Halving It All

Halving Your College Costs

2011-03-15T15:16:00.000-07:00

This is a very hard post for me to write.

Today I got some news that put the nail in the coffin of my oldest son's plans to attend a university in the United States. For those of you who don't know my situation, we immigrated to Canada from the US about six years ago to be near my husband's family and to be able to pursue our dreams of self-employment.

My oldest son chose to apply to US universities because he's interested in Meteorology and we couldn't find any schools offering undergraduate degrees in Meteorology in British Columbia, where we live. He also wanted to return to the US.

I felt that we could pull it off. He had a homeschooling background but was attending his senior year of high school at a public school. I figured he'd interest US universities because of where we live AND the homeschooling background. His grades are terrific, his SAT score was very high. He sent in his applications and we waited for the results.

The results are in.

He got accepted everywhere. He got scholarships everywhere.

But the scholarships aren't enough. Since we no longer live in the US, he counts as an out-of-state student at every college. While his scholarships cover full tuition in almost every case, they only cover IN-STATE tuition. Out-of-state tuition costs more than double in-state. Add in housing and food and plane tickets and it's too much.

So - on to plan B. He can attend the local community college for two years and transfer to either a provincial university or a school in the US, if he saves enough money. Here's the cost difference:

Four years as an out-of-state student at one of the state universities: $26,000 - $29,000 per year. Total: $104,000 to 116,000

Two years at community college: $3500 per year. Two years at regional university: $15,000 per year. Total: $37,000

Two years at community college: $3500 per year Two years at US university: (out-of-state) $27,000. Total $61,000

Interestingly, what's bugging me the most isn't the outcome of my son attending the regional community college/university. It's not "winning" the scholarship "game." It feels like we stole the football at our five yard line, ran it all the back up the field and got within a foot of making the goal and then dropped the ball.

I mean, for heaven's sakes - he got the grades, did the applications, aced the tests, got accepted, got the highest scholarships these schools offered.....and still isn't going. ARGH!

Halving it all isn't always pretty, folks. But at the end of the day, my son will still get a fantastic education at a third of the price in-province and at about half the price even if he attends a US university for his third and fourth year.

I'll choose halving my costs over taking out loans or borrowing against the mortgage any old day.

Kids Halving it All

2011-02-24T14:18:00.000-08:00

Two days ago I announced to my family that spring break (in three weeks) was going to mean spring cleaning for us. After working 24/7 for the last year and a half I need a break and my house needs to be scrubbed from top to bottom.

Yesterday, son #3 was home sick and apparently bored because suddenly he started hauling boxes and bags out of his room and into mine. Then he started hauling furniture out. By the end of the afternoon things were pretty bare.

Being the good mom that I am, I yelled at him. :(

In my defense, I did say that spring cleaning was going to happen in three weeks - NOT YESTERDAY. I am currently working 12 hour days finishing a huge production push with my job and I am not ready to move furniture, go to Good Will or any of those things. I am a little bit at the end of my rope.

It's good to know the kids have absorbed de-cluttering skills, however.

Radical Homemakers, by Shannon Hayes

2011-02-22T21:44:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a recommendation on a forum, I ordered Radical Homemakers for my Kindle last night and started reading it right away. I'm not sure how I missed this one before, since it's right up my alley. Anyway, I'm finding it's pushing me to think about "halving it all" in a whole new way.

When I started this blog, I wasn't working outside the home. I was, in fact, doing what many of the people in Shannon's book are doing - finding ways to live frugally and make things myself as a way to live a better life.

But I struggle with wanting and at some point that wanting became so strong I started several jobs: I went back to child care (teaching preschool) and I started a publishing business. Child care was fun because I love kids and I got nice steady paychecks, which I'd missed during my years at home. The publishing business was fun because it used every ounce of my brainpower and was a roller-coaster ride of learning new things and averting crises.

Then something happened, actually a convergence of things. I looked up a few months ago and realized that I no longer have time for my family - any time. I rush through meals, which I no longer cook: my husband took that over. I go days only exchanging a few sentences with the older kids. I rarely go outside. Rarely. Instead, I work twelve to fourteen hour days for very little remuneration. I eat out more, as a "reward" for my hard work. I've put on twelve pounds in the last year - a lot for my small frame. I eat ibuprofen like candy. And twice in the past two years a large corporation (one of the giants) has damaged my family's earning potential by throwing its weight around in ways that are criminally unfair to the people who create the products it sells.

Why am I doing this? I find myself asking again and again. Is it worth it? What do I really need that money for?

According to Radical Homemakers, I'm not alone in longing for my old, more sane, life. Part of the reason I wanted a career is because I felt so boring at cocktail parties (the few I attended). When people asked me what I did, I said "I'm a mom." If pressed, I said, "I homeschool." I could talk your ear off about curriculum, and often did, but most people didn't care, or were antagonistic to the concept.

Now that I have the career, people are somewhat interested, but only for a few minutes. That's not a good enough reason to lose track of my own kids, the weather and the phase of the moon.

I look forward to reading the rest of Radical Homemakers to see what choices others have made in my shoes.

Hard Choices

2011-02-10T16:23:00.000-08:00

I am far from perfect. I struggle with keeping a consistent life vision in my head, and I have an all or nothing type personality which means I'm often riding high on a new project or crashing and burning with an old one.

Last night I crashed and burned. Strung out from way too much computer time, facing several months of work that simply can't be done any faster but must be done before I take on new projects which are beckoning me, I fell into a fit of the I wants.

The litany basically goes like this: I want to move back to California. I want to travel the world. I want to be a homemaker but also have an endless supply of money. I want to be thin. I want to be beautiful. I want to be successful. I want it all right now.

At times like these it's hard to remember why I made each choice I made along the road. It's hard to viscerally recall how much I hated working 60 hour weeks and had no time for my own children. That's why I left California and moved north. It's hard to remember how much I wanted to use my particular skills and brainpower. That's why I started my own company. It's hard to remember that I was the one who said I had to publish 65 books last year. That's why I gained ten pounds.

I can make new decisions. In fact, I'm suffering today because I am making a decision over and over again: I am choosing to edit audio for far more hours than is comfortable for my body because I want to get it done and have it all squared away before I take on the new projects that beckon me. I could choose differently - I could do a little each day.

I keep telling myself that in the future I will make good, sane choices that will allow me to have a lot more fun in my life. I tell myself, Work hard now while it's cold and snowy so I can play when it's sunny in a few months. It's a valid choice as long as I keep remembering I'm the one making it - no one is imposing it on me.

Job Flexibility in a Changing World

2011-02-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

I just read a post by Alisa Valdes on Publishing Perspectives about her forays into self-publishing. Alisa is the author of a popular novel called The Dirty Girls Social Club, that did very well with a traditional publisher. She is self-publishing the third book in the series.

What struck me was some fear-mongering responses in the comment section. Yes, it's true that many self-published authors don't expend enough care on getting their work edited or getting a nice cover, but instead of offering helpful hint, the commenters slam the idea all together.

Why is that?

I think in some part it's fear for their own jobs. An editor writes in to say it's not fair to use your mother as an editor. A cover artist thinks only professional artists can do a good job. Sounds to me like sour grapes.

Back when I started my audio book company I put out a call for audio editors and sent out descriptions of the tasks I'd need done by whomever took the contracts. An established audio editor read this description and sent back a furious letter detailing me all the ways I was "doing it wrong." Evidently, the tasks should have been broken down and handed out to about six different people, all of whom needed to be paid around a $100 an hour.

Guess what? That was the old studio system. I use a new system - one in which a person sitting at their own home computer can get the work done in a fraction of the time with free software. I understand why that man was angry - he'd probably spent years building that big studio, and as a man in his 50s I'm sure it was intimidating to think of changing careers.

I got the message back in college that I should be prepared to switch careers a number of times in my life, and I also believed from day one that Social Security would be gone by the time I hit retirement. I feel lucky that I heard and absorbed these ideas because it's set me up to not be so afraid of needing to rethink the way I work in the latter half of my life. I am watching my industry change daily. I know for a fact that what works today won't work two years from now and I'm preparing for that. I don't want to be like the angry man I referred to above, watching a new generation speed by me and having no idea how to catch up.

I actually already have a plan for my late sixties/early seventies. I will downsize and cash out, live in a small apartment in a town that's set up well for walking, and take care of two babies for spending money.

Now I only need to come up with the five careers I'll need between now and then.

What is Good Work?

2011-02-08T16:46:00.000-08:00

It is a trip to come back to this blog. The past two years have been a whirlwind period of my life where a lot of things changed and a lot stayed the same. Recently I started a new blog as a place to mull over my latest life questions when I realized the new issues have a lot to do with the issues I used to discuss in this blog.

In essence, when I used to post to this blog I was going through my things and trying to figure out how to simplify life by cutting back on clutter and possessions. I wasn't alone in this. I didn't know it at the start of my journey, but simplifying life was a theme that tons of people shared.

I stopped posting when I ran out of things to "cut in half". I'd gone through my clothes, my books, my kitchen, my kids' toys - everything. I even got rid of my car for a month and hoofed in everywhere. I talked about cutting back on utilities and so on, and the food budget...what else was there to do?

Well, lots actually.

When I tapered off of posting here, I revved up a new home business. I started with editing, added audio book production and then sequed into publishing. My publishing business is now a going concern. We put out over 50 audiobooks last year and they appear everywhere from Amazon to Audible to Barnes&Noble, to libraries all around the continent...It's an exciting business and really gratifying work.

But something's been happening lately. A few things, really.

1. My body hurts. All the time. My eyes hurt, I get headaches, I walk around like an old woman - all stiff (and I'm not an old woman!), I've gained weight....quite frankly, I look like crap a lot of the time.

2. My children are now raised by wolves. Okay, not really, but I'm not sure who is raising them, because I'm not. Okay, okay, my husband has picked up a ton of slack and that's probably okay - he has a better relationship with them, appreciates what it takes to run a house, and has gotten to cook all the food he likes to eat for the past two years. I, however, feel like a peripheral object in the mirror - smaller than I should appear. The house doesn't feel like mine anymore. Sometimes the kids don't feel like mine.

3. I am beginning to wonder if there is life beyond the computer. The things I create have no physical presence in the world. On the one hand that's good - no trees have to die for my books to live; they are all digital. On the other hand, I feel like I'm selling books in a world that's inundated with books to people I'll never see....and sometimes I wish the fruits of my labors were more immediate. I have a side job teaching preschool three mornings a week, mostly to get me away from my computer for a few hours every other day before my eyeballs explode. I used to rank it lower than my intellectual publishing job. Now, however, I am valuing it more and more. It's real. I perform a service that has immediate implications for my customers. I'd like it if more of my work felt that way.

4. I am taking the good part of good work more seriously. As my husband says, we keep talking about things and not doing them. Isn't time to get to it? I've never been a climate change alarmist, or one to jump on a bandwagon. I figure we'll probably make it through the rest of my life without too much hassle - especially up here where we live. Still, I'm beginning to take it all more seriously and wondering if it's time to think about the longer term. My husband craves a small farm - has been craving it for years. I can get on board with it, if we can find the right place.

Oh, I'm running on and on. What I'm trying to say is that instead of being into slow food, I'm getting into Slow Living. I'm tired of running all the time, tired of being chained to a computer, tired of huge corporations making decisions that affect the quality of my life.

So now - Halving it All is going to be about work and life, finding the balance. Wanting a little less, working a little less, but doing more good work and wanting more good things.

Does that make sense?

Where is Jennifer?

2009-06-22T09:36:00.001-07:00

I've been working on several new projects, so while this blog is inactive, why don't you come and take a look?

I'm experimenting with a new publishing format. Check out my online serialized novel here: Shadow Armies. I update it daily.

And I'm gearing up my editing business with a new blog here: Editor Jennifer.

See you there!

Work to Live

2009-06-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

We're taking the summer off from our normal routine of driving east and spending July and August with my family in New York. We've gone each of the past three years, and I don't think I could have taken another 10 day round trip drive this year.

I'm using this summer to build up the coffers, instead. I've started caring for a baby, I'm teaching three classes through the rec department, and now I'm considering applying for a job rehabilitating rental instruments at the local music store.

My oldest son just got his first real job at a bakery downtown and he's looking for web design work.

My youngest son found a part time gardening gig and is determined to work on a farm somewhere in town this summer.

My husband will continue making computer games, but he's also looking into teaching a few classes of his own.

It's fun seeing how it's all coming together and I love the way that we're able to pull together our skills and create work in addition to taking on "normal" jobs. It feels like we're getting to the point that we were aiming for; putting together a portfolio of work rather than just sticking to one humdrum 9 - 5 job.

It would be tougher to do this in a more expensive place. Or if we were determined to live a more expensive lifestyle. This pace of existence really suits me and having something different to do each day makes it worth getting up in the morning.

To the Thrift Store and Back

2009-05-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I took a big step backward in order to step forward. I went to the local thrift store, donated a bag of clothing, and then proceeded to shop its aisles for junk to take home.

I got several Christmas ornaments, some art supplies and a bunch of flat baskets with dividers - all for the preschool I'm slated to teach this fall. I'm planning to work a lot with centers that go beyond toys and dolls. I need all kinds of manipulatives, puzzles, containers, art supplies; you name it.

I won't buy everything, though. I refuse to do that on the salary I'll be making. I'm going to scrounge around all the child resource organizations in town to see what I can come up with. I'm also going to put the word out that I'm looking for donations. I'll work this out.

The reason it's on my mind is because it's bringing up an old frustration: it takes money to do things right.

I like to do things right. I hate doing things half-assed, especially when I'm in the public eye. If I'm going to teach a preschool, it's going to be the best damn preschool in town. Know what I mean?

But I could probably spend as much as I'll earn next year if I was going to get it just the way I want it. I can't do that, obviously, so I'll have to find another way.

This issue goes to the heart of everything I'm doing this year: it's not enough to "halve it all". You have to improve life - or whatever it is your doing - in the process. You can't just minimize things until they fade to nothing. There has to be a point.

I guess as far as the preschool is concerned, the point is that I need my income in order to fund the rest of my life. I have to find a happy balance, a way to save money but still create the experience I want to give to these kids.

Off I go to search for donations....

Doing Things the Hard Way

2009-05-25T08:56:00.001-07:00

There's a new show out here in Canada - I don't know if it's in the US or not. It's called "The Goode Family", and it's an animated show about a family that tries desperately to be green, but often fails miserably.

I've never watched it and don't intend to, but I can relate on one level - it's hard to be truly green. Especially when you're neighbors are looking in.

Face it, we're herd animals, so it's completely respectable now to head to the grocery store with your shiny new cloth bags. In fact, here in Terrace it's hard not to. Just this past week I noticed that stores all over town are upping the ante for providing you with a plastic bag at the checkout counter.

It's not so respectable, though, to have a lawn full of dandelions. Neighbors look down on this.

Our lawn has more dandelions than grass, so this is an issue that has personal significance. I think our neighbors would be pretty pleased at this point if we just dumped a load of weed and feed and took care of the problem once and for all.

That's not the way we do things around here, though. Surrounded as we are by rivers and streams that are home to some of the best salmon fishing in the world, we're not about to add to the toxic run-off that's killing them off.

Instead, we're using kid-power. Each day we mark off a rectangle of lawn and each day one or two children trudge reluctantly out armed with dandelion pickers and get to work. The neighbors do not seem to approve. Sometimes they lend the kids top of the line dandelion implements. Sometimes they make loud comments about what wonderful kids we have to do such hard work. I keep half-expecting a midnight posse to come by and weed-n-feed our lawn themselves.

Our method is working, though. Bit by bit, the non-dandelion part of the lawn is getting bigger. No rivers have been ruined. No fish have died. The kids' muscles are getting bigger. What's wrong with that?

1000 Strawberry Plants

2009-05-19T23:59:00.000-07:00

We had a choice.

We could buy strawberry plants for about $3.00 a pop at Wal-Mart. Or we could buy a thousand of them for $100 ordering from a company in Ontario.

Guess which one we picked.....?

Branding

2009-05-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning thinking about logos. I'm about to launch my online serialized novel, and since I plan to put out more than one of these stories I need a name and logo for the "parent" company (me) that is producing them. I can't spin the title of this company around me - "Jennifer Stories" - because in time I'd like to be pulling in stories from other people. I need a more global name - a kick-ass, hip, drags-your-butt-into-the-seat type of name.

And I need a kick-ass logo.

Branding a product is about more than coming up with a picture or word to represent what you're selling; it's about spinning a story - a compelling story that reels your customer in. When you buy a Diet Coke, for example, you're not just buying a soda; you're buying fun, youth, energy, activity, happiness, excitement....

I've been thinking about the story I need to tell about my, well, stories, in order to get people to understand what my product (serialized novels) is all about and why they want to spend their time reading them. As I've pondered the message I want to send, I began to think about how we do something similar to branding with our lives.

Think about it. What is your story? My story is that I'm a maverick - someone who bucks the system, thinks outside the box, and never takes the easy path through the woods. My story is that I'm a rugged individual, an entrepreneur and a forward thinker. I'm a modern day Renaissance woman, with my finger in many pies, and I'm a pioneer, someone who experiments with new ideas long before they become mainstream.

That's it - that's the Jennifer "brand". The story I tell myself as I walk through my days making choices about how I spend my time....and, honestly, about what I buy.

Are you aware of your story? What's your brand?

Stepping Off the Cliff

2009-05-17T20:09:00.000-07:00

When was the last time you were really brave?

Isn't it such a good feeling when you step up to the plate and take a good, hard swing at a fastball, even when you don't feel qualified to be playing in the game?

It's such a rush of terror and exhileration - it always makes me want to laugh out loud.

I've been brave these past few months; not just once, but over and over again.

I was brave when I hired an artist to create a banner for the novel I'm self-publishing. I've never worked with an artist before, and the experience of telling someone exactly what to do, and then telling them what to change when they did so, was entirely brand new and wonderful.

I was brave when I decided to call up our local rec department and offer to teach some classes - something else I've never done before. It all went better than I could have dreamed, and now I'm slated to teach three courses this summer.

I was brave when the woman who coordinates those courses offered me a position running their preschool next year and I went for it. I hadn't planned on picking up this kind of job, but I saw an opportunity and trusted that it was the right thing to do.

Over the next few months I will be launching a book, teaching classes, earning money, creating curriculum, working on a website and tons more. Suddenly I'm inundated with opportunities, as if the Universe was saying, "Yes! Yes! Yes!"

It's a good place to be and I think being brave has something to do with it.

Along with clearing out enough junk in my life to make space for all these new opportunities to happen.

Getting to Work

2009-05-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

My husband and sons have been working hard in the yard lately to increase our area of food production. We've been starting seeds, buying plants and waiting (im)patiently for the last frost date to pass so we can get started.

Preparing good beds for planting takes a lot of work. We started by clearing the side of our house, which previously was a haven for trash cans, gravel, runaway grass and so forth. As Lennard dug out the area for the beds, he screened the dirt and separated out the small stones. You can see the piles here: one is the really sandy dirt, one is the stones and one is a pile of manure Lennard got from a local horse farm.

Once my husband had the area level, he built boxes out of cedar and placed them where he wanted them to go. He then filled them with a mixture of topsoil, compost and manure. One box was for potatoes and carrots. For that one he created a more sandy mix of soil.

He planted some beans and peas already, but we're going to wait until next week for the rest; we can get some last frosts around here.

Here's a picture of the boxes:

What is Worth Having?

2009-04-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

Back when I started this blog, my idea was that if I could just cut back on possessions and whittle away at my bills, I could get to a place where I didn't need so much money. I would worry less and play more.

Life, kids, and global economic meltdowns have all gotten in the way.

Now I find myself asking tough questions: What is worth having? And what is worth halving? (or doing away with all together?)

My husband and I went over our budget yesterday and it's not food and clothing that are driving up the numbers - it's things like dental care, looming college bills, and the need to eventually replace our van.

Each of these things represents consumption, resources, a drain on our planet. Each represents something difficult to give up: health, education, mobility. I suppose I could make a decision to lose teeth rather than spend money on fixing my gums. I could decide that my kids were on their own when it came to higher education. I could decide that a car just isn't for us and join the hundreds of people in my community who walk or ride the bus everywhere.

But it seems I've found the place where I draw the line. I'm not willing to give up dental care, higher education or personal transportation. The thought of doing so fills me with a kind of dread, like watching black clouds mass on the horizon. I wonder if before my life is over I'll be asked to give up one or more of these things. It's not that unlikely.

When I was in my early twenties, my parents showed me an article that said that my generation would be the first that wouldn't surpass it's parents in wealth and worldly success. I brushed it off at the time, but it certainly has proved true. My parents stood proud of their ability to send four kids to private universities. If my kids attend private universities, they'll need scholarships and loans. I remember how happy my mother was the day my parents bought a second car. My husband and I gave up our second car five years ago. Yay, environment. Sigh. Sometimes it's hard to tell the victories from the defeats.

If our goal is that everyone on this earth should have equal access to health care, education and personal possessions like cars, all of us in the west are going to have to learn to live with much less. Will it be enough to choose cloth bags over plastic and buy organic produce instead of conventional? Or will we be forced to make the really tough choices?

Creating Community

2009-04-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of buzz going around about sustainability, and my town is jumping on the bandwagon. Yesterday, I hosted a brunch for a group of people interested in this topic and it was really fun. I met several people I didn't know previously, and got a little more insight into the web of connections in my small town. One woman was a school board trustee who is heading up a committee for sustainability in the school district. Another volunteers at the Terrace 2050 group, which is starting a "visioning" process for our town's next 40 years. A third runs several food programs around town to bring healthy snacks to the schools and to provide food for low-income families, among other things. A fourth is studying for a Masters in Environmental Education degree.

I felt surrounded by interesting, enthusiastic people - buoyed up by them, even. Just getting together and talking with like-minded people can really spark ideas and energy for knew projects.

But even more than that, I enjoyed a sense of community yesterday that went beyond the normal confines of a "meeting". It was the sum total of all the parts of the day; not just the interesting conversation, but the children from all our families running around and playing together out in the back yard. Food on the table and people scribbling ideas on bits of paper. Conversations extended over washing up the dishes and pulling on shoes on the way out the door.

I think we need these gatherings, the kind where business is conducted, but so is "getting to know you". Meetings in which it's okay to bring the kids and laugh and chat, as well as covering the agenda. That's what really builds community.

Simplifying Easter

2009-04-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

Easter was a breeze this year. For one thing, my kids are getting older. For another, I refused to go into debt over it. We dyed some eggs, and the kids got a large chocolate figure and some snackish stuff in their baskets. That's it.

And it was enough...but luckily we got an Easter bonus! We were invited to a large Easter shindig over at a friend's house in town and it was terrific. This family has a farm with horses and a large spread of property. They fill and hide thousands of plastic Easter eggs all around the property and then invite about a hundred or so little kids to come find them Easter morning. My two youngest ones had a blast running around and hunting for them.

In addition, everyone brought food to share and the grandpa of the family gave rides in a cart attached to his tractor. The Easter bunny made an appearance, bouncing around in the fields far enough away to retain his "realness" for the little kids. There were apples to feed to the horses and lots of fun things to do.

I really enjoyed the small-town feel to this celebration, along with the realization that although I feel like I've met a lot of people around town, here were another few hundred that I hadn't seen before. We caught up with some old acquaintenances and met a few new people. What a nice morning.

Halving the House

2009-04-10T21:14:00.000-07:00

We're actually getting people coming by to see the house. I'd just about given up again, but it seems like interest is picking up. We have a new sales tactic. If anyone calls about the house, my husband tells them to come right over and take a look inside. None of this "I'll drive by first" crud. You have to strike while the iron is hot.

All the women who see our house want to buy it. There's so much space for everything - you can just see them thinking, "Finally - a place for every piece of furniture I've ever wanted to own!"

The men are thinking something different. I don't know exactly what it is.

No offers yet, but maybe we'll end up moving into that smaller house, after all.

Greenfigs Are Bananas

2009-04-08T18:53:00.001-07:00

Greenfigs are bananas; that's one thing I learned today. I also learned that being accurate doesn't always translate into being right.

It's been a busy day. My oldest ds and I cooked a meal from St. Lucia, and everything about it was exotic and difficult to replicate. The first dish we tried was "Greenfig Salad". The recipe was sketchy. I'd never heard of green figs, but I was excited when I found a package of dried figs in the produce section of the local Save On foods that showed green figs on the cover. This in contrast to the package sitting next to it with a picture of brown figs. Ta-da! I'd found them.

Or maybe not. We did a little more research this morning and discovered that greenfigs are actually small green bananas that grow in a bunch. They're about 3 - 4 inches long and kind of like plantains. Luckily, I'd bought plantains because the recipe mentioned green bananas in the "how-to" section, even though it didn't list them in the ingredients. We made do.

Another recipe called for breadfruit. I searched high and low for breadfruit, but I couldn't find it anywhere. The produce guy at the Save On looked it up for me. They didn't carry it, but he told me its flesh had a nutty flavor when baked. Hmmmm. That sounded a little like butternut squash, and that's what we decided to substitute. I'm going to harass one of my California friends until they recreate the recipe with the real deal. I figure they can find breadfruit down there.

I've also been working with an artist to create images for the novel I intend to serialize soon. That's been an eye-opener. I gave him a description of what I wanted. He produced a fantastic image. But some of the details were off, so I sent him another list of "to-do's" with instructions on how to make it exactly "right". He followed my instructions to the letter.

His first image was better. I didn't realize how he'd carefully crafter the balance, the colors, the placement of objects, etc., until I made him change them. Correct is not necessarily right. I think there's a life lesson in there somewhere. I just don't know what it is.

How to Slow Down?

2009-04-07T20:45:00.000-07:00

Sixteen hours. That's how much time we have to work with if we're getting a proper amount of sleep every day. How do you divide your time up?

Most of us start with our list of "to-do's" and go from there, but what if you are trying to live a healthy, balanced life?

Do you have time for exercise, the kind that gets your heart pumping?

Do you have time to walk to the store instead of hopping in the car?

Do you have time to prepare meals from scratch and eat them around the table with your family?

Do you have time to alternate physical labor with desk work?

Do you have time for stretching, yoga, and massage?

Why not?

I should have time, but I don't seem to be able to do all of those things every day. I'm in my car way too much these days, for one thing. I do make all my meals from scratch and eat with my family daily, but physical work? Not often. As for stretching....it's the first thing to fall off the list.

I have high hopes that someday I'll be the ultimate serene, healthy, glowing individual that will have it all together. Maybe when I'm 70.

How about you? Have you found serenity? Are you living a healthy life?

Sunday Brunch, Revisited (Or...Be Careful What You Wish For)

2009-04-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

Remember how I was talking about wanting to run a fake Sunday Brunch restaurant a few days ago? Looks like I might get my first chance in a couple of weeks.

Two days ago, I attended the final lecture of the Terrace Lecture Series, which happened to be about local foods. A nice young man named Pete stood up and talked about the state of local food today in Terrace. Then the audience chimed in with what they knew or were interested in finding out.

By the end of the lecture, the auditorium was buzzing. People are interested in local foods, farmers markets, supporting local farmers and more. The question was asked, "What are we going to do to harness this energy?" There didn't seem to be an immediate answer.

"How about setting up a Meetup website?" I offered. That's what the Sustainable Living group in Santa Cruz had done and it seemed to be a viable way for people to keep each other abreast of what was going on in the community. Today I set up the site and designed our first "Meetup"; a local foods brunch at my house in a couple weeks' time. We'll eat local food and network about our future plans.

I'm getting a 50 lb. sack of potatoes grown locally next week, and something needs to be done with all those potatoes, so my plan is to oven-roast a ton of them the day before, and then slice them up and fry them up with some garlic and herbs. I'll also get a bunch of local eggs and make heaps of french toast with my homemade bread. It won't be a totally "local foods" meal, but it will be a start. I wonder if anyone will want to attend? I wonder if everyone will want to attend, LOL?

I wonder if we'll eat 50 pounds of potatoes?

Around the World in 192 Meals

2009-04-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

We were out for a walk about a week ago, when my oldest son had a great idea: why not create a cookbook with meals from every country on the earth?

First he had to figure out how many countries there are, something which proved more difficult than one might think. He settled on a list; all the countries recognized by the United Nations. There are 192 of them.

Next, he figured he had 27 months between now and the day he graduates from high school. That means that he needs to research, prepare and write up around 7 meals per month for the next 27 months.

He's blogging about his experience at Around the World in 192 Meals. If you check it out, you'll see he has two kinds of posts:

1. Posts about the country, with some information, a map of the country's location, and some links to other resources.

2. Posts about preparing the meals, complete with tons of pictures and tips.

At the bottom of each recipe post is a link to printable versions of the recipes - very handy for actually recreating the meals.

We started with Venezuala and the food was absolutely delicious. My son did a great job picking out recipes. Tomorrow we're cooking Danish food. Yum. During the rest of April we'll also do Gambia, Laos, St. Lucia, Swaziland and Paraguay. Meal planning just got a whole lot easier for me.

Come check it out and give the kid some kudos for a job well done.

Perfection?

2009-03-31T11:38:00.000-07:00

I've read a lot of "back to the land" type books. The kind where an unsuspecting couple chucks everything, buys a parcel of (generally inappropriate) land and has a series of hilarious adventures on the way to settling into their new, rural, simple life.

The truth is, it isn't that easy and it isn't that hilarious, either. We're not exactly back-to-earthers, ourselves, but even the journey here, from Santa Cruz, California, to rural northwestern BC, has had some difficult moments.

It helps to have a very clear vision of what you are aiming to achieve when you set out on this kind of adventure. My vision was as clear as mud. It went something like: I don't want to have to work fifty to sixty hours per week anymore and I want to homeschool my kids. Everything else was open to interpretation.

I have fumbled my way toward a clearer vision: I want a healthy, active, intellectually interesting lifestyle that includes an eclectic schedule, homeschooling, gardening, healthy eating habits (local food, homemade food, etc.), writing and travel.

Still, it's easy for me to get derailed. When someone makes a derogatory comment - "If your kids aren't in school, won't they be weird?", "I couldn't stay at home all day.", "I couldn't handle my husband working from home.", "We take the family on vacation every year, whether we can afford to or not - you only live once, you know.", "What do you mean you're not sending the kids to a private University for all four years?" - it can send me into a tizzy for days.

I think the reality is that life is life. There is no perfect way to do it. There are going to be crappy times where nothing goes right. Heading off into the country to look for the simple life doesn't guarantee happiness. Nor does staying in the city.

I'm beginning to think that I think too much; and so does everyone else. Who are we fooling? We're all just winging our way through our lives. We're all just doing the best we can. Let's cut each other some slack.

Just Me and the Ultra-Religious

2009-03-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

It's been a weird afternoon.

I snapped today and decided I needed a few more long skirts. I hate pants. Don't ask me why; it's a sensory thing. I absolutely, positively hate the feeling of fabric wrapped around my legs.

Unfortunately, I hate the feeling of being cold even more than the feeling of fabric wrapped around my legs.

That means I need long skirts for the winter months; preferably long enough to hide the fact that I'm wearing very unfashionable thick wool hockey socks beneath them.

As soon as I typed "long skirts" into Google, I noticed an alarming trend; all the websites that came up were "modest" clothing sites for either super-religious Christians, Jews or Muslims.

I had to laugh. This isn't a crowd I identify myself with. Nor, I imagine, do they identify with each other. But we all agree on one thing; we want long skirts and they'd better be comfortable, darn it.

Still, each group has its own preferences as to style. The Christian sites tend toward hand-made prairie chic. The Orthodox Jewish sites prefer more mid-calf length skirts, with lots of denim. The muslim sites are by far the most stylish. I bookmarked a bunch of them for further perusal, but decided I'd better take a break when I found myself considering one of the "silk caftans with matching hijabs".

I'm left wondering, though; since when did the ultra-religious become my peeps? Everything I do seems to lead me back to them; homeschooling, sustainable living, frugality, having a large family, baking bread, making homemade cheese, wearing skirts....

I draw the line on head-coverings, though. I really do. I think. Some of those scarves were awfully pretty....

Sunday Brunch

2009-03-28T19:55:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is Sunday and that's brunch day here at our house. I'll get up and listen to a little gospel music while I putter around the kitchen, make some soup for the week and mop the floors.

Around eleven, I'll clear out and let my husband take over. He's in charge of the brunch festivities. Tomorrow's menu is waffles, sausages, fruit and juice.

As good as our brunches are, we both miss Zacchary's, a restaurant on Front Street in Santa Cruz that used to be our favorite Sunday brunch destination when we lived in California. Tonight we were talking about how we can re-create the experience we used to have at Zacchary's here in Terrace.

First we analyzed the elements of the experience:

1. The food - yummy, fattening, awesome brunch fare: pancakes, waffles, french toast, fried potatoes, eggs, and so on. We could do that.

2. The atmosphere - warm, inviting, comfy, casual, wood, cushions, tables scattered around. We could do that, too.

3. The company - happy, interested, intellectual, upbeat customers chatting and laughing while they wait for the food. Hmmmm....could we???? Sure - we could round up some friends who fit the bill.

4. The little flourishes - pitchers of syrup, newspapers and magazines laying around, music in the background. Heck, I think we could even handle that.

Here's what I proposed: Let's invite a mess of people over to brunch one Sunday. We can set up tables around, get a few papers and leave out our magazines, put on some good music, do all the cooking. Instead of asking people to bring potluck dishes or (worse) pay for such a meal, let's ask them to donate items towards the following week - flour, maple syrup, blocks of butter, eggs, etc. Repeat the experience five or six times over the course of the summer, setting out tables in the yard, etc., as the temperatures rise and the gardens bloom....and call it good!

The kids would be in heaven. Heck, I'd be in heaven. Doesn't that sound like fun?

Learning vs. Schooling

2009-03-26T23:50:00.000-07:00

Which is more important: the learning, or the documenting of the learning?

The answer seems obvious, but it's not. As a homeschool mommy I not only teach my children; I have to prove that I'm teaching my children. Not on an everyday basis, thank goodness, but every now and then.

My oldest is 16, which puts him perilously close to college age. I will need to create a transcript for him which proves he's ready for the next step. It's a real pain in the butt.

Let's take history, for example. We're currently listening to a Teaching Company lecture series on the middle ages presented by a respected University professor (whose name has slipped my memory). We're also reading works of philosphy and literature that match up with the time period (some written during those times, some written about those times). At the end of this year my son will know more than most people do about the Medieval period. But unless he writes some stupid research paper or takes some silly test, I won't be able to prove it. And I'm sick of papers and tests. I'm sick of busy-work of all kinds. So is my son.

Some people chuck busy work to the wind and just let their kids learn. Whatever they want, however they want. I'm not there yet, but boy am I close. I spent way too many years of my life cramming for tests and forgetting all the information within 24 hours. The things I remember are the things I learned because I wanted to know them.

I'm annoyed that standardized tests and other kinds of beaurocratic busywork keep intruding on our precious learning time. I'm annoyed that my local community college puts hurdles in front of homeschoolers who want to attend. To my way of thinking they should be overjoyed that any student wants to pay them money to sit in class.

Don't mind me. I'm cranky tonight. Why don't people get that learning is the easiest thing in the world? It's schooling that's hard.

Buried in Short Stories

2009-03-25T23:05:00.000-07:00

I think I mentioned before that I'm judging the short story contest over at Rusty Axe Games. Well, suddenly stories are pouring in from all over the place and I've been hard-pressed to keep up.

I'm in charge of reading through the entries and assigning them a "grade". The top five stories progress to a second round, and the winner is determined by popular vote by visitors to the website.

Each story takes me a half-hour to forty-five minutes to read and process because in addition to the grade, I also give a paragraph or two of feedback about the story, itself. It's all adding up.

Not to mention the fact that I'm trying to work with an artist to design a header for my own online serialized fiction website.

And baking tons of killer artisan bread....

Just in case you were wondering why my posts here are getting both smaller and farther apart.

Homemade Artisan Bread

2009-03-24T22:27:00.000-07:00

I'm so proud of myself. I finally got up the courage to open up my Artisan Bread baking cookbook and try it out. I created my own leaven from scratch, using flour, water, a few raisins and some yogurt. It takes six days to get going and then you can use it. Tomorrow I'll take a picture of it and add it here.

I put off trying it for so long because somehow it seemed unlikely that it would work. Sure, I've heard of other people using "starter" to make their bread, but it had taken on mythical proportions in my mind; not for the likes of me.

I was wrong. It worked like a charm.

I tried the first recipe, Crusty Potato Bread, with some trepidation, convinced that either my own penchant for shortcuts or my oven's wildly off temperature would ruin it. I was wrong again. The bread turned out beautifully and was devoured by my family in about two minutes flat.

The crust was crusty, and the bread had a bakery tang to it - not a strong sourdough, but along those lines; much richer than my normal bread. Today I used a second batch to make grilled cheese sandwiches with carmelized onions and green peppers. Heavenly.

Life just got a little better.

Hear, Hear!!

2009-03-21T20:16:00.000-07:00

I told you I'd talk more about, To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, by Caitlin Flanagan. This woman is so spot on.

In this chapter, Executive Child, Flanagan is talking about how our kids' schedules have come to run our lives. We go overboard on "activities" (music lessons, gymboree, ballet, soccer, etc.) for several reasons:

1. In order to give structure to our time with the kids, especially during their younger years so that those endless afternoons with the toddlers don't seem quite so endless.

2. In order to make us feel good as parents. If we stay at home it's so we can feel good about getting our kids out of the house into organized situations with their peers. If we work, it shows others that we put a priority on our children's development, even if we're not with them all day.

3. To give them that all-important edge on college applications. Yep. Let's be truthful now. We all know little Billy ain't getting into Harvard without the kind of curriculum vitae that used to land you an executive job at GE.

Is it possible to change things? Can we possibly go back to a situation in which children have...gasp...long afternoons with nothing other than playing to do? Can we possibly go back to the time when children ran around the neighborhoods playing kick the can or ghost in the graveyard over the span of seven or eight backyards? Current how-to books stress the importance of having at least ONE family dinner per week. How about a family dinner every night?

Here's what Flanagan has to say:

"What they are loath to admit is that the great missing element of that kind of existence is not dinner gongs or lists of conversation starters. It's a kind of family life in which expectations have not been raised, but radically lowered (my emphasis!).

"It requires a mother who considers putting dinner on the table neither an exalted nor a menial task, and also a collection of family memebers whose worldly ambitions are low enough that they all happen to be hanging around the house at six-thirty. For family life to mimic the postwar ideal that is our current fixation, we would need to revive the cultural traditions that created it: the one-income family, the middle-class tendency toward frugality, and the understanding that one's children's prospects won't include elite private colleges and stratospheric professional success, both of which may hinge on tremendous achievements in the world of extracurricular activities." (P. 158-9)

Hallelujah! Can I get an A-men?! Not for that last line, mind you, the first part of which might be right, but the second is dead wrong; but for the rest of that paragraph. That is the definition of sanity, folks. We do not need to run around like chickens with our heads cut off. We do not need to schedule our children's every waking hour! Let them be bored!!!!!

As for college - here's the truth. What every eastern prep-school and Ivy League college does NOT want you to know is that they are NOT necessary. You know who ends up being successful? Not Ivy-League aces. It's the people that go to state schools and graduate with a solid C average. Face it; a kid whose gone through what it takes to get into an Ivy these days is about five years away from a major mid-life crisis. They're already burnt out! And if extra-curricular activity burn-out doesn't get them, their debts will.

Here's the rest of what Flanagan has to say about kids:

"If children are to have unstructured time, they need a mother at home; no one would advocate a new generation of latchkey children. But she must be a certain kind of mother - one willing to divest her sense of purpose from her children's achievement (Hallelujah, again!). She must be a woman willing to forgo the prestige of professional life in order to sit home while her kids dream up new games out in the tree house and wait for her to call them in for a nourishing dinner. She must be willing to endure the humiliation of forgoing a career and of raising tots bound for state college." (P. 159)

I am that kind of mother. Send your kids on over to play and stop by for a cup of tea, will ya?

Building Green

2009-03-20T13:32:00.000-07:00

I got a fantastic book the other day, called, Building Green: A Complete How-To Guide to Alternative Building Methods, by Clarke Snell and Tim Callahan. I'm a sucker for straw-bale houses, and that sort of thing. Someday I'd like to live in Arizona in a hand-built, free-form, artistically-rendered straw bale home. For now I read books about them and day-dream.

This is a great book to daydream over, with its pictures, descriptions and how-to explanations of earth plaster, straw bale, corwood and cob building methods, plus step-by-step instructions for how to build a living roof.

The best part for me right now, though, is its introductory chapters on siting, landscaping and design.

Even if we sell my current house (I'm working on it!), I won't be building from the ground up; I'll be renovating an old house and trying to make it workable for our needs today. Snell and Callahan point out that before you start any building project, you need to be aware of how your house will sit on the site. Can you align your house with the south? (Yes! Thank Goodness). Will you have windows that take advantage of a southern exposure, and any type of thermal mass to retain the heat you get for free from the sun? Hmmmm.

My husband and I have been talking about this. The trick with using passive solar heat is how you site your windows and roofline. You want nice, big windows that catch the sun on a winter's afternoon. But you want an overhang on your roof that blocks that same sun on a scorching summer afternoon. Okay.

Our kitchen is perfectly positioned to be a lovely room all day long. We are shifting our planned master bedroom so that it's on the south side rather than the north side of our house - one or both of us may end up with our home office there, after all. It's too bad our livingroom will be on the north side and our bathrooms on the south, but I don't think that can be changed. I'll campaign for a nice large window in the bathroom, if possible.

Another important consideration when you design a home is cross-breezes. I was shocked when I moved to Canada to find that many homes in our town have no windows on the side walls, but apparently this isn't unusual. Worse is the practice of installing huge picture windows in the main front room that cannot be opened. Our current house drove me crazy until we installed a new window in our living room. Before that the only way to catch a breeze in the front half of the main floor was to leave the front door wide open.

I hope we'll be able to install some extra windows in the new place. I understand that side windows leaves one open to the view of the neighbors, but....it's a small price to pay for a lovely cross-breeze in the middle of summer and a lot of additional light all year round.

Building Green covers so much more material, and I'm sure I'll reference it again in the coming months. Look for it in your library or bookstore - it's a terrific book.

Simple Food

2009-03-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

Meat. Vegetables. Rice.

That's all we're eating here for the next five days. We've been snacking on all sorts of processed food lately, and I can tell that my kids' bodies are overloaded with sugar and chemicals. Some members of my household have food sensitivities and it's time to give them a break.

I blew an afternoon going through cookbooks trying to make a menu plan for our restricted diet before I finally gave up and just made up meals on my own. Very few cookbooks feature meals based on such sparse ingredients. Tonight's dinner was baked chicken with herbs and potatoes. Simple, elegant and filling. We had butter on the potatoes, but I used no flour to thicken the broth; this will be a wheat-free week.

Three hours later, my body wants to know where's dessert? I've had the strangest craving for ice cream tonight; strange because I rarely eat ice cream, and really - it's way too early to be craving anything. I just started this process.

There's another odd thing about this diet; even though I end up eating way more meat than usual - when there are no condiments, meat becomes the condiment - I generally lose a pound or two within a few days. I don't think we realize how many calories are ladled into every slice of cheese, every bagel or muffin, every teaspoon of prepared salad dressing or every dollop of peanut sauce (my personal favorite).

Last time I did this I stopped having nightmares and began to wake up early every morning - completely refreshed. Of course that was offset by severe crankiness around four in the afternoon. I wonder what will happen this time.

This is the way our ancestors must have eaten in the days before they settled down to farm. I have to imagine that labor and fresh air probably gave their food a flavor mine doesn't seem to have. Sitting around a campfire would have lent the whole affair a certain ambiance.

Maybe I'll try that tomorrow night. We'll stand around a blaze in the snow watching out for the neighborhood moose. Not so different from our ancestors, eh?

Why Living in the Boonies Rocks

2009-03-18T16:07:00.000-07:00

Need I say more?

I didn't think so.

Straight Talk

2009-03-16T14:02:00.000-07:00

My husband and I have had a couple of uncomfortable conversations lately about sharing the house with each other 24/7. I'm confidant that my husband loves me, but it still stung when he said, "Don't take this the wrong way, but sometimes it's great when you're gone. Then I can just do what I need to do and I don't need to worry about you."

That's okay, because apparently it stung him when I said, "You should go get an office or something so that you can be away all day until five pm. Then I wouldn't have to worry about the kids making noise or a mess. It could be all put right by the time you got home."

See, my husband works from home, I homeschool three of our kids and write from home. Except for my youngest daughter, no one goes anywhere! That's what it seems like, anyhow.

On the one hand it's nice, but on the other hand...well...let's just say the mystery is gone. I know what my husband does "at work". He knows what I do at home. There's no illusion that he's being the suave, sophisticated suit-wearing professional swimming with the sharks in order to bring home the bacon for his family. Nor is there any illusion that I'm prancing around like Doris Day, fluffing the pillows on his favorite easy chair or readying a martini to hand to him when he gets home.

While we've gained something - a kind of family closeness you probably don't get when everyone's apart all day - we've lost something, too; a little of the pageantry of life.

The day used to have a finish line of a sort; five o'clock. That was the time when the person at home needed to have the house cleaned up, dinner on the stove, the kids' homework and musical instrument practice out of the way, and any guests kicked out. The person at work could expect to come home, take a load off, read the paper for fifteen minutes (the kids carefully coached to leave dad alone for at least that long) while dinner finished cooking, its aroma building up his appetite and reminding him to switch gears from office paranoia to home relaxation.

While there was still the clean-up and bedtime routines to perform, kids knew that their monopoly on Mom's attention was over; now that Dad was home he got first dibs. They could expect to be told to get their stuff ready for school tomorrow, take a bath, finish your homework, and if they were lucky, "yes, you can go outside a little longer." They didn't expect to be shuttled to another activity or for Mom to help them produce a power-point presentation for history class.

The grown-ups of the household had an evening to share and wind down with; some time to themselves before going to bed and getting up to another workday. Modern life has obscured all those boundaries and I don't know how to get them back. Honestly, if no one's going to come home at five o'clock and admire my clean house...why bother to clean it? As for the 5 o'clock whistle ending the workday? Forget it. Both my husband and I often work well into the night. And weekends. And weekend nights....

I don't really have the answer for all this, but I wish I did. I think I need to start scheduling my days as if no one else was here. I guess I need to work toward that five o'clock deadline even if no one leaves home, making a reasonable to-do list, getting it done and then stopping.

Maybe what I really need to do is to look way back in history - back to the days when more families spent their days together (on farms, etc.) than apart. Maybe they have something to teach us about how they preserved their boundaries while spending all their time together. I'm going to have to think about that.

The Housing Market

2009-03-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

We're re-listing our house this week and dropping the price.

Last night I stayed up until the wee hours looking at all the MLS listings for Santa Cruz, California, where I used to live. Prices there are sliding - especially on the low end of the market. Compared to the rest of the world, real estate in this coastal town is still ridiculous, but not quite as ridiculous as it was last year.

Several things caught my eye: there were stand-alone houses (albeit small, decrepit ones out in the boonies) listed for under $300,000. Even one or two under $200,000. I haven't seen that in years.

Suddenly there is a flood of mobile homes and condos on the market, too. People are unloading their second and third (investment) properties. Some are probably trying to get out while the getting is still good. One in particular caught my eye - a two bedroom, two bath mobile home not far out of downtown Santa Cruz. It's price? $40,000. That's unheard of - at least in this last decade.

Western Canada is different than California, but I can see what's coming; it's time for us to sell. So I'm going to shake off these March blahs, get a sign out in our front yard and clean the house from top to bottom. I'm ready for our next project. Let's get going!

Making Chores Fun

2009-03-13T09:20:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to come up with a scheme to make the things I have to do more fun. I don't think I'll ever love loading up the washing machine or mopping the floors, but those jobs have to be done.

Homemaker magazines always say "blast some tunes!" to brighten up your day, but I've got three kids studying in my house and a husband trying to write computer games. I can't be that boisterous. My newest solution is to download books on tape onto my ipod and plug myself in. I bought new comfy headphones yesterday since the generic white earbuds fall right out of my ears and now I can shove the ipod in my pocket and clean to my heart's content while I listen to something good.

In fact, yesterday I found myself coming up with more jobs than I planned to tackle so that I could keep listening. This just might work.

The real trick is that I picked a book that's pure candy. I don't need to be lectured on the fall of the Roman Empire while I scrub the tub - not right now, anyway. I need something light, cheerful and fun. I'm listening to Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer. Have to keep up on what the competition is doing, right?

I'm about to go plug in and do my stretching (another necessary "chore" that had gotten boring lately) and then vacuum the whole house. What's your motivator for cleaning? Have you got any bright ideas?

Simple Goals

2009-03-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

When I posted yesterday, I thought, "Someone new to this site is not going to get why a discussion of Asperger's pertains to the concept of 'halving it all'."

I think it does, though. One of the reasons I'm searching to make life simpler and more fun is that so often my personality traits (and those of my family) make life more difficult. If my home was truly a haven, we'd all be happier, because at heart we're all homebodies. We like people, but after a while, we need quiet time alone. We enjoy going out for meals or movies, but we prefer to be self-employed rather than working with others.

If I were smart, my goals would include such things as improving my home through renovations and upkeep, building out a big vegetable and flower garden, maybe adding some small livestock to the list, upgrading my cooking skills with an emphasis on vegetarian/vegan meals (since food sensitivities run rampant in this house).

Instead my goals run to things like - world travel! Becoming a best-selling author and touring the country! Giving lectures and running retreats!

Anyone see what's wrong with this picture? My "exciting" goals are all things that would...well...make me miserable, if truth be told. It's hard to give them up, though, because my realistic goals sound pretty darn boring, don't you think? And I've grown up with the "never say die" attitude; you can be anything you want if you just try hard enough. In light of all that, focusing on my own home and family seems like the world's biggest cop-out. It seems selfish. How can I contribute to the greater good of the world if I just stay home?

Well, hmmm. What might I accomplish right here?

1. I could launch four children into the world who truly understand their strengths and weaknesses, and those of other people.

2. I may improve my family's health and put less strain on my country's health care system.

3. I may be able to learn about sustainable gardening, building, remodeling practices and so on, and pass on that information on to other people through places like this blog.

4. Ditto with vegetarian/vegan cooking.

5. Uhhh....

Well, that's a lot right there, isn't it? Creating do-able goals that leave plenty of room for creativity seems smarter than driving yourself nuts with a list of goals that would really make you miserable should you ever obtain them.

Have you ever taken a good look at your goals? Do they suit your temperament? Are they really goals? Or are they a list of things you think you should want?

It's worth taking a second look.

Let's Talk About Asperger's Syndrome

2009-03-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

Asperger's Syndrome is the label given to people with certain social characteristics. People who have some or all of the following: inability to read "social cues", inability to maintain eye-contact, a tendency to hyper-focus on whatever interests them, a monotone way of speaking, "lecturing" instead of engaging in conversation, and so on.

I come from a long line of Aspies - not diagnosed, mind you, but it's glaringly obvious. When I remark to people that I'm pretty sure I fall somewhere on the "spectrum", I invariably hear, "No - that's impossible. You're totally normal."

Snort.

No, not really. I've just been smart enough to figure out how to cope. I've always watched everyone else's behavior and copied it. I can mimick other people's tone of voice, their gestures and facial expressions, when they laugh and how they act. I try them out in new situations and see what kind of response I get and go from there. I've gotten pretty good at it.

Another trick I've learned is that when I enter a new situation or move to a new town it really helps to make friends with one person who is popular and outgoing. These people inevitably come with a whole raft of other friends and acquaintences - way more than I would ever gather in my own slow, bumbling way - who will put up with me for that popular person's sake. I have always had these helpful friends - Catie in grade school, Julie in high school, Jennifer and Donna in my later years. When I haven't found such a friend to help me out - like during college or in my early parenting years - my life has been utterly lonely and difficult.

It doesn't help that I struggle with "face-blindedness" - the inability to recognize people's faces - another Aspie trait. Some people have it way worse than I do and literally cannot recognize a familiar face no matter how many times they see it. I'm not quite that bad - but I'm bad enough.

The first week I went to college, my roommates and I decided to host a party in our dorm room. We made up flyers and posted them around the dorms and handed them out randomly to all the other freshman who were wandering around campus. A lot of people showed up for the free beer.

I was nervous that night and I wanted to make a good impression, but I had no idea what to do. My friend Julie, who had been my social coordinator all through high school, now went to college in another state. I was on my own.

I made my way around the room introducing myself and trying desperately to make small talk. I couldn't think of a thing to say after I'd given out my name and the fact that this was MY room they were all partying in. Everywhere I looked people were laughing and chatting. What was everyone talking about? How did they know what to say? (Inability to make small-talk is a classic Aspie trait.) I kept circulating, trying desperately to find someone with whom I might click. Then came the final humiliation. I introduced myself to a girl and two boys who were clustered together, each holding a beer. They were obviously art students, with wildly dyed hair, multiple piercings and gothic clothes. Likely candidates for interesting conversation, I thought.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Jennifer. I live here."

The girl shook her head at me. "Do you realize this is the third time you've introduced yourself to us? And each time you've said exactly the same thing."

Holy crap.

No, I hadn't realized that. I would have sworn on a bible that I'd never seen these people before in my life. It was my first conscious inkling that something was really wrong with the way I "see" people. I wanted to die. I wanted to hide. College was very, very hard.

While most people don't realize I fall somewhere on the Asperger Syndrome spectrum it affects my life in a daily way. I have to be hyper-vigilant in all my interpersonal interactions or I end up offending people or putting them off. I hate the expression they get on their faces when I screw up - that sort of mixture of surprise and disgust when I break some social cue rule. It can be exhausting to talk to people. When I begin to feel overloaded, I reach for a book. Something about following the lines of print with my eyes calms me down and orders my brain. Still, that can be another social mis-cue; people feel snubbed or worse if you pick up a book and read in their presence.

Why am I talking about Asperger's Syndrome? Someone has to. It's one of those things we need to talk about again and again until people get familiar with the concept. Because maybe if people know what to expect from Aspies, they won't be so offended or put off by them. We may act insensitively, but most people with Asperger's are actually incredibly sensitive. We don't mean to be rude. We just don't know any better.

If you or someone you know falls has Asperger Syndrome, check out Asperger's from the Inside Out, by Michael John Carley. Carley writes about the experience of being diagnosed at thirty-six, at the same time his son was diagnosed with Aspergers's, and how it radically changed the way he looked at his past and how he prepared for his future. I highly recommend it.

Know Anyone Who Draws Like This?

2009-03-09T17:33:00.000-07:00

(Tim Warnock)

I'm looking for an artist.

See, I've been slaving away at a novel for...oh...years, now...and while I've queried off and on, and gotten several requests to see more pages, I haven't landed an agent. Now the publishing industry has imploded and I'm done waiting.

I'm going to publish it myself.

No! No! you'll scream. Don't do it!

Believe me, I've said the same thing many times over. Self-publishing is the kiss of death for any novel, right?

Maybe. But I haven't just written a novel; I've created a world that can house many stories. It's our world, but it's different and there's room for plenty of growth. If I hand my novel over to a traditional publisher, they will decide how to market it, pick out the cover, and pretty much control the process from there on out. If the book isn't a huge success, they may decline to publish the rest in the series, leaving me high and dry with a story not fully told.

I want something different. See the pictures up on top of this post? It was made by Tim Warnock, and I love it. I probably can't afford to hire Tim to create the artwork to go along with my novel, but I'm going to find someone who can do a close approximation and together we are going to present this story to the world. I will serialize the novel and publish it online on a site that is so visually stunning that you'll want to return to it just to look at the artwork again. As the story unfolds post by post, the visuals will change from time to time, like the illustrations in a traditional novel.

In time, I may make the website interactive, allowing for readers to post and critique their own stories or artwork, offering editing services, contests, etc. Maybe someday I'll be able to put other authors and illustrators together to publish more books.

I put a call out to artists on ifreelance.com this morning and have received 18 bids for the artwork so far. It's a lot of fun to look at the various artists' work and compare their styles. Over the next few days I'll post in a few other locations. I figure the worst that can happen is I get some killer new artwork for my walls.

Know a starving artist? Send him or her my way.

Why Stay At Home

2009-03-07T11:49:00.000-08:00

I overheard two women talking this morning at my daughter's dance class.

"You're back at work full time?" One asked. "How do you like it?"

"I'm getting used to it," the other one said, struggling to keep her toddler from falling off a ledge. "I liked being at home with the kids, but I didn't feel like I was accomplishing anything there."

"I know what you mean," the first one said. "I've worked since I was fourteen. How could I sit at home all the time?"

I bit my tongue, but what I wanted to say was: "Sometimes the most important thing in the world you can accomplish is just being there when your family needs you."

That message was brought home to me with a vengeance this week. I used to think that once my kids were all out of diapers, they wouldn't really need me anymore. Older, wiser women told me over the years that my teenagers would need me more than my toddlers did. It turns out they were right.

When I was a teen it never occurred to me to discuss anything important with my mother. She seemed so out of it; incapable of understanding anything I was going through. I went through some pretty heavy stuff during those years and told her nothing about it.

So I was honored yesterday when two of my older children invited me out to the woods with them, where they showed me every patch of ground they cover in their games, and the significance of each tree, path, mound and gully. The landscape has taken on epic proportions to them and they didn't hesitate to share all of it with me. It seems like a simple thing, but I understand the significance; they're acting out their dreams here, and they want to share that with me.

It took longer for another of my children to come to me this week and tell me about something that's been troubling him, but in the end he did and I'm forever grateful. There's nothing we can't get through as a family as long as we can talk about it. It's silence that destroys people. It nearly destroyed me as a teen.

I started this journey of simplification out of some pretty selfish desires - essentially wanting more money for fun - but with each passing week it's morphing into something new; something more important than I might have guessed. The paring down of possessions, costs and activities - or at least the preparation I've done so far - is allowing me to step back into a more prominant, more involved role with my older children, just when they need me most.

Could I have done what my children needed me to do this week if I worked full time? Possibly. I sure would have tried. But I'm more grateful than I can say that when one of my kids needed me, I didn't have to call in to my boss, wrangle time off, and try to somehow meet all my obligations simultaneously. Today my heart and my energy is where it needs to be: here at home.

The Secret Shortcut

2009-03-03T09:25:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a book called The Energy of Money, by Maria Nemeth, PhD., lately, and yesterday I was working through one of her exercises which was supposed to illuminate my "life's intentions".

Ms. Nemeth instructed me to pretend I have a genie at my serivce. She said to write "all the things that you have always wanted to do or have in life. Write down whatever comes to mind. You have all the freedom in the world." (p. 81)

Okay, I did this:

1. Write a best selling novel.
2. Have a million dollars in the bank.
3. Travel the world....

Next, she said, "Look at each item. Ask yourself: Why do I want this? What desire will it satisfy? When you discover the underlying reason for your choice, write it down on a separate piece of paper. Put these answers in the form of 'to be....'"

I did this part, too:

1. To be respected.
2. To be financially secure.
3. To be adventurous....

As I made my way down the list, something happened. I noticed a pattern in my list of "underlying reasons" that went something like this:

To be respected.
To be helpful.
To be content.
To be content.
To be content.
To be healthy.
To be content.
To be content.
To be helpful.
To be adventurous.
To be adventurous.
To be content....

Hmmmmmm........

I'm thinking I don't have to wait for some genie to appear to grant me these wishes. Nor do I have to become a best-selling novelist or travel the world. I do need to find ways to be helpful, healthy, adventurous and content and I can probably do that in my own backyard or at least within a ten-mile radius from my house.

Heck, I'm doing it already!

And that part about being "financially secure"? I don't really need a million bucks for that. Having a million bucks didn't keep a lot of people financially secure in this last economic downturn. Financial security for me really means having property, having little to no debt, being healthy and willing to work.

Do you see the short-cut available to me? I can either take the long, circuitous route of waiting until I'm published and rich to be satisfied....or I can be satisfied today. Does that mean I'm giving up on my dreams? No - not at all. It just means that I'm already at the finish line in one sense. I don't have to achieve my "goals" in order to achieve success. Knowing that my success already lies in my hands, I can work backward from the finish line toward my goals, enjoying the whole process.

That's pretty sweet.

Hard Choices

2009-03-01T13:24:00.000-08:00

I can't afford everything I want right now.

That's a scary sentence, isn't it? Try saying it out loud: I can't afford everything I want right now.

Did you do it? Did you say it out loud? Or did you make a face, jump over that sentence quickly and move right along, hoping to get to another topic? Did you feel that if you said it out loud, it might make it come true - more true than it is already?

I feel that way - superstitious about money. But on the other hand, I also feel a tiny bit freer every time I tell the truth about it: I can't afford everything I want right now. The thing about the truth is that it anchors you in the present, while leaving room for future possibilities. I can't afford everything I want...right now. But that doesn't mean that over the course of my life I won't experience most things I'd like to experience.

For the last few years my parents have been paying for music lessons and karate for my kids. It's been wonderful, but a month or so ago my father let me know ever-so-subtly that they need to cut back. I immediately told the kids so they could be prepared: next fall everyone gets one activity - that's it.

Yesterday, reality set in. My oldest son plays violin, drums, baritone and piano. He takes lessons for violin and piano. We rent the piano. My son thought he had formulated a good plan; he'd drop piano lessons and continue his studies of the instrument on his own. After all, he knew the basics already.

He'd forgotten all about the cost of the piano.

"We can only put our first four months' rent toward purchasing it," I told my son. "We have to decide right now whether to buy it or not. I can purchase it out of savings, but we'll have to pay that money back."

The piano costs $1050. We've paid $200 toward it already. I could put another $200 or so toward the cost out of money I've put aside toward activities. My son would need to come up with the other $650.00.

I sat with my son while he worked it out. I could tell he wanted me to come up with another source for the money. He wanted me to take care of it for him, and I wanted to take care of it for him, too. Every mommy fiber in my body was crying out, "It's a piano, for God's sake! How can you not buy your kid a piano!?!"

But you know what? I can't afford everything I want right now...not even for my kids.

So I sat, and I breathed, and I told myself - my kid can have that piano if it's what he really wants. He's paid off large purchases before and he can do it again. If he got an after-school job he could pay it off in a matter of weeks. Still, I wanted so badly to intervene and just buy the darn thing and hand it to him.

After a couple of minutes my son said, "I don't think we should buy it. I think I should concentrate on my violin. There are other things I want to spend my money on more than a piano. I started taking lessons because I thought I needed piano to get into music school, but I've decided I'm not making a career of music, anyway."

Not the answer I expected, but a well-thought-out answer nonetheless. I'm happy to report that the decision doesn't seem to have caused him to lose any sleep. He's bright and cheerful today. I'm still having plenty of qualms. How do I not buy the piano? Surely we have the money for a piano! It's hard to let my child learn these lessons. It's hard to let myself learn them, too. It's very freeing, though, to speak the truth:

My son could buy that piano if he really wanted it. Heck, I could buy that piano if I really wanted to.

Obviously, the piano is not really that important, after all.

Where Do You Belong?

2009-02-28T11:26:00.000-08:00

Last night a bunch of my girlfriends threw me a surprise party and I got to spend an evening with eight women who I love and who inspire me. I met some of these women four years ago when I was new to Terrace and floundering with the enormity of leaving my good friends and my country behind to start a new life in Canada. Those were some ugly times, and I'm afraid that these women saw me at my whiniest worst. Nothing was good enough for me about Terrace - not the town, the resources, the stores or the people. I was downright miserable and I finally had to face something about myself:

I hate change.

I take a long time to adjust to new circumstances. I am tentative about exploring. I hold back from new people and I don't warm up to them for a long time. I compare new circumstances to old ones unfavorably until I've had awhile to get used to them. I resist new things.

It takes me four to five years to feel "at home" in a new place, and I know I'm getting there when I realize that I've created a personal landscape around the area in which I live. This personal landscape includes the homes where my friends live, the library, the grocery stores I frequent, "my" gas station and the roads I prefer to walk on to get around town.

My personal landscape also includes natural objects: the trail behind my house that I've walked on with the kids so many times, the faces carved into the trees on Ferry island, the sheer rock cliffs of Thornhill mountain that kept me company through my living room window the first lonely winter I lived here.

It includes the two standing stones my friend Eberle pointed out, the owl and the eagle that live near my house, the black berry bushes on the Howe Creek trail, and the giant trees by Lakelse Lake whose roots astound me each time I visit them.

When I visited Santa Cruz last week I visited my old personal landscape. I went to Capitola beach and got Thai food to eat on a bench by the sea-wall. I visited my favorite stores and my favorite friends' houses. I saw Iris' asparagus bed and walked the loop trail through the giant redwoods at Henry Cowell.

And I tried to visit my tree - the most magical, wonderful tree in all of Santa Cruz county - but it was gone.

The huge, live oak tree used to stand in Arana Gulch. It grew at a 45 degree angle out of the ground and you could scramble up its humongous trunk and lie in its branches without any worry of falling out. Its limbs were like umbrella spokes curving down to touch the ground all around you. It had a niche in its trunk a few feet off the ground were people left offerings and bits of burnt prayers. I took Mary with me to go find it and we circled the meadow a couple of times before I allowed myself to look at the trees lying along the ground.

I found my favorite tree in a crumpled heap, looking like it had simply shattered. I wasn't sure if I was right, so I asked a couple walking past: "Do you come here a lot? Are you familiar with this tree?"

"Yes," the woman said. "We call it the Grandfather Tree."

"Did it used to have a niche in its trunk?"

"Yes."

It had to be the one.

"When did it fall down?" I asked.

"Honey - when did your father pass away?" the woman called out to her husband. She turned back to me. "The tree fell down right after my father-in-law died."

The man thought back. "2004," he said.

Right after I left Santa Cruz. I took pictures of the tree and Mary and I walked some more. I kept on waiting to feel sad. Heck, I thought I would feel devastated. I loved that tree and I have a lot of special memories around it.

Instead, I was surprised to find I felt grateful. That tree could have died any time. I might never have known it or climbed around in it at all. I might not have the memories I have. But I got to know it - I got to be there when it was alive. The landscape has changed, but my landscape hasn't.

I realize now that my personal landscape doesn't change over time, no matter how often I move; it just gets added to. It just gets richer.

You Must Remember This

2009-02-26T10:22:00.001-08:00

It took me about two days to snap back into my Santa Cruz persona when I was on vacation there. And then it felt like I never left. What's so different about Santa Cruz, you might ask?

It comes down to optimism.

I don't know if it's because it's so sunny, because the climate is so mild, because the fresh ocean breezes blow the cobwebs out of people's brains, because of the influence of the University in town, or because it is a hippie destination...but there is a strong feeling of optimism in that town - at least among the people I know.

Santa Cruzans expect the best of people. They love change. They love new ideas. They throw themselves whole-heartedly into concepts like fairness, equality, sharing, prosperity, and open-ness, and they expect everyone else to do the same. Santa Cruz has health-food stores galore, and way more than its fair share of acupuncturists, chiropractors and herbalists. People radiate health in that town. It's uncanny.

It's impossible (for me, at least) to be around that kind of unbridled enthusiasm for life without being swept away by it all. Suddenly I wasn't the only one talking about sustainability, simplicity, or growing vegetables during the winter months. I was among friends...among my "peeps".

Thank God. I needed that more than I even knew. Because it's easy to be positive when you're around positive people. It's easy to be creative around other creative thinkers. I spent nine days soaking it up and now here I am, full to the brim again. Maybe this time I can remember the feeling of being surrounded by like-thinkers and resist the temptation to fall back into the laziness of negativity. I'm sure going to try.

One of the Rewards

2009-02-16T08:39:00.000-08:00

When I set out on my journey to halve it all, part of the point was to free up time and money for fun experiences. Well, tomorrow I'm setting off on one of those. I'm flying down to California to stay with friends for nine days. I'm looking forward to spending time with people I love, shopping (a little), sunshine (maybe), hikes in the redwoods, music and terrific food.

I'm not sure if I'll get the chance to pop by and post, but I plan to take a ton of pictures and I'll be on the lookout for tiny, wonderful houses, and people taking steps toward sustainable living and frugality.

Check back for updates; otherwise I'll "see" you all on the 25th!

Six Billion Stars

2009-02-14T10:25:00.000-08:00

It's interesting to think about the population of our planet. Six billion of us. That's a lot of people. A couple days ago I wrote about how families differ in their consumption - mostly based on their income, but sometimes based on their inclinations.

I think it's human to spend what we can. It's also human to want more; it's part of our genetic makeup that keeps us improving our chances of reproducing and continuing the species.

There's another aspect to our makeup which drives us, though - our desire to stand out - to be noticed - to be a star. It's the thing that makes some women starve themselves nearly to death so they can be photographed. It's the thing that makes some men subject themselves to repeated head injuries and trauma for the sake of scoring a winning touchdown. It's the thing that makes people gush out their innermost secrets to Maury just for a moment on TV.

The sad thing about this quest is that the moment is never enough. As soon as it's over, we want the next moment and the next. Only a few people will ever attain the kind of stardom that lasts a lifetime, and old age has a way of catching up even to them.

I'm not immune. I could care less about most "stars", but I'm insanely envious of J.K. Rowling and Angelina Jolie. I find myself getting catty about it, too; Rowling just writes for laughs, after all, and Jolie couldn't possibly be a good mother with the schedule she keeps, right?

Ouch. I wonder if there's an antidote for our desire for the spotlight? Maybe we can cultivate a desire to be one of the crowd - the crowd that's heading in the right direction.

That's how I feel about blogging, really. Yes, it would be nice to stand out. It would be nice to become a super-star of simplicity and sustainability, but really the whole point is to join in the conversation. One person can make a difference, but a whole bunch of people can make a big difference. My job is simply to chime in.

Besides, my real aspirations aren't that big. All I want is a life that includes lazy, sunny afternoons with time enough for gardening, reading a novel and shooting the breeze with good friends. That's my definition of a star-studded life.

Birthday Wishes

2009-02-13T10:02:00.000-08:00

I'm forty today. Like my son said yesterday, I'm "halfway there".

Life isn't a race, though, and I'll admit I have lots of fears about growing older. It doesn't help that last night I watched two episodes of The Tudors in which just about everyone lost their heads. Death seems both closer and really scary. Life, on the other hand, seems very sweet and precious.

Me, at 3 or 4:

I had hoped I would approach forty a little more gracefully than I'm managing today. On the one hand I feel both svelte and fit, and that rocks when you're my age and have had four children. On the other hand, I feel like I'm so far behind everyone else. Where's my stellar career? How come I'm not a household name? Am I ever going to get over my shyness and do something useful?

Everyone in The Tudors last night got to confess their sins before their heads were cut off. It seems like a good idea. Maybe it's time for me to confess all my past failures and transgressions and clear the plate so I can prepare myself for the "next half". It's always good to take stock before you move forward, right?

While I'm busy doing that, I'll leave you with a few pearls of wisdom I've garnered in my forty years:

1. Love is always the answer.

2. Nothing can make you happy, you can only be happy.

3. No one cares what you look like. They only care what they look like.

4. If you want to help someone, shut up and listen.

5. The people who matter are already impressed with you.

Have a terrific day, everyone!

The Secret Sustainable Living Movement

2009-02-12T11:11:00.000-08:00

I've never heard anyone else talk about this phenomenon and it may be that I'm perfectly placed to see something that other journalists/newswriters/bloggers aren't: but if you want to learn about living sustainably in terms of larger families consuming fewer resources you should look no further than the Christian homeschooling movement.

That's right - the Christian homeschooling movement.

Liberal "greenies" like to pretend that they have it dialed out when it comes to living lightly on the earth, but often that's a sham. Sure they shell out big bucks for products that are organic or herbal or not tested on animals, but the truth is that they still consume way more than their fair share of the world's resources. The environment will not be saved by a Silicon Valley suburbanite living in a 5,000 sf house who chooses Aubrey organics shampoo over Pert.

When it comes to living "lightly" on the earth, a family of eight who survives on one parent's salary of $50,000 is going to have it beat six ways from Sunday over a dual income professional couple with a combined salary of $150,000. There's no way around that.

Christian homeschoolers rarely think of themselves as "green"; they think of themselves as "thrifty". They bake their own bread, grow gardens, don't use the car much (because they only have one and the dad takes it to work). They shop at thrift stores, hand down clothes over and over again, give homemade gifts at Christmas time...you get the picture.

These people often can't afford organics and high-end cotton clothing. They may shop at WalMart and warehouse stores. But they buy in bulk and they don't have the money for frivolous gew-gaws. I contend that their footprint is therefore smaller.

"But...but...think of the population boom!" you'll say, and you're right; population is a concern. But I'm more concerned about the population of people who think a large house, two incomes, three tvs, five computers, and several cars are all necessary to achieving the "good life". I'm concerned about the populations of countries like China, India, and so on, who have taken our values on as their own and want those trappings, too. A family of eight in Iowa who lives in a 1600 sf house? Not worried about them at all.

Sustainable livng has to start with common sense. These women have plenty of it. I may not agree with their religious views or politics, but I can't argue with their frugality. The other day when I decided to look into switching from paper napkins to cloth ones, I didn't consult a fancy "green living" website; I posted on my old homeschoolers' forum. It didn't take long before I was overwhelmed with practical, knowledgeable answers from women who'd either made the switch years ago, or never used paper ones to begin with.

Look around - spot the families in the small houses, the ones with the bountiful gardens and cloth diapers on the clotheslines. Those are the people we need to listen to now.

Almost Green by James Glave

2009-02-11T10:52:00.000-08:00

Almost Green, by James Glave documents one well-meaning young professional man's attempt to create a green structure - he calls it an "eco-shed" - on his property on Bowen Island, BC.

You can see why I picked it up to read; obviously Glave is a man who shares my interests, but I didn't get far in the book before I discovered that he and I are approaching our sustainable living projects in vastly different ways.

Let's start with the fact that Glave is focusing on a shed rather than his house. When we meet Glave in his book, he's already made several huge mistakes on his path toward sustainable living. First, he chooses to live on an island. That means every workday his wife drives her car and takes a gas-guzzling ferry ride to work. There's absolutely nothing sustainable about that.

Second, they purchased their house based on a killer view and its large lot. Because they're paying so much to get that killer view and lot they don't have the money to afford a sustainable house. Even if they had the money, the homeowner's association would have vetoed such a structure; it wouldn't have fit with the character of the neighborhood.

Having dug himself a huge unsustainable hole, Glave attempts to make amends with the world by building the most sustainable "shed" this side of the Rockies. Does it work? Weeeee-eeellll.....

Let's start with the cost. Glave budgeted $50,000 for his shed. To put that in perspective, that's $10,000 more than our budget for renovating our entire 1500 sf house, putting up a 250sf addition, adding a second bathroom, moving a kitchen, turning a non-livable basement into five livable rooms, adding several large new windows, and installing a new roof.

By the end of the book, Glave has spent more than $85,000 on his green shed. More than double our whole budget. What did he get in return? A workspace/guest house. The truly sustainable thing would have been to install a desk into his bedroom and buy a couple of sleeping bags.

That doesn't even take into consideration the schlepping around he does to get his custom products, the environmental cost of running the huge equipment it takes to haul things in and out and excavate, etc.

By the end of the book, Glave has constructed a shed that showcases environmentally-friendly products (sort of), but he has not built sustainably. And I commiserate with him whole-heartedly. It's going to take a ton of Glave-type mistakes before we come close to getting this right.

Lest I sound like a sanctimonious prick, let me state for the record that I didn't start out thinking of our renovation as "sustainable". The word I would have picked was "cheap". But sometimes (not always, mind you) that results in the same thing.

Like Glave, we're taking our southern-facing walls into consideration - how can we use those windows to passively heat our house in the winter? It helped me a lot to read how he is doing it. We're also looking at our materials and trying to make smart choices. We aren't going to pay astronomical prices for reclaimed wood (we live out in the middle of nowhere - shipping a special order makes no sense at all), but we will use boards made from fast-growing second growth pine trees rather than some fancy-schmancy hardwood or gas-emitting laminate. And we have a basement full of windows salvaged from a local project that will either go into our home or into our greenhouse. The trick with recycling building materials is to make use of your contacts around your town. Pal around with builders and contractors and make sure they know all about your project. Sooner or later they'll let you know about a cheap or free source for something you need.

I may even give in and let my husband make a polished-concrete floor in the living-room addition. But only if he agrees to let me make a bunch of hand-made rag-rugs to throw all over it to warm up the space. His reaction: "Well, that's really...uh...retro."

Unlike Glave, we plan to do all the labor ourselves. We'll get help with the electrical (although I sense a course in wiring in our future), but that's about it. We've had enough practice now that we sort of know what we're doing.

I commend Glave for what he tried to do, and I doubly commend him for being honest about his attempt to be green. We can learn from his mistakes and I suspect that next time Glave will come at his project from a more wholistic standpoint. Because sustainable means reproducible, after all. And none of us can really afford an $85,000 shed.

Don't Look!

2009-02-10T14:25:00.001-08:00

My husband posed a question to me today: are we planning to spend too much on our renovation based on what we'll get from it?

To recap - we're putting our house on the market next month, and if it sells we plan to use some of our profits to rehab one of our rental homes for us to live in. That will leave us eight rentals to pay all our bills, plus money in the bank. Even if neither of us makes a dime on our other endeavors we'll stay afloat.

The problem is the house we plan to move to is old and need some major upgrading, including electrical work, a new roof, an addition and a second bathroom. My husband's question is a fair one - will our resale value reflect our investment? Hard to tell.

And what's our alternative? That's the question that got me in trouble this morning. First I perused the local real estate ads: nothing. There are no "deals" in town. Housing prices shot up last year and no one is willing to lower them yet.

Next I pulled up the Santa Cruz, California, listings, and found a whole different story there. Santa Cruz is paradise - a coastal town with lots of charm and character. Prices hit the roof a couple of years back and then started to slide. Two years ago you wouldn't have found a single stand-alone home in Santa Cruz in the $300,000 to $400,000 category. Now there are several I'd consider living in. Still, we can't afford that. Not without some major lifestyle changes.

That's when I lost it. I emailed a bunch of listings to my husband titled: "All the deals are in California" and marched downstairs to his office to hammer in my point. If homes in California are getting to be the same price as homes here, why can't we move back? See, even a die-hard fan of sustainable living turns into a sucker when paradise comes calling.

It took about an hour to regain my sanity. An hour of choking back tears and chanting inwardly "sustainable living, sustainable living." I adore Santa Cruz - the people, the climate, and the funky sensibility there, but there are many reasons why not to move back to California.

1. The prices aren't the same. Not really. Those houses are $300,000 - $400,000 US, not Canadian. Big swing there. They are also far out of town, up in the hills, which would mean we'd spend hours in the car and lots of money on gas.

2. A California house means keeping up with the Jones', California-style. I'd like to believe this isn't true....but it's true. It takes a lot of money to "slum it" in Santa Cruz.

3. We'd have to go back to full time jobs. Both of us. With all the expense that entails and the detriment to our quality of life. We'd probably need a second car, too...

4. Which means we'd be right back where we started when we decided to sell our house and move away from Santa Cruz four years ago!

What's the moral of the story? There will be opportunities presented by this recession. Housing prices will fall and if you've saved up some money you may be in a position to find a great deal. Go over your numbers and think about it, especially towards fall and winter of this year.

Just keep your head. Don't buy a house just because it's "such a bargain for its location". That's not sensible under any circumstances.

Halving Your Taxes

2009-02-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

I said I'd be honest, right?

Most people don't want to give up enough extra income to make a difference in the taxes they pay, but it is true - if you make less money, you pay fewer taxes, too. If you follow our model - "want less, spend less, earn less and live more" - then you might find yourself the recipient of some of the "benefits" of being "poor".

We have worked hard to cut down our bills and expenses, and the choices we've made around work - self-employment, working from home, etc. - makes it much more likely that we'll earn modest incomes rather than superstar ones. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to publish a best-selling novel, and my husband wouldn't shy away from writing a best-selling game, but so far we haven't launched ourselves into the kind of earnings that get you on the front of Money magazine.

What I've learned over the years is that the vagaries of the tax code mean that one year you might earn just enough to get all kinds of tax breaks or even payments from the government (Earned Income Credit in the US or Child Tax Credits in Canada), and the next year you might earn a tiny bit more and have all your "gain" wiped out by a corresponding "loss" of those benefits you received the year before.

There's nothing you can do about it, except to be aware it's coming. When you live frugally you have to know all the numbers; you simply can't live by the seat of your pants.

I'm in the middle of sorting out my taxes right now. I don't hire an accountant - I do it myself, because it saves money ($100 an hour or more!) and because I find even the best accountants make mistakes. Doing the taxes myself allows me to become familiar with the tax code so that I know the kinds of things I can do the following year to set our businesses up in the best possible way.

How are you holding up this tax season?

Sticking to a Budget

2009-02-09T08:55:00.000-08:00

There's an old Dickens quote that runs: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure ninteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

So simple and yet so true, right?

I learned about debt the hard way as a young woman. I got my first credit card as a freshman in college before I even had a job, and I used it to tide me over whenever money got tight. I remember I racked up $600 in debt that I couldn't pay by my senior year.

That turned out to be nothing compared to what happened later. As a young mother with two children and a partner addicted to trouble, my car loan, medical bills and credit card charges combined to total about $17,000 of debt. In a desperate attempt to get out of it, I tore up my credit cards, gave back my car and finally borrowed money from relatives to pay it all off.

Then I went without a credit card for well over a decade.

I still buy nothing today (except houses) that I can't pay for with cash I have on hand. While I now have one credit card, I pay it in full each month and sometimes I pay it off early, as well. I use it only for online purchases for things I cannot get here in my small town (mostly school books).

I may be tempted, but I don't think I'll ever succumb to using the credit card for something I can't afford again, because the result is just what Dickens says: misery.

It isn't worth it, and now that my emphasis is on achieving the smallest possible "footprint", it gets easier to resist.

I think it helps to know your weaknesses. A friend of mine owns a store in town crammed full of beautiful clothing and shoes. Much as I like her, I don't go there unless I have several hundred dollars earmarked for spending. It's too tempting. Why put myself through that? I don't visit bookstores, either, unless I have twenty dollars burning a hole in my pocket.

Am I perfect at controlling my spending? Snort - not likely. It's an ongoing struggle. I screwed up in January, and I'm going to have very little cash for my trip as a result. Still, I don't owe anyone anything, and that's a true blessing.

Old Habits Are Hard To Break

2009-02-08T11:58:00.000-08:00

I took my fifteen-year-old son to WalMart this morning to buy some socks and shoes. He gets a larger monthly allowance than our other kids do and is expected to buy all his own clothes out of it. He's been skating by with hand-me-downs from his sixteen-year-old cousin, but that gravy train has run out, so it was time to shop.

As I wandered around the store I spotted a certain item of clothing on sale that I could use one or two more of. A certain...uh...intimate item of clothing that one really should try on before one buys, but one never really wants to try on - certainly not in a WalMart fitting room. I grabbed two. They were $4.50 a piece - how could I resist such a low price?

I should have resisted it. They're both the wrong size, laughably so. They're cheap as all get out. Two pieces of crap, forgive my French, and now I'm out ten bucks. I'll take them back, but really - I ought to know better. Didn't I just say a couple of weeks ago that it's better to buy one quality item than a multitude of cheap junk?

I've learned my lesson. And my son is learning lessons, too, about taking his time, shopping around and buying smart. He didn't like the prices of the jeans at WalMart ("They're $17.50, Mom!"), so I'll take him to the consignment and thrift stores next week and see what he can find. He's not going to pay for "quality clothes" at his age - he'd much rather spend the money on a new guitar amp. I guess the acorn doesn't fall far from the oak tree, eh?

Halving My Gas Bill

2009-02-07T11:35:00.000-08:00

I want to point out that I've made a change on the site. I used to post how much money I spent on gas per month, but that really didn't make any sense: the price of gas is all over the place and $50 buys me a heck of a lot more now than it did four months ago.

So I've posted the odometer reading in the right hand column, and I will update it weekly. During these cold months I use the car fairly often. As soon as it warms up and stays lighter, longer, we will all get back to walking and riding bikes. It will be interesting to see how my weekly totals compare.

Of course, the biggest difference will come because last year I drove 6,000 miles to New York and back. This year I'm staying home. I think I halved my gas budget right there.

Feb. 4, 2009: 111,231
Feb. 10, 2009: 111,432 (201 miles)

Ask The Curmudgeonly Canadian - Straight Talk About Hard Times

2009-02-05T19:49:00.000-08:00

Halving It All is pleased to announce our latest feature - Ask The Curmudgeonly Canadian! Send in your questions about finances, the recession, buying and selling houses, renovations, computer programming, affairs of the heart, and whatever else you can think of. The Curmudgeonly Canadian (aka my husband) will answer with brutal honesty.

***

Our first question comes from "Happy".

"Dear Curmudgeonly Canadian,

What do you look for in a bargain house you may be looking at? Trouble signs, etc."

CC answers:

Dear Happy:

To decide whether or not a house is a bargain:

1. I add the cost of my planned renovations to the purchase price of the house(including something for my time and risk).

2. I add in any buying and selling costs. (This means taking into account realtor fees if you are going that route and whatever normal fees buyers and sellers pay on a house of that value in your neck of the woods. In Canada, your notary public can handle the sale so check with them, in the US you can check with your local escrow agent to find out what normal fees would be. If you need a mortgage then also talk to the bank and find out about any costs you might incur to get a mortgage, to pay off a mortgage and whether you would have enough money into the place that you could avoid PMI and other loan related costs.)

3. I compare it to the price of similar house that has recently sold in the neighborhood (a house of similar size and number of rooms). If the number I've reached for my purchase and renovation is significantly less, then I've found a bargain.

OK, assuming that you have identified a bona fide bargai, here's my take. (Further caveats: I'm not a pro; I just know enough to be dangerous. I also don't have a vested interest so that may make my advice more valuable than that of a professional who wants your money. Think of me as crazy old uncle Lenny who might just know a thing or two.) Here are the things I look at:

1. I look at the foundation - if it's not on a solid basement then you want to get down there with a flashlight and start looking around for water and termite damage.

2. Is the electrical system sound? If you take covers off of things will you find blackened spots where things have gotten too hot?

3. What kind of shape is the roof in? try to get up in the rafters and see if there is adequate air flow so that things haven't been sweating and subsequently rotting.

4. Look at the plumbing and step around all of the potentially wet areas of the house (sinks, toilets, tubs) and see if anything is soft which might equate to water damage.

5. Are the floor joists for all levels still sound? Are they not too long for the span they are carrying and of sufficient size not to cause sagging? Look for cracks in drywall which will suggest the foundation might be up to something (shifting).

My ideal bargain? A house that's priced way under market, with bad carpets and beat walls - cosmetic problems that frighten off the newbies but are the easiest things to rip out and make new again for a small amount of time and money.

Good luck!

The Curmudgeonly Canadian

***

Do you have a question for the Curmudgeonly Canadian? Email it to: lenandjennifer @gmail.com!

What Would Ma Ingalls Do?

2009-02-05T09:59:00.000-08:00

I've spent the last few months reading through the Little House on the Prairie books with my seven-year-old daughter. We're on The Long Winter, which is proving to be perfect reading for these difficult times. No matter how bad our economy gets, or how grim the grey winter skies, when it comes to hard times we've got nothing on the little town of DeSmet in the winter of 1880-81.

Winter came early that year, with a blizzard in October, and after that it hardly let up. Pa Ingalls made the quick, smart decision to move his family to town for the duration and it was a good thing they did; they would have frozen or starved otherwise. Blizzard followed blizzard that year, with each storm lasting several days. Most times there was only one clear day between each storm. Trains couldn't make it through the snow-covered tracks after mid-December and the town was left on its own until spring.

One thing that stands out to me in these books is how Ma always manages to scrounge something together for every special occasion, no matter how broke or how hungry they are, and no matter how awful their circumstances. We can learn something from her.

We might be in for a few rough years before the economy improves, but we don't have to spend those years whining about what we don't have. Instead, we can turn our thinking around and see the possibilities. This is your chance to fall back on your inner resources, your chance to be creative, to think outside the box.

It's also a chance for all of us to take a long-needed breather from the consumerism that's kept us in a frantic rush to work, work, work so we can spend, spend, spend.

Think of the recession as a fiscal vacation.

Face it, we act like sheep in a herd more often than we care to admit. If the Johnsons serve champagne and filet minon at their parties, it's hard to reciprocate by throwing a potluck, but if everyone's entertaining on the cheap....well, it gets easier, right?

Last month I talked about planning for fun, and I encouraged you to go to your calendar and make sure one fun thing was happening each week. Well, here I am encouraging you to do the same thing this month. If you're short on cash, make it simple and cheap - a walk with a friend, a trip to the coffee shop for a book club meeting, a visit to a local museum. Go on. Do it right now. I'll wait.

It's not really luxury we miss in difficult times; it's joy that we miss. When we attach joy to money, we do everyone a disservice.

Why Aren't I Afraid?

2009-02-04T16:24:00.000-08:00

This latest cash-flow issue certainly came as a shock to us and last night both of us were feeling a little stunned, but this morning I noticed something - both of us seemed pretty chipper. Cheerful, even. What on earth?

I think it's because we're so clear on where we stand right now. We know exactly how much we need to earn, where the money comes from and how much of a financial cushion we have should our supply of cash cut off. We took a hit this time, but we're still okay.

In addition, we're both healthy, we're smart and we're capable of hard work. Our worst case scenario is one of us has to find a menial job. We'd still be able to get by.

This isn't the first time we've been knocked for a loop. About a decade ago, before we were married, my husband was working for a large Silicon Valley game company when management decided to pull the plug on the game his group had been assigned to. "We'll assign you to another group; what game are you interested in?" he was asked. My husband came home from work that day looking like he'd just been run over by a bus.

"Well, what do you want to do?" I asked him.

"What can I do? I'll wait to get assigned to a new game."

He didn't seem to happy about it. "Is that what you really want to do?" I asked.

"No," he said.

"What do you really want to do?"

I could see the struggle going on in his mind. "Quit and go back to Terrace and spend some time with my Dad," he blurted out.

"Why don't you, then?" I said. Why not? After all, his father was fighting cancer. Wasn't his son's place at his side?

"What will you do?" he asked.

"I'll come with you," I said.

If my husband's game hadn't been sidelined at that moment we wouldn't have spent four months in Canada that year with his parents. He wouldn't have been there the day his father got the good news - his cancer was in remission. He wouldn't have been there the day his mother got a phone call - my husband's brother had been admitted to a hospital in Alaska with a brain tumor. He wouldn't have been there in Alaska with the rest of his family when his brother passed away. And honestly, I don't know if we'd be living in Terrace today.

That day - that conversation - changed a lot of things in our lives. It was the first time we said as a couple, "to hell with the way everyone else does things: this is what makes sense for us." It was the first that we chose a more human lifestyle over a corporate one.

Remember this - when life pitches you a curveball, don't be afraid; just adjust your stance and knock it out of the park.

The Universe is Laughing At Me

2009-02-04T09:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we hit an unexpected bump in the road. My husband sells computer games. They're the kind you find online and download to your PC to play. It's great - no waste, no messing around with shipping or retailers, just a clean and simple way to deliver games straight to people.

He sells games on his own website, Rusty Axe Games, but he also sells his games through larger "portals"; online companies who advertise like crazy, so get thousands of people coming to their sites every day.

One portal in particular accounts for a lot of my husbands sales and a few days ago, without any warning, they decided to slash prices on every game they carry across the board. Games that sold for $19.99 previously now sell for $9.99 (if they're lucky) or $6.99 - all at the whim of the portal, not the developer.

What this means for people like my husband is that his take - the percentage he earns from each game sold on this portal - has been slashed. He'll be paid a third of what he previously earned per game.

Thank God this isn't our only income stream. But it sure knocked us for a loop. Because as soon as one portal does this, all the rest pretty much have to follow suit or go out of business. Once everyone knows they can get pretty much every game they want for $9.99 on a portal, no one's going to come and buy it for $19.99 on the developers' own web pages. The business model just crashed and burned.

It's hard to know what this means for us long-term. My husband already makes niche games, so he'll pull them out of the portals and only sell them on his own website. That gives him a chance to protect his "brand" and build it up as something worth paying the extra money for.

What it means short-term is that our margin just got thinner. We're still all right, but it behooves us to consider other ways to make money over which we have more control.

I'm just happy I was already working on ways for us to live on less. I'm pretty well prepared to absorb a blow like this. These are interesting times, for sure.

All The Interesting People Are Right Here

2009-02-03T10:27:00.001-08:00

We're not the only ones who have moved here to Terrace, BC to get away from it all. I walk my daughter to the bus stop every morning and I've gotten to know one of the fathers there - Dag - whose son goes to the same school my daughter does.

Mostly we chat about the weather and the bus being late, but on Friday Dag was bursting with news he had to tell somebody. Terrace is one of the five runners-up for the Canada-wide "Hockeyville" competition sponsored by Kraft foods. Essentially, small towns (and some not so small) compete to be designated "Hockeyville" by getting everyone in town to show their team spirit and support for the sport. The winner gets money towards the local arena/hockey programs and hosts an NHL exhibition game in the fall.

There is also a competition for the "Hockeyville" song, and here's where Dag comes in; he's a singer/songwriter and his song won the contest! We got to hear it on national television over the weekend during one of the games and reporters from the CBC were hear in town broadcasting from our local arena.

Anyway, he and his family wanted a better life than they were living in Vancouver and so they came here, but while his wife found it easy to procure a job, Dag is an artist, so he's going to have to create his own work. Music is his thing, but he's into gardening, too. I recognize a fellow eclectic visionary.

It's fun to run into other people taking the same journey we are, and it just goes to show you that there are all types in every community; you just have to be patient enough to meet them. I've begun to think of it as an archeological expedition, sifting through the layers of people in town until I find the like-minded ones. Or maybe a safari is a better metaphor: I go about blending into the scenery, watching and waiting until someone betrays his eccentricity with a sudden movement or flash of color. Then I pounce on them and pump them for all the information I can: what are you up to? What new things have you learned? How do you practice your art? How do you make a living from it?

Have you met anyone interesting lately?

Dance For Joy

2009-02-02T09:35:00.000-08:00

Dance classes started up again last night. This time I'm taking a choreograph bellydance one and last night's class was a lot of fun.

I find that learning to dance is as much about UN-learning old habits as it is learning new ones. When you're raised by fairly uptight WASPs, you don't embody "grace" so much as "rigidity", so I have a lot of retraining to do.

Along with overcoming my stiffness, I have to overcome certain stumbling blocks in the way I view my body. As in my long-held conviction that my belly should be under wraps at all times.

Not only is my belly uncovered during bellydance classes, it's the focus. Last night we worked on a new move called "the belly pop". Yep. Just what it sounds like.

"Take a step to your right and push your belly out," my instructor Krystyna said.

Push my belly out? Are you kidding me? After all these years of holding that sucker in?

Just when I was about to mutiny, I flashed to the conversation I'd had with my kids at dinnertime. It was more of a lecture, really. I was telling them how when you pay attention to your personal grooming and your attitude, you don't just benefit yourself, you benefit everyone around you. Studies show that if a captain of a large ship is in a foul mood, even if he stays in his cabin and talks to no one, somehow everyone else on the ship will become aware of his mood and their stress levels will rise. So, too, in a family. If one person is walking around angry or sullen, everyone suffers.

I think the same could be said for people's self-confidence. If you walk around hating yourself (or your body), you don't just affect yourself, you affect the people around you, too. You make it hard for them to appreciate you. Your family loves you - all of you - but if they say, "You look great!" and you reply, "No, I don't - look at my stomach!" sooner or later they're going to stop complimenting you out loud and that little spark of love will have been squashed.

So, go ahead - stick out that stomach. It's good for you.

I Did It Again

2009-02-01T10:55:00.000-08:00

Be careful what you wish for.

After complaining yesterday about guests that leave too quickly, I got the other kind yesterday. Those kids stayed three hours longer than they were supposed to. Oh well. Eventually they did go home.

But then my worst nightmare happened. A mom came to pick them up and we chatted while the boys got ready to leave. After a while I said, "I'm Jennifer, by the way."

"I know. We met at the UNBC teacher training day when we spoke about what parents want from their children's teachers."

Whoops!

How is it that everyone remembers me and I don't remember anyone? I've always been bad about that and here, in this small town, it's worse because I run into people I'm supposed to know all the time. I don't know about you, but I have to see someone four or five times before I get clear on their faces and I have to be told their names at least as many times or I can't get it straight. I hate that about myself. It's one of the reasons people think I'm such a snob until they get to know me pretty well - even after we've met once I don't say "hi" in public. They think I'm snubbing them. I just don't recognize them.

Today I'm walking around saying, "Bonnie. Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie." Whose mother is she? I haven't a clue. I'll tackle that next time, I guess....

2009-01-31T18:12:00.000-08:00

One reason I've been working so hard to simplify is that I want more leisure time. More leisurely time. One of the things I want to do with that leisurely time is spend it with other people.

That means I have to be crafty, because most other people in this world believe that they are supposed to be hustling around like maniacs all the time. I shouldn't point fingers; I suffer from this syndrome, too. Sometimes I'll be at a get-together and even as I'm enjoying myself I'm thinking, "If only I could check my email while we talk."

I remember a time when guests would come over and I couldn't get them to leave. It'd be two o'clock in the morning, the kids still up, and I'd think, "Man, would they just go home?" Now I can't get them to stay more then two - three hours before they get jittery and start edging for the door, and no, I don't think I've gotten that boring as I've aged. I can see it on their faces; they're missing their fix. They haven't checked their stocks in an hour. What if there's breaking news and they haven't seen it? Maybe someone's started a fight on their favorite forum and everyone's choosing sides!

What's a girl to do?

Face it, I'm forced to make coming to my house better than the internet (or tv). That's a heck of a lot of pressure. One way I lure people in is with food. Today the prey was a gaggle of teenage boys my son brought home to play Dungeons and Dragons in the basement. They were slated to be here from 10 am to 6 pm, which is pretty bold in this age of split-second entertainment. Kudos to my son to get kids to commit to any activity that lasts that long. I had to take steps to make it a success.

This called for pizza, and lots of it. And that's how I spent my day. 10 pans of homemade pizza later, plus a plateful of homemade cookies, and I think they were hooked. One kid apparently ate a whole pizza by himself. I'm feeling pretty self-satisfied tonight, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. I've got my work cut out for me if I'm going to start a slow-socializing movement here in town.

We Did It!

2009-01-31T10:35:00.000-08:00

Congratulations, everyone - it's January 31st! We made it through the toughest month of the year (for me, anyway)!

Next month is February. I'm going to focus on one serious topic - budgets, and one that's just as serious but far more fun - love.

I don't think it's possible for a family to downsize without budgeting. A budget, for all its bad reputation, is just a tool that allows you to get control of your money. It gives you choices. It gives you power.

Love can also be a tool of sorts. You can use it as a lever to lift yourself or others out of a hole. You can use it as a blanket or a medicine to heal those who have been hurt. You can use it as a shovel to fill in chasms between you and your enemies. It's good to have in your arsenal.

In thirteen days I turn forty and you know what happens when women like me hit milestone birthdays like this: we shake things up. Big time. I'm looking forward to a very stellar year. I hope you are, too.

Elsewhere, USA

2009-01-30T15:23:00.000-08:00

I came across a review of Dalton Conley's book, Elsewhere, USA, in Business Week magazine recently and I'll be looking for it in my local library. Here's the line from the review that caught my eye:

"We are constantly on the lookout for economic opportunities, whether we're at the gym, our kids' school, or out with friends. This collision of worlds has made us buiser, if not downright frenetic. But it has also left us feeling disjointed and dislocated, as if we should always be somewhere else, doing something else."

Does that feel familiar? It sure does to me. For one thing, I look at every incident in my life as possible fodder for my writing; people, places, phrases, conversations. Any of it could lead to a blog entry or a book.

For another thing, social sites like Facebook demand, "What are you doing now?", every time I check in to see what my friends are up to. It's no longer good enough to live my life; now I have to advertise it, too.

A few years back I would get on my computer, check my email and get right to work. Now I get on the computer and negotiate ten or more sites, giving updates, reading messages, hunting for an interesting conversation to chime in on. In any given day I might interact with a few hundred people.

But do any of them give a rat's ass about me?

Isn't this behavior what you'd expect from a lab rat? Press the button, get a treat, press the button, get a treat. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy talking to people all around the world and I love the opportunity it gives me to talk to people I wouldn't normally get to talk to. I've actually had some amazing conversations over the years, and I've definitely been affected by the company I've kept - I hope for the better.

Is it real, though? Would I have been better off pursuing a couple of true, real-life friendships in town? People I can actually see?

I'm not ready to give up on the internet as a tool, but I know I have to change how I use it. I need to make more active choices about how I use it and let it use me less.

"I'll be happy when..."

2009-01-29T10:17:00.001-08:00

How many times a day do you think something like this:

"I'll be happy when I've got this room cleaned up."

"I'll be happy when Brian's braces come off and I don't have to pay that bill anymore."

"I'll be happy when I finally get that promotion."

"I'll be happy when our house sells."

After saying things like this for nearly forty years, I no longer believe that I will be happy - truly happy - when any of the statements I make about the future come true. I've hit all kinds of milestones in my life - graduations, a wedding, babies born, babies out of diapers, buying a house, selling a house, writing a novel, and so on - and though I've experienced pride and joy at my accomplishments, once some time passes life feels just the same as it always did.

Tal Ben-Shahar says, in his book Happier, that this is because "We learn to focus on the next goal rather than on our present experience and chase the ever-elusive future our entire lives. We are not rewarded for enjoying the journey itself but for the successful completion of a journey....Once we arrive at our destination, once we attain our goal, we mistake the relief that we feel for happiness....When we mistake these moments of relief for happiness, we reinforce the illusion that simply reaching goals will make us happy." (p. 19)

Isn't it time to tear down the illusions?

Your future accomplishments may make your life easier. They may relieve you. They may bring you moments of joy.

But they have nothing to do with your joy right now in this instant. If you want to feel joy right now - all you have to do is feel it. It's right there.

I'm Almost Done

2009-01-28T09:55:00.000-08:00

Five months ago I arrived home from New York determined to halve my possessions. I'm getting perilously close to finishing. In some ways it's an ongoing process; like any other mother, I'm always going to have to sort through old clothes, toys, and papers that my children accumulate and then outgrow.

But I really have gone through and weeded out a large proportion of my possessions. My house seems very roomy when I walk around it. It seems much too big.

Just because I've halved my possessions (or maybe "thirded" them at this point?), doesn't mean that my work is finished, however. It just means I've cleared the ground for moving forward. Now comes the hard part: changing the way I live my life.

My husband brought up the point this morning that we need to become more deliberate about our consumption. When we identify a real need we should stop to consider our purchase instead of acting in haste. We should reward the best producers when we spend our money, and it that way we'll end up rewarding ourselves, too.

If I need a new sweater, for example, I can look at that purchase from several angles. I could simply buy yarn and make one myself, assuming that I'll both enjoy the experience and get exactly what I want. Or I could cruise the local thrift and consignment stores, with the intention of getting more use out of an object that's already been produced. Or I can buy a new one.

I don't know about you, but I've gotten into an awful shopping habit. I walk into a clothing store, look for a "great deal" - two for one shirts, for example - and pick up a bunch of them. I feel so much more virtuous when I walk out the store with six shapeless cotton t-shirts than I do if I buy one gorgeously tailored shirt that fits me perfectly. Then I get home, put one on and look in the mirror and wonder why I look like crap all the time.

There are several issues here. One, when I buy a shirt that costs five dollars, I know someone isn't getting paid a living wage. Two, I know that shirt has been shipped halfway around the world. Three, I know it's going to fall apart within a season or two. It's supposed to; otherwise I wouldn't go back to the store and buy more. Four, I bought six of them! I spent the same amount of money as I would have on the gorgeous shirt.

Five, at the end of it all I still wasn't happy.

And that's what I'll talk about more and more in the coming weeks. Most of our consumption isn't based on need at all - it's a senseless pursuit of fleeting feelings we identify as happiness, but aren't anything like the real thing.

It's time for a sea change.

The Dreaded Art Cabinet

2009-01-28T09:46:00.000-08:00

I can't tell you how long I've put off facing these next two cabinets. Actually, I have a feeling I've cleaned them out and posted pictures of these before, but like anything else associated with my seven year old daughter, they have a way of exploding out of control at a moment's notice (you should see her room).

Here are the befores:

And the afters. Look - I got another empty drawer!

Shelf Space

2009-01-28T09:25:00.000-08:00

I am beginning to collect empty cabinets. They're kind of a security blanket for me, letting me know that when I sell this house and move to a smaller one all my stuff will fit.

I worked on a set of storage cabinets down in my basement yesterday. In the original configuration of this house they would have been in the kitchen of the basement suite. We've been using them as a place to store tools, paints, cleaning supplies and other things we needed for the renovation. I didn't manage to "halve" it - too much of the stuff either belongs to my husband or we still use; I refuse to throw out cleaning supplies, for example.

Here are a few "before" pictures:

And here are the "after" shots. Not a huge difference, but at least it's more organized.

I puttered around the rec room some more and cleaned out a few things. Here's my final pile of stuff going either to GoodWill or the trash:

A Message From the Universe

2009-01-27T11:43:00.000-08:00

I have only heard God's voice once.

I've had insights, flashes of understanding, feelings of closeness with the Universe and so on, but only once did God actually speak to me out loud.

I wasn't expecting it at all. I was walking down Brommer Avenue in Santa Cruz, passing by the mall. I was pushing a stroller although I can't remember what child was in it. He or she was asleep.

I was lost in my thoughts when all of a sudden a huge, loud voice coming somewhere up above and behind me said:

"Psssssstttt!"

It scared the crap out of me. I jumped and froze on the sidewalk and looked all around. I was in the middle of a busy district, coming up on a crossroads of multiple lane roads, but there was no one - no car, no truck, no person - in sight. I was all alone (except for the baby). And God.

Now, I have a number of rational explanations for this: it was an overcast day - sound carries - maybe a truck was letting off steam or something a block or two away. After joking about it for awhile with my friends and family, it just became another good story to trot out now and then (like I am today).

But I've always thought that if God was talking to me, it was the perfect things to say. Short and sweet. "Jennifer - pay attention!" Too bad it didn't work. Or maybe it did - that was back when I knew my life needed to change. Maybe God was trying to wake me up to the alternatives. Maybe he was warning me something big was coming down the pike.

I'm bringing this up today because signs are coming thick and fast that I'd better shape up and start paying attention again. "Stop!" they're saying (and they aren't all red and hexagonal). "Quit thrashing around. There is something important going on."

Now if they'd only tell me what it is.

Money Recap

2009-01-26T09:24:00.000-08:00

This month I concentrated on money issues: figuring out how much I have, how much I spend, and what I spend it on. Here's a recap of what I've learned:

Our mortgage, although relatively small, is still our biggest fixed expense. If we sell this house and move to our rental property, we won't have a mortgage at all.

Next comes food - last year we spent about $7000. I'm working to drive that number down without sacrificing quality.

Then comes health related expenses: $1296 for insurance, at least another thousand for dental work, plus the cost of braces for two kids. Maybe $3,000 - 4,000 this year? I'm not going to waste time trying to change this number. I have learned the hard way not to put off dental work. At least the braces are one-time fees.

We drove across country last year. I'm going to guess we spent about $2500 on gas for the car. Since we aren't going to New York this year that number should decrease considerably even if we do move.

Our natural gas bill was $1830 for the year. Moving would cut this number.

Our telus bill (phone and internet) was $1078. Don't know if I can budge this one.

BC Hydro (our electric bill) was $654. We're going to install a clothesline for a start.

Star Choice (satellite TV) was $268. We already cut back here.

Of course, there's a bunch of miscellaneous stuff: property taxes, regular taxes, clothes, and so on. Some of that will go away if we move. The rest I'm trying to mitigate by considering my purchases more carefully.

Next month my emphasis is going to shift a little: Now that I have a better handle on our expenses, I'm going to take a good hard look at my budget and see if I can free some money up from bills to improve the quality of our "experiences".

Traditions

2009-01-25T16:12:00.001-08:00

On days like today my life feels very full. I spent the morning with five other women friends at a kind of women's retreat we do yearly. We gather together and spend several hours constructing collages of our hopes for the coming year. I am always amazed by the creativity and insight these women possess and now that we've done it three years in a row I am blown away by the journey we seem to be on together, too.

This is the first year I've been clear enough in my head and heart to really show up for the event and I attribute that to the halving journey I've been on for the last six or so months.

Although some days I feel like I'm not making any progress, days like this show me just how far I've come. I have the time to spend a whole day on "selfish" pursuits. I have the materials I need. I have enough organization in my life to be able to prepare without panic. I have enough clarity about my inner workings to be able to project a year's worth of themes onto a canvas.

What an amazing discovery.

This is what I want from my halved/doubled life - real experiences with real people that involve talking, creating, doing and planning. Experiences that leave me refreshed and ready for my work.

What popped up at me out of today's creative endeavor? That I'm missing what's right in front of my face. It's time to allow my children and my husband to accompany me on this flight of fancy. I need to talk to them about my hopes and plans. I need to stop squirreling away my ideas for when I'm alone. I'm strong enough not to be swayed by their opinions and emotions. I'm safe among them.

That's how far I've come. I can speak my truths out loud.

Planting The Seeds

2009-01-24T11:21:00.000-08:00

Remember how I was bemoaning the fact that when we moved our new house(s) would be almost as big as this one is?

My reaction to the news obviously had an effect on my husband, because he came back with a new solution - a way to reconfigure our renovation on the main house so that we can live there without needing the second one. That would put us below 2,000 sf - still more than half the 3,500 sf we occupy now, but getting there.

The main house will now have room for a washer and dryer, a second bathroom (toilet and sink), and a mudroom - something that is pretty necessary in British Columbia's wet climate. We might choose to retain the second house as an office for my husband for the first few years, but we won't need to, and that will make a big difference in several ways. For one thing, we'll save money. Even if we do keep the house as an office, we'll shut it down during the cold months, so we'll pay far less on bills than if we were using it as living space. Then, when the kids head out to college we can move my husband's office to a bedroom in the main house and rent the other house out. The additional rent would take a big chunk out of college expenses.

As more children move out it will become easier and easier to live solely in the main house. We'll worry less about the load on the septic system when renters move in. It's a good solution.

I've learned that this is the way real-life problems get solved - by giving yourself time to ruminate over them. It's also a great piece of marriage advice. I find that when I put problems into words they stick in my husband's mind and eventually he finds a pretty darned good solution for them. It's often radically different than the solution I might think of (chucking it all and moving to a yurt in Arizona, for example), but it's usually pretty solid. The trick is to make sure he's aware of the problem (I have to say it out loud - not assume he's aware of it) and then to get out of his way. It takes a lot of trust, obviously, but the results are worth it.

Halving Your Paperwork

2009-01-23T13:14:00.000-08:00

I tackled my file cabinet first this morning during my attempt to finish halving my bedroom. I do this once a year anyway, usually around the time I file my taxes. I relish the fact that I get to throw away a year's worth of old tax papers (from eight years ago), and there's always something else to get rid of, too.

Here's the beginning pile:

And here's the pile of stuff that eventually landed in the trash:

Not half by any stretch of the imagination, but a pretty respectable showing, I think. Most of that pile represents tax documents from back when I ran a large daycare out of my home. Going through them brought back a lot of memories of the days when toddlers swarmed me and I almost always had a baby (or two) in my arms. I wish I had let myself enjoy it more. I had no idea how transitory that stage was going to be. It's been nearly five years since I shut it down and we moved out of California.

I'll admit that sometimes I avoid going through my stuff because I know I'm going to suffer bouts of nostalgia. Argh - who's got a baby I can snuggle!?!

Time For A Check In

2009-01-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

"I don't know what's wrong with us. It's like we can only think about one day at a time; we can't seem to make any plans for the future."

That's what my mom said the other day when I asked her if she and my dad were coming to visit us this year. I know exactly what she means, too. It's January, the month in which everything seems to come to a big, grinding halt. The month in which there isn't nearly enough money and way too many days. The month in which you jot down a list of things to do and then lose it immediately. The month in which spring seems light years away.

I planned to finish "halving" my bedroom yesterday, but I forgot to do it. Somehow the entire day disappeared in half-hearted internet searches and online conversations. Today I am resolved to do better.

You have to fight the January blahs actively. It's too darn cold to go outside for more than a few minutes, so I'm going to get my heart rate up inside. I'm going to put on my current audio-tape (The Year of Living Biblically) and plow through this room. There isn't a whole lot to do, so I can do it well. Then I can feel like I accomplished something.

I'm also going to look back at my "fun" plans for this month and figure out if there's anything left for the final week. I already have lots of fun things planned for February - dance lessons, a trip to California, a night out dancing on Valentine's....

How about you? Are you scheduling things to look forward to into your calendar? Give it a try - it really helps!

Some Money Conundrums

2009-01-22T09:51:00.000-08:00

What is the relationship between wealth and consumption? If you are rich, does that necessarily mean you waste more resources? One would think so, right?

Does that mean that a rich person should hoard their money, instead? If they invest it, doesn't that mean that other companies will use the money to consume resources? What if they give it away - won't their recipients use it to consume resources?

If you are trying to make less of an impact on the earth, should you try to earn less money, as well, to avoid the whole consumption trap?

What is the perfect income, then? How do you know when to stop?

I have lived through lean times and abundant times, and I've learned a funny thing. There's a tipping point between being poor and not-so-poor where every additional dollar you earn gets eaten up by additional taxes and the loss of aid. It's the number in the United States where your "earned income credit" amount begins to go down. In Canada it's the number at which you start paying more for health care.

There must be a magic number as far as consumption is concerned - a number at which you can be self-sufficient without being exploitive. I really don't know what that is, though.

At first I thought it would be best to stay at the lowest income you could get by with, but then I realized there are a few problems with that:

1. Cheap goods are often worse for the planet and people in third-world nations to produce than expensive goods are.

2. Natural products are often more expensive than ones made out of materiels that will stay in our landfills for all eternity.

3. People who don't have a "cushion" of money often cost the rest of us more in terms of health care since they use emergency services rather than preventive ones.

So maybe it's not how much money you have - it's how you spend and invest it. One thing I am sure of, though - the less you spend on things, the easier it is to build a "cushion" even if your income is low.

Pizza!

2009-01-21T19:48:00.001-08:00

I've been meaning to add recipes to this blog for a long time. I'm going to stick to the crowd-pleasers that work consistently for me and along with the basic ingredients and instructions I'll tell you how I save money with them.

My son did some calculating today and figured out that we make five pizzas for under $20.00 with this recipe. The price sure beats any you'll find for frozen or take out pizzas and it tastes just as good (my family thinks it's better!). I'm giving you the basic recipe for cheese or pepperoni pizza here. Obviously there's a million different toppings you can use to suit your own tastes.

I cut costs in several ways. The dough is just cheap to make. You can substitute canola oil for the olive oil to drive down the cost even more and no one will notice.

I get a huge blocks of mozzarella (4" x 4" x 12"?) at the wholesale club. It costs $27.00. I used a little less than a third of it for all five pizzas. For the sauce I use canned spaghetti sauce which I find for about $1.18 a 680 ml (around 20 oz) can but often is $.99 in the US.

For the dough:

2 cups warm water
4 tsp. yeast
4 tsp. sugar or honey
7 cups flour
4 tsp. salt
1/2 cup olive or canola oil
2 cups warm water

For the sauce:

1 1/2 cans (680 ml or about 20 oz) of spaghetti sauce
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
dried basil and oregano to taste
salt and pepper to taste

5 cups grated cheese (measure after grating)
1 pepperoni stick (1 1/2 inches wide x at least 5 inches long), sliced very thinly

1. Mix yeast and sugar or honey into the warm water until it is dissolved and let sit for 10 minutes. The yeast should form a froth on top of the water, otherwise it is inactive and you need to start again with new yeast.

2. Mix flour and salt in a large mixing bowl. Pour in the yeast mixture. Add the oil and another cup of warm water. Mix it all together thoroughly until it forms a ball. Add in more water as needed to get a doughy consistency.

3. Knead the dough to mix it thoroughly for about four minutes. Clean your bowl, add a tsp. of oil to it and return the dough to it, turning it over to coat with the oil. Cover with a clean cloth and let rise for 15 - 45 minutes. If you let it rise longer, the final dough will be lighter, but I've used it after barely 10 minutes or so and it's really just fine.

4. Put a drop of oil on each baking pan and spread it around to grease the pans. I use rectangular pans sized so that I can have two side-by-side on an oven rack at one time. Divide the dough into 5 equal chunks and roll them out until they fit your pan with a little overlapping the edges. Place on the pan and then roll the edges over to make a crust.

5. Pierce each one in several places with a fork so no air bubbles build up during cooking time. Use a quarter of a can of sauce on each pizza (roughly 1/2 - 1 cup) and spread it around. Sprinkle with some of the garlic, basil, oregano, salt and pepper to taste. Spread a cup of grated mozzarella cheese over each pizza (use more if necessary to get good coverage). Top with thin slices of pepperoni, if desired.

6. Only bake what you can fit on one rack at a time. Watch your pizzas until you get a feel for how long they take in your oven since temperatures can vary from oven to over and your pans might be different than mine. I cook mine at just under 350 degrees F for 15 minutes.

Enjoy!

You Call This Progress?

2009-01-21T13:38:00.000-08:00

I've been excited lately about the idea of selling our house and moving to our rental property. It would accomplish several things. First, we would be mortgage-free. Second, the earnings from our rentals would cover just about all our bills without help from our other earnings. Third, we would cut our housing footprint in half.

Wait a minute. Scratch that.

Trust me never to actually do the math until today. "What's the square footage of the houses down there?" I innocently asked my husband this morning. He thought a minute. "About 2,000 square feet."

"For both?!" My eyes just about popped out of my head.

"No - that's just one. Somewhere between 2,700 to 2,800 square feet for both of them." He takes one look at me and adds, "It sounds better when you say 'half the size' doesn't it?"

Sure does. 2,700 square feet? That's hardly smaller than this place. And it's spread over two houses. Wasn't the whole point of moving that we'd end up with half the stuff to take care of?

Completely depressing.

"I know where you're headed with this," my husband said. And we went over our reasons again for inhabiting two of the rentals instead of just one. For one thing, they share a septic field and my husband isn't convinced the field can handle our large family plus another. He also wants an office space away from the noise of the kids (we homeschool). It gives us a place to host visitors and events. We could hypothetically teach classes there and so forth. Another huge consideration is that right now each house only has one bathroom, so if we only lived in one we'd have to install another bathroom. That's a pretty big expense.

Still, I came away from that conversation in a funk; who knew it was so hard to downsize? So now I'm trying to look for the bright side.

1. We would still own less property - fewer things to maintain, repair, clean, etc.

2. Should be less driving. A lot of the miles on our van come from trips my husband makes to the rentals.

3. The rental houses are heated with electricity. Right now one of the biggest contributors to our carbon footprint is our natural gas furnace. When we move to the rentals we will save 25 - 30% on our heating bills, possibly more. AND we will cut down the carbon footprint that pertains our heating by 66%!

4. You all can come and visit. You want to see the Great White North, right? I'll throw in a lecture about following your dreams and we'll call it professional development, okay?

5. If we shut down the second house during the coldest months of the year we will save even more on bills.

6. We'll have a ton of gardening space and can grow more of our own food (plus have chickens if we care to)

I guess we're still making progress. Just not quite as much as I wanted to.

The Owl Waits For No Man (Or Just Say 'Yes'!)

2009-01-21T09:28:00.001-08:00

We had a lovely walk yesterday but we didn't find any owls. We waited too late and he wasn't out there, and I spent much of the walk kicking myself for not going the previous day when he was hooting his little heart out.

It just goes to show that when someone asks you to do something fun (like finding owls) just say "Yes"! My excuse is that I was already on my way to doing something fun (lunch with my husband), but there are lots of times when I'm just too lazy to take people up on their offers.

I've resolved to change that this year. I'm going to try to say "yes" much more than "no." I've resolved to stop being such a scaredy-cat and a stick-in-the-mud.

I find that he world has a way of rushing to meet you whenever you put aside your inhibitions and take a step toward it. In the past twenty-four hours I've had two "strangers" make offers to me that have left me smiling. One offered a book and one offered a pair of speakers for my computer so I could hear a song they wanted to share. How beautiful is that?

I'm off to get started with my day. Now practice with me: "Yes! Yes! Yes!"

To Find The Owl

2009-01-20T09:17:00.000-08:00

For today's adventure we're off to find an owl we keep hearing in the late mornings. It seems to be living in the woods near the start of the Howe Creek trail right near us. It's pretty cold today and I haven't heard him (or her) yet, but we'll head out soon to see if we can track it down.

The sun is up and everything looks pink this morning. I love the way it reflects off the trees on the hillside outside my window.

Here is a mountain in the distance that can be hidden for weeks at a time by clouds. We're having a much colder, clearer winter than usual this year.

I'll bring my camera when we walk, but I'll be surprised if I manage to take a picture of the owl. Might as well try, though, right?

Stop Everything!

2009-01-19T09:13:00.000-08:00

I have a picture in my mind of how it's supposed to be. Sunbeams, hardwood floors, books everywhere, artistic materials, paper, paintbrushes, fabric, glue, computer wedged among the other creative accessories. Hours stretching out endlessly for thinking, making and writing. Kids busy with their own inventions around the house or perched in a tree. Abundant garden, homemade meals that take hours to eat, company dropping in whenever they wish....

But here's my reality:

See that calendar? What's the first thing you notice? That's right - there isn't a single day without something written on it. Not. One. Single. Day. And that's how it's going to be for the next six months.

I can't be angry about it (although I am) - I'm the one who put all those things there. I'm the one who encouraged each of my four children to sign up for an activity - heck, how about two! I'm the one who signed up for more activities for myself, nagged my husband until he did the same and then threw in a bunch of lunch dates, to boot.

Here's the kicker - they're almost all fun things. Music lessons, karate, dance classes, archery, band practice...all the good stuff in life, right? So how come every time I see the calendar I feel like I'm about to turn into the Incredible Hulk? Well, because only a fraction of those activities are my activities, and yet I have to interrupt my day in some fashion or another for just about every single one of them. I'm the mom, after all.

There's a great explanation for why this drives me crazy in The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron:

"An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing. Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliancy. Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family and friends as a withdrawal from them. It is.

For an artist, withdrawal is necessary. Without it, the artist in us feels vexed, angry, out of sorts. If such deprivation continues, our artist becomes sullen, depressed, hostile. We eventually become like cornered animals, snarling at our family and friends to leave us alone and stop making unreasonable demands.

We are the ones making unreasonable demands. We expect our artist to be able to function without giving it what it needs to do so. An artist requires the upkeep of creative solitude. An artist requires the healing of time alone. Without this period of recharging, our artist becomes depleted. Over time, it becomes something worse than out of sorts. Death threats are issued.

In the early stages, these death threats are issued to our intimates. ("I could kill you when you interrupt me...") Woe to the spouse who doesn't take the hint."

It's kind of funny to read about, but it's not funny at all when you're experiencing it. Last night my darling daughter wanted to sew a shirt for her stuffed bear. High on her own creative juices she was oblivious to my growing frustration as she interrupted my writing every two minutes so that I could thread her needle or tie it off. This after I spent the rest of the day participating in one family activity or another. I'm happy to report that at no time did I raise my voice or throw something across the room and she completed her project before I entirely lost my mind, but oh, there were moments when I wanted to scream.

I know I'm not alone. Several days ago a thread appeared on a homeschooling board I frequent that asked wistfully, "What do you think Stay At Home Moms do while their kids are at school?"

The answers were pretty accurate: they fill up their time with enough busywork and activities to stave off their guilt for having time alone until they're busier than those of us who homeschool. I know. I've been there.

I'm determined that I will sign up for nothing this summer. My goal is boredom - the boredom that is the precursor to flights of wild creativity. I wonder what on earth that would feel like?

When Doing Means Buying

2009-01-18T12:33:00.000-08:00

I just updated my checkbook and I've been sitting around wondering where the heck all the money is going this month. I've only spent $386 on groceries - I should be able to get in well under budget this month - but I've completely lost control of everything else.

Budget killer #1: Homeschooling books. Now that my kids are reaching the higher grades these suckers are expensive. I'm at a real disadvantage living in Canada. Every time I order one I pay a huge price for shipping them over the border - you just can't find most of them locally. Total: $481.00. What was I thinking???

Budget killer #2: Music lesson related fees. Between books and Music Festival fees I've dropped at least $120.00.

Budget killer #3: Fees for a certain sport. Another $100 by the time all was said and done.

Budget killer #4: Accessories for archery/cost of going to the range.

Now, I should be happy - all of these are experience related, right? Even the homeschool books are props for learning, not just gew gaws to keep around the house. But somehow I had hoped that this shift from "having" to "doing" was somehow going to result in a stress-free money-rich environment.

Nope. That's not going to happen until I quit trying to do everything all at once, right now! I'm mad at myself. I've just managed to make life difficult for the next several months, at least. What was the point of that?

Time to go count the change in my change jar.....

Prepare To Be Inspired

2009-01-16T22:57:00.000-08:00

I often remind myself that I've liked something about every single house I've ever lived in. I have to remind myself of that because each time I get ready to move I kind of get freaked out. Each house has special memories and I fear the new thing - what if it turns out to be awful?

I will probably never live in a house this big again. We got it in a sherriff's sale (because my husband is a genius) and it was the ugliest, awfulest thing you ever saw when we bought it. Stunk of smoke. Green and blue stained carpet everywhere. Dark, gross....it had a bathroom on the main floor I didn't enter for months (a year?) because it was one of the last rooms my husband got to (now I love it). It's so much better now, but it has two issues we can't fix.

One - it's huge: 3500 sf. Lovely to have so much room, right? Each child gets his own room, my husband has a separate office, I have just as much "office" space in the bedroom plus room for yoga and exercising. We have a huge rec room downstairs and a huge livingroom upstairs. I've had 25 people sit down to dinner in my dining room with room to spare. But I also have to keep all that clean; swept, mopped, vacuumed, sorted, tidied.....bleah! And there are vast amounts of space not really used for anything at all - cupboard after empty cupboard, etc.

Two - it's a big box. Nothing we've figured out seems to change that fact. Outside it looks like a big box. Inside it looks like a big box. Lots of my walls are completely empty because I can't afford art big enough to fill it. I don't want art that big - then I'll have to worry about it and move it around with me, too!

So when we decided to think about putting this house up for sale today I had mixed emotions. There are things I really like about this house - especially its location - but I wouldn't mind getting another chance to fix up a funkier place.

I curled up tonight with one of my favorite books HomeWork, by Lloyd Kahn. If you've never seen this book, go find it right now - it's gorgeous, the pictures are so inspiring. You'll want to pack up and move/build your dream house right now, too. I went online to see if he had put out more books and found his blog/website here. You'll want to go back and look over and over again. Turns out the world is full of people building amazing places to live. I'm thrilled he's blogging now. I'm sending my husband a link as we speak. Our next house probably won't be our forever house, but it will be a great one to practice on. I need to make sure his mind is moving in the right direction!

Worrying Together

2009-01-16T08:59:00.000-08:00

In the movies you see starry-eyed young couples saying things to each other like: "It doesn't matter if we're poor - at least we have each other."

I went through some very hard times as a young woman/mother, and having a partner didn't really help, to tell you the truth. I found it easier when I split up with that partner and had to deal with the hard times (three young children, very little money) on my own. Turns out the "starry-eyed" part is pretty central to the equation. It is easier to deal with trouble when your partner is just as committed to working hard and improving your lot.

There was more angst at my house yesterday. More "are we going to make it?" angst. We are making it - we're in no danger right now of not paying the bills - but I think the question that's haunting both of us is "are we going to be successful?"

Last night we lay in bed together facing this question. And the question of whether or not to...well...you know. When I worry, I put heart and soul into worrying and it's hard for me to concentrate on anything else. Last night I was worried about everything. What if we're never successful? What is successful? What if this is as good as it gets? What if the economy slides and nothing good ever happens again? All the while trying to get in the mood.

Normally, that's when I give up and say, sorry - I just can't. But last night something shifted. We started talking worst-case scenarios: let's sell the house and move into our smallest, one-bedroom apartment. We'll cram all four kids into the bedroom. All six of us will spend our days around the dining table, each with our laptops working. My husband and I will sleep in the living room/dining room/kitchen -all of which is smaller than my current laundry room.

As we devised more and more bizarre ways to make it work I realized that our "worst case scenario" sounded like an awful lot of fun. Suddenly I didn't have to work at being in the mood anymore. I love adventures. I love it when weirdness looms. Even if our creative ventures fail miserably we have our health, we have our brains and hands.

We have each other.

The Cheapest High

2009-01-15T09:57:00.000-08:00

I jogged this morning.

Never in my adult life did I think I would write those words on a page. I have always hated running and I've never done it as a voluntary activity. Last year, however, I noticed a trend on a message board I frequent: More and more women were talking about a "Couch to 5K" program that was really working for them.

I remained skeptical for a long time and I can't remember now what made me decide to try it. I think it was mostly the combination of all the threads I read that went something like, "I'm 45 and I've never run before and today I ran my first 5K race!" I guess it was just my competitive streak coming out - if they could do it at 45 then I could surely do it, too.

I started slowly. Stopped. Started again. Stopped. Then one day last summer I went for a run with my husband and we did a mile. I was shocked. It wasn't even that hard. And I was hooked.

Well, hooked is maybe too strong a word. The truth is I run for awhile and then I stop and then I pick it up again and quit for a few weeks. I don't think I'm ever going to be a die-hard fan. But when I need it - it's there for me.

I'm needing it right now. The weather is bleak, money feels tight, the whole world is in a slump.... In times like these a good shot of oxygen to the brain can be a real pick-me-up.

If you've never tried jogging, think about it. Even a short (very short!) run can get you breathing hard and your adrenaline flowing. As always, check with your doctor before doing anything drastic, and go slow to start. In fact, that's the key to jogging, really: run slow. Shuffle along, even. You'll be surprised at how far you can go.

The best part, of course, is that it's free and doesn't take fancy equipment. It can take as short or long a time as you want. And you'll feel instantly better. Trust me. Get out there and get moving. January will look completely different when you're done.

Fear and Angst Come to Call

2009-01-14T11:25:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was one of the hard days.

My husband and I both work from home. He writes computer games, I write novels. He sells his games and makes money. I keep writing and dream about making money. We own rentals which pay a lot of our bills.

We've made it this far and our lives are definitely much more creative and fulfilling than they were five years ago before we moved and started "living our dream", but none of our income is guaranteed and each time my husband gets to the end of a project there's a big scary waiting period to see if the new game is going to sink or swim.

So far this time the jury is out. It's a good solid game and it should sell, but so far it's not getting the buzz my husband would like to see. We're left to wonder what's going on - is it the economy? Is it the game play? Is it the subject matter? Is it the name?

We take turns, my husband and I, having crises of confidence in our work, but one person's crisis can trigger another. We walked together yesterday afternoon to pick up my daughter from school and my husband shared his frustration. "Maybe it's time for me to reevaluate what I'm doing," he said. Why should he spend all his time coding if no one's going to play the games?

These words triggered panic in my heart. Did we work so hard only to see our dream fail? What would we do if we gave up on this? Go out and get regular jobs and rejoin the corporate grind? Put the kids back into school? Is that our future?

I began to wonder, too - if I'm not published yet, will I ever be? What's the point of writing stories that no one reads? Why don't I just pick up a newspaper and find something that earns a paycheck?

But then I rallied. No - we're not giving up yet. The last game was a success. It's too early to rule this one out and besides, we're not going broke or anything - that's the point of all this halving and careful living we do - we have the ability to weather a storm and press on.

I decided to use my husband's angst as a wakeup call and remember that I have an opportunity here that's too precious to waste. It's time to buckle down and treat my own work seriously, to make deadlines and reach them, to start knocking on some more doors.

And today I've had a more productive morning than I've had in weeks. Bring on the fear and angst, I say. I'll bring on my resolve to see this through.

Uuuh....

2009-01-13T11:37:00.000-08:00

No one's got an ugly outfit to get rid of?

Come on - show me your ugly outfit!

Get Rid Of It - You Know The Outfit I Mean!

2009-01-12T09:37:00.000-08:00

I think I mentioned that I'm in a group of women working our way through a book called, The Artist's Way. We read a chapter every two weeks, do a lot of journaling and the "tasks" that the book sets, then come together and talk about our experiences.

One of the tasks the author set last week was to go through your closet and pull out the one outfit that you hate - the one that makes you feel rotten every time you wear it, but you keep because it's perfectly good...

Well, you know how much I love weeding through stuff. You'd think by this time I'd have gotten rid of all those kinds of outfits, but you'd be wrong. I hate bulky sweaters and I hate pants, but I live in the northwest of British Columbia, so I spend about three-quarters of my time here dressed in pants and bulky sweaters. I hit the thrift stores each fall and load up on new sweaters, but by December I hate them all. No. I don't hate them....I loathe them.

I used to be a big proponent of setting fire to the things you hate. Luckily, I got a little more ecologically minded. Plus it's dripping wet here all the time in January, so bonfires are out. I'm happy to say that I very obediently went into my closet the other day and pulled out the most offensive sweater I own - a stupid blue one that makes me look like a fuzzy Butterball turkey. It will never darken my door again, but perhaps someone else will just love it. And perhaps that person will decide to clear out her closet and the next time I go to Goodwill or the consignment store, there it will be - the one sweater I actually like. There's always hope, right?

Is one of those outfits hiding in your closet right now? The one you punish yourself with when you're already having a crappy day? The one you put on because "no one's going to see you anyway and you didn't even wash your hair today so what's the use?" The one you wear because you gained five pounds and it's how you deserve to look?

~~Burn it!~~

Ahem, I mean donate it today - someone will like it, right? And you'll have cleared a place in your closet for something new, exciting and pretty to come your way. You can't accept the Universe's bounty until you clear out your pantry, right?

Get to it!

Archery

2009-01-11T16:19:00.000-08:00

My son (11) and I set out to the archery club today for the first time. I got him a recurve bow for christmas and this was our first chance to actually shoot due to severe laziness and cold weather (I wasn't going to drive him to a safe place and then stand around for an hour in the freezing cold).

The club uses the local community center during the winter months. They set up targets at varying ranges with a curtain behind them. Yep - there's a boar, a bear, a deer...

The two guys who head up the club were incredibly helpful and greeted my son like an old friend, which made him feel very welcome. They showed him a few things and let him loose and it took a few minutes but eventually he got the hang of it.

Things were set up just like over at the rifle range - a line, a range master, etc. Everything was very safe and under control.

I liked being able to see people use some different kinds of bows. The kids mostly had longbows/recurve and the adults were fairly heavy on the compound bows. I have to say I lean toward recurve, myself.

Here's the kid at the beginning of the session - he's struggling a bit to pull the string back. It was all a bit awkward at first:

About fifteen minutes into the shoot there was a commotion at the other end of the line. A little kid had just done a Robin Hood maneuver - shot one arrow and then shot another arrow right into the first one. The arrow didn't split (darn fiberglass!), but it stuck there. My camera couldn't handle the low light to take a picture of the arrows while they were still stuck to the target, but here's the kid and arrows after he pulled it out. You'll have to look hard to see them stuck together.

I only got to shoot four times. My son wasn't volunteering to give me a turn and I figured if I wrestled him for the bow it would disturb the other archers. I hit the bear once.

I'm going to pick up a wrist guard and glove for me this week and then I can borrow one of the club's bows next week. That'll be a lot more fun than sitting around watching. I think I'm going to ask for a bow for my birthday next month.

When the weather warms up they hold meets outside. John (one of the guys in charge) said they have full-size 3D targets of every mammal that lives here in the NW, and they have a bunch of African animals, too. They range them around in the woods and you have to walk around and find them, then take aim and shoot.

On Mother's Day weekend in May they have a weekend match with camping and a pig roast. Last year there were 200 participants from all over the province. I can't wait. I've been dying to go camping since we got here - it's been over four years!

Anyway, I'm stoked. Two to three hours of archery every Sunday? I'm in!

Things?/Experiences!

2009-01-11T10:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was feeling blue because I was vacuuming and the vacuum cleaner kept shutting itself off. I'll check the filters, but it might just be getting to the end of its useful life. And my son needs to pay his entrance fees for the big music festival coming up. And we need new sheets. And the kids' socks have all fallen apart at the same time....

What's the use of scrimping and saving if it just means I have to use that money to buy more things? Doesn't that defeat the whole point of the exercise?

On the bright side, today I get to go try something completely new - shooting a bow and arrow.

I bought my son a recurve bow for Christmas and today we are going to our town's archery club to learn to use it. I bought him a target, thinking he could just shoot it in the backyard but my husband vetoed that idea. When the weather gets nicer I'll start taking him out to the bush - there are several spots I know we can go where no one's around to accidently hit.

I've wanted to learn to shoot a bow and arrow all my life, but today I feel strangely blank about it all. Does this ever happen to you? It's like I'm afraid now that this dream is coming true it won't be as fun as I thought it would be. Or I won't be good enough at it - something like that. Fear of success, you could call it.
I'm determined to buck that fear this year because it really gets in the way of having a good time.

Anyway, I'll bring the camera and take some pics. Now I'm getting excited about it. Must have just been a touch of existential angst there....

I'm Sick Of Holidays - Part Deux!

2009-01-10T15:58:00.000-08:00

Holidays suck.

I have no problem with the concept of celebrating things in our lives, but today I feel like I spend so much time, effort and money on the stupid holidays we're told to celebrate that I don't have time, strength or money for doing things I'd actually like to do with my family.

Christmas is basically fine. I like a lot of what we do and the kids are getting older and more helpful. But the rest? Pffffbbbbbtttt!

Valentine's Day is overrated. Expensive flowers, expensive cards, expensive candy (I DO NOT NEED), expensive dinners out? Forget it - I'd rather wait until Beltane (May 2nd) and just head out with my honey for a romp in the fields under the stars.

Easter? If I was Christian I would spend the day at church. I like decorating the eggs and hiding them for the kids, although in truth I find that neither exercise is nearly as much fun as it sounds like it could be. I hate the expectation that there will also be a ton of CANDY again, and possibly other gifts. This year I'm going to skip it if at all possible. Instead I'm going to buy seeds and bulbs. We can spend the day planting and getting our hands in the dirt.

Fourth of July is about as close as the United States gets to a reasonable holiday. Parades, fireworks, the whole town getting together. No present or candy. That's more like it.

Halloween? Again - I'm SICK OF THE CANDY. Could we skip it? Could we run around in the woods instead in our costumes and scare each other silly? Or could we dance around bonfires until we're absolutely exhausted, grown-ups and children alike? I actually like the part where we go house to house and there's nothing for it but to deal with the candy, but I think this holiday could be a lot more fun.

Thanksgiving - all right, that one is fine again. Good food and family. No presents, no candy. I can deal.

But still, I'm feeling a bit uninspired. Where's the fun and creativity in all this? Aren't holidays supposed to be the spice in the year - the stuff to look forward to? I can't say I look forward to any of them that much, mostly because it seems to be about work instead of play.

And because there's not much communal spirit to it all. Maybe it's just easier in warmer climates to hold outdoor celebrations. Or maybe we all have it so good all the time that celebrating a holiday isn't really that special. Maybe other people have a built in community that celebrates in more fun ways than mine does. I don't know.

I just know I feel like there could be something more.

I'm Sick Of Holidays!

2009-01-10T15:48:00.000-08:00

I'll put the warning right here - I'm cranky today. I've got three teenagers acting like teenagers and I'm a bit fed up.

I'm also cranky because I took down the Christmas decorations and that always leaves me feeling a little flat. I actually "halved" this stuff earlier in the fall when I cleaned out my storage space, but today I sent the kids outside and spread out all the decorations, then gave myself permission to get rid of the ones I no longer like.

Here's the beginning spread:

Here's the stuff I kept for next year:

Here's the big trash bag full of stuff going to Good Will!

At least that's done.

Cutting Your Vacation Expenses In Half

2009-01-09T09:49:00.000-08:00

There are whole sites devoted to this topic, so I'm not going to try to re-invent the wheel. I'll just tell you some of the tricks I've learned about cheap vacations.

Let me start by saying that vacations comes under the heading of "experiences" for me. That means that vacations are actually one of the places where I feel its okay to spend the money I'm saving elsewhere. Figuring out how to vacation on the cheap is more about extending the possibilities of the experience (and extending the vacation itself) than about being cheap for the sake of being cheap.

I live in the northwest and the rest of my family all lives on the east coast, so many of our vacations are spent in New York. Plane tickets to New York are astronomical - often over $1000 a piece these days. Since we live in a small northern town, we pay $500 - $600 just to get to Vancouver.

So we drive instead. And we've gotten the cross-country trip down to a science. Gas, hotels, and food cost about $3,000 round trip - half the price of flying!

Interestingly enough, six people driving in one van creates about 40% less carbon dioxide than six people flying in an airplane, so if your carbon-conscious you save that way, too.

Our trip takes five days and four nights. Since I know our route well, I book the hotels in advance and make sure we get a pool each night, and a continental breakfast, if possible. We get up early, pile in the car, listen to audio books while we drive, eat lunch in the car (tons of sandwiches), stop for dinner at a fast-food joint and break off in the evening early enough for a quick swim (or a few hours at a waterpark in Wisconsin), before falling asleep.

I generally get us two nights where we stay in a suite with a separate bedroom for mom and dad, and two nights in more budget accomodations.

This works for us because we've set up our lives in such a way that my husband can take his work with him. Once we reach New York we stay with family for at least six weeks. My parents have room for us, and they've installed DSL in our room so that my husband can plug in his computer as soon as we reach there and get back to work. (Poor guy - although the beauty of doing work you love is that, well, you love it!)

What would we do if we didn't have this family situation?

Well, my next option for a cheap vacation would be camping in state parks or other recreation areas. Most people have several of these within a day's drive and you can make camping as simple or as elaborate as you like.

This year my family is staying home. I'm taking a quick trip to California, but I'll be couch-surfing at friends' houses, so my flight is my only expense. Since the cost of flying is so outrageous, I called a travel agent and told her what I was looking for. Then I waited until she called back with a seat sale. If there hadn't been a sale, I wouldn't have gone.

If you're really short on cash but you want some sort of vacation, my advice is this. Pretend you've just moved to the town you live in, or better yet - pretend you're visiting from Belgium. Look up your town on the internet and read through the tourist highlights about it. Are there places you don't go because they're "just for tourists"? Try them out! Dig out your camera and photograph your town the way you would if you were just visiting. You might be surprised at some of the gems you find close at home. Set up a few days' worth of activities as if you were preparing to show a guest around, and then do them yourselves. Walk up to strangers while you do this and ask them questions about things. You might meet some new people, too.

I was just talking to a friend in the supermarket today about what if instead of taking a vacation to a far off place you stayed right where you are, but met and talked with everyone within a three block radius of your house. Like sat down, ate a meal and had a drink - took time to really talk. That might turn out to be way more fun, entertaining and enlightening than a safari to Africa ever could. I wish I wasn't so damn shy - I'd try it out.

Cutting Your Medical Bills in Half

2009-01-08T09:12:00.000-08:00

Okay, we cheated on this one, big time.

But I'll explain how my family cut it's medical bills in half. Actually, we probably pay a quarter or less for medical bills than we used to pay.

It's simple - move to Canada.

I know, I know, that's not very simple. I do know - I did it and went through the hell that is immigration. It's not simple at all. First you have to look long and hard for a Canadian to marry. A Canadian that isn't marrying you for the coveted American green card. You have to marry a Canadian that (secretly) wants to go back to Canada and take you with him. (But that's another story....)

How does health care work up here?

Basically, you pay a monthly fee based on your income. You might not pay anything, or you might pay a few hundred a month. Currently, for six of us, our monthly fee is $106.00.

What do you get for that?

All doctor's visits are free. Most emergency services, operations, etc. are free. I think you pay for the ambulance and you might have to pay for some services, but so far I never have had to do that.

You do pay for prescriptions, eye care and dental bills. Some employers have plans for these like the ones you get in the US.

What all this means for my family is that I take the kids in when they're sick instead of waiting for it to get really serious. I never drive to the emergency room wondering if I'm about to go bankrupt. Things were a lot different for me when I lived in the United States.

Once, when the kids were little my son had a febrile seizure - a seizure brought on by a high fever. He was raced to the hospital by ambulance where he had a series of tests involving all sorts of expensive, high-tech equipment. The good news was that he was fine. The bad news came in the mail a couple of weeks later - all told, the bill was over $20,000. It literally brought me to my knees.

So what's the answer if you can't move to Canada? Start by doing your research. Make sure you know all your options for medical care. And purchase medical insurance based on the likelihood of using it. A single guy needs less insurance than a family with small children does. Having to foot the bill for a single large medical procedure can wipe out any savings you accrue from not purchasing insurance at all.

Use preventive care whenever possible. You know this stuff, right? Don't drink excessively. Stop smoking. Exercise. REST. When you're sick, stay home in bed until you're better. Consider getting a flu shot.

Look at all your medical bills and question them. Mistakes are made all the time. If you or someone in your family has an ongoing condition, think of this as a part-time job. The more visits you are billed for, the greater the likelihood of errors.

Don't be afraid to use generic drugs and to call around to pharmacies to check their prices. Why not? You compare costs for other things?

And if you are thinking of moving, switching jobs, and so on, take the cost of medical care into account. Some states have better plans than others if your employer doesn't offer you a plan. Some states have better COBRA policies, too. It's worth taking into account.

How am I going to cut my medical bills in half? Hmmm - here in Canada my main choice would be to stop earning so much money. That doesn't sound so great. So I guess my plan is simply to keep my family as healthy as possible so that we don't have to pay extra bills.

Random Pictures of My Husband Working

2009-01-07T14:00:00.000-08:00

It just keeps on snowing.

It warmed up a bit, though, and I knew all that snow - a foot and a half of wet, compacted stuff with a little ice on top - was going to slide off our metal roof pretty soon. Yesterday I made the kids use the side door all day, because if anyone was underneath it when it all came down they'd be toast.

I was making dinner when it let loose. Holy cow - it sounded like a freight train. Even though I'd been expecting it I jumped a foot in the air.

Here's a picture of my neighbor's garage roof just before its snow fell off. You can see how deep it is:

Here's a picture of my backyard. Yep - we were going to take the trampoline down...and then we never quite did it:

My husband looked out today and saw the neighbor guy pulling the snow off of his roof. He started to think he'd better get the snow off our back roof, too - the back half of our roof isn't sloped very steeply, so that portion wasn't likely to fall off on its own.

Here he is standing on the roof of the shed outside my window knocking snow off. I know, I know - it's a picture of his butt. Isn't that how Ree of The Pioneer Woman got her start, though? Taking pictures of her dh's butt while he and the other cowhands worked her ranch? And now she's hit the big time. Maybe someday I will, too. Come on, honey - work it!

How Do You Spend Your Time?

2009-01-07T13:47:00.001-08:00

Remember what I said when I started out? I'm trying to halve my stuff and bills so I can double my time and fun?

I went on a long walk this morning - it's a four mile loop. I stopped along the way to do my banking and grocery shopping and lugged the groceries the last mile home. It was all great, actually, until I got home and saw the time.

Panic!

The whole morning was gone. Wasn't I supposed to exercise, go to the bank, do the shopping and....?

Oh yeah.

The weird thing about setting your life up so that you get to spend your time the way you want to is that then you actually do get to spend your time the way you want to.

But...isn't life supposed to be hard? Aren't you supposed to spend large parts of it wracked with guilt and resentment? I always thought so.

Turns out I was wrong. That's not to say there aren't still icky parts. There are always toilets to clean. And snow to shovel. But I love the fact that taking a four mile walk is something I'm supposed to do - not just something I might get to do once in awhile.

Cutting Your Natural Gas Bill in Half

2009-01-06T15:19:00.000-08:00

Here's my long-range plan:

1. Lower night-time temps as much as possible. Lower daytime temps a degree or two. We keep our house temps low, but they could be lower. According to BC Hydro, lowering your thermostat by two degrees can save you 5% on your bill. BC Hydro is an electric company, so I'm not sure the numbers are comparable for natural gas heat. Pacific Northern Gas doesn't have that info on its website. But we'll save some amount of money that way.

2. Perhaps stop using the heat earlier in the spring and start later in the fall.

3. Play with turning down the heat at the kids' bedtime rather than keeping it high until we go to bed. Maybe we'll start going to bed at a decent hour.

4. Get slippers for everyone. Canadians take off their shoes when they enter a house. Buying myself some comfy and warm slip on shoes was the best thing I've done. I'm much more comfortable this winter than I was in previous years.

5. Make sure everyone has a decent supply of sweaters. I do. The boys don't.

6. Switch from washing our clothes in a warm/cold cycle to a cold/cold cycle. I actually thought I was doing this already - turns out I wasn't. I do anywhere from 7 to 10 loads of laundry a week, so it adds up.

7. I just went and checked and our hot water heater runs on gas. I hadn't realized that before. That means we can take shorter showers and be careful not to let the hot water run needlessly when we're washing dishes, etc.

8. Eventually (this is the long range part of the plan) move to a smaller house. We currently live in a 3500 sf house. Our last house was 1600 sf. We wondered if our heating bill would be twice as high when we moved here, but that turned out not to be the case. At the old place we had a 30 year old heater. In this house we have a high-efficiency heater. We are heating twice the space for the same price. That tells me if we moved back to a 1600 sf house with a high efficiency heater we could cut our heating bills (and our carbon footprint) by quite a bit.

We had our house on the market most of last year. So did everyone else in town, unfortunately. I don't know if we'll be able to sell anytime soon in the current economic market. Some day we will, though.

I'm off to turn down the heat

Utility Bills

2009-01-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

How on earth do you cut your utility bills?

I've been dreading this question. Step one was finding out how much I pay for everything. I did that a couple of days ago. Step two is looking at them one by one and doing a little research.

My natural gas bill is on my mind today. Obviously, the way to cut the bill is to use less of it, but that's our source of heat.

We have a high-efficiency furnace. We installed new windows which should be better at holding in the heat. We turn it down into the 50s at night....

We keep it at about 70 degrees during the day.

What else can we do?

I'm short on time today, unfortunately, but I'm going to try to do a little online research. I'd love to hear any suggestions you have, too. How have you cut back on your heat usage?

How Much Money Do You Have?

2009-01-05T09:45:00.000-08:00

I've met more than one person over the years who never updates their checkbook. Why should they? The bank sends them a statement each month.

I'm often operating too close to the line to take this kind of approach. And I can't stand surprises of the "Oh - I have no more money" sort. I keep track of everything and I can tell you where I'm at financially at any given time.

But my husband and I split the financial responsibilities. He's in charge of some things, I'm in charge of others, which means that for either of us to get the full picture we have to sit down and compare notes.

I hate these meetings. For one thing, money just makes me tense. For another, my husband likes to keep figures in his head. I want them down on paper. When he starts rattling off numbers, my eyes glaze over and he starts sounding like one of the adults in a Charlie Brown movie.

It's worth it to know where we stand, though. We've been checking in a bit more frequently lately since the whole global economic brou-ha-ha, but we keep coming to the same conclusion; we're fine for now. Our stock investments are way down, but we won't need them for a few years. We'd like to sell some real estate, but there's no guarantee that we can. It doesn't hurt that I've been on this frugality kick - our costs have stayed the same even as prices have risen. Our small town is a good place to hunker down during a recession. Everything we need is right here.

I like to keep reminding myself that my frugality has a purpose. It's not to pinch pennies for the sake of being cheap. It's to spend less on unimportant things so I can spend more when it really counts. Knowing what I actually have to spend is the first step.

So my question to you today is do you know how much money you have? When's the last time you checked in on your investments, bank accounts and so on to see what's actually there? Tax time is coming up, too - do you know what you're missing?

The View From My Window

2009-01-04T13:39:00.000-08:00

Cutting Your Bills In Half

2009-01-04T09:55:00.000-08:00

I played around with numbers yesterday and learned some interesting things. First I took all our household bills and totalled them up. Since paying them is my husband's job, I didn't even have a good idea of what we spend per month on gas, electricity, etc.

I totalled up our electricity costs and the amount of kilowatt hours we used last year, and then I totalled our natural gas costs (what we use to heat the house) and how many gigajoules we used last year.

I took these numbers and plugged them into several different carbon footprint calculators. The results were interesting. One, made by a company called Livclean, says that we have a slightly larger footprint than others in our area.

Another, DirectEnergy, says that we have a lower footprint than others in our area.

That was a little frustrating, but I played around with the calculators and learned something more helpful: the largest portion of our carbon footprint comes from two sources - our minivan and our natural gas heat. We can cut back on our electricity use until the cows come home with very little difference in our footprint - our electricity here comes mostly from renewable sources - British Columbia's raging rivers.

Any reduction we make in car usage or natural gas heat use makes a big difference in our footprint.

As far as money goes, our health insurance costs and our phone/DSL bill rank #1 and 2, but both of them are a far distant second to the amount we spend on food. I'll be talking about all our different bills one at a time; where they stand currently, what kinds of reductions we could possibly make.

And I just remembered - I need to write down how many miles I have on my minivan, because I'm just guessing about our yearly mileage at this point.

I'm curious to know if anyone else has played around with carbon counters. What did you find out?

Photographs From The Front

2009-01-03T19:18:00.000-08:00

Trina (a reader) has been gracious enough to share some pics of her latest cleaning/organization conquest and reports that a week later her desk is still clean!

Here's a couple of before pics:

And some "after" pics!:

Way to go, Trina - doesn't it feel so great when it's DONE?