One Size Fits All

Penn State has a sustainability website. Their mission:

The mission of the Penn State Center for Sustainability (CfS) is to integrate education, research, and outreach on issues of sustainability through innovative, interdisciplinary projects, facilities, and hands-on learning opportunities.

Our Educational Mission: To support the ecological literacy and stewardship of students, faculty, and administrators through sustainable technologies and practices.

Our Research Mission: To conduct meaningful and applied research on accessible sustainable technologies and practices, and integrate environmental context into education and experiential learning models.

Our Outreach Mission: Offer programming opportunities for Pennsylvania businesses, individuals and the K-12 community to integrate sustainability in their lives and operations through education and the promotion of appropriate technologies and practices.

After hearing many good things, I decided to buy one pair of Smart Wool socks for my husband and myself. There are claims that they can last for almost a decade and I want to see if that is true. SmartWool also claims that 10% of every website order goes toward some organization that “promote environmental stewardship, healthy lifestyle choices for youth, and encourage responsible outdoor activity participation.” I got the pair of socks that was labeled as a heavy duty outdoor socks. I want to try wearing it indoors primarily as we plan on keeping the thermostat low or off.

I also purchased a pair of slippers from North Star Trading Co that I’ve previously mentioned. I think it will be really neat if we go the entire winter without turning on the thermostat. However, I should probably think of my compost worms, they may not like the extreme cold weather.

Lunch prepared from Farmer’s Market purchases:
Acorn Squash(pdf link), string beans, pot pie, apple crisp.

Very , very tasty meal.

Its a rainy day today. Since the farmer’s markets will soon close I didn’t want to miss it. I am stocking up cheese that is so tasty I think its better than chocolate. I got lotso stuff including yogurt. The yogurt container had the following address which I looked up on google. The location is very pretty:
116d S Ronks Rd,
Ronks, PA

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It seems that I may have finally managed to sign on to a CSA or a buying club (forget which) with Meadow Run Farm. They will be delivering animal products during the winter season. Every year I always miss signing up for these things and its annoying.

The eggs, yogurt and cheese I’ve been getting from the Farmers’ Market this year has been excellent and I’d to continue supporting local food producers throughout the winter.

***
I am so tired right now. I’d like to nothing better than to go to sleep, but alas…I’m in the rat race. Pity, pity, pity.

It would be nice if my accounting and business classes begin discussing the ethical implications of the housing market “crisis” - about banks being bailed out for poor decisions that should have been analyzed some more.

But we will instead focus on the past and discuss Enron to death.

Despite global warming, we still experience some bitterly cold days. This year in an attempt to stay warm indoors and save on our energy bill we decided to get some warm clothes. First on the agenda is slippers. LL Bean’s Wicked Good Slippers seem to be highly recommended. But I wanted to know where they were made. I emailed LL Bean’s customer service and received a response almost immediately: they were made in China.

For all I know the workers making them in China could be well treated and well paid. But if I want to do my little bit to decrease the trade deficit, I should buy stuff made in the USA.

I found a great site that lists companies that sell products made in the USA: Still Made in the USA. Through this site, I found two companies that make slippers that look similar to the LL Bean slippers: Sheepskin Goods and Quoddy Trail Moccassins.

I love reading different ways of subverting the so called norm.

Dumpster Divers Go Mainstream In Thrifty Germany:

“It’s the culture here in Germany,” says Dora Fecske, a Frankfurt businesswoman. “Why trash something if it’s still good?” She recently found a large wooden dining table in the street and carried it several blocks to her home with help from friends.

Ms. Fecske’s furniture foraging is the ultimate expression of one of Germany’s favorite pastimes: saving money. Even when Germans do spend it (they need to eat, after all), they aren’t looking to pay full price. Flea markets pull big crowds every weekend. Used goods are so popular that Germany is eBay’s biggest market outside the U.S.: Surfing the site accounts for nearly a fifth of the time Germans spend online.

Regular retail stores have a tough time. No-frills discounters such as Aldi dominate the supermarket sector. Even Wal-Mart Stores Inc. was too upscale for Germans: The U.S. giant finally gave up on the country last year, after failing to make a euro cent.

To survive, stores have to appeal to Germans’ sharp eye for a discount. Electronics retailer Saturn has for years lured customers with the slogan “Stingy is Sexy.”

The trend is stubborn, with deep roots in history. Germans save their money partly because war and economic disasters during the last century make them think the future will bring more rainy days.

Today, even though the German economy is growing solidly and unemployment is falling, consumer spending is in the doldrums.

Not buying it

Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.

They dress in castoff clothes and furnish their homes with items found on the street; at freecycle.org, where users post unwanted items; and at so-called freemeets, flea markets where no money is exchanged. Some claim to hold themselves to rigorous standards. “If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it’s not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism,” said Adam Weissman, 29, who started freegan.info four years ago and is the movement’s de facto spokesman.

I’ve been having all sorts of “crazy” thoughts over the past few years. I’ve been actively thinking about retiring early and then thinking about exactly I can live and how little can I live and survive on and what to do during my retirement and exactly how long do I expect to live and more gruesome…how to end it all when I poop in my pants involuntarily for the first time - because that will be the beginning of the end.

It all started when I joined the gym and started attending the spinning sessions. Even though I used to ride my bike, I didn’t particularly like it too much. But with spinning I found myself getting stronger physically and mentally and began day dreaming about long distance bicycle trips. I did a few long distance bike trips and found them to be the most satisfying thing I had ever done. However at the time, I was working a corporate job making enough money to pay for full time classes, live in the center of the city and buy the stuff I wanted when I wanted to. So after years of wanting a “nice” job I found that I disliked it.

I began doing all sorts of self analysis. I thought about where I wanted to work and under what circumstances. I realized that I needed to accomplish a bunch of things before I turned 35. Because in my 35th year I had plans of giving birth.

So I quit my “nice” job (no amount of money can make me put up with overly competitive people who constantly stress me out), I started working at a non-profit. Soon I came to the conclusion that while I had left the money behind I had not left behind the hyper competition or the stressful co-workers. So I formed a conclusion about the entire non-profit sector. Actually many of my friends work for non-profits and have less nice things to say about their employers.

What was left? I looked into self-employment, but it takes a certain type of person and I didn’t want to pay high costs for health insurance and the various other taxes. Then I thought about working for the government.

I have many friends who are not quite crazy about working for the government for a variety of reasons. But there were many perks. One of them being nice benefits, and the variety of branches all over the country and the world. This was perfect because I wanted to work for one particular agency (I don’t work there…yet) and they had branch offices in all my favorite cities in the U.S. And because vacation type can be accumulated, I had the possibility of doing many long distance bicycle trips. Additionally, early retirement was offered to many employees after a certain number of continuous years of working for the Govt. (this is true for many municipal, state and federal jobs). So while I would sacrifice some amount of pay (at least initially in my field), the benefits were too many to pass up. Besides I thought it was the perfect way to learn about a particular government agency works and see if I could figure out why some agencies don’t live up to their stated goals or annoy citizens so much.

I had been tracking my income and expenses for several years, I had gotten a really good idea on how much I needed to live on. After doing very general extrapolations, I found that my end retirement goal was quite feasible especially considering my more recent decision to not bear any kids.

But the question is what got me thinking along the lines of early retirement. I have many friends who are artists (either professionally or as a hobbyist) and because of my fear of financial insecurity and a general lack of confidence in my own ability (as a cartoonist and musician and my aspirations as a writer), I never actually pursued these artistic interests of mine. So I promised myself that as soon as I retired early I would focus on my art 100%. My most immediate stumbling block has been my current undergraduate degree, which I’ve been working on for about 8 years. It will soon come to an end, and I plan on finally trying to work on my art that I’ve been putting off for a very long time.

Title of this post is from a Frank Zappa song. The answer is “your mind”

*warning* negative post ahead
(more…)

Since the first and second installment of our frugal habits, I thought I’d put out a new one.

Clothing
We’ve started purchasing clothes from the thrift store. This fits in with our environmental concerns (buying used) and our wallets. There is a great thrift store not very far from our place and we’ve found pants and shirts that look and feel brand new. Now we plan on purchasing socks, shoes, and undergraments new.

Utilities
We’ve started washing our clothes in cold water. I was analyzing our gas bill since we began tracking our bills and found our gas bill a bit high. I couldn’t figure out why. I knew that we were cooking nearly all our meals at home, but that didn’t explain the increase in our gas bill. I finally figured out that it was our washer (we used to use hot water to wash our clothes). While we’re lucky to have a washer and dryer at home we do wind up paying the water and gas bill and water is heated with gas.

Food
We’ve come very, very close to eliminating all packaged food. While we’ve completely eliminated processed food, occasionally we do buy something in a can or something shrink wrapped. Between the farmer’s market and a local food market (that supports locally and organically, grown produce) the amount of processed stuff we bring home has fallen greatly.

Debt
We’ve attacked our debt very strongly. Husband began a new, much better paid job recently and we have had no desire to do anything with the extra money but save and pay of debt.

It would have been nice to have all this self analysis and realization come to fruition the day after my last exam. But instead I had to have it now, in the middle of my final semester. I suppose philosophy cannot be timed.

I’ve been reading Karen Armstrong’s memoirs (she has written two of them and I recommend both). Her experience with the church led me to relive my own memories of my life with my family and the church. I broke away from both at around the same time. I imagine this was traumatic, but I have no idea what exactly is traumatic…I would need some sort of scale to assess exactly how much I was affected by all this, I guess this is the bean counter in me talking. While I made conclusions on how I would eventually deal and live with my decisions, it clearly wasn’t an easy choice.

While I wasn’t overly religious, the concept of a God was something very real to me. Also, I now have begun to understand the role that religion can have in one’s life. A need for socialization and community is something that a religious environment has the capacity to provide.

So besides coming to terms with decisions I made several years ago, I’ve also begun to wonder about the all important question: what is the meaning of life. Actually, I haven’t. I’ve been mainly thinking about what I would like to do with my life.

I’ve always played around with the idea of being a writer. I originally wanted to go to college to major in literature because I enjoyed Dickens, Bronte, Twain and other such novelists. I wanted to immerse myself more in literature and thought an English degree would enable me to do that. But for a variety of reasons, I never did study literature in the depth I wanted to. It probably is a good decision because I dislike organized study of literature in the manner academia tends to approach it.

For a brief while I wrote for the college newspaper and enjoyed the experience. I joined a writing group and submitted exercises and critiqued other people’s work as was expected. The writing group experience was also enjoyable - for the most part. For the past several months, for the past year actually, I found myself returning to my main passion: reading. I stopped reading for several years when I got hit with financial problems, and other problems. Reading was the last thing on my mind. Then I got a full time job that was interesting but very draining. After quitting that job I returned to reading and found that I had really missed reading so much. Although I don’t read as much fiction as I used to, the subjects I have approached and read has given me a lot of pleasure. So I thought about writing non fiction material. And since I am terrified of financial insecurity, I am afraid to pursue writing as a viable option.

But I’ve been thinking about how writing would fit in with my personality. I actually need very little materially and monetarily. I enjoy spending long periods of time thinking by myself (another big revelation this year was that I am both an introvert and a loner, although a happily married loner).

I promised myself that this would be my last horrible year in college. And with that promise I decided to postpone everything to focus on school. So any additional thoughts on being a writer and the actual feasibility of it will have to wait for another 57 days.

I am reading Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase. A small excerpt:

In the course of my studies, I have discovered that the religious quest is not about discovering “the truth” or “the meaning of life” but about living as intensely as possible here and now. The idea is not to latch on to some superhuman personality or to “get to heaven” but to discover how to be fully human - hence the images of the perfect or enlightened man, or the deified human being.

Oh brother are you gonna leave me wasting away
On the streets of Philadelphia
- Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Philadelphia

The picture above shows a very common sight in my neighborhood: litter. For whatever reason, there are some people who live near me that think that the streets of Philadelphia is a trash bin. Complaining to the Department of Streets resulted in me getting bumped from Department of Its-not-our-responsibility to the Department of Its-Not-our-Responsibility-Either. And walking amongst trash strewn all over the places can get a person down. So there is a group of us litter haters who have decided that we will pick up the trash that others leave on the Streets of Philadelphia. This is problematic for me in one regard: it interferes with my 90% emission reduction project - it adds to the garbage I have to take out. Which is annoying because I finally have managed to get it down to about 2 lbs/week (most of it is now composted).

Anyway, but now I don’t have to feel so bad because of #6 on this list: “Act like a considerate citizen of the world, and you’ll boost your self-esteem.” After picking up everyone’s litter over the weekend on my little street my husband and I kept patting ourselves on the back over how beautiful we singlehandedly had made our street look. So the trash pickup did give us a bit of a happiness boost. However…I doubt picking up chicken bones (also something that is frequently found littered everywhere) would result in that same boost. Perhaps this is how we start to realize the benefits of having stray cats and miscellaneous rodents that inhabit our fine neighborhood.

This college thing is getting worse and worse. And I only have another 60 days to go. I don’t know how I’m going to finish especially since every day I feel like quitting with even more intensity than I felt the previous day.

My solution: I’m going to aim low. As in C grades in all courses.

Today I envy everyone that went to technical school, skipped all college after high school and those that went to community college for 2 years.