Tag: homelife

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Home Life

Book Reading

Book Shelf
Book Shelf

LAKE MACBRIDE— Long form reading was slight in 2014. A daily hour or two of reading articles from screens displaced reading books, and my reaction is mixed.

Part of me wants there to be more long-form reading, and part of me understands the new dynamic of staying in tune with what is going on in the world through reading many articles on multiple topics. It is unsettling.

I keep close track of the books I read. If there are less of them, each one played a role in daily affairs. No real clinkers made it to the following list of the twelve books I read this year:

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook

Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The Home Place by Carrie La Seur

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Wrong David by Christa WoJo.

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser.

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen

The Pruning Book by Gustave L. Wittrock

Gardening with the Experts: Pruning by Moira Ryan

Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska translated by Joanna Trzeciak.

The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester.

My Life by Bill Clinton.

Two of these are the result of being on social media, The Home Place and The Wrong David. They would not likely have been read if I hadn’t been on twitter. I know Carrie La Seur from before she returned to Montana, and reviewed her book on Amazon.com. Christa WoJo is an Internet marketer and writer living in Panama. WoJo describes her book as about “drunken Americans behaving badly in France.” Both were quick and engaging reads primarily for diversion.

In a way, all of the books were read for diversion from a life too full of low paying jobs. The most practical reading was Hillary Clinton’s secretary of state memoir. If she will be running for president, I felt it important to know what she did in that role with more detail than may be found in a single article. Besides, like her husband, she is an interesting person.

Suffice it to say that I want to read more in long form. My new year’s resolution is to work toward that end.

Categories
Home Life

Christmas Miscellany

Baked falafel and Kalamata olive sauce
Baked falafel and Kalamata olive sauce

LAKE MACBRIDE— It has been a quiet Christmas holiday and that’s okay.

Our family has never been very big, even when nieces and nephews from both sides are considered. There are shirt-tail relatives, of course. If we connect the threads, that could include all of humanity, something that may be wondrous, but is not practical for a holiday gathering.

Our daughter came home for Christmas the weekend of Dec. 12, so the holiday decorations have been up since then. In past years we started decorating on our wedding anniversary, and continued until Christmas Eve. With decorating done early, there was one less thing to do on the actual holiday.

Christmas day I visited my mother and we talked for two and a half hours—more than we have in a long time. After that, I came home where there was not much action because of illness. I made baked falafel and Kalamata olive sauce for what turned out to be my Christmas dinner. Like with the quiet, I was okay with that. I took the first photos in my new project.

We don’t exchange gifts any longer, but I bought a couple of books which arrived Dec. 23. I’m halfway through Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. It will be a quick read and I won’t be buying any winter tomatoes in the foreseeable future. In queue is Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. Mailer was prolific, and the new tome already has been a valuable research tool on contemporary writers.

We went to the New Pioneer Food Cooperative in Coralville together. Going to NewPi is a couple of times a year trip for me. I placed some rolls from the bakery, vegan sausage for gumbo, and some fair trade organic cocoa mix in the wagon. I can’t help but price compare with the warehouse where I work, and the coop is sky high with brands both places carry.

The benefit of NewPi is the wide variety of organic and local foods. They even have bottles of vinegar made with the same mother as the jars we have in our pantry. I don’t know how they manage a diverse inventory when the grocery business is going the opposite direction, but I am glad to be able to visit them once in a while.

I wrote 61 newspaper articles for three papers in 2014, with the last one making yesterday’s front page. It has been a learning experience to freelance, and a different kind of writing. Some editors have been better than others, and each has provided solid lessons in the craft of writing. I am thankful for the opportunity our local paper provided to get me started, but glad I moved on to the Iowa City Press Citizen. More articles are planned in 2015.

 The holidays are in full gear. With my work at the warehouse, I’ll stay busy until Jan. 1 as we want to end the year with zero carry-over product demonstrations. That means I’ll be working almost every day until we are finished. For a while, the warehouse work is my only job—the first time since I can remember there has only been one. And that’s okay for a while.

Categories
Home Life

Budgeting

Final Planting Schematic
Final Planting Schematic

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.

Categories
Home Life Work Life

Waiting in Winter

Waiting Room
Waiting Room

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.

Categories
Sustainability

Reinventing Weekend

Le WeekendLAKE MACBRIDE— The idea of a forty hour work week and regular, scheduled workdays, including a Friday until Sunday weekend, was blown up a long time ago.

Beyond reason, I continue to long for le weekend, as elusive as it has become. Longing overcoming reality in a way common in the consumer enclaves where life often finds us.

Any more, I work every day, and enjoy almost all of it.

The unfinished work of my generation has been reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons. What has changed is the weapons systems have aged, support structures have become calcified, and each year we understand new ways nuclear weapons could be the end of everything we know about life on Earth. Whether by design, by accident, or madness, a nuclear explosion would have devastating consequences for humanity and must be avoided at all costs.

“There have been two conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in the last year and a half, in Oslo, Norway, and in Nayarit, Mexico,” Gunnar Westberg wrote on the IPPNW Peace and Health Blog. “At the latter 146 states participated. The conclusion was that any use of nuclear weapons would have such severe humanitarian consequences that they must be abolished completely.”

There will be a third conference in Vienna Dec. 8-9. The good news is two of the nine nuclear states will be in attendance for the first time, the U.S. and U.K. The rest of the news is the U.S. is committed to a methodology for arms control based upon enforcement of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Therefore, besides many chats over Viennese pastry and coffee, only limited work toward abolition seems possible.

In my early sixties, I can still work on nuclear abolition. But what about after I am gone? When living memory of the dawn of the nuclear age and its aftermath recedes, what then?

Our descendants will be left with an aging nuclear complex, the purpose of which has been in doubt for decades already. If current government operations continue, it will continue to be five minutes until midnight.

Considering the doomsday threat, talk about le weekend seems futile. Better get back to work.

Categories
Home Life

Breaking Down

Prairie Grasses in Late Summer
Prairie Grasses in Late Summer

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?

Categories
Home Life

Still Trying

Solon During a Snowstorm
Solon During a Snowstorm

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.

Categories
Home Life

Staying In For Thanksgiving

A Vegetarian Thanksgiving Dinner
A Vegetarian Thanksgiving Dinner

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.

Categories
Work Life Writing

Meeting at the Cemetery

Rural Cemetery
Rural Cemetery

BIG GROVE TOWNSHIP— There was trouble last night at the cemetery, the first such trouble since I was elected township trustee.

It had to do with who could be buried in whose plot, and the trustee who coordinates plot sales and burials wanted to discuss the issue. The funeral is Friday, so no time for dalliance. We are meeting at 8:30 a.m.

Two years into my term, being a township trustee has provided a steady stream of learning about our community. There has been time to consider things, and almost no controversy—just repeated expression of wills about what should get done and how. Any conflicts that surfaced were quickly resolved.

I’m confident we will figure this one out.

Yesterday it was shown that Mary Landrieu did have 59 votes to proceed on Keystone XL, and that’s all she had. The bill overriding the executive process on evaluation and approval of the project now goes into the dustbin of the 113th Congress. It likely will be back next congress.

I spent part of the last two days transcribing testimony to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide particularly.

“I began my career as a summer intern at EPA 42 years ago under what has euphemistically become known as Russell House One,” Dianne Dillon Ridgely said. “I was a 19-year old kid. And what is most dramatic is much of what we addressed that summer—in terms of air pollution, in terms of the public’s engagement on power production—are exactly the same things, particularly in terms of coal, that we are still addressing and fighting 42 years later, and to me that is really a sad commentary.”

Ridgley is a 42-year veteran of governmental action (or inaction) on clean air and clean water, having been appointed by Presidents Clinton, Bush 41 and Bush 43 to international delegations to address environmental issues. We’re still addressing them. There is hope the EPA’s actions won’t be blocked by the 114th Congress, something the presumed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell indicated is high on his to-do list. Time will tell, but I believe we are on the right side of history regardless of what the Congress does.

My last workday at the local paper was Sunday. It will feel a little weird to be able to focus on my writing on the weekends instead of proof reading the paper. The bucket of part time paid jobs is down to three, and one of those is finished the second week in December. When the number surged to eight last summer, it was too much to juggle. Having found a bottom, the goal for next year is to keep what remains, and use it as a base. In addition, I will seek paid writing jobs and temporary positions and opportunities that can add a few C-notes to the treasury each month. What remains is that I work to support my ability to write.

Hope against hope, I want to get out in the yard and mulch the leaves, and shorten the grass. For that to happen, the snow needs to melt, the yard dry out, and half a day of warmer temperatures roll in. In these days of crazy weather, that is possible, however improbable. That’s where this Wednesday finds me.

Categories
Home Life Living in Society

Worry, No Worries

Rural Polling Place
Rural Polling Place

Half of our household budget is paid from wages earned by working in the warehouse. It’s a constant worry and last night highlighted a couple of things.

Up all night coughing due to a cold, or something, I called off today. My worries were about 1). being sick, 2). leaving my superior in the lurch by my absence, and 3). losing the $50 or so, I would have earned today. Each took its mental toll as I rolled and coughed and finally called off around 4 a.m. so the voice mail would be waiting when she arrived to open the office.

It was a reasonable decision, as the condition might worsen had I gone in and worked on my feet, giving people breaks. Coughing and hacking over food samples can never be good, so in the end everyone was served. I suppose the worry serves a purpose too.

After my call, the display on my mobile phone showed the outside temperature was 22 degrees—the first hard frost. A friend wrote:

“I was close to tearful about all my reddish orange raspberries that would have been perfect for harvest in just say three more days. Last year they were completely done a few days before any freeze. Sigh. It was a banner year for raspberries and I’ve loved them all! But I guess harvesting berries past Oct. 31 is really asking for climate change!”

So the season spins, its markers passing rapidly, but recognizably as we tread on in life’s journey. At 1:30 p.m., I had stopped coughing enough to feel ready to sit in my writer’s seat and get to work—tissue box at the ready. I turned from worry to no worries.

Some people worry about a Hillary Clinton presidency, but not me. Few people have the breadth of experience she does, and fewer still focus on the advancement of human rights the way she does. This week she was at the Hamburg Inn No. 2 in Iowa City with Rep. Bruce Braley to have a pie shake—and be seen there. Specifically, a chocolate-bourbon-pecan-flavored pie shake, according to media. It was a sign of something.

I finished her recent memoir, “Hard Choices,” in between coughing spells this morning.

“Now, more than ever, the future is very much on my mind,” she wrote in the epilogue. “Over the past year, as I’ve traveled around our country once again, the one question I’m asked more than any other is: Will I run for President in 2016? The answer is I haven’t decided yet.”

Far be it from me to opine on the matter of whether she should run for office again. But if she does, positives outweigh negatives, by a distance. In sooth, she has no competition among the parade of potential 2016 aspirants testing the political waters in Iowa this election cycle. That is, if experience matters.

If experience doesn’t matter, as a nation we have lost our way.

In my self-imposed quarantine, I’m hoping a couple of things. 1). that I recover my heath well enough to work at the warehouse tomorrow, as we need the income, 2). that Iowans reject Joni Ernst on Tuesday, and send Bruce Braley to the U.S. Senate, and 3). that Hillary Clinton gives fair consideration to throwing her hat in the ring for 2016.

Hopefully that pie-shake reminded her that Iowans are not so bad.