Diamond-Cut Life

Everything I read about the year ahead of us refers to a tighter economy, including widespread job losses. Interestingly, I haven’t seen any buzz about a very sensible economic option if you’re one of the millions of Americans who lives alone: having a housemate.

In Part I of Top Ten Tips For Living With Others I focused on finding and choosing a good housemate, and managing your own expectations. Here in Part II, I focus on managing the situation itself. For a variation, see my piece on having a housemate who works for rent.

6.) Remind yourself you’re being paid thousands of dollars annually to manage a housemate situation. If a housemate reduces your living expenses by $400/month, that’s $4,800/year — more than that if you’re saving or investing some of that money. If finding or getting along with this person takes you 10 hours/month, remember you’re being paid $40/hour for that time.

7.) Have a life and friends outside of the house. No house or apartment can meet all of a person’s needs in any event, whether you live alone or with others. Everyone loves to have the place to themselves once in awhile, and that can happen if everyone has some outside activities. Show some interest in your housemate’s life outside the home, and bring some interesting things home to tell about.

8.) If everyone is financially stable and eats similar food, consider sharing groceries. This has worked well in my home, with everyone paying in at the beginning of the month, and Thor, the happy shopper, making his list with everyone’s input. I enjoy eating together when possible, and our small kitchen and refrigerator could not hold two sets of food, in any event. Of course, this wouldn’t work if money is so tight that a person needs to control every grocery dollar they spend.

9.) Be messy only in your own space. Within your bedroom, your mess only affects you, at least when your door is shut. But if it’s community space, i.e. kitchen, dining room, living room, shared bathroom, clean up after yourself as if you’re being paid to do it (you essentially are, since living alone would cost you thousands more per year.) This kind of daily consideration is the biggest make-or-break issue I know of among housemates, except in the rare cases where everyone is happily sloppy in unison.

10.) If one situation or housemate doesn’t work out, give another a chance. Different housemates yield very different experiences, and even the same housemate may become much more pleasant when happily employed, for instance, than when unhappily employed. If one housemate doesn’t work out, get clear on why it didn’t work. Try again, making sure to create a different experience this time.

Certainly some people need to live alone. But I think in the U.S., it has become an automatic default for single people to live alone, despite its costliness, whether or not they can afford it. It would be a national form of self-help if a large number of people dusted off their interpersonal skills and conserved money and resources by living with one or more others, even for a temporary period of time.

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Yesterday the ten of us took my mother in law Joan’s ashes to Cannon Beach here in Oregon. She had loved the beach, felt deeply alive there, and had requested her ashes be scattered there.

The day was bright but cold, way down in the 30’s with the wind-chill factor, and we huddled close like a football team at the water’s edge near Haystack Rock. We each shared a memory of Joan or a reading. There were tears, blowings of noses, lots of supportive side-hugs. Nobody’s ashamed to cry in this family, and that works well for me since I cry readily, and accept that about myself.

The ashes themselves were silvery and very fine, like a more refined form of the sand under our feet. Released into the water, they swirled white like smoke before dispersing and integrating into their new home. I looked at the vast ocean and sad faces and thought: How ancient all this is, experiencing a death and doing a ritual for it.

The details of the rituals vary, but expressing grief and mourning, displaying respect to the dead person and surrendering to a will greater than our own all come down to us through thousands of generations of ancestors. If I mentally erased our modern clothes, the ten of us could have been doing our ashes ritual long prior to Stonehenge. Death unites all peoples; advanced technology has no power over death. It always comes down in the end to a family crying and holding each other on a cold winter beach, dealing with the ashes of their loved one.

As a free-thinking Christian, I take comfort not just in God, the Holy Spirit and Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, but also the richness of our ancestors. I see them as having created footprints in which we are following, whether or not we realize it. Our ancestors endured millions of death, crying rivers of tears, showing us we can endure our grief, too.

The diamond-cut life emphasizes community, something our U.S. culture does not excel at.  (In fact, lack of community and loneliness may often drive over-consumption). Two winters ago I took a friend grieving the loss of her father to a grief workshop led by Sobonfu Some, a joyous, dynamic woman from the Dagara tribe of western Africa. She led us in community-building and rituals from her indigenous culture that I recommend to anyone wanting a positive experience. My friend and I left Sobonfu’s workshop renewed, energized and as deeply alive as we had ever been. Her indigenous culture has rich gifts, including a connection to the ancestors, that I believe our culture badly needs.

Yesterday at the beach, after the ashes had entered the ocean, my brother-in-law Todd turned to me with open arms, looked me in the eye, and said, “I love you, Alison”.  “I love you too, Todd,” I said right back, and we fell into a tight hug. This was new, and felt wonderful to me. The shared death and ashes experience had cracked our hearts open further to each other, and I had become more a part of the family, the tribe, than ever before.

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I’m back after a break spent with family, helping my mother-in-law Joan pass away peacefully at Providence Hospital here in Portland. Joan was a passionate  soul who believed in making the world a better place. For that reason and because she cultivated thrift during the Great Depression like most of her generation, I think she would approve of these suggested New Years resolutions that help address global warming. Most of them save money, as well.

I’ve done many New Years resolutions in my life, with varying degrees of success, and I’ve also worked as a counselor, helping people to help themselves.  I know this to be true: what gets measured, gets managed. If you want your 2008 to be any different than 2007 and years prior, put a steady system of measurement in place. I like to use the ‘recurring events’ function of Outlook to remind me to measure whatever I’ve decided to manage.

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1.) Monitor and reduce your consumption of a luxury item. I am doing this with wine, and donating the money saved to increasing my giving to Women For Women International. I actually wept for joy when I received my first letter in 2006 from the mother in the Congo whom I sponsored into literacy.A small sacrifice for me made a stunning difference to her and her family.

2.) Use your car less than in 2007, reducing, for instance, your annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT’s) by 20% to 50%.  (I’m told average annual VMT’s per car in the U.S. are 5,000). Research shows less hours spent in your car is likely to help you lose weight. Moreover, it is your car’s VMT’s, not its age in years, that ages it, depreciates its value, and hastens the need for costly repairs.  Wondering how to go about driving less? Find a number of tips here.

3.) Reduce your electricity bill (and therefore usage) by 15%-45%. The electricity bill itself makes this easy to track and measure.  Here are tips on how we use half the national average. The bulk of electricity in the U.S. comes from coal-burning, the biggest single contributor to global warming. We make a difference when we use less electricity.

4.) Fly less miles. I love going places as much as anybody. But flying creates the huge bulk of our carbon footprint. Calculate the non-work-related miles you flew in 2007, and decide to reduce it 20% to 50% in 2008. Dubious about this idea? More about it here. Remember that train travel uses fossil fuels much more efficiently than air travel. Here’s the link to Amtrak.

5.) Buy carbon offsets quarterly or twice a year. These create investment in projects that either reduce carbon emissions or absorb them, as in tree-planting. My household uses this easy carbon counter and then buys offsets online from the Climate Trust, a solid non-profit outfit here in Oregon. Our offsets for 2007 came to only $100. The beauty of doing this quarterly is that it keeps us steadily measuring our carbon footprint — which makes us more mindful of reducing it.

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After being snowed and iced out the last two Sundays in a row, I finally get to go back to church this morning. My connection with God is even more important than usual to me right now because my mother-in-law Joan, in her ninth day at Providence hospital, appears to be dying. Her lungs are failing her.

I say ‘dying’ because the word is plain and clear, but I actually think of Joan as crossing over.  I think her soul is getting ready to leave her physical body behind. Of course it’s not pretty to witness, visually speaking, and the sadness among the family as we vigil at her bedside is strong. But unprettiness and sadness are part of what we sign up for with life. God’s love is stronger than those things, in my experience.

My last thought before I leave for choir practice prior to church is that illness and physical death in many cases stimulates our sense of community and connectedness. My in-law family, for instance, seems the closest and most united right now that I have ever seen us.

In this culture in particular, we tend to be overly individualistic, but illness and death remind us we are actually interdependent, and closely woven together. I don’t see this as merely being a “positive side” of death and crossing over, but rather, a glimpse into the true structure of our lives and and our world.

photo courtesy of gari.baldi

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Earlier this month in Part I of The Flow of Wine and Money I noted that wine and libation are linked to the sociability I love — yet they’re a luxury, in the face of a nation and world that are way financially stressed.

We all know that what gets measured, gets managed. I had calculated that my drinking an average of four glasses of wine per week at $5/glass, since I turned 21, has added up to a $30,000 lifetime investment in wine so far. Ouch! (And I’m far from being a sophisticated connoisseur who reaches for the stuff featuring the good bouquet, or nose, I think it’s called.)

For the last four weeks I’ve been tracking whether I drink or not in a given day, and how much when I do drink. The report: I’ve had nothing to drink slightly more days than not, and when I do it’s almost always either one or two glasses of wine or cocktails.

Sounds unremarkable – but the process of tracking my wine consumption led to my refraining more often than I normally would. It’s much more satisfying to mark a tally in the N column than in the Y column. The tallying itself is a motivator that changes my behavior and leads me to consume less. What gets measured, gets managed.

Of course, drinking is linked to sociability, even community, which I consider central to the diamond-cut life. Yet last night when the champagne was flowing for my friend Jean’s 50^th birthday, I had sparkling pear juice in the same elegant glass as the others, and felt no less sociable for it.

Decision: in 2009 I plan to keep tracking my wine consumption with the goal of minimizing it. I’ll put the dollars saved into increasing my giving to Women For Women International – which excellent organization I’ll write about in January.

Coming up in the final days of December: Top Five New Years Resolutions For Making A Difference, and Part II of Top Ten Tips For Living With Others (see Part I here).

photo courtesy of herbert.feutl

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It’s a modern notion that people should live alone; this is the first time in human history that millions are doing it. Living alone is also expensive, both in dollars and in the earth’s resources.

I lived alone for five years following a painful divorce, and I benefited from the peace and quiet and regained sense of control that situation gave me. (I’m now in a happy marriage, and we sometimes have a housemate who works for rent). But I notice that if I had lived alone rather than with others my entire adult life, I would have spent an additional $60,000 on the roof over my head (conservatively estimating$200/month added expenses for 300 months).

The fact that I lived with housemates in my youth has let me live in some lovely homes and neighborhoods I could not have afforded by myself. Moreover, the situations gave me a much livelier social life, a lot of good information and advice, and made me safer on the occasions I got sick, had a car problem or otherwise needed a little help.

I encourage people living alone to consider living with a housemate, even just for a six-month experiment. Here are the first half of my top ten tips for living with others:

1.) Know and state clearly what you are seeking from the beginning. If you want a clean, tidy housemate, say so. If the housemate you are wanting to replace was never home and you loved that about them, volunteer that fact. If you’re a homebody who comes home from work and stays put, wear that on your sleeve.

Because we have only one bathroom, our written agreements with housemates have even detailed that Thor uses the bathroom from 6:30 to 6:50 a.m. for his weekday showers. This then made for smooth early mornings. What seems awkward to discuss or write down up front can actually create smoothness in the living situation itself.

2.) Look for a roommate experienced at living with others. A person builds their skills by having done a thing. I like to ask what a person learned from past living situations. If they’re still angry about something, I won’t choose them as a housemate. I suggest asking for references from past housemates, whether you placed the ad or are responding to the ad. I ask the references open-ended questions like, “What’s Miriam like to live with? What are your best and worst memories of her?”

3.) Expect to not always have your own way. This is true of life in general, and therefore true of a housemate situation. If that irks you too much, then live solo (and don’t save thousands of dollars).

4.) Consider brief daytime phone calls to a housemate to handle little things. I’m a good problem-solver during a work-day, but I do not want to go home from work to a problem. One housemate and I would give each other a phone heads-up on the rare occasions we were too rushed to clean up after ourselves before leaving the house. The advance apology made the mess forgivable, rather than upsetting.

5.) Consider that the best housemate may not be your lover. I question people automatically assuming they should move in with their lover, because these arrangements are sometimes the most volatile and least stable living situations. Expectations of the relationship tend to spike upward or veer sideways. While we all know many happy long-term, live-in lovers, consider that a stable person with good references that you’re not attracted to may be the best housemate for you. While I am not one to focus too much on fear, crime statistics show that lovers as a group are statistically much more dangerous to us than people we don’t know.

Please add your own tips for successfully living with others and /or sharing resources. Tomorrow, Christmas Day, I’ll be taking a break. Then I’ll be back with ideas for cost- and carbon-lowering New Years resolutions, Part II of the above piece, and a follow-up to The Flow of Wine And Money.

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Tomorrow I’ll write about living successfully with others — skills that can enable us to save tens of thousands of dollars over our lifetimes while also slashing the emissions that drive global warming. (It will be a follow-up to my guest post appearing today at Get Rich Slowly).

Today, tips on reducing our heating bills. The overriding principle is to focus on keeping people warm, not keeping space or stuff warm per se.

• Install a programable thermostat and set it so the heat is only on when you’re both in the house and awake. This is the most powerful single thing you can do to burn less fuel and save on your heating bill. Our heating bill dropped swiftly and significantly after ny non-techie husband installed ours in 15 minutes with a screwdriver.  Our heat now goes on 15 minutes before we get up in the morning, and off 15 minutes before the last person leaves for work. Here’s one of many places to buy a programmable thermostat. You can easily override it – but the default needs to be that it dials way down shortly before bedtime and your daily departure to work.
• Reduce the amount of space you’re heating. This is the second most powerful thing you can do to slash your heating bill. If you seldom use a room during the winter (a back bedroom or heated basement, for example), simply close its heating vent. Then remember to keep its door shut. Our laundry room is in our basement, but we never heat it. We just zip in to handle laundry, and zip back out.
• Wear fleece in the house. Its sweet caresss against the skin and comfort quotient just can’t be beat, in my book. And it enables us to happily keep the thermostat at 67 or 68 degrees.
• Generate your own body heat by being active rather than sedentary. Remember, the goal is to keep you warm, not necessarily the entire house warm. Vacuuming warms me up quickly, especially when I move furniture around. Hanging up clothes to dry rather than using the dryer burns more self-warming calories, and saves a considerable amount on your energy bill over time.
• Indulge in good, cozy footwear, since much body heat gets lost through the feet. I wear fleece socks for warmth plus Teva sandals for grip on our hardwood floors. In general, if we have bare feet, bare arms or bare legs indoors in  the wintertime, we’re overspending on heating because we’re not focused on keeping the person warm.
• Keep drawers and closet and cupboard doors closed. If they’re open, you’re paying to keep them warm. Do you really intend to do that? Don’t forget to close the doors to the microwave, washer, dryer, toy chest and clothes hampers. A bed skirt helps to avoid heating the space under the bed.
• If you work from home during the day you can use an electric space heater to heat just your workspace and dial back that programable thermostat.
• Install insulation. We installed ours in the crawl-spaces in our attic in autumn 2005, and the difference was swift and certain. The house now heats up faster (using less fuel), and takes longer to lose its heat. The reverse is true is summer. Insulation is a good investment.
• Tightly seal around doors and windows. You can use old towels right now to stop drafts around a leaky door or window. Caulking for around windows and doors, new weatherstripping and door sweeps (they seal the bottom of exterior doors) are available at most supermarkets and are cheap and easy to install. Here is a good hands-on account of weatherizing a lovely, drafty old home from Christine at Living Beautifully, Frugally.

• Seal that fireplace. While it’s cozy to sit around a crackling fire, fireplaces are notorious for pulling the heated air out of a room and sending it up the chimney even especially when in use. A fireplace store will sell you doors you can use to seal up that “hole in the wall” when it’s not in use.

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We’re in the full grip of winter, not just here in Portland Oregon but in much of the country. Given the impact of our heating bills on both our wallets and carbon emissions, tomorrow’s post will be “How To Slash Your Heating Bill”. And given that many roads are impassable to vehicles right now, today I’m offering tips for walking safely in snow and ice. More on coping with winter here.

My husband and I hiked a three-mile round trip yesterday in the snow to visit my mother-in-law Joan at Providence Hospital. I loved the physical challenge and I gained more insight into how people traveled in snow for most of human history. As fossil fuels run out and it becomes more costly to burn carbon, I think we’ll be traveling back to our walking roots:).

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Wear hiking boots or the sturdiest shoes you own. Fashion be damned! Don’t try walking on ice in dress shoes or any shoes lacking traction. Wool socks are a must for warmth (the one time I wore cotton instead I was miserable).

Allow extra time and walk slowly in snow and ice. Be willing to be late, and to tell people it’s because you chose to stay safe. Call ahead to advise people you are walking and may arrive late.

Consider using walking poles. They are inexpensive and make walking in snow and ice much easier and safer.

Try not to carry much–you need to leave your hands and arms free to better balance yourself. If you have to carry things, I suggest a small backpack — but don’t become top-heavy.

Use a stomping motion to break through the upper crust if possible. Heel-first works well here.

If you can’t break through the crust, walk flat-footed and have as much contact with the ground as possible.

When on a slope, plant your feet sideways. This greatly increases your traction.

Bend your knees a little to improve balance and response to slippage.and take smaller steps than usual increases traction and can greatly reduce your chances of falling. Stop occasionally to break momentum.

Get your hands out of your pockets and use your arms for balance. If you have to carry packages, distribute the weight of them evenly.

Be prepared to fall and try to avoid using your arms to break your fall. If you fall backward, tuck your chin in so your head doesn’t strike the ground with a full force.

Remember to bring your cell phone, and have it within easy reach.

Get help from someone who is walking securely - or offer to help a person who is wobbling. Never be ashamed to ask for someone’s arm to help you across a slippery or deep spot. I have a happy memory of helping an elderly, overweight, very wobbly coworker walk to her front door after getting out of a car. I held her arm tight against my side and stomped merrily through the crust for us in my hiking boots. I’m almost certain she would have fallen without help, but poignantly, she had not asked for help. I needed to offer it to her.

Thanks to my coworker Robin M. for sharing many of the above tips.

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Today is winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. In the days before fossil fuels routinely lit our nights, winter solstice was celebrated as the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun.

Imagine how vulnerable our long-ago human ancestors were as the days grew colder, darker and shorter. They struggled to protect themselves from the bitter elements; they carefully rationed the food they had saved from summer and autumn. Surviving the winter was by no means a given. Winter meant death for many.

And so for the life-giving sun to return, for the days to start growing longer again was a time of great celebration. Winter solstice meant rebirth. It was a holy day (the origin of the word holiday).  For our ancestors, winter solstice was a turning-point of hope as great as . . . . . well, as great as the birth of a savior for humanity. As great as the later birth of Christ.

Over many years, the pagan Birthday of the Unconquered Sun became the Birthday of the Unconquered Son. Our modern Christmas is a direct descendant of the pagan winter solstice. In both holy days, we are celebrating hope in the darkness, and our connection with a life-giving force much greater than ourselves.

Happy birthday to our beloved Sun and Son.

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Today I am printing an urgent open letter from Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben, two of the nation’s most respected environmental writers and thinkers. I initially decided to join them in civil disobedience in Washington D.C. to address global warming, and my husband told me he’d support me. Then I realized that March 2 is in the middle of Oregon’s legislative session, where my work in transportation options will be keeping me squarely in the state Capitol, working to fight global warming from that angle.

So: if you will join Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry in civil disobedience against a new coal plant, I will give you support and publicity in this blog.

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Dear friends,

There are moments in a nation’s—and a planet’s—history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. Please consider joining us on Monday March 2 to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.

Why?

Coal-fired power is driving climate change. Our foremost climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, has demonstrated that our only hope of getting our atmosphere back to a safe level—below 350 parts per million co2—lies in stopping the use of coal to generate electricity.
Coal is filthy at its source. Much coal is obtained by removing entire mountaintops in West Virginia and Kentucky, exemplifying an out-of-control relationship between humans and the rest of creation.

“Clean coal” is a lie, but a lie told with tens of millions of dollars, which we do not have. We have our bodies, and we are willing to use them to make our point. We don’t come to such a step lightly. We have written and testified and organized politically to make this point for many years, but the daily business of providing half our electricity from coal continues unabated. It’s time to make clear that we can’t safely run this planet on coal at all.

We hear President Barack Obama’s call for a movement for change that continues past election day, and we hear Nobel Laureate Al Gore’s call for creative non-violence outside coal plants. As part of the international negotiations now underway on global warming, our nation will be asking China, India, and others to limit their use of coal in the future to help save the planet’s atmosphere. This is a hard thing to ask, because it’s their cheapest fuel. Our witness in March states that we’re willing to make some sacrifices ourselves, even if it’s only a trip to the jail.

To participate with us, you need to go through a short course of non-violence training. This will be, to the extent it depends on us, an entirely peaceful demonstration, carried out in a spirit of hope and not rancor. We will be there in our dress clothes, and ask the same of you.

We will cross the legal boundary of the power plant, and we expect to be arrested. Our goal is not to shut the plant down for the day—it is but  one of many, and anyway its operation for a day is not the point. The worldwide daily reliance on coal is the danger; this is one small step to raise awareness of that ruinous habit and hence help to break it. To join us or get more information, go to
http://ran.org/get_involved/powershift_and_mass_civil_disobedience_updates/.

Thank you,

Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben

photo courtesy of Little_Ricky

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