Twins spin me around

My first youtube upload. The camera was upside-down, and I don't know how to flip the video. *sigh*.

Plant walk

On Sunday Reid & I went on a plant walk in Discovery Park. It turned out we were the only people who showed (besides the leader).


I met a lot of plants that I hope to meet again, including Stinging nettle, Plantain, and Horsetail. I'm pretty sure I've seen plantain around my neighboorhood; I am looking forward to finding it & adding it to my local snacking menu, which currently includes chickweed, dandelion, and blackberries.


I'd like to find something close to home that will make a tasty tea.

At the right is a snap of horsetail that I took.

mead bottling

When we drank mead in December, we decided that making a lot more was a good idea.

Bottling underway

Rinsing the bottles (so they're not sticky)

A full complement

A change in drinkware

The babies have broken a lot of glasses recently. Luckily they haven't gotten cut, but we still needed to find something to drink out of.

Goals:

- Sturdy, so babies can't break them easily

- 12-20oz seems like the right size

- fits comfortably in the dishwasher

- Not plastic, for reasons I described before.

- Cheap, ideally something that we can get used.

This turned out to be an easy one: we're using pint, regular-mouth mason jars. The meet all of the above, plus they can take a secure lid, so babies won't spill my pint of milk on the carpet.

I'm wondering how well they would work for tea and coffee, especially since you can get them with a handle. Will they cope with the thermal stress?

Storing leftovers

The babies are getting better at opening drawers and unloading the contents on to the floor. That means that all the things stored down low are now stacked on top of the things that are already stored up high. It's a mess.

The lowest drawer contained the plastic food storage containers. Even before the babies, this drawer was my nemesis - hard to keep organized, difficult to put things away, hard to get out what you need, and impossible to find a lid & container that match.

Now, those items are stored on a shelf that really didn't have the room to spare. (The picture on the right is the result of a dedicated organizing effort on that shelf; many of the items are either holding food in the fridge, or scattered around the house.) Frustrated by the chaos I can't control, I'm looking for something better.

Today I use mason jars for liquids (kombucha, milk, yogurt, kefir, and low-viscosity soups), as well as for fermentation, but they don't work well for, say, cheese. They're also a bit heavy and fragile for carrying in a backpack to a festival or something, and of course, they don't stack.

nesting. Nesting keeps things compact. You can often buy sets of plastic food storage containers that nest, but they only nest in one way. I want a set where each item nests in another of the same size & shape.

stacking lids. I need lids that have a sensible home, too. They should stack.

only a few sizes. Instead of a set of 20 items, each one of them different, I want only two or three sizes/shapes. This way it's easy to find a lid & a container that match, and I don't have to think very hard to select a container for the job. If I had two sizes, I'm guessing they'd need to be about one cup and one quart.

transparent. I want to be able to see what's inside without opening the lid.

durable with secure lid. Putting the container in my backpack shouldn't mean that everything else gets a taste of the contents. On a related note, removing the lid shouldn't be so hard that the contents go flying.

no sharp edges. I'm surprised I even have to write this, but my "disposable" Glad containers have rough edges, as a consequence of being made out of minimal materials.

glass or ceramic. I find that hand-washing plastic is hard - it never really feels clean. I am concerned about the chemical reactions between acidic foods and plastics, as well as the leeching of plastic compounds. I don't own a microwave, but I've heard concerns that microwaving in plastic can be dangerous, too.

Looking at my list, I don't think it's possible to find one item that can meet all of these needs. Right now, the best plan I can think of is a composite one:

• Mason jars continue to do what they're doing today.



• Keep a few of the plastic Tupperware-style containers for the backpack, in various sizes.



• A set of glass 1c and 1qt containers with good lids, similar to:
  

  That's the best that I can come up with. What do you recommend?
  

Food storage of the past

Thinking about food storage lately, I want to write what I know about how people did things before refridgeration:

Fermentation. Fermentation produces acids and alchohols that inhibit spoilage, thereby increasing the useful life of food. The classic example is sauerkraut (and cousins such as kim-chee) which, if made in the late fall, can keep all winter long, supplying the dinner table with tasty vegetables. It's not just about veggies - salamis and cheeses have been a big part of the European diet for a long time.

The cellar (and related spaces - stored winter ice, cool stream houses, etc.). The cool food cellar was important in the summer, when everywhere else was warm. But even in the winter, they allowed produce to keep longer in closer to ideal conditions.

Heartier crops. The fruits and vegetables we eat today are not the same strains that people ate a century ago. With the commercialization of the food supply, it made economic sense to pick foods for their shelf lives, durability, and appearance, vs. flavor and nutrition. One obvious example comes from apples:
in the 1970s, you could either get red "delicious" or golden "delicious". The "delicious" brand apples were chosen (and subsequently bred) not for their flavor, but for their color and their ability to last in cold storage until the next fall, providing "fresh" apples all year round.
When I switched to organic produce a few years ago I noticed a similar change - the food didn't look as smooth, uniform, shiny, and perfect, but it tasted so much better.

While the "delicious" strains had a long shelf life in cold storage, we also see that today's fresh produce doesn't last as long because of our farming practices. Healthy crops grown in rich soil are able to resist spoilage longer. I keep thinking of a blue-water sailing book from the 1970's, where the author suggested carrying produce on board in well-ventilated space, because it would last for months. That's unusual today.

On the shelf. I've seen a couple historical examples of keeping foods right on the shelf at room temperature, instead of refridgerating. One comes from the movie Big Night - in the last scene, Secundo picks up a bowl of eggs that were just sitting out, and makes breakfast. Another comes from the Aubrey/Maturin novels I've been reading, where a character will often pick up a peice of meat that sat out all night (or longer), put it in his pocket, go for a long hike, and eat the meat for lunch.

I'm not sure what to make of these examples, other than a suspicion that our ideas about what is required for safe food storage may be a bit overzealous.

Dump the fridge? I've been looking at listings for houses built in the 1920's and before. I find them beautiful. I also see that the fridge never fits. It sticks out in to the middle of the kitchen, or it's in the next room. I think it would be interesting to move towards fridgelessness one day. For the meantime, I'll try to take comfort in the thought that I only need 1/5th of a fridge, since I share mine with 4 others.

Decluttering the study

Another sign our house is too big - we found another space full of clutter that we hadn't though of before. This time it was the "study". This is a bedroom that once held all the computers and some desks, and we spend nearly all our waking hours in there, pre-children.

Today it's Reid's bedroom, but still full of stuff from those days. We thought he might like to put his clothes in there

- A big box of VHS and print porn and in storage there. Gone.
- Julie's old SLR camera. 9+ years unused. Given.
- Blank paper. In notebooks, pads, loose, etc. What is this for? Donated.
- A whiteboard w/ markers, eraser, and cleaner. Given.
- Dozens of "home improvement" magazines. Recycled.
- 7 milk crates that were holding all this and more. Only 2 are holding anything any more.
- PC speakers with subwoofer that may or may not work. Need to find a home for these.
- Family photographs. Saved.
- random CDs that were missing their cases, and cases that were missing their CDs. Matched & ripped; ready for storage.
- and much, much more!

Now the closet is almost completely empty. I'm not sure where the milk crates will go.

I also decided to get rid of about 1/2 of the books I own. That's not a huge difference, as previously all my books fit on one shelf. Now they share a shelf with other books.

Damn, it feels good.

Next up:
- the "cat room" was the victim of random accumulations ahead of the babies' birthday party. Need to clear that out.
- Still a few "junk boxes" that need to be sorted out

Birthday walk

On the babies' first birthday, I took them for a walk. The idea was that they would fall asleep in the stroller, and then be well-rested when the guests started arriving.

Great journalism of 2007: Women living alone

Check out this article entitled Watch out, men! More women opt to live alone. It says that 51% of US women are not married.

Let's temporarily assume that we live in a world where everyone is heterosexual, and where the population is evenly split between men and women. Bear with me.

I have to ask, "to whom are these women not married?" Close to 1/2 of men are not married, too, right? Why is the fact that many men are not married unworthy of a headline warning women?

And why are women chosing it? Isn't marriage a mutual decision? If 99% of men made the choice to stay single, then just as many women are going to be single, without having made a choice to that effect.

And why is it a problem for men? Am I supposed be disappointed that women are choosing not to get married? If I were single & looking, I might be glad that women aren't expecting me to commit to a life-time.

And what's with this "living alone" bit? Don't unmarried couples often live together? Don't married couples sometimes choose to live separately? Don't people live together when not in a marriage, as roommates?

And back to by original assumption: isn't this article a bit absurd when you consider that not every woman can legally marry her partner of choice, even if they're both willing?

So it's valentines day. By tradition, today we buy sugar for our sweeties, as well as roses, which often create serious health risks for the people who grow them (due to the chemicals used). I think I need something romantic that still aligns with my values.

How 'bout: drop me a line if you want to get horizontal. Boobs preferred.

That should do the trick.

I want Wiki! (Part 2)

The more time I spend on wikis, the more I wish wiki-like functionality was available elsewhere. 

 

For example, I've been reading through the Q and A section on the Ishmael site.  People have sent Quinn a lot of questions, and the questions with answeres are posted on his site.  I read a question, try to formulate an answer in my head, and then see what Quinn has to say.  I'm not just checking if I have the "right answer", but instead trying to understand what the differences in our answers mean.

 

In some cases, I feel like I could provide a richer answer than what is there - an answer that would be helpful to readers.  In those cases, I wish for Wiki.

 

Here's an example (http://www.ishmael.com/Interaction/QandA/Detail.CFM?Record=57 ):

 

Q: My chosen profession has begun to look like "part of the problem" rather than "part of the solution." I'm beginning to feel obliged to abandon it, as a matter of conscience. Do you see it this way?

 

A: You're wondering if we wouldn't be better off if your chosen profession didn't exist at all. A young film maker once expressed the same reservation to me (unknown to the general public, film-making is a tremendously pollutive business). I told him what I'll tell you: WHERE WOULD WE BE IF EVERYONE WITH A CONSCIENCE GOT OUT OF HIS CHOSEN PROFESSION?

We MUST HAVE film makers like him---and people like you in your profession! We must NOT cede key professions to people who care about nothing but profits.

This happens in plenty of other contexts, not just filmmakers who have been infected with Quinn's ideas.  For example, a few years ago when the debate about gay marriage was reaching a crescendo in the news media, I remember a lot of folks who were feeling frustrated talk about moving to Canada.  Similar to the case that Quinn describes, fleeing the USA because of politics you disagree with will just allow the politics to move further from what you're wanting.

 

But if I had wiki-like functionality on this page, what I would add is this:

 

 Don't assume that DQ is telling you to keep doing exactly the same job you're doing today.  You can change how you do your job, to address these concerns.  You can also change jobs in the same profession.

 

To consider the filmmaker example, you could direct your efforts to support making films that help your audience ask questions about Mother Culture.  You could help reduce the waste produced by the film projects you work on.  You could quit your job (but not your profession) and start a new film studio, organized as a tribal business (as suggested in Beyond Civilization).  You could do all three!

 

On the other hand, if you picked your current profession because it would bring you money and power, even though you hate the work, then switching professions may make good sense.  Trade money and power or something much better.

 

 

I want wiki! (Part 1)

I've been exploring the writing on Wikipedia regarding Daniel Quinn.  These are complex topics, so it's not a given that the writing there would be on target.  So far, it seems to be in reasonably good shape.

 

A particularly interesting article to me is New Tribalists.  It has twice as much content in the Criticism section as in the rest of the page.  It appears that a Criticism section is an important part of Wikipedia's attempt to produce a " Neutral Point of View".  What you'll often see is a paragraph describing a critcism, followed by a paragraph of response. 

 

That's good news in this case.  When you don't understand what a sensible person is saying, it will usually seem like nonsense.  You criticise, and then the speaker has a chance to respond with clarification.  It's a dialog that is somewhat similar to much of the dialog in Ishmael and My Ishmael. 

 

I'd like to make a few minor contributies to this article, to hopefully improve its value, but apparently I've been blocked!  It looks like someone with an IP address close to mine did something damaging on Wikipedia, and an admin has blocked an IP range in an attempt to stop them.  Unfortunately, they got me, as well.

 

I'm new to Wikipedia, so I'm still figuring out what's going on, but I don't see my IP in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist .  *sigh*

Someone who gets me...

Apparently The Lacatvist is being sued by the pork industry for a T-Shirt. Some people's priorities are clearly backwards ("let's make more money by abusing pigs, at the cost of children's health"). Must suck to be them.

Her Cafe Press store includes this fine example.

Evolution has halted

In one of his books (The Story of B maybe?), Quinn said that we have halted evolution.  He only mentioned the idea in passing, and it hasn't reappeared in other books, so I'm guessing he doesn't consider it a key element of his ideas.  Still, it is one that caught my attention. What does he mean?
 

Modern medicine and friends

 
I've heard people say something like this before, but usually it turns out that they just don't understand what evolution is.  They typically mean something like 
 

In the 'wild', people who (can't see / can't walk / have regular seizures / have acute ashma / have low sperm counts / etc.) would not survive to reproduce, thus the human species would tend to select for the opposite traits.  Thanks to modern medicine we allow these traits to continue to occur, and potentially proliferate in our gene pool, resulting in a weaker human population over time.

Or to put it colloquially, "our technology means that the human species is getting worse."  (The problem with that statement, of course, is that evolution doesn't say anything about "better" or "worse" but merely about "more fit" and "less fit" to survive in a given niche.)

 

I don't disagree that this occurs.  In fact, I have an example that is close to home.  My English grandfather was not sent off to fight in World War II, because he had asthma.  While his healthier peers went off & died, he stayed home and had 3 children, all of whom had some breathing issues.  I have some of those traits, albeit mild ones.  The decision to select non-asthmatics as soldiers meant that we selected for asthma in the next generation of the English.

 

However, this doesn't mean that evolution has halted.  It means that the mechanism of selection has changed.  In a hunter-gatherer tribe, the ability to, well, hunt and gather, is clearly critical to survival, so characteristics that interfere with the ability to do those things ( e.g. blindness) are likely to reduce reproduction, and hence their representation in the gene pool.  In modern, civilized society, the criteria are different, but they still exist.  For example, physical attractiveness is still a factor in sexual selection; the ability to eliminate or tolerate certain toxins (e.g., cadmium, mercury) or radiation is more important today than it was 10,000 years ago.  So, evolution of humans still occurs today, and will always occur.

 

Similarly, the characteristics that are selected for in other species have been dramatically affected by the world-wide dominance of human civilization.  The traits of cows are desirable to humans as a food source, so we increase their opportunity to proliferate.  Meanwhile, predators of cows, such as wolves, have traits that interfere with cow's proliferation, so we reduce their opportunity to proliferate.  In these ways, we have a dramatic impact on the gene pools of both cows and wolves on the earth.

 

Now, I don't know for sure what Quinn meant, but I'm guessing this isn't it.  He clearly has a deep understanding of evolution and natural selection -- probably much deeper than mine -- so he probably wouldn't make such a simple error.

 

Food supply limitations

 

Perhaps what Quinn meant was:

 

Consider that civilized humans transform available land from its wild state to a food-producing state.  We do this rapidly and efficiently, thereby allowing us to produce corresponding increases in food supply.  Whereas non-civilized peoples have allowed food supply to limit their numbers ("living in the hands of the gods"), we have effectively removed the limits on food availability for nearly all humans on earth.  In this way, a limited food supply is not a significant factor in the gene selection of civilized people.

 

That seems much more reasonable, and in line with a lot of what Quinn has to say elsewhere, but I still have trouble believing that's what he meant.  Saying that you have "stopped evolution" seems to be a much stronger statement than saying that you have "removed food supply limitations as an environmental selector".

 

Who lives and who dies?

 

Or perhaps he meant:

 

Consider that civilized humans will, without hestiation, obliterate obstacles to increasing food supply for humans.  Cows like to graze pasture, so we'll destroy rain forests extremely rapidly ( 100 acres / minute!), destorying the "inconsequential" life in that area, so that our cows may graze.  If wolves show interest in our cows, we won't just defend the cows when the wolves approach.  We systematically seek out and destroy all wolves, nearly eliminating them as a species, on purpose.  We make the decisions about which species thrive and which are decimated.  For millions of years, the selection was made by a complex mix of natural forces; for the past 10,000 years, we have taken that decision in to our own hands.  We decide who lives and who dies.

 

The gods love diversity

 

Or perhaps even:

 

The universe if full of diversity.  Each blade of grass is unique.  Each plant is unique.  Each mammal is unique.  Each species is unique.  Just as the Law of Gravity is written in every particle of matter, the Law of Life is written in every living thing.  Diversity of life is at the essense of that law.  Diversity of life is at the essense of the theory of natural selection.  Civilized man has dramatically reduced the diversity of life on the earth, by driving some species to extinction, while we allow others to proliferate almost unchecked.  The result dismantles the normal functioning of evolution by natural selection.

 

It's just selection

 

Maybe it's something much simpler.  Wikipedia's summary of Darwin's theory is "populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection".  Under natural selection, it says:

Natural selection is the process by which favorable traits that are heritable propagate throughout a reproductive population: individual organisms with favorable traits are more likely to survive and reproduce than those with unfavorable traits. If these traits have a genetic basis, then the genotypes associated with the favored traits will increase in frequency in the next generation. Given enough time, this passive process results in adaptations and speciation (see evolution). Natural selection explains why living creatures seem to match their environmental niches so well.

Natural selection is one of the cornerstones of modern biology. The term was introduced by Charles Darwin in his groundbreaking 1859 book The Origin of Species, ^[1] by analogy with artificial selection, by which a farmer selects his breeding stock.

So, maybe Quinn means "we've stopped evolution by replacing natural selection with artificial selection".

 

Hmm.  This last one seems the most plausible -- it's the one that holds together, and the one that you'd expect from someone who had studied evolution carefully.

 

 

Finding hope in criticism

The Ismael article on Wikipedia says this under "Criticism of population claims":

 

Recent population trends indicate a dropoff in fertility rates in most regions in the globe; many demographers claim that increased women's autonomy and access to reproductive technology is responsible for the decrease, and that such trends actually bring fertility below the " replacement rate" in many industrialized nations. Some argue that people in industrial societies have less of an incentive to "over-reproduce," as children are a net economic drain, unlike in agrarian societies. In this view, it is possible that population levels will become self-limiting if high rates of reproduction become irrational and avoidable.

 

It's an understandable criticism, and Quinn's response is described in that article.  However, there's something else here.

 

It is true that in industrialized nations aren't growing their population the way other parts of the world are.  While the potential reasons are concerning

• too busy conusming products and media to breed
• too busy working to pay off the debt from the former
• exposed to polutants that interfere with fertility or libido

there is some hope.  You see, people in these countries aren't sitting around mourning their lack of reproduction.  They aren't crying in the streets because they didn't have any kids.  For the most part, they're perfectly content to not be reproducing so much.

 

That's where the good news lies: there is a way to get civilized people to avoid reproducing in such large numbers.  Something in their life is pushing a button that gets them to choose not to reproduce so verbosely..  Now all we need to do is find another way to push that same button -- a way that doesn't involve the incredible consumption of natural resources and production of pollutants.

 

(Flash-forward: In Beyond Civilization, Quinn has a proposal for a way to address the ills he describes in his earlier books.  Perhaps that proposal can succeed because it is able to push this "don't reproduce so much" button, without the undeseriable consequences that Quinn points out in response to the criticism above.)

 

Is mass starvation the answer?

When I first read Ishmael, it took me a lot of contemplation to make sense of what he was saying. These are ideas that conflict directly with what we hear every day, everywhere we go. I'd heard the same message since I was very young. Anything else was difficult to understand at first.

Today, I think I have gotten past the initial hump, and can at least articulate what I believe Quinn is saying. Most of what he said in Ishmael seemed pretty reasonable to me. The ideas are not complex, even if they are outside my normal arena of thought.

However, there was one bit that I got stuck on.

He talks about the relationship between food supply an population. That for any population of a given species, if you increase the food supply, the population will grow to match, and if you decrease the food supply the population will shrink to match. He says this is true for all species, and that includes humans. What our culture has done, via Tolitarian Agriculture, is to continually, and dramatically increase our food supply for 10,000 years.

He also makes a strong case that this behavior is a problem - that it's not sustainable. In fact, we have long since past the point of sustainabilty. To attempt to maintain current behavior will result in our extinction, and soon -- Quinn says 100 years if we keep going the way we're going.

When I read this, I thought it sounded like Quinn was saying we should reduce the food supply available to humanity, which would in turn reduce the human population. That is, people need to get busy starving to death .

Well, that's not something I can accept very easily, for a number of reasons:

Starving hurts. Really, it's a terrible way to go. I hate it when dinner is late; I can't imagine the agony of dying of hunger.

Who decides? Some will go hungry, while others eat enough. Who chooses? Judging by our past behaviors, it will be the elite that chooses, and they will choose themselves & their friends to eat. That is, the haves will have food, and the have-nots will not have food. The fact that I would almost certainly be in the 'haves' is no comfort to me. Anyway, this is something that no one has the right to choose. As Quinn says, "who lives and who dies" is a matter for the gods; the fact that we think we are wise enough to make that choice is the reason we ended up here in the first place.

The system would be abused. Duh. No matter how fair the system could be, someone will use their power to abuse it.

Still, perhaps we can convince ourselves that it's OK for mass starvation to happen, because:
a) today lots of people are already starving
b) the result would be "better for humanity"

But then I consider:

It's only temporary. If we could reduce the human population by 90% this way, the remaining 10% would have little motivation to stick with the program, and our numbers would grow again. We're doubling every 37 years, so it would take a bit over a century to restore the current population.

Then I consider what I think I know about Quinn. He is not trying to deliver a doomsday message, but instead a message of hope. It just doesn't seem to fit him to say that he's suggesting we starve 90% of the population. He must have a better idea in mind.

more Quinn

After reading Quinn's Ishmael trilogy, I was looking for more content. I put a hold on the rest of Quinn's work at the library. 2 items appeared right away, and of course I consumed them in short order.

The first was Tales of Adam, a series of short parables about a man in a hunter-gatherer tribe, teaching his son the lessons of life.

The second, entitled An Anamist Testament was a pair of cassette tapes of Quinn reading his work. The first tape was Tales of Adam. The second was The Book of the Damned.

It was interesting listening. They reflect many of the same ideas that appeared in Ishmael, but from a different perspective. Where Ishmael is written for someone civilized who is new to these ideas, these tapes seem more appropriate with someone who has already digested Ishmael.

Now that I have consumed 6 titles of Quinn's work, am I an expert? Far from it. I'm working hard to probe his ideas, and re-evaluate my thinking with this new perpective. It's slow going. Luckily, my wife has also read some of his work and is interested in talking through this stuff.

I hope to have a little time to blog about my thoughts.

Tips for living simply #4 - if you get stuck, cheat

When I first started getting rid of stuff, it went quickly.  There was lots of trash collected everywhere.  Just putting it in the trash can made a big difference.

 

Then I started getting rid of things that I knew I didn't need.  For example, I had 3 motorcycles but rarely rode, and 2 of them didn't even run.  I gave the broken down bikes to a high school auto shop class.

 

More recently, I got stuck.  I could see that there was plenty of stuff to filter through and discard, but the real reason I was stuck is that there was even more stuff in the house that I didn't know what to do with, specifically kids stuff - toys, books, etc.  I know how to deal with my stuff, and am willing to make the decision to deny myself an item I might want to have on hand (say, a spare hard drive) in exchange for the clarity, simplicity, and comfort that come with having an uncluttered, managable home.  However, I was not comfortable making that same decision on behalf of my kids.  How can you take away your kids toys?

 

At the same time, I knew the toys were a problem.  The twins are nearly a year old, and are more than capable of putting out every toy in the house in just a few minutes.  They are, of course, completely unable to put them away.  It then takes me 20+ minutes to put all those toys away, assuming I sort them out properly - legos in this box, blocks in that box.  (If I don't sort them, instead just tossing them in to a huge bin, then there's no way anyone can find a complete set of somethign to play with.)

 

I knew that we had too many toys, but how few is too few? For most of human history - millions of years -- children grew up without any toys to speak of, and presumably they still had fulfilling childhoods, and became well-functioning adults with fulfulling adulthoods.  Even today, I see that my children use play to learn about the world around them, but they often use items that are not specifically designed to be "toys" but have some other purpose.  This makes sense, as what children are trying to do is learn about being a person by mimicing their parents, and their parents are using hammers and forks and pillows and cars, not legos and dolls and blocks and marbles. 

 

In fact, this is the essense of unschooling - that children learn because that's what children do, not because someone teaches them.  This is the natural way of things.  You don't have to fight it, or force it.  You also don't have to ignore it - you can facilitate it.  You can make sure that children have opportunities to explore what they want to learn about, and trust that they will learn, and enjoy that learning.

 

So, it seems that the minimum number of toys for a healthy childhood is zero. (Can you see my reasoning?)

 

I started grabbing complete toys and removing them from the scene.  I prioritized toys that were not completely age appropriate for our kids today, and toys that were in complete sets in their own containers.  These I carried out to the shed.  I did this until I got tired of it.  

 

Suddenly there's a lot more room in the house, especialy in the rooms we use the most.  The toys we still have around are well-used.  After the kids have played in a room, I can still walk through it without breaking something underfoot.  I can clean up after them in a reasonable amout of time.

 

The title of this post suggest cheating, which is exactly what I've done.  We still own a lot of things we don't need, and we're perhaps ignoring the problem by putting them in the shed.  That's still better than keeping them in the main living areas.  It means we're acutally a step closer to getting rid of those toys entirely, if we decide that we like the way things are now better than before.

 

 

 

 

Reid likes pizza

Yesterday Reid & I went on one of our adventures. Before the twins were born, we used to do this pretty often. We'd pick a museum or something and catch a couple busses to get there. Good parent/child time.

Yesterday's involved a long ferry ride. I didn't let him eat on the boat because he was experiencing some motion sickness. When we arrived we decided to eat at a pizza joint. Reid ate a large slice, and insisted he was still hungry. The second slice was even bigger, so I grabbed this snapshot.

OK, I'll write

Lee also says:

You solve problems all day. Even if it’s a relatively simple solution
(script, house repair tip, way to get better gas mileage,) write about it
anyways. Those looking to solve that same problem in the future will thank
you.

OK, here I go:

script

My PowerShell prompt:

function prompt{
Write-Host ("PS " + $(get-location) +">") -nonewline -foregroundcolor Magenta
return " "
}

house repair tip

If you decide to run new low-voltage wiring (like ethernet), go ahead and pull way, way more than you think you need. The work to pull the first wire is huge. The additional cost to pull a bundle is small. I recently pulled:

• Cat-5e (ethernet)
• Cat-5e (phone)
• Cat-5e (spare)
• RG-6 (video)

Now I think I should have pulled another RG-6, which people seem to like for satellite.

I'm wondering if I can use the spare Cat-5e to run line-level audio for whole-house music.

(Great thanks to my brother for doing the messy under-house work.)

way to get better gas mileage

Don't drive. Walk, bike, bus, or don't go in the first place. This is so much more effective than anything else I can offer.

When I do drive, I've picked up the following highly annoying habit: I go really slowly up hills. Specifically, I try to take it easy on the gas up a hill, even if that means I gradually lose speed. With an automatic transmission, I try to keep as much throttle on as I can without it downshifting. This does seem to annoy other drivers, so I try to do it when there's no one right behind me.

When I approach a red light, I get off the gas way, way early, which saves some gas. I'll even brake a little, from far away, in order to still have some momentum when the light goes green and other traffic starts to move. This doesn't make me any later, but somehow it still pisses off the other drivers, who then drive harder to get past me. So it may be a net loss.

Lee on Writer's Block

I just read Lee Holmes' post entitled Break your Writer's Block. He's right, and I think his suggestions can help me get blogging again.

My favorite quote:

you’ll find that you can produce more random junk in a minute than you could
have imagined.

It's true!

I read Lee's blog because he works on PowerShell, which I just mentioned. Neat.