Ms MoneyPenny

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore

2012-01-01T22:01:00.001-05:00

I tend (or tended, before a career, wifehood, and motherhood entered the picture) to be one of those people who attracts...stuff. Experiences. Confidences. Drama. Sometimes they are physical experiences, such as bearing sad witness to the death - and a helmeted foot race to the nearby ambulance company - of one of my classmates when getting certified to ride motorcycles (a brief stint with an R6 followed, but once you've seen death by motorcycle, it loses it's appeal, or at least for me it did).

Sometimes it's an emotional experience, such as some of the confidences that seem to come my way.

Sometimes it's both - like the time I paid a waitress at John Harvard's Brew House in Harvard Square $20 to dump a glass of water on me to get out of a blind date. Seriously - apparently it's still a bit of brewhouse lore. Trust me, when a blind date tries to order for you (having never met you before) and brings you a screenplay "I thought you might want to read for me", escape via soggy pants via the exit nearest the bathroom starts to sound pretty good. Guy sent me an e-card the next day with singing flowers on it too, which only confirmed that it was money well spent. I can only hope that the general male population understands that "You look like a gin-and-tonic kind of girl" is not an effective pickup line. Plus I hate gin.

But last week I had one of the most surreal experiences I think I've ever had. 2 days after Christmas, phone rings. Robocall. Normally I hang up on them, but I had my hands full of a dinner recipe, so I listened. Political survey. 3 questions. Seeking to understand who I thought was handling the debt crisis better. Or worse. No question, of course, on whether I believed there was a true debt crisis (and I suppose there is, or will be, although I think it pales in comparison to say, the hunger crisis, or the jobs crisis, or the stupidity crisis that seems to not be contained just to Capital Hill), just what I thought of the Democrat and Republican Parties and the President's handling of it. On a scale of 1-5, with 1 presumably being something somewhat akin to 'abysmal' and 5...fixing the problem?

Needless to say I'm not totally bought into the idea that austerity in the worst economy since the Great Depression is the way to get the economy going gangbusters. And since the voting options did not include that the Republicans have been hijacked by a bunch of nutbags, the bulk of the Democrats pay lip service to their base and then head off to fund raise on Wall Street and leverage insider information, and the president seems to be the Neville Chamberlain of our time, I punched in my 'they are all the detritus of society, with the Democrats and the President only marginally less stinky than the loonies who would allow Rick Perry near the nuclear football" votes and hung up after duly noting my responses were received.

It wasn't the polling that was so shocking. It was that I was offered a 2-day cruise to the Bahamas for taking a 10-second robocall poll.

Seriously?

Now, I'll confess that I occasionally toss money to a campaign I believe in - although I will never forgive myself for the $50 I threw at John Edwards. But we're talking like $15 or $25 here, not $1000 a plate fundraising. In other words, I'm a good bet if you have a candidate I like - which doesn't happen all that often, but if you were planning to fund your campaign on my money or my connections, you probably shouldn't run for anything more than local trash collector of the year. And even that would be a brief race involving lots of potluck casseroles.

Now, I didn't take it, but you knew that. See, first - I have no idea who was funding that poll. I'm suspicious of Political Action Committees and their agendas. And the fact that they didn't fess up to who was funding it says it's highly likely it's a PAC.

And quite frankly, 2 nights in the Bahamas is FAR less than I'm worth, even for answering a loaded poll that left no room for commentary - intelligent or otherwise - in less than a minute.

Add this to the list of things that make it clear our political system is demented, like the fact that people get paid to put comments on political news articles supporting one point of view or another - I'm not sure the paycheck even requires reading the actual article most of the time, since the comments are often unrelated at best.

But seriously, I'm not going to let the Adorable One grow up in a world where Mommy's political opinions are for sale for an onboard all-you-can-eat buffet. And when the money offers start coming to someone who tosses the occasional 10-spot at a candidate, you know things are completely out of whack. I'm not connected in any meaningful fashion - I have no political juice.

I'm torn between amusement at the relative idiocy of it, and utter disgust, which is about how I feel just about every time that John Boehner or Harry Reid speak. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised after all.

But if you were on the fence about whether our political system has bought a 1-way ticket to the loony bin, let your mind rest easy now, because when someone's trying to buy me, their next stop is Larry the Cable Guy.

Enjoy the Bahamas, Larry.

After the Christmas Rush

2011-12-26T16:24:00.000-05:00

Christmas came and went yesterday, and it was lovely. Both sets of parents joined us for the day and dinner, which was nice - it was an easygoing day. The presents and the company were wonderful.

But today was even better. Aside from kitchen cleanup, which continued into today, and some laundry, we've done exactly...nothing. Except read, eat when the mood strikes, and the adorable one and I both took naps.

I really like the day after Christmas. After all the rushing and wrapping, all the preparations are finished, and in our house the next big event (the adorable one's 3rd birthday) is almost two months away. There are leftovers in the fridge, which means there's no need to cook. There's no rush to take decorations down - they can stay for a few days, or weeks at this point, until the tree starts to shed needles at an alarming rate. We can take our time finding homes for the presents. All the holiday-preparatory house projects - this year painting the entryway and setting up a wall gallery of family photos up the stairs - are complete.

The only thing pending is the furnace replacement in a little less than 2 weeks. It's still working partially, and the wood stove is supplementing, so we haven't had to rush, which is a relief. My brother in law, who does that sort of thing for a living, a friend of his, and my husband will replace the furnace while the adorable one spend an early January weekend with my in-laws. It should save us about half the cost of paying someone to do it.

And I'm mostly on vacation, so more days like this are on the docket. We'll do a few day trips - to the Aquarium, and Old Sturbridge Village, and probably to the local zoo, but otherwise, we've got no plans. Which is the way it should be.

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday.

Happy Holidays and an Update

2011-12-16T15:15:00.000-05:00

Happy Holidays to all! We're 9 days out from Christmas, and I'm getting close to ready. All the shopping is done, some of the wrapping is complete, I'll be baking more this weekend, and the two families that we've done 'Christmas' for this year - both refugee families - are starting to recieve their warm clothes and supplies. The first drop off was this morning, and I'll do the last one on Christmas eve morning.

I love the holiday season - the lights, the tree, the food. Our turkey (local from Vermont) has been in the freezer since Thanksgiving - if you want a local turkey, you take them when it's butchering time - and there's one last pie pumpkin on a shelf in my kitchen awaiting it's fate as several pies and pumpkin bread.

I've been preparing a lot for 2012 this year - unemployment will run out soon for my husband, and so next year we'll do more cutting back. Which is actually OK. But I have done some preparing - clothes and birthday things for the adorable one for next year, buying our garden seeds early, stocking up before we let our big-box store membership expire, filling the freezer with local meats.

But some things you can't prepare for except to save and hope they don't occur, like a cracked furnace and replacement heating system, to the tune of $7k or so. Apparently furnaces are not self-healing. Who knew?

Well, OK, we did, we just didn't expect it 2 weeks before Christmas. As I said to my husband "It's a good thing I bought your present yesterday, before we knew". The response "Same for yours".

But it's all good. We probably won't get as much renovation work on the house done as we hoped in 2012, but we'll have a huge garden.

On an unrelated note, Christopher Hitchens died. I adored his work, and I think I would have liked him. He was the Archie Bunker of intellectuals - nothing was to sacred to examine, not Mother Theresa, not God, and certainly not himself. The world is a little smaller without his caustic wit. RIP.

Expanding our Family....Sorta

2011-10-16T14:08:00.000-04:00

I've hesitated to post about all of this for myriad reasons - it involves other people who may not prefer to be blogged about, it might sound like I'm tooting my own horn, and it's not something I'm without mixed feelings about at times.

But it seemed like a big thing to leave off the blog, and a good opportunity to plug a good charity, so here goes.

I seem to have acquired 4 kids over the last year. Well, two, and then perhaps another two on the side. And before you ask, no, we're not adopting or having quadruplets.

In January of last year, one of the gentlemen that attends our church showed up one day with a new family. A father, and 2 daughters, recently arrived from a refugee camp in Kenya by way of Ethiopia (at least for the father, the girls were born in the camp). Now, just for a frame of reference, they got here in a period of record snowfall - there was about 5 feet on the ground on our lawn. And they arrived with no winter gear, and light sneakers that wouldn't stand up to a single slush puddle.

Turns out Jim heads up the board of directors of R-I-M, the Refugee Immigration Ministry, and these were houseguests until an apartment could be found.

So, I asked what winter gear they needed, and Sander and I got them boots and winter hats, and the girls some clothes. And then got a thank you note from their father. And then we babysat the girls the day of the adorable one's 2nd birthday party so that their father could move them into their new apartment.

And the girls and my daughter fell head over for one another and were inseparable after that.
So we went from winter boots to almost extended family in a matter of months. A little odd, even for me. And that's saying something.

Then almost immediately after they moved into their own place, Jim took on another family - this time asylum seekers - a young mother, father, 2 year old daughter, and a baby on the way.

And of course, the 2 year old had nothing that fit, and since the Mom's maternity appointments were in Boston near where I work, I started providing rides home and a loan of maternity clothes. And of course, the adorable one decided that their daughter and she should be BFFs. Let it be noted that she doesn't take no for an answer, my child. I don't quite know where she got that. ;)

And then the baby was born, and there you have it. Since the younger family is intact, they need mostly friendship and clothes for the kids. The other family is a bit more complex - and they have somehow become much more wrapped up in our lives, and we in theirs. And they may become extended family in a truer sense - my sister the farmer needs a farm caretaker, and Dawit has both the veterinary and construction skills that fit. He needs a home for his daughters, and some stability. We're working through the details, and the adorable one and I recently took them out for a visit to NY.

Both families have lost everything in terrible ways. The younger family fled for their lives during the civil war in Congo, and experienced horrible things - being human trafficked, spending last Christmas in a mexican jail, a 6-day march down a river - in the river- for 12 hours a day, holding their toddler daughter up on their shoulders to keep her from drowning.

The older girls lost their mother when she was beaten to death. The younger one was 7 months old. Their father has lost and lost again, almost too many things to list.

It's always a mixed bag when you expand your lives to accommodate newcomers. And here, there's culture and language and power issues. There's a lot to bridge in a relationship like the ones we're engaging in - our inability to begin to comprehend what their lives have been like, the simplistic view of everyone in America as 'rich', the struggle to navigate a culture so dissimilar from their own, and the difficulty in starting over as adults in a place where their experience, education and frame of reference are seen as valueless.

We've made a commitment though, to help these 2 families through to success - to make sure that the kids stay clothed and shod, to help their parents get ahead. Somehow, some winter boots have turned into much more than that.

It's not without mixed feelings, this commitment we've made to intertwine our lives - even at a distance - with people so different from us. When you choose to do it with people who have similar frames of reference, it's easy. This is a bit more complex, and it's called out to me that while it's easy to give, it's not always easy to give in ways that are meaningful to others but not to yourself. And that we all sometimes need to be made a bit uncomfortable in order to personally grow.

I think everything happens for a reason. Maybe that's trite, but I do. This year we acquired some extended family, and we are better people for it. That doesn't mean it's easy.

There's more to this story, and I will tell it. But later.

Cooking Season

2011-10-09T14:41:00.000-04:00

The fact that it is 84 degrees in the front yard today hides the fact that it is autumn here. We're having some unseasonable warm, dry weather after September's deluge, and it has revived all our spirits.

The blast of warmth allowed the tomatillos and ground cherries to flourish, and both are now dropping off the vines.

In the summer, we fire up the grill most of the time, and slice up vegetables and some mozzerella drizzled with a little balsamic vinegar for a salad. It's simple, quick, tasty, and keeps the kitchen from heating up. Aside from our weekly bread making, the oven rarely turns on from June-September.

But this week, despite the heat, it is back in action - roasting tomatillos so that I can make salsa verde, turning some apples that developed soft spots into an old school recipe I found for boiled cider pie (I'll let you know how that one goes, but it smells wonderful), and dinner tonight is Congo Chicken Moambe, a recipe I tracked down when I hosted some recent refugees from the Congo for dinner, that has now entered our regular rotation of meals. It's simple and delicious.

It's a pleasure to be in the kitchen, although I have taken several opportunities to go outside today and enjoy the sun, but since Sander and a friend are helping take down branches and small trees around the property, the adorable one and I have been shooed inside for a good chunk of the day. The Topsfield Fair is still going on, which makes it a pain in the arse to go anywhere (at least, to get to the park, or most local farms, which are the only places we might want to go), and after a few busy weekends, I'm not exactly sad at being stuck in the house.

There's another reason that I'm cooking as much as I am today - we have an overnight guest tonight, as a very old friend is the Blacksmith at the fair, Carl having ditched IT work for something that makes him infinitely happier. As he's been pulling 12 and 13-hour days at the fairground, we've offered crash space, and we all know that pie at 11 pm followed by croissants at 8 am are just the thing when you are blacksmithing all day. Or at least, that's my theory.

I love this time of year. Besides the occasional batch of green salsa, the preserving of food work has dropped off significantly. We have to keep a close eye on all the food we do have - potatoes, onions, and squashes don't last forever, so we have to check daily and use up carefully - but aside from the general chores that all of us have in life, such as cooking, laundry, cleaning up the house, and my least favorite, ironing, we are able to kick back, have friends over more often, and even sleep in.

Pretty soon we'll have our cord of wood delivered, and can start enjoying nightly fires. I'm ready for fall and winter - for the end of yard work, and for putting the garden to sleep finally, until the seedlings get started in the dark of late February. I like all the seasons, to be honest- I think that gardening helps me like even the months that aren't all that pretty. March is ugly, but it's seedling time. April is wet, but the flowers start to come up, and we can plant peas. January and February are good for hibernating and catching up with friends.

But now it's cooking season, and the pie is ready.

Postcript to the Garden

2011-10-02T10:31:00.001-04:00

It's raining. Again. We're expecting a bit more than a 1/2 inch of rain. And it's going to rain on and off for much of the week. It's not that I mind rain, I'm a fan. It's just that we've had something like 15 inches of rain over the last month, and I prefer not to live in a perpetual bog.

But hey, at least the lawn isn't brown.

It's also been really warm. With the exception of 1 cold snap a couple weeks ago, the weather has hovered around 80 most days. Today is cooler, and that's good - I'm ready for a frost. It will protect the garlic I just planted - garlic is planted in fall, then harvested in summer - and kill all the bugs. I'm really sick of mosquitos, so a frost would be nice.

We lost all the remaining tomatoes in the garden....to mold. The rain, coupled with lack of sun (the two seem to go together, oddly enough) and the inability to dry out has molded every single tomato on the vine. While it's normal to be done with tomatoes now, typically I lose them to cold. The mold thing was a little disturbing. We pulled a few green ones out last week that have been left to ripen in a paper bag, but even then - anything not in the fridge is molding in the kitchen. Even the hubbard squash, which should have lasted well into the winter, being an, um, winter keeper squash, developed a soft spot, and had to be hacked up, baked, and frozen.

In addition, my lawn is growing mushrooms. Lots of them. That's how wet it's been.

On the upside, it's been a good year for mushrooms. There's this sweet old italian guy that occasionally drives by and harvests mushrooms at the edge of our property, and as thanks brought us back a jar of them preserved with onions and zucchini. I don't know enough to know what mushrooms are safe to forage for and which ones are poisonous, but I'm baking him some cookies, and maybe he'll show me.

I should be grateful though - at least there's been no flooding. Last weekend's trip out to my sister's farm included a drive through of the nearby town of Schoharie, which was under 9 feet of water following Hurricane Irene last month. It looked like a third world country, with boards covering stores and windows, and heaps of furniture and trash out on the street. Some areas had leaks of oil and sewage, so the cleanup will be huge. And they had a couple hours warning -another town nearby, also in the Schoharie Valley had about 8 minutes warning to run for their lives.

Makes complaining about rain and mushrooms sound a tad whiney, eh? It definitely shook me to see.

Despite that, some of the farms on higher ground survived, so we still came home with red peppers (1/2 bushel) a bushel of onions, another 1/2 bushel of butternut squash, and 1/2 bushel of potatoes, all of which are keeping cool in the basement. We'll need to check on them daily to make sure they aren't impacted by the damp, but if all goes well we should be able to make them last until December or January.

Even though the peppers seem to be withstanding the rot, and the 1 pumpkin we harvested is hanging in, garden season is effectively over. We're still expecting 2 more cold-hardy cherry trees to be planted this month, and I need to order some flower bulbs to plant in the newly-redesigned back yard, but until the seed catalogs show up in December, we're done.

As for chickens, in 2 weeks there's a livestock auction, following the fair in our town. We haven't decided if we'll get chicks then or wait until spring, but we're at least going to go check it out.

Despite everything, this was our most successful and productive garden year yet. The containers of homemade sauce in the freezer, plus all the produce we ate are a testament to our increasing success on the home front. Next year it will be even better.

That's the thing about gardening - there's always next year.

How Does My Garden Grow 2011: Harvest Season

2011-09-17T21:36:00.003-04:00

It got cold here this weekend. No frost, but cold enough so that the dish detergent on the counter next to the kitchen sink, which sits right below a slightly-open window, chilled to a solid block of soap last night. Cold enough.

The tomato vines, which delivered tomatoes very late to the party this year because of a very cool, rainy spring, are finally starting to die down. We'll probably get tomatoes for another week or so, and then I'll be out picking all the remaining green ones for a batch of green tomato chutney. The peppers, cucumbers and tomatillos are still going, but even they seem to sense that the growing season is ending.

The farmer's market in town, which is open on Saturday mornings, closes down next week. It uses some of the space that will be dedicated to the Topsfield Fair, which opens in less than 2 weeks. It's the big excitement here in town, and for 10 days there will be a traffic jam next to my road. If you like giant pumpkins and racing pigs, it's the place to be.

We went there this morning, as we've been trying to do most Saturdays, to get some last peaches to eat and freeze, some broccoli, and a few other things that I don't have in my garden this year. A quart or so of wax beans went directly from blanching to the freezer, the corn we'll eat this week. We also brought home 2 giant butternut squash, as we prepare for soup season to arrive with the turning of the leaves.

Since Sander was working on the stone wall that surrounds the garden again today, the adorable one and I were on Farmer's Market duty, and decided to make a morning of it by driving out to Russell Orchards afterwards to pick some apples. We came home with lots and lots of apples, 2 sugar pumpkins for pies, a baby white pumpkin because the adorable one was besotted with it, and one rather enthusiastically large hubbard squash.

Hubbard squash is delicious, but getting into it is tricky - but we can talk about making pie with a Sawzall another time.

A recent re-read of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has resulted in me trying to up my game on the local food front. There's an upside and downside to deciding to do this in mid-September. The upside, of course, is that it's a brilliant time to obtain local food. Peaches, apples, squash and pumpkins are in abundance. So are greens like Kale and spinach, as they thrive in the cooler weather.

The downside of my decision is that harvest season is short, and so despite the blackberries and peaches in my freezer, the 50 pounds of local beef, pork and chicken & sausage that are soon to arrive (none spending their lives any further than Vermont), and the ability to stockpile squashes and pumpkins, and the pasta sauce in the freezer made with our own tomatoes and some of our own peppers, we'll still be grocery-store bound this winter.

And realistically, for a few more years. But not as much as last year, even, despite the fact that we've preserved far less food than in our 8-day preservathon last year.

The adorable one and I are off with some family friends to my sister's farm next weekend, and if the local farms weren't completely flooded due to Hurricane Irene, we should bring home lots of onions, potatoes, and whatever else we can put our hands on. Next week Sander will clean the farmer's market out of whatever squash they have, and we'll go apple picking at least once more the following week. The organic farmstand down the road, Green Meadows is expensive, but open all year. A market opened in our little town last year with an amazing selection of local cheese. New sources of 'local' constantly spring up everywhere, it seems.

Next year, with all 8 garden beds in, I'll be able to start far more seedlings in more variety. One of the things we didn't get to this year was growing birdhouse gourds, or any of my flower seeds. We can also put in a permanent herb garden, something we've been talking about for several summers now. And finally, chickens - when is still unknown, but they are coming - we pay for farm eggs now, but at $3.99 per dozen, I'll be thrilled to collect them from the chicken coop, even on cold mornings.

Also, next year the adorable one will be 3, and we can have conversations about why we shouldn't buy goldfish crackers any more, but she can help make homemade granola bars instead. She would already rather have an apple just off the tree anyway, so it's not going to be a hard conversation. Mostly. I think.

It's been an interesting year. The more I learn about climate change and resource depletion, the more worried I get, and couple that with the economy, and I have developed an ant-like urge to be prepared for winter...and for later. While on the surface everything is normal - if you could call the current economy normal, almost everyone I talk to on some level shares my deep unease - the sense that things are not quite right. I think we know, in the same way muskrats build thick walls on their dens, somehow knowing when the winter will be particularly hard, that things are changing. It is as though we've been out for an afternoon jaunt, when we realize with a jolt we have stepped to the edge of a precipice, and a few more steps would take us tumbling down.

But the more I learn about human resourcefulness, the more hopeful I get. We may have lost many of the skills of our forebears, but there are many of us relearning. I personally know blacksmiths, weavers, farmers, and people with multitudes of skills one might call 'quaint'. There are more chickens in backyards than anyone could have imagined even 5 years ago. Seed companies are selling out of seeds due to the resurgence of backyard gardening. What we sow, so too we reap.

This year, our self-sustaining garden has gone from dream to reality. Next year it will produce abundantly, and hopefully for years later. My one pumpkin may never turn into a field of them, but maybe next year the one will be five. And then 10.

Soon the garden will go to sleep, and I'll be dreaming of how my garden will grow next year.

Happy Fall.

Why You Really Need to Give a S**t About Climate Change & Resource Issues Part the Last: Growing Hope

2011-09-06T06:03:00.079-04:00

It is easy to feel daunted by the changes needed to be ready for a planet with less oil, arable land, variety and availability of food, one with fewer jobs and more risks.

And, being that we're good deniers, us humans, it's much easier to duck one's head and say "It's all too much, and I don't know what is fact and what is fiction, so I'm just going to sit on this fence post for a while longer. Maybe I'll do something later. If someone could just show me that this change is certain..."

I know I feel that way. I feel it in the grocery store and farm stands, where eating by my moral compass continues to hike my food budget - and sometimes I don't eat my morals, so to speak, as the cost is high, and I am time-strapped. As illustrated by the open packet of snack stick crackers next to me. That said, I'm not going for perfection, just better. Somedays I hit 'better', somedays not. But I'm going to keep trying. Will we get to the 100 mile diet in time? I hope so.

It's not just food, though.

We priced out all the work needed to make our house more insulated this year - windows, a replacement for the front door, blowing insulation in....it was more than $70k, which was overwhelming. So we put some money into finishing our backyard instead, since it was dug up for a project - we took the work off of my husband's back - literally.

The work on our house still needs doing. It desperately needs insulation and new windows - and the house will get them. Just probably piecemeal. That work comes next. We do have 4 windows for the basement, and hope to get those in before the snow flies.

And our fruit trees are all still a few years away from bearing, and the garden is always a work in progress. As I wrote yesterday, we still don't have chickens, and after that I'm not sure what's next. I think Sander will nix having a cow. :) Honeybees maybe? I'm not sure. Something will pop into my head, and then my amazing husband will figure out how to make it so.

So I get it that this is not simple. But I do think that making these changes - even a little at a time - will matter in the long run. Even if we need time to become sustainable, we're ahead of the curve. It's kind of like the people who, when a war-torn country comes to peace, step forward with plans that they've been drawing up on how the government should run, or how the sewage system will work, or whatever. They don't know when their plans will become useful, just that when the time comes, a governing body will be needed, and sewage will have to be dealt with. So it is with the apricot, apple and cherry trees we've planted. So it is with our plans to live more sustainably.

There's this idea that some problems are too big to solve. But I don't think that's true. There are problems that are too big to solve easily and quickly, but I don't believe there's many problems that actually are unsolvable. We may not always like or expect the solution, but solutions are there.

"We can do no great things, only small things with great love" is what Mother Teresa said.

Planting a garden is an act of love, and of hope. It's also a practical solution to $5/pound organic tomatoes in the grocery store, quite frankly. And it is a community builder - neighbors who are there to be asked for gardening advice, neighbors to receive it. The adorable one likes nothing better than to 'pick' - be it raspberries in June, tomatoes in August, or squash in the fall. She is intensely proud of the literal fruits of her family's labors, and to be able to participate. It gives us a reason to be outside, and in the kitchen, the places where families and communities gather.

After we pick whatever it is, she follows me to the kitchen, to help me prepare the food. She wants to put her hand over mine on the knife handle (yes, we're careful) to chop things, and to stir carefully whatever is on the stove, with Mommy running interference from the flame and hot food. Extra long wooden spoons are perfect for her purpose. Given the choice of watching TV or joining Sander or I in the kitchen or the garden, she will choose the participative activity. And this is a kid that never misses an opportunity to watch Strawberry Shortcake reruns.

Planting a garden won't stop energy shortages, but it might mean jumping in the car less to go grocery shopping. It is one solution, and it is one of the solutions all of us can take on. Which is important - we humans are meant to be productive and creative. Turning cucumbers into pickles, squash into soup, and tomatoes into sauce is inherently a creative act. As is starting seeds. You become much more than a consumer. You too, are a creator.

Well, that's that. You can decide to give a s**t or not about all this. This is not about what side you are politically (actually, the local movement has much for conservatives to like - power to the people, decentralization - it's not just a crunchy liberal thing). I hope you decide to join in the local food thing, because we could really use your help.

So...Chickens

2011-09-05T06:20:00.024-04:00

I've wanted to raise chickens for a long time - close to 10 years now. One day, not long after my sister Sharon moved out to upstate NY and decided to farm, I went out for the weekend. She and I were going to take the kids out for lunch - my nephew who is now 11 was 2.5, and the almost-10 year old was an infant. Her other two kids were far in the future, and while she had a garden and some chickens, the CSA and the farm were yet to be created.

So I'm putting a double stroller into the trunk my little 1999 Olds Alero, which was a tad tricksy. Took a few minutes, and much maneuvering. When I finally managed to get it in there, I heard a little noise behind me. "Brrbuk?" It was almost a question.

Startled, I turned around to find a line of about 6 chickens with their heads cocked, watching me intently. "Brrbuk?" said the first one again. Might have been chicken for "Hey, hi - haven't seen you around before and what the heck is it you are doing? You seem pretty interested in it, so can we see too?"

So, trying to be sociable, I said "Hi".

Yes, I talked to the chicken. You would have too. Admit it.

Apparently that was all the invitation that was needed, and they bopped around my car, looking in the passenger door, and poking at the tires.

I was mesmerized, not unlike my kid is at Sturbridge Village when the sheep come to the fence looking to be fed, and she obliges. They were chipper and friendly and fascinated with me, the car, and everything. I'm not a big pet person - I like cats and dogs okay, but I've always been the sort that thinks of pets as a life option, not a necessity.

But the chicken thing stuck with me. Since we moved into our house in 2007, we've been talking about it, but much has come first - needed maintenance & repairs, the adorable one, and so on. This year we finally dove in and bought a coop and arranged with my sister to get some chicks. Since they need to be ordered in batches of 25, it's always good to 'go in' with others. Ordering issues, the heat wave in July and other things have held up the arrival for several months.

After many delays, we were expecting the chicks Sunday - yesterday. The adorable one and I filled the box in the kitchen that was to be their first home with sawdust, and mixed some chick feed with grit.

They had arrived in NY at the farm, and my Mom was supposed to drive them here.

Sunday morning the phone rang. My sister. With some really bad news. They went out on Saturday. Something got in the barn. Killed all the chicks - mine and hers. No survivors. She's going to try to get a replacement shipment before the cold weather comes. This time they'll live in the house until they make their way to us.

Poor babies. The adorable one wants to know when she can feed her chickens, when Nanna will come with them. I have no good answer for her. 2 1/2 is a little young to be talking about death. "Sweetie, they couldn't come today, but they will soon, I'm sorry".

So again we wait. This time with an empty box of sawdust in the kitchen. I'm not moving it yet. I've waited this long, I can wait a little longer.

Why You Really Need to Give a S**t About Climate Change & Resource Issues Part II: It Wasn't Raining When Noah Built His Ark

2011-09-04T13:12:00.001-04:00

It wasn't raining when Noah built his ark. - Howard Ruff

Let's say you are given a choice.

Change your life now to reduce your impact on the earth - potentially radically and significantly, or some day in the future, your kids or grandkids may suffer for it. That they would go hungry, do without. Well, maybe not your kids or grandkids. Maybe someone else's. But maybe yours too. Hard to tell. As for when - well, later. How much later? Not sure. Could be 10 years, could be 50. But it's coming.

So make the change, or something bad will happen to people later. Sometime later. Lots of people. What change? Well, buy less stuff. What stuff? Well, you know, the stuff you don't need.

This is the problem with the message about the environmental issues and climate change. There's not enough specifics for us to understand what to do now, today, and why.
For most of us in the first world, we aren't seeing it. Okay, so 2 tornados went through a swath of Massachusetts for the first time in recent memory. Hurricane season is getting worse. Drought and water issues across the globe, okay - but not here, right? It has nothing to do with me, right?

Well, yes. Actually - it does.

It's really hard to see how the dress I bought online is impacting whether there's enough arable land or water. Or how leaving all the lights on in my house all evening may mean that my grandkids are back to using candles. We're not as a species good at seeing relationships between today's actions and what happens many years from now. There's scientific data there, but seeing the correlations and causations is something that most humans, well, suck at. Especially when we particularly don't want to hear it.

There are plenty of disbelievers out there. Plenty of people to tell you that we are absolutely entitled to our way of life.
That the millions of unemployed in the US are the slackers - that companies are just 'doing what they have to in order to survive' when they lay off masses of people - never mind those higher-than-ever quarterly earnings.
That this is just a recession and we'll get over it, even though the lights went off in the economy 3 years ago and still seem to be on a dimmer switch.
That we're entitled to giant gas guzzling vehicles because this is America, ferfrigssake, and no one has the right to tell me I can't drive what I want.
That the poor are lazy, and could get jobs and eat better if they really wanted to - no one makes them eat fast food, right?
That the people in the Horn of Africa are a lost cause anyway, and God, why the hell won't those people just use some freaking birth control?

And so on.

The reality is that the resource depletion and climate changes we're experiencing are on a trajectory to get worse. That's not a political issue, it's just the simple truth.

And we need to start preparing.

It probably goes without saying that savings helps. Those with a little padding always fare better than those without.

And gardening - well - I've blogged it before - it's an investment in our future and our kids. So quit it with the Chemlawn crap, since you may need to grow food where you are currently dumping chemicals. Let me put it this way - would you panic and call poison control if one of your kids ate the stuff you put on your lawn to control weeds? If you would, then stop putting it in the water supplies mmkay?

Support local farms and farmers. The more of them there are, the more likely it is that supply interruptions will be mitigated. Mitigated, not avoided.

Think about investing in renewables, but don't expect technology to save us. Think about alternatives to heating oil if you live in the Northeast.

Insulate your house.

Quit shopping for entertainment. Most of us don't need more stuff (as someone who likes to decorate for the seasons at home, this is one yours truly needs to listen to)

Pack your lunch, invest in a reusable coffee cup, etc etc.

Plant some fruit and nut trees. They are pretty, and supply food.

So I've said all this stuff before. Nothing new. But if you wait for proof that bad things are coming, you end up like those people who run to home depot for flashlights just as the rain starts. Buy a bunch of them to have around - and BTW, Maglite is still made in the good ol' USA, so you can stimulate the economy too.

Noah didn't wait to start building until he felt a raindrop. His neighbors thought he was a nutjob. They might think that of you too. But whatever - Noah stayed dry. They didn't.

And hey, if by some magical outcome, I'm wrong, you'll have an insulated house, fruit to pick each summer, good lunches, have gotten to know the local growers and farmers in your area, and have some sassy flashlights to boot.

Why You Really Need to Give A S**T About Climate Change and Resource Issues Part 1: An Introduction of Sorts

2011-08-31T13:05:00.002-04:00

I want to introduce you all to someone. This is Jeremy:

Jeremy Grantham of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo asset management, or GMO, to be specific.

For those of you who speak market, you may already know who he is. For those of you who don't, let me tell you why you should be reading and listening to everything this man has to say.

GMO manages assets for clients that add up to about $106 Billion dollars. For individuals, the minimums run between $5M and $10M dollars to even get to talk to them about managing your money.

In other words, GMO handles really big amounts of money for really wealthy individuals and institutions.

But that's not why Grantham is important, or even what makes me think you should listen to him. It is because not only does he speak market, he speaks with deep market knowledge of diminishing resources, and he thinks, and analyzes for the long term.

Which leads him to say things like this in his Q2 2011 Letter to Investors about the problems facing us, and therefore our income stability and overall stability:
Overall, the best farms will have no erosion problems but, on average, soil will continue to be lost across the
globe. Together with increased weather extremes and higher input prices (perhaps much higher), there will be
increasing problems in feeding the world’s growing population.

 In particular, a significant number of poor countries found mostly in Africa and Asia will almost certainly suffer from increasing malnutrition and starvation. The possibility of foreign assistance on the scale required seems remote.

 The many stresses on agriculture will be exacerbated at least slightly by increasing temperatures, and severely by increased weather instability, especially more frequent and severe droughts and fl oods.

 These types of slow-burning problems that creep up on us over decades and are surrounded by a lack of scientific precision hit both our capitalist system and our human nature where it hurts.

 Capitalism, despite its magnificent virtues in the short term – above all, its ability to adjust to changing conditions– has several weaknesses that affect this issue.
o It cannot deal with the tragedy of the commons, e.g., overfishing, collective soil erosion, and air contamination.
o The finiteness of natural resources is simply ignored, and pricing is based entirely on short-term supply and
demand.
o More generally, because of the use of very high discount rates, modern capitalism attributes no material cost to damage that occurs far into the future. Our grandchildren and the problems they will face because of a warming planet with increasing weather instability and, particularly, with resource shortages, have, to the standard capitalist approach, no material present value.

Grantham goes on to list how we will likely respond as a society to the issues (not particularly impressively) and the specific impacts to Energy, Metals, Fertilizers such as Phosphorus and Potash (both Potash and Phosphorus are critically necessary for plants to grow - and basic elements, which means we can't manufacture them. We run out, we don't eat. It's really that simple), Water and so on.

This man, worth more than most of us probably can imagine, is talking about how Chinese farmers recycle human waste to limit their soil depletion in his letters to his investors. Why?

Because he recognizes that we are at a tipping point. In his own words:
Last quarter I tried to make the case that the inevitable mismatch between finite resources and exponential population growth had finally shown its true face after many false alarms. This was made manifest through a remarkably bubble-like explosion of prices for raw materials. Importantly, prices surged twice in four years, which is a most unbubble-like event in our history book.The data suggested to us that rarest of rare birds; a new paradigm. And a very uncomfortable one at that. (emphasis is mine)In short, the way we live today is a devils bargain - we have intense short term gain in, well, everything - but there is the price tag. As with credit cards, eventually a payment becomes due, and this time the interest cost may be higher than we can manage.

Recently, as food somehow came up in a conversation with someone I dearly love, a response to our significant increase in local and, at least - whenever not local - organic and fair trade food purchases. "Oh, I don't give that much thought".

As it is with many comments that one recognizes as the sort of thing where it's better to leave it lie and move on to another topic, I did just that.

But it bothered me.

And I began to think that perhaps no one has, as yet, made a convincing argument to the general population about why it is absolutely, utterly critical that they think about that. Because we are at a tipping point. And what my daughter and her daughters may have available to them is likely to be less - far less - than what I have or my parents have.

Those with political agendas will, by turns explain to us how everything is just fine and how we're careening into a crisis situation that is about debts or deficits. Both are wrong.

There's a crisis, but it's much more fundamental than that. It's about water supplies, food availability, soil depletion. It is about the ability to feed our families. Our current level of abundance is unsustainable. And we, as individuals, need to do something about it.

That box of wheat thins, that package of Pepperidge Farms whatever-it-is has implications on our future. My choice to drive to work rather than take public transport has a price.

I hardly fit the description of someone who has either the pedigree or the moral authority to dictate to others. There are packages of Goldfish in my cabinets, Chex in my pantry, Hot Dogs in my freezer. But I am trying - to carpool, to work from home to lower my impact. To eat local and sustainable. To find new ways to abundance that don't involve Pottery Barn.

I have a long way to go, but I'm not alone in that - we're all a far cry from where we need to be on this. It's kind of reassuring to have some company when I travel this road of learning how to live so that my choices don't mean some banana farmer's child in South America goes hungry so that my child can eat.

Few of us like being told we need to change, but, like when a toddler acts out, limits are needed. There are those who would like us to never have to give up individual advantage for group benefit, but they are at odds with a sustainable future. Where individualism gets important is understanding that the government, big business, or new technology aren't going to save us. We have to save ourselves.

So why would Jeremy Grantham, who manages more money than most of us can probably imagine, be talking about agriculture, and not the next new technology? Talking about small farms, and European crop failure in the 1880s rather than the future trajectory of Apple and GM?

Because it's what matters. More than anything. It's going to be where we need to invest, where our risk lies, and where are future is. The future is not the next IPO. It's in the next tomato harvest.

Bulk Food The Local Way

2011-08-29T09:26:00.000-04:00

Most of us are used to the idea of warehouse store shopping - large quantities, often lower prices. If you are careful, there's a lot of good deals to be had.

But if you are trying to eat more locally and sustainably, you can do that in bulk as well. It takes a little more time and effort to suss out sources of food than it does to drive to Costco or BJs, but it's well worth it.

We do a lot of bulk-buying out near my sister's, in Schoharie County, NY. It's a land of rolling hills and lots of farms. One in particular, the Carrot Barn, sells bulk tomatoes, broccoli, potatoes, onions, cukes, and many other things as the season progresses. Cheaply too, and sustainably grown. Last year a full bushel of onions cost us $18, and lasted for almost 6 months. That's a lot of eating for $18.

We also ordered bulk beef - really excellent bulk beef, btw from a Lancaster PA farm last year, after our visit to the area.

But I am on a mission to find even more local food in bulk near me. And I've lucked out a bit, and the options seem to be growing.

Recently, Valley View Farm, just a mile or so down the road started offering boxes of peppers and 'second' peaches this year, and offer shares of maple syrup, honey and other items throughout the year. They also recently started offering bulk meat from other local farms, serving as an aggregator of sorts for the ordering - offering beef, lamb, chicken & pork from local producers.

The other good option is to get to know local producers. Freqenting a farmers market, striking up conversations - "Hey, I'm looking for ___in a large quantity, do you ever do that?". It's a no-harm, no-foul conversation. While a bulk sale has the risk of lowering a farmer's profit, it also has the upside of ensuring a sale for their goods. So it has the potential for being a win-win. As they say, it never hurts to ask.

While we are nowhere near getting to the point we'd like to be at, with 1/2 of our food sourced locally, we're taking baby steps to get there. I'd love to hear how others are doing with local sourcing as well.

How Does Garden Grow - Late August

2011-08-28T15:58:00.001-04:00

It's been a strange year, weather-wise, and it's had a weird impact on the garden. Which is growing beautifully (hopefully still, Hurricane Irene isn't quite finished with us yet). But everything is very late. We had a great lettuce season into July, since the weather was cooler and rainier, but other than that, it's a late garden year.

We picked our first ripe tomatoes this week. The cucumbers are fruitful, but still tiny. Only one winter squash survived the rains, but is the size of a small end table. The tomatillos, those who haven't been stolen by the chipmunks are thriving, and have vined out everywhere.

If the warm weather holds, we should be okay - I'm much more happy when I'm faced with canning jars and a hot stove in September anyway. As long as an early cold snap doesn't roll in, it should be a pleasure to pick our veggies over the next few weeks.

We didn't pick up a lot of bulk food this year - just a half bushel of onions and & 1/4 bushel of pickling cukes out near my sister, most of which became 14 pints and 4 quarts of bread and butter pickles. We also picked blackberries for my birthday (that, plus a picnic made for a near-perfect birthday), which are in the freezer, awaiting some further disposition - with the advent of peaches from a friend's tree, I'm thinking blackberry peach cobbler.

We've signed up for a box of peppers from a local farm, and some peach seconds as well, which will probably go into muffins and be the foundation for peach butter. If we can swing it, we'll get a bushel of onions from my sister's when we go out in September - last year's bushel lasted us almost to February - and we use a lot of onions!

The chickens are still pending - the coop is here, but hatcheries in the midwest stopped shipping in the July heat wave, so they just arrived in NY, and they will come home next Sunday, September 4. Though we can fit up to 16 birds in our house, only 8 Buff Orpingtons will call it home this year. Next year we hope to add a few more in rare breeds.

The garden construction still goes on. We got the 4 4x16 beds done, but my husband ended up having to build a fairly labor-intensive stone wall to hold the dirt for the remaining 4 4x8 beds. The wall is almost done, and then the fence, arbor and remaining beds can go in - again, we're hoping the weather holds for a while longer.

Next year I should have all 8 beds, and then hopefully a more productive garden than ever. And egg-laying chickens...and then...

I am starting to think I need to come up with a name for our mini-farmlet. Hmm.

Diary of a Working Mom - Late Summer Edition

2011-08-08T19:35:00.000-04:00

As working moms go, I'm a pretty blessed one. I get to work from home at least 1 day a week. We can afford for my husband to be home and still have everything we need and more than a few things we want. We have supportive family and friends who step in whenever we need the help. And I get to live in a beautiful spot, surrounded by trees and grass and flowers.

But this time of year, as summer starts to wind down, I get a bit pensive. I like my job. I'm pretty good at it too, and a combination of really hard work and good luck and opportunity have allowed me to have not just work, but a true career.

Still though, I wonder what life would be like if I'd taken another path. A stay at home mom maybe, or a farm, or an entirely different part of the world. It's not that I resent my current life, it's just that I'd like to occasionally be able to try on different roles. And I suppose I could, but then I'd have to leave the life I do have, and I don't particularly care to do that. At least, not yet. The farm will come - eventually. In the meantime, we are adapting in place, turning this slightly faerie tale-ish spot into a teeny farm - complete with chickens, fruit trees, a huge garden, and green as far as the eye can see.

And even though I know I'm bloody well blessed as all heck that I spend as much time with my family as I do, I always want just a little bit more time. Just a little bit.

And while I really do mean that we're going to take a year off when the adorable one is 12 and travel around the world, I'm not sure that I want to live any of the places that we talk about visiting. Okay, except the italian riviera, which I fell in love with when we visited in 2004. I'm just lacking the 4 million or so euros (maybe down to 3.5 million by now) for a villa overlooking the Bay of Fables in Sestri Levanti. I smuggled home a lime from the trees there, true story. I miss it.

Still, this is the time of year I wonder. I love our life, but the idea of trying on new ones like new hats appeals to me. Hmmm...

How Does My Garden Grow Volume 2: June 2011

2011-06-12T12:15:00.002-04:00

It's been a cold spring here. Changes in the jet stream have made it a cold, rainy and windy on and off since March, making it hard to get out and work in the garden consistently.

And this is a big garden year for us. After 3 years of 3 temporary, stone-bordered beds, we've finally decided to spend a bit of time and money and make the garden space more permanent - more beds, a fence to keep out the unwelcome locals, such as deer and rabbits, and to keep in the newest members of our family, arriving in late July - 5 chickens (5 more will come next spring).

We've finally settled in with our new budget, and so some of the money that we had saved for projects - money we were afraid to spend until now - is getting spent. Garden updates, a chicken coop and the associated residents, and finally, work on the exterior of the house, which is in dire need of insulation and new windows, a new front door, and various other expensive maintenance.

I didn't start as many seeds as I had hoped to, time got away from me, as usual. But I do have a respectable number of tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, bok choy, spinach and other greens. We
got a few pumpkins into the ground, as well as some cukes, and we might try a few late melons too.

Along with the new garden comes more long-term plantings as well. Two dwarf apricot trees, two golden muscat grape vines to train over the arbor entrance to the garden and some more raspberries to line the garden fence are heeled into temporary locations while we finish the garden construction. I also got my act together this spring and ordered garlic to plant in the fall, which always sells out before it crosses my mind in the summertime.

So this year should be a good year for garden produce, and in a few years we should see the literal fruits of our labors from the long term plantings - including some apples finally from our dwarf apple trees, and perhaps a cherry or two from the North Star cherry tree we planted 2 summers ago. We still want to fit in cranberries, bayberries, blueberries and cornelian cherries, but those can wait a little longer. There's only so much we can do in a year.

It's funny, when we moved in, we never imagined that 4 years in we would still be working on setting up a permanent garden, or have so many house projects still in-flight or not even started yet. Sometimes I look around us and think, "We're going to be at this forever".

We knew when we bought the house it would be a project house, and that some things would take years (not in small part because house projects are paid for in cash in MoneyPenny world). But some of the smaller things have hung on far longer than we hoped for - pre-empted by other projects in some cases, pre-empted by lack of time in others.

But first, the garden. Have you ever seen 15 yards of dirt in your driveway? It looks something ...er..exactly, like this:

Although actually, this was after a yard or two was used. Affectionally titled 'Mount Dirt', it has taken up a good chunk of the driveway for the better part of the last 8 weeks.

The garden will eventually be 8 beds of varying sizes surrounded by a retaining wall, a fence, and an arbor with golden muscat grapes growing over it, flanked by apricot trees. So how do you build such a dream garden? (please note, when I say 'you', I mean your incredibly tolerant and accomodating husband who hasn't yet run away to a nice clean white condo where no one talks of wanting livestock).

Well, so first, you tear up a good chunk of the front yard.
Then you buy 15 yards of dirt to level it, that is, if your yard slopes down a hill as ours does:

Then you get $500.00 worth of lumber and start building beds. 3 of the long beds are done (16' x 3'). You make the beds, drag them up the yard in the hot sun, and line them with weed-suppressing cloth.

Then you fill them with dirt. Approximately 35 wheelbarrows of dirt fill one. Patiently ignore wife who is fretting over how 'leggy' her seedlings are getting and she needs to plant them today, now, after you've spent hours of backbreaking labor filling aforementioned freaking beds with dirt.

Once beds are finished, then call in garden expertise to plant:

And then:

Well, okay, now we repeat it 5 more times, and then start on the fence, but you get the idea.

Food: It's What's For Dinner

2011-05-27T11:38:00.001-04:00

It's the friday before Memorial Day, almost the start of a nice long weekend. Sander is out building me the new garden beds so that we can do some planting this weekend, I've been inside working, and the adorable one has been at 'school' - the toddler program at the local Congregational Church, which she attends 2 mornings a week.

This weekend is a bit of a milestone - last year on this Friday, Sander came home from his job for the last time.

But this year is nothing like last year. Usually we spend Memorial Day weekend up at Moosehead Lake, but this year we're home, aside from a brief overnight trip to my inlaws Sunday to Monday. And we're excited, because it is a garden weekend. 3 of the new raised beds are in and just about ready to plant in, the muscat grapevines and the apricot trees have arrived...and in a few more weeks, chickens!!

But before I can get to all that, I need to figure out what the heck to make for dinner. Friday dinner is important, because Friday is date night here. We don't get out much (although next week we have a babysitter so that we can go to 'beerfest' - should be fun even though I'm a wine drinker). On Fridays we put the adorable one to bed, crack a bottle of wine, and relax together. I don't dial in to work, we don't try to accomplish anything, and we don't worry about anything more than whose turn it is to sleep in on Saturday. It's rather nice, actually.

We've tried to have a standing meal, like pizza, every Friday. The problem with that is that the adorable one is coming into her prime pizza-eating years, and so we'd rather share that meal with her. And other meals got sort of boring over and over.

So on Friday afternoons it is my job to come up with something. Some weeks I am right on top of it. Today, not so much.

This week we took in our final CSA winter share delivery, so there are a lot of green things to be used up - spinach, kale, lettuce, leeks, scallions...that sort of thing.
We haven't been so good lately at staying on top of food before it goes bad, so I'm trying very hard this month to ensure that nothing rots.

There's plenty of food in the house, but of course, that hasn't prevented me from opening cabinets and the refrigerator and freezer and staring into them blankly. I could go to the grocery store, but that would be a waste of time and money - I have plenty already. I just need to figure out what the hell to do with it.

But in a tiny flash of inspiration, I remembered one of my favorite blogs: Scordo.com. And sure enough, there it was. Sausage (lean chicken sausage) with onions and a bunch of green things sauteed in garlic, with a bit of salt and some red pepper flakes.

And something else. Maybe a touch of pasta. Maybe popovers. Maybe.....

The Perfect Day

2011-05-08T21:10:00.000-04:00

Today is my 3rd Mother's Day, and by far the best one yet. Not because of any particular gift, although my husband and daughter did give me a gift of 2 hanging plants, and my daughter potted me a petunia at Sunday School. Mostly because our life, while absolutely, insanely busy most weeks, seems to have hit a groove on weekends. We seem to have finally figured out how to balance work (around the house and sometimes for me extra hours on the weekend at my paying job), errands, fun and rest.

Not always, mind you, but we're definitely getting better at it. Mostly.

Take this weekend. We're just back from a 4-day trip to Disney(insanity with a toddler, as well as a rediculous indulgence, but fun), and of course, everyone was unpacked but me - for the record it is after 9 pm on Sunday and there is still stuff in my suitcase. But on Friday I went to the grocery store on the way home, so that was done. And Saturday, in and around lunch with friends, we managed to get all the housework done (okay, all the housework that we planned to do, anyway. There's always more.) Which meant today got to be for pleasure. In and around church, a visit to my Moms, and planting lilacs and begonias in the yard, I took a nap. A real nap, for almost 2 hours.

In Mommyworld, naps are the holy grail. I slept so long this afternoon I dreamed. And that after I got to read for an hour, uninterrupted. For pleasure, not for research. A novel, even. If you don't know what a treat that is, you either don't have kids or never pick up a book.

Alert the media.

And I finally found the time to transplant my seedlings -some, anyway - and still make a stir fry for dinner. After which Sander did the dishes.

It might not be a perfect day by most people's standards. There were no expensive flower bouquets, nor was there any restaurant meals or spa visits. We all got pretty dirty in the garden - the adorable one loves to dig in the dirt as much as her parents. Our breakfast was at our church, where a small group of people spent their hard-earned time and money to make brunch to celebrate mother's day. The waffles won't win any awards, but the food was good, and the community better. And so went the day - family, friends, flowers, and rest.

Happy Mother's Day.

The Wilder Life

2011-04-18T09:20:00.000-04:00

My mother in law recently sent me a book. Not just any book either - perhaps the perfect book.

See, I am one of an absolutely astronomical number of women approximately my age who have spent - and still do spend - time in what Wendy McClure affectionately titles 'Laura World'.

A good chunk of those of us in the approximately 35-45 age group grew up having read the Little House books, probably before 3rd grade. And then there was Melissa Gilbert and Michael Landon on television every week, living somewhere in Walnut Grove (never mentioned by name in the books, but the Ingalls family did in fact live there).

But then we all grew up, and Laura Ingalls Wilder faded into the haze of girlhood, along with 3 months off every summer, a part of another time.

Until my older sister bought all the books, and the Little House Cookbook. And during sporadic visits to her home, I reread them. And then got the series for myself, ostensibly for the day I had a daughter to read them to. And bought the same cookbook. And made fried apples n' onions (which are brilliant, by the way, and will be on the table for every Christmas dinner until I can no longer cook).

But still, I never truly realized how many others around me lived in Laura World too. And how mild my fascination seemed in comparison to Ms. McClure's, despite the fact that I've received more than one raised eyebrow for having given my daughter the middle name of Rose, after Laura's daughter. Yeah, so my kid is named after the daughter of a now deceased author, who was a successful author herself.

The books are fictionalized - based around historic experiences, to be sure, but fiction nonetheless. They skip over unpleasant facts like the time that Pa and the family skipped town in the middle of the night because he was too broke to pay a debt, that one of the reasons the family left the 'Big Woods' of Wisconsin was that a hunter's bullet narrowly missed Laura when she was outside the house, that Nellie Oleson is a composite of several girls that Laura encountered during her life - including one that was briefly competition for Almanzo's attention, and an entire segment of Laura's life in Burr Oak, Iowa, that was probably a little too unpleasant for her to want to write about. Or want to remember.

But unlike for others who have a foot in Laura World, the realities don't bother me. I tend to think I would have loved to meet she and Almanzo in old age, and wander around the farm in Mansfield, Missouri that they built up - even though they never really made a go of farming, eventually retiring in comfort due to other income, including that of the books. I doubt I would have agreed with them politically. The racism in the books is pretty icky too - especially that of Ma to indians. Given that reportedly a local american indian saved Caroline Quiner Ingalls' family from starving one winter when she was a little girl, that racism is especially repugnant.

None of us would want to live through what Laura did, mostly in houses the size of a refrigerator box. When the adorable one is older, we'll work our way through the cookbook, even grinding Long Winter bread. We'll talk about what it all means.

And it does mean something. The period in US history called "Westward Expansion" fascinates me. It's the, well..manifestation of Manifest Destiny (what probably morphed into today's view of American Exceptionalism). Read through the eyes of a historian, it's easy to apply that worldview to the Ingalls family.

Still, there's magic in Laura World, all the more so because the places are real. You can actually still visit the now-caved in dugout on Plum Creek. You can see the Wilder farm in Malone, NY, the setting of Farmer Boy, and one of the few original structures mentioned in the books that still stand. Laura World is part of our own history. It is a place where love, a fiddle, and sheer force of will win out over - well, everything. It's a catalogue of skills most of us no longer share, and a catalogue of a life most of us would be scared to have to lead.

Laura Ingalls Wilder passed away in 1957, just after her 90th birthday. Almanzo died at 93, 7 years earlier. None of Laura's sisters bore any children, and Rose Wilder Lane had no descendants, and so that line has passed on. Few who knew Laura and Rose in any meaningful way are still amongst us, and there are as many questions as there are answers about the stories - the real ones, and the other ones too.

I'm not sure why Laura World is so compelling, but it is, and I was glad to find a kindred soul in Ms. McClure. For those of us who visit Laura World, it is a must-read, even if the illusion-bubble gets burst along the way. In a couple years, with my daughter, we'll start the Laura pilgrimage too, starting in Malone. Because we have to, even if I can't quite explain why.

Thanks for the book Jean. And for everything.

Virtually Tongue Tied

2011-04-15T13:32:00.000-04:00

I haven't blogged a lot lately. Which is directly related to a decision I made a few months ago to share my blog more broadly, adding it to my LinkedIn bio. Which is kind of interesting.

The tool I chose to expose my blog in turn exposes me - and some fairly personal thoughts - to my professional network. And all of a sudden, I questioned every post (and I started and stopped a lot of them). Should I share that opinion? Is that the right way to say it (whatever it is)? What would xyz contact think of what I said? Should I continue to be as honest and frank as I have been?

It's not that I think I've done or said anything wrong - quite the opposite, I'm proud of what I write. But I had to question - do my opinions potentially clash with those of my employer, or my client? And how well should my professional network know me?

The upside and downside of social networking is that it exposes us. Sometimes uncomfortably so. And so I found myself deleting draft after draft of posts. For a while, I even contemplated just skipping the whole blog thing. After all, if it was going to cause this much concern for me, what was the point, right?

But then I decided that one of the things that I like about myself is that I say what I think. No one ever really has to wonder how I feel or what I think about a particular topic. I can be very diplomatic when I need to be, but I prefer being frank and honest. There's good ways and bad ways to be right out there with opinions and thoughts, and sometimes I do it well, and sometimes not so much.

But rather than question myself for every sentence I write, and put virtual handcuffs on myself, I think I've decided to continue to post about the things that interest me, make me think, offend me, make me worry, make me happy, make me money, lose me money.....in other words, worry more about the risk of not saying anything than the risk of putting it out there.

You still won't get me on twitter though.

March: The Ugly Month

2011-03-24T13:09:00.000-04:00

These days, when someone asks me how I am, I say "Tired". It's true - like just about every woman my age I have a job, a house, a commute, a family and a bazillion demands on my time.

But it's also March, which, translated from the original NewEnglandese, means "ugly month". Which means it's grey, cold, no flowers, no snow, and lots of sand and debris on the streets, because the street cleanings don't start until next month.

March and November are the most unattractive months in New England, but at least in November everyone is looking forward to Thanksgiving, and the pumpkins haven't rotted on the doorsteps yet.

Add to that the lost hour of sleep due to the clocks changing, and there's a big pile of 'ugh' going on. Okay, so there's a few snow drops up, but even those aren't serving to change the drabness this year.

So I'm cranky in March. The only thing that keeps me happy (besides chasing the adorable one around) is potting up some garden seeds, and I um, haven't done that yet. I really think we all should get a pass to just go back to bed and wake up in time for Easter. I may run for office on this platform.

So I went out and bought some cute, brightly colored picture frames for the pictures of the adorable one that litter my desk at work, and paint chips for the guest room.

And now I'm going back to bed (er...work). Wake me when it's spring. No, I mean when it's actually spring, not what the calendar says.

What We Owe Each Other

2011-03-21T14:42:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite sets of stories to read and re-read are the Little House books. Not because I idealize the time - not even a little. I like modern medical advances and central heating, thank you very much. But because the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder's life, in the words of herself, helped along by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, and the stories by Roger Lea MacBride of Rose's life (these stories pick up where The First Four Years leave off) articulate for me in some fundamental way, the simultaneous need to be independent in the true sense- to minimize one's dependance on others for food, financial well being, etc - and our equally compelling need to be interdependent on one another as people.

Recent events - the outcry over deficit reduction to the elimination of all else in our all-too-easily-swayed-by-big-money-donors congress, the Japanese tsunami, and the unrest in the middle east have reinforced my desire to be as financially and food-independent as possible, as quickly as possible. Food prices are rising, as are oil prices, and the two are inextricably linked anyway. More and more people are being impacted by climate changes, and with that, the markets will continue to swing - and the financial fortunes of most of us with it. I believe this current instability, and the wild swings of change will continue.

With insecurity comes the all-too-natural instinct to protect ones own. Money, time, family, food supply. But when we don't look out for one another on a broader, societal level, we create the situation we fear. If enough people are hungry, and their children are hungry, revolution comes - fueled by the lack of supply created by those who speculate and stockpile. And the stockpilers of food become the targets: few of us would allow our children to starve and not take action either. Right or wrong, food, housing and the essentials of life will send people to the streets...and against those who have what they lack.

The same goes for deficit reduction at the expense of social well being - when we remove the social safety nets for our fellow humans, they will not stand forever and watch they and their families fall through the cracks. At some point, what we've seen in Wisconsin around labor rights and in the middle east for revolution, is driven by the ability to feed and house families. When there is threat to that, the seeds of civil unrest are sown.

In the story of The Long Winter, the town of De Smet is starving. 7 months of blizzards stop the trains, and with it, the food supply. Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland go on a hunt for wheat -using rumors and hope as their guide.  The miracle is not just that they return with the wheat and keep the town from starvation. It is that, as the story tells us, they, and a hungry Charles Ingalls manage to keep a mob from overrunning the storekeeper who tries to double his money off of their hungry backs. But later, in the spring, even that fails, and the townspeople break into the first train that goes by for the food supplies.   And that same Charles Ingalls defends the action of those who stole the food "Let them stand some damages" - of the Chicago and North Western Railway. When the townspeople banded together against a common oppressor, they managed to sustain their families.

I first read these stories as a girl. But reading The Long Winter again as an adult gives me a new perspective on things. How long would most of us be willing to watch our children get hungrier and hungrier, with only hay for fuel, sitting in a room cold enough to freeze a bottle of ink? For 7 months, as the Ingalls family did? For 7 weeks? 7 days?

We in the United States are hopefully far from the state of things in Tunisia, Libya and other parts of the world. And it is true that we need to encourage less debt and more independence.   But continuing to slash social programs that provide housing, food, mental health services and help for the most needy of us, while continuing to sustain those agencies that brought the economy to it's knees 3 years ago is counterproductive. Continuing on this path only brings us closer to creating what we fear.

So while I will continue with my family on the work of minimizing my dependance on others for income and food over time, I also acknowledge that most of us can't - and we shouldn't even try to - do without each other. It makes no sense to produce everything we need ourselves, and would be an unsustainable amount of work anyway. And the skills and abilities of all of us vary greatly. The reality is we cannot live without one another - we need human interaction to thrive. Someone to hug, to learn from, to play with. And we need shared efforts and resources to grow.

Some of us can do more than others. Some of us have more than others. But the ever-widening divide between the haves and the have nots may serve to bring together groups that will balance the power divide, as has happened so many times before.   I do not yearn for this, I dread it. Because it never goes smoothly. And it is eminently preventable.

I wish I could be less worried. But until we as a society can figure out what we owe each other, what is fair and equitable, I worry.

A lot.

REAL Gender Equality

2011-02-21T10:37:00.001-05:00

Just as I committed to blog more, two rather massive and messy projects at work got dropped on me, which meant I was back to working nights and weekends. That, along with some other commitments I had made proceeded to suck up all my time, and then my daughter decided to get her two year old molars, and we went into a few weeks of nosleeparanza.

Needless to say I sat here and stared at the screen a few times, started more than a few posts, and then went to bed.

The combination of life with a toddler, lack of sleep, a commute, tons of work, life in general and endless snowstorms made my brain shut down for all but the most basic day to day tasks. It wasn't quite of the 'drool from the corner of the mouth' variety of shutdown, but close.

But then yesterday I read a blog post on Slate about women who outearn their husbands, and it caught my interest, and switched my brain to the 'on' position, even if just briefly. This coincided with some interaction between my absolutely wonderful husband and my absolutely wonderful father-in-law (okay, slight edge to my husband, as I tend to think he's about the greatest guy on the planet, give or take the Dalai Lama and a few others). See, my father-in-law is fabulous, without a doubt one of my favorite people. But he's a leeetle old fashioned, and the idea that my husband and I are dependent on my income tends to make his palms sweat in fear.

It's not that he's not proud of my husband, quite the opposite. It's that, like many men, much of his identity is wrapped in the idea of 'provider'. And for him to be jobless at my husband's age, with a family and a mortgage would have been an absolute crisis. So I think he's having a bit of trouble wrapping his brain around the idea that not only are we fine, but we're better than fine. We're even, um, good. Really good.

Sander would love to be back at work. He misses it - a lot. And he's looking hard. Signs that the tech sector is easing up and starting to hire are around. That's good.

But in the meantime, I feel extraordinarily blessed to have a husband who takes being a father as seriously as he does. Without a doubt, I have a complete co-parent at my side (if not even a better parent, I often admit), the kind that other women profess to want. I married a renaissance man, and the trade off of that is that our roles are not traditional ones. Which is just fine with me. Really fine.

I should probably admit that I am probably more well-positioned to accept our non-traditional roles than most. Raised by gay "moms", gender roles were never my strong suit, given that toilet-fixing and other male-type roles were being done by women. I was a US Marine, and I can tell you right now that the suggestion that I wasn't a full equal to my male counterparts wouldn't go well for the suggester. I had two female and two male attendants for my wedding, and got just a teensy bit pissy when the pastor suggested they process in male/female pairs with arms linked during our rehearsal - I was only going for it if my husband's all-male attendants left the church with arms linked as well. Needless to say, I got my way. It's not that I cared so much about how they processed so much as I was annoyed at the idea that they should be paired because they were mixed genders. If I'd had 4 female attendants it would have never come up.

So, I have pretty strong feelings about gender equality. And that includes who should be the breadwinner. If women want to be equal, it must cease to matter, and we must acknowledge that our families financial well being is as much ours to ensure as our husbands. That's not to say that all women should go into the workforce -far from it. But rejecting the automatic equation of male as breadwinner and woman as nurturer is the only way things should be is one way women win equality. And that means that those husbands who earn less or not at all aren't 'losers' or 'unmotivated' - they are equal partners working towards that family's well being.

And the idea that a man's value is defined by his ability to generate income has to go too. It isn't that no one should move towards a well-paying career, and I'll be the first to admit that there is real satisfaction to be gained from work. I happen to really like my job, and when I do something well, I love it. But the role of men has to be broadened in our minds. If someone wants to sign up for the traditional arrangement, great. Just support our slightly different one to the same degree - societally, legislatively, and so on.

Women are often great nurturers, and men are often great breadwinners, but neither of those things are the measure of their genders. Far from it. And I for one would take my husband, currently curled up with my daughter watching Sesame Street than any old master of the universe.

I am one lucky woman.

My Daughter, Myself

2011-01-30T20:51:00.000-05:00

In just a 17 days, my daughter, the adorable one, turns 2. There's a lot of twoishness going on - pickiness about nearly everything, from what she eats and wears to whether she wears anything at all, temper tantrums, the ever-enjoyable turning into a limp noodle-being and sinking to the floor when she doesn't want to go somewhere, and a whole big lot of the word 'no'. Pretty normal for an almost 2 year old, all things considered.

I love to watch her though. She's curious about pretty much everything, and she's convinced with the right balloon she could fly. She's outgoing, and seems to have an idea about people - more than once she's provided a hug to someone at exactly the right time. It's like she has a 6th sense about that kind of thing. I both love to watch her grow right before me, and pray that she doesn't grow too fast. I get the empty nest thing now, I know I will be both proud, and deeply saddened when it's her turn to fly off.

Motherhood has changed me. It's inevitable, really - parenthood starts when a rather smallish little dictator is delivered to unsuspecting parents. Babies are adorable dictators, but dictators still. All of a sudden, you go from being all about you - albeit not as svelte a you as perhaps you were accustomed to being before the advent of the whole pregnancy thing - to being all about someone other than you.

But that's not the surprising part. I sort of expected that part, although the sheer brutality of 12 months without a single night of more than 5-6 hours of sleep (and often less) would startle anyone.. anyone who could work up the energy to be startled, that is. To be honest, I still don't often get a good night's sleep. But even that isn't the really big surprise.

The really big surprise is that not only did parenthood change my focus, it changed the way I see the world. If I had empathy before, but it's nothing like now. Kids who are hungry, in need of medical care, or heck, just winter boots - are deeply upsetting to me. Our giving, both planned and ad-hoc, has gone up exponentially in this area. To the point where Sander occasionally attempts to remind me that saving the world is beyond our means.

But in many areas, it's also crystallized my feelings. I think some things to me are more fixed and firm than they were before. I'm open minded about some things, and about most people, but I'll never be able to vote Republican. I tend to think that motherhood forced me to become a more ruthless editor of my life - tossing out once and for all the possibilities that likely will never fit me so that there's room for the possibilities that may. There's that cliche about never saying never, but I think it's okay sometimes. I've made it to 37 years old and still don't like lima beans, I'm comfortable saying that they will never cross my doorstep. The only way you are getting lima beans down my throat is if it's 50 years from now when I'm drooly and in the old folks home. Because by then I might not care, or be able to tell the pureed lima beans from the pureed peas.

Motherhood has also helped me to understand loss. To have a child is to forever have that little finger of fear in your heart. I know enough people who have either lost a child or children who have lost a parent while they were still young to not feel vulnerable. And a recent loss of our own over Thanksgiving, of a baby in the first trimester brings that possibility of loss much more in the present. I literally thank God every day for keeping the adorable one healthy and safe.

Parenthood has made my marriage infinitely more solid...and infinitely more fragile. It took a while for us to adjust, but we're more of a team than we've ever been, and rediculously happy to boot. That said, I'm now so much more aware of what could go wrong.

And I even now get why someone like Michelle Duggar keeps doing the baby thing. It's hard to look at your child as a blessing and not see more as a blessing too. Not going for 19, not even more than 2 - but I do understand it.

I get what it means to love someone just for loving your child.

I get why parents will give up everything and anything to ensure their child has what he or she needs.

Motherhood is a funny thing. It takes what you think you know about the world and upends it on it's ear. But you don't really mind, and after a while it starts to seem rather normal..after a while, you wonder how you could have ever seen the world any different.

My daughter is about to turn 2, and it's a milestone for me too. There's no Peep and the Big Wide World party for my milestone, but that's okay - it's one any mother or father could recognize.

Is There Enough Oil To Fuel The Economic Recovery We All Want?

2011-01-04T21:02:00.000-05:00

Allow me to direct your attention to Jeffrey Rubin's very interesting question here.

I'm not saying he's right or wrong. But I thought it was a fascinating, and prescient take on our current economic conundrum.

Is there? No idea, but it will be interesting to find out.

Disconnecting

2011-01-02T06:00:00.004-05:00

This year, for the first time, I took the week between Christmas and New Year's off. It's a good week to take off in the corporate world - there is little going on, and most people take at least some vacation.

We didn't go anywhere - we've been on the road a lot this year, between weekends to visit family, our 1200-mile road trip this summer, a few trips up to Moosehead Lake, where my husband and his parents have cabins, and some other random trips, so some time home was a good idea.

Still it was busy - a good chunk of time was spent on the perpetual tidying-up wheel as a steady stream of visitors came through last week, starting on Christmas day and running up until New Year's Eve. Okay, one of those visitors was my mother, who came over for a few hours so that we could have a date - we even achieved the holy grail of parents with a toddler, seeing a movie...in the theater. Yes, folks, it can happen (it only took us 22 months) Alert the media.

But we spent a lot of time relaxing and doing stuff as a family, which was great. I think the greatness was augmented by the fact that with a few sanctioned exceptions, when I needed to remote in to work, I totally disconnected. I read the news online in the mornings, but that was about it. Whole days went by when I didn't even check email on my blackberry.

The end of November and all December was a bit like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride for me, and as a result, for my husband and daughter. I had a fair amount of work and non-work commitments, and to top it off, I ended up stepping in at the last minute for a major transition in my - not my client - company unexpectedly in early December, when the person who owned the work I took over had a double family emergency. By the time I came up for air from that, the holidays were in full swing, and we were not ready. So we headed in to Christmas at a dead run, which wound down oh...about 9:15 am Christmas morning when I got the turkey stuffed and in the oven. While a room full of people was waiting for me so that they could open presents.

Fun, right?

So I owed my family some time, after long workdays followed by weeknights and weekends of 'I just need a few hours to...' . Disconnecting meant some requests didn't get answered in a timely manner, and that I punted on a few things I probably should have stepped up for. But it was worth it, because I managed for the first time in a while to put my family first, above all the other stuff going on. And wow, did they need it. So did I.

My life - and many others around me - have become about 24/7 contact. Texts are expected to be answered in minutes, not hours. IM is the norm at work, which is a mixed blessing. It saves me from endless conference calls, but it is a pain in the butt, and has interrupted more work than I prefer to think about. I used to go days without answering email, but now I answer it daily. Our new normal is to be available...always.

And I think it's a really mixed bag. Sure, instant information is handy. But the constant flow of texts, emails, IMs and alerts means that few things happen uninterrupted these days. There's always something external that needs paying attention to, and opportunities pass by those who don't stay on top of the stream of data that flies our way. But relationships are the best thing in my life.

Because I disconnected, I got to fully enjoy introducing my daughter to real, live penguins at the aquarium without distraction. I got to spend a full hour talking to my 90 year old great aunt about her experiences as a nurse in the Phillipenes during World War II when I visited her in the hospital while she recuperates from a fall. I spent long hours talking to my husband about everything and anything. I played blocks, dinosaurs and chase with my daughter, minus the almost ever-present feeling that I should be doing something else. I slept in, took naps, and read.

My life doesn't often afford me the opportunity to sign off for a few days. But I think I'm going to make it an annual goal to do so every year at the holidays. It's far too easy to overlook the really important stuff when the texts are flying.

Should You Have New Year's Resolutions?

2011-01-01T06:00:00.002-05:00

I set new year's resolutions every year. Sometimes I keep them, sometimes I don't. Sometimes, around April or May of a given year, I find myself racking my brains to even remember what those resolutions were.

It's a process.

But I plan to keep making resolutions, and here's why:

I think setting goals and not meeting them is better than no goal-setting. I also believe that writing down one's goals (note to self: writing them on post-it notes you then proceed to lose is not a good methodology) helps you achieve those goals, even if you never look at that piece of paper or blog post again. I am a case in point, see my note to self above. I couldn't tell you why that works, but it does.

Whether you set those goals on January 1st or August 14 doesn't matter. It's the setting of them, writing them down, and then taking specific actions to move in the direction of achieving them that matters.

So what are my goals for 2011? I have a few, in a few different categories.

Blog-Related
1. Blog more. I certainly did better than in 2009, but I'd like to manage 5-7 blog posts a week. I think it's achievable, but it will take a commitment to do so.

2. In conjunction with that, a redesign of my site and a concerted effort to move more traffic to it.

Personal
1. Spend more time in the garden. This is also a way to add focused family time to our lives, as well as increasing our food yields and improving our landscaping.

2. Exercise more. Between work, which is rarely just 40 hours, commuting 2+ hours a day most weekdays, family life, friends, and external commitments, this is just one thing I have not managed to fit in. But I need to figure this one out, because it's having a detrimental effect on my life.

3. Less TV. Because we're so tired so much of the time, TV is the default entertainment most nights. Because of that, we've pushed off other things that may be just as enjoyable. I'll shoot for 1 night a week free of TV.

4. Spend more time with friends. Sadly, because of the reasons in #2, friends often get bumped to the bottom of the list. I need to work on that.

Professional
1. Start work on my PMP. It's something I've pushed off

2. Use my network to continue to try and drum up both clients for my company and work for my husband

Sustainability
1. Plant more fruit trees and perennials, such as berries.

2. Enlarge the garden

3. Insulate and re-side our house, which will help with how much heating oil we burn.

4. Grow and/or find more sources of local food, and spend more time preserving it.

Well, it's a long list, but even if I only get it half done, that's pretty good. It will be interesting to see how the list turns out.

Happy New Year!!

How about you? Do you make resolutions? Why or why not?

7 Web Sites to Help You Become Someone Else

2010-12-16T10:11:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm not referring you to fake ID sites. But most of us daydream about the what-ifs - a teacher who wishes to become an author, or jettisoning the corporate world for a small farm, that sort of thing, or even just master a style of cooking. Here are 7 web sites that can help you learn a new skill, even if just for fun:

1. You want to master Italian cooking
Go here: Vincent Scordo's blog is nothing short of brilliant, and his recipes are the real deal. Be prepared to develop an arancini addiction.

2. You want to learn how to think like, or become, a CEO
Go talk to Eric. At the very least you'll be entertained by his narration of his Acela trip to New York City. I can relate -back in my public transport days, I must have had a sign on my back that read: If you ate too much garlic for dinner last night, and it's eking out your pores, plus you like to elbow people when you turn the pages of your newspaper, sit next to me! I really don't miss that. I'm all for public transport. Hold the garlic.

3. You want to be prepared for the Apocalypse, or at least become one of those mountain man types
Actually, some of the articles and information on Backwoods Home's website is quite good. And if you are looking for an all-camo wardrobe and a 5-year supply of freeze-dried food, these are the folks that can help with that.

4. You want to become a consultant
Years of watching consultants work at your firm have convinced you that the lifestyle is one of travel and glamour. (PSA: travel is often a yes, glamour not so much) Go read Consultant Journal. Good blog, good information.

5. You want to escape the Rat Race
If you want a career change, or to retire early, there's a lot of web sites out there to help. But the most thoughtful and well-written article I think I've ever read on the topic is here. For help with executing an early retirement plan, try here.

6. You want to develop the next cool mobile device app - but don't have unlimited funds
Go here first. Then do some googling. Even if you don't, reading Business Insider is a good idea.

7. You want to be the next reality TV star
Think Mike Holmes has nothing on you? Have more kids and better hair than Kate Gosselin?
Go here to learn how to get the cameras trained on you. But be careful what you wish for...

Well, there you have it. Just remember to tell all your future fans that you learned it here.

How Does My Garden Grow: 2011 Planning Edition

2010-12-14T21:43:00.002-05:00

Today I skipped right past the holidays, ignoring the fact that I still have a gobzillion presents to wrap and baking to do - and ordered some seeds for next year's garden.

Since I haven't done a full seed order in a couple years, nor have I kept track of the age of my seeds (PSA: most seeds increase, instead of decrease, germination year over year for a period of several years. Onions and the rest of the allium family are an exception), it was time for a new seed inventory. I promise to keep better track of this one.

My seed orders have improved over the years. For one thing, I have a better handle on what we don't have success with, and what will get eaten vs. passed over once picked. Do not talk to me of the nutritional value of rutabagas - I don't like them, and to paraphrase a former president, I'm 37 years old and I don't have to eat them if I don't want to. You can mail my portion of rutabagas to the hungry children in Africa, okay?

I'll even provide the envelope.

So there.

But despite that, I still get sucked into descriptions of French heirloom winter squashes (note to the squeamish, those bumps are created by the sugars in the pumpkin, which means it's sweet and tasty), tomato breeds created by Thomas Jefferson, beans bred by my own ancestors, the Cherokee, and so on. If it says old and rare, I probably want it.

Because growing Reisentraube tomatoes, Vert Grimmpant melons (don't you just love the name Grimmpant? If we ever get a pet we're totally naming him or her Grimmpant. If I get my way, that is.), and Yok Kao cucumers is totally cool. Would you like some Bleu of Solaise lettuce? Doesn't it sound like it needs to be in a salad with blue cheese, candied walnuts and maple-roasted pears?

I do. But maybe I'm just hungry.

We'll also grow some things the adorable one can enjoy - she's already planted last year's garden with us, and has become an expert at raspberry picking. We can't seem to convince her to wait until the tomatoes are actually ripe to pick them, but what's a few cherry tomatoes sacrificed on the alter of learning to love being outdoors? So this year we'll add miniature pumpkins, birdhouse gourds, and more annual flowers. All the flowers, too, are old school - sweet peas, bachelor's buttons, love-in-a-mist, pansies, bells of ireland, and my personal favorite:

   Kiss me over the garden gate.
   The name says it all, does it not?

When the adorable one is a little older, say, in a year, we'll add Four O'Clocks too, and I'll read her the poem by my favorite unlikely poet about the naughty Four O' Clocks who refused to have their faces washed.

We're also going to add apricot trees, a couple Cornelian cherry trees, and some blackberries. I'd like to put in more apples and some peach trees, but we have to take down some trees first.
I'd love to have some nut trees too, but space and the layout of our land do not permit it at the moment.

Oh well.

I'm in no rush for the holidays or winter to be over. But gardening is important, and not just because I love to do it. The number of people in this country that are food insecure is rapidly increasing. Kitchen gardens are one way to solve that problem - perhaps even the best way.

Chew on this from 1943-45:

The US Department of Agriculture estimates that more than 20 million victory gardens were planted. Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9-10 million tons, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables. So, the program made a difference.

We grew, during WWII, 9-10 million tons of food in our front and back yards.

Imagine what knowing we could, with just a few minutes a week, produce 9-10 million tons of fresh food from our back yards would do for our national optimism, which, quite frankly, could do with a bit of a bump. What it might do for those going hungry. What it might do for our own health and weight. Imagine the wonder that kids have when they grow a pumpkin themselves, or make a birdhouse out of a gourd, or run through a field of giant sunflowers. Imagine it's your kid.

It could happen again - one Quadrato D'asti Rosso pepper at a time.

Yes, Madeline, There Really Is a Santa Claus

2010-12-09T09:48:00.000-05:00

For weeks now, the back corner of my living room has looked like a department store threw up in there. So has my guest room, but that's a different Christmas altogether.

For the last several years, Sander and I have 'adopted a family' for the holidays, through Beverly Bootstraps, a local food pantry and outreach organization. For the last two years, my in-laws have joined us, and basically doubled our ability to provide Christmas for a needy family.

The lists are heartbreaking. Sizes for coats and shoes, needs for mittens and hats and underwear described. This year the family that my parents 'got' had a little boy who needed a blanket for his bed. I can only desperately hope his family doesn't wait until Christmas to give it to him. All too often, these are single parents, working and out of work, who can barely break even, and face the reality of having to hold out their hat for a donation or tell their kids that Santa isn't coming this year.

We go a little overboard on the giving. Everyone has some 'societal trigger' - something wrong with the world that bothers them more than anything. For me it's kids being hungry and cold. I find it utterly inexcusable, and totally frustrating. It's not that I don't care about the cold and hungry adults- I do. But kids are powerless to control or change their situations. Add on top of that the notion that Christmas is the time of year that the discrepancy between children that are 'haves', like my daughter, are in stark relief to the 'have not' children themselves - they know they aren't getting what other kids are - and that hunger actually affects a child's brain development, and you not only get the short term pain of no presents under the tree, but the long term societal impact of kids who grow into adults that are starting life out 10 steps behind the rest of us.

The shopping and sorting and dropping off has become the marker of my holiday for me. I love Christmas with my family. With every decoration we add to the house my daughter's excitement grows palpably. I love to cook Christmas dinner, and I love the lights and decorations. Cutting a Christmas tree from the tree farm next door and hauling it home is a favorite tradition.

But that's the fun. For me, Christmas is knowing that this year, 3 kids and their Mom get to believe Santa Claus is real.

My husband and my mother-in-law dropped everything off yesterday. The pile in my living room is gone.

And so Christmas for me is over, even as it is just beginning.

This year, Beverly Bootstraps had 75 more applications for their holiday 'adopt a family' program than last year. I'm happy to say that they covered every single family, and have extras toys to give out to walk-in parents as the season goes on.

Theory of Economic Relativity: The Cost of Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

2010-11-24T06:00:00.011-05:00

Over the last few weeks, our hot water heater has started acting up. Some mornings we get water so hot you could cook an egg in the shower on the cool setting. Other mornings, it's on the lukewarm side at best.

So this week we'll have someone out to look at it. Could be just a sensor, could be the whole thing is on it's last legs.

I like to be proactive about these things, and not wait until it dies, which will inevitably be on a morning when I'm midway through the shower, with shampoo suds running down my back, and I'm going to be late to a meeting. They say that Alfred Hitchcock turned the water to freezing cold without warning Janet Leigh during the shower scene of Psycho in order to get the appropriate reaction from her, although Leigh denied it. Still, I've no doubt it would be effective. There's nothing like an icy blast of water to elicit a shriek.

Water heaters are pricey, but in the realm of home repair, not that big of a deal. Traditional heaters run about $600 plus installation. Tankless heaters are more expensive, running about $1000 + installation, but much more energy efficient. If you can afford it, tankless is the way to roll.

But then there is the commitment we made to 'go solar' the minute it became feasible. A grid-tied solar heating system is really costly, and low on the priority list right now, as it falls behind other big projects that are a tad more urgent, like insulating and residing the house. But solar hot water is another story.

Solar hot water systems are more expensive than traditional systems. We haven't yet gotten a quote on one, but let's give a safe estimate of maybe $3000-$3500 to install. Which is a bunch more than $1000 for a tankless heater. Still, a recent post on my sister's blog put this into perspective - and I'll quote her quoting her friend:

My friend Pat Meadows, a very, very smart woman, has a wonderful idea she calls “The Theory of Anyway.” What it entails is this – she argues that 95% of what is needed to resolve the coming crises in energy depletion, or climate change, or most other global crises are the same sort of efforts. When in doubt about how to change, we should change our lives to reflect what we should be doing “Anyway.” Living more simply, more frugally, using less, leaving reserves for others, reconnecting with our food and our community, these are things we should be doing because they are the right thing to do on many levels. That they also have the potential to save our lives is merely a side benefit (a big one, though).

So in other words, if solar is the moral choice in our opinion - and it is - we have an obligation to look at implementing it.

Still, the difference (for argument's sake, let's go with a $3200 estimate) in cost is big. If a tankless heater is $1000 + installation - let's call it $1500, and a solar system is $3200 + installation - let's call it $4k, then that's a $2500 difference in cost.

Let's say we take advantage of the 30% tax credit that we'd get early next year when we file our taxes. That brings the cost down to $2700. Then lets say it saves us $30 on our electric bill for the next 10 years. That means that at the end of 2020, we've come up with a net profit of $900.

It's a long haul investment, to be sure. And it's a bunch of dough out of the gate. But it has the result of being both the 'anyway' choice and being an economic benefit over many years. It is one of those places where our morals and our pocketbook get to come together, which is what I call 'economic relativity'.

What will we do? Not sure yet. But I like the fit.

Radical Thinking in the Garden

2010-11-23T14:21:00.002-05:00

If you have an extra 5 minutes today, go read this invitation to the Tea Party by Dar Williams.
It's just brilliant, spot on, absolutely on target.

If you are still here, here's a little bit to whet your appetite:

"As you might have guessed, I don't want to scrap what you might call big government. I distrust big business more than big government. But often enough the two entities have been bedfellows with silk sheets and matching toothbrushes, so I'm willing to meet you halfway. I'll meet you in a community garden. Community gardens close the loop, decentralize power, and let people help people, addressing issues that differ from region to region. They improve our physical health and increase self-reliance. With greater strength of the community mind and body, we're better able to deflect the buzz and hype of anyone that does not have our best interests at heart. We The People can do that."

Radical thinking at it's best.

Oh, and if you thought my idea that keeping kids warm, well-fed and safe was a means to a brighter future was idealistic or simplistic, go read this. Even the Washington Post agrees with me.

Holidays are the Gateway to Seed Season

2010-11-23T08:54:00.001-05:00

Back in the day when my husband and I were in the midst of planning our wedding, which, being a somewhat DIY affair, was a time-intensive undertaking, my older sister gave me some particularly sage advice.

"The wedding", she said with a wise nod, having done the deed herself a few years back, "is the gateway to the honeymoon".

And whenever wedding planning got overly time consuming, as fun as it was, we reminded ourselves that it was the ticket to the 11 days we were spending up in the Canadian Rockies hiking and having daily cocktail hours.

I feel similarly as the holidays approach. I love the winter holidays. There's eating, there's parties, there's cutting down a Christmas tree, there's eggnog, and mulled cider, and cookies. Every gathering seems to involve mashed potatoes, and heck, you could invite me to a closet cleaning if you served me mashed potatoes. Especially if they have cheese in them.

But I digress.

Still, the holidays can be a lot of work. There's the shopping and wrapping and baking.  Our December weekends seem to book up by mid-June. And so as the relative chaos grows, and my living room becomes buried under a pile of pine needles and ribbon scraps, I start to look forward to January. A lot.

Because January is when the seed catalogs arrive. And so while everyone else is complaining about the dark and the cold (I whine about it too, just with a 2-week lag while I drool over descriptions of pumpkins and tomatoes), I'm curled up on the couch making lists of things to plant, and with drafting paper, planning where the seeds will go.

I always buy too many. I'm always far more ambitious with the seeds I start than the space I have. But I love seed season - because it reminds me, in the dark and cold of winter, that soon the snowdrops will peek up over the crusts of snow in the yard, and the ice will, eventually, 4 months later, melt.

Usually I'm in no rush though. I'm content to tuck the yard and garden in every year and take the breather that is January-March. No leaves to rake, no weeding to do, few social demands - it's respite from the endless business of planting, growing and harvesting, the start of every year. Lots of soup and bread dinners in front of the woodstove.

But I still plot and plan about growing season again.   We all have to choose what we work for. Some people build things in clay or brick. I like to build in dirt.

When the sun rises, I go to work.

When the sun goes down I take my rest,

I dig the well from which I drink,

I farm the soil which yields my food,

I share creation, Kings can do no more.

- Chinese Proverb, 2500 B.C.

Hobby Shopping

2010-11-22T08:30:00.001-05:00

This past Saturday, my husband and I took a wine making class at Old Sturbridge Village. We've been wanting to make wine for a long time, and so when news about the class popped up this summer, just as my parents were asking me what I wanted for my birthday, we jumped on it.

On the surface, wine making is pretty simple. You can pretty much turn anything into wine - fruit, vegetables, stinky athletic socks, whatever. All you need is water, sugar, fruit (I'm skipping the sweat socks myself, your mileage may vary) and yeast. A food-grade plastic bucket to ferment it in, a few sterilized glass bottles to rack it in, and food-grade tubing to siphon it with. Listerine makes for a great sterilizing agent for your corks and tubing and that sort of thing. Rubber gaskets and corks may be the most expensive part of the deal, and those can be reused, albeit carefully. The bucket can be gotten for the asking from a local restaurant. Glass bottles can be picked up at a recycling center. If you plan to strain your ingredients, bleach an old pillow case.

Wine making can be dead cheap. Well, okay, unless you want to make really good wine, then it can get more complicated, and potentially more expensive. But you can make some pretty good stuff with a minimum of cost and effort. After all, people have been making wine for thousands of years before you could have frozen grapes shipped from Napa or before a hydrometer was even invented.

Which brings me to my philosophy around hobbies. The modern approach to hobbying seems to be an expensive one. Take biking, or skiing. Buy expensive, brand-new bike or skis. Buy matching gear and single-purpose footwear (bike shoes that clip in, say, or $300 ski boots). Then go out and play, after an investment of considerable money. By then, of course, playing is serious business. After all, look at what you have spent!

My personal opinion is that approach is backwards. First decide if you like to do something, having made the most minimal investment possible, then put your money into it. Let's take that biking example again. Borrow, buy on CraigsList, or find on sale an inexpensive bike. Buy a helmet, since spending $30 is worth not spending your remaining days as a drooling vegetable. Put on some old sneakers and go for a ride. Enjoy.

Love it? Fine, invest. Padded bike shorts definitely make long rides more pleasant. Better, lighter bikes are much faster and easier to lug around, and you'll offset the cost by reselling your old bike anyway. Hate it? Resell your cheap stuff and make your money back.

You may not look as fancy, but that isn't the point of a hobby. The point is to take up something you enjoy. I can't tell you how many good sets of golf clubs I see at yard sales for a fraction of the cost, after spending a few years gathering dust in the owner's basement.

Try it first. Decide if you like it. Then spend your money. Chances are you'll make better decisions about what to buy anyway.

Not Exactly E.M. Forster

2010-11-20T06:00:00.034-05:00

Do you ever read something someone has written and think "That was perfect. I might as well just hang up my keyboard right now."

That's how I feel about this blog: The Occasional CEO

I have nothing but admiration for good writing - something I hope someday someone will say about my writing (I'm not there yet and not fishing for compliments. Really). Really good writing? Rare, even in the world of 100 million blogs.

Eric's blog is simultaneously informative, witty, interesting, and smart. Go read it. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.00, skip a day of work if you have to. Fortunately, reading The Marshmallow Test might only make you 5 minutes late to a meeting. You might even leave the meeting with a promotion.

Why are you still here, anyway?

And by the way, if you haven't read A Passage To India, by the man this blog post is named after, get thee to a library. There are a lot of books out there. Few are perfect. This one is.

Are You Allowed To Enjoy Unemployment?

2010-11-19T08:36:00.003-05:00

So, my husband is unemployed. If you've been following along for the last few months, you know this.

Next month he begins to fall into the category of Long Term Unemployed which has a whole host of negative connotations especially if you listen to certain individuals, who apparently think that those who can't find a job have a host of personal failings the rest of us are immune to, and perhaps should just float away on an ice floe, so as not to continue to bother the rest of us hardworking, morally superior Americans who are employed.

Huh. I've never quite understood that particular line of thought, and I'm grateful that the people around me don't either.

Unemployment brings out a lot of different emotions during the course of it, especially the type of unemployment that the current economy has brought about. It's scary, it's overwhelming, it's filled with uncertainty, it can make people question their own self worth.

But it can also be a lot of fun.

I can hear the lynch mob screaming, even as I type. "Unemployment should not be fun! Unemployment is serious business. These people are taking money from other hardworking Americans! Unemployment is probably enjoyed only by those people who want a permanent government handout, and prefer to sit on their lazy asses all day!"

Let's ignore those moralizing basilisks for a moment though, while I make another, more important point.

More Important Point: I do not mean to make light of unemployment. At all. It IS scary. And it makes people who want nothing more than to go to work lose their homes, their savings, and creates food insecurity, which, in a country as bountiful and full of plenty as ours is - well, the fact that people around us can't be sure if they can feed themselves is shameful.

But I'm a firm believer that you only get one life. And that life is meant to be enjoyed as much as possible. Even when money is tight and you don't know what is going to come next.

Money is important. But when you get right down to it, money is not the value of a human being.

14.9 million people are unemployed. More are coming to join their ranks this December. And walking around in a state of puritanical misery is neither good for the economy, their individual job prospects, or their mental and physical health. Adopting an unemployment hair shirt also teaches the children of said unemployed that money = happiness.

Let me repeat that, because I think it may be the most important thing I have ever written: It teaches their children that money = happiness and lack thereof should = unhappiness.

Now really, is that the lesson we want the next generation to come away with?

One of the greatest gifts my parents gave me is how to have fun on very little. It's not a gift in the sense that being able to have fun without money is somehow morally superior to having fun with money. Not at all. In many ways, it's much easier to have fun with money. And often I crave the type of fun that money brings. As we all do. Nothing wrong with that.

But.

To teach your kids - or yourself - to have fun, and to see adventure even when circumstances are less than ideal gives not only a sense of safety in an uncertain world, but it grants a level of resilience as well. In other words, having fun is healthy. Normal. And really really important. Let's quantify this - who would you rather hire, the person who is optimistic and hopeful, or the person who walks around pissing and moaning?

Yeah, I thought so.

So here's the thing: Enjoying unemployment may be the best way to stop being unemployed. Heck, enjoying your life is probably the best way to have a good one under any circumstances.

That doesn't mean you stop looking for a job, or spend lots of money on unnecessary things, but it does mean that perhaps if you are unemployed, you consider doing some of the things you have never had time for - stuff around the house, volunteering, learning a new skill, that sort of thing.

Life is uncertain by it's nature. So have a little fun, will ya?

Here are some ways you might go about it.

The Best Of MoneyPenny

2010-11-11T12:45:00.006-05:00

After almost 4 years of blogging erratically, I've written um, a decent number of posts. Some were good. Some were bad. Some were even really really good.

Here's the best of the best, for your reading pleasure:

1. 7 Beliefs That Prevent Wealth
If you aren't accumulating assets, some of your beliefs might be in the way.

2. Poverty Of The Soul
I worry about a society that thinks the amount of money you have equals the quality of you as a person.

3. About Those HENRYS
High Income, Not Rich Yet people are often confused with the weathy. Here's my take on HENRYs

4. Peak Oil and Us (You, Me, Everyone) Part 1: What Is It, and Why Do I Care?
What is peak oil? Why should I care?

5. How To Prepare For The Apocalypse Part 1
What you need to know, just in case.

6. To Be or Not To Be Mathematically Optimal
Money is not just about numbers.

7. How To Avoid a Descent Into Madness
What to do when life spins out of control.

8. 12 Goats, 2 Chickens, and a Camel
Negotiation is an art.

9. Plan For The Worst, Hope For The Best
It can keep you out of hot water.

The Real Problem With The Economy

2010-11-11T08:41:00.004-05:00

Happy Veteran's Day to me and all the other Vets out there. Thank you for your service!

Last night as I was driving home, I heard this interview on NPR. Paul Auster has a new book out, and it's about, amongst other things, home loss due to foreclosure.

I'd been thinking about the economy again during my ride home. It's something that I, along with many of my fellow Americans, think about a lot these days. And something the author said during the interview hit me square in the chest.

Auster says that home is a place where you should feel absolutely safe. "It's the place where you don't really have to defend yourself," the author says, speaking from his Brooklyn brownstone. "I think that's the idea everyone holds in his head, is that this is the place you are welcome no matter what you've done, no matter how rocky things have become for you. And unfortunately not everyone has this refuge."

And I got it. For the first time I could put into words why we as a nation have gone from hopeful to perpetually anxious in the last nine years.

We don't feel safe.

Too many CEOs enhance their profit margins by cutting jobs instead of, oh, I don't know, making something good. And we're complicit in this one too - cheering as our stock value rises, even as our colleagues are packing up their desks. It's just business, right?

We don't feel safe in our jobs. It's no longer a matter of how hard you work.

Too many of us have watched someone go from the top of the world to the bottom. One of my colleagues watched his neighbor, a highly paid exec, lose his job, be out of work for 2+ years, and then the house, the retirement funds, all of it - because few, if any, of us can last forever without income.

We don't feel safe in our homes. It feels risky to have a mortgage, it's just one more exposure.

Too many of us have watched our 401ks and IRAs lose value, or just hold steady, over and over again.

We don't feel safe for retirement. It's almost certain that a huge percentage of the population will not be able to sustain themselves.

In short, the places that are supposed to be safe are now areas of deep insecurity.

I grew up poor. Subsidized housing for the first few years of my life, actually. And it has far-reaching impacts on many areas of your life when you grow up without.

1 in 5 kids right now is growing up in poverty. The impacts, both long-term and short are well-documented. Being hungry or cold or perpetually worried shortens the focus. Instead of keeping one's eyes on goals, one's eyes become focused on much shorter term things- enough clothes, enough food.

In short, survival.

When you are focused on survival, it's hard to think about things like getting an A on the test. Long term life success is out there in the future - it's not like today. Today is now, present. We want kids focused on their future? Keep them warm, well fed and safe. You want to sustain the arts, build America's scientific acheivements, create a strong job market? Keep kids warm, well-fed, and safe. You want everyone to be able to stand on their own two feet?

KEEP KIDS WARM, WELL-FED AND SAFE. It really is that simple. Until we figure out how to create a sense of safety and well-being for our society again - not just optimism for the middle class, but optimism that one can rise out of poverty, we're going to be stuck here, in this rather unpleasant place of worry, fear and insecurity.

No one wants to see their hard-earned money go out the door. I've yet to meet a liberal that thought all the social programs were particularly well run. But I've yet to meet a private interest that didn't have it's own agenda or set of preferences in dealing with people. We need to figure out a way to invest in our future, which might just be heat, hot water, soap, food, abuse prevention, a winter coat, a safe place to live, and a lot of hugs. No, I'm not just idealistic. If you want long-term strategic thinking from someone, they have to be able to focus past the immediate to move on to the long run.

Some individuals can do that without the things listed above, but that doesn't mean that they are stronger or better than those who can't. It just means that there was some external or internal force that helped them along.

We need to figure out how to make our current population of adults feel safer in their jobs and homes. But until we figure out how to do it for the kids in our world, over the long haul, we're not ever going to feel safe again.

Stay The Course

2010-11-10T16:39:00.001-05:00

“To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Over the course of the last 5 months, my husband and I have gone from what was a deep sense of unease with his unemployment, to at least a relative sense that no matter what happens, we're okay.

While we still haven't sorted out all the details we need to, we think that we've reached a place where we can afford our life - minus some of the previously enjoyed luxuries, adding in some new and equally enjoyable things - for the long haul. And by afford, I mean that we can still save for retirement, put a little in the bank, and maybe take the occasional vacation. We just need to stay on careful track. Which is okay, neither of us really minds short term constraints for long term gain.

So we're lucky. And I never forget it. Except those occasional times when trading short term constraints for long term gains gets annoying and frustrating, and I want to skip town for a weekend. Or something.

It's very easy to go off course, and start thinking 'well, maybe we could just..." And all of a sudden, I find myself pricing out a trip or something like that.

It's not that I'm into self-sabotage. It's that I get bored or tired or cranky, or some combination thereof, and I want a change. Preferably one that involves a jacuzzi tub in some hotel or bed and breakfast.

It's not like I'll never have that, either. It's just that I get tired of waiting and planning for it. I call these moments having 'iwantsies'. Whether it's a weekend in the mountains, taking my daughter to a show she almost certainly isn't yet capable of sitting through, or replacing my entire wardrobe, the iwantsies are awfully inconvenient. They take up time, energy, and focus me on what I don't have instead of what I do.

Which is the thing I find especially annoying, since I'm working hard to never forget how lucky I am.

It most recently popped up around New Years Eve. In the BAOA era (before the adorable one arrived) we used to party with friends. Last year, we got chinese take out and were in bed by 10ish. This year, I started fantasizing about a luxury resort in the mountains, relaxing in front of a fire after a day in the snow and a 5-star dinner.

Then reality intervened. First, every hotel in the universe jacks up their prices for NYE. If we want to continue along the comfortable path, a $1200 weekend is not in the cards (and that was a cheap quote). Then there's the fact that the adorable one crashes at 7:30, tying one or both of us to said hotel room. 5-star dinners? With a toddler? Are you nuts?

Right then. But then I thought maybe we could go for just one night to a Christmas-themed park in the same mountains. Cheaper stay, lots of fun. Right?

Well, except that we really want to get the adorable one a kitten for Christmas. Leaving a kitten 2 days after getting it is just irresponsible. Oh, we could put it off. Getting the kitten, I mean - it could wait until January. But she loves 'Eeows', and we've been planning it, you see.

The reality is we could go if it really was important to us. But instead, I'm going to take the week between Christmas and New Year's off. We'll stay home, all of us, including the aforementioned future member of our family, the Eeow.

And on NYE, we'll sit in front of the fire made in our very own woodstove in the family room, or if we decide to be really wild and crazy, in the fireplace in the living room, and drink wine. And have a nice dinner, maybe of takeout, maybe not, depending on our lazy factor.

No packing, no stressing, no big expensive getaway. That's later. And what will we get in return? The knowledge that when we do go away later on, there's no guilt. No blowing the budget. That we're on course.

That is, unless I give in to temptation....

Peeling Pumpkins

2010-11-08T15:09:00.001-05:00

The first time I peeled a pumpkin and cooked it down into puree, I was about 25. The other day, I remembered why I'd waited 12 years to do it again.

It's not that I don't like fresh pumpkin, it blows away pumpkin puree out of the can. But peeling a pumpkin and cooking it down is a pain in the butt. No, actually, just the peeling part.

Usually when I want to peel a squash or a pumpkin, I slow roast it. But with puree, roasting does slightly change the flavor, and I just think it comes out better if you peel it and cook it down with just a teeny bit of water on the stove.

But like I said, it's a pain to peel a raw pumpkin. It went like this: we bought a beautiful cinderella-shaped pumpkin at a local farm stand last month. I was sucked in by the word heirloom and the lovely orange color. What can I say, I'm a sucker for a pretty squash.

So there it sat, on a shelf in the kitchen for a few weeks, waiting for the right moment. That moment was Saturday. I'd been fighting a cold, and was finally feeling better. We had a family party on Sunday, and I'd promised to make the cake. Pumpkin Chocolate Cake, to be exact, baked in my pumpkin-shaped Bundt pan. Okay, so I like pumpkins. A lot.

So I found myself, after a long day of errands, peeling pumpkin. Because I believe in local food, less packaging, and eating as close to (but with the dirt washed off, thank you very much) the earth as possible, this was the only way to start. Plus roasted pumpkin seeds are really really good.

1/2 way through, at about 25 minutes - it was a big pumpkin - I was thoroughly irritated and tired. 3/4 of the way through the pumpkin got wrapped in plastic wrap and I left it for later (later has not yet arrived).

In the end, I didn't have heavy cream for the cake anyway, so I made Gingerbread cake instead. With a toffee glaze. It was good. And I stuck the cooked pumpkin in the freezer for something else.

But it reminded me that sometimes, sometimes, convenience foods are awesome. And really convenient. No, they don't taste as good. Yes, they create environmental impact.

But dammit, a can opener is just so much easier to use.

And so it goes. Talk to me about it again in another 12 years.

Asking For It

2010-10-12T15:00:00.001-04:00

I want to talk about networking. And yes, this does have a monetary component.

I'm an okay networker. I'm very good at making friends with people I work with - you know, the 'I really like you and want to hang out with you outside of work' kind of friends. And over time, that's become something of a network. These are people I genuinely like, so it's easy.

Leveraging that network is something that I have long tried to avoid though. Mostly because I hate the idea that I might be using someone in a way I would hate to be used. I avoid that like the plague. I'm not good at asking for things like work, consideration for a position, whatever. I'll advocate to to the skies for someone else. But for me? It makes me feel sorta queasy.

Oh, I do it anyway. It's a requirement of being a consultant to let people know how you are the perfect fit to help them with a problem. But it makes me uncomfortable, and feels shallow.

Or it did. Something recently changed. My husband got laid off. For a little while, I hesitated in asking colleagues, clients and others if they would pass on his resume. I didn't want to be considered needy, or make anyone feel uncomfortable. And I didn't want my husband to be judged for needing a job.

My biggest fear stems from the fact that our society is pretty judgy about out of work people, despite the millions of them - and seems to have an idea that perhaps getting laid off is a personal failing. So while I would mention it, I skirted actually 'needing' anything from anybody. Because my husband is freaking awesome, and anyone that judges him like that deserves a hand sandwich or a slice of palm quiche. Okay, that's the Marine in me talking. I wouldn't really.

I think.

The reality is the best way to find a job in this economy is to know someone. And I know a lot of people. And so I've found myself stepping out of my shell and asking if I can send along his resume. If folks know of anything. How great he is. I've been surprised at the response. It's been great.

And I've been surprised at the change in me. I found myself comfortably telling the VP that recently hired me how it was going to make things easier for him, since I knew the people and the culture that we were trying to change in my current role. He agreed wholeheartedly that it was a great fit for just that reason. And now I know what to say for the next thing that comes up in this organization.

It's true, it's simple, and it's a sales pitch - and that last thing doesn't invalidate the truth of it.

29 Gifts and the Kindness of Strangers

2010-10-08T20:49:00.006-04:00

This week, I was the recipient of a gift. Quite a special one, actually. From a stranger.

We have a wedding to go to next Saturday, you see. The adorable one is invited as well. And well, she didn't have a dress.

Okay, so she has dresses - a couple corduroy jumpers for fall, and a couple really pretty holiday dresses that I got on clearance last winter, which it's a tad early to wear. But nothing for a wedding. And since that's the sort of dress that probably would never see another wearing, I hated to spend the money.

But, being her Mom, and seeing as we really wanted to bring her (this is a girl that loves a party), I bit the bullet, and started looking. I even asked for some input on a message board I frequent to see if I could come up with some inexpensive options.

And out of the blue, a woman, another mother, on the message board offered me the loan of a lovely dress her daughter had worn last winter. Just because my daughter needed a dress. You hear about the kindness of strangers all the time on the news, but this was one of those things that I never expected.

Along with the dress, she included the loan of a book, and a very nice handwritten note in a card. The book is called 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life by a woman named Cami Walker - suffers from MS. Had her life turned upside down by illness and pain. The premise of the book is that giving comes from a place of abundance, and that sharing what you have in a deliberate manner can change your life.

I was, of course, one of the gifts in my benefactor's 29 days of gifts.

So I opened it and started reading. "Oh heavens", I thought. "Feel good drivel."

But then I couldn't put it down. I read it through to the end in 3 days. And I was caught. As much by the generosity of the woman who had sent me the book as the book itself. I'm not a big fan of these sorts of things. But the 29 Gifts movement is something different.

Today was day 1. I gave a baby gift to my friend Kath, who just had a baby, her 3rd daughter. And I gave another gift too - my town hosts the oldest agricultural fair in the country, and the fairgrounds is about a 1/2 mile walk from my house. Traffic is absolutely horrific for the 10 days of the year the fair is going on - it can take hours to go a mile or two. So Sander and I offered, like we do every year to friends and family, our driveway as a parking spot - saving the traffic and the parking fee. I also offered the same to some colleagues. And tonight one of my colleagues took me up on it, and brought his family to my driveway. It was a small gift, but what matters is not the size or the dollar value. It made me feel good to do, he and his family are wonderful people.

Tomorrow we host a cookout, delayed since August. I guess gathering and feeding people we love and care for is a gift of sorts, but there may be another opportunity for giving as well. And I have something special in mind for Sunday.

If you get a chance, read the book. It's worth it.

And I'll keep you posted on my giving, which already seems to be giving back. Because I feel pretty darn good.

No Better Option - At Least For Now

2010-10-07T09:05:00.010-04:00

A lot of people read my blog - I know, because I look at the numbers, but I don't have a lot of followers or commentators. But interestingly, I had two fairly strong-minded commentators for my recent post It's Really Easy To Cop Out. Both came from backgrounds with an absence of abundance, and both decried the government as the way forward to social and financial well being for all.

It's a common refrain, especially these days.

A particularly interesting point in the lengthy and well-written comments was the idea that instead of supporting taxation for social programs, I should 'write a check to a charity'.
What's interesting is that we do support a lot of not for profit programs. We sponsor a child and give regularly in addition to World Vision. We support our church, which has a huge number of social programs it supports - in fact, I recently (gulp) became a co-chair of their capital campaign committee, which is working to create more resources to help more people. In addition to the dollars we tithe, I give up my time, missing bedtimes with my daughter, something I hate to miss, to ensure that their mission continues. Add to that our regular donations to a local food pantry, Beverly Bootstraps, the Salvation Army (bless them, really - they help the people most of us would cross the street to avoid, and that alone makes them worthy of our money), and our ongoing support of a Massachusetts living history museum that we love, Old Sturbridge Village, and I'd say that our giving is pretty well rounded.

I don't tell you this to toot my own horn. I tell you this so that you know that yes, we give - substantially in some cases, continue to give through a period of diminished income, and think that giving is important.

But there are limitations to charities. For one, they can pick and choose their audiences. I really don't believe in Catholic Charities social policies that demean women to lesser roles, and effectively rule out helping gays and other individuals that meet their perspective. I don't like it, but they are well within their rights to refuse to aid - it is, after all, their charity.

I'm not saying that the government does it all well or right. Obviously, they do not. But they have to help everyone - regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, age or any other potential limitor in the private charity space. And because of their size and scope, they can literally force the requirement to help people down the throats of those who would rather not. Personally, I think that's good. If the free market system was working, we wouldn't be in the economic place we are. Remember, government oversight didn't create this mess. Lack of it did. If you think Lloyd Blankfein is working for the greater good, you need to put down your crack pipe. If you think that the richest 5% controlling 85% of the wealth is good - and if you think they all earned it honestly, I can't tell you enough how wrong you are. You probably won't believe me, but you are.

I'm not a fan of ever-expanding government, but I've yet to see a proffered better way. The markets don't take care of those who cannot, or will not, care for themselves- and really, on some level does it matter if the fact of the matter is that someone will not step up and take care of themselves vs. those that cannot? Sure, it's easier to want to support the cannots, but ultimately, the will nots are the cannots for whatever reason. I'm not saying it's right that some people game the system. But I am saying it is our responsibility as a society to ensure that everyone has a place to stay, food in their stomachs and basic health care.

The measure of us as a people is how we treat our fellow human beings -especially those that need the most. I for one don't think I should get to decide who is deserving of help and who is not, rarely do we ever have all the facts about our fellow man.

Your mileage may vary with what I have to say. But screaming about the failure of the government is screaming about the failure of yourself to come up with a better option.

The Ebb and Flow of Money

2010-10-05T08:28:00.006-04:00

Back in my early twenties, when I landed on the IT infrastructure project that would launch my career, I was pretty broke. To make ends meet, I had been duct-taping together temp work with after hours retail work. I could pay the bills, but I was definitely not getting ahead.

Then I landed on an SAP implementation. Massachusetts was undergoing deregulation in the electric supply industry, and the company I worked for was buying up the electricity generating assets. A consulting partner was brought in to provide the expertise to implement a new operations and financial system.

It was late 1998 and early 1999 - still the days of wine and roses in the IT consulting world. And I found myself living in a curious state of dichotomy - on my smallish salary, I would go home to my lightly furnished apartment some nights for a dinner of mac n' cheese, but other nights I would go out with the consultants, and find myself eating fine food and drinking excellent wine at some of Boston's top restaurants. I started travelling for work, and the gap between my actual (income) means and my (expensed) lifestyle got even greater. I would be taking colleagues out to high-end steakhouses on my corporate card and staying weekly at the Hilton, while privately wondering how I was going to afford groceries until payday on Friday once I returned home.

It was a pretty odd way of living, to say the least.

Over the years my career took off, my means improved significantly, and the gap between my means and my lifestyle got smaller. If anything, most of the time my lifestyle allowed for a fairly abundant amount left over.

But in May, my husband lost his job. And so all of a sudden, I find myself back down that odd little rabbit hole in which I started my career: a $200 dinner with clients one night, packing leftovers for lunch the next day. Curiouser and Curiouser, as Alice would say.

It's not that we are scrounging, in fact quite the opposite - our means in comparison to our lifestyle has allowed for us to build up a cushion that protects us from most of the worst that the current economy is dishing out. And in point of fact, I almost always prefer leftovers for lunch, coffee from home and cooking in. We're in no danger of going hungry or losing our home, and we're still able to give of our time and money to causes we believe in. But it is a fairly odd way to live.

In thinking about it, I realized that I agreed with Suze Ormon that money flows through our lives like water. Sometimes a rush, sometimes as trickle. If you make a fist, you lose it all, but if you cup your hands you can fill them up with enough to quench your thirst.

Right now, money is flowing into our lives, but not at the rate that it once was. That's okay, we're figuring out how to adapt. It's interesting, revisiting a place so similar to where I started, where life is overabundant one moment, and not so much the next. I've learned - from way back when - that I can savor the leftovers as much as the good wine. And so the ebb and flow doesn't matter so much to me any more. Sure, I'd still like a swimming pool full of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, but it's not necessary for me to be happy.

And that is abundance indeed.

It's Really Easy to Cop Out

2010-09-22T09:40:00.003-04:00

You know, as I get older, I get more political, and more liberal. It's funny, because in my early 20s, I contended that grassroots upswells were for 'little people' who couldn't affect change. And now, I'm a believer.

Why? Because it's become clearer to me how far we have to go.

Here's what I believe.

It's really easy to say that health insurance or housing isn't a right when you have no worries of losing either.

It's really easy to say that the poor should pull themselves up by their bootstraps when you've never been poor, never had to dodge a gang on the way to work, never had to wonder if you'd have dinner on the table, and never had to work 3 jobs to keep a roof over your kids head.

It's really easy to say that women's rights don't need to be protected by the courts, as that jackass to end all jackasses, Antonin Scalia recently said, when you don't make less than your male counterparts just because you happen to wear a bra instead of a jockstrap.

It's really easy to say that we shouldn't extend unemployment benefits when you have a job.

It's really easy to say that extended unemployment keeps people from looking for a job when you don't have to worry about whether you are going to lose your house tomorrow morning, and have to live in your car.

It's really easy to say that the free market solves problems when deregulation over the last 20 years has benefited you and yours, and you aren't one of the millions who it hurt.

It's really easy to say that federal social programs are too expensive when you don't need them.

It's really easy to pretend that their aren't kids who are going hungry, without immunizations and medical care, and without basic needs when you don't see them every day.

It's really easy to say that people want to get a handout, when you don't have to see the shame on their faces when taking it.

These things are all cop outs. They are all said from positions of relative power, education, and well being. They are rarely said by the people that truly need the services and the help. Our government doesn't always do the best job, that's true. But human need is never so simple as 'get it together and get a job' or 'survival of the fittest'.

We're a society, we Americans. We're not just consumers, we're citizens. I was a US Marine. The one thing you know about your fellow Marines - whether you are BFFs or not - is that they have your back.

Somewhere along the way we've forgotten what it means to have our fellow American's backs. I pray that the current trend of selfishness takes a turn for the better. Because more people fell into poverty over the last 24 months than at any time since the depression. And if we don't have those people's backs, who is going to have ours if something bad happens to us?

Diary of a Working Mom - Part something-or-other

2010-09-20T06:00:00.001-04:00

So in the interest of sensible budgeting, we cut the housekeeper down to once a month. And you can tell. Or you could, except that I won't let you past the front door.

Sigh. It's not that it's a mess when she doesn't come by for 4 weeks because we do tidy up, vacuum and mop, it's just a tad dusty and the clutter breeds in the corners when we don't have to clear surfaces as often. We did dust for a dinner guest last week, but seeing as it's cobweb season (that is a season in my house, please don't ask) I noticed a few spiderwebs we missed after our guest left.

I'm not ready to give up my housekeeper yet. We could - it's $90 that we'd save, but it's still a lifesaver for us, so we've given up other things first. Eventually we'll probably have to - our income is still less than outgo with Sander out of work.

Interestingly, cutting back hasn't really bothered us too much. We miss our wine club, and a few other things, but we're not missing too much. We're even getting out some. More for picnics than lunches or dinners out, but we've made efforts to get out and do things, since we have time now.

In November we'll finally see some unemployment checks. We're not clear whether he'll be eligible for any extensions so we're assuming that we'll have unemployment from November-June, and at that point, we'll make hard decisions if this is still going on. Fortunately, we should be able to bank a little with unemployment to make up for some of the savings we've burned down.

Refinancing the house will save us about $360 a month, less than we hoped for, but definitely still worth doing. We decided to take the offered gift to pay off our 2nd mortgage, but as a loan. Still, our payments until he returns to work are about 1/2 the 2nd mortgage. And once he returns, we'll pay that loan off very aggressively.

We're going to a 25 year loan, and when Sander goes back to work, we'll return to the biweekly repayment plan that takes an additional 4 or so years off the loan. We're hoping to pay it off before we're making college tuition payments, so we'll up the ante as we can over the years. While we don't intend to retire here, we would like to stay for a long time.

So where does that leave us? With a fairly small delta of income to outgo, maybe $800 or so, maybe less, once unemployment runs out. If we get to that point, which I hope we don't. The sort of thing that can be made up for with part time work.

Assuming all goes well on my employment end, we should see my income rise a bit over the next few years as well. So eventually we could be fine, if we just hold out. And so we've tied the knot, and are going to hang on.

This whole process has been a learning experience for all of us. It's tough to get laid off, and it's tough to transition from income earner to full-time caregiver. My husband is a wonderful Dad, but there are some long days for him. For me, it's been tough to plan, and I'm a planner - giving up a bit of control-freakishness is good, but hard for me. For Kiera, she has seen tons of routine disruption and less social time with other kids, primarily her cousins. On the upside, she loves being with her Dad, and we're working hard to make sure she gets to spend time with other kids.

And it's been an adjustment to figure out our roles for all of us. But we've been lucky - if anything, this experience has made our marriage stronger, and taking full control of our daughter's routines (okay, she's got a lot of control there too, just try to make her nap when she doesn't want to) has probably made us better parents. When she returns to child care, I think we'll have a much better picture of what works for us as a family and what works for her in terms of environment.

Sander losing his job has ultimately been a mixed blessing. We've got less money but more time. We've had to react to circumstances instead of being able to choose the course, in many ways. But I think on the other end, I'm going to come to the conclusion that I wouldn't have traded this experience for an easier time of it. Watching my daughter and my husband bond like they have, and learning how to pull together even more than ever have been lessons that no amount of income can replace.

A Week in the Kitchen

2010-09-19T10:58:00.000-04:00

Our race to process and preserve all the food we brought home from upstate NY at the end of August took a total of 8 days, when we cut the final corn kernels off the cobs and froze them - not as sweet as if we'd gotten to it within the first day or so, but not bad, the peaches were turned into a peach raspberry pie for a party we attended and the final pot of sauce came off the stove and went into the freezer.

We've eaten well as a result, and will all winter, but both Sander and I were pretty tired from it all. We literally sliced, chopped, pressed, strained, blanched and cooked for 8 days straight. I worked, he had the adorable one full-time during the week, and I was writing an article for work. At least my life is not boring, right?

Cool weather finally rolled in towards the end of our kitchenathon, ending a 6-day streak of hot, humid summer weather. I was grateful - we'd spent most of that time working over a hot stove, and there's nothing less appealing than that when it's 99 degrees out. Because of the heat, most of the food this year was frozen instead of canned. I have a pressure canner, and a gobzillion jars, but had neither the energy or the inclination to deal with it.

Over Labor Day weekend, as the pile of food-waiting-to-be-dealt-with was dwindling, and the 8412 tons of dishes that result from putting up the produce was dealt with, we decided to add to the pile and went apple picking. Hey, I'm not saying we're sane. But in my husband's and my defense, we love to pick apples. The smell of an apple orchard full of ripe fruit is something to be savored. My daughter, who would eat apples and almost nothing but, given the choice, was in absolute heaven. We picked a 10 lb bag (1/4 peck) but I'm guessing it was more like 18-20 pounds of them.

It was a big pile of apples. This batch is just for eating as-is, although I am tempted to turn a few into apple cake. But the next batch in early October will be for sauce, apple butter, apple pie...apple anything.

Then I went out to the garden and looked at an absolutely insane amount of chard, sighed, and started picking. The first batch was sauteed for dinner guests and turned into a frittata.

But there's a lot more now. And kale. Lots of kale.

I turned the $1 butternut squash into soup last night, so all the produce we brought back is used up or tucked away in the freezer.

I like chard and kale. But now I have to figure out what to do with that, too. There's a ton of green tomatoes still out there too. I'm hoping they ripen, but if not, I'll be making green tomato preserves. I'm most appreciative of the bounty, it's just the all-at-onceness that overwhelms me. Yeah yeah, I know I do it to myself, but still.

Still, 2 weeks after the kitchenathon is over, I'm missing it a bit. My Mom is heading out to my sister's at the end of the month, and she will bring more back - most likely more broccoli, some squash, and more onions.

Yum.

Go Liz!

2010-09-17T08:00:00.003-04:00

I've been keeping my fingers crossed for Elizabeth Warren to head the new consumer agency created by the Dodd-Frank Act.

If you haven't already read the Two Income Trap, you really should. It's absolutely fascinating.

But it's time for someone to head up an agency that isn't bought and paid for by Wall Street. And I love it when a girl gets ahead.

Good Luck, Ms. Warren. My fingers are crossed for you.

Living Well on a Shoestring: Toddler Fun Edition

2010-09-13T13:38:00.003-04:00

Having a toddler at home practically full-time, as my husband does, creates a need to get the heck out of the house on a regular basis. The park is a good option, but as the weather cools or it rains for a few days straight, the need for free or very low-cost fun pops up.

So here's what we've dug up around us so far:
Free intro classes at Gymboree and Little Gym. Enrolling costs, but taking the intro classes is free, and spread over 2 weeks, gives a great thing to look forward to.

Our nearby mall has a great playspace for kids. It's free, and it's a good place to go when the weather isn't great.

Our local library has a toy area, a fish tank, and free story hour. Plus all the DVDs and kids books we could want to bring home, but not keep. It's great for a 'try before you buy' book acquisition strategy.

Groupon recently offered $5 admission for adults (kids under 2 are free) to the Stone Zoo. For someone as animal-crazy as my daughter, this is a really good time - $10 for the family for the afternoon.

For $5, Monkey Joe's is a great place to go and play, with bouncy houses galore and a toddler area. Big red balloons are an additional $1.75. This is a huge winner for us.

For the book-loving kids, a visit to the Used Book Superstore is not to be missed. For very little money, about $1.25 each, often less on sale, a child can get a 'new' book. Most are in very good condition. An additional perk is parent recommendations from the parents browsing in the store. A random Mom was the reason we came home with Counting Our Way To Maine, which is a perpetual favorite in our house.

A nearby farm, Russell Orchards is always a hit for us - there's ducks and chickens to feed ($0.25 feed dispenser), horses to pet, a playground that's appropriate for a lot of ages, hay rides and apple picking in the fall, ice cream, and hay rides. And the animal visits and playground are free and open to the public.

While apple-picking isn't free, $15.00 last weekend brought home a tote bag (probably 20 lbs?) of apples at the aforesaid Russell Orchards, and was a good 90 minutes of running around and having family fun.

Later this month we'll be driving up to Quichee, Vermont to camp overnight in the local state park. A cheap tent, an air mattress, and some food, plus the $18.00 camping fee makes for a fun weekend getaway. We have the tent and air mattress, so aside from gas and some marshmallows, chocolate bars and graham crackers, there isn't much we need.

Just typing this list, which is probably a very small subset of the fun things to do with a toddler, makes me appreciate how many no-or-low-cost things to do are around me. And all are things that we'd enjoy whether the economy was good or bad.

Interesting News

2010-09-08T10:16:00.002-04:00

Michael Burry is in the news again. Yeah, he's the guy from The Big Short. And he's betting on farmland.

Here's what he said to Bloomberg:
“I believe that agriculture land -- productive agricultural land with water on site -- will be very valuable in the future,” Burry, 39, said in a Bloomberg Television interview scheduled for broadcast this morning in New York. “I’ve put a good amount of money into that.”

I'm not a big believer in market oracles. But if ever there was one I believe in, it's Mike Burry. Sure, he's validating my take on future events, so that makes it easier. But this is a guy who studies things obsessively. If he's going in a direction, even if you don't agree with my take on Peak Oil and the economic impacts, watching someone who correctly identified the biggest market failure since 1929 is a worthwhile task.

Just sayin'.

Betting On Black Swans

2010-09-02T08:35:00.011-04:00

I recently finished reading Michael Lewis's book about the stock market crash and the start of the Great Recession, The Big Short. I love ML's books - I read Liar's Poker about a dozen years ago, before I knew anything about Wall Street, markets, or investing. I think I picked it up off a $1 book table, and was mesmerized. Unlike many others, I did not read it as a 'how-to' manual.

The Big Short though, that hit a nerve. No, no, I wasn't betting against the subprime market, although I did wonder how long the general population thought that maxing out their credit cards and cashing out home equity to shop at Pottery Barn would last. I really wondered how certain individuals managed to afford the homes they bought, and I was fairly certain that most of Wall Street was reasonably corrupt. That said, until I read The Big Short, I did not have a clue how corrupt and stupid the people that created this mess were. To say the book is enlightening may be one of the greatest understatements of all time.

But it got me thinking about something I've been mulling for a while, which is hedging the market against peak oil. Or starting a hedge fund. But since I don't know anything about hedge funds except that they sound like 'hedgehog' (I'm not sure that some of the people running them know more, to be honest, but we'll leave that alone for now), for now, we'll talk about my personal money.

I am a big believer in investing in what you know. But I'm not a believer in trying to time markets, or predict the behavior of people. Both are pretty fallible, and most of us bank on the idea that the future will look somewhat like the present. The idea that it might not is often discarded out of hand, or referred to as a 'Black Swan Event'. I've long taken the tack that Black Swan events are not necessarily the outliers they are assumed to be, but often predictable and natural outcomes of actions and reactions. It goes back to kindergarten science: What goes up must come down.

This often paints me as a pessimist. I'm not really, I just tend to think using the idea that life as it is will be fundamentally similar to how it has been as a predictor of the future is really sort of short-sighted. Assuming that things will change, sometimes radically and unpleasantly, sometimes for the better, but will always have an outcome of change, seems like a better bet.

So I've been thinking about taking a few market positions based on my theory of the outcome of Peak Oil impact on the next 25 years. If I'm wrong, I could lose money. If I'm right, I could become one of the few that makes money out of the crisis. My only reluctance is a moral one - is it right to bet on a catastrophic outcome? I think yes, and no. Yes in the sense that planning for the future, no matter what you think it will look like, is a good thing. No in the sense that there is some moral hazard to betting on things falling apart - especially because there is always a loser in these bets. That said, they might be losers anyway.

Most of us build our lives around the predication that catastrophe will not affect us. This is a good thing - trying to build up barriers against all potential risk and/or hiding under the covers is rarely a good approach to life. But the assessment of feasible risk is a smart thing. The trouble is the realization that there might be a finer line than most of us prefer between reasonable risk assessment and paranoia. I'm going to go for the idea that I'm using the former, while taking into account the idea that crazy people rarely know that they are crazy. Hedging on one's own point of view is often the ultimate risk.

So where will I put my money? Probably some into oil futures, some into the local economy, and some into businesses that will allow information flow in an era of decreased mobility. As I firm up my plans I'll blog more about them - my husband and I are still dealing with the immediacy of his job loss, so making bets on the future is something I have to wait on right now.

If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. It might hurt to lose money, but that's all. And if I'm right, it won't be a happy collection of profit. But it will be a predictable one.

An Interesting Conundrum

2010-09-01T07:38:00.003-04:00

One of the biggest issues around my husband being unemployed is not the unemployed bit. It's the impact to the budget. Quite frankly, whether he gets paid or not is a bit irrelevant to me - I didn't marry him for his present or future financial means, I married him because he's a great partner and a fantastic father, and I couldn't imagine life without him.

If it wasn't for the budget impact, I could care if he ever earns another dime - it's just not important to me (although it is to him, I don't think he's quite as enamoured with him being home as I am). Which is how I know he was the right one for me - when I'm not weighing the financial implications of a decision, and money is the least important factor, it's the right life choice.

This past week, a financial game-changer came to light. When we bought our house, we put a significant amount down, but it wasn't 20%. At the time, a 2nd mortgage, worth about 9% of the value of our house at the time was a better deal than PMI.

That 2nd mortgage, while small, is a barrier to our ability to refinance - and with current rates where they are, a refinance might save us about $800 a month, conservatively. So needless to say, we've wanted to do it.

Well, the ability to pay off the 2nd mortgage came up as an opportunity this week. With that paid off, and the road to refinancing cleared, all of a sudden our budget shortfall shrinks to.....$0. Maybe less than $0. Probably significantly less than $0.

Simple decision, right? Maybe. It involves a gift, and so we're weighing the decision. Will we probably go for it? Yes. Is it the right thing on all fronts? Probably. But I'm reasonably proud, and get a little twitchy about money I didn't earn. It's a hang up of mine, along the lines of "I did it myself". Sounds a little toddler-like, doesn't it?

Yeah, it is. I never claimed to be mature all the time.

So all of a sudden, what my husband's next move is becomes an entirely open field. Career change, part-time, full-time...it's all a choice. And that is a type of financial freedom we didn't expect. We'd be back to a place where paying off the mortgage before our daughter goes to college is a real possibility.

So what's next? I don't know. First, the logistics. Pay off the loan. Gracefully thank the givers of the gift. Hope that my husband's lack of income doesn't prevent us from a refi (it shouldn't).

And then? We'll see.

Almost More Than We Know What To Do With

2010-08-30T08:21:00.010-04:00

Lately, I've been carpooling with a colleague several days a week. It's working out pretty nicely - each of us saves tolls and parking costs at least 1 day a week, as we take turns driving in, and having company in the car passes the commute time.

On Mondays, the obvious conversation point is what we did with our weekends. This weekend, we went to visit my sister on her farm.. Visits to the farm are always relaxing, as my sister and brother-in-law are great cooks, and it's a peaceful, unhurried place to spend time. My daughter loves the animals- in addition to the usual flock of chickens and other animals, this time there were 10 baby goats to pet and chase.

Almost everything except gas is cheaper in upstate New York. In particular, it's a big farming area - Schoharie County was the breadbasket of the American Revolution . So when we go, we always come home with something. This time it was lots and lots of food. I mean lots.

One of our favorite places to visit out there is The Carrot Barn, a farm with a great shop full of local goods, produce and meat, a greenhouse, and a little cafe. This time of year our trip had purpose - to buy fruits and vegetables in large quantities, for the express purpose of preserving them.

But first we went raspberry picking at another farm. The fall raspberries were just starting to come in, but 90 minutes or so worth of effort netted us 3 quarts. We also picked up some peaches and a butternut squash (the latter being $1, it was hard to resist). Total spent at Boringer's: $15.75.

Then on to The Carrot Barn for lunch and shopping. And we came home with:
1 bushel (52 ears) of sweet corn, complete with burlap sack
1/2 bushel of sweet yellow tomatoes
1/2 bushel of paste tomatoes
1/2 peck of cippolini onions (about 1/4 bushel)
1/2 bushel red peppers
1 1/2 bushels of broccoli
Total: $73.70

In addition, there was a giant bunch of dill my husband plans to dry, and 3 dozen eggs from Sharon's chickens.

To give you an idea of how much food this is, I drive a Subaru Outback. And we had a tough time fitting our small bags of clothes for the weekend in the car once all the food was in there.

And there is still more to come. We have bulk organic flour coming in a couple weeks, and next time my Mom heads out to my sister's, we'll have her lug back more broccoli, more onions, and some butternut squash. Food preservation is serious business in my family.

It's hard to estimate how many meals or servings we're going to get out of this stuff right now, but I'm going to conservatively estimate that the total we spent, $89.45, would be about $250 worth of food in a grocery store, so wholesale is quite a bit less than 50% of retail.. I'll have, and will post, better numbers after we've preserved it all.

So last night once our daughter was in bed, Sander and I hit the kitchen. I made bread, which needed to be made anyway. And then we started chopping, blanching and freezing. By the end of the evening the raspberries (3 quart bags) and broccoli (15 quart bags in total) were in the freezer, and dinner for tonight was prepped and in the crockpot (italian pot roast), and the basement was still overflowing with vegetables. Tonight we have to start on the corn and tomatoes. The next 3-4 days are going to be spent almost exclusively in the kitchen, as we're in a race against time to get all the food preserved before it rots.

I'll take some pictures and post them later. This is something you have to see.

I love to preserve food. Much of it goes in the freezer, but we'll probably can the tomatoes as sauce - there is nothing that is better in the cold months than pulling out some home-jarred tomato sauce. It tastes like summer.

Now, when asked about my weekend by a fellow consultant, I wasn't sure quite what to say.. But I went for it, and told Scott exactly what I did with my weekend. And cheerfully
acknowledged it sounded a little loony. And yet, I'm fairly certain that instead of utterly weirded out, he was interested. Much of the car ride was a discussion of how to preserve the various foods, and ended with a discussion of the appeal of downshifting to farmlife.

People surprise you sometimes. I tend to think that most people I interact with on a day-to-day basis probably think I'm a little odd when I say things like "I have to be home tonight because I need to make some bread - we're out". I mean, most people go to the grocery store. But a lot more people than I expect are surprisingly interested in that sort of thing, and I spend a lot of time sending the link for Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day around to various people (note: you don't need a pizza stone, baking sheets work fine, and the best mix of flours I've come up with so far is 1/2 cup whole wheat, 1/4 cup bread flour, 1/4 cup oat flour, 5 1/2 cups white).

So I need to remember to keep a more open mind about my various oddities when talking to others. And it confirmed that the carpool thing is working out.

How to blanch broccoli:
Cut broccoli heads off the stems. If you like the stems, chop them and blanch separately.

Boil a big pot of water. Drop in the heads for 60 seconds. Fish them out (if only have 1 pot worth, dump it and drain them, but otherwise the water is reusable) and drain in a colander, immediately soaking in cold water so that they stop cooking.

Put in freezer bags in meal-sized servings, and press as much air out as possible. Freeze. Lasts about 4-5 months.

Around the World in 180 Days

2010-08-27T07:15:00.002-04:00

Unemployment sends people into crisis mode. And one of the side effects of being in crisis mode, is that looking long term becomes difficult-to-impossible. It's hard to make long term plans when you don't know what's going to happen next week or next month.

But oddly, even as our own unemployment crisis goes on, my husband and I have started to make some long term plans. Not about retirement, not yet anyway. Not even about saving for college. Nope, this is revisiting an idea from a long time ago...a trip around the world.

When I met my husband, I was in the planning stages of a year-long sabbatical from work to backpack around the world. Having spent years spending long hours and working 6 and 7-day weeks doing systems implementations, I was burnt out, and in need of a change. I had planned my route, was pricing out airfare with specialty providers, and saving up. This was by no means going to be luxury travel, more like camping and hostels. Still, I was mesmerized by the idea. I still have the route penned in to my atlas.

But then I met my husband, and eventually other plans took the place of the backpacking trip that was supposed to start in Singapore and end in Norway. We've done some traveling, but not like that.

But recently, I started thinking about that trip. Not for now, not yet. But maybe, just maybe, a 6-month sabbatical when our daughter is 12 or so. It's become a topic of discussion - what would we need to save up? Where exactly would we go?

It's become a fun way to spend an hour, here and there. We're not quite serious yet, but I put it at over 50% probability that we'll reach a point where 'Wouldn't it be nice....' becomes 'Okay, when should we leave?' We know it wouldn't be before the adorable one is 10, so we've got a ways.

But when the time comes, I just might be blogging from India or Kilimanjiro. Life is just too short not to.

Stupid Things People Say

2010-08-24T20:18:00.006-04:00

I've been sitting on a comment made back in July for a while. Here it is, from an anonymous poster:

I am in the process of looking for a house, and most of the subdivisions in my area do not allow vegatable gardens. Can you believe it!? It is acceptable for the white house lawn to contain vegatables but not in your precious subdivision. People need to open their eyes and see the bigger picture!

Unfortunately, I can totally believe it, Oh Anonymous One. I can. It never ceases to amaze me how shortsighted we all can be. My advice? Skip the HOA. Buy where you actually aren't going to be policed by neighbors without enough to do.

But this is not, by far, the most unbelievable thing I've heard in the last few years. As a matter of fact, it's pretty low on the list. Here's a bunch of things that might make even Anonymous think she or he has fallen down the rabbit hole. Well, okay, it's my top 5 for tonight Even more unbelievably, Sarah Palin didn't say most of them. Hey, there are other dumb people too.

(I'm in a mood today. Can you tell?)

5. "Throw the bums out" of Washington.

Originally a comment by Lee Iacocca many many moons before the great recession, this statement has been latched onto by Tea Partiers and the media alike.

While turnover in Congress is good, note that approximately 11,000ish congressional and other government staffers would not join the elected representatives in the exodus. And honestly, who do you think gets more done, the freshman congressman, or his staffer with the rolodex? Yeppers. So while I'm all for a little congressional turnover - I'm a very democratic-leaning independent, but can we start with Chris Dodd? He's just an asshole - I don't think this is going to solve the problems.

4. "Although macroeconomic forecasting is fraught with hazards, I would not interpret the currently very flat yield curve as indicating a significant economic slowdown to come"

The worst part of this quote is that it's by someone whose intellect and Great Depression research I greatly admire, but whose judgement I've come to question. Yeah, I'm talking to you, Ben Bernanke, quoting your comment of March 2006. Sigh.

3. "If anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work."

That gem is from the absolute prince of a Senator, Jon Kyl, of Arizona. Personally, I think we should vote Jonny out of office, and send him to stand in line at the unemployment office.

2. "We're all Arizonans now."

Well you knew on a stupid things people say list Ms. Palin was going to end up on there somewhere, right? This is in response to Arizona's new exercise in legal bigotry that the lovely and ever-open minded Jan Brewer signed back in April. I don't know which one of those two is worse, to be honest, but Sarah does win on stupid thing-saying.

1. "I'm doing God's work."

Taking the top spot in my list of stupid things people say is Lloyd Blankfein, who has earned a special place of scorn in my heart. Lloyd, if you don't know the name, is in charge of Goldman Sachs. Apparently God's work means helping screw 8.5 million people out of jobs and countless numbers out of their homes by bilking the market, then paying oneself uncountable sums of money, and buying your way through Congress.

Huh. I don't remember that one from Sunday School. Something about camels and needles, but not that one. Unfortunately, I think we're all just going to have to wait for the Karma Bus to come get ol' Lloyd. Let's just hope it hurries up.

Kentucky Windage

2010-08-24T09:02:00.015-04:00

I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the way I see the world lately. But of course, just as I reached a point of peace and comfort with my life choices, approach to work and so on, events made me wonder whether I should be quite so comfortable and content.

So there I was back to feeling unsure of myself. Goody.

Ah, it's so fun to be a woman sometimes.

Years ago, I took a 2-day leadership course through my then-employer. In the late '90s, these were all the rage. I don't remember learning much at the conference, which was heavy on bonding with people I'd never see again, and 'visualization' instead of actual tools and methodologies, but it was a nice 2 days in a Newport, RI hotel, so as these things go, it wasn't too bad.

The one thing I do remember is a 1-page leaflet in the back of the binder of handouts. The title, interestingly, was Kentucky Windage. I was bored. I was former military. The story was about sharpshooters. And so I started reading.

The gist of the story is this: back in the post-Civil War era, as our approach to military policy began to solidify under a single unified banner of the United States, how to integrate soldiers from the North and South took up a lot of time and mental energy. When you boil it down, the North didn't win because it had better soldiers, for the most part, the South had the really good ones. The North won because it had superior firepower, numbers and resources. Oh, and it was on the right side of the conflict, and there is something to be said for winning hearts and minds by being on the moral high ground.

How to leverage the sheer skill of southern soldiers into a northern-led army was the name of the game for a while. And one of the things the north wanted to leverage was the skill of the Kentucky Sharpshooters and those like them, who had made quite a name for themselves as having no peer in the expertise of their shooting.

Let me clarify, we're talking about Kentucky hill boys here, some who joined up with a gun and no shoes. Little education - and probably fewer teeth - amongst the lot of them. Picture this: barefoot, poorly spoken, illiterate, wearing the proverbial coon-skin caps. And outshooting the highly-trained, deeply formal, beautifully uniformed officers out of West Point wasn't exactly something that made them popular. And yet, they did, every time.

In Kentucky, a methodology of sorts had been developed to the point of becoming instinctual for hitting a target. Here's one description:

"Hitting a target in the real world (not on the blackboard) means compensating for variables, such as natural, varying winds and elevation, speed of the target and speed of the shooter.If a target is moving one direction, the shooter (and the firearm) are moving a different direction, the wind is blowing (at 500 meters, the wind can be blowing three or four different directions and different speeds) and you're shooting up a hill, it takes some savvy to launch a successful shot. "
http://kentuckywindage.com/whatis.html

This is about the most counterintuitive approach you can take to a rifle shot, or at least it can look that way at first. Moving away from the shot in order to better make the shot? And yet, when you think about it, it makes sense. It's complex geometry combined with a bit of chaos theory with some understanding of weather and acceleration combined. This is stuff that mathematicians study and figure out. Except that these guys didn't know mathematical theory.

Or at least, they didn't know they did.

These guys figured out how to shoot so well because the success of their one shot up a hill with the wind blowing in 3 directions was the difference between feeding their families or not. It's amazing how good you get at something when it's a necessary and fundamental part of your needs.

We often underestimate, especially in this day and age, what we know, and our capacity to have learned outside of the classroom. If it wasn't the result of a test or a credential, we doubt it.

And yet, throughout history, refined knowledge about important things pops up in the most unlikely places. Like the Dogon's detailed knowledge of Sirius B long before a telescope was capable of finding it. Or a neurology intern named Michael Burry knowing exactly when and how the subprime mortgage was going to collapse, when even the folks that were packaging up the securities that led to it's downfall didn't.

Why do I tell you all this? Because when I start to doubt myself, I start to think about Kentucky Windage. And the Dogons. And Mike Burry. I'm not saying I know what they know. But ultimately, each of those examples became successful because they trusted their instincts.

So while I'm wrong a lot, and I'm okay with that, sometimes I just have to trust that my gut is going to lead me in the right direction. And it allows me to push back both at myself when I doubt, and at others.

So here's my point: Trust yourself. When you know you are on the right path, even if everyone around you is scratching their heads, keep going. Because if the Dogons could be certain of the existence of a star they had never seen, and some Kentucky hill boy could hit a target in an elevated position at a distance while compensating for wind and moving in the opposite direction, and Mike Burry could know what all the brain trust on Wall Street missed, you probably know something too.

An Eventful Week

2010-08-21T09:56:00.007-04:00

This week has been one of those weeks. You know the ones, where it's a roller-coaster of highs and lows, and every time you think you have your footing back on level ground, there you go again. It was a good week work-wise, and in many ways. But of course, there was the downside.

Our daycare situation, family-based, unravelled rather swiftly and abruptly. We had been trying to keep my daughter in my sister's care part-time so that she continued to have her routine, got to see her cousins, and so that when Sander returns to work it would not be a huge shock to return to a daycare schedule. For a variety of reasons, it stopped working. We'd had some inklings that the situation was headed towards it's end, but the suddenness threw us both for a loop.

As a result, the 'big dig' in the backyard didn't get done, and we were unable to make that area safe in time for a planned cookout this weekend, so we ended up postponing. It wasn't ideal to do so, but it was the best decision - with multiple kids invited to the party, and an unsafe backyard, it was easier to call it off than to expect parents to spend all their time corralling their kids.

The backyard project has been a source of stress to both of us - it will be great when it is done, but it's over budget and over schedule, and that's never pleasant, especially with my husband being unemployed. He's doing a great job though, and I'm looking forward to the result. Still, being unable to finish it was a hard blow for him.

Top all of this with the transitions that we've been through - him to primary caregiver of an ever-moving toddler, us to dealing with what feels like a never-ending list of things that decided to cost more than expected or have to be put off altogether, his unemployment claim denial until the end of October, which means we're burning through savings (because his previous employer refused to follow the policy they themselves laid out) and then the daycare situation, and the fact that neither Sander nor myself has taken to hiding in bed with the covers over our heads is, I think, kind of impressive.

Then yesterday, just as we were starting to relax, a smell started emanating from the kitchen. At first, it smelled a bit like burnt popcorn...except no one was making any. Then it turned acrid and stronger.

The refrigerator had decided to die an ignoble death. Now let me just say that were it not for the poor timing of the expense, my husband and I would have been thrilled - I didn't think it was possible to hate a refrigerator before I moved into our house. But we did. Cheap piece of crap does not even begin to describe it.

So yesterday afternoon, off we went to find a new one. We needed the expense like we needed a hole in the head. Really. But it's not the sort of thing you can just let go. If the dishwasher dies - and I fully expect it to soon - we'll just wash by hand until the time is right, which is not a big deal to me. The trash compacter? Who cares - I've never quite understood why a trash can should have a motor to begin with (something tells that trash compactors were a male invention, along the lines of "hmm I have this small motor, what to do, what to do...I know!! Let's add a motor to the trash can - it doesn't have one yet!!") . But refrigeration isn't something we plan to do without, and since it's August, it was an imminent need.

Fortunately, Lowes had a floor model on sale that met the need at a very affordable price, with free delivery within 24 hours. And, another upside, the old one was overdue for a good cleaning, and now we can just skip that. :-)

The only catch was the width. Our current fridge is 32" wide. The new one - which would save us quite a bit over other available-in-24-hours models - is 32.5" wide. The way our kitchen is constructed, a very constricted space was framed out to contain the fridge. We came home and well...uh-oh. 1/2 inch short.

Then my-ever creative husband peeked around the frame, and realized that he could plane down about 3/4 of an inch of the wooden frame that the refrigerator sits in without putting the frame at any risk.

So he is now planing and sanding down the frame in order to be ready when the fridge is delivered between 3 and 5 pm. The kitchen floor is half-covered in wood shavings,

Oh, and did I mention we're having dinner guests for my birthday at 4 today?

At this point, I just have to laugh. It's not worth being stressed over any of this. Right now, our normally ideal life is a little out of control. But we're still so very blessed and lucky. I can tell you that the events of this week rocked us, but I don't feel like I can complain today, on my 37th birthday. It is, in fact, a wonderful life I have.

Especially since I got on the scale this morning and I weigh less today than I have since before I got pregnant, which makes it hard not to be cheerful.

So, happy birthday to me.

How Does My Garden Grow 2010

2010-08-19T09:46:00.008-04:00

Even though I got multiple requests to blog my garden this year, I have been reluctant to do so. Over the last two years, our plans for our garden have been significantly downscaled due to other demands. The 8 garden beds have stayed 3 for that time.

This year, all that we've gotten is some asparagus, rhubarb, chard, basil, tomatoes, a few peppers, and one resiliant melon. We may have some onions as well, we're about to dig them up and find out.

The strawberry plants are thriving, but haven't produced yet. The raspberries have offered just enough fruit for my daughter to pick and eat every couple days - a handful, but nothing significant, and we've lost some of them, along with an apple tree, which we have to replace so it's still-surviving companion tree will pollinate. In any case, it will be a couple years before we see fruit on any of our fruit trees, including the cherry tree, which is thriving.

We didn't start any seedlings this winter, as the grow lights went up late and the table was covered in doors we've been refinishing. So we relied on the bounty of seedlings from my sister and parents.

For the last two years, the refrain has been 'next year'. Then next year comes, and we're deep in other projects, and the garden gets pushed to the wayside.

This time we mean it though. We've decided that we'll schedule ourselves at home every other weekend from next May-September in order to make this work, and put Sander to work on the garden beds starting in April. This may require rescheduling some other projects, but that's okay. The garden is finally at the top of the heap, priority-wise.

We've talked about some redesign of the garden beds as well. Right now, they are about 8 feet long and 2.5 feet wide. As we've begun to use them, we've realized a more grid-style layout would probably serve our purposes better, and maximize space.

One hesistation we've had in building out more beds - aside from the time factor - is that sometime, probably in about 5 years, our septic system will need to be replaced. And of course, the garden is right above where they would be digging.

Right now, that only affects the two perennials in the garden, asparagus and rhubarb, which would need to be replanted. The strawberries are elsewhere, as are the fruit trees. After a lot of discussion, we've settled that we'll probably wait the full five years to replace the septic, since the need isn't imminent, and it's a very expensive undertaking. So we'll be building out the garden in a way that maximizes space, but is easily dismantled for when the time comes to dig up the front yard.

We'll also probably add more fruit trees and other perennials - maybe some blackberries and blueberries, a couple peach trees, and some more apple trees. This time, we'll invest in some older trees that will bear fruit earlier. In keeping with my love of all things colonial, I also really want to plant Bayberry, Hops for home brewing and some grapevines. Sander and I are taking a wine-making class this fall, which was a birthday gift. MoneyPenny Manor wines has a nice ring to it, at least I think so.

We already grow plenty of dandelions, although not by choice, but we figure that learning how to turn them into wine maybe beats spraying them with lawn chemicals.

And next year, if all goes well, is also a chicken year.

So the smallish, .66 acre plot of land will continue to be turned into a very tiny homestead, one plant and tree at a time. More playing in the dirt to come.

Developing a Backup Plan

2010-08-18T06:00:00.012-04:00

Sander and I have recently started having some tough conversations related to his layoff. No, I'm not nagging him. This is about what happens if we become one of those statistics - you know, the people who still can't find a job after a year, or two, or more.

My husband is a really smart guy. Couple degrees. MIT on the resume. Can build or fix anything to boot. I have faith in him. It's the economy I worry about, and the total lack of jobs.

But this is not about him. It's about a house. Our house.

As I've mentioned before, our house is a rather old and demanding one. I'm fairly sure the previous owner sold after 30 years in residence (Fun fact: we're only the 3rd owners of our 1933 colonial. People tend to stay around in our neighborhood) because things were starting to need the kind of maintenance that gets expensive quickly. Like new wiring, that sort of thing.

But as much as I complain about it, I love our house. I mean, I really love our house. There's something rather magical about the setting, with the giant old oak trees whose leaves and branches spread over the road like a mantle. And when I look out my front door, I overlook a Christmas tree farm. Around me are farmers and gardeners and even a raiser of miniature horses. Each Christmas since we've been there, we've walked down to the neighbors house with hot apple cider in our travel mugs, paid our tree fee, and carried the chosen tree over the stone wall.

And then there's the house itself. It's a pain in the butt, maintenance wise. It's poorly insulated, and oil heated, which gets expensive. But we've spent the last 3 1/2 years making it our own. It's the place we brought our daughter home to on a cold, snow-dusted day last February. And to someone who grew up in mostly apartments, a home of my own has always been at the top of every 'what do I want out of life' list. Always.

So there's that.

But it's an expensive place to own. Our mortgage, despite our large downpayment, is a touch over 50% of my net. And then of course are the heating and electric bills, and all the other bills and maintenance that come with homeownership.

And our income is down by a bit over 1/3. When Sander was working, the house wasn't even a bit of a stretch, it was a very comfortable amount, so much so that we've been on track to pay it off a good bit early.

But he's not, and while I have no doubt he'll find the right thing, we had to start conversations about our backup plans, because the house is probably - probably- untenable on just my salary. I say probably because we could make it work, but I'm not sure it would be a very happy arrangement for the long term. The house needs some things, and I'm not quite ready to give up some things small and large, like opening a bottle of wine in front of the woodstove fire on Friday nights, like taking the adorable one to StoryLand next year, or someday trekking the Lycian Way . We will if we have to. But we're trying not to have to. For the short term, sure. Forever? Not so crazy about the idea.

So "What do we do if..." has been the opener to a lot of discussions lately.

We could move. We still have equity, at least we're pretty sure we do. And given the location, I think we could sell - it's a very desirable place to be. But there's the economy, and uncertainty is the name of the game. We'd probably lose much of what we put in to the house, but we would come out clean.

But then there's the "Where would we go if...?" part of the conversation. Back to renting? Buy another house? Neither of those options seem particularly appealing. We're in a good place in our house. We're happy.

I don't know that there's a single right decision. Normally, I'm a planner, and I want to be ahead of the game, knowing my next move - and having several backup moves - before I have to make it. But this time, I almost feel like I'm going to let events unfold for a while. Sure, that's how lots of other homeowners have gotten into messes, but I'm not them, and our situation is solely ours, even if it has similiarities to that of others out there.

So I'm playing a bit of educated russian roulette. I may be making a mistake with that, by not getting out in front of the situation. It's possible.

But I also believe that sometimes when you reach the end of your rope, the best thing to do is tie a knot and hang on. So that's the plan, at least for now.

Diary of a Working Mom: Finding Yourself

2010-08-17T06:00:00.009-04:00

With the movie version of Eat, Pray, Love being advertised on billboards everywhere, and my husband's job transition (along with 8 million of his closest friends), finding oneself is a big thing these days. And my father in law recently pointed me to a NY Times article on The Case for Working With Your Hands, which I think was a very insightful look at some of the costs of office life.

I'm way too practical to chuck my life to go off and find myself. I do someday want to backpack my way around the world, but that's not so much to find myself as to do some neat stuff. I'm never been clear on the connection between plane tickets and self-awareness. Except perhaps as a sales pitch for the travel industry.

But I digress.

That said, there is something to knowing who and what you are. I'm an eternal admirer of those who, like my sister, figure out early where they fit, and make their world fit to them. I, on the other hand, sort of fell into my career path, and, finding it to be reasonably lucrative and not too hard - long hours, but not hard, as well as pretty enjoyable, grew in that direction. Over time, my life grew up around my career location - I met my husband at work, we chose a community that provided us both a rural-ish lifestyle and a decent commute, etc. Work - the work I sort of fell into - has been a bit of the centrifuge that my life fell into place around.

I have realized that much of my talk of downshift and exploration of alternate ways of living was my thinking about taking the reins, so to speak. Instead of flowing my life around work, I found in myself a need to choose my path. I still don't exactly, precisely know what this means, but I'm working on it. Because me choosing is something that's become really, really important to me.

Last year I found myself in a new place. I joined a small consulting firm, full of folks that I had worked with at my current client over the years. I liked these guys (and when I say guys, I mean it - I was the first woman in my office in a long while, although now I am one of 3.). I knew they were top notch in their fields, I trusted them, and they had been trying to recruit me for a while. The timing was right, and so I jumped in - probably headfirst, at least holding my nose and stepping off the cliff without really knowing what was beneath. New company, returning to work as a working Mom....I had no idea what I was in for. Clueless is an understatement.

As a consultant, I'd always been an independent. Okay, as an everything, I'd always been an independent, but in consulting, that means that your client is the only set of needs you need to meet, the only demands you have to flex around.

As part of a company, you have to learn the culture, and participate. As well as meeting the client needs. And that of your family. For a long time, I was exhausted by all the demands. I loved parts of it - the mindshare with others, the social factor, being part of a company viewed as the best, but I struggled with other parts. Especially the demands on my time, and the thinking that was sometimes so different from my own - in a small company, the culture matters. I was being forced to see things, and act, very differently than I was used to.

That was hard. I was going through two transitions at once, to working motherhood, and to being part of a team, responsible for delivering to my client, and delivering to my company. I often felt like I was being drawn and quartered. Which isn't pleasant under the best of circumstances.

And I resented the hell out of it.

I was tired, sometimes so tired I wanted to cry when the alarm went off. My project was difficult, and I was working long hours. My daughter didn't start sleeping through the night for 7 months after I returned to work, until she was almost a year old. We have an old, rather demanding house. On weekends, between cooking, cleaning and running errands, I barely got outside to my beloved garden, which grew into a pile of weeds.

The hardest part of it all? I stopped trusting myself. Trusting my judgement, both at work, and with my outside life. I started worrying often that I was doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, and never meeting the right set of needs at the right time. If my daughter was sick, I was frantic because I had some work deliverable. If work was demanding, I was worried my family would stop needing me, or that they would resent me for being otherwise occupied.

But a few things have happened over the last few months that have changed my outlook. I became the sole breadwinner, and while I worry about money, and I know it won't go on forever, I've discovered that it's a role that fits me pretty well. I don't quite know how to describe it, but on a lot of levels, it's led me to make peace with my role as a working parent, and my role in our household. I'm not saying it's all puppies and rainbows, but there it is. A different project made my hours shorter, which is nice too, although I imagine the demands would be easier now, a year in - not because my family demands are less, but because I've figured out how to juggle better. The transition is over - I've adapted.

I've realized my child is happy and well adjusted, my husband is happier than before he left his previous employer, and while it's not bump-free, that's pretty good.

And a few work-related things happened that made me start trusting myself and my input again. Much of my struggle with my new company was with whether I fit in the culture, and where I fit in the organization. I guess I realized that whether I fit the culture was somewhat irrelevant - I was part of the culture because I was part of the company. My client was happy. I was providing value. I may not be developing business on the golf course, but I'm providing intellectual capital my company can use to build a strategy for solving particular problems with those clients. And it's damn good shit. If I do say so myself.

And I do.

In short, I figured out that I wasn't so far off base after all. Is that finding yourself? Oh, I don't know. Maybe a version of it. I can't say it was cheaper than a plane ticket. And I certainly don't have it all figured out. Heck, I don't even know what I'm having for dinner. But I've figured out that I'm good enough at my job, at motherhood, and at my life. And that's not small.

For now, for today, I know where I fit. Now if I could only find my keys...

"Whatever you are, be a good one." - Abraham Lincoln

The Local on a Shoestring Project

2010-08-16T13:47:00.004-04:00

I've decided that my next big project is how to eat and play locally on a shoestring. Over the next couple months, I'll be posting updates on how we've managed to eat well and have a good time cheaply while supporting our local economy.

I'd challenge others to join me, and send me updates, which I will post. Tell me how you are doing things locally and cheaply. Tweet this, too - send me your friends. There may even be free stuff for you involved.

Here's the rules of my game:

1. Local for diet means as close to home as possible, but let's say the outer range is driveable in a day - 300 miles, in my world. That encompasses the local beef from Lancaster County, PA that we invested in, as well as the farm stand 4.7 miles away.

2. Local for fun means within a few hours drive. It can and should include picnics, beaches where applicable, camping, zoos, parks, and so on. Bonus points if it's a really neat thing that is local only to you, or if it takes less than a gallon of gas to get there. Triple word score if you walk or bike to it.

3. It should be something you or your kids or your friends want to do. Don't send me your local newspaper's calendar. Send me what you did this weekend.

4. Free is better than not free.

5. This is not a crafter's challenge. It's totally cool that you built a Taj Mahal replica for your chickens this weekend. But that's not the intent of this project. This is something that you are doing or eating in your neck of the woods.

Aaannnnddd...go.

Summer is a Good Time to Escape

2010-08-16T11:05:00.006-04:00

Over the last couple weeks, I took a break from all things financial. I got very tired of the news, all conflicting and all bad, and the cost overruns from our own 'Big Dig' - in which a new set of deck stairs became a new 2nd deck and backyard setup.

Don't misunderstand, I'm proud of my husband and what he's doing, it's just a little overwhelming, what with the unemployment situation. But this is something he needs to do - a little backyard construction, a little internal construction. I think it's good for him.

Still, I got weary of working and re-working the budget to try and get our outgo down to just my income. And the surprise expenses. It made my head hurt, and when that happens, it's time to just take a break. Besides, I was adding to the MoneyPenny deficit, as my daughter conveniently chose the last week or so to have a growth spurt and outgrow her shoes, a good chunk of her clothes, and I prepared to equip her for fall.

Sometimes it's nice just to not pay attention for a while. Laser-like focus on certain things is great, but it gets tiresome after a while. And I had a few life-related things to work on, like an article for my employer, and cleaning up the house for our annual summer BBQ, which we, in my 'Oh, f-it' frame of mind, decided is still on.

This weekend, while my husband and brother in law were building things in my backyard, my daughter and I went up to Maine to spend the weekend with my inlaws. I'm blessed with the best inlaws in the universe. So I spent the weekend getting pampered and watching my daughter be doted on. It was like a mini-vacation. With no cooking, cleaning or errand-running responsibilities, I was able to simply enjoy my daughter. Her grandparents got to read to her, take her to the beach and enjoy her, and my husband got uninterrupted time to work on his projects.

Aside from gas and tolls, I spent a total of $6.35 on italian ice. Not bad for a weekend break.

I've blogged before about how I feel the occasional bout of escapism is good. Sometimes the best work on something is done while doing something else, and that thing is on the back burner. It clears the mind, resets the body, and opens up possibilities. A bit like meditation, except that I have an issue sitting still for more than a few minutes at a time. I'm a champion fidgeter.

I'll tell you a not-so-secret secret: I like my husband being home. Were it not for the financial implications, I'd be happy to have him home forever. He and my daughter like it too.

So we've started looking for what I'm calling 'what's behind door #3' in our lives. In our current life, finances will make an otherwise good thing stressful. Chucking it all isn't a current option we're considering. So we're trying to find a 3rd path, one that gives us the sanity of a slower life, but without the financial limitations of the current situation.

No idea what that looks like. Maybe I should go back to the beach for a few more days?

Peak Oil and Us (You, Me, Everyone) Part V.II - The Beginning

2010-08-03T12:38:00.008-04:00

So what happens after we enter a period of oil decline? Is it predictable?

Well, some things are. But a lot isn't. A classic lesson is how Cuba survived the US oil embargo after the collapse of the Soviet Union. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Community:_How_Cuba_Survived_Peak_Oil is a fascinating documentary and potential lesson on how we might address similar shortages. That said, I have my doubts that our completely polarized 2-party system has either the will or the foresight to enact policies that would help average citizens improve their chances. They are too busy pointing fingers at each other, and the Cold War dinosaurs still in political power seem to ignore Sun Tzu's most basic lesson: know thy enemy.

I could debate whether Cuba is an actual enemy, but the premise remains that our leaders - and many of our citizens - have a blind side when it comes from learning from other political models. The risk of seeing yourself as the best of something is unwillingness to continue to improve and learn from those who are less successful. It's a dangerous path to take, to assume that there's nothing to learn there, but it's one that our political leadership has embraced.

So if there's no political will, how will we as a society adapt? I think this one is going to be grass roots, by individuals and by smaller, agile organizations both in the business and nonprofit worlds.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, organizations that can help businesses adapt before things get bad are good places to be in and join. Helping large companies institute greener practices, remote work models, and manage risk is going to be an ever-growing arena.

Developing skills to actually produce one's own goods and services - from raising a food garden to knitting to animal husbandry to wine and beer making is both fun and a potential source of income in the long run.

Broadening horizons - such as medical professionals developing proficiencies in battlefield medicine, herbal remedies and historical medical practices (spiderwebs, anyone) is never a bad thing.

Knowing your community is the ultimate protection. In our small town alone, are experts of all shapes and sizes, and resources for all kinds of goods and services. Support local community and expertise so that it doesn't get lost. And besides, often making friends is an excellent byproduct.

Eating local helps in reducing food miles, supports local farms and keeps knowledge in the community. It can be a bit of a challenge to learn to eat locally and in season, but there are many resources on canning and preserving and eating in season and from the garden and farmers markets.

Involve your whole family. We recently picked up a copy of Roots, Boots, Buckets and Shoots: Gardening Together With Children, and we can't wait to plant next year's pizza garden.

The best part of this is that this process can be enjoyable. Peak oil does not have to equal a life of bleak deprivation and drudgery. Maybe, just maybe, it will help us with priortizing what is important in our lives.

And that's something most of us could use a little more of.

A Tale of Two Lives

2010-08-02T09:11:00.013-04:00

Yesterday I got together with a friend of mine from high school. It had been about 18 years since we'd last gotten together. It was great to reconnect. I'd always liked and admired J, but never so much as I did after yesterday.

Our lives have taken drastically different paths over the last 20 years. Hers has been marked by tragedy - multiple miscarriages, the loss one of her children in infancy, and most recently, long-term unemployment. Her husband's, that is. A skilled pipefitter, his employment went the way of the Dodo when demand for this type of manufacturing work dissapeared in the wake of the seemingly-endless recession.

Despite extended unemployment, her work doing medical transcription, and some overnight work he has managed to pick up, the current economic conditions have left their life in question. Savings depleted. 401ks raided. And now, they just don't know what comes next. All of this to very nice people who have never lived beyond their means. Never been to a Caribbean Island. No giant McMansion, just a patio, an inflatable pool and a grill in the backyard.

Our conversation left me wondering when they were going to get a break. Because I think they've had enough, quite frankly.

But it also made me realize how close we were. As much as we want it to work out, in our current home, 1 income won't cut it forever. Sure, we can go a long time, but eventually our financial trajectory is the same as theirs. It may take far longer - years maybe - , and hopefully by the time we get to that point the problem will have been solved, but there it is.

So far apart, so much the same.

I listen to the political harping of Democrat to Republican and I think - these people can't solve this. There's no will to solve problems in Congress now, everyone is too busy playing the get re-elected game, and pandering to whatever they think likely voters want to hear.

Big business is too busy sitting on piles of cash, something that the titans of Wall Street applaud them for (think about that the next time you laud what Warren Buffett has to say, mmkay?) instead of hiring people and creating jobs. Banks aren't lending. States and towns are broke.

It makes my head hurt. It really does. Because people like J - hardworking, gentle people - are getting screwed. Really, really screwed. Because everyone who has the power to make changes is working very hard to ensure the status quo doesn't get disrupted.

I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would have thought, were he to see what has happened.

I have hope for our economy, for J's husband and mine, for some recovery. What I've lost hope about is that the people who have paid the price for this economic disaster will ever recover fully. I think they'll never see the world with the hope and optimism they did before, and will always have a fear of loss. It happened once. It can again.

I'd like to get that hope back for J and I.

Peak Oil and Us (You, Me, Everyone) Part V.1 - The End

2010-07-28T08:46:00.008-04:00

The end of my Peak Oil story has two parts, sort of like the upcoming Harry Potter film, except that there is less in the way of wands and Voldemort and Weasleys. Too bad, really, it might be a bestseller if it did.

Even, if some naysayers are right, and the unlikely theory that some oil comes from abiogenesis, or components of it, and there isn't an inherently ending supply, it's unlikely that we can keep up with projected oil demand, which continues to outpace our ability to produce supply.

Our society is quickly coming to a tipping point. The question is, will we hide our heads in our neatly groomed lawns, or will we acknowledge that we are the proverbial frog in the pot of water? It's a question I genuinely can't answer. Most of us are much better at responding to events than planning for them.

The decline of oil is the sorites paradox of our time. The paradox asks at what point is a heap of sand no longer a heap of sand if the sand is removed, one grain at a time. And because I find the sorites paradox so fascinating, let's extrapolate some of the arguments on sand and replace them with the debate on whether there will be an oil shortage.

Here's what wikipedia says about denial of the heap to non-heap discussion.

'On the face of it, there are some ways to avoid this conclusion. One may object to the first premise by denying 1,000,000 grains of sand makes a heap. But 1,000,000 is just an arbitrarily large number, and the argument will go through with any such number. So the response must deny outright that there are such things as heaps. Peter Unger defends this solution. Alternatively, one may object to the second premise by stating that it is not true for all collections of grains that removing one grain from it still makes a heap. Or one may accept the conclusion by insisting that a heap of sand can be composed of just one grain, and solely deny the further conclusions regarding zero-grain or negative-grain-number heaps.'

At what point is there no longer oil to meet the need...or the want? This is what is called Epistimology, or an unknowable boundary. We've never calculated what we actually need. We humans confuse need with want on a daily basis.

Denial is one natural outgrowth of an unknowable thing. Atheists deny god, the faithful wholeheartedly believe, Agnostics sit on the fence, all without any evidence for or against. It's entirely normal and predictable that some will embrace the theory of Peak Oil and make, or try to make proactive changes. Some will deny it to the stars and use as examples the boundaries of what they can see and touch. Others will fall into the 'wait and see' camp. The conflict between the three perspectives only serves to make us look harder to find answers, even when they aren't apparent. That is, if we can all remember to play nicely together. If.

There are those that will bank on the world remaining as it is, with change only entailing growth and expansion. There are those who will forecast the end of the world. There are those who will take a more moderate approach in their predictions or reactions. I tend to think extremists on any end have less of the truth than those in the middle, but only sometimes. Sometimes the extremists are right (like, say, America's founding fathers, who technically committed high treason). I guess we'll have to see.

In the meantime, there are a few simple steps to take. I'll outline them in the final installment.

Interestingly, this month's issue of Mother Earth News has an interesting commentary on food miles, and the impact of oil usage on our future. While it's clear that the mileage our food travels is not the only environmental impact, it is the one that is most susceptible to the changes that Peak Oil. I'll talk more about food miles for the final installment, but it's worth reading a bit about.

Peak Oil and Us (You, Me, Everyone) Part IV - Getting Dirty

2010-07-22T12:02:00.003-04:00

So let's see. Where did I leave off on Peak Oil?

At some point in the next 10 years or so, it is likely that we'll start to see the impacts of peak oil. Gas and home heating oil prices are probably going to spike sooner, but we'll see a tipping point only after those prices have reached a point where either a) Americans decide that a little civil (emphasis on the civil part) unrest is a good way to get heard and/or b) even the well-to-do start to be impacted.

In contrast to the above paragraph, probably most of you are thinking something like "Um, gas prices are down, thanks. So if all these supply issues are real, then why didn't gas stay high?
Well, there is an explanation. The high gas prices started their downward trajectory after their peak in 2008 just as the economic crisis was making it's way around the world. Remember the headlines - hundreds of thousands laid off every month, with no end in sight, banks on the verge of collapse, that sort of thing?

Unless you were living in a mud hut, you heard about this stuff. No offense intended to mud hut dwellers, of course.

Gas price swings are not directly related to supply. In many cases, they are about projected demand. When you think of it that way, it makes perfect sense that the price at the pump is different from what the actual long term supply is.

So it's easy to look at stable gas prices and see Peak Oil - and this series of blog posts as yet another sky-is-falling paranoid delusion. The implications of Peak Oil are unimaginable to most of us. Me even. Things always get more prosperous for America, right?

If only we could be so lucky.

Oh, how I wish all of the above were true, and you could just write this off and call it a day. I do.

But it isn't, so let's move on to reality and what baby steps can be taken now to help us plan for then. First, and most key is thinking with your tummy. Think local. Think dirt. Think seeds. Think the farmstand down the road. Think Chickens in Your Backyard. Hey, chickens as pets are cool now, right?

I'm not going to tell you how to start a garden. There's a ton of resources out there to tell you just that. But here's what I am going to tell you - some of that perfectly maintained lawn your lawn service grooms in the back might just be the perfect place to solve some long term problems, so lay off the weed-killer, since it's not very tasty or good for you.

And here's some other things - gardening is a great way to get all of you outside, even the smallish ones. Kids love to grow things. Kindergarten, remember? Seeds in little paper cups covered in plastic wrap on the windowsill. Read even a toddler the story of The Carrot Seed (for what it's worth, this is one of those rare board books that both my toddler and I can read approximately 412,356 times a night and still enjoy). Then go plant one. It's not too late - just cover it up with these in the fall and watch it grow.

The key here is to start small. Sure, Peak Oil is a big problem. But we've got a few years yet, so don't go tilling up your entire plot of land or stockpile Ensure. Get a tomato plant. When you have a nice big one, slice it up with some salt and realize that a dirt manicure can be one of the most gourmet experiences there is.

We're all going to have to get dirty at some point. All the better if we first learn how to enjoy it.

Naked in Public

2010-07-09T21:32:00.007-04:00

Talking about economic vulnerabilities - your own, that is - is kind of like taking off your underpants in public. Even people who have their own vulnerabilities look away, as if you've done something embarrassing, like drunkenly photocopy your butt at the office Christmas party. It's that vaguely uncomfortable look, the one that begs you to change the topic. To anything, really.

Those conversations - it's just not done, especially amongst those of us who make good incomes and should have it all locked up.

Even if we all don't, it's social convention that you do. If you don't, then it must be a personal failing. After all, if you make a good income and don't live above your means, everything is supposed to continue along linear paths.

I typically don't follow linear paths well, having never colored within the lines particularly well, but the financial lines...well, I stay in the box. I grew up in less-than-stellar financial circumstances, and I have made darn sure that life would be different for myself, no matter how many hours I had to put in to make it so. If that meant coloring within the lines, so be it. I can conform when I need to.

But what if financial vulnerability isn't a personal failing? What if someone is good at their job, works hard, stays on top of things and gets it done still gets laid off? What if the inability to find a new job for some of the folks that have been out of work for a year or more isn't that they are substandard employees or the leftovers of the labor market? What if they, in fact, are us?

It's easier to think of them as, well, them. Not us. Never us. We're too good, to valuable, too, well, whatever - to become them. They must have done something wrong, right?

Here's the thing - what if they didn't? What if they are us?

A recent radio report on foreclosures in Massachusetts was eye-opening. See, the folks who had no economic fallback - the most vulnerable - lost it all a long time ago in this recession. With no backup resources, no emergency funds, no retirement accounts to raid, those who lost their jobs or saw their business fail because of the recession were the first to go down.

Where are the foreclosures now? In the good neighborhoods. The nice towns with landscaped lawns and granite countertops and good schools.

Why now? Because they -them- like us, had savings. Had retirement accounts. Had resources to keep the bad things away. For a while. Until they couldn't any more. And now amidst the lovely neighborhoods, close to the good schools, the granite countertops are getting dusty. The lawns are getting overgrown. And the residents? Gone.

It makes me sad to see. Not because I don't think that some people over-leveraged themselves or made bad decisions, or did strategic defaults when they didn't have to. But some of them didn't. They worked hard, saved, paid off their credit cards. And went down anyway, when a month of unemployment turned into a year. Or two.

I think that when you fall down the economic ladder, you lose something of what you were. Maybe you gain something else, it's hard to know.

Yep, it's like taking off your underpants in public. We just don't do it. Because we are not them. And as long as that is true, then no one needs to discuss things quite so unpleasant.

Am I talking about me? No. Honestly no. Are we a bit vulnerable? Sure, but not exposed - we can make it work. But could it be? Sure. More easily than I'd like to admit.

Here's the thing. You can do it all right and still go wrong. And then they wouldn't be them any more. They would be us.

An Interesting Conundrum

2010-07-08T11:20:00.004-04:00

We're heading into the 6th week of my husband's unemployment, and it's been up and down.

We enjoyed our vacation and time off together quite a bit, but came home to the news that we may have to defer collecting unemployment. Massachusetts is one of only a handful of states that allows the unemployed to collect benefits before burning through any severance, but that is only if the severance is classified correctly. In my husband's case, it may not have been, so we're waiting to hear if we need to wait until late October before seeing any unemployment checks.

I can't say it isn't stressful, even though we'd get through the time OK. It leaves a lot of things up in the air, and that's not pleasant. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

As we've reviewed our budget to see where else we can cut in the event that the news isn't good, I've come across a problem. There just isn't too many places we can cut.

Sure we have cable, and phones with data plans. Of course, eating out will be rare - a given. We can definitely eliminate other small dribbles of spending. Our June vacation was our last for a while.

Those are the simple things. But most of our spending has been on fixed expenses such as the house, or one-time larger investments such as a renovation project. And while some of those projects probably could have been delayed, the reality is that most of our projects have been of the necessary sort - new oil tanks, replacing the electrical panel, demoing a bathroom due to a water leak. It's just a fact of life in a lovely but old home. Believe me, spending money on dumpsters and wiring isn't enjoyable. I'd much prefer a new rug for the living room.

So even cutting back on those things, when and where we can, doesn't create a lot of leverage in our budget. We don't eat out much anyway, especially because a toddler dropping things on the floor and perpetually trying to escape her high chair doesn't make for a relaxing time. We haven't seen a movie in the theater in over a year. We don't do shows or concerts or sporting events. We get our DVDs from the library. We've never had a lot of interest in whooping it up, preferring to have a well-padded savings account, maxing our retirements, and truly enjoying hanging out at home.

The reality is that we'd almost have been in a better place if we blew a lot of money on meals out, shopping, trips to the casino and so on. Like I said, that's the easy stuff.

We're still in an okay place right now. But it's frustrating to do it all 'right' and still end up stressed and worried about the future.

The only upside of all this is that we have a lot of company.

To Tweet or Not To Twit

2010-07-08T07:47:00.002-04:00

I'm going to be honest here. I don't tweet.

And I don't want to. Ever.

As a blogger, I should want to build my mindshare and exposure by using Twitter. But I just can't bring myself to.

Why?

Because I'm not that interesting on a moment-by-moment basis. Seriously, does anyone care that I'm 'heading out 2 plant strawberries' or think 'So nice out 2day'? And if so, why do you? Can anyone explain that to me?

I've read some tweets. They weren't that interesting either. Even the ones that notified me of a sale or something. I'm just going to say it. Twitter is silly. It reminds me of the type of notes I wrote in middle school.

Besides, who has time? I work, I have a family, a home, a garden. I blog, I email, I try my best to spend time with friends and family. Should be enough, right?

I don't Facebook either. I probably should, except Facebook seems to use melodrama as a key form of communication, and that's something I'd like to avoid. I'm sure there's good stuff about it, lots of interesting stuff. I've never logged on though. Maybe I should.

But then again, planting strawberries is more of a priority to me right now.

Hello my name is MoneyPenny, and I'm hopelessly social-media lame.

The Longest Vacation Ever

2010-07-07T09:55:00.005-04:00

I realize it is probably utterly ironic that I left for a long road trip, then followed it immediately (like, 4 days later) with another road trip in the middle of writing a series of posts on Peak Oil.

Aside from a few days between trips, I have effectively been on vacation since June 17th. The most relaxing part? The last 2 days, which I've spent at home.

Putting 1500 miles on the car is neither frugal nor relaxing, but I must say, we had fun.

Still, it's nice to be home, and back to our routines.

I hope everyone had a nice 4th of July.

Being Wrong

2010-06-11T12:58:00.007-04:00

I hereby interrupt the regularly scheduled but potentially yawn-inducing series on Peak Oil to talk about wrongness.

Oh, I hate being wrong. Even when it's the best learning experience ever. Which it usually is. Yeah, shut up, I know I'm wrong to hate it (oh, the irony), okay? I also don't like constructive criticism, so nyah nyah. At least I am willing to admit it. I know I'm supposed to respect and appreciate the opportunity to grow and improve (and eventually I do), but often I just want to stick out my tongue and go 'thhhppppt'.

It's a mature day for me, what can I say?

Ira Glass, who is totally cool, did an interview with Slate on being wrong and how being not so good at things or wrong about things can actually make someone good at things. It's a brilliant interview of a brilliant guy. I was blown away by some of his statements. Two in particular stuck out.

"I had this experience a couple of years ago where I got to sit in on the editorial meeting at theOnion. Every Monday they have to come up with like 17 or 18 headlines, and to do that, they generate 600 headlines per week. I feel like that's why it's good: because they are willing to be wrong 583 times to be right 17"

It's sort of like the stats on Ty Cobb. One of the greatest ball players ever. Lifetime average (I know I've mentioned this one before) was .367.

If Ty could only get it right 1/3 of the time, what about the rest of us mere mortals? Most of us don't have a good batting average. I try to remember this when attempting to generate leads within my consulting firm. I'd like to hit it out of the park just once, but if I have to open 34.29 doors to be able to walk through 1 (583/17 = 34.29), it does help to know that.

Peak Oil and Us (You, Me, Everyone) Part III - Charles Dickens and the Future

2010-06-11T08:38:00.009-04:00

The Getting Dirty post became part IV, because I started writing this one instead.

So okay, someday oil declines are going to cause things to change around here. And we need to learn some skills. But does that mean that society as we know it comes crashing to a halt and we all effectively travel back in time 120 years? Or that things go all post-apocolyptic on us?

Er...no.

Tell me if you remember this from high school:

' It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. '

Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities in 1859. In my personal opinion, that paragraph contains some of the most important words in the history of the english language.

Why? Because it contains true, honest, big-picture perspective. It is always the best of times and the worst of times. It is always both the season of light and darkness. There is always evil and good. And the more things change, the more they stay the same. In some regards.

Don't you wish people still wrote and talked like that though? I do.

As a young adult, I had a bit of derision for the story, or not so much the story, but the tale it told. I mean, start a revolution by attacking a prison? As the frequently offensive and often correct Fred On Everything writes, it beat attacking a men's room, but only just.

But I've come to understand that Dickens saw the world through eyes that I both agree with and would love to emulate. More than 100 years separated his death and my birth, but he saw things so clearly. He saw things as they are, instead of how he wished they could be. And yet I think he must have been an optimist, because so many of his stories ended in hopeful circumstances. And I think those are the circumstances we face going into peak oil. The best of times, and the worst of times. The best of people, and the worst.

So how do we apply this to a changing environment we can't yet envision or predict?

You plan for the worst, hope for the best. Acknowledge what is, sure, but also what you want t the world to be. Start making small changes now, and continue making them, but keep living your life. Keep an open mind about what is to come. Heck, people have been predicting the end of the world since civilizations began, and it hasn't happened yet. Think about the things you could learn - for work, for life that you can apply both now and later.

A good example of this is understanding how companies will need to change to meet the impacts on themselves and their employees. Sure, they'll lay people off, and the social impacts of that are going to be very large. But there will lots of need for people who can help companies adapt to a largely remote workforce. Or to help with planning that once again includes sidewalks and thriving downtowns. To help manufacturing companies to figure out how to thrive in a climate of ongoing low demand. To figure out how to leverage older technologies, along with some new ones, to meet needs for transportation, medicine and a whole host of other things. To help communities become communities again.

Since I started this topic with a quote, I'll end it with one.

The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

That one was Sun Tzu. He was a smarty pants. Just sayin'.

I don't necessarily see Peak Oil as an enemy, but the opportunities for our success - and our failure - as we face it will come with the change.

Peak Oil and Us (You, Me, Everyone) Part II - What We Need To Learn

2010-06-09T07:25:00.008-04:00

So I hope I made you just nervous enough to keep reading with my last post. Because honestly, it makes me nervous that there's so little conversation about Peak Oil. Scary stuff, that. Just the sheer dependence of our - and other country's food supplies on petroleum is enough to unnerve even the most stalwart optimist.

I'm not a big fan of living on a diet of fear though. Gets tiring and boring and in the way of doing productive things a fair amount of the time. I mean, it's good to learn about Peak Oil, the economic impacts - all of that stuff is good from a macro, being informed perspective.

But the real value comes in being productive about it. And that's where we have to look at some interesting models to start to learn. Most of those models are old. Like, prairie housewife old. But the lessons can be adapted and updated.

We've got a lot going for us heading into The Long Descent. We're a more educated society. Huge strides in medicine, womens rights and nutrition have been made in the last 120 years or so. These are going to do nothing but serve us well as we go forward.

But we have some strikes against us. Most of us have forgotten, if we ever knew how, to fend for ourselves. Those of our families that knew how to capture a wild yeast and keep a sourdough going, or how to bake bread over open flame, or how to raise and butcher our own meat are long gone. And worse, most of us don't know our neighbors and our communities. In a world where supplies are limited, community- the sense of it and the reality of it - is often what stands between us and dire needs that are unmet.

But the biggest strike against us is our sense of entitlement. The sense that manual labor, such as picking crops or felling trees is for the uneducated masses. The sense that somehow we are better than that. The sense that a degree, or a series of them, allows us to insulate ourselves from the unpleasantries of life. The sense that we can buy our way to prosperity. Changing our minds about what 'successful' means is a huge challenge.

But not insurmountable.

This is not a story that has to have an unhappy ending. We can learn, and learn we must.

Where? Well, this is the fun part - there are so many places to learn from. Where do I suggest starting? Don't laugh. Here. Yeah, I mean it. Re-reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's lightly fictionalized descriptions of her childhood will give you new respect for what people are capable of. When you are done with the series, make some of these recipes. If you have kids, or just still feel like a kid, the taffy-pulling and ice cream making recipes are not to be missed.

Then go watch this. Seriously, if they can do it, we can. And we've got a lot of perks they did not - for one, we all don't have to build log houses, and for another, we can skip the corsets.

Then read this. My mothers hosted Carla Emery at their home several times before she passed on, and my sister recipe tested for her. Oh yeah, and read my sister's blog, The Chatelaine's Keys, she's brilliant and interesting, and an actual expert on the stuff I'm writing about. Which, I must add once again, I am not.

Then start a garden. Try baking some bread - this bread will literally take you 5 minutes. And oh, is it good. Read some more.

Look, you can think I'm a loony living in apocalyptic la-la land if you want when you read this. Actually though, I'm not. I'm a disgustingly practical working mom in upper middle-class suburbia who consults for Fortune 500 companies. I'm boringly normal, hardly an unshaven hippie-survivalist. I drive to work through traffic to Boston during the week, I wear high heels, makeup, and I color my hair. And for the record, I shave my legs.

But I think we're in for a wake up call sometime in our lifetimes. No one knows when or how it will come. But I have endless faith that we can learn what we need to.

Coming up: Getting Dirty

Peak Oil and Us (You, Me, Everyone) Part 1- What Is It, and Why Do I Care?

2010-06-08T08:30:00.008-04:00

With the gulf of Mexico filling with oil and killing everything in it's path from birds to incomes, I think it's time we talk about Peak Oil. And what it means.

Before I do, let me just say this - there's a lot of really in depth research out there, and I don't claim to be that. What I am is a voracious reader, and deeply interested in the topic, but by no means an expert. I'm also a bit of an optimist, and I really don't think that things will be as bad as some of the predictions. Peak oil is very real - even Dick Cheney would tell you that at some point, the oil is going to run out. And once you start reading about all the things made with petroleum, you understand why Peak Oil is such a big deal that it deserves to have capital letters.

Basically, it works like this:

1. There's a limited supply of oil, and an even more limited supply of oil that is reachable by current technology. And getting to some of the deposits is incredibly risky and expensive (talk to someone on the gulf coast about how risky it is).

2. Oil production will peak and then begin to decline sometime in the near future, if that point hasn't been reached already. No one is really sure, and there's a ton of debate. Let's just say that the debate is about a less than 20 year period though, and most estimates of the realistic most conservative and most optimistic scenarios are only about 9 years apart - 2016 to 2025. That's um, not that far away.

3. As oil production declines become more apparent, gas prices and other resources will become increasingly expensive. For those of us in the northeast that use home heating oil (that would be me), heating our homes becomes a tremendous issue. Let me put it this way: a barrel of crude peaked at $147 a barrel in June of 2008 when prices were skyrocketing. At that point, gas for my car was about $4.12 to $4.38 a gallon here in the Boston area, or about double the price we had been paying a few short months ago. If oil hits $200 a barrel, which has been predicted by some of the best industry analysts out there, that's probably $6.50 gas. Per gallon. I don't know about you, but that's a lot of money to me.

3. Almost everything is made with petroleum. And I do mean everything . So much for those of us who need antihistimines in the summer, antiseptic for anything, take vitamins or medications, want to glue something, paint a wall, throw around the old pigskin, or need an artificial limb. About 6000 products are estimated to have petroleum components.

4. The supply chain will have deep interruptions. Most of today's procurement by stores is 'just in time' meaning they have enough for a short period of time and frequently restock. This means that stockrooms heaped with lasting supplies of goods are a thing of the past, and most factories order based on short-term demand. Then there's the trucking industry - at the height of the spike in oil prices a couple years ago, I read that it was costing about $1700 to fill a tank for a truck. What happens when stuff is too expensive to make or bring anywhere? That's a problem.

5. Food is the scariest supply chain interruption. Most food is trucked or freighted approximately 1500 miles before it hits your grocery store shelves. Finding sources of local sustainable food, including what you can grow is the only way to offset this. But building up sustainable food supplies locally isn't easy or quick. When Peak Oil hits, food is going to become a big, big problem.

6. If you can't afford to get to work, you probably lose your job. Although if it comes to that, the stock market plummets probably have eliminated your job anyway. With a nationwide average of 10ish% unemployment, a lot of states unemployment funds have long since gone broke. Imagine the effects of much greater job losses. We can barely afford the government we do have.

7. No one wants to talk about this. At all. The assumption is that life will go on as it has - increased prosperity, opportunity, nice vacations, good jobs, etc. The sheer idea that it might not happen, and that the Great Recession was just a warm up exercise is so unthinkable to most of us that the only option is to make those that do talk about it into survivalist crazies not fit for normal society. Except that they aren't crazy. And not talking about something does not make it go away, sorry folks. All I'm saying is if you have the dream trip of a lifetime planned, don't put it off until 2026.

8. There's pretty much nothing we can do about it. Even if preparedness were something the nation was ready to have a conversation about, the discussion is probably so depressing that most of us would just get back to 'Dancing With The Stars' anyway.

9. The worst case doesn't have to happen. I mean that. We're pretty good at adapting, us humans. We've lost a lot of the know-how, and that's a problem, but there are still those amongst us who know what we need to know.

10. It's not going to happen overnight. And that's a very very good thing.

Scared you yet?

Good. You should be scared, this topic makes Rob Zombie look like a cuddly teddy bear. And, my little smurfs, it is true, all true.

But all is not lost, and I'm going to tell you about that. But not tonight. Sleep tight.