 gallons/day throughout the year. Second, obviously our water company has some hefty rounding errors.

I have now combed the water company's website, and can find no information about the actual method of delivery (despite finding an entry on the FAQ for "How does the water get to my tap?"). However, we have several water towers around, so I guess we have a gravity-fed system. Company-wide, they claim to use 65% surface water and 35% wells; given that we live right next to a major river, I'm guessing that we're heavily on the surface water side. Our water table is very high--as close as 4 feet from the surface in some areas. Precipitation in our area seems to hover around 3.5" average per month, pretty evenly spread out, although higher in the spring & summer than otherwise.

We have two 5-gallon bottles of water downstairs right now, and I'm planning on getting more. We also have a Big Berkey water filter, so we ought to be able to get drinkable water in any situation, as long as water is at all accessible to us. We live near the Wabash River, which I don't see going dry any time soon, so there is a ready source of water (foul, but filterable). In fact, water scarcity is not a problem in our area; to the contrary, flooding is. However, we try not to waste water, so we do have a two (soon to be three) barrel rainbarrel setup for the garden, and in fact our garden doesn't require a lot of extra watering.

Food

Okay, food's just gonna be tricky. If I were being really good (and it has been known to happen), I would be keeping careful notes on our finances via Quicken. I even have categories set up for local, bulk, ethnic/specialty, and supermarket shopping. And if I'd put an entry in that thing for the past nine months, I could obviously just call up a quick graph of our food consumption. *sigh* No such luck, of course (but I think this will inspire me to get back to it). So, the ham-handed method instead.

Our homemade diet is primarily vegetarian, with local meats maybe 2-3 times per month. We're not averse to eating more meat, but we just can't afford good meats more often than this; however, we don't really miss it, either, and it makes us really appreciate it when we do eat meat (bacon is positively orgasmic!). We've been working hard at shifting our diet to as much local foods as possible, with bulk purchases making a backbone, and supermarket purchases sort of filling in the gaps. We aren't doing too badly so far. My average cost at the supermarket these days is between $35-55 per week, down from an average of $100-150 per week before this project started. I've also now got the budget to buy mostly organic foods when I do have to shop at the supermarket. We almost never do fast food, but we do eat out at a local cafe fairly often (about once per week). I spend about $100/month on bulk purchases from a buying club. Over the summer, we stock up on local foods that I preserve in a variety of ways--tomatoes, potatoes, other root veg, meats, green beans, fruits, honey, nuts, etc. A lot is frozen, a lot else is canned. I need to seriously learn how to keep records! I'm learning slowly how to dehydrate. We've got some reasonably hefty food storage downstairs, including several hundred pounds of various types of wheat and grains (we have a grinder), potatoes, apples (which didn't go that well this year, but was fine last year, so I need to figure that one out). I'm building up our supply of dried beans (probably have around 50 lbs of a variety of types), pastas, dry milk, etc. If I were to guess, I'd say we've got about a 3 month supply of enough to feed us, and a full year's supply of some things in particular.

Currently, the only way we have to cook is on our electric range/oven, or on our Coleman camp stove (or occasionally the barbeque grill). I have the plans (and possibly even the willpower) to build a solar oven this year. We are also going to start inquiring more about a wood cookstove for the winter, but that will be a slow process, mostly predicated on whether or not Brian gets another job in town and we then can use some of our savings for that rather than, say, survival. We also have friends who just took out an old coal stove for a wood-burning one, and we might steal the coal stove and see if we can't rig up an outside cooking setup with wood for things like summer canning and such.

We're in gardening zone 5a-b (mostly a, but we're technically in a weird little bubble of b--go figure). I currently have a garden of about 25' x 25', with some extra beds creeping down. I have ridiculously detailed garden plans up on my blog (adaptinginplace.blogspot.com). Provided we do stay in this house (our preferred occurrence), I will start to more aggressively encroach on our lawn. We have at least another 25' x 75' we could eat into. Already Brian's potato patch and a garlic patch will be put in there, and I've got plans with a neighbor to put in a low grape arbor between our properties. On the other side of the driveway behind our house, we have a small space where I have a growing herb bed, a strawberry patch, and a blackberry bush. Oh, and a stupid, dumb gumball tree. Oh, how I would love to get rid of that tree.... Anyway. My neighborhood is blessedly free of all that HOA nonsense, and I can't find any actual city regulations on gardening or the like (even policies on small livestock like chickens seems to be a "don't ask, don't tell" policy). I'm getting better at gardening--this will be my fourth year of it. We cannot, and really will not be able to, feed our family on our land, but we can certainly make a healthy dent in our diet.

Also, I seem to be president of the BOD for a startup local foods co-op. Huh. Why anyone lets me run anything is frankly beyond me, but there you go. We are probably a year out from open, give or take. The co-op we're planning is the full-sized grocery store style. Many folks have many different reasons for pursuing this project, by my main one (which is shared by several folks on the BOD & steering committee) is laying the foundations for a real local foods distribution system--one that can be scaled up quickly when it becomes necessary. Also, even though our town is small-midwestern, we have the classic food desert right in the middle of town, so we want our store there to serve the very underserved population.

Shelter

We've a house which we rather like. We didn't buy at the top of the bubble, but nearly so, although Indiana never really got smacked by the bubble in the same way that other places did. Still, I'm sure that we're technically underwater on our mortgage, but that just isn't why we bought our house. We chose a house within our budget that we would be happy in for a long time (despite all of our family's best efforts to convince us to buy above our means because we'd only be moving soon anyway). The real problem with our mortgage isn't that it's underwater, because as long as we can afford the payments (just under $700/month) we don't really care. The problem is that if we did have to move, or couldn't afford the mortgage, we couldn't sell at probably any price, because houses just don't move here. Even at the top of the bubble, houses in our town would sit on the market for months and years. Our house, in fact, was well-priced (for the time), very sound and well-kept, in a nice neighborhood, etc., and it sat on the market for two years. At the top of the bubble. Yeah.

Anyway, if we can stay, our house has a lot to recommend it for a low-energy future. It was built in the low-energy past, after all--a 1902 construction. It has high ceilings, walls & attic that have the bejezus insulated out of them (you can't even walk in the attic for the insulation), double-pane windows, a cold-porch, storm door to a basement with a potential root cellar, and a reasonable amount of gardening room. It is quite tight, especially for its age. It is very sound, has a new roof (well, new-ish) and a sound furnace. The plumbing will probably be a problem in the not-too-distant future. If Brian lands a job, it is likely that some of our savings will have to go towards repiping our house--eesh. We do not have significant drainage or flooding problems (we're out of flood plain), but the town drainage was built about three years before Jesus was born, so it is really starting to suffer. We do have a somewhat damp basement, which is great for food storage, but maybe not great for our foundation. But it seems to be the sort of "perhaps we should clean our gutters" damp rather than the "oh dear, call the contractors" damp.

If we can't stay, most likely we'll bug out to Brian's family farm about two hours away, and give real, honest-to-gods homesteading a shot (hopefully with at least some income from somewhere).

Energy

We have natural gas heat and electric everything else.

Gas: we used an average of 131 therms of gas per month this winter (although we've got one more heating bill to go). So, higher than the American average, but for three months rather than all year. If I spread the total therms used across the whole year, we're right at half. Not bad, but could be better. We kept our heat very low this year (60*F), although we still haven't installed a programmable thermostat, which I'm sure would help. We did lots of other things to keep energy usage down. It's worth mentioning that even though we cut our usage in half this year, our cost stayed pretty much constant.

Electricity: I've gotta get me one of those kill-a-watts! Okay, anyway.... Last year we did not use our AC at all, and that seemed to go well enough, so I anticipate the same this year. As such, our electricity remains fairly constant over the year. Our average monthly use has been creeping back up. It hit a low of 444kWh/month a few months ago, but has gotten back up to 807kWh/month on our last bill. =/ I suspect, sadly, that the swank new computer we got for xmas is a significant contributor to this. I would say that our relenting and using the dryer contributed, which I'm sure is true, but since I don't do laundry nearly often enough, probably it didn't contribute much.

We've bought into the Duke Green Energy program, and currently pay for about 500kWh of "green" energy (some wind, solar, probably some biofuel [erg]). If we could get our energy use back down, that would nearly cover our needs. Also, someday, we have a tall house whose south-facing roof is large, unbroken (no chimneys, windows, etc.) and not shaded by *anything*--it's just begging for some solar panels. That's on our "pipe dream" list.

Health Care

We are currently blessedly healthy people. Our medications/medical needs are as follows:

-- Brian's glasses (*very* high prescription, hard to get)

-- prescription-level doses of folic acid for me: I'm higher risk for cervical cancer, but this is optional (hey, folic acid occurs in food, right?)

-- hormone supplements for me: stupid poly-cystic ovarian syndrome. Medication is optional, but cheap and currently easy to get, and useful when I don't feel like growing a beard.

-- ginseng & coffee: for depression

-- condoms

--not yet, but I'm sure at least one of our kids will need glasses (although I don't so just maybe they'll escape that)

Brian's family has a history of diabetes, although he currently doesn't show any signs of it. I am adopted, so I've got no idea what my medical history is. I'm overweight, but not severely so, and have been repeatedly tested for glucose tolerance with no signs of diabetes (even when pregnant).

We are fairly well integrated into the local midwifery system (such as it is), and could probably use that as a conduit into an underground medical situation. We have a made-of-awesome GP who is very willing to do "off-books" work. Dentistry will be a problem, but our whole family has pretty good teeth (I have three cavities, and I only got two of those in the past 3 years). Brian and I are also, IMHO, damned bright people, and very capable of informal diagnoses ourselves. I've downloaded and am working through "Where there are no doctors". I've got a smidgen of background in herbalism, but I'd need to do a lot of work to get me up to usable speed.

Communication

We have a land-line cordless phone set, and a corded phone (not plugged in) in our closet for backup. We have a pay-as-you-go cell phone that we hate, but acknowledge the utility of. And we have email, which is very heavily used. We hardly use snail-mail, although printing out our address book (which is stored on our--hey!--email program) is probably a good idea. We do have a few radios, although nothing that can be crank-powered. We also don't have a solar-charger, although I think I'll look into that soon. I haven't put much thought here yet, and probably should.

Transportation

Our primary modes of transportation are: car, moped, bike, and foot.

Car: we use an average of 50 gallons of gas per month in the winter, and probably half of that in the summer (but I'll keep better track and figure it out for sure). We live in a smallish town, so most things are bikable in a distance-sense. However, there are a number of places that are between unsafe and impossible to bike to--stores across highways with no crosswalks, etc. and so we use the car. I'm also a cold wimp and usually buckle and put the bike away for the winter by mid-November, and it doesn't usually come back out until March.

Moped: Brian heavily uses his moped for personal transportation, when bikes are impractical. He uses is for almost all of the winter (except for "holy crap!" snowstorm days). The little thing uses about 2-3 gallons of gas per month.

Bike: both Brian and I bike a lot from spring through fall. We both have bike trailers for hauling kids and other sundry goods around. Almost all of our needs can be met on bike when weather permits, except for grocery shopping (which I'll get to below). We have good bikes--a Giant and a Trek--that we splurged on a couple of years ago with our christmas money. Does anyone know what a good conversion rate from calorie to gas/petrol might be? I'd love to be able to tell people how many calories worth of gas I burn off! =D

Foot: there's not much walkable around here, but Brian does occasionally walk to campus for his job. We also walk or bike to the nearby park.

Public Transportation: our town does have bus service, but it's pretty terrible. The routes are convoluted, and the busses usually only run once per hour, if that. Nonetheless, I will be looking into it for our grocery shopping--especially if I can maintain our "don't buy much at the supermarket" methodology.

Other Tools

Gosh, Aaron, you weren't kidding when you said this category was ambiguous (I might even suggest that it's nebulous!). Here are some things that we rely on pretty heavily and/or have available:

refrigerator

deep freezer

DVD player/Playstation (for sanity)

Computer (again, sanity)

local library

detached garage with workspace

camping gear

bar-b-que grill

Rototiller

Gardening equipment

2 lawnmowers (gas and non gas)

Lots of books and role-playing games

After this season:

-- solar oven

-- mini-hoop houses/cold frames

Get this blog a medic, stat!

2009-03-05T10:41:00.002-05:00

No, the blog's not dead, far from it. I've probably got 15 just started/partially finished posts on my account right now. Which is fancy and great, but not doing any of you any good because y'all can't see them yet, because in my opinion, they're not yet fit for human consumption. Given that they're fermenting on the blogger system right now, they're obviously more on the "think-piece" end of things, and will probably be produced slowly over the course of, well, decades.

So what about our daily work on learning to adapt? Um.... yes, about that. Probably the reason I've not been posting much about that is that we haven't been doing much about that. You see, the kids got sick, then my husband got sick, then the kids got sick again, and then there were midterms, and then the dog at my computer mouse, and the moon left the third house of Capricorn, and... and...

Oh wait, I don't have a dog. Hm.

But seriously, I've not been making major changes to blog on yet, although I will hopefully soon post pictures of my gorgeous baby broccoli, cabbage, kale, and (whenever it germinates) celery. My husband and I have also been in discussions about things like wood-burning stoves, bug-out buckets, and job prospects. So there are some posts which will be forthcoming.

But in the biggest news, I am now taking Sharon Astyk & Aaron Newton's "Adapting In Place" online course! I am definitely looking forward to what I will learn from this course, and I am sure that much of my material (which I produce) for the class will end up here on my blog. Hey, it's ready-made blog material, what can I say?

So stick around, if'n ya want to. =]

Well, since you asked...

2009-02-17T14:19:00.003-05:00

Yeah, so I also have an herb garden:

[Garden plan done on my www.growveg.com account--man, I love that software!]

There she is (well, once you click on the image so you can see it). As you can see, I've got all manner of things going on in there. The strawberry bed is coming into its third year, and doing well so far. I know that the plants should be dying off soon, but I allow the runners to replant themselves almost entirely unchecked, so I'm hoping it will self-perpetuate (advice here would be welcome). We get enough strawberries for a few desserts & breakfasts during the early summer, but not really enough to put up. I typically buy strawberries from a local farmer for that. Similarly for our blackberry bush, which is now in its second year--I expect to get much greater production out of it this year. Well, I would, anyway, if my crazy next door neighbor would stop whacking off canes of it the second one crosses over onto his side of the yard. You'd think he would want the free berries? Or at least, tell me and I'll corral it (I must stay vigilant this year, lest another amputation occur!).

As for the herbs, here's what's going on:

Perennials (those marked with an * are new this year):

Sage (x2)
Tarragon
Rue
Lavendar (* will be adding more this year)
Rosemary
Feverfew
Soapwort
Lemon Balm
Lovage (huh, that one's not labeled. Silly. It's the unnamed herb to the right of the sage.)
Winter Savory
Hyssop
Lady's Mantle*
Thymes (x2)
Horehound*
Thistle*
Yarrow*
Sweet Woodruff

And the annuals--all, obviously, new this year:

Cilantro
Parsley
Summer Savory
Chervil (whoops! That one didn't make it onto the plan! Will fix that soon--probably put it between the hyssop and the lemon balm)
[Basil] This is actually in the main garden, but I thought I'd at least note it here, lest any of you think that I'm a nutcase who doesn't plant basil.

And then there's the big stupid gumball tree. Oh, how I'd love to get rid of that thing. But in the meanwhile, a serious "whacking back" of it will ensue this year. If only I could convince the power company that the tree is a danger to the power lines (which, really, it is) and they would take it down....

Oh, and a word about my rosemary. I've named it "Harry Potter" because it's the rosemary that didn't die. Rosemary's are not hardy in my zone. By rights, that thing should be dead. I did nothing--possibly even less than nothing--to protect it over last winter. In the spring, I went out resigned to having to pull it up and replace it with something else, but when I went to test the branches... they bent! They didn't snap! And when I snipped one off? It was green on the inside! Wow. So I've got fingers crossed that it made it this winter, too (and this time I even cut it back and heavily mulched it, so there's some hope). We shall see.

Okay, kids, here it is!

2009-02-10T13:13:00.008-05:00

"A garden is never as good
as it will be next year."
--Thomas Cooper

(I am just positive that you'll need to click on the picture to get a larger version so that you can possibly tell what's going on in there--well, if you want to anyway.)

So here we have it--the Spring Garden Plan 2009(tm). The first thing to notice about it is that it's probably time for me to lay off the caffeine. ;-) I should give credit for the software I use, too, which can be found at www.growveg.com. I really love this service--it's got lots of great utilities, and it's just plain old fun to use. For US$25/year, maybe it's a bit frivolous, but I suck at keeping paper records, so this will do.

Okay, seriously now, this is my fourth year gardening. I've had mixed luck with it, but I think I'm finally starting to get my brain wrapped around the project (or, at least, other people seem to think I am, because they keep asking me questions about gardening as if I know what I'm talking about). The garden this year is about the same size as the gardens I've done for the past three years, with a couple of additions (the potato and garlic squares), but there are several notable changes I'm making:

I will be adopting the "square foot gardening" method for several parts of my garden
There will be a "kid's pizza garden"
My husband wants his own square
Some hardcore new fertilization

Let's look at each of these in turn, shall we?

Square Foot Gardening

As you can probably see, in the SE corner of the main garden I have a number of 4'x4' square plots, rather than the more traditional long beds or rows (and the remainder of my garden is regular, 12'x3' raised beds, and has been for the past few years). I am trying this method to see what I think of it. Certainly I've heard rave reviews, and it does make a lot of intuitive sense to me as well, so what the heck? I will be trying two basic styles. First, the four squares at the bottom-most corner you will see are labeled "Kitchen Garden". These are the squares from which we can harvest for daily eating throughout the growing season. It's where I will (and I will, damnit) build coldframes and such for season extension. I am hoping that this will create a useful divide between what to eat and what to store. I often found myself not harvesting things to eat last year, because I was worried that it would put too much of a dent in our food storage. Well, let's just put them in separate sections, then! The other two square beds (which contain onions, carrots, and beets) are meant for storage--I'm testing the SFG methodology with respect to mass crops for putting up. I am actually rather optimistic about all this. The remainder of my garden will be regular raised beds.

Incidentally, the garden-planning utility isn't great for actually plotting out what I'll put in the SFG section--so that stuff's not really set in stone. It's more just reminders of what in general I want in there, and in what rough proportions, as well as planning out where the frames will go for vertical crops.

The Pizza Garden

I want my kids to garden, but I don't want to overwhelm them. So I've planned in a 4' diameter "pizza garden" (got the idea from Sharon Astyk), and I let the kids decide what to put in. They picked tomatoes, beans (bush or pole? probably pole), some leaf lettuce, carrots, and two kinds of flowers--blue nasturtiums and marigolds. Cute, eh?

My Husband's Patch

Those who know my husband are probably still busy picking themselves up off of the floor after having read that he wants a section of the garden for himself, so I'll assume that you don't know the backstory here. My husband and green things do not traditionally get along. Gardening has pretty much been my domain for, well, the entirety of our relationship. But I think this has been making him feel guilty, as he is very much on board with everything I'm trying to do, and he wants to help. So this year he's asked to have a plot of his own. Switching some of the garden to a SFG method, I think, made the project of helping out in the garden become more manageable to him, rather than attempting to wade out into my sprawling, wilderness-like layout. Also, he could choose what he wanted to plant, which will hopefully make the project more interesting to him (I suspect he would have to restrain himself from actively sabotaging my tomatoes otherwise--he hates tomatoes [and yes, I still married him voluntarily]). He has chosen to do a bed of potatoes, which I think will be a great choice for him and a good starting place. He really likes potatoes, so he'll have a vested interest in trying to take care of the plants. Potatoes are also pretty forgiving, as far as I know. They do require a different sort of care than other plants, but not so much that it's really more difficult, just different.

The New Fertilizer

Yes, the new fertilizer. I'm taking a leaf out of an old Mother Earth News article found here (http://tinyurl.com/2rgxmy), and mixing a homemade fertilizer to add in, along with the copious amounts of compost I put in. The fertilizer is a ratio'ed mixture of lime, gypsum, bone meal, alfalfa meal, and kelp meal. All of it (except the kelp meal, which I need to order online) rang in at just over $20 (and that's for almost 150# of agricultural products), so it's a pretty durned good deal, if it works. I'll be sure to report on its success or failure later. But, of course, this will be used in conjunction with compost--always always always have compost! Love my compost! Don't take good care of my compost, but that doesn't mean I don't love it!

And so... there you have it! That's the plan. For future reference, our lawn is actually twice the size, width-wise (i.e., east to west) as what we're using now, which is probably even better land since it gets better sun. I will be steadily encroaching on it as I get better. I am planning on putting in a short grape arbor and/or blueberry bushes along the North side of our lawn, between mine and my neighbor's yard (who won't mind one little bit having grapes or blueberries coming onto her side, and might just help me pay for them). Who knows what else? We'll see.... =D

The Epic Battle for my Refrigerator

2009-02-07T09:35:00.010-05:00

It's good to just REMEMBER the silliness of trying to cool down a box inside your house down to 40 degrees in the winter, while another appliance tries to warm your house up to 65. And it's good to realize this during an ice storm - when I heard reporters wailing that the worst part of losing power was that "all the food will spoil!"
--Z, comment from Crunchy Chicken's Blog

Well, those of you who frequent blogs like... er... well... this one, have probably noticed a certain amount of kerfluffle lately--much ado, if you will--over refrigerators and whether or not they are a necessity to have, or an unnecessary drain on our resources. The kickoff seems to have been Crunchy Chicken's post (with an extensive and worthwhile comment section), and additional notable posts have occurred on Greenpa's blog. The situation seems to have grown beyond itself, landing articles in the hallowed halls of the NYT, Treehugger, and Consumer Reports (the links to these are on Greenpa's post; I'd link them myself, but that's, like, work). Anyway, I thought I'd throw my $.017 into the ring (hey, the dollar just keeps devaluing, ya know), partially because I think I have a couple of novel things to say, but mostly because I'm a hopeless follower.

So the first thing I should discuss here is my own psychology. And my own psychology dictates that statements on environmental lifestyle changes like those found in Crunchy's comment section--the ones that look like "OMG, that's like, barbaric! No one can live like that!"--are almost pure crack cocaine to my brain, driving me to do exactly what they say would be an insanely depraved lifestyle. So I'm working with a handicap here, people.

Anyway, The Crunchy One gave several reasons why giving up on one's fridge will actually cause greater energy waste than keeping it (let me be clear here--she was not the one giving the ZOMG IT'S IMPOSSIBLE! arguments; hers actually involved thought). To me, to be honest, they look verse and line like the Standard Rationalization for Not Changing Your Lifestyle #2. I'm not trying to be cruel to Crunchy, but arguments that look like hers make me instantly skeptical. And the comment section contains several useful rebuttals to her claims (none of which, I must point out, got picked up by the NYT, or even Treehugger [now that was disappointing]). My basic response to her claims, which follows Sharon Astyk's & Greenpa's comments, is that yes, she's right. If you unplug your fridge, and do nothing else to change your lifestyle accordingly, then yes, you'll end up using more energy. Hm. But more on that later.

Some technical issues. The NYT reports in its coverage of this ongoing controversy that the typical American household spends only approximately 8% of it's energy usage on refrigeration. The intention here, I suppose, is that this is such a small amount when compared with, say, heating and cooling (which ring in at 43%), that it's not worth the time & inconvenience of changing. And here's where the lecture I did in my Critical Thinking class on Wednesday comes in, the one where we discuss the human mind's apparent complete inability to grasp proportions appropriately. Okay, let's look at this a different way: what do you suppose the effects would be if everyone in the U.S. cut their energy consumption by nearly 10%? Um, stonking huge? Yeah. Eight percent really isn't trivial. Another way of looking at this situation: we here in the U.S. use way way way way way too much energy already. Saying that our refrigeration costs are so low when compared to our energy usage for heating and cooling is a red herring, because we need to spend way less on those things too. And yet another way of looking at the situation: um, the energy usage figures came from where? In the NYT article, they came from Frigidaire. Frigidaire. Yeah, Frigidaire. But I'm sure they are a reliable source. The Consumer Reports article, on the other hand, used numbers from Energy Star, which really should be more reliable, and probably is. But if only I knew what the Energy Star methodology was! How do they calculate energy use for refrigerators? Do they just plug one in for a year and see what the kill-o-watt reader says at the end? Is it "optimally filled"? Is it ever opened? Is it in a household with at least three people who are content to sit in front of the open fridge and read a short novella while thinking about what they want to eat? I can't help but be somewhat skeptical of the numbers given. And even if I buy them in toto, I'll just go back to my first two issues with this analysis.

So there's that.

But the real issue I think is the one about whether or not unplugging your fridge would result in a net increase of energy use--this is the Crunchy's claim. Mainly, this would be due to increased costs associated with having to go to the market more often (no cold storage to keep food fresh), no leftover storage so cooking smaller meals, so more wasted food, and similar issues. But, as is pointed out in her comment section, these problems are predicated on not changing your lifestyle at all, beyond reaching behind the fridge and pulling the plug.

In fact, it might seem bass-ackwards to some, but I think having a refrigerator actually increases our energy use, even beyond just the electricity required to run the thing. Why? Because a refrigerator is part of the "just in time" lifestyle--the one where we believe that we can--nay, we should!--be able to have fresh fruits, dairy, vegetables, meats, and anything else our heart desires at the drop of a hat. We can go to the store any time we want for these things, and then we can put them into the refrigerator to make sure they stay completely fresh until our heart desires them! What is the obvious result of this lifestyle? A complete lack of planning and foresight. If you are counting on your refrigerator to keep everything fresh, you don't really need to do much planning. You can buy what strikes your fancy (within budget, perhaps), and just shove it in the fridge. Where it will probably rot, because there was never any plan for using it. Or if you discover that you need at least three other ingredients (probably also fresh) that you didn't realize you'd need because you had no plan. So, what do you do? Back to the store! So you buy in excess of what you really need, and then still need to make additional trips to the store to get more. Huh.

But really, it is more about the lifestyle than anything. Going without a fridge is another way of removing oneself from the convenience lifestyle to which we've become accustomed. Or, to put it another way, the convenience lifestyle to which we've become accustomed cannot exist without the refrigerator. If you don't have a refrigerator, you don't expect to have fresh food whenever you want--and why should we have such an expectation? That is a pure, and unnecessary, and energy-costly, luxury. It's an expectation novel to our current lifestyle (and, maybe, to some of the monarchic courts of old, and even they didn't expect fresh tomatoes in December). It's part of the source of overproduction and waste of our lifestyle. Even if getting rid of your refrigerator created no net reduction of energy use, it is still worth doing just to get our brains back out of the "anything we want, any time we want it!" mentality. Breaking ourselves of this attitude goes far beyond just our food systems (although it will be crucial there, too); it means learning to make do with what we have, and not expecting to be able to find whatever we want at any hour, or even at any time of the year.

Okay, so is my household fridgeless? No, it's not. We actually have a huge, Energy Star Behemoth in our kitchen that we bought when we got our house. But it's becoming increasingly insulting to me that we have it, love it though I do (it's just sooooooo pretty--black, french doors, *sigh*). But especially in the winter, and especially when I've got a cold pass-through right on the other side of our pantry that I can easily maintain at 45*F or lower, it is very hard to justify. I mean, seriously, I was talking about a convenience lifestyle earlier. Am I actually so wedded to my convenience that I'm not willing to walk an extra 12 steps (I counted) from the main cooking area to the pantry exit, rather than the 4 steps to the fridge? Is that really worth the cost of keeping my brain full of the just-in-time lifestyle? So I will be looking seriously into modifications here. My most basic goal will be to not use the fridge at all next winter (because, really, damn); I may experiment with a return to the "ice box" method of days gone by, since we do have a deep freeze downstairs that I'm not planning on getting rid of.

One stupid problem--our fridge is big, and it's a very tight fit into its place in the kitchen. Moving the fridge to unplug is a PITA like you'd not believe, and it also tends to rip the linolium under it. I'm hoping that we have a "just for the fridge" circuit downstairs that I can just throw, because unplugging the machine from the wall is, well, difficult. But I shall persevere!