Sailing: An Odd Essay

Truncated Trains

I might hop a train if the trains here still went anywhere worthwhile.  There's tracks a five minute walk back through the woods, and we can hear them rumbling by several times a day.  The heaviest train-cars shake the bones of this old house a little.  (Not so much as the tractor trailers and buses passing out front.  It does not take so much to rattle this house.)  The noise of the trains is exciting and romantic, and we don't mind it at all.

Unfortunately the trains do not go far.  The scenic dinner train runs from Hyannis to the canal and back.  It doesn't even cross the magnificent railroad bridge, as it did in my youth when I rode across it clutching my absent older brother's cheap 1970s panasonic camera.  Too much trouble, no doubt, all that lowering and raising. 

Meanwhile all the tracks in Falmouth and running up and down the lower Cape have been ripped out, paved over, and turned into bike paths.  Lovely if you've got a bicycle and a Sunday afternoon.  But what about those of us with a ticket for the conductor?  What if we get lonely in our cars and want to travel someplace together?

The trash trains get to cross the canal, though.  They haul everything from Hyannis on down, I guess, to the Semass processing plant, where it gets burned and turned into energy.  One could hop on and ride it that far, I suppose, and maybe make a decent adventure of it, huddled among the garbage.  But I'd be ready to hop the next train back.  I've already seen the Southeastern Massachusetts.

I'm tired of driving.  My car needs an oil change and a new muffler.  Every week it wants new gas. 

I miss the subways of Boston, despite and all they're falling apart.  From what I understand there's even more trains in New York.  I think we need to live there for a little while before we're dead.  I'll make a hobby of learning every station, little islands in a vast infinite world.  Little places to remember until we forget.

Not for a while, though.  All our stuff is here, and all our stuff is tired of moving around.

Can We Put Away Childish Things In A Play State?

The Wife and I talked a bit this morning about our generation's fascination with toys.  We continue to collect them and even play with them as we grow up.   It seems to grow out of a sense of entitlement, irresponsibility, and a core discomfort with the aging process.

Our friend Mandrake came and spent the night with us this week.  It's been too long since we've gotten together - he's finishing up school in the city and we've moved back to the 'burbs.  So we had a great time, catching up and playing a game.

We stayed up until 2 AM playing Rock Band on his Xbox 360.  He brought his whole kit with him: the drum-set, microphone, two guitars, and the console itself, of course.

The game is addictive.  It creates this illusion of accomplishment as you tap buttons or hammer on drum pads in an attempt to match the patterns being flashed past you on the screen at increasing levels of difficulty.  You create avatars to represent your band in the game, and after every gig, the machine tells you how much virtual money you've earned and how many imaginary fans have started to follow you.  Then you can buy new virtual sexy clothes and hire virtual publicists to further your imaginary career.  You can buy tour buses to get to different gigs around the country, and eventually a jet to carry you to opportunities around the globe.

I was hooked.  The game simulates so much.  There's the challenge of music, which is pretty damned tricky even in a game, and you feel the satisfaction that musicians must feel when they actually get together and pull it off.  I mastered the drums on medium difficulty pretty quickly.  Ivy did a great job with the karaoke vocals, while Mandrake and Snake pinned down the lead and bass guitars.

There's that sense of accomplishment when you've earned enough to unlock new songs and venues, which makes you want to keep playing to see where you'll go next. 

Plus, it's a thoughtful way to listen closely to a lot of good songs you might have heard before but never paid attention to.  I have a new respect for drummers after playing this game, and Snake is noticing base lines in a way she never has.

So I'm not going to knock it, despite the fact that it can't be as satisfying as, say, actually playing an instrument.  It's a good way to have some fun with your friends - a heck of a lot more fun than just sitting down in front of the TV and getting stoned.  (We missed Obama's speech on account of Rock Band, and I'm all right with that.)

But once I got past the utter concentration required by this new skill, my mind had a bit of free space to reflect on what I was doing.  I couldn't help feeling a bit foolish - and futile.  This is my Puritan ancestry speaking up, I'm sure.  I often wonder if I was born missing the gene for a simple and straightforward appreciation of fun. 

But video games, in general, have been leaving me cold, lately.  This, despite the fact that I originally started this blog to write about game culture in detail - at least the games we could afford.  I lost that focus a long time ago.

When the latest generation of consoles came out (Sony PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii), we went and got the previous generation machines we'd missed out on so we could try all those games we'd passed on for budgetary reasons.  (Really, how can you justify being a multiple-console household when the things cost $300 apiece?)  I'm glad we got these old, used machines so cheap.  After putting a couple of hours into Metroid Prime - a game of the year, back in some year - and watching my wife wander around the fields of Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, these pursuits just felt like fruitless labor.  There's real crops to be planted and animals to feed, and the weather's getting warmer!

Another friend of mine has had an Xbox 360 since it came out.  We've played some games at his place, on a truly stunning hi-definition projector.  It was overwhelming, sensually.  But I decided not to spring for one, because all these processor cores and graphics chips are just driving the same old game-play through more and more polygons.  Dramatic and immersive, no doubt.  And buying games might be good for the economy.  But gaming on the 360 did very little to plug up that gnawing hole at the center of my self-worth.

So to the extent that Rock Band meant fun with friends, I had a great time.  Mandrake claims that buying the game has already paid social dividends for him, with all the parties he's taken his kit to around the city. 

But in terms of being an experience I want to pay for, then practice and master?  Not so much.

* * *

So, toys.  There used to be a time when we put away childish things.  Then our grandparents came back from the most brutal war of all time, made a bunch of boomer babies, and set about building a safe, comfortable, and structured world for them to grow up in.  (The Wife is deep in study and appreciation of that era right now, and I'm loving it.)  It seems to me that, for many of these Boomers, they came into a world where they really didn't have to grow up.  There was no urgency to their childhood, no sense that if they didn't pitch in and pull for the family, people might not make it.  This was probably the first time in history that this was the case.  So childhood expanded to fill the space it was given, because childhood is fun and feels good.

The amount of schooling it took to start a career increased, until our parents could piss away four or eight years after high school in pursuit of something called a liberal arts degree.  Then birth control came along, and so with their adult bodies they could have the most fun that a human being can have - all without consequence.  When the government drafted a bunch of them into service, they certainly didn't like that one bit, and that was understandable too, since their leaders didn't have any more understanding of what was going on than a child would, anyway.  So the boomers who whined like babies or ran away were let off the hook pretty easily, and we won't see a draft again. 

Social Security, Medicare, education spending and other government programs grew until our parents really didn't have to make a grown up, responsible decision at any point throughout their lives.  They might be more successful if they did.  And they might raise more responsible and well balanced children.  But if they weren't up to it, or just didn't feel like it - well, it wasn't like the universe was going to reach down and crush their families, like it would in the old days.

At least the Boomers managed to get up to some gritty, real-world, consequence laden fun.  Free love, LSD, all that hippy-dippy alternative lifestyle bullshit - if they really played hard enough it could still get you killed.

But they seemed to wake up one day (maybe it was to crack and heroin, or maybe it was to AIDS), and they decided that the world needed to be made even safer for their children.  Playing with adult things was too dangerous. 

Unfortunately, rather than teaching their children to be adult with adult things, they encouraged them to play with playthings all the way into adulthood.

Now we have the Gen-X kids who were warned that drugs would kill them, only they've been bottle fed Ritilin to keep them calm and Dexedrine to help them concentrate.  Kids who would once have walked, ridden their bikes, and played across entire neighborhoods and towns that have been locked inside their bedrooms to protect them from pedophiles, cannibals, and every other vague threat trumped up by Fox News and their brethren.  Kids who were told that as long as they stick with the program and stay in school (and then continue to stay in school again and again while taking out government loans to pay for it) they'd be able to get a job, have money saved for them, and retire at a comfortable age.  Now those Gen-X kids are all grown up.

And most of them believed it all, because they've never been told anything else.  They've gone to school and done what they're told and come straight home.  They've kept their minds busy with the only things they're allowed to control, which are toys.  And it seems inconceivable that their kids will have to do anything different.

It was fun.  I mean, the toys are good, immersive, dramatic and stimulating - more shiny and responsive than anything in the real world, anyway.  But now we're getting to the point that, by the time this batch of kids grows up, they just want to keep playing with toys - the latest computers and consoles, preferably, while the toys which are too simple and obsolete to entertain them any more are shelved, collected, and revered the way we used to honor our ancestors.

I mean, what's with the Star Wars and Pokemon figures in office cubicles?  The collections of old comic books?  The action figures and Hello Kitty USB drives and this horrible, horrible torture toy?  Is the world so safe now that we have to turn on our toys and abuse them to convince ourselves we're alive?

This brings me to Japan, the ultimate Toy State.  (Play State?)  Our obsession with disposable plastic amusements seems fleeting in comparison with Japan's, where the people work hard and play hard - they play like nursery school children on meth.  Seriously, where do they build all these toys?  And what must their landfills look like?

I suspect the Japanese infantalism is so much greater than ours because their welfare state hatched pretty much the day after the last bomb dropped and then grew into a behemoth that would seem positively Marxist if they didn't somehow simultaneously climb to the top of the world in manufacturing and trade.  (Niall Ferguson does a nice job explaining the Japanese economic system and the consequences it now faces in The Ascent of Money.)  So much modern fun seems to come from Japan: Nintendo, Sony, anime, cosplay, trance vibrators.  It's a beautiful country, I hear.  It's a wonder anyone ever goes outside to look at it.

* * *

So what's my problem with toys?  I don't know.  Maybe I'm just hitting middle age and feeling, shit, I ought to get out and look at something real while my legs still work.  And I'm wondering why the rest of my generation seems so hung up on childhood, when really, we're only children for such a short time.  Are we ever going to get our hands off our simulators and stimulators and actually do something?

Unfortunately, the real world has this against it: it's damned expensive.

I first cut back on the video games when we got the boat.  Sailing was a tremendous unmediated experience, I tell you what.  Hopefully someday we'll have the money to get back to it and enjoy again all the joy and life-threatening terror it involved.  Meanwhile, the latest Xbox and a batch of plastic pretend instruments are immediately attainable, whenever we want them.

I have another major concern: that America and Japan and the rest of the Play States are going to take themselves out of the picture in a couple of generations.  Because while we're completing our decade-long degree programs and having protected sex and playing video games, an awful lot of babies are being brought up in damned serious countries that cannot afford to coddle them, and aren't inclined to, either.

Not that it really effects me.  I mean, I'm not making babies for the team.  But, you know, somebody should.

Another Day In Bed = Lazy Vacation

I don't get sick that often, but when I do, man, do I ever go down hard.  I actually muddled through a couple of days of feeling low with no fever.  Waking yesterday with a fever and a violent cough was quite a shock. 

But with the help of an internet connected laptop, it's amazing how fast a couple of days can drift by.

There's Google Reader, delivering more news than I could possibly use throughout the day.  I should probably prune off some of my news feeds.  I don't really need to know about every new netbook hack or model that's come out.  And what the heck am I reading Slashdot for?  It's not like I work in high tech.

Then I had a few episodes of Jon Steward and Stephen Colbert to catch up on, as well as the excellent, entertaining, informative The Ascent of Money, which I now believe should be required viewing in every middle school history class.  It's like looking under the hood of global geopolitics at the economic engine underneath, and surprisingly fun.  Plus I'm totally gay for clever professors with Scottish accents.  (Hey BBC, why not make Niall Ferguson the next Doctor Who?)

Then I got retro and played Baldur's Gate II for a few hours.  What a great game that was (is!) and it plays a hell of a lot better on this computer than it did on what I had in 2000.  (I doubt I'll have the patience to finish it any more this time through than back then, though.)  It is impressive how much more story-driven it is than, say, World of Warcraft, which is limited by its massive multi-player mechanics to be more of a free for all, open ended experience. 

Getting through battles in BGII can actually be pretty tricky.  You have to manage six characters, make sure they all have the right weapons, armor, and spells equipped, and then place them in strategic locations to draw the enemy out, isolate and attack the opponents who are doing the most damage first, etc.  All of which has me understanding anew the appeal of WOW and the like, for folks who want to just sit down and click on enemies for a few minutes here and there.  (Only why, then, do folks get sucked in for so many thousands of hours?)

And I napped.  I napped to the point where I worried I might not sleep through the night last night, only I did, and then I napped some more.  It's like all the sleep I haven't gotten over the past year has come home to roost and collect interest. 

Nothing for it but to drift off again, I suppose.  Only it's a little disconcerting when the light in the windows seems to flicker off and on with the rapidity of one of those lamps they put in a chicken house to make the hens lay more eggs.

Temp ≤ Witches Teat

The penny-pinching continues!

We have electric heat, which is criminally expensive.  But by writing down the number on our electric meter every day and graphing our daily electricity usage, we've motivated ourselves into living in just one or two rooms of the house for most of the day and leaving the rest cold.

At night, all of the heat goes off.

So we've managed to keep our electric bills under $300 a month, even in this miserable weather.  That's not too bad, considering it includes heat, hot water, laundry, stove, lights, and computers.  I know folks paying more than that just for their oil.  (Of course, they get to keep the entire house warm.)

This morning we had frost on the inside of our bedroom windows.  And the water that was left in a pan in the kitchen sink had frozen into a solid block.  Also, the kitchen sink faucet didn't work until the heat had been on for a couple minutes. 

I guess I should be glad we didn't break any pipes, since at that point this sort of stubborn thrift turns into false economy.

The chickens need to be brought hot water a couple times a day, and if we don't gather their eggs right away, the eggs will freeze and crack.  There's something fundamentally sad about a frozen egg.

Accepting the Forgetting is Hard Work at Christmas

There are some things we just have to accept.

For example:

Maybe, despite what we told ourselves when we were younger, we're more comfortable working for someone else than we are running our own enterprises. 

Or: maybe we're not willing to spend thousands of dollars for surgery on a pet, even if that surgery could give it a couple more years of life.

Like: there just aren't enough years left for our investments to return what they've lost. 

And: some things are irreversible.

Limitations, shortcomings, bad news.  Denial just piles on the interest and penalties, so that when we do finally come to terms with reality, we owe a hell of a lot more.  Better to accept what we can early on. 

It's a muscle worth exercising. 

* * *

Here's a true Christmas Story involving a friend of mine.  Names and a few details changed, etc...

* * *

32 years ago, my friend Cheryl's father lost the ability to form new memories.  This was similar to Alzheimer's disease, but it was caused by a freak stroke or something and hit him in his early 30s. 

Cheryl's mother, Sue, has taken care of him all this time.  Sue, Cheryl, and the other children have learned that no combination of therapy and medication will improve Joe's life.  All they can do is keep him safe and make him comfortable. 

Joe can make his own instant coffee so long as he uses a kettle that whistles.  Loud noises bother him, so the sound of a kettle that he put on ten minutes earlier will bring him back to the task at hand; he'll switch it off and make his coffee. 

He can get by like this, and has done for three decades.  He can survive for the day while his wife goes off to work. 

Some things have gotten easier now that he's older.  His knees bother him now and he never feels like going out for a walk.  When he was younger, he had a tendency to wander.  He'd get lost in the neighborhood.  Once, he decided to take the Beagle for a walk, and on that walk, he gave it away to a couple of strangers.  "I don't need this anymore," he told them.  They were perplexed, but this guy seemed intent on abandoning the dog, so they took the leash and went on their way.

His wife saw the dog walking with the strangers on her drive home.  It wasn't hard for her to piece together what had happened.  Thankfully they were happy to give it back.  Sue loves that dog.

* * *

Some things we accept, move on, never question.  Others require occasional reminding, and some require all-day every-day outright effort. 

After this fall's ice storm knocked out their power in New Hampshire, Sue took Joe and the dog to their friends' house to stay a few days until electricity was restored. 

The few days turned into a week and a half.

These friends, Bonnie and Harold, they'd kept in touch with Sue and Joe since high school but they really weren't all that close.  Still, in an ice storm with an elderly dog and a terminally forgetful husband, you take your kindness where you can find it.  At least their friendship made up for in duration what it lacked in intimacy. 

Joe and Bonnie had even gone to Senior Prom together. 

Their friendship was being tested by the second day.  The house had a guest bedroom, but Sue and Joe had not slept in the same room for years, and doing it now would confuse the living shit out of him.  So Joe was installed in the bedroom while Sue stretched out on the living room sofa.  She scattered her clothes and cosmetics around her, bringing a refugee camp feel to the living room. 

By the third day, Bonnie was suggesting they be careful around one another.  "I know you need to be here and I'm happy to help you, but I think it would be best if we respected each other's space and tried to stay out of each other's way when we can."

But Sue was trapped in her friend's house and unused to sitting still.  As another storm settled in, she decided she was going to make some fudge to give away for Christmas.  She set a thick mixture to bubbling on the stove.  Heavy snow came down outside, adding insult to the previous storm's injury. 

While Sue cooked and watched the flakes come down, their Beagle got into the medicine bag by the sofa and ate all his pills at one go.  (I've never known a dog so eager to take his own medicine!)  Soon he was whimpering and rolling around on the floor.  A call to the vet confirmed that without emergency medical attention, the dog was going to die.

Bonnie doesn't drive, apparently, and she made it clear she didn't want her husband Harold taking the car out in a storm either.  But Sue was too distraught over the state of her dog, she said, to drive herself in this weather.  So she convinced Harold to take her over Bonnie's objections. 

But the fudge!  Sue pulled Joe away from the word-search puzzles he uses to pass the time and said, "Joe, the dog is sick and we need to take him to the vet.  Harold is going to take me but there is fudge cooking on the stove and I need you to finish making it." 

I don't know if she had a recipe book open on the counter or if she just assumed Joe would remember how to make fudge, of all things, when he couldn't remember anything else that had happened in the previous 33 years.  Maybe his regular success with instant coffee gave her some encouragements. 

Sue and Harold set off.  Bonnie went up to her bedroom to fume at Sue and worry about Harold driving in the snow. 

Joe was left in the kitchen.

The fire alarm went off half an hour later.  Bonnie came down to a kitchen full of smoke and a pan burnt through with a thick layer of what looked like sticky vulcanized rubber bonded to the bottom.  Joe was baffled.  He clapped his hands over his ears and screamed back at the sound of the alarm. 

What it's like to come downstairs and find your prom date of 40 years prior in your disastrous kitchen, I can only imagine.

Harold and Sue were in a car accident on the way back from the veterinary hospital which did some pretty serious damage to the car after all - confirming Bonnie's reservations about driving in the storm. 

But at least the dog was saved.

Bonnie decided she wasn't housing the Beagle anymore, though.  Sue and Joe were too much to take care of already.  The dog was shuffled off to Sue's son Gregory, who, a day later, accidentally left his sliding door open so that the dog escaped.  Gregory spent several hours looking for it, until he called the animal shelter to discover that a passing trucker had spotted the dog walking along the highway, picked it up, and brought it in.  When the family all finally got together for Christmas dinner and the dog was returned, Gregory told Cheryl about the misadventure with the dog, but nobody told Sue.

All of which makes me realize: you can accept that your husband has a debilitating mental disorder that means you have to care for him and provide for your family entirely by yourself for the rest of your life.  You can accept this because you have to, and you can survive and lead a life with a sort of hard routine happiness. 

But in a moment of crisis that acceptance can become too hard to maintain, and you'll forget that your husband isn't able to handle the damned fudge.

Christmas Success

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas.  (Sorry I'm a bit late with the holiday wishes but, you know, life.) 

We had nine folks and six dogs (count 'em!) which don't get together often enough, so that was lovely.

Dogs all had a pretty comfortable time too, don't you think?

The Nap

I hate it, but it's always been this way and it's never going to change.  There's no use fighting it, or complaining.

Around noon I start feeling sleepy.  If I'm doing something interesting, or keeping busy with some physical task, I'm uncomfortable.  If I'm working at something dull, it's agonizing.

Between two and three in the afternoon I will fall asleep.  Like I said, there's no fighting it.  It's been this way since puberty.  In school, that second-to-last class of the day was hell.  In eighth grade I was sent to the nurse after falling asleep in English class and cracking my head against the desk.  In tenth grade, it was chemistry.  But by then I'd learned to take a seat next to the wall where I could rest my head.  Fortunately both the class and the teacher were too dull to notice. 

Other years, I arranged it so I'd have a hole in my schedule around that time.  I'd sleep in the school library, or stretch out on a patch of grass outside the cafeteria.  It's strange that teachers never bothered me about this, but I was known to be a good student and I suppose they were inclined to save their disciplinary energy for bigger problems.

If I hadn't napped by the time school let out, I'd drift off in the car on the way to my piano lesson and then fumble my way through the first half of it, playing as one hung-over.  My teacher took it as a testament to her skills how much I improved from the first half of the lesson to the last.

I often wonder if I skipped college because I felt guilty, in advance, about how much of it I was going to sleep through.  I do know that The Nap made me reconsider a career in aviation.  It was clear that, as soon as the wonder of flight gave way to routine, I'd be drifting off at 30,000 feet.

Now I have to work.  When I can, I arrange it so my lunch-break falls around The Nap.  I'll sit in my car and wolf down a sandwich in ten minutes so I can sleep for twenty, reclining my back-rest against the back seat and rolling my jacket up for a pillow.  When I've worked jobs that don't allow for scheduled breaks, I've used the slow times to sit with my back to the door and a newspaper on my lap and trusted to the door-buzzer to wake me when a customer comes through.  I've programmed myself to come out of a nap on autopilot and greet you with enough alacrity to convince you I was just reading. 

On slow days, with no customers to interrupt, I'd sleep for an hour and a half, like that.

Coffee doesn't help.  Not at two in the afternoon.  I've tried sugary sodas and those horrible energy drinks, too.  I'll drink a thermos-full of coffee, starting at one, because it does seem to shorten the recovery process, kicking in when I wake up again.  But nothing stops The Nap. 

When I feel it coming on I've got 20 minutes to get my ass to a chair or a sofa and close my eyes.  Voices will start swirling around, then.  Conversations my brain has with itself in the background.  Storylines, plots, entire lifetimes compressed into a few minutes, like a pocket-universe in an episode of Doctor Who expanding and collapsing right there while I doze. 

I'll hear music I've never heard before, pop songs and advertising jingles for products and services that don't exist.

"We'll help you run 'em down, boys.
We'll run 'em out of town..."

If I'm driving, well, it can be scary.  But I've got ten minutes to find a rest-area and pull over before I go under.  I often have to do this when I've fought The Nap off at 2 p.m. and it comes back to collect the debt, with interest, at 5:30.

My grandfather was the same way, apparently.  He managed the Northgate Mall in Seattle.  He'd take a two hour lunch break in the middle of the day, drive home, eat the lunch his wife prepared, and then sleep for an hour or more.  (I'm often resentful that the 1950s, in which things like this could happen, were all used up by our parents and grandparents.)  I don't know if my father did this too, although I suspect his schizophrenia may have something to do with the pronounced voices I hear around the edges of sleep.

I don't know if it's narcolepsy.  I don't just pass out.  My doctor buddy suspects it's just my personal sleep cycle.  And it's not a life or death condition I'm dealing with, here. 

Still, I spend so much of my life sleeping, or longing for sleep, or recovering from sleep, that I can't help wondering how different life would be if I didn't have this...problem? condition? 

That recovery phase, that waking-up, it's often the hardest moment of all.  When the eyes are open but the body is too much to move and the world seems a bleak, immobile place where nothing ever changes except the hands of the clock, sweeping out their pre-ordained courses without me.  I've made my peace with The Nap but I could do without that last bit.

Complicated Steps Towards Simpler Living

In the spirit of simplicity and frugal living, here are a few of the things we're doing to pinch pennies, these days:

1. Moving out of the city and back into our house.  I had mixed feelings about that, but now that we're settling in it feels okay.
2. Raising chickens and honeybees.  Neither has produced yet, though we expect the eggs to start soon and to get a good crop of honey next summer.
3. Cooking more.  We'll get the occasional take-out, but I don't think we've gone out to eat for a couple of months.  This is a huge change from our City Year.  And I'm brown-bagging my lunches.  I'd guess this is costing businesses around my workplace about $1300 a year.
4. Cooking together.  Another benefit of coming back to the Cape has been landing closer to family again.  It's cheaper and more fun to eat with family and friends, and you can take turns.  (Full disclosure: my wife and my nieces are the ones taking turns and I love them all very much.  I will occasionally help with the dishes.)
5. Budgeting.  Donna's borrowing some of the best practices from the 1950s (you can read her blog about her obsession with mid-century living here) and working out a weekly grocery budget with meals planned in advance.  The result: we've got our weekly food bill down to $40.  That includes those brown-bag lunches.
6. Wearing sweaters.  (Face it, Jimmy Carter was right about this.)  We have electric heat, and it's not in this year's budget to convert the house to gas or oil.  Electricity is criminally expensive, so the heat stays off or as low as possible.  A sweater is absolutely necessary.  Sometimes two.
7. Closing doors.  The one and only good thing about electric heat is, every room has its own thermostat.  And over the years we've thrown up a few walls in the house to make better use of what were formerly wasted, open pass-through spaces.  So the bedroom doors stay closed and the heat never gets turned on on the second floor.  The kitchen gets warm enough on its own with all the cooking we do.  I only need to heat my office when I'm in there, which isn't often enough.  And when we leave a room we turn the heat off as well as the lights.
8. Plastic sheeting on the windows.  I've got to get around to this.  I also want to make a removable plywood and insulating foam insert for the fireplace.
9. Coal.  An oil burner and baseboard plumbing may not be in the budget, but a coal grate for the fireplace could be.  I'd be happier if the house had a central chimney.  But, keeping a fire going in there when we're all home would keep that end of the house warm, and that room is open to the stairs, the upstairs hall, and the kitchen hall.  So long as the chimney cleaners sign off on it (coal burns a lot hotter than wood, and coal-started chimney fires almost brought down my childhood home - twice) this could be a cheaper way to keep the draftiest and most open parts of the house warm through the coldest months.  I realize a coal stove would be more efficient and probably pay for itself in a couple years.  I'd love one of those locally made beauties from the Iron House.  But we like gathering around the fireplace, and I'm just not ready to block that off with a big iron box.
10. Fucking NStar.  Remember the debate in Massachusetts about de-regulating NStar a coupe of years ago?  Since that happened, their profits soared and their stock price quadrupled.  Remember those ads saying deregulation would be good for the consumer?  They were paid for by NStar.  I spent a couple of hours deciphering one of their bills with a spreadsheet - because they don't make it easy to understand.  Bottom line, we're paying 19 cents per kilowatt-hour plus some $11 "customer fee" every month.  So I'm reading my meters every day at the same time and writing it down, so we can see what happens if we switch to those flourescent bulbs, for instance, or how much money we save if we start...
11. Taking Less Showers.  (Don't look at me that way.  That's what deodorant's for.)  It costs around seventy cents to take a ten-minute shower, between heating the water heater and running the well-pump.  With three people that's around $60/month for a shower a day, without even laundering the towels.  We're doing less laundry and flushing the toilets less, too.  The old yellow - mellow rule is in full effect.  Using the stuff that turns the toilet water blue helps, here.  We just have to be careful when we use a public toilet now, that we remember to flush it.

So.  Those are our recessionary plans.  What are you all doing to prepare for the coming economic storm?

And seriously, check out Donna's midcentury Atomic Living blog and her new Etsy Store for vintage kitsch and 1950s inspired art!

Thanks to Cape and Islands Tire in Falmouth

Over the past month, three of my four tires have gone flat. 

One started leaking around the valve-stem.  Our mechanic fixed that for $24.  Then, two days later, I hit a pot-hole and blew a massive gaping hole out of the sidewall of another.  I changed the tire in the break-down lane and drove to work on the donut, taking a break out of the middle of the day to get the blown tire replaced. 

Then, last week, I heard a rumbling from the side of the car and pulled over to find one of the tires on the other side had gone flat.

I can change a tire in under five minutes, now.

I took the wife's car the next day and asked her if she'd take mine in to Cape & Islands Tire in Falmouth to replace the three tires that hadn't been replaced already.  I figured we were out somewhere between $200 and $300, which we can't really afford right now.

The Cape & Islands Tire people said, "I can't sell you three new tires.  These tires are fine.  The flat one would be fine too, if you husband hadn't driven on it so damn long."

She explained that I kept getting flats and thought something was fundamentally wrong with our tires.  They insisted that, no, replacing the other valve stem was all it needed. 

So they balanced and rotated the tires, replaced the valve stem, and sold us just the one.  For a total of $90.

A pleasant surprise.  We'll be going back there again.

On Teaching Kids Financial Responsibility

I was discussing the sorry state of the economy with a wealthy customer, a fellow who is "terrified" of the effects an Obama tax increase would have on his business. 

We ignored our differences and discussed how, in the face of the looming $60 trillion Credit Swap Default apocalypse, the $700 bailout package was like pissing on a forest fire. 

We discussed those absurd economic stimulus checks and the fact that they did little for the economy above and beyond piling another load of shite into the federal deficit.  Trying to look on the bright side, I pointed out that the online porn industry experienced a surge of business after those checks came out.  He shook his head and complained about the moral decay of our country.

He said, "The real problem is that our kids aren't taught to save money, any more."  And then we swapped stories about running paper routes to save for bicycles and riding paper routes to save for running shoes.  He told me that, today, he often shuts off his daughter's cell phone accounts when they spend too much time gabbing and go over their plans' minutes.

"My oldest daughter is in college now," he said, "and she flipped out when I told her we decided to make her pay for her own textbooks."

"Ouch," I said.  "Textbooks cost a lot."

"Yeah.  She started crying and asked me, 'How am I going to come up with the $600 I need to pay for all these books?'  and I told her, 'Figure it out.  Get a job waiting tables if you have to.'"

"Well," I said, "if you want her to do well in school she's not going to have time for waitressing.  But there is a lot of money in online porn, these days.  Has she considered a side career in acting?"

There was a long uncomfortable silence, and for a moment I thought he was going to take a swing at me.  But finally he said, "Well, I ended up paying for half of her books.  I really didn't know they were going to be that expensive."