Two Springs

"What good is the warmth of summer without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?" - John Steinbeck

After I moved from New England to the Sun Belt I had little inclination to notice the cycles of nature - the seasons, the moon phases and the sun position. I tended to stay inside and run the AC, day and night. I only became reacquainted with nature's cycles after spending some time at Woodman's Lee and experiencing life close to the earth and without electricity.

The specter of a power interruption evokes catastrophic images, providing a growing market for the emergency generator industry. Once, while perfectly content on the cabin porch, I read a heart-rending account of storm victims who've somehow endured days without electric service. It didn't occur to me until later that I was also a power-less victim. (Hey, wait a minute...aren't I entitled to some FEMA money, too?)

Paradoxically, I find that going without electricity is empowering and liberating. You get up at sunrise and power down after sunset. This feels just right. The sounds of nature transmit unattenuated through open windows. New windows, by the way, have warning stickers cautioning homeowners about the dangers of actually opening them. Here's the label that greets us when we open our kitchen window at our townhouse.

A Very Dangerous Open Window

As for feeling 'just right', well, there are meds for that. Our culture has little time for sun, moon and seasons - there are apps for those. Society must evolve, dutifully accepting that open windows are a hazardous liability and that power failures create pitiful victims who deserve government compensation. We must all aspire to safe, fixed windows and hermetically seal out nature. I lived that way in Florida, rushing from air conditioned car to air conditioned work, home and shopping centers. It was a depressing, unhealthy, unsatisfying existence.

The alternative, once I discovered it, was to live somewhere where I could embrace the natural world. For instance, work during the sunlit hours and relax when the sun sets. Once I got used to that, it seemed blasphemy not to. We have the incredible fortune of moving to an area with four distinct seasons. All too distinct at times, such as this week when the temperatures plunge below 0F. But that provides spring sweetness and spring is only a month away.

We are also fortunate to be able to experience spring twice this year - once here in SC and once in upstate NY. Spring arrives early in SC, around mid-February, but so does summer. Summer in the South tends to quickly wear out its invitation, as the dog days become a near-death sentence of heat index warnings.

Springtime is lovely here in the South, but it's more intense and meaningful in the Adirondack mountains. There, the tree buds seem to burst open overnight, the air is clean, the earth smells rich and full of life after it thaws. The birds sing with gusto; perhaps bidding good-bye to an Adirondack winter is cause for intense celebration.

Olympic Dreams

We live in a mythological society where fiction is valued more than reality. A recent editorial in the Lake Placid News, wistfully pining for another Winter Olympics in the Adirondacks, illustrates this. The editors infer that Lake Placid won an Olympic-class competition for the games in 1980, beating out the best of the rest of the world, because of its miraculous ability. The reality is that Lake Placid was the only bidder for the 1980 Olympics.

The selection was made for the 1980 location in 1974. Back then, no one wanted the Olympics anywhere near them. Other countries 'no-bid' because they were afraid of being a terrorist target. The infamous Black September attack on the Israeli team at the Summer Olympics in Munich occurred only two years earlier, in 1972, and the gigantic 'Event Security' apparatus of today hadn't been invented. Lake Placid's innovation was to build the Olympic village as a prison, with the athletes locked down under armed guard. The facility was  designed to eventually be converted into a federal prison - the current Ray Brook Federal Correctional Institute.

The Olympics are usually a financial disaster for taxpayers. Businesses make lots of money from all the construction and concessions. Their profits are privatized, and any losses are socialized. The 1980 winter games were supposed to be run at a profit but they ran up such a large debt that NY state eventually had to pony up an $8 million bailout. 

Nowadays, $8M is a government-bailout rounding error (or, half of Derek Jeter's salary) but it was a tough sell back then. The supposedly free-spending and liberal Carter administration (another myth) had enough - the feds already sank $90M into the games. So the NY taxpayers were stuck with the tab, as the 1600 unpaid creditors, most with political connections, wouldn't tolerate an Olympic bankruptcy. In another bygone-era transaction, the state actually received something in return - the skating facility that Eric Heiden and US Hockey Team immortalized (no mythology there!) and Lake Placid's two majestic ski jumps. The ongoing maintenance costs several million dollars per year, so there was still a sucker element to the transaction.

In 1980, the games cost an incredibly low $150 million, about as much as we throw away every 12 hours in Afghanistan. Chicago recently flared off $100 million to simply prepare their (unsuccessful) bid to host the 2016 games.

The current 2014 winter games in Sochi have a widely reported, but mythological, $50 billion price tag. The actual amount is probably closer to half that, but it's still 300 times the cost in 1980. 

Lake Placid (along with Innsbruck and St. Moritz) has the distinction of hosting two Winter Olympics, Lake Placid's earlier one was in 1932. There's plenty of mythology surrounding those '32 Olympics. One example is the chest-thumping comparisons of our exceptionally free and open society, as compared to the overt racism demonstrated during the 1936 summer games held in Nazi Germany. To buy that version of history requires ignoring the racism, notably antisemitism, that was socially acceptable in the nominally free and tolerant northern states - particularly in the more exclusive resort areas. But antisemitism during the 1932 winter games is another story for another day. 

Can Lake Placid snag a third Olympics? First, the usual cast of characters (corporations, governments, one percent-ers) would have to be shaken down for the dozens of billions required to host an Olympics. Then, the-businesses-that-run-the-government would have to convince the voters that this is, somehow, in their self interest. The few (but noisy) citizens who care about such things will have to be persuaded that the monumental debt, the further ruination of 'forever wild' lands, the transportation nightmare, the hyper-commercialization, and the lock-down security requirements will somehow improve their quality of life. In the techno-mythological world we live in, these are mere marketing details.

The masses can be reliably be counted on to support - via higher taxes - events that they can't possibly afford to attend. (Franklin County, which borders Lake Placid's Essex County,  has a lower per capita income than Mississippi.) The Sochi ticket site proudly advertised that 85% of single event tickets will cost less than $300. Such egalitarianism! No worries, the common folk can satisfy their Olympic participation dreams with used ticket stubs, such as this one, for only $100 on ebay. 

More Move Preparations

Mailing the retirement paperwork!

This phase, 32 days from 'first motion' to Woodman's Lee, is a combination of drudgery and hopeful anticipation, mixed in with some anxiety.

Drudgery involves sorting, packing...and now getting estimates for moving. But we're making progress. S negotiated an early end to our lease, saving us enough money to pay for the horse transportation and a fair bit of our move, too.The gas grill was placed at the curb yesterday and it was gone in an hour. The retirement paperwork was completed and mailed. I will process the official termination this week. I cancelled my subscription to Aviation Week (after 30 years!)- its substitute will be Mother Earth News. This week we have to contact the Building Department to get information on building the barn and outbuildings, too. We'll need to arrange for movers if we will use them for packing and unpacking, otherwise we already have a transport company reserved.
We took loads of stuff to Goodwill and send more boxes of keepsakes to the kids. S emptied the upstairs closet, and the bed will be sold. It's a lot of solid progress, just a little bit every day.

The hopeful anticipation is the fun part. We discuss where to locate the outbuildings, the clothesline, where we'll park (down the driveway because mud season is coming), our mailbox, the design of the fences, new windows, the garden and of course, the barn and horses. We debate keeping chickens and ducks.

The anxiety is normal, I suppose. We wonder how we'll survive the winter, if the horses will weather the trip and transition to their new home, if the dog will wander off and we'll have to place an ad like the ones we see every day, and even how long our septic system will last. But we have our health and the finances look ok, so those are two big worries off the table...for now.

Simple St. Valentine's Day

This is my ideal Valentine's Day gift: A handmade card with an original poem from my sweetheart! What a terrific example of simple and elegant living.

Valentine's Day is an interesting holiday, wrapped in mythology. One involves St. Valentine, the priest who was executed by Claudius II during the waning days of the Roman Empire. His crime was secretly performing banned marriages and trying to convert soldiers to Christianity. Years later, Pope Gelasius I  created St. Valentine's Day to commemorate him. I used to think this may be the first truly original Christian holiday, as Christmas and Easter were co-opted pagan holidays celebrating the winter solstice and beginning of spring. But the Romans had a bizarre festival, Lupercalia, that was celebrated in mid-February (featuring Cupid), so the Pope apparently superimposed yet another religious holiday upon a pagan festival.

All that's ancient history, today we drop the St. and now Valentine's Day is the second largest consumer-binge holiday (Christmas is #1).

Given the success in marketing 'Black Friday' to us as the great obligatory Christmas shopping holiday, I assume businesses are pressuring Congress to move the MLK holiday to February and market that as 'Dream Monday' to juice up the Valentine's Day shopping. I suppose President's Day could be moved up a week, perhaps that's more appropriate because presidents are spendthrift role models.

The Internet has a counter-cultural outlet for everything, including conscientious objectors to Valentine's Day consumerism. Here's a rather humorous graphic, ironic given the huge amount of junk we import from a nominally communist China:

Many presents we buy to celebrate Valentine's Day, such as flowers, chocolate and jewelry have astoundingly grotesque origins.

• Most of the flowers in the US come from Columbia and Ecuador, and the global marketplace demands efficiency above all else. That generally results in poor working conditions and unsustainable use of resources. Africa performs the same function for Europe.
• The child slave labor associated with chocolate is well documented despite an ongoing half-hearted effort to address it. Buying chocolate without regard to its source is unconscionable once you learn about common industry practices.
• The diamond industry has been an environmental and labor disaster for as long as I can remember; the current subject of conflict diamonds is just one of many horrors. Gold and precious metal mining is rife with labor and environmental exploitation, to the extent that it's hardly newsworthy anymore. 

It's encouraging that information on the evil side of these industries is readily available and as we the people become more aware, we can vote with something more valuable than a ballot - our dollars. That's a path to a more lovely St. Valentine's Day.

Cold Weather Ops

Minus 21F is about as cold as it gets in the winter at Woodman's Lee. We've insulated the cabin well and can heat it to perhaps a 70 degree temperature difference - meaning we'd be enduring 50F inside right now.

That's not going to work for us, although past generations endured it and survived. The biggest source of heat loss are the windows and we're planning to replace them before next winter. There are 16 windows and we could prioritize replacement, focusing first on the ones that will provide the most benefit.

We can reduce heat loss per window by about 50% by upgrading to modern double pane windows. Our goal is to respect the original look and feel of the existing windows, meaning they will have to be wood. We may also add a door - we only have one. I'll probably increase the size of the windows as much as I can to admit more sunlight.

Our preference is to buy from a locally owned business, but for comparison purposes, here's an example of the type of window we'd be considering. At $300 per window, we'd be looking at spending about $5k for the whole job.

Some things I won't miss...

Daniel Island is marketed for its exclusivity and a lot of people around here think it's the best place on earth. I suppose it can be, if you overlook a few eccentricities. One is an obsession with leaves and landscaping. An army of landscapers descends on the neighborhood twice a week, accompanied by all types of gas powered blowers and trimmers. They march down the street, trimming and blowing away all vestiges of inelegant growth. 

We're conditioned to believe that nature has to conform to our boundaries, and our homes should uniformly match the ideal of Disney with a lawn like a golf course. So lawns, parks and sidewalks are battlegrounds for the landscape army. It looks and sounds like a battle, workers in uniform, elaborate equipment, attacking the enemy - overgrown shrubs and fallen leaves. When they are finished everything looks just so. Something about it seems wrong - the waste of fuel, the noise, the waste of labor, and all that debris that probably ends up in a landfill. I want to live in a park, but not Disney World's version of it.

Anyway, I won't miss the Landscape Army. Another social oddity I won't miss is the practice of leaving dog poop in the (Chinese manufactured) poop bags. It's rather common for the dog owners to go through the effort of bagging the poop, then leave it for someone else to toss into a trash can. Most dog owners are rather fastidious about cleaning up and disposing the poop. But I still see these little poop bags all over the place around here, and I certainly won't miss them after we move.

Sometimes Technology Simplifies

We're making progress towards our departure from one life and our arrival into another. I initiated my retirement process at work by going online and clicking all the appropriate buttons. What used to be a bureaucratic ordeal is now dead-simple.

We took more loads to Goodwill and the Post Office, printing shipping labels here and avoiding the lines at the inaptly named Mt Pleasant Post Office. I used the same web site to reserve a PO box in Upper Jay - we like that post office best; it dates back to the 1800s.

Upper Jay PO

S. packed many boxes this week, far more than I did. The garage is filling up with neatly packed and labelled boxes. Every box is recycled, virtually uncirculated cardboard boxes from the neighborhood recycle facility. In today's wasteful global economy, nearly everything consumed is transported from thousands of miles away, and all that stuff is packed in single-use cardboard boxes. I suppose it's common to actually buy moving boxes - and then thoughtlessly toss them out after one use. I've never bought one but I have tossed out boxes that the moving companies provided. That always felt wasteful even if placed in a recycling bin. It's always satisfying to repurpose instead of buying new, even something as humble as a box.

I listed the trusty Subaru on Craigslist, getting responses literally minutes later. We sold it - cash in hand, title signed - 28 hours later. On a weekend. That transaction, along with the buying postage, getting a PO box and applying for retirement started me thinking about the advantages of technology. Technology's disadvantages become obvious as you downsize and simplify your life, and it can lead to developing an anti-technology attitude. Technology's advantages are so ubiquitous that we can risk overlooking them.

The Subaru, for example, was purchased on the Internet, S bought it from the original owner in Massachusetts.We listed it for free on Craigslist and the buyer was able to contact us via cell phone, text and email. We used Google Maps to find their house, without a single wrong turn. The buyers researched the car's reliability history online. I was able to find and print out an official SC DMV bill of sale - the DMV requires one to go to their office to physically obtain one, but a local car dealer thoughtfully scanned and uploaded a .pdf. I learned that the bill of sale is critically important in SC, via the Internet.

Compare this to the pre-Internet days. Buying a new car rarely made sense even back then, so the task would be to find a reliable used car at a reasonable price. Readily accessible national listings didn't exist, and certainly not free and none with color photos! Used car prices were published in the Kelley Blue Book, and 40 years ago that book was withheld from the general public. As for reliability, researching maintenance history was a lot more work and you'd have to go to a library or buy magazines. Often those magazine articles were biased because they have conflicts of interest with advertisers. An example is the Chevy Vega, the fifth worst car ever according to Edmonds, and "built with contempt for its buyers". Here's an ad (probably from Motor Trend magazine) for the Chevy Vega...Motor Trend's 1971 Car of the Year. If you based your research on Motor Trend, you'd be in trouble.

Today it's simple to search for firsthand maintenance discussions in online owner forums - every car has its typical weak spots, and the idea is to find a model that has easily repairable ones. Once you figured out what to buy, what was available and how much to pay, you'd start the inspection and haggling phases. Those phases haven't changed much. But instead of asking the owner for directions we just get his address and navigate with GPS, free computer applications linked to vast data centers, cellular data networks and a smartphone.

Then you had to get the money. Typically that involved a trip to the bank - meaning a transaction on a Saturday afternoon (such as ours) was impossible. Today one can withdraw thousands of dollars from a series of ATMs. So, what used to be a several day process can now be done in 28 hours.

Technology often burdens society - weapons, energy waste, complexity and social isolation are examples. It's easy to complain about it, but there are advantages - including, perhaps, blogging.

Eating Simply

Guide to Vegan Living

The two biggest things I've done to simplify my life is to eliminate TV and stop eating meat. Society tolerates such things, but it doesn't embrace them. I used to feel odd about missing references to commercials, sporting events, reality shows, news programs, etc. Now I joke about my cultural illiteracy. However, the link between TV and consumerism is no joke. Eliminating the materialism and all the complexity associated with that facilitate the pursuit of a simple life.

Veganism is harder to joke about because, no matter how discreet you try to be, it usually makes others uncomfortable. Only one half of one percent of the population consume no meat, fish or dairy products. Thoughtless consumption of animal products is an established cultural norm. Nearly all of the pathetic animals slaughtered and consumed today are inhumanely raised in filthy Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, with staggering environmental and health costs. Agribusiness externalizes much of these costs on society. 

The agricultural industry depends on the public to ignore the violence, cruelty and environmental damage associated with their products. These businesses-that-run-the-government successfully lobbied states (across the red-blue spectrum, from South Carolina to Vermont) to pass 'Ag-Gag' laws. The statutes outlaw simply photographing the unspeakable cruelty - even if the photographer is on public property! New York is also considering such a law, making 'UNAUTHORIZED VIDEO, AUDIO RECORDING OR PHOTOGRAPHY DONE WITHOUT THE FARM OWNER'S WRITTEN CONSENT' punishable by incarceration and specifying financial liability for any damages. If these places were treating their animals right, they wouldn't care if you took a picture.

Instead, our freedom-loving society will throw you in jail and take your money if you post a tweet of employees (I wouldn't call them 'farmers') torturing animals. A nation of animal lovers must also reconcile a cognitive dissonance every time they eat. Vegans, by their very presence, illuminate a hideously dark subject. They also aren't the life of the dinner party!

But, if you can deal with rejection, veganism vastly simplifies living. It liberates us from the mental stress and discomfort associated with maintaining a burdensome cognitive dissonance. It simplifies food shopping and cooking. Even cleaning the kitchen is easier because you don't have to degrease your dishes and decontaminate biohazards. Microbiologists assert that a typical home has more germs - fecal bacteria - in a kitchen sink than in a toilet! Meat is practically the exclusive source of the pathogens.

The best part of veganism involves health. It can be an effective way to lose weight and keep it off. It can also drastically reduce cholesterol levels (and all those other blood test values) and keep them in the optimum range.

Move Preparations and the Discipline of Simplicity

March 21st, our target move date, is approaching. We're excited about our new adventure into a more simple life, close to nature in a peaceful and beautiful setting. It's even more wonderful to arrive at the beginning of spring, as the North Country awakens from its winter slumber. I like autumn, but I think springtime is my favorite season.
Our highest priorities are to get our stuff moved and the horses established. Then we have to construct our garden. All that presumes that the place doesn't need major repairs - always an unknown. I think it's important to engage the community and I'm hoping to join the Volunteer Fire Department. I don't know anything about firefighting but I can learn. There's also a Volunteer Ambulance in town and I may consider joining that (again with zero knowledge of the field). It's easy to live in isolation but I don't think it's healthy.
We are making progress every day. We pack a few boxes, all labelled, staged and ready to ship. We are getting rid of the stuff we don't need. Life gets increasingly simpler when you 'edit' your stuff. Our big goal in the next two weeks is to sell one of our cars, our beloved Subaru Forester. We have three cars and we'll keep two - although that seems like one too many.
The discipline involved in simple living can be quite difficult. I'm taking a computer science class that I really like, but our little netbook computer will be replacing our big desktop machine. The netbook won't run the software so I'd have to upgrade - buy another computer - to remain in the class. I thought about it and made a tough decision to give up the class. A new computer is a step in the direction of complexity, not simplicity. I'll probably spend more money buying a new computer than I estimated, many hours configuring it...and we'll have yet another device to charge, maintain and keep track of.
So, the netbook will be our computer, such as it is. I'm sure we'll upgrade eventually but the idea is to "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without". 

The Barn

Here's a plan we've been considering. It's 20 x 24, with expansion capability to double that. Our priority is to build the barn because we want to move the horses onto the property as soon as possible. That'll also require fencing, so we have a lot of work ahead of us.

The Woodshed and Heating

This woodshed plan was featured in Mother Earth News years ago and I've yet to see a better one. I'd like to build it because we plan to heat with wood. We used to use a kerosene heater but kero is getting hard to find, it's expensive and bad for the ecology.

Wood, however is a sustainable resource - trees grow fast in the North Country and we have an abundance of them. Cutting and splitting wood is good exercise and proper forestry management involves culling trees, it's just like weeding a giant garden.A good wood stove burns clean if you install and operate it properly. I'm not sure we've done either, but our neighbors can guide us. Wood stoves are are always a popular topic of discussion in the Adirondacks.

I wondered how to estimate the amount of wood we'd need for the heating season. I came up with a couple of ways and ended up with roughly the same estimate - 7 to 8 cords of wood. That's a lot of wood.

My first estimate involved thinking about how many logs we'd burn in a typical cold day, then multiplying that by the number of cold days. I came up with 8 cords that way.

The other estimate was more scientific, involving the number of degree days, the heat loss of the cabin and the energy content of the wood. That yielded about 7 cords. A cord of wood is 4 x 4 x 8 feet.

The wood has to be dry and it takes at least all summer do that. We'll have to cut quite a bit of wood and stack it every day in order to lay in enough to keep us going throughout the winter. I may have to augment that at first by buying some firewood. Seems like a waste with all the trees we have, but we'll do our business locally and I'm sure it'll be appreciated.