The Spinning Life

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! =)

The Epic Battle for my Refrigerator

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!

My Current Approach

First, did you know that the flat-out worst time to start a new blog is right before a major holiday season? Yup, no kidding. My new blog is not only competing with my regular life, but with no school, and cookies, and presents, and family gatherings, and and and.... I hope to post somewhat regularly in the future, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's rather sporadic at first. Ah well, it'll give me time to come up with reasonable things to write about, eh?

Before getting into the nitty-gritty, I should say first that I am a devotee of Sharon Astyk and her blog, Casaubon's Book, and find almost everything she has to say of huge value. Much of my thinking on adapting in place (how to do it, why to do it, etc.) has been shaped by her writing, although I've not had the good grace to be able to take her actual class on adapting in place yet (but I sure hope to!). My financial thinking has been heavily shaped by Chris Martenson and the folks over at The Automatic Earth. I think I do have some original material to contribute to these discussions, but again, most of my emphasis will fall into the "how the *@#$&$ am I going to do all this?!" arena.

My overall approach to adaptation, these days anyway, falls into two broad categories: (1) preparing for short-term emergencies (e.g., 3-day to 2-week outages, evacuations, etc.); and (2) preparing for lifestyle-changes brought about by our Brave New World. The first one I'll call "short-term preparedness," and the second one I'll probably refer to as "the long emergency preparedness" after Monsieur Kunstler's work. I think that, technically, there probably is a third category that goes somewhere in between these two--the months to a-year-or-so long emergencies. Am I preparing for this sort of emergency? No. For one thing, if you're prepared for the long emergency, then you're pretty much by default prepared for any medium-range problems we'll have (short-term emergencies have a somewhat different set of constraints). But more than this, the middle-ground preparedness implicitly assumes that there will be a time when we come back out of this situation, and I think that's false. Preparing for the new world, to me, does not involve just managing to get through the next year, and then everything will return to normal. I think that normal is pretty much over. We're still clinging to it, no doubt. But I think it's a illusion to labor under the idea that this is only temporary. So when I store food, it's not just "to get us through this year" because the logical corrollary of this mindset is that I won't restock, or not much anyway. But preparing for the long emergency means that I am changing my family's whole lifestyle. Food storage and energy adaptation will be permanent changes in the way we do things, not just temporary inconveniences (well, at least the ones that work will be).

And in fact, this leads nicely to a discussion about why do these things now? Why not just enjoy the cheap energy while we've got it, and then deal with the fallout later? Certainly that's been the modus operandi for the past century, why stop now? I think there are lots of responses to this, some obvious and some less so. Many of the obvious responses revolve around the idea that it's probably a good idea to sort out how to live in a low-energy world before you're likely to die of starvation from it cause you never learned how to garden, or how to cook from scratch, or how to find local farmers, and so on. Right now we've got a sort of cushion period available--not a very big cushion, mind you, but we can float between the worlds, as it were. We can prepare for the future while still having the current "just in time" economy as backup. This is a huge luxury. Disaster will not currently strike us if I find that I've failed to store enough wheat berries for the upcoming year--I'll make a note of how much more we'll need, and then I'll go to the store for some flour. We can flip the power main in our house and see how it goes for three days of no power, to see how good our emergency preparations are. And then, bliss of bliss, we can turn it back on and fix what we did wrong. Heck, if we're really underprepared, we can even cut off the experiment early! Incredible! During a real emergency I can flip the power main all day long and all that will happen is my arm will get tired.

Another in the "obvious" category is the economic benefit of living this lifestyle right now. Of course, there is a fair amount of money outlay for some of the things I want to do, but in general, we will save money by changing our lifestyle now. Buying food in bulk is cheaper than buying it piecemeal from the store, and as a side benefit it's reassuring to know we have plenty to eat and cuts down on last-minute treks to the grocery store. Gardening helps cut our grocery store costs, improves our lives & health, and helps keep me sane. Buying from local farmers can be cheaper, and certainly fresher, than buying from grocery stores, and it has the side-benefit that it helps make our area more self-reliant and it builds our local economy by keeping our money & tax dollars in town. That helps maintain our job pool and infrastructure--good things indeed. And using less energy just costs less than otherwise--we're not sucking down as much oil, coal, & natural gas, so less of it shows up on our monthly bills or out of our monthly budget. The less electricity we use, the more we can afford to offset what we do use with wind & solar packages offered through our utility company. And the side benefits here are environmental--less emissions, helping to slow down global warming, which is really something we cannot afford to wait on, no matter how cheap energy might be right now.

But then there are the less obvious reasons for why I want to do these things now. I don't want this lifestyle to feel like torture and deprivation, since I'm pretty sure it's how we'll be living for the foreseeable future. If I'm in a head-space where I simply. cannot. survive. without. my. iPod I've got a serious problem, because my future may well be one without an iPod. And this is the prevailing attitude right now--the notion that we should ever have to live without cell phones, or satellite TV, iPods, cars, and the like, is intolerable to many in my society. When these people are finally forced, either via energy or the economy, to give up their toys, I'm betting they will suffer mightily. I don't want to suffer. I want this lifestyle to seem normal. I want the food that I serve now to be like the food I will serve in two years, since that will provide comfort and continuity, rather than just one more reminder about how our lives have changed.

Think about it this way: imagine a woman talking with her grandma. Like most people of her generation, the grandmother grew up with a root cellar and food storage, with fairly plain foods, very few luxuries, maybe not even indoor running water or electricity, and other similar lifestyle differences. Now imagine this person telling her grandmother, to her face, that her childhood is beyond-the-pale unbearable, and it is worth it to destroy the environment and the future of our children just so that she can avoid living like her grandma did when growing up. Was grandma's life really that depraved? There were many people during the depression who genuinely suffered, and I'm not advocating joy in suffering. But most people just lived differently, and far more lightly, than we do. They had a different set of values; they evaluated their lives on different terms. They expected different things out of their lives, and had different goals. Their mores and institutions aren't necessarily better or worse than our social mores and institutions--just different. But they're a set of mores and institutions far better suited for the coming world than the ones we currently have, and that is where the rubber meets the road.