Sunday’s Foary to FotL Book Sale

Today’s trip was much less expensive. 46 books, mostly paperbacks, for $18.00.

Unfortunately, nothing of a nice anthropological or historical nature. All the history books were focused on American politics and history, and the anthropology books were all dinosaurish.

Only 1 cookbook today, and it was equally gardening and cookery – the Moosewood Kitchen Garden Cookbook.

The rest were old herbals, gardening books, and a nice armload of paperback fiction.

Sorry, skydancerlilitu, nothing on Mesopotamia, or anything even remotely in the region. I’m afraid Oklahoma is amazingly provincial in discarded books.

There was precious little on the occult as well, even among the “old books” section.

I did manage to add another volume to my “Man, Myth, and Magic” encyclopedia set. My set is almost complete now. Maybe next year, they’ll have the last few volumes I need.

FotL Book Sale

The results of our trip to the Friends of the Library Book Sale netted 90 books for $57.00. Most of these are hard cover books with jackets. This is the stack of books, with Itzl among them to show just how many books there are. Each of the 4 stacks of books is taller than he is.

We’ll go back tomorrow to check out the other room of books.

Now, I need to buy a book shelf for them.

And laughterdance? Two of those books had your name on them and belong to you.

Chronically Homeless

The homeless are apparently of a different breed in London. That, and they have so few homeless, unless they are counting only the hard-core long term homeless.

I can’t think of a major city anywhere in the US that doesn’t have at least 400-500 homeless in that city. Oklahoma City has around 800 homeless people on almost any given night, less than half of whom are in shelters. We have around 300 hard-core homeless – people who refuse almost all help. They aren’t in the shelters and probably aren’t in the count of homeless people because they don’t receive much of any aid. It’s not that they aren’t offered help, they refuse it and don’t seek it out even when they know about it. They will take sandwiches and beverages, but not usually directly. You have to set them down and walk away from them. In many ways, they are like semi-feral cats or dogs. They may take a warmer coat or new shoes, or another knit hat – as long as they are in dark colors and left where they can “find” them.

I really don’t have the skills to help these hard-core homeless (other than leaving food), just as I don’t have the skills to help those homeless through drug addictions or mental problems.

I wonder what England is doing that they have such a small number of hard core homeless people? And what can we do to emulate it?

Morning Thoughts

I stopped at 7-11 to get some juice to drink for the day (and to replace the bottle I’d been using for water that disappeared – cleaning crew probably threw it away again). I was in line to pay when this woman cuts in front of me. She looked old – deeply lined face, white hair. Still, age wasn’t an excuse to be rude. So, I asked her, “Oh, are you cutting in line?”

She answered, “I’m 53, I have a right to do what I want.”

I couldn’t resist. I replied, “Well, sweetie, I’m 61, and when you reach my age, I hope you regain your manners.”

I let her go ahead of me, of course. I probably would have offered to let her go first if she’d taken her proper place in line behind me. There was no reason to let her know that, though.

And it got me to thinking, too. She was probably very beautiful when she was younger. I think it’s harder for beautiful people to age than it is for plain janes likes me.

I never felt the need to spend hours tanning in the sun in a skimpy bikini to attract attention. I worked in the sun, with a hat on and long sleeves (most plants aren’t kind to bare skin), but not so I’d tan. I also never wore make-up unless I was forced to, therefore I never damaged my skin with too much sun and make-up.

That and having inherited good genes means I don’t look as old as I am – no lines, not much in the way of gray hairs. I’m still a plain jane, now I’m a plain jane that looks young.

I think I’d rather look closer to my age than I do, though.

FotL Book Sale

2-4-07

The Friends of the Library Book Sale at the State Fairgrounds is the weekend of February 24.

I usually spend far too much money there, sarfing up books I’ve wanted a long time and can’t resist when they are 50¢ each.

Last year, I spent nearly $60.00 there.

This year? Is anybody’s guess.

Today

This morning’s activities included bringing sandwiches out to the places where homeless people sleep. The past three weeks, there haven’t been any people in those places, and I’ve been hpoing they all found indoor places to stay while the weather was so brutal for this part of the country. We still have ice on the ground.

Today, there was only one person, new to being homeless. I gave him hot chicken soup and all the sandwiches he could pack and a list of places to go for getting re-housed. He still has a job, so it shouldn’t be too hard if he can get off the streets in the next week or two. Any longer than that, and the chances of getting re-housed falls and falls dramatically. It’s as if there’s a conspiracy to keep people homeless once they reach that level.

Anyway, he still had cell phone service, warm clothes, a working car (old and decrepid but functional), so I hope he uses the information I gave him to find a place quickly.

That was actually a very hopeful homeless meal-share, one of the best I’ve had in 5 years.

The rest of the morning, I did necessary shopping – buying ingredients for the pet brews and grocery shopping for the house. I found a new bread machine to replace the one the wild mice munched last year.

I didn’t think it would be so hard to find a replacement bread machine. I consider them one of the central pieces of equipment for a permaculture kitchen, especially if you’re like me and have lost part or all of the use of one of your hands.

I bought a Sunbeam 2 pound bread machine because, for this entire year, that’s the only one I ever saw in the stores. All the stores. No Rivals, no Breadman, no Panasonic, no Hitashi. My choices are the Panasonic and the Breadman. Instead, I now have a Sunbeam.

At least it was cheap, so if it turns out to be a bad machine (ie doesn’t meet my expectations), it won’t be a large waste of money.

I’ll bake my first loaf in it tonight, after I brew up some Dogshead Mead and some Sea Cream Cat Beer.

The local brew shop came through for me in terms of bottles – I’ll be getting them delivered (I love my local brew shop!) later this afternoon.

I stopped by the Farmer’s Market for cabbage and potatoes and carrots, which is about all that’s locally available this year.

Cold

You know it’s cold when you get home, and start dinner, and the butter you pull out of hte refrigerator is softer than the butter that sat on the counter all day.

I don’t often regret not having safe heating in the house, but days like today make me wish one of the 3 gas wall unit heaters or the floor furnace in the house worked. They’re so old, though, that as each broke, we were unable to find replacement parts to repair them. The library gas heater was the last to go, last winter. I’d saved enough to install some sort of new heating systemn, but then the car required every penny of the savings. Fortunately, having lived in poverty a long time, I know how to keep the house at a survivable temperature – I get it really warm while I’m home to monitor the heat sources, and with the insulating tapestries, window hangings, and closing off unneeded space, it will hold the heat throughout the night and the interior temperature never falls below 45º – the temperature the house is when I arrive home.

It takes 2 hours to raise it to a comfortable temperature.

All of this is a pain to deal with, but honestly, it’s so much better than being homeless in weather like this.

Last Saturday, none of the homeless people were in any of the places where I bring sandwiches and soup. I will go out again this Saturday, but I hope they’ve all found places in shelters.

Temperatures like this, I don’t see any reason why school gyms can’t be opened as shelters for the homeless, or churches. There are so many churches I pass that are largely unused because they will help only their own parishoners, and I find that unutterably sad.

Our Numenist Community Center is small, but we have often opened it for homeless people – from those left temporarily homeless from disasters to those who are chronically homeless but only want a single night or two indoors. If our Center were larger, we’d shelter more people – and feed them, too.

What we could do if we had a building the size of a church! A large kitchen where we could prepare food, rooms where the homeless could sleep, restrooms and showers where they could groom themselves, washers and dryers to clean their clothes, an address where they could get mail, a place to socialize and study and meditate, and land enough to grow edibles to use in the kitchen.

Modern churches are such wastes of space. It hurts my heart to see those empty buildings and know how alive and useful they could be.

Affordable Living

Kids in poverty have less parent time.

And to whom is this a surprise? I noticed that nowhere in the article did it address why parents who live in poverty spend less time with their children. Instead, it seems to draw the conclusion that poor parents care less about doing things like reading to their children, talking to them, or eating meals with them. The reality is that poor parents have less time to do these things because they work for lower wages, and so have to work longer hours or more than one job to be able to provide their children with food, clothes, and a roof over their heads.

As prices skyrocket and wages remain stagnant at the bottom of the heap, this problem will only get worse. Social issues also impede poor parents from having time to spend with their children – the outrageous emphasis upon the minimal family unit of male husband and female wife plus children has plunged those who live on the fringes of society even lower. Governmental regulations assist in that by limiting the number of people who can share a dwelling place and insisting that the adults in the household be a married male and female couple. Being unable to share housing and pool their meager resources for the basics prevents them from having anything extra, from time to money.

Landlords further exacerbate the problem by limiting the number of children and/or pets in the household and charging exorbitant deposits and move-in fees, then not maintaining the property in livable conditions so the family has to spend extra money coping with the damage (travel to somewhere else for toilet or shower use, for example because the plumbing doesn’t work, eating out because the stove or refrigerator that came with the place doesn’t work, buying boards or plastic for broken windows, higher utility costs because a window is broken or missing, unable to use some utilities because the lines need repair – the list could go on). Coping with residential inadequacies takes even more time away from their families.

Remember, for people who work a routine 40 hour week, they only have 3.2 hours a workday free for anything beyond work, sleep, waking, and bare essentials of house care. Many poor people have transportation problems, so they are likely using a portion of their 3.2 hours in travel to and from work – the second job they have cuts into their sleep time and any time they may have to do housework or play with or care for their children, let alone relax.

They are poor not just in money, but in time. Poverty isn’t about a lack of money; it’s about a lack of resources, of which money is but one part.

We need to do more than address the money issue. We need to relax the social codes that prevent alternative families from forming to support themselves. There’s nothing sinful or evil about people sharing a house and expenses. Just because unmarried people pool together out of financial need doesn’t mean they are “gay” or “deviant” – it means they’re wanting to make a better life for themselves and their children. That’s not an unreasonable desire. Parents always want their children to do a bit better than they do.

We need to change tenant laws so parents can afford a basic place to live, either as a single family unit or in conjunction with other, possibly unrelated, people to help pay the bills.

We need to stop building McMansions and consider building more affordable housing for those on the bottom half of the income scale. There are many more poor people than there are rich – what the builders might loose in a huge single sale, they’ll make up in the numbers of lower sales. These houses don’t have to have all the bells and whistles of McMansions, either – solid walls, foundation, and roof, good plumbing and wiring, space for basic appliances like washer/dryer, refrigerator, stove. It doesn’t have to be of fancy materials – sound basic materials will do well. It doesn’t need to be carpeted. A durable, easy to clean linoleum is sufficient. I’m kind of fond of the idea of more than one bathroom, but really, one good working bathroom is all a family needs – I’d think separating the toilet and bathing areas would increase the functionality of both especially when there’s only the one toilet.

So there it is, the basic house: make living room and kitchen one big room, add a toilet room and a bathing room, and 3 bedrooms big enough to sleep several people. 900-1100 square feet is sufficient, and the home is big enough for 2 or 3 families to share. Median cost on such a house, centered on a 60′ x 60′ plot, should be around $20,000. That’s affordable for many people who live in poverty. There’s nothing wrong with making this a 2 story duplex, same amount of land, twice the dwelling space – for about $30,000. That’s enough yard space for a small dog or a cat run (pet cats shouldn’t roam freely), a few kids, a small patio for a grill, a small vegetable garden for each family, and even a nice fruit or nut tree – one yard in front, one in back. The land is small enough the tenants wouldn’t need a lawnmower – a weedeater would take care of the grass.

A home that small will be less expensive to heat and cool, as well, making utilities affordable. Rent would run around $100 a month (mortgage a little less), and utilities, I regret to say, about the same.

With an affordable home and utilities, the poor family would have fewer stresses in their lives and can devote some of the time having a solid, functioning house would provide to their children.

Raising the minimum wage to a living wage would also be a relief. The “trickle down” theory only works when there’s no dam in the upper levels that prevents anything from trickling down. The problem here is that eventually, that dam will burst. When it bursts, it won’t be pretty. Better, I would think, to spread the wealth around. It is the lowest paid employees in any business that ensure the business continues to function. Would it really hurt that much to let some of the wealth flow into their pockets for the hard work they do?

I wouldn’t mind seeing a regulation where the difference in wages between the highest and lowest paid employee in a business was set so that when the CEO and CFO and other executives gave themselves a pay raise or a bonus, everyone in the company received one as well – based on that percentage of difference between highest and lowest paid.

There wouldn’t be 10 years between pay raises for the lowest level employees while the upper level ones got bi-annual pay raises and bonuses. Many businesses are showing larger than ever profits, but the lower level employees wouldn’t know that by their paychecks.

No one who works a full time job should be so low paid they qualify for and need welfare assistance. No one who works a full time job should ever have to consider whether they should spend their paycheck on food or rent for a cheap place.

A family should only need one person in it working full time to be able to afford the basics of life. That we – as Americans – pay such small wages that parents who work full time jobs must often take a second job to make ends meet – and that time spent working means they can’t spend time with their children. That is disgraceful. We Americans should be ashamed. More, we should do something about it.
I don’t want to hear any more talk about “family values” if that talk doesn’t include living wages, decent, affordable housing, tax-free food, and an adjusted tax base so there are fewer loopholes for the upper income quarter of Americans and less burden on the lower income half of Americans.

many states and counties have laws they haven’t enforced in years that prohibit people of different races from living together, or unmarried people from living together, and a single family dwelling is exactly that – unless you own it, only one family (husband, wife, kids or husband and wife, or mother and kids, or father and kids, and rarely, grandparents and grandchildren) is allowed to live in it. The laws are still on the books and some places are trying to enforce them, like the recent case where a Georgia couple were evicted because they weren’t married, even though they’d lived together for almost 20 years and had 3 children together. They were told to either get married or move out.

The more land you have with a house, and the more “luxuries” in the house, the more expensive it is. I was talking about replacing the building of McMansions with building houses more people can afford – and I’ve been looking at housing costs in a number of states as I hope to be able to build my own place when I retire. The house I’m currently in (1/4 acre of land, 1300 sf, brick, wall-to-wall carpeting, storage shed in back, semi-landscaped) was $35,000. Building a house like I described in the post – “salt box” or “match box” houses they used to be called – on less than 1/8 of an acre of land (less than half of the land my house has) can be built at current prices for around $20,000.00, giving the contractor a decent but not large profit. They can be pre-manufactured and assembled an a couple of days. If the house is “unfinished”, the new owner can finish it out at their convenience – painting interior walls, installing baseboards and plug covers, hanging interior doors, and staining the cabinets, hanging or installing light fixtures, and so on. Now, in other parts of the country, this may cost more, but only because the land itself will cost more.

However, I don’t see any reason why vacant lots can’t be quickly and easily converted to living space inside urban areas. It doesn’t have to be just suburban development. Building these types of houses close to where they work would make sense.

There’s nothing that prevents the developer from including peripheral trees or shrubs and adding in a children’s playground now and then – teeny tiny parks the size of a housing lot every block or so as a place to gather fr the neighborhood and a place for kids to play and to walk pets.

I’d recommend letting the poverty level families buy these houses – pride of ownership and responsibility for its upkeep would result in greater willingness to see to the upkeep of the place, and to make sure it remains safe for the families living there.

Eh, but that’s my thoughts, and they may not be workable.

You CAN Have Your Cake and Eat It, too

I’ve been reading about people who sign compacts to not buy anything at all but food, medicine, and toiletries for a year, and others who decide not to buy anything new but food, medicine, and toiletries, and others who live by dumpster diving, getting even their food, medicine, and toiletries from other people’s trash. The purpose, for them, is to reduce their impact on the environment. That’s a worthy goal, but honestly, I don’t see how deprivation will achieve it.

We have to look at living lightly from a variety of perspectives. Consuming anything at all has an impact, the goal is to reduce that impact. Don’t sign agreements that limit what you will buy. Consider instead ones that suggest how you buy. Anything you acquire has both an economic and an environmental impact – whether you buy it new, used, or acquire it through dumpster diving. Spend some time before you embark on a save the environment course of living by actually researching how much of an impact your current lifestyle has and the impact your proposed lifestyle will have. Sometimes, in attempting to be environmentally conscious and economically aware, the course chosen does the opposite intended.

Accept, at the beginning, that anything you choose to do will have both an
economic and an environmental impact. You can’t avoid it. Find instead an
achievable goal – reducing the clutter in your life, for example, or weaning
yourself from impulse buying, or improving your own financial security. Create
a set of actions that will help you achieve that goal, and make those acts a
habit. Review your habits in depth every 5 years. Anymore often than that, and
you won’t be able to tell if what you’ve been doing actually works – some things
take a longer time to manifest than others, and you want to give it all a
chance. Besides, doing a yearly in-depth review becomes a chore that gets put
off because it is time-consuming and labor intensive. Do a brief overview
yearly and save the in-depth one for a five year review.

There are several steps to this process, don’t try to implement changes until
you’ve gone through all the steps. It makes more sense and you’ll be more
likely to stay on track. No shiny distractions.

Step One: This one will take a bit of time, but it’s all part and parcel with
almost every goal to simplify your life, life more environmentally aware,
increase your personal financial security, have a reduced economic impact on
society, or just make yourself feel better and happier. Do take all the time
you need to complete this step. The first thing you need to do with it is buy
yourself a spiral bound notebook or an insert for your day-runner that you can
write in daily. Keep this with you. In it write down every single thing you do
– from stretching and hitting the snooze button three times on your clock before
you get up to how long your morning grooming routine takes to whether you stop
to buy a newspaper or breakfast snack on the way to work clear up to your
bedtime time routine when you turn the lights out and snuggle down to sleep.
Everything. Stopping to feed the ducks, or watch kids play street hockey.
Driving aimlessly around town looking for someplace that appeals to you for
lunch. Chatting on the phone. Text messaging your co-workers. Tapping a
pencil against your teeth while you think. Watching TV or listening to your
iPod. All of it. Every last second of time you spend doing whatever it is you
do. At minimum, this might take a week, for the truly obsessive-compulsive.
Most people will take a month and think they’re done, but I think it should take
at least one year – so you include all the various holiday activities and
seasonal activities in all of this. This is where having a spreadsheet comes in
really handy, so enter the data you accumulate in your notebook daily or weekly
until you’re satisfied you’ve listed every thing you are most likely to do
throughout the year. Your time is one of your most valuable resources, and you
need to know exactly how you spend it. You can do other steps while you are
doing the other steps. Don’t forget to include the time you spend on this
project in your log of activities.

Bear in mind that if you work a 40-hour week, you will spend 2080 hours a year
at work, and probably about 520 hours a year getting to and from work. If you
sleep 8 hours a night, you will spend about 2920 hours sleeping, and another 365
hours a year preparing to sleep, and another 365 hours a year waking up.
Everyone has 8760 hours in the year, and we’ve already filled about 6250 hours
with work and sleep and waking. Then there are the routine tasks: grocery
shopping, clothes shopping, housecleaning, walking the dog, preparing meals or
taking the time to buy prepared meals, voting, keeping current with the news and
weather, lawn care, shoveling snow, doctor’s appointments, other types of
appointments, etc. Figure about 720 hours a year on necessary household and
personal tasks – that goes up if you have large gardens or lots of snow or
remodeling projects or frequent illnesses. That brings the total on work,
sleeping, waking, and necessary tasks to 6970. You have 1760 free hours a year
that aren’t dedicated to work, work-related tasks, or necessary survival tasks.
Approximately 260 days are work days, which means you have 3.2 hours a workday
free, and 9 hours a day on weekends. I have not removed holiday hours from work
hours because those vary widely, so you may have more free hours than 1760 a
year. Conversely, if you work longer hours, you’ll have less free time.

And if you have children, you need to factor in the time it takes for their
needs – trips to the doctor, school, and extracurricular activities, play
times, “drag” time waiting for them to get ready, extra time for meals and
shopping, appointments with teachers and school administrators, PTA meetings,
etc. In fact, if you have children, consider that the bulk of your free time
will be dedicated to them for at least 18 years. You will need to plan
carefully to have any free time to yourself and to meet your goals.

Pets also take time. You need to clean up after them, feed them, play with
them, train them, take them to the vet. Don’t forget to factor their needs into
your time.

Do you begin to understand why we feel so rushed and harried – we have so little
actual free time for personal pleasure and with which to pursue our own goals?

Step Two: Inventory everything you own. Everything, yes, even the report cards
you kept from your grade school, and your kids’ reports cards. Old
correspondence and greeting cards. Bits of ribbons and stray screws and nails.
Write it all down. It’s more fun to do this with someone – one person calls out
what they find, the other writes it down. Obviously, we are keeping the
computer and internet service, so use it. Type the inventory into a spreadsheet
like Excel or database program like Access. Use Library Thing to inventory your
books and music collection. Don’t sort, separate, or throw away anything at
this point. You can make separate lists – one for each room,and include any
outdoor space you may have, like garage, storage shed, greenhouse, doghouse,
rabbit hutches, poolroom; just don’t pile things into separate piles of “keep”,
“toss”, “sell”, etc. You want a full and complete inventory.

You might want a separate list for food items and consumables like toilet paper,
cleaning supplies, and toiletries, because these quantities may change as you
conduct the inventory simply because you’ll need to use them, and replace them.

That separate list of food is useful for many other things, which segues into
Step Three.

Step Three: Inventory your food. All of it, including herbs, spices, and
half-used packets of powdered cheese sauce. Don’t forget the Mystery Tubs of
leftovers in the refrigerator. On this list, it’s perfectly acceptable
to toss foods well past their expiration dates or ones that are close to
attaining sentience in their own right. Moldy, mildewy, spoiled, soured, or
otherwise bad foods need to go. Inventory only the edible foods.

A part of this inventory will include meals – list what you eat at each meal,
whether you cooked or prepared it at home or ate in a restaurant or at a
friend’s house. All three of these lists will be very important when you get to
Step Six and beyond.

Did you know that in some countries, people are taxed on the size of their
refrigerators, and few have the behemoths we do? We store far too many things
in our refrigerators, and then forget about them because we tend to have
refrigerators larger than we actually need. Freezers are a different matter.
We actually need much larger freezers than the typical family has. That’s
something to ponder as you continue on to

Step Four: Make a list of your personal goals, short term and long term.
Consider how much money you’d like to save, whether you want to invest any
money, vacations you want to take, things you want to own, things you want to do
or learn how to do, how much de-cluttering you want to do, people you’d like to
keep as friends, dietary changes you want to make, volunteer work you want to
do, etc. List it all, even the improbable and impossible.

Step Five: For each of the goals you listed in Step Four, make a list of the
steps you need to take to achieve that goal. If you know the time each step
will take, include that.

So – look at the goals you’ve made, the time they’ll take and compare it to the
time you actually have. Don’t forget to factor in time in which to do
absolutely nothing or to sleep in, and give yourself a bit of leeway for
unexpected opportunities or tasks.

Now, go through your list of goals and prioritize them based on what you now
know about your available time. Decide which ones you really want to do (and
that can certainly be all of them, if you want). Develop a time frame – a
humanly accomplishable time frame, in which to do them. And don’t hesitate to
decline any tasks that don’t fit into the time frame and “wiggle room” you’ve
given yourself.

Be sure to plan for simplifying your life as a top priority item. When you’re
finished, you’ll be using less time to keep things tidy and clean and organized.
It’s worth it to spend the time now to buy yourself more time later.

The more free time you can make for yourself, the more time you’ll have for
other pursuits.

Now, Step Six: What to do with all those lists you made. That first list is
how much time you spend on your activities. Look it over carefully and see
where you can rearrange the time you spend on things. Consider your commute
time – can you reduce it by using another method to travel to and from work, or
work from home part of the time? How about transferring to a closer work
location? Is it possible to take that unpaid lunch hour and move it to the
start or end of your work day to give you more time that isn’t spent at work?
Any free time you can create is your time. Your boss isn’t paying you
for your commute times or your lunch hour, so find out how you can reclaim those
hours for yourself.

What about other tasks? Can you reduce the number of times you do them, like
shopping once a week or once every two weeks instead of two or three times a
week? Or can you combine tasks – like dropping your car off for the oil change
and walking to the nearby grocery store to shop or pay bills at a nearby bank or
place that accepts payments? Can you schedule everyone to have routine health
care done at the same time? Remember, this is your time you’re spending, and
you have a list of things you plan to do. Areas you cannot trim too far are the
ones dedicated to your children and your pets. You’ll just have to plan around
those times and accept that those times are dedicated times.

Look at your deadlines. Are you always a day late on bills and having to pay
late fees? What other fees do you have to pay because you didn’t get a chance
to do things in a timely manner? Here’s where you’re plotting and planning your
time, so be sure to make a schedule for paying bills, filing taxes, renewing
memberships and subscriptions, and doing other things that have deadlines. One
of those large graph calendars would be good for this – and the best place to
hang it is either beside the refrigerator or the computer, with a pen attached
so you can write in appointments and such as they come up.

Step Seven: In List Two, you made an inventory of all the things you own. Take
the time now to go through that list and sort – on the computer screen, by room,
the things you must keep, the things you’d like to keep, the room it should be
in (funny, how things travel to odd places about the house, isn’t it?), the
things you never use, the things you don’t want anymore, that are broken, worn
out, past their expiration date, or that you can’t figure out how to use. Print
these lists out and take them to those rooms with boxes labeled: Don’t Want and
Broken. Fill the boxes up. Figure out if the broken things can be fixed and if
you want to keep them enough to fix them. Sell these things on eBay or put them
up on Craigslist or Freecycle.

What’s left needs to be examined to see if they, too, need fixing, cleaning, or
refurbishing. You may need to invest in proper storage or display for them –
shelves for books, for example. When you’re moving and cleaning things, take
some time to paint or paper or wash your walls, baseboards, lintels, window and
door frames, and other architectural fixtures. Take down and launder or replace
curtains or blinds. Put everything back in its new and proper place.

Do this one room at a time. Don’t expect to get it all done over a single
weekend. If you’re a pack rat by inclination or genetics, expect it to take
months to get through all of this. You’re spending a lot of time on simplifying
your life, but when you’re done, you will find you have more free time.

Step Eight: In List Three, you listed all the foods you have on hand, and
tossed all the expired and spoiled foods. Now, look over the list and see what
your diet is like. Are there places where you could streamline it, condense
shopping trips, buy locally? Are there foods you regularly buy that you never
really eat? Stop buying them. Are there things you wish you had on hand that
you never do? Add them to your shopping list. Do you want to explore new
cuisines? Here’s the time and place to tailor that to your life. Do you eat
out more than you think you should – or less? Here’s the place to rectify that.

With your inventory printed out and in hand, you can go through your pantry and
clean things up even more, organize them, and make things convenient for your
use. Don’t hesitate to do things like re-arrange the kitchen equipment, trade
the large refrigerator for a smaller one and add a freezer. Put in shelves for
your canned and jarred foods if you need to. Simple ones, like the expensive
Swedish modular shelving, can be made from dowel rods for the shelves and 2×2’s
for the supports (or 1×2’s for the shelves and either 2×2’s or 4×4’s for the
supports), or buy “L” brackets and screw the shelves directly to the walls, or
buy pre-made shelves. Organizing your foods will make a tremendous difference
in streamlining your meal preparations – and that frees up a bit of your time.

Now, with these eight steps, you’ve organized your home, de-cluttered your life,
saved a bit of money, and altered your diet. From here, you can decide how much
further you will go. Step Nine is all about the future.

Step Nine: Remember, all of this started because you were interested in “going
green”, or reducing your impact on the environment and the economy, or to
simplify your life. In the previous eight steps, you’ve settled your life so
you can do just that. Now, you have time to ride a bicycle to work (assuming
you live close enough to work to do that), or choose to buy less and consume
less.

Most places will tell you to just stop buying things, but that’s not so easy.
What I recommend is the “wait for it” method. Never go shopping without a list.
Buy only what’s on the list. If it’s not on the list and you see it and want to
buy it, walk away. Go home. Think about it. Think about how many hours you
have to work to pay for it. If you still want it after going home and thinking
about it, put it on the shopping list. When you go shopping, if you still want
it, it’s on your list; you’ve budgeted for it, and given yourself permission to
buy it. This gives you a cooling off period, keeps you in your budget, and
reduces your spending. You’re less likely to reach for that magazine or candy
bar if you have taught yourself to wait for it.

Anticipation is a highly underrated tool. Given the passage of enough time,
you’ll either determine you really do need whatever you wanted on impulse, or
you’ll realize you didn’t need or want it after all; it was just a neat gadget
with which to re-clutter your house.

Shop at thrift stores, second hand stores, or acquire things from Craigslist or
Freecycle,or paperbackswap.com, to reduce your personal expenditures and
slightly reduce the environmental impact (it doesn’t realistically reduce it by
much because if you’re buying it used, someone else is probably repalcing it
with a new version). If it squicks you to buy something used (like shoes or
gloves or mattresses), go ahead and buy it new, but do some comparison shopping
and buy brands you can support in good conscience.

One thing I do recommend is applying the concept of permaculture to your kitchen
and home – make it a cohesive and interrelated whole. To quote one of the
founders of permaculture, Bill Mollison, “permaculture is urging complete
cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.”
We want to care for the earth, care for people, distribute the surplus and
re-invest in the earth and the people. That can be done on a small scale within
the home. Every element in a design should have multiple functions within the
home, serve several purposes, and be related to one another in use and setting.
Think of the kitchen, where the stove, sink, and food storage are located close
together. Your counter tops, equipment, and books related to cooking are all
together within easy reach and function together as a unit. Expand this type of
functionality throughout the house, letting the design and the furnishings flow
from one use to another. Consider how friends and family tend to gather in the
kitchen during visits, and it seems natural to bring the two rooms together with
a blurred and open border between them, so the functions of entertainment and
visitors mingles with the function of feeding everyone. Think of other ways you
can blur the borders between rooms and their functions and even with the
outdoors.

Energy-wise, in the home, consider how the home is situated towards the sun, and
use it for lighting and supplemental heating. Consider how your home is related
to your neighbors, your friends, where you work, shop, and play, and see how you
can maximize a permaculture concept there. You can’t get cooperation from a
divided and hierarchical system, but it’s natural to a “guild” or community type
system, where each element depends upon the others. That recognition of
dependence is the true “greening”. If you want to be environmentally and
economically conscious, rather than buying “green” things just because they are
labeled as “green”, consider their place in a community of appliances, supplies,
things, people, critters, and uses. Even things which aren’t technically
“green” or labeled as “green” can be so, if used appropriately. Once you’ve
inventoried and de-cluttered your home, organizing it along permaculture lines
should be easy enough. Then, it follows that the things you come to need and
want will fit in with the permaculture concept and you’ll find yourself buying
less. When you do buy, you will buy better – better quality, a better fit to
you and your chosen lifestyle, and better for the environment.

It may not be better for the national economy, which is based in consumerism and
obsoletism, but it will be better for your personal economy.
And that, in nine time-consuming, but comparatively easy steps, is one way to
become more environmentally and economically conscious and to live a lifestyle
that is greener and better for the world and for you.

Osaka Homeless

Homelessness is not just an America issue.

In Osaka, Japan, the homeless have formed an association to help one another. There are apprxoimately 10,000 homeless people in OSaka, and not all of them belong to homeless associations. Those who do are still homeless, but they have food and support and even work. Many of the members of these associations are older men, who have become disabled and couldn’t continue working traditional jobs and couldn’t make their rent.

Unlike America, where thte homeless are left to fend for themselves, vilified and condemned by vagrancy laws, and run out of every place they find to provide even minimal shelter, in Osaka, the homeless live in tent cities, often erected in parks and on public land. So long as they continue to inhabit their tent, they have at least one place to call “home”, humble and inadequate as it may otherwise be. Private citizens have donated land on which the homeless may live and grow vegetables. The sale of surplus vegetables buys the members of these associations fuel and rice. Some are able to have part time work or temporary jobs or are hired for odd jobs, and the contribute a portion of their earnings towards buying rice and fuel. They cook for one another and look out for one another. They also collect and sell aluminum to buy rice and fuel for the association to distribute among themselves.

It’s not ideal, but it seems better than the way we treat our own homeless – who have no land they can use upon which to erect even a small tent city or grow their own food.

I’m thinking something similar to what the Osaka Japanese are doing may answer some needs for our own homeless.

The homeless need a place to sleep and live, however humble and primitive it may be. The blue tarps the Japanese use as tents could work, but why shouldn’t people donate their old tents to the homeless cause, and land where they can safely erect those tents andgrow some of their own food, with a “soup kitchen” of their own?

Homeless families, the elderly homeless, homeless single people are all on the increase in America. 70% of our homeless are people in these categories, with inadequate or no resources for them (since they are not mentally ill or addicted drug users, and often have employment), and laws which prevent them from providing even minimal shelter and sustenance for themselves (via vagrancy laws, most often) in tents or other temporary shelters. When tented homeless are found, they are either arrested and imprisoned for vagrancy or forced to move. They have no opportunity to build a community and take care of themselves.

I think this is an excellent project for Numenists to undertake – to help the homeless acquire plots of land upon which to live and grow food, and to develope a support network for themselves and – with work and luck – find a way to become re-homed and leave their tent behind for the next temporary tenant.

I’ll see how receptive the local homeless people are to this idea next Saturday, and what resources I can call on to make it happen.