Category: voluntary simplicity

art, butterbeans, coffee pot posts, collage, consumerism, Coronavirus Chronicles, Mixed media art, Reading, voluntary simplicity

Sunday morning coffee pot post

Laurie

And, OH! This coffee is so good. I put a big scoop of Trader Joe’s salted caramel hot cocoa mix in it. Divine. I’d really like to go back to Trader Joe’s today and buy more of this and a bunch of frozen dinners to take to work, but I considered what it would be like to go to TJ’s on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. I think I’ll wait on that. I’m pretty new to Trader Joe’s since my first grocery shops were always the farmers’ market then Deep Roots then a local grocery. We listened to a story about Trader Joe’s on NPR and were fished in…it was a lovely experience. It’s good that it is on the other side of town.

The other place we shopped heavily during the pandemic was Costco, and we had a lot delivered. Once vaccines became widely available I stopped doing grocery delivery, realizing that between the mark-up on the products and the tip that I gave the shopper, I wasn’t saving any money. Sandy and I are – gasp, I’ll say it – hoarders and we got ahead on groceries at some point several years ago and our closets are generally full enough that we can get by for a few months if needed. I also have water stored in sterilized glass apple juice bottles. At first it was prepping in case of civil war or some other calamity. Little did we know how useful this would become so soon. I have to remember to rotate out the food, though. I donated some to the graduate student food drive for the food pantry this week.

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I have most of my grocery shopping for Thanksgiving already done so I’ll go to Deep Roots for my coffee, bread, yogurt, etc. today. My sister provides the turkey and cornbread dressing and dessert and lots of casseroles since she is the primo chef in the family, and retired, and enjoys it. I’ll bring my asparagus/mushroom/almond casserole and marinated goat cheese from Goat Lady Dairy and butterbeans from Smith Farms. We have our assignments and that has always been mine. Usually I grow the butterbeans, but I let that go this year.

One thing that we WON’T do is go shopping. I’ve celebrated Buy Nothing Day for years now, which is the Friday after Thanksgiving. It blows my mind that anybody actually enjoys that frenzy. We stopped giving physical Christmas gifts a long time ago. We still give each other presents, but they are not tied to any one day or obligation. It happens by whim when we see something that we know that someone would enjoy. I strongly believe that is the way gift giving should work.

Frugality is much on my mind, as I spin toward the goal of early retirement. I never thought that there was a chance that I might be able to do it, until my financial advisor at work told me that if I could live on 11% less, I could. Well, I have cut out a lot of fat during the past twenty years, but there is still 11% that I can cut. One thing that I did was I started putting a lot more in my retirement account. So now I know that I can live on what’s left.

I just don’t know how people can rent these days. We are so lucky (and smart) that we bought our house in a decent neighborhood at a good price and paid the mortgage off. Sandy rented his condo out so much more cheaply than the surrounding apartments. He said that he always remembered that when we first moved to this street the landlord said that he wanted to provide young people with an affordable place to live. I really liked that guy and it sounded really noble but we also had leaks and a hole in the bathroom floor. It wasn’t totally altruistic – he didn’t want to fix the problems. Then he sold us the house really cheap! Still, rents are insane these days and I don’t think that I could afford to rent an apartment on my salary if I had to do it.

Yesterday I broke down and decided that I had to take some allergy meds. I had stopped them when I realized that they were triggering my restless leg syndrome. It has been rough. Sleep was weird for the past 24 hours. I slept well on Friday night and late on Saturday, took the 24 hour Allegra-D, then Sandy and I went out for lunch and checked out Jerry’s Artarama. I came back and sat down on the sofa looking at my Kindle, and each cat settled down on each side of me and purred. I was so content and relaxed, I didn’t have a headache, and I could breathe! Then out of the blue I got really sleepy and took a three hour nap. The kind where you lay your head down and don’t move for three hours. These two things totally screwed up my sleep last night, so I spent from 1-4 a.m. stretching my feet and legs and back and cracking my toes and knuckles. At some point I turned on the light and started reading The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and wow. That was hard to put down. So it was another late sleep this morning. I’ll try to make it through the day without meds and a nap until bedtime tonight.

Jerry’s Artarama, which I didn’t even know was in Greensboro, y’all. It’s in a part of town where I never go any more. I need a source of inexpensive framing supplies for my artwork that I plan to sell, so I joined it. I bought a cool little device that you pour acrylic paint into and it has a marker tip – I chose the inch wide one. I hope that it will work well with stencils. I also bought a cheap stand-up easel for Sandy, black gesso, and a clip on glass panel for a matted print that we had bought from Ireland back in 2012.

One thing that I learned from this trip and the Dick Blick catalog, is that I need to get away from the 8×8″ size work. I bought a lot of wood panels in that size and I can make those hang-able, but there isn’t much choice in pre-made mats or frames in that size. When I make my prints this winter, I’m going to pay attention and cut my papers to standard sizes before I print them. I want to mat or frame my collages and prints and paintings for sale, but I don’t want to spend a lot of money on it. I’ll use a local frame shop for the ones that I want to keep or put in a show.

I spent in the wee hours of the morning thinking about what I’m going to do with this…thing…I made last weekend. And, as often happens, my inspiration took off when thinking about Lake Waccamaw. This is going to be the base for a real mixed media piece, with painting and leaf printed cloth and driftwood and maybe bones?

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I worked on this collage some last week and I like it. It will probably be part of a book, though.

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Back Forty, bloggy stuff, coffee pot posts, depression/anxiety, Food activism, Local food, Reading, Slow Food, voluntary simplicity

Sunday morning coffee pot post

Laurie

I can’t upload to Flickr right now and I’ve been worried for a while about the change in ownership of the platform. I have so many photos on it – over 10K – and over the years I have linked here to my photos stored there. I would be wrecked if the platform changed its code or went bankrupt and dumped my photos. Anyway, I’ll just move along and deal with it later, since it is much too beautiful outside to fart around on the computer. I am writing this on the front porch on my laptop, but I will lose power soon.

One thing that I am trying to be more conscious about these days is my use of plastic. Once you start paying attention, it is stunning how much plastic is in almost everything we use. I don’t have time to avoid it completely. That would require me to commit to buying almost all my food directly from the farmer, and only certain ones at that. I’d almost certainly have to stop buying dairy and meat products. There are some packaged foods that don’t use plastic, but you kind of have to figure it out by buying them and keeping it in your head. Sandy and I decided to start eating vegetarian at home a couple of weeks ago once I cook what’s left in our freezer. However, I don’t think his resolve will last long. He’ll go out and buy something to eat if he doesn’t feel the urge to eat what I’ve cooked.

I really loved the look of Leslie Marsh’s studio when I went there for a book workshop earlier this summer, and my friend the fabulous Zha K was getting rid of most of her possessions to sell her house and get the hell out of North Carolina, so she gave me a lot of baskets and cigar and wine boxes and candy tins. I’ve slowly been transitioning my studio storage over to these boxes and baskets and, most importantly LABELING THEM, and I’ll give the plastic bins to Goodwill or Salvation Army or wherever. This is mostly an aesthetic feel-good action, but I’ll take my feel-good where I can get it these days.

My depression has lifted, THANK GOD, and I hope that I won’t see it again for a while. Or forever, but I’m pretty realistic about the fact that it’s probably something that I have to deal with for life. That’s not to say that there has been an absence of stress or sadness in my life, but depression is not about that. I can cope with stress and sadness when I am not depressed. People who have depression will understand this.

I’m going to work on my tapestry diary this afternoon on the porch. I finally came up with a simple design for June and July that reflected my main focus, although looking at it now makes me realize that I need to reduce the size. Otherwise it will overpower the rest of it. We removed the swing from the porch to make it less crowded. A front porch swing is lovely in concept, but we seldom used it and it divided the space. Now there will be more room for company on the rare occasion that we have more than one visitor.

The groundhogs are back now that the tree removal is over. I’m still getting plenty of tomatoes, especially the ones inside the wire cages. Figs are ripening on the tree, but the few that have ripened so far have been nabbed by the birds. Reflective tape and all. I’ve been buying bicolor corn from Rudd Farms every weekend, enough to eat some and freeze some. Tomatoes, onions, peppers, and some eggplants have gone in the dehydrator. The squash overtaking the back forty turned out to be tromboncino. I’ve got to start putting markers in the garden. These photos are from a week ago so the tromboncino is in the tomatoes now. I should pick the flowers and try cooking them. I’ve never done it.

Soon we will hear if our solar panel installation will be approved by the Historic District Commission. I will be surprised if it is not, but usually there is some caveat that is expensive to add. For example, we have wanted to replace our front door for a long time and our certificate of appropriateness for that has expired because we haven’t been able to find a door that fits and satisfies both of us and the city staff that we can afford. So we still have this wretched hollow 50s ranch-style door.

If and when we get that approval, it will be hooked into the meter so that it should provide all our electricity and we will only have to pay a meter fee to Duke Energy. The cost is not much more that our current electric bill (we pay an average amount monthly on a budget plan). In a few years, if the price goes down for whole house batteries, I’d love to go off-grid totally.

I finished reading Salvage the Bones this weekend. A very difficult book, but I persevered through the uncomfortable content and was swept up in the story. At one point I did not think I would be able to finish it. I’m glad that I did because it is brilliantly written. I found her afterword about her experiences growing up and her experience going through Katrina to be helpful in my understanding of the culture and why she chose Medea of Greek mythology to be a touchstone throughout the book. It also reminded me a little bit of my childhood growing up in rural N.C. even though my black friends were not so poor, my best friend’s father was an alcoholic that raised his family in a falling down house with junk cars and stray dogs all over the yard. The black family I tried to hang out with (the parents on both sides were not pleased) had a Skeeter, and I was reminded of the disconnect between our cultures.

This was an accidental photo but I like it anyway.

Okay, time to cook and freeze corn and weave tapestry on the porch.

Back Forty, butterbeans, coffee pot posts, Market report, Slow Food, voluntary simplicity

Saturday midday coffee pot post

Laurie

Normally I don’t drink coffee past noon, because of my sleep issues. Today I am breaking that rule. I’ve got a spurt of energy going for me today and I don’t want to lose it!

The tree removal has been moved to Monday. He started on Thursday, and stopped after taking down one big lower limb and the bottom of the sky fell out. I mean flash flood warning heavy rain. I watched from the back door and the white clouded sky behind the limb was like a flash of light as it fell to the ground. I can already tell that these two guys are gonna be good at this, which is a very tricky job. A double trunk, about 80-100 feet tall as I estimate, covered high up in wild grapevine attached to other trees, and way too close to two houses. It’s not a good idea to climb trees with a chainsaw when everything is wet and slippery.

One secondary benefit, because we did not have this in mind when we decided to take down the tree, is that we have a perfect roof for solar panels. The quote we got from NC Solar Now impressed us. We will have to tie in to the power grid through Duke Energy’s meter and pay a meter charge, but in the optimistic view that big storage batteries might get cheaper and we will still have a reliable operating national power grid, it will be a few years before we can think about going off-grid. It’s probably a good idea to try this first anyway. They think that because our power usage is pretty low, twelve panels could cover most or all of our electric needs.

This is one way I can help make the world a little better, and it makes me feel better too. Although I strongly feel that it is too late for us to turn around the tidal wave of climate change – of course it is already here – I believe that we need to do what we can to adapt to the new reality.

It is a good day today. It’s not raining at the moment, which I’m grateful for, and even though I had an awful recurring dream in which I have somehow married an old boyfriend who stalked me for years and I am bewildered and horrified as to how I got into such a predicament, such dreams do make me grateful for the opportunities I have had in my life and the choices I’ve been able to make. I often wonder how things might have worked out if I had made different decisions at key times in my life. So many times I didn’t know it would be a major fork in the road. For example, what if I had chosen UNC Chapel Hill instead of UNC Greensboro? My life now would be entirely different. What if I had not dated another old boyfriend here in Greensboro? I would not have met Sandy, my husband. What if I had not gone to Oregon to take a tapestry workshop with Pam Patrie? I would not have the wonderful friends and connections in the tapestry world that I have now.

Then sometimes I think that what I thought were important decisions really weren’t. For instance, I don’t think that my degree in Studio Art is worth all that much, although that is where I first learned to weave and do woodcuts. I’ve learned much more going out into the world beyond Greensboro and taking classes.

What if I had decided to head out west or emigrate to another country? Who knows how completely different, for better or worse, my life would be?

It’s too late to emigrate to Ireland. I’ve had to accept that. You have to have an income of $55,000 individually or $110,000 as a couple combined. We will never make that much money. Canada doesn’t want retirees at all. There’s not even that option to check on the application. I don’t want to move south. We’ll check out Portugal next year, but I’m realizing that nothing is a given in this world – we can’t know that any place in it will be better than here by the time we are ready to go.

These days, I am looking at aging in place. I still hope to move west to Washington or Oregon, but that will be a while. I am not willing to give up a good job that is secure for now before I get to age 62, and I might have to wait until 67.

In the meantime, our house value is going up, up, up. The house next door sold immediately for an insane amount of money. The new neighbors are currently in Bangkok, where one is teaching at American University. They plan to move in in November, and have arranged for Armando, a young man who worked for them for several years, to take care of the yard. I might employ Armando myself. He thinks very highly of our new neighbors. It all seems good.

Today, it is still humid and the mosquitoes unfortunately did not drown in the deluge. The temperature is still below 90 so we have the doors open and the fans on. I have been to the Greensboro Farmer’s Curb Market and bought peaches, corn, eggplant, yellow squash, potatoes, and sweet peppers. We have lots of cherry tomatoes and some Roma and Better Boy tomatoes ripening in the back, although the groundhogs have eaten a few that are not protected by wire cages. They don’t bother the ground cherries or herbs, so I have those. The candy roaster squashes are taking over the back – if they bear fruit and the groundhogs don’t eat them, they will be huge and a nice source of food for this winter. Not all the butterbean plants were eaten and a few that were damaged are playing catch up. I’ll have a few but probably never enough for two servings or freezing. The few I’ve shelled have gone into soup.

I’m about to slice and dice and fire up the dehydrator, maybe blanch a few veggies for the freezer.

I’m toughening up. I’m thickening my skin. I’m getting ready. I’m also being kind to myself when I need downtime.

Halfway through Bella Poldark, the last of the book series. I will be sad to see it end. Then I will catch up on the TV series. I canceled Sling when the price went up this month, which included HBO. I will miss AMC but I’ll figure that out. That, along with the 2% raise I’m getting, will pay for the solar panels.

Only one photo this time – my new steampunk loom, Rosie, which I need to warp up once I catch up on my Fringeless online class.

consumerism, Upcycling, voluntary simplicity

The Year of Going Deeper

Laurie

A lot of articles and posts came out in the past few years about people who have decided to drastically cut spending for a year. Pledges have run the gamut of the obsessive compulsive buy absolutely nothing, create no waste, grow all food and barter plans to more moderate plans to cut down and purge. And then, of course, there are those whose poverty leaves them no choice.

I became an advocate of voluntary simplicity in the late 80s, when I really couldn’t afford much extra anyway. For several years I wove on frame looms (still do) with rags and bought the cheapest yarn I could find at yarn outlets. I crocheted a lot. I worked at a bookstore that carried a lot of remainders and I was able buy samples from book buyers very cheaply and so book buying was my biggest addiction. When I came into a small inheritance from my aunt I spent it on a Harrisville floor loom kit, which I got at a wholesale price from a friend who had a weaving supply store.

We didn’t travel much or far. Both of us had low-wage jobs that gave little vacation time and no sick time at all. We would toss a tent and the dog in the back of our little pick-up truck on the rare weekend we had off at the same time, decided what direction to head, and went that way. We went to Lake Waccamaw a lot because it was free.

My life has accumulated a lot of stuff since those days, as we both got better, more stable jobs, a small house, and we absorbed the belongings of our parents that we couldn’t bear to part with. The book addiction is deeply rooted in both of us. I LOVE COLLECTING BOOKS of ALL kinds. Novels, art books, old musty books with Art Nouveau covers, dictionaries, encyclopedias, nature books, old textbooks, secretarial manuals…it’s bad in my house. The hoarding is bad. Bad, even though I regularly purge these books boxes at a time. At one time I justified it as wanting to open a used book store one day. I sold books on Amazon for a few years. Now I justify the hoarding as supplies for my book/mixed media/collage creations.

So this year, no purchasing of books or art supplies or knick-knacks that we do not need. I like the way David, the author of Go Deeper, Not Wider, approaches this idea. It puts a positive spin on using what we already have to enrich our lives. I’m not going without, I’m going deeper.

It’s already hard for me. I see a recommendation for a magazine, or a particular kind of scissors, and I look it up online. I know that if I buy an e-book or digital issue of a magazine it will most likely be forgotten without reading it. That has been proven. Online classes are bought and abandoned halfway through or sooner than that.

However, I mentioned that I bought the Blurb PDF of India Flint’s “Bagstories” and I have joined the private Facebook group where she is going to guide the buyers of her wee book in a project. This, so far, has already been worth the price for the connections I’ve made to other North Carolina artists on the Facebook group! This fabric may be a tad too stretchy for the bag projects, but I finally sacrificed my batik pants from the late 80s/early 90s that I loved so much and started cutting them up to reinvent them for a new use. I’ve almost finished measuring the warp for that rag rug project I began several years ago.

I’ve hoarded fabrics the way I’ve hoarded books – it’s time to go deeper into them as well.

Back Forty, coffee pot posts, voluntary simplicity, whining

Saturday coffee pot post

Laurie


Every now and then I feel the need to drink coffee and type whatever comes to mind until the feeling goes away. That’s a coffee pot post.

I took a break from the visual journal posts. Partly because I kept forgetting to put the battery back in my camera but I realized that I needed a break. My blog passed the nine year mark in late February. Pretty amazing. 2005 seems so very long ago. I don’t know whether I’ll post every day again any time soon.

Work has been busy and stressful. I had my feelings hurt pretty badly, but most of it was due to misunderstanding, and the rest I pretty much knew about the undercurrent anyway, and they probably don’t know that I know. It is a rare workplace that doesn’t have some kind of toxic personality trying to gain control by poisoning others with their own warped intentions. I’ve heard that one in ten people are sociopathic and you’ll never know about it. I still love my job and almost all of my co-workers, and the students just plain rock.

As I told one person in the many conversations about this last week, I played dumb for about half my life (due to getting picked on for being smart in school and later from the haze of alcohol and depression) and I have no intention of ever doing that again. Passive aggression can be fun but it’s not my style. As much as I despise confrontation I despise gossip more. These days I own up to my mistakes and expect others to be honest instead of talking behind my back. I could have gone for my Ph.D. or M.F.A. but I chose not to because I don’t like writing for other people. I’m not saying that I’m the smartest person in my workplace – far from it – but I find it ironic that some of the most ardent feminists I know would be quite happy if I would sit down, take notes, and shut up.

Okay, that had been bubbling up for a while.

The weather has been quite dreadful this week. My county is under a state of emergency right now because of all the power outages and trees down from the ice storm yesterday. Fortunately, we never lost power and seem to have no damage. Sandy and I had a fun day and evening planned with Missy and Bob, but they have trees down and no power and they are way out in the country. The temperature is supposed to rise up into the 60s by tomorrow so my hope is that we will be able to finish up some of the yard clean-up we started two weeks ago.

Today I’m going to make an effort to purge my bookshelf and studio. I need the room and I have to be honest with myself that I will never touch 90% of my books ever again. I have SO MANY BOOKS, and I loved collecting them, but I get most of my reference information from the Internet and I can check out almost anything from a fantastic library just across the street from my office. Heck, they will even DELIVER the book to my office!

I’m considering having a porch sale/party and putting the books out there for my friends first. I’ll have a lot to give away and others to sell for less than $2, probably. My main problem likely will be my husband snatching the books back. He loves collecting books as much as I do.

On March 22 I am traveling to Reidsville for the first meeting of the Handweavers and Spinners of Rockingham County. I have two boxes of back issues of Handwoven, Shuttle, Spindle, and Dyepot, and various beading magazines to give away at this meeting. Any fiber-related books that I cull today will go too.

I need to lighten my load.

I feel better already.

Here’s a Meyer lemon on my tree, nearly ready to be picked.

voluntary simplicity

Update

Laurie

Hey, I’m still around and I’m okay. I am not a holiday person and I get overwhelmed this time of year, even when all seems right with the world. I promise to write at least one good post this month – if nothing else, I’ll probably do a Festivus post and I do an end-of-the-year post every New Year’s Eve.

Today and tomorrow I have taken vacation days to seriously tackle deep cleaning and purging my house and yard. It is taking me a month just to do this humongous kitchen with all the hoarded food and jars and many sets of china and crystal and glassware and flatware that we never use. I’ve had two people over to take what they need, and plan to invite another young man who is just moving out on his own to pick out what he wants. Most of the stuff from my husband’s side of the family is going into storage for whatever Sanford heirs want them, our wedding china has been sold, our wedding crystal is being stored or sold, I have boxes of stuff to go to Goodwill, and I’m starting a box of my Aunt Lib’s stuff for my niece who is named after her. Old paperwork has been burned in the woodstove, and what junk that is of no use or can’t be recycled is going in the garbage. I hope to finish the kitchen today, and I have a friend who has volunteered to help me clean up the garden tomorrow.

When I am done, I’ll have storage room for art supplies, and I have moved my loom into the house from the back building. I’m going to take some time today to finish measuring and maybe winding a warp.

Back to work.

buying local, consumerism, voluntary simplicity

Buy Nothing Day today

Laurie

If you’ve followed me for a while, and I suspect that there are VERY few of you left from the old days when this blog was mostly about food and voluntary simplicity and anti-consumerism, you know that I’ve celebrated Buy Nothing Day on the day after Thanksgiving even before I knew there was such a thing. I am NOT a shopper. I HATE crowds and traffic. I am, in fact, quite phobic about crowds, enough that I often avoid movies, concerts, plays, and even church because I don’t like sitting closely with a bunch of strangers. Vestiges of agoraphobia. For a long time I was a retail worker and the two days after Thanksgiving were the busiest days of the year. So you better believe that I will be spending the day at home and appreciating the ability to do so.

However, now that I am a member of a local artists’ co-op that desperately needs some sales, I am not pushing Buy Nothing Day today, even though I personally will be buying nothing because I am broke after spending all my money on house repairs and a Kindle Fire this month. I am asking that if you’re out there spending money, consider spending some or all of it with your locally-owned small businesses and restaurants instead of the chain stores and restaurants. I’ve watched so many of my favorite small businesses go down in flames this year. It has been very sad.

If we don’t support our small locally-owned businesses, we soon will not have any choices other than merchandise made in bulk and shipped in from countries who do not treat their workers or their environment with respect. The quality of goods continue to be lowered to meet the corporation’s ever lower prices, forcing us to replace our goods more often (such as this crappy HP laptop which is on its way out and is being replaced by that cheap Kindle Fire) and fill our landfills with more stuff. Our citizens will continue to go on long-term unemployment and pray for compassion to awaken in the hearts of our Congress.

So today, I ask you to either Buy Nothing and enjoy the company of your family and friends and Self, or to buy local if you must.

augggghhhh, coffee pot posts, critters, Local food, voluntary simplicity

Sunday morning coffee pot post

Laurie

Real life has gotten a lot busier now. Classes begin tomorrow, and the new graduate students came in last week for advising and orientation. I have to say that I’m impressed with them so far. I love my job, as I say often! A large part is due to my co-workers, who have great personalities, compassion, and most importantly, are sane. And I say that with complete seriousness. You haven’t experienced misery until you get stuck in an office with a person with serious negative mental problems.

Speaking of that, on Friday I came home for an early lunch to drive downtown and buy some bread and a cinnamon roll at Simple Kneads, which is closing and its customers were rallying to try to save it at the last minute. Anyway, when I was at home two policemen showed up at my next-door neighbor’s house. This wasn’t very surprising, except that there were two of them, and I slipped inside to give them privacy. But the next day, her neighbor on the other side approached us and said that the sheriff had been there later that day and now he had not seen her outside or heard her, which is very unusual. He finally called her daughter, and it turns out that she was taken to a mental health facility for evaluation. I am glad that her daughter managed to facilitate this, because she was getting progressively worse and we were worried about her.

I just hope that they can keep her and do something to help her, because she doesn’t seem to be able to take care of herself. Her family has tried to “commit” her before and she refused help and was not deemed a danger to herself or others, but really, she is. I am not afraid of her but her state of mind does make me nervous that one day she might harm herself or decide that one of us is possessed by demons and attack somebody – conversations with her support this. Not that she would attack someone, but that demons are very real to her, and she lives in a very dark, sad surreal world.

My colonoscopy had perfect results, yay! Theo’s health problems have been heavy on my mind though. He finally stopped licking and biting himself obsessively only to come down with some sort of respiratory problem. I can’t imagine where he could have picked up a virus so I assume it is allergies. I’ve had cats with much worse physical problems but never a sneezy cat. His eye was watering a lot and he was snuffling and sneezing and I really, really, really did not want to take him back to the vet for a third time this month. A friend on Facebook advised Chlor-trimetron (her vet had advised it for her cat) and so yesterday I gave him a little less than 1/4 pill twice and it did seem to help.

This made me realize just how dusty and covered with cat hair the house has gotten. With my hand problems and a vacuum cleaner that needs repair it got way worse than usual. So we spent a good part of yesterday cleaning the front room down to the bones – moving the furniture out, cleaning the floors, baseboards, walls, and windows. Dusting and cleaning the upholstery. I love our old Victorian pieces of furniture from Sandy’s family, and our little collections of interesting stuff, but my God. Dusting them is a nightmare. It always makes me wish that we had chosen to live in a new house instead of a 1922 Craftsman with plaster walls. These houses seem to generate their own dirt. Sometimes I think about having the whole inside sheetrocked.

One reason why I haven’t written on the blog is that I’m very frustrated about the whole Friends of the GFCM situation (they have disbanded but still have final business to take care of) and so angry with certain people (not in the Friends) to the extent that I no longer want anything to do with the GFCM again. I’m just done. I don’t want to think about them any more. So I’m trying to put a positive spin on this for myself – it will be a new challenge to search out other venues of local food. My friends the Bettinis have a farm stand and the Rudd Farm has a farm stand near them with a lot of different vegetables. I think that I’ll cruise out that way and buy direct, and also check out the state farmers’ market on Sandy Ridge Road for the first time in a very long time. Other farmers that I like have farm stores or stands or other venues too. So it won’t be as consolidated and convenient, but it will be an adventure. I would love to order from Piedmont Local Food, but I don’t want to use their only public pick-up location in Greensboro for reasons of my own.

Sigh. Sometimes this buying ethically philosophy is difficult. I actually had someone admonish me this past week for standing up for my principles instead of “reality.” HA! I’m sure that those of you who know me know that he was barking up the wrong tree.

Today I’m going to finish up the living room – take all the things off the shelves and clean them and the shelves. Yuk. Then I’m going to stitch and work on binding another book. Yay. And I’m moving forward, despite the world around me, I will keep on truckin’.

buying local, consumerism, voluntary simplicity

Buy Nothing Day

Laurie

Buy Nothing DayIf you’ve known me on the Web for a while, you know that I am an advocate of Buy Nothing Day, which is celebrated in the United States on the day after Thanksgiving. I try to live frugally and make careful choices about what I buy. That means that I have tried to purge those items and activities that I have to come to realize that I only buy or do because I am expected to, not because I need or particularly want them. This is why I have been able to do a lot of traveling and I don’t bitch about the cost of healthy food. I drive an old car when I need to drive, I wear my clothes until they are worn out, and I don’t have a large fancy house, and it is usually a mess because I consider my time and energy more valuable than money. I seldom watch TV anymore and I buy used and handmade items when possible.

Black Friday, so-called because it is the frenzied day that will put some businesses back in the “black,” is a dark day to me because it focuses on what dismays me about this society – our priorities are all about stuff and how to get more money to get more stuff. In fact, we are told that to be patriotic, we must participate in the rampant consumerist mindset of this country. I am not alone in my disgust for this focus on money and stuff during the holidays. I know many others who say that they will not be in the stores on Black Friday. And a few very wise folks turned the tables on Black Friday to make it an official holiday for us who are not consumed by the thought of hitting the sales at 3 a.m.: Buy Nothing Day.

This year, I noticed that another day has been established: Small Business Saturday. That’s a shopping day that I can support. Small businesses are in danger of becoming extinct in this country. If you must shop for the holidays, please consider the positive impact that shopping locally has on your community.

Our family decided a few years ago to not exchange presents for the adults on Christmas, thank God. When I do give gifts, I try to give handmade.

The First Friday Indie Market will be downtown Greensboro again on Dec. 3 from 4-9 pm, in conjunction with Greensboro’s Festival of Lights. You’ll find lots of unusual and beautiful gifts at the market and in the shops on Elm St. Please save the money that you would have spent on Buy Nothing Day, and bring it to downtown Greensboro on December 3rd!

coffee pot posts, consumerism, voluntary simplicity

Saturday morning coffee pot post part deux

Laurie

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.