But Will It Make You Happy?

On the bright side, the practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier. New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses.

This was a very timely article in the New York Times, considering the new mattress and refrigerator that I have craved and really needed for so long and bought just this week. I spent a pile of money, but I’ll pay it off in one or two months from my savings, since I try very hard not to carry any credit card debt.

And it is a nice segueway into my other pieces of life this week. A little over a year ago I wrote this post about how I planned to live out my life. And I’ve held myself true to it. I wring out all the goodness I can out of this life, although it has not been as easy as I would have hoped this past year or so. Regarding the statement from the article above, it is possible that I spend a little too much time anticipating the future rather than living in the present moment, but so be it! I’m pretty happy, happier than many people, I think. Much, much happier than I used to be.

I signed up for Albie’s class at An Artful Journey in Los Gatos, California in February 2011. I’ll be able to spend three whole days working with her at a beautiful retreat in the redwoods. This is a done deal. The first night there I will be celebrating my 50th birthday!

And I signed up for Art & Soul Hampton again in early May 2011, although I’m just going for the weekend this time. I wasn’t planning to, since the Embassy Suites screwed up my billing so bad the last trip and staying there is expensive. But I’ll see if I can find a cheap hotel nearby for two nights, drive up on Friday night and come home on Sunday. It is a terrible time for me to take off work, and there is almost always a family reunion that weekend. Still, I really wanted to take this class and this class, and since it is within driving distance and I won’t miss work, I decided to go ahead and do it!

Because anticipation is spicy and juicy and keeps my energy and hope alive!

Oh, there were other things that went on this week that I was going to write about, but writing this made me want to get up off my butt and do something else.

I walk a short distance to work Monday through Friday, and my eyes are always sweeping the ground around me for natural or manmade found objects that I might be able to use one day. I am a natural scavenger. Often I bring home a stray earring or a feather. Today I plucked some dried iris leaves (for making paper) and picked up a yellow plastic toy part that might make an interesting stamp pattern.

Sometimes I force myself to look up the whole way and that makes for an entirely different walk. In winter I get to see the bones of the trees and I am taken back to my tomboy days when my biggest goal in life was to climb every tree within a certain distance of my house. I was allowed to roam the woods in the winter when the snakes were hibernating, and was told once by a hunter that I nearly got shot.

When I walk through the parking lots, the sky above is empty and I get a sweeping view of the clouds and the tops of the buildings and trees around me, although the sunsets and sunrises are obscured by buildings.

The railroad runs next to my walk to work, so I get to see the graffiti on the boxcars and hear the rumbling of the wheels on the tracks.

Usually the daycare kids are outside playing when I walk by and I listen to them laugh and shriek and cry and watch them climb up the sliding board and roar like monsters.

I know where the mockingbird’s territory is and where the cowbird attacks himself in the sideview mirror of a certain car. In May, I stop to pick mulberries for snacks. In October, I gather black walnuts.

When it rains, I know where the muddiest places are and the best route to avoid them. The iciest places are in front of the church and the museum.

Once a deer with antlers galloped by me as I walked this route to lunch with a friend. There was a lot of traffic and people walking on the sidewalk. He hung a right at the corner and disappeared. I’ve always wondered what happened to that deer. I hope that he found his way.

The big day of the year is coming this Friday to a home near you!

“Take the Plunge:

You know what they say: a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. You feel that things are falling apart – the temperature rising, the oceans churning, the global economy heaving – why not do something? Take just one small step toward a more just and sustainable future. Make a pact with yourself: go on a consumer fast. Lock up your credit cards, put away your cash and opt out of the capitalist spectacle. You may find that it’s harder than you think, that the impulse to buy is more ingrained in you than you ever realized. But you will persist and you will transcend – perhaps reaching the kind of epiphany that can change the world.”

BUY NOTHING ON FRIDAY, NOV. 27.

I have two friends who have recently started blogs. One is Anne-Marie Scott, who led Slow Food Piedmont Triad last year before life got in the way. She started the Locavore Makeover Project, in which she is spending a year mentoring two busy families and teaching them how to prepare healthy whole foods. My dentist is in one of the families! It has gotten a lot of attention in the local newspaper, and more recently by Alice Waters, who was in town this week dedicating the Edible Schoolyard at the Greensboro Children’s Museum. Anne-Marie is looking forward to moving to a new home where she plans to begin urban homesteading.

The other belongs to Charlie Headington, my (and many other’s) muse and friend. He is Mr. Slow Food around here, and founded our local chapter along with Steve Tate, who operates Goat Lady Dairy. Charlie can hardly get through a visit to the Greensboro Curb Farmers’ Market because of all his fans and friends stopping him for conversation! He was my inspiration and guide for the Back Forty, my grad school mentor, a teacher of permaculture, a Slow traveler, a wonderful writer, and a practitioner of voluntary simplicity. I’m thrilled that he finally started a blog, a big step for him: Charlie’s Revolutionary Garden. To read how he describes himself, go to this post. Now, give him some blog love and encourage him to keep it up!

Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated with stories of living off the land, self-sufficiency, making things from scratch. Then I hit puberty and I was distracted by trying to find a mate, drowning my depression and anxiety in alcohol, and trying to make my parents proud of me by attempting to be like other people. I never could achieve the third one because it just wasn’t in me to conform.

Recently I talked with an old high school buddy who laughed that I always had to be doing something different. I thought a lot about that. It’s true. I had to be an actress, not a writer or an artist, where my real creative talents lay. Not only that, I had to be a mime for a while.

Then I couldn’t knit or crochet or needlepoint, something that you could take with you and that everyone was familiar with. No, I had to be a weaver. Not only that, I had to be a tapestry weaver or do complicated dye techniques.

I couldn’t just throw a pot. I had to hand-build and make pinch pots while meditating and drawing the energy up from the earth. I considered digging my own clay, but I stopped doing ceramics because my hands couldn’t take it.

I have gathered loads of vines, stalks, twigs and cattails. I have handwoven baskets all over the place. It wouldn’t do to buy a basket. I make my own hats.

Now I can’t be a painter. I have to be a printmaker. I have to do woodcuts. Because, think about it. How many woodcut artists are there out there? Will I start chopping down my own trees soon?

I’m making books, but I’m not satisfied to buy paper for the pages. Even fancy handmade paper. I have to make my paper myself, and gather the fibers myself. And grow the fibers myself.

It amazes me that I never decided to raise sheep or grow flax and cotton because it wasn’t enough for me just to weave, I had to raise and spin the fiber. If I hadn’t been humiliated in costume shop, I’d probably be sewing all my own clothes.

Believe it or not, it is so obvious that I had to be different, but it never really struck me how much until my friend said that.

One way I am different is that I chose to be childless. Anyone who has made this choice for whatever reason can tell you that you are pretty much suspect among “normal” society. Most people assume that you don’t have children because you can’t. Which is fine, because it’s just not something that I’d ever have even thought twice about, so I don’t care what opinions folks form of my childlessness. I assume that it makes no difference to them either. Except as I got older, I slowly learned that to some people, it colors their opinion of you in a negative way. One way you can tell is that they will start telling you how it’s okay for you not to be a parent. But I never considered that it would not be okay for me not to be a parent.

Well, here I am, 48 years old, not many eggs left in the old uterus. I’ll be happy when that last one is gone, let me tell you. And I am happy, so happy, that I don’t have to pretend to enjoy being a mother the way that my mother did, or deal with totally fucked up grown children who can’t take care of themselves. Or experience the loss of a child, since I can barely deal with the loss of a cat. Guess what, I get to be selfish, because I didn’t have children. Yes, I do.

So I’ve decided to throw my heart to the winds and travel as much as I can. No storing up acorns for me. I’m going to be the grasshopper, not the ant. I had a beautiful, wise young friend who went to bed happy and healthy one night and didn’t live to see the sun come up. My friend John did everything right and was struck down in a flash by a rare disease. Yes, by God, I’m going to suck the marrow out of life and not die and discover that I had not lived.

I like being different. And guess what else? I don’t think that I’m going to cook for the foreseeable future. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of housecleaning too. Let the rooms fill halfway to the ceiling with cat hair.

My car won’t start. But I don’t need it. I don’t think that I’ll fix it. I’ll get some baskets for my bike and ride the bus and catch rides. I’ll drive the Honda on the weekend and on long trips. We don’t need two cars.

I’ll keep working because I need to pay bills and pay for my travel expenses. And art supplies. And good coffee. And beer. And books.

I’m going to be a free spirit. Because I can.

Before I settle in with our local newspaper, of which half will go automatically into the recycle bin, I’ll ramble here for a little while. After all, the ice has begun to form on my back steps, changing my plans to weave in the studio this morning. I had it all nice and cozy back there too, but I’ve taken a few dives down icy steps in my day so I try to avoid that when possible. They are calling for a big winter storm, 100%. I’m only excited because we haven’t had a good winter storm in a couple of years. We’re lucky to have a great woodstove that not only puts out great heat (I have a fan that operates off the thermal heat of the stove) but also has a flat top that I can cook on. So far, I’ve never had to use it out of necessity - we’ve been lucky because we’ve been through a couple of major ice storms here.

So I went grocery shopping yesterday and brought in a pile of wood and cooked and chopped veggies and began the big job of sorting through the junk that came out of the laundry room when Sandy and James refloored it last weekend. I’ll feel so much better when this is finished, but I can only do so much without aggravating my hip.

Today I’ll cook some kind of chowder - clam or vegetable/corn. Maybe a butternut squash soup of some kind too. I love to cook soup. I browned some hamburger from Rocking F for a casserole yesterday and I always go ahead and brown extra for some pasta sauce.

Actually got out in the drizzle yesterday (tromping back and forth through the growing mud flat in my backyard) and dug up a couple of leeks for the soup. So I do still have a bit of a winter garden! I also had a bunch of potatoes that had sprouted so I cut chunks of the potatoes with sprouts out and planted them in the raised beds. I keep thinking that I’ll grow potatoes in a garbage can full of straw one day but I keep forgetting to buy the straw.

Oh, and yesterday I cooked a perfect omelet! I couldn’t believe it. It almost made itself accidentally. I was not paying much attention to it and so the bottom set enough that I was able to fold it, flip it and place the uncooked portion beneath with the whole thing intact. And it wasn’t overcooked. I put goat cheese and a little bit of steamed broccoli and leeks on top before I flipped it. I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to do it again, but this gives me hope!

Despite what people may think, I am not an expert cook. I dabble sometimes with more complicated dishes, but meals are usually pretty basic at our house. There’s a lot of spaghetti with meat sauce and meat loaf and marinated baked chicken breasts, rice and potatoes and veggies from the freezer. I have been paying off my spending spree before Christmas, so I try to make meat and poultry stretch. (I paid off my cards with this paycheck - yay!)

Last weekend I made stock from chicken and turkey carcasses and vegetable trimmings that I’ve saved in the freezer since November. That basically meant that I dumped it all in a big pot, filled it with filtered water, put it on the cranked up very hot woodstove, and let it simmer for about two hours. Then I strained it, let it cool, put it in the fridge for a day so that any fat rose to the top. I skimmed off the fat and put the stock into freezer bags measuring two cups each. This is easy and works with other bones (hambones are great, but only if they are from local pastured pork!) and most vegetables, as long as they are not bitter or very strong like eggplant peelings or broccoli. Although I find that asparagus stems are wonderful in stock. You have to experiment. And it’s basically free - stuff that would have been thrown on the compost pile or in the garbage.

Okay. Plans for today. Hmmm. I haven’t written about my addiction to Grey’s Anatomy, have I? Well, I don’t watch much TV. I can’t remember when the shows I like are on and there is a good lending library for DVDs where I work. I also watch Hulu - mainly 30 Rock and House there. I like the fact that I can take my laptop to bed when I’m ailing and watch these shows whenever my schedule dictates, not theirs, and without most of the ads. So I decided to watch Grey’s Anatomy from the beginning, having heard about it for a long time without a clue to what my co-worker was talking about. And I got so hooked. I’m up to the third season now, and I hear that it went downhill from here, so maybe I will get this monkey off my back soon. But I am so happy that I have six episodes here in the house to watch since we might have the day off tomorrow!

I actually had a dream last night that a male character from Grey’s Anatomy made a pass at Christopher from the Sopranos, and the scene faded away. I knew that that guy had made his final mistake. Now that would be interesting. The Sopranos and Grey’s Anatomy.

The main thing is that I need to finish weaving the bottom of my tapestry box, and I can do that while I watch DVDs. Then I can think about the design for the sides. I’m considering needlefelting and beading on this one. It will either be a spacy or stormy kind of scene.

And I guess that it’s time to start my tomato, peppers, and eggplants inside.

Okay, I’ve run out of steam. Time for another pot of coffee and the news. Have a good Sunday!

It is important which coffee mug I choose to begin my day.

Yesterday was such a waste. I’ve been fighting off something for a while, don’t know what, maybe “just” congested sinuses. I know that my blood test showed low iron in December. Anyway, I went to bed early Friday night, got up with a wicked headache on Saturday morning, fed the critters, drank some coffee, and went back to sleep listening to Hearts of Space until nearly noon. I watched episodes of the first season of House on DVD. Late that afternoon, Sandy and I went to Fishbones where I had a fish burrito. I love their fish burritos. I love all their food. Then I went to sleep at my normal time last night.

Exciting life, eh?

Today I plan to do a bit of catch-up. I did laundry on Friday night, so I don’t have that in the way. I feel enthusiastic about my woodcut class and am chomping at the bit to get started. I took a large piece of polyurethaned veneered plywood from a table I took apart to a neighbor friend who cut it into 12 x 18 pieces for me. One piece, along with two pieces of a wood strip that I scavenged from the trash, will become a bench hook, a kind of brace that props against a table. This will hold my wood block firmly in place while I carve it.

Another piece will become a register for block printing - basically, a platform with wooden edges to hold the block in one place during the printing process. You lay the paper on top of the inked relief cut and rub the back of the paper against the block. Simple stuff. So glad I decided to do this.

But, what I really need to do is to go through my drawings and paintings and photographs and come up with some ideas of what to do in this class! Well, actually, coming up with the ideas is not the problem…narrowing them down is the problem. Luckily he is going to meet with us individually and guide us in a direction.

I know that I want to work with images of my cats, but not for this class. I try to pretend that I don’t care about other people’s perceptions, but this man doesn’t know me and I don’t want the first impression of me to be the middle-aged cutesy cat lady. I like to work with themes of place, so perhaps I’ll go to my photos of Spannocchia or Lake Waccamaw.

Or food. I like food. Did you know that?

Susanne wants me to come over and give her some advice on converting her back yard to no-till vegetable garden beds. I love any excuse to go over there and soak in the art vibes.

Okay, the second pot of coffee is on. An article in the NYT said that people who drink 3-5 cups of coffee a day had a lower risk for dementia. Good enough for me! Finally, a vice that I can feel good about.

Now, about Hearts of Space. I decided to subscribe to it, and I am so glad that I did. In the end, the quality of the programming and the large amount of music in the archives did it for me. They just kicked off a beta version where they have some samples that you can listen to any time, but today is Sunday, which means you can listen to their weekly radio show for free by signing up.

This leads me to a related subject: voluntary simplicity. I thought hard about subscribing, because on the surface, it seemed expensive. When I weighed the cost versus the benefit, I saw that it was worth it for me. Different people have different views of voluntary simplicity. I believe that it is not just about saving money. It is about using your money wisely to support the things that you value. I decided that I wanted to support this programming because it provides a service that enriches my life. There are times when I listen to this music that my whole inner being feels like it is expanding. It may not be that way for some people. But for me, anything that makes me feel that way that is healthy and legal has got my vote for my hard-earned dollars.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy other than the fact that the refinancing people are not getting back to us. But it will happen. I’m moving ahead.

We’re making our preparations for winter. Yesterday we bought a truckload of firewood from a different man who brought us twice as much for the same price as last year’s firewood guy. And the wood is good quality - last year’s was too green and I ended up using much of it for borders around my raised beds.

The plan is to put off turning on the heat for as long as possible by firing up the woodstove every night. With the fan pushing the heat to the back of the house, our thermostat went up five degrees last night and we didn’t use much wood. This morning the temp in the house is 66. Tonight the low is supposed to be around 38. We dress warmly in the house and make use of throws and quilts if we’re sitting on the couch or at the computer. So until we get into some serious cold, we’ll be able to put off turning on the gas heat. If it came down to it, we could move the futon into this room and shut off the right side of the house.

It’s important to plan for these things. I’m a lurker on several discussion lists where the people are very, very serious about it. I feel okay about my preparations, but I realize that I could do more. For example, I have stored water in gallon glass juice bottles in the studio, but I don’t have enough. If it really came down to an absolute crisis, I could boil water from my rain barrels on the woodstove, though.

I could improve my food storage. I have a lot of grains, beans, and dried foods, but water is always the key. I could do better on my canning if I would break down and buy that pressure canner - that way I could can anything that I grow or barter for.

Here’s the thing - I’m really an amateur in this area, mainly because like most people, I don’t want to dwell on the negative. So I piddle about with it enough to make me feel a little more empowered so that I feel better. But so many people have given this absolutely no thought at all, and don’t want to. Not only that, they have children! I don’t know, I think that if I had children I would be totally obsessed with peak oil.

Perhaps part of my concern stems from growing up with parents who grew up during the first Great Depression. My mother didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing, but she was lucky enough to have an college-educated agriculture teacher for a father and they produced all their own food. They got along better than most people in her area because they understood that food is the priority. I learned a lot from listening to my mother and grandmother.

I wish that either of our presidential candidates understood the food crisis. It’s about more than higher prices. It’s about power concentrated in the wrong places.

Seven incredible food activists and writers on one stage at Slow Food Nation: Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, Carlo Petrini, and Corby Kummer. Wendell Berry, as always, is a fount of wisdom and is not to be missed. Corby Kummer is a wonderful moderator and his exchanges with Carlo Petrini are often very funny. See the video and others at the Slow Food Nation blog, or you can come back and see it here- I embedded it on its own page because I want to rewatch it every time I need some inspiration.

Forget Obama and McCain - Wendell Berry for President!

I love these crisp mornings that we are finally beginning to have. But even more, I love that I was able to sleep late this morning. This is rather new for me.

I’ll go to the curb market a little later and do a bit of shopping, but I’ve mainly been living off what I bought earlier this year and put in the freezer. It was packed and I need to make some room. I also have to remind myself that frozen food doesn’t stay good forever and not follow my mother’s footsteps in making my fridge and freezer into a museum of food.

Here’s what I like about the Back Forty right now. Picking butterbeans and field peas is like a treasure hunt. They are unruly and I have them planted in different places all over the garden. The willow and Loudermilk beans have crawled up to the top of the fig tree. I will have to get a ladder to pick them! Every time I walk through, which is often, I try to lift up a tangle of vines in a different spot or look at it from a different angle, and every time I find more that I missed. There will be ones that I miss even so, and those will be saved for next year’s crop.

Yesterday I sat and read in the playhouse, and Miss Peanut meandered back there and hung around nearby. I am always thrilled to see any sociability from Miss Peanut. She used to be more friendly before she lost her eye, still not wanting to be touched, but if I was sitting quietly in the back yard she would lay down nearby, even to the point that once I was on a blanket on the ground, and I looked up to see her laying on the blanket with me. I knew that she would like the cement pavers. I have them outside the playhouse now, and they generate warmth and are a little rough so that she can roll on them.

So I talked to her a lot and she responded. That is a family trait that she shared with Mama Kitty and Squirt and Ozzie. Mama Kitty taught them all to meow conversationally. Now she is the only one left and I know that she must be lonely, so Sandy and I sit and meow with her now and then. She relaxed and I watched her wash herself. A cat washing her face is one of the cutest things ever, but it is particularly nice to see Miss Peanut do this because she was so sick and looked so terrible for about two years after her eye accident, matted and dirty and there wasn’t a thing that I could do about it. Now she is plump and clean, and her bad eye no longer looks like a poster from a horror movie.

Ditching any unnecessary obligations seems to have done me some good. I still have a few left - I promised to do a Slow Food table at the market on Oct. 11 - but dropping my Sierra Club duties and dropping my class helped a lot. I’m going to talk with Anne-Marie later today about our upcoming annual election for Slow Food and try to come up with a plan for my replacement for at least a year. I’ll still be the techie, but I need a break from folks thinking that I’m the point person (I am the list mama and send out the emails, but I’m not the leader). The new Slow Food chapter structure suggests four year term limits, and I think that’s a good idea as long as someone will come along to replace the person! And I’m at the end of my four years. I don’t want to get totally burnt out.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my wants and needs. I still don’t have a solution, but I know that I have a great life and a great situation, and that if I concentrate on the present moment, I feel pretty good. So I think that it’s more of an attitude adjustment that is needed. And I need to do more art, but I want to think about it more than I want to start doing it. “Start” is the key word here. If I can just get started, I am off and running.

Anyway, I’m feeling better.