These were painted by my MIL on the basis of photographs taken last summer. Aren’t they absolutely gorgeous! Oh, I just had an Insight! Maybe this is the year when we start sending out New Year’s cards? LOL.
All images (c) 2012, Sudakshina Ghosh
Adding Rooms to Our House
We have always used our basement for three things: laundry, storage (aka dumping) and, seasonally, seedlings. There are two large rooms and a spacious corridor.
One room holds the furnace and the two big oil tanks that the previous owner needed so her 50-year-old furnace could overheat her uninsulated house (we fixed all of that first thing). Those two tanks now store enough biofuel for the next two and a half years, maybe even three if we stretch it. The rest of that space has some great shelving, racks against the ceiling for wood and piping, and a concrete floor. It is the perfect space for a workshop and that’s what it will be: a space for messy projects that involve sawdust, splashes of paint, grout. and soil and water for the seedlings. All it requires is the removal of “storage boxes” and the food pantry (jams, canned foods, honey, etc.).
The other room is so large as to be a bit amorphous, which invited spontaneous (i.e., unorganized) dumping. Â It used to have asbestos tiles which we had removed, leaving an unappealing concrete surface. We have already covered that with a DRIcore subfloor, and over the weekend we put up a dividing drywall with a door.
The smaller room to the right became the storage room. It will hold all our boxes with out-of-season clothes, clothes of Amie’s en route to Goodwill, old toys, electronics and miscellaneous There is also an inbuilt cabinet where I’ll put all the food related storage items: all the glass jars, plastic containers, as well as the big canner and dehydrator.
The larger room to the left  will be our media/project room. The idea is to watch movies there (projected on a screen), but mainly to work on arts and crafts. I envision several work tables, benches and shelves for painting, sewing, electronics, printing, etc. Also some bookshelves. This room needs the most work. I can feel a TO DO list coming on!
- sand down seams in drywall (already spackled)
- paint all walls and doors
- install finished (laminate) Â floor
- put up bookshelves
- put up shelving, benches
- move in all the tools, books, paints etc that are cluttering up the rest of the house
Amie is very excited! We all are! But splitting up that one big room it is as if we added two whole new rooms to our house.
And that’s not all. There are three more basement areas to work on. First, the laundry area, which is in the corridor. It holds the washer and the dryer, a sink in a grubby, warped cabinet. I’d love to put in some new and clean cabinet space for storing laundry soups, etc., and a counter where we can at least make some coffee or tea and wash up the dishes.
Then there is the pantry. At the moment our food storage is in the “messy room,” but I’d like to move it closer to the kitchen. The corner in the corridor right next to the stairs is perfect. We’ll need to add some shelving there.
Lastly there is what I call “The Hurricane Room – You Only Need It Once!” (yes, that’s its full name). Our house is a ranch with a steel beam running along its length in the middle.  The tiny space under the stairs is also right under that beam and so the most reinforced place in the house.  It’s also near a window (for egress), and right around the corner from where the pantry will be. That’s where we will store our emergency supplies, and I’ll make it comfortable enough so we can spend an hour in there if need be. Like I say: you only need it once!
Hens Don’t Like Snow, but They Love Hen-Sitters
Yesterday we had our first real snowfall of the season. Just an inch, if that. In the morning I opened the coop hatch and, unlike on other days, the chickens didn’t rush out, scolding, hurrying down the plank to their food under the coop. They poked their heads out, looked around, questioned, hesitated. Two ventured down the plank to the point where the roof stops. Then turned back. Then tried again. One made it down, one other followed a minute later. I’m standing there, still in my PJs, going “come on, come on, it’s alright, it’s okay, come on”.  One more was laying an egg in the nest box so she couldn’t be bothered. The fourth, dithering on the plank, turned, went back intot he coop and sat on the roost: “I’m not coming out!” Funny chickens.
Over Thanksgiving break we went to NYC to visit friends for the whole long weekend. On this end I had a line-up of three friends and their families to take care of the hens. They divided up the morning and evening chores and the chickens must have loved it because they were so healthy and happy when we returned. Who knows how many yogurt treats they got! They probably also got a lot more attention from the hen-sitters than from me. My friends got to keep the eggs they found, of course, plus some eggs I had accumulated up till then, and jams and honey and Belgian chocolates.
They brought their kids and one brought her mom too, who is an incurable knitter. When we returned home we found this little egg sweater sitting in our fridge. Â Isn’t that too cute!
It makes such a difference, Â to be able to travel for a short while, knowing the ladies are well taken care of. Thank you, friends!
Powerful Householding, or How to Stop Flicking Switches
I am part of a group that seeks to “green”  our church (UU). At the last meeting only women came, five of us. One of our discussions revolved around single-use paper cups during coffee hour and Sunday school. We have many mugs and we figured out how to put them back to use. The major obstacle is, of course, inconvenience. Will people go into the kitchen and rinse their mugs or put them in the dishwasher? What kind of mess will that make? Can we ask the (volunteer) coffee hour hosts to take this on? Should we help the coffee hour hosts deal with the dishes?
To us it was self-evident that we should do this: we avoid plastic bags and single-use bottles, bring our own containers to restaurants for leftovers and to the deli to avoid the baggies. But we were well-aware that others, even in our liberal church community, would not welcome this. Their lives are busy and difficult enough as it is, why add another inconvenience?
As we talked this through, I realized that, though I take on some of these measures because they are “green” and, even deeper down, principled, I also like the fact that they add effort to my daily life. I actually think it’s a nice bonus!
You see, as an unpaid part-time work-at-home mom, I gradually realized that the daily running of the household was so easy as to be meaningless, worthless. Yes, it is wonderful not have to scrub the laundry and one’s hands in cold water, not to have to go out to the pump to draw water, to have dishwashers and automatic furnaces and a car to go get all the food we want from the supermarket. But what was left, but the flicking of switches from on to off to on again? That demands no respect. The respect goes to the money-earner in the house who bought the machine, the engineer who designed it, the “civilization” that made it all possible.
Then I started carrying take-out boxes around and eschewing plastics and single-use anything, and began to divest our household from supermarkets through gardening, keeping hens and bees, and began building things with my own hands, hanging laundry to dry, and switched from oil heat to a wood stove (we buck, split and stack  our wood and gather and cut kindling ourselves). I did all this for environmental and resilience reasons, out of the principle to take only what I need, and partially also as a way to contribute financially by generating savings.  And I found that the inevitable inconveniences were welcome, because they put effort and thus meaning back into the daily chores, making them  empowering again.
Later on I talked about this with a friend who is a full-time (and then some) career woman. She took exception to my line of thought. She is stretched so thin that adding any of these inconveniences would just make her snap. Of course, we all make different choices. She chose to get her empowerment mainly from her position, her pay check. She pays others to do the household chores for her, so all she has to do when she gets home after a long day of work is mostly flick switches (she has outsourced everything but cooking, which she loves), so she can spend her precious free time with her family. I chose to aim for a balance between household/homestead and activism (not found it yet!). I get some of my empowerment from my activism, but I too want a fully meaningful life, and so I welcome it in my household life.
That is why this morning I got up way too early, having gone to sleep too late after working on solar in my town – what was that about balance? I shrugged into my winter jacket and sneakers and grabbed the wood basket and went outside. The freezing wind and slushing snow woke me up good. The hens were yelling at me to be let out of the coop, and then I replaced their frozen water. Back in the porch I filled my basket with firewood. I took it in and made breakfast and lunch while shouting to DH and DD to get out of bed! Â Then I sat down in front of the stove and lit the newspaper, which lit the fat wood, which lit the kindling, which lit the firewood. While others were still waking up, having breakfast, commuting to work, waiting to get somewhere empowering, I had already worked. I was already powerful.
The Approximate Shape of You
Well, things are picking up. With Sandy and then the election I am galvanized into action again. Plans, ideas are revived. I see new ways of making them possible. We need to start doing more climate change outreach, right now when it is fresh on people’s minds and even the politicians are talking about it. We need to plan that Great Unleashing, that big party that draws the community together around the resilience challenge. We need to see that solar co-op happen, for those here who wanted solar but were shaded out, with perhaps a component that allows those with excess kilowatts to sell them on a “local solar market”…
I caution myself to be careful here. Perfect is the enemy of good and Rome wasn’t built in a day and one step at a time! Â I need to stay sane, and calm, and not overwhelm myself and others. I need to fit my ambitions to my capabilities.
I’m always looking for new ways to put this to myself.
A week ago I discovered Stephen Jenkinson, who works with dying people. There is an interview with him here in which he speaks about the death of loved ones as well as of the culture. The message is that the culture is dying and that, instead of running away, we should be present at her death bed just as we should be present at our loved one’s death bed. The whole interview is worth your attention. But there was this one line which spoke to me loud and clear:
“You have to decide that maybe the crazy place you find yourself in could use a little sanity that’s got the approximate shape of you.”
Jenkinson adds that you should risk  arrogance. I don’t see arrogance in this, not anymore. I think only those who are still hiding their lights under a bushel, for whatever reason, see arrogance in it as a way of judging and justifying their own inaction. Those who have accepted that the world needs work and that “if I’m not going to do it, who else will?” see that line, on the contrary, as a caution.  Yes, there is a space there for me to fill. Yes, I shouldn’t leave it empty and I shouldn’t fill it halfheartedly. But also, I also shouldn’t overfill it, stuff it to bursting so there is no space to breathe, so it explodes and takes others down with it.
There is just that one space with that particular shape, my shape. I want to honor and serve and love it. If I do too little, that space and the world around it will let me know. If I do too much it will nudge me, if need be push me, back in line. As long as I let it.
There. Earthed again (*).
(*) Because the word “grounded” has bad childhood connotations.
What Makes an Ordinary Day Extraordinary?
A couple of days ago as I was walking to the elementary school to pick up Amie I was suddenly struck by what a fine day it was. Then I stopped in my tracks – we walk to and from school through “the woods”, that’s the neighbors’  wooded backyards, so they were, literally, tracks – and laughed out loud. Another mom, just behind, caught up with me and asked with a smile what I was laughing about. My plain and simple answer was: the criteria we have for what constitutes “a good day”!
I’m not talking about the day when you bump into Bill Gates in the elevator and sell him your project, or find an agent for your novel, or win the lottery…Â I’m talking about an ordinary day — that day. And I found that three particular things had “made” that day:
- all four hens had each laid an egg after being on strike for two days, possibly freaked out by the hurricane,
- my neighbor had brought me a pound of wild oyster mushrooms,
- I had just tasted the mead and it far exceeded my expectations.
Why did this make me laugh? First because I thought: is that all it takes, food? Then I realized that all this food was rather exceptional food. That in this suburban neighborhood I was managing to cultivate out-of-the-ordinary food:  all of it home-made, home-grown, and foraged within a mile of my house (the mead is from my own honey, the mushrooms were foraged in my street). It was something I so dreamed of years ago. And now here it was, making my day, making my ordinary day!
Amie and I that day talked about how much of our food is local and what that means. We know the people and animals who grew it. Knowing them we can appreciate their labor, their love, the need for our support. We are naturally moved to gratitude. We decided we need a way of saying thanks. If you know of a poem or short message of thanksgiving (that is non-religious) to be said over our dinner everyday, please share it with us. It will help us celebrate the  extraordinary food that lifts us up out of the ordinary.
Riot for Austerity – October 2012 – Month 48
FOUR YEARS OF RIOT!
Four year summary coming soon
This is the Riot for the month of October 2012 for the three of us. My summary of our first three years is here. Edson fixed the calculator: all go tither to crunch those numbers!
We did well in October. The somewhat lower numbers are because I recorded the last Riot on October 2, so we’re looking at two days less than I usually count. Still, it looks good. I wish I could say what we’re doing to make it look that good, over and beyond our average numbers.
Gasoline. Â Calculated per person.
9.8 gallons per person
23.8% of the US National Average
Electricity. This is reckoned per household, not per person. We cook on an electric stove. According to our solar meter, we produced 6477 kWh since the system was turned on, and 302  kWh this last month (the return is going down quickly now – comparre to 502 in September and  615 kW in August –  You can follow our solar harvest live here). We owed NStar nothing because we still have credit from our over production, but we do know that with that credit we bought 10kWh from them. So we used 302 + 10 kWh = 312 kWh, which I think is pretty neat!
312 kwH
17.3%Â of the US National Average
Heating Oil and Warm Water. This too is calculated for the entire household, not per person. This is all for heating water for dishes and showers, since we’ve not had to turn on the heat, yet. We did really well last month and kept it up this month. We’re still looking into an electric on-demand heater with perhaps a solar thermal unit.
7.8 gallons of oil
12.7 % of the US National Average
Trash. After recycling and composting this usually comes down to mainly food wrappers.
6 lbs. pp per month
4.4%Â of the US National Average
Water. This is calculated per person. We did even better than last month!
431.4 gallons pp.
14 %Â of the US National Average
Disaster Preparedness, Resilience, Treading Water and Dangerous Assumptions
Amie reads Calvin and Hobbes during Hurricane Sandy (13h) power outage, 29 October 2012
So we weathered yet another storm. Or rather, we didn’t. Sandy went around us. We got some of her peripheral gusts of wind and some rain, but none of it very severe. Â Half of my town was out of power. Â School was closed Monday and again today due to power outages and blocked roads.
So we got lucky. Or did we?
Our power went out at the very beginning, before Sandy had even made landfall 300 miles south of us. So just the smallest of what Sandy could throw at us instantly toppled our infrastructure. Why? Because  all she had to do was continue what Irene and previous storms had already wrought: trees and branches weakened by those storms had to come down.
The lesson here is that we don’t go from crisis to crisis, resetting each time. Instead we now accumulate risks and dangers. The next storm, however small, might be a major tipping point. The next big one might be utter disaster. Lacking the money or will to repair our infrastructure to pristine condition or to replace it with more resilient systems – systems that can take a hit - we “maintain” it in good enough condition for “normal” conditions.  The downed wires will be restrung, but we won’t be putting them underground.
We’re merely treading water.
***
Reading during (40-h) power outage Nor-Easter of October 30, 2011
Here’s another example of our lack of resilience. When the grid went down, our grid-tied solar array went down with it. Batteries are still too expensive, environmentally problematic and short-lived, so my household was without power too. With Solarize Massachusetts we managed to get about 130 solar small residential and business arrays up here in Wayland and in our neighboring towns of Lincoln and Sudbury. We pat ourselves on the back for our success, yet in times of crisis it turns out that it means nothing.
The majority is not bothered, of course. “Those couple of days in the year when you’re without power don’t matter,” they scoff. To them it’s all about the 362  (give or take) good days of energy efficiency and environmental impacts. These are all good and necessary qualities, of course, but we should also be looking at resilience. Climate change and other predicaments will impact  us more and more, faster and faster. “Normal” will shrink and “Frankenstorms” will become the norm. All our efficiency won’t matter if there’s no resilience underlying it.
If you’re thinking that that’s rushing to ring the alarm bell, may I point out that only a few years ago people laughed at the possibility that whole swaths of the country might be without power for more than a couple of hours. “This is not a developing country!” Nowadays we easily skip worrying about the power, taking it for granted that it will be lost, and move on to worrying about the water supply. In a few years time, even loss of water supply will be expected. What’s next?
And so we go happily down the rabbit hole, adjusting our expectations with each step so that we don’t have to do something about it that may – sweet Gee! Â – demand sacrifices to our wallets or our idea of ourselves as on top of the world!
***
For me this isn’t just a social – local or international – issue. I’m pointing the finger at myself too.
Yes, we’re prepared. We have bug-out bags at the ready and food, water, flashlights, batteries and sleeping bags (*) in a hurricane room in the basement. But let’s not kid myself! Yesterday, as DH was charging our brand-new NOAA  emergency radio, the hand crank broke off. I was furious: what if we had really needed it? Though I am still  fuming, I am grateful for the wake up call. There could have been no more powerful sign of how fragile we are, and only fractionally less fragile even with all our preparations.
That I believed that my radio would work also betrayed that I had not really given up a key assumption: that we are rebuilding this ship in dry dock rather than plugging her leaks in the middle of a choppy ocean. I thought I had:  it’s my favorite image of our world in peril, along with “we’re treading water,” which complements it. But obviously I had assumed that this radio was built in dry dock, that is, under the very best of circumstances and conditions. I know now that it was not, that it was made cheaply, its parts sourced and assembled by the cheapest bidder, its testing foregone because the buyer would buy it anyway and because, perhaps, most buyers wouldn’t need it, anyway.
Well, may we all shed our assumptions, and soon. Treading water is hazardous enough without live wires coming down!
—-
(*) Some accuse us of being hoarders, but we bought our emergency supplies in times of plenty, when our purchases didn’t  impact supplies – which is not something you can say of those who raid the supermarket shelves the day before the storm.
A Study of Honey Frames
In order:
- comb that the bees drew out, filled with honey, and capped with a thin cap of wax,
- comb after uncapping, oozing with honey (here’s a video of uncapping),
- comb after extraction (see video). Extraction is never total: there is always lots of honey left, more or less depending on the viscosity of the honey and the determination of the robbers (us),
- so you give the extracted frames back to the colony for “cleaning.” Is that clean or what!? The bees are excellent cleaners!
  
  
Poem by a Friend
My friend Janine, fellow Transition worker and fellow blogger, has written a gripping poem. It haunts till the end. This is the beginning:
                     I dreamt a sword fight broke out in the cornfield
                     I was dodging poison arrows in the brassica
                     tripping over minefields in the brussel sprouts which
                     when stripped of their leaves
                     look like tiny holiday trees lined up
                     like an enchanted forest
                     but then what enchantment doesn’t conceal
                     the poison apple
                     or the rings of power?
Visit her post to read the rest. You will not be sorry!