LAKE MACBRIDE— Is it better to use home electricity to power devices or batteries? As readers can see from the image, I opted for battery power and here’s why.
I already own a Kodak EasyShare Z1285 camera that takes two AA batteries.
While cameras come and go in the course of a person’s photo taking, extending the investment in currently owned equipment is more convenient and less expensive. Both of those things matter.
There is also the issue of coal and nuclear generated electricity coming into our house from the rural electric cooperative. While I don’t know how these alkaline batteries were initially charged, they are made of common metals—steel, zinc and manganese—and do not pose a significant health or environmental risk as burning coal and disposing of nuclear waste do. Heavy metals, mercury particularly, were eliminated in alkaline batteries in the 1990s.
The large pack of batteries also frames a project for the new year with the highest resolution digital camera in the house. When the batteries are gone, the project will end.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Christmas is a busy time for retail workers. The end of year holidays, stretching from Halloween until the Super Bowl are a key time for companies to close sales that impact annual results. A lot of part-time and seasonal workers are needed to get everything done.
The working poor I know have their hands full of wage-earning opportunities at multiple jobs. For most, having Christmas Day off is not a benefit. It is a time to bank wages for the slow times coming later in winter. If hours were available Christmas Day, many would gladly work them.
My previous retail work ended when I left home to attend college. It was a part-time job stocking shelves in the drug department of a box store. We handled everything from sanitary napkins to record albums. As long as I had money to fuel my car, eat out with friends once in a while and buy some personal items, most of the dollars went into savings for college. In retrospect, it wasn’t many dollars, but a dollar had more buying power in the late 1960s.
My high school job is an example of how some view the current role of low wage jobs in society. They are dreaming. It bolsters an argument to keep minimum wage where it is, or eliminate it altogether. The truth is today people pay living expenses from low wage jobs like I had, and work at more than one job to earn enough to keep the bill collector from their door. Low wages are not about getting people a start in their work life. Working poor is a never ending vortex of not enough money to pay expenses with little time for a break, let alone a vacation or holiday.
There is help for working poor and I don’t refer to government social programs. It is social networking. Car broke down? A loaner is offered. Don’t have a car? Rides are shared. Turned out of your apartment? There is a couch or extra room. Need a job? Maybe you can work where I do. Social networking has always been around. When working poor it is a necessity and way of life.
We live by the choices we make in life, and no one chooses to work poor. The progressive lament that working poor is wrong isn’t helping as life goes on and we make up for losing a day’s wages somewhere else as one of our employers closes for the Dec. 25 holiday. There is no holiday when working poor.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Budgeting. We think of spreadsheets and calculations that determine our balance sheet— and ensuring there is enough action in the works to produce enough income to pay expenses. In December, it’s about considering this year and preparing for the next, and it is not all about finances.
What shall we do next year? Once some answers are framed, the budget process begins. Two things are clear this holiday season. Our household is in better shape this year than last, and there are opportunities beyond basic survival.
Our household relies upon a mix of part-time jobs to fund expenses. I outlined my approach in 2013, and the basic framework is unchanged. Where the financial budget is lacking will be made up by new adventures in part-time work.
This year’s challenge is how to use time.
As readers will recognize, my time has been spent gardening, writing, cooking and in part-time paid work. This won’t change. However, there are some new things on the horizon.
We need to downsize, and there is a full-time job just doing that. Next year will partly be about that.
I want a book to sell at speaking events. Framing topics, writing and editing one is high on the list. Most likely it will be a collection of past writing, which fits in with downsizing.
We moved to Big Grove in 1993, and our house is showing wear. It is time to make a list of projects and work on some of them.
While this isn’t much of a plan, it is a framework of how to spend a year. That is a beginning to proper budgeting.
LAKE MACBRIDE— Part of writing a newspaper article is waiting for people to get back.
Phone calls are a mixed bag. I prefer email or text message responses because they allow me to consider my questions—and the subject to consider answers—before hitting the send button.
My stories are somewhat uncoupled from time so I like to get solid quotes which shine the best possible light on people interviewed.
I have half a dozen queries out, and it’s as far as I can go. I wait.
This year’s holiday season is already unlike any previous. Mom went in for surgery last week, and our daughter was here over the weekend because of her work schedule. It’s still eight days until Christmas.
Our decorations are up ahead of schedule, and that’s a good thing. With all of the family visits more regimented and some finished, there will be time to do other positive things.
My first order for garden seeds shipped on Monday. The Winterbor kale is back ordered, which is better than last year, when it wasn’t even available. The garden will get a good start, as I already have the starter soil and trays.
My first two responses have arrived via email, so I had better get back to my newspaper article.
I re-read Jennifer Jacobs’ 50 most wanted Democrats article twice and have to say I disagree with her framing.
In the first place, the Republican caucuses are a place where only registered Republicans who show up get to vote, not “where each Iowan gets one vote,” as Jacobs asserts.
Second, I know very few Iowa Democrats who jumped on board some presidential hopeful’s campaign because they were able to associate with people on this list. For example, when Dave Loebsack co-hosted Evan Bayh at Jim Hayes’ home in Iowa City, a crowd gathered, but to say it helped Bayh during his 2008 presidential bid, other than to help him decide to bow out, would be optimistic and self serving. Who would even say that besides someone like Jacobs?
Third, the selection of political activists for the list also serves Jacobs’ point of view. These are folks with whom she presumably has a relationship, and depends upon to present a “balanced” view of Democratic politics. Her view is anything but balanced, and stroking this group only builds her relationship with them, rather than saying anything about how Democrats select candidates.
Finally, this group more represents the problem with the Iowa Democratic Party than a leverage point for presidential hopefuls to gain support. If this list is our set of leadership, we are doomed to defeat as long as they are around. Jacobs clearly gets that wrong. What’s needed is a new, more diverse and much younger set of faces.
If we recall Dunbar’s number, Jacobs has limits on cognitive recognition, and setting fifty Democrats may be a reasonable limit for that part of the political spectrum, at least in her world.
A couple of points:
Is Roxanne Conlin not able to gather a crowd or raise money for Dems? Everyone who believes that, stand on your head.
Jerry Crawford? Really?
Zach Wahls? Besides a flash of celebrity, what does he add?
This sentence about Sarah Benzing is a killer. “Although the latest campaign she managed, Bruce Braley’s, was branded the worst U.S. Senate campaign in the country, Benzing has a good track record.”
I don’t seek to run people down, and know many people on this list. I’m just sayin’. Jacobs is trying to frame who we are as Democrats. If we sit by and let that happen, we had better get used to Republicans running the state.
LAKE MACBRIDE— My resistance to shopping broke down yesterday. I stopped at a national chain drug store and bought a packet of razor blades and two cans of shaving cream. I was almost out. By the way, when did razor blades move to $2.29 each? Rhetorical question.
In a life without television it can be quiet in the house. After returning from a two-hour shift at the warehouse, I crashed and slept for four hours.
While preparing dinner, I turned on the radio to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, as I have been wont to do since I learned about the program in the late 1970s.
In 2011, there was a clamor about the underwriter Allianz, a German financial services company, and their underwriting of A Prairie Home Companion. They are said to have collaborated with the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, and Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida) introduced legislation that would allow Holocaust survivors to sue Allianz.
“(Ros-Lehtinen) has launched a letter-writing campaign aimed at blocking the insurer from advertising with any U.S. media until it pays off all Holocaust survivors’ life insurance claims. During World War II, Allianz insured concentration camp facilities and sent money to the Nazis instead of rightful Jewish beneficiaries,” according to the congresswoman’s website.
“Allianz is no ordinary insurance conglomerate,” Ros-Lehtinen wrote. “This company was involved in one of the greatest atrocities in recent history and has gone to great lengths to dodge acceptance of responsibility for its actions.”
And I thought Allianz was bad underwriting for A Prairie Home Companion because of their financing of nuclear weapons.
Last night they were promoting Martinelli’s Gold Medal Sparkling Apple Cider, a product I sold at the warehouse last Tuesday. It is that weird blend of familiarity, and the unspoken meaning of underwriters that garners my attention as I listen to the radio program. If I had left the house quiet, I wouldn’t have been thinking about that—not at all. A Prairie Home Companion could pull the plug on Allianz, and should. I listen, as old habits can be comforting even if they aren’t the best for us.
What else is there to do while preparing dinner in the kitchen?
LAKE MACBRIDE— We rush toward the new year with hope. Imperfect, we still try and that is something. Some would say it is everything.
On a piece of scratch paper I estimated 2015 income from known sources. The information was to apply for a tax credit during the open enrollment period in the Health Care Marketplace. Our budgeted income is about the same as 2014 actual, although with fewer part time jobs. We qualified for a tax credit of $13,224, which will actually be a payment by the federal government to a health insurance company.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been under relentless criticism and legal challenge, and it’s far from over. The Muscatine Journal published an article that explained the current case to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court this spring or summer.
“The court has decided to hear a case that questions the legality of federal subsidies for private health insurance purchased via the federal government under the new health care law,” Erin Murphy wrote. Depending upon what the court decides, the tax credits like mine may be on the chopping block for some 24,000 Iowans.
If the subsidy is eliminated, and lawmakers take no corrective action, it means I would have to find more part time work to produce weekly take-home pay of $254.31 to pay for health insurance. It would be the equivalent of working another 30-hour per week job at about $8.50 per hour.
In 2011, Medicare cost $549.1 billion to provide services for 48.7 million beneficiaries, according to the Medicare Newsgroup. That works out to $11,275.15 per year, or $1,949 less than the tax credit we were provided in the Marketplace. It seems doubtful a politician could connect the dots, but wouldn’t it be cheaper to lower the eligibility age for Medicare and pay less to insurance companies? That makes sense, so what was I thinking?
I’ll complete the process of choosing a plan before the Dec. 15 deadline, and it looks like we’ll keep our current policy. Then we’ll wait and see what the high court does.
And we’ll still be trying to sustain a life in a turbulent world.
LAKE MACBRIDE— A dusting of snow lay on the driveway as I walked to the road to get the newspaper. I breathed the cool night air for a few moments. The carrier had not arrived.
Returning to the kitchen, I turned off the boiling pan of eggs—protein for our ovo-lacto vegetarian holiday feast planned to include wild rice, sweet potatoes, lettuce salad, steamed broccoli, homemade baked beans, a relish tray and an apple crisp. There will be leftovers for days.
Except for the lettuce, the meal will be made from pantry ingredients, the result of shopping, but also of canning, growing, bartering and pickling. It’s a sign of the times.
We spent our thirties through fifties traveling for Thanksgiving, but no more. It’s just the two of us. We won’t even travel the three miles to town where one of the churches offers a free Thanksgiving meal for all comers.
In the quiet of each hour we will plan and cook the meal, serve it, and then clean the living room to put up the holiday decorations. Fit retreat from a bustling life among people.
A day to be thankful for what peace there is and the quiet fallen snow beneath predawn air.
LAKE MACBRIDE— What is going on in Ferguson, Missouri, and around the country, over the Aug. 9 fatal shooting of Michael Brown, 18, by Darren Wilson, 28, and subsequent absence of grand jury indictments? Don’t ask. What I know is filtered by biased media—both corporate and social. The many people with whom I spent time in a real place yesterday simply didn’t mention the topic—not one time among hundreds of people.
What matters more than this emotionally charged incident is how we view people in the context of the society we construct among friends, neighbors, family and acquaintances over the course of time in a place. We create our own enclaves, and that’s where we live much of our lives, and deal with human diversity as best we can.
When a person has experienced ethnic diversity in countless settings, the tropisms regarding Ferguson make little sense. By framing Ferguson in terms of ethnic diversity, I am already opening myself up to criticism. So be it—that’s who I am and have been since my youngest days. In my defense, I tried to live the dream as best I could.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said.
It takes more than citing a quote to achieve justice.
The 2013 population of our county was estimated at 139,155 by the U.S. Census Bureau. The white, not Hispanic or Latino population was 81.6 percent, with 5.5 percent black or African-American, 5.5 percent Asian, 5.4 Hispanic, and two percent other categories. These are facts.
Most people I encounter have little cognizance of them. Neighbors whisper about what would happen to property values if a black family would move in. Among working poor, conversation is often about how “different,” and by implication unacceptable, the behavior of “foreigners” is. In the most rapidly-growing parts of the county, a homogeneous culture centered around church, school, family and work blocks out basic facts about ethnic diversity. In each scenario participants have built an enclave that by any definition includes palpable intolerance.
“I cannot exceed what I see,” 1976 Nobel laureate Saul Bellow said. “I am bound, in other words, as the historian is bound by the period he writes about, by the situation I live in.”
In terms of ethnic tolerance, the situations I call home are not the best. What’s a person to do?
At a minimum, intolerance should not be ignored. We must say something when its ugly face is raised in conversation. It’s not easy to do when a lot depends upon our continued interaction with people found in the places we live, learn, worship, shop and work. Nonetheless, we must confront intolerance personally and directly. We can all do more in that regard.
A great diversion is following incidents like those in and around Ferguson and asserting actions, opining in media, taking direct action. This is little more than a distraction from the work that must be done to challenge intolerance in the tight enclaves where we live our lives.
The work has begun for many of us. If there is a lesson from Ferguson, it is we must do better.
Journey Home 
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