Time and Money

In the course of musing, writing, and blabbering, I'll frequently find myself stating that there isn't any logical reason not to go to the store and buy whatever I'm trying to make, grow, or raise.

Often, going out and buying it would me cost less in both time and money. And, yet, I'm resisting that course of action.

(As an aside: I'm led to believe that the cost we pay for something these days does not reflect all the externalized costs, so it seems possible that - while the retail price of a good makes it seem cheaper - it isn't really cheaper to just go out and buy it. It's a question that would be interesting to address. In a different post).

It's not a point I can rationally address, even in my own mind. I realize it isn't logical in our current system. Which makes it a difficult point to defend to anyone else, beyond simply saying that I'm not in love with the current system, wherein we spend our time earning money and then use the money to fulfill our needs and wants.

So many middle men. So much Wal-Mart (or, whichever less-detestable store you might prefer).

It makes me wonder if my time is best spent earning money to fulfill my needs, or if - for some things - it might be more efficient to spend my time fulfilling my needs.

Nah.
Because that'd be crazy. Right?
..........

Yesterday, I was talking with a friend about the scarf I intend to make for my husband. He wants - and has wanted for years - a Dr. Who scarf. Specifically, one of the Dr. Who scarves shown on this website for people who spend a lot of time thinking about Dr. Who scarves:

http://www.doctorwhoscarf.com/mine.php

Just how long has my husband wanted a Dr. Who scarf? Longer than I've known him. At least since college, when he asked one of his grandmothers to knit him one.

At that time, he was not specific enough in conveying his desires. Or, possibly, his grandmother had never heard of Dr. Who and just translated his request to, "I want a really long scarf."

On the other hand, now that I have attempted to fill an online shopping cart with the exact yarns specified on the knit-your-own-Dr.-Who-scarf instruction page, it occurs to me to think that, upon being asked for a ridiculously long scarf that would consume many skeins of yarn, his grandmother just bought whatever happened to be in the bargain bin on the day she went shopping.

End result: ten-foot-long scarf made of varying shades of brown.

It is a magnificent scarf. Truly.

But - while it is more than ample to warm someone's neck and, simultaneously, several other extremities - or, alternately, an entire small child - it is not a true Dr. Who scarf.

Wrong colors. Wrong pattern. Dr. Who would never wear it. Sheesh!

When I started crocheting, my husband initially expressed great excitement at the fact that I could now crochet him a Dr. Who scarf. Upon seeing the result of my early crocheting skills, he pronounced it nice, but not sufficiently like the Dr. Who scarf.

Which, as it turns out, is because a Dr. Who scarf must be knit and not crocheted.

Big difference.

Someday, perhaps, I will delve deeply into the rift that I have discovered between knitters and crocheters. It is, I have come to believe, among the great untold conflicts of our time.

Suffice it to say for now that history and literature are filled with such stories of warfare and strife: the Capulets and the Montagues, the Hatfields and the McCoys, Cain and Abel, the Earps and the Clantons, the creationists and the evolutionists, the Sharks and the Jets, or the Bloods and the Crips.

While less bloodthirsty (despite the sharp implements), the division between the knitters and the crocheters appears no less disdainful than these. Ware to those who cross between the two realms of yarncraft!

Okay. That's sort of an exaggeration.

Most people I've met who can do one can do the other. But they do so disdainfully, wishing they could get back to the one they love. And it is in this manner that I have embarked upon learning to knit in order to make my husband the scarf he has desired for almost 20 years.

What can I say? I'm just that awesome a spouse.

So, yesterday, as I was telling this tale of scarves and hostility to a friend, she asked why I didn't just look for a Dr. Who scarf on Etsy.

I looked at her blankly.

Not because I'm unfamiliar with Etsy (I have, as it turns out, my own completely unsuccessful Etsy store, thank-you-very-much: http://www.etsy.com/shop/AntleredRabbit).

But because, as I told her, that would defeat the purpose of the whole project. It would be contrary to my idiom.
..........

As an aside, it turns out that there are several Dr. Who "inspired" scarves (not unlike the one my husband already has) on Etsy. Should you, like my husband, desire such a scarf, I recommend looking there.

I'm sure as heck not making one for anyone else.
..........

The thought of simply buying my husband a Dr. Who scarf being outside of my idiom struck me as similar to my disinclination to spend his hard-earned money to purchase entryway furniture or new socks.

It's quirky and fun to make a scarf. But is there any way that knitting a Dr. Who scarf, or darning socks, or making a futon frame is a rational use of my time? Wouldn't it make more sense to convert my time into money through employment and just buy stuff?

Time is money. Right?

At some level, doing these things makes about as much sense as it does for me - a person with only the vaguest hold on economic principles - to try and answer this, essentially economic, question. And, of course, reality won't stop me in either venture...

If you've got a great gig, and can pull in some serious money with your time, it is logical to turn your time into money you can use to amply fill your needs and wants. You can fill lots and lots of wants that way.

But I don't have a great gig pulling in the big bucks. I'm a stay-at-home mom.

It makes me wonder if my time is money, too?
..........

If you calculate the value of my time at $20 an hour, then the scarf (pictured below) that I spent 5 hours crocheting cost approximately $100 in potential income. Which makes it an outrageously costly scarf. Especially when I could buck my idiom and buy one at Wal-Mart for $12.50.
But I'm technically unemployed. So the value of my time - the amount someone else will pay for my labor - is, more or less, zero. Right?

In that sense, if I find five hours over the course of a couple of days in which I can knit a scarf, the labor is - essentially - free!

Score! It's cheaper for me to do it than it is to pay someone in a foreign sweatshop.



So... Which is it?

Well, I don't know. But it's clearly more complicated than just being $20 or $0, because - even if I could find a hypothetical twenty-dollar-an-hour job (which isn't, by the way, a stretch, since I maxed out at a GS-9 before getting knocked up and dropping out) - I wouldn't be taking nearly that much home.

A quarter will go to taxes - which I'm happy to pay, of course - and child care will run at least $5 an hour for my son and somewhat more than that after my daughter gets out of school in the afternoon.

I'd also have to pay for some sort of transportation to and from work and - for many jobs - a wardrobe that consists of something other than mom jeans. Now it looks more like I'm taking in eight or nine dollars an hour.

Which is, funny enough, what my landlord offered to pay me to shovel horse manure out of her barn.

Maybe I should rethink that gig.
..........

When I ran this theory by my husband, he pointed out that shoveling horse manure out of a barn differs from an entry-level position somewhere else in that it isn't the first rung on a ladder to anything grander.

While I'm not convinced that a job shoveling shit is completely unrelated to my former career in archeology, I'll give him that one.

It would be wonderful if this moment in my life felt like I was working towards some sort of larger career goal. If I were, it might make financial sense to spend my time at a job that only netted eight or nine dollars an hour. It would be an investment in future earnings.

As an aside, I think that this is the hardest part of stay-at-home motherhood for me, a person who was once defined by career goals (which were not - as it happens - in the field of child care - the career most relevant to my current activities).

And the truth is that I don't have any GS-9, 20-bucks-an-hour job opportunities to turn down. I keep my eyes open, but I haven't seen anything local open up in my career field or for that kind of pay. So, even if I wanted to enter the job market, it's not clear that it would be in a job that would be a step towards something more grand.
..........

Which brings me back to my scarf-based confusion. Which, by extension, is confusion about all the tasks I am planning over the course of the coming year. Are they liabilities? Activities that cost us the amount that I could (in theory) otherwise be earning through income-generating activities? Or should I view them as generating the amount we otherwise would have spent acquiring eggs, scarves, socks, or tomatoes?

Or should we even think of them in terms of time and income?

Should I toss it all off and view it all from the Bhutanese perspective of gross national happiness?

All this blather comes to a single crux: I wish there were a level at which I could make these activities logical. Speaking of them as "hobbies" diminishes the importance of the role I'd like them to attain in our lives. My intention is for us to consume a fair number of our summer calories from the foods we grow. I want for the eggs we raise to constitute a real, measurable unit of our food supply. Farther down the road, I'd be interested in raising a portion of the meat we consume as well.

In my mind, that's more than a sideline.

On the other hand, I don't want to pretend that making scarves or growing tomatoes is going to be my profession.

There is a vast gulf between a hobby and professional, marketable production and - in my mind, at least - within that gulf lies the realm of self-sufficiency. Producing enough to fill your family's needs, and maybe enough to share with friends in hopes of future reciprocity, but no more than that.

In this scenario, time doesn't equal money; it equals food, clothing, and shelter.

Maybe it's a delusion. But I'm going to call it a goal.
..........

In the end, I don't know how to conceptually monetize of my time in this endeavor. Am I a financial liability? A benefit? Or is it a wash? Would I be better off getting a "real" job - in the event I could find one - than trying to raise chickens or knit things? Can this learning period be viewed as educational? One step on the way to a moment where my labor could directly fill wants and needs.

I'm not delusional. I realize that this entire discussion reflects my psychology more than it does my tenuous grasp on economics of the home. I was raised in a time and place where "success" is defined by money, and who you are is defined by your profession. I expected to have both a profession and an income at this stage in my life. I feel adrift and dependent without them. Attempting to provision our needs while staying home seems like an avenue to assuage these feelings in the absence of a job at which I could earn more than I would be paying out to replace childcare, cooking, and housework.

But then I return, in my mind, to a place where it doesn't seem crazy. Humans have done this. They have - for tens of thousands of years - worked to provide their own subsistence. Were it impossible, our species wouldn't have made it this far.

It is real labor, and it can be difficult and uncertain. But in a time and place where the wants multiply, the layoffs are unending, money invested in the market swoops up and down in value at the whim of events I can't control, and there just aren't all that many jobs around for an archeologist who hasn't worked full time in eight years...

Suddenly, forgoing turning time into money and, instead, looking to turn labor into subsistence doesn't seem quite so crazy after all.

Underneath It All

As winter approaches, the pile of warm clothing adjacent to my front door drifts like snow, heaping against the wall and over the sofa; obscuring every available flat surface.

Faced with these mounds of boots, fleece, and Gore-Tex, I chose to fight back. I decided it was incumbent upon me to contain these fallen mittens and scarves in a manner both organized and accessible.

Problem was, I didn't have a containment system up to the challenge.
..........

Last year, I attempted to perfect the use of the big plastic box (AKA: BPB). In this scenario, all scarves, hats, mittens, and other warm gear got tossed pell-mell into the BPB, where they jumbled in a heap; intermingling with no regard for ownership.

It was - in almost every way - an imperfect solution.

When a child queried, "Where's my scarf?" I would answer, "Did you check the big plastic box?"

Inevitable answer: "No."

Of course not. Why on Earth would they look there?

One symptom of my kids' abhorrence of organizational schemes is their firm, unfaltering resistance to even acknowledging the existence of such schemes. They are organizational agnostics.

Like a missionary, I attempted to bring them the truth. To show them the light, the way, the mittens: "Well, go check there. That's where they should be."

The child would go off to check, disgorging the full contents of the BPB onto the floor in the process.

Inevitable result: "It's not here."

"If you put it in the box when you took it off, it should be there. Did you put it there when you took it off?"

Inevitable answer: "Uhhhh....."

Further investigation on my part would usually reveal that the scarf was, in fact, in the BPB, or on the floor next to the BPB where it had been disgorged by the child attempting to find it amidst the chaos.

Alternately, the mitten was often declared "lost forever," and the subject of much weeping, consternation, and rending of other garments.

Usually we would ultimately discover the item in the car, or at school, or stuffed into a shoe next to the door, or in a jacket pocket, or on the floor next to the toilet, or in a box of crayons, or frozen into the snow on the front step.

Pretty much anywhere other than the place it should have been.

And, on rare occasions, winter accessories apparently achieved translocation to whatever dimension socks, scarves, and mittens abscond to for vast portions of their use lives.

Which all goes to say that even I - the BPB evangelist - found the strategy lacking. It was just a container for our mess, not a remedy for the mess itself. We needed something better.

I briefly considered buying some new sort of entryway furniture. Target carries hallracks with benches, and there are a lot of things from Ikea that would probably work.

But I don't want to spend more money. Even reasonable amounts of money. And I really don't want to buy more stuff.

We already have plenty of stuff. The drifts of hats, scarves, and mittens, for instance, are stuff. And stuff, no matter how desirable, always somehow requires - through it's very existence - the acquisition of more stuff that can be used to contain the stuff.

It's mind numbing. It's too much. It's driving me insane.

We have so much stuff.

When I thought it through, it occurred to me that one nice thing about all this stuff is that, somewhere amidst the clutter, we probably already had a containment system that would work.

So I looked around my house, to see what might be repurposed.
..........

When I think about my father working in the garage, I envision him standing at an antique piece of furniture that was central to his work space. I don't know what it's actually called, but "sideboard" seems probable. It has some shelves above an oblong, beveled mirror and a bunch of drawers that he used to hold screws, nails, and wrenches. One drawer was set up with partitions - they were intended for silverware - and was lined with a soft, blue velvet. When I opened it, it exuded that pleasant, oily smell of tools and hardware.

I love that smell.

I have been told that this sideboard was originally part of my parents' collection of living room furniture, which - the story goes - was sort of a motley assortment of pieces. As the current owner of a sort-of-motley assortment of furniture, I can understand my mom's desire to have things kind of match each other a bit, despite having varied origins. She accomplished this by painting her motley collection of furniture white.

Viola! Matching furniture!

In these, the days of Antique Roadshow, it seems obvious that this constitutes some sort of crime against furniture. Leigh and Leslie Keno rail against painting antiques on an almost weekly basis. But back in the olden days of the early '70s, I'm sure the white-painted sideboard and matching shelves looked super fly with my parents' zebra-striped faux-fur bean bag.

I love my father's repurposed work bench so much that, after leaving home, I offered to trade him the piece for an actual work bench. It was a tactical error to ask after leaving home, though, because over the past dozen years I have never had a chance to get it. I can only hope that, one day, there will be a way for it to get moved up to join my current sort-of-motley assortment of furniture. And I have always dreamed that - by that day - I would have acquired the necessary skills to make it something other than white.

Crimes against furniture notwithstanding, I'm a natural-wood sort of gal.

So when I looked around my home for possible containment systems for hats, gloves, and scarves, and my eyes settled upon an old, white-painted, hand-me-down dresser covered in stickers, I saw both a containment system and a learning opportunity.
..........

If I have learned one thing from this learning opportunity, it is this: It is probably not worth the time, effort, and - more to the point - loss of brain cells it takes to refinish something about which you do not care deeply.

Somewhat conversely, I have also learned this: It is best to start your refinishing career with an item about which you do not care deeply.

In that sense, the little dresser was the perfect first project. It was small, not special or particularly nice, and it didn't belong to someone whose memory I cherish.

My husband and I acquired it in grad school from a guy who was leaving for another program and didn't want to get a U-Haul. A nice guy, but not someone I'm as sentimental about as, say, my grandma.

Over the years, one of the drawers developed a crack and the white paint had been embellished with crayons, markers, and some of those stickers that they give to kids at grocery stores. It was a mess.

I was using it to hold random scraps of paper. Yeah. Really. Let's not talk about it.

Suffice it to say that it was ready to serve a more noble purpose.

So, we purchased a bottle of CitraStrip "Safer" Stripper and some other random scraping tools and I got to work.

The bottle of CitraStrip alleged that it was safe for indoor use, so I figured I'd be good in the garage, which isn't airtight. Given that I've never used anything other than CitraStrip, I can't tell you if it is actually any safer, less toxic, or less likely to induce hallucinations than any other stripping product. What I can tell you is that for about 12 hours after stripping concluded, my heart was racing, I had funny thoughts, and my head felt screwed on all wrong.

This, in my opinion, might be the best reason not bother with too much more furniture refinishing. If I do find a reason to try again, it will be outside, in the summer, on a day with a nice breeze.

Fume high aside, the CitraStrip worked pretty well, bubbling up most of the paint with the first application. Everything that wasn't worked into a nick or crack.

Removal of the paint revealed another truth about refinishing furniture (and a lot of other endeavors): You can spend a lot of time with some stripper, and peel back a lot of layers, only to discover that what lurks beneath isn't all that appealing.

In retrospect, I'm not sure what I expected. It's a little wooden dresser. Not awful, not beautiful. Functional. It'll do. But once I'd scraped it was clear that the dresser wasn't worth spending a lot more time on. The law of diminishing returns pretty well predicted that further effort would not be rewarded with vast improvement. It would still look like an ordinary little dresser.

Like Kenny Rogers says: "You've gotta know when to walk away. Know when to run."

Even buzzed on "safer" fumes, I knew it was time to fold 'em.

I glued the cracked drawer, stained all the visible surfaces, and put the hardware back on. The dresser now stands by our front door, ready to accept our gloves, hats, and mittens. It generally matches my other wood furniture.

Success.
..........

The kids are dazzled with my mad skills. They can't believe that this is the same dresser they used to draw on. They were excited to lay claim on their individual drawers. Kids always love to feel like something is theirs.

My husband, on the other hand, almost laughed himself into a hernia at the notion that our family would manage to maintain our stuff in our individual drawers.

He's probably right. But, what can I say? Hope springs eternal.
..........

I realize now that, when I took on this project, I wasn't thinking about this little white dresser, I was thinking about the large, white sideboard in my father's garage - a project I've been pondering for years. It would have taken a lot more (not to mention less "safer") fumes to transmute one into the other, though.

But I now know that, if ever there is a day that I can undertake the task of peeling away the paint on that sideboard, I should enlist the help of someone more skilled in the process than I am. And perhaps that's the most important thing I could have learned from this project: how not to mess up when it really matters.

Knowing is half the battle.

In the meantime, I can get to work in our battle against the drifting outerwear. Will this be the moment our family actually achieves organizational zen?

Yeah. Well... I didn't inhale that much stripper.

The Chain

One of the skills that I have been working on for the past couple of weeks is crocheting. I knew that I wanted to try either knitting or crocheting and, after approximately five minutes of consideration, I decided on crocheting because it requires one tool (the hook) instead of a pair of needles.

Any craft reliant on my ability to keep a set of something together is doomed.

I know I made the right choice: my home has already experienced a hook diaspora. The hooks come in multi-packs of different sizes and colors. Their pretty, rainbow-hued shininess attracts my children in the manner of magpies or packrats. And, like packrats, they abscond with the hooks and squirrel them away in random places throughout our home. I consider myself lucky that, unlike packrats, they don't cement them into the clutter with amberat (although, given the current state of potty training around here...).

A second advantage to crochet hooks - not unrelated to the first - is that they aren't pointy like knitting needles. It's not the best day ever when I sit down on an unexpected crochet hook. But it doesn't require a tetanus shot or stitches.
..........

I've discovered that I like crocheting.

I'm fascinated that a single strand of fiber (a line) can be efficiently converted into something that covers an area (a rectangular scarf) or even a three-dimensional object (a cone-shaped hat). It's geometry - with yarn!

It also reminds me of physics. Or - let's be honest - what little I understand about physics. My husband rented Physics: The Elegant Universe and Beyond last year and I watched - with almost no comprehension whatsoever - as the idea that there are actually eleven dimensions, most of which we can't perceive because they are all wrapped up inside each other, was explained. Somehow, the process of making loops, upon loops, upon loops that curl together into a row that holds its shape and builds into an item we recognize and understand makes me think of those other, hidden dimensions.

So, over the past few weeks I've been making things. I started out with a scarf and hat for myself, and moved on to something for my son. He's got a gigantic head and has outgrown all his hats from last year. Plus, I had some spare purple yarn hanging around the house, and purple is his favorite color. (And, yes, this picture is irrefutable evidence that I should add "Re-covering dining room chairs" to my project list.)



Although it isn't pertinent to crocheting, I'm excited about the buttons. I didn't have any hanging around the house when I finished the "turtle long-neck" portion of the project (as he calls it), so these are made from some shells I collected at the beach last year. I drilled some holes into them and sewed them on. Viola!
..........

Beyond the practical reasons to pick crocheting over knitting, I also have to admit some historical bias: I already had some (rather limited) crocheting skill.

When I was a kid, one of the girls in my gang of church friends taught the rest of us how to crochet a foundation chain. I don't remember which of the girls was the source of this knowledge or the day I learned it, but I do have a clear memory of the group of us crocheting chains like children possessed. It became the activity that accompanied our endless games of "Little House on the Prairie."

Look! We're crocheting! Just like Laura and Mary!

I'm not sure, in retrospect, why no one at church observed the miles upon miles upon miles of foundation chain we were producing and thought to teach us to make a scarf. Given my own experience with kids, I suppose it was probably akin to letting sleeping dogs lie: if a gang of seven-year-old girls is happily entertaining itself, for heaven's sake, don't confuse it by trying to provide additional instruction.

Since I knew from personal experience that crocheting foundation chains is something that seven-year-old girls can excel at, I decided to try and teach my daughter.

I have a history of being bad at teaching her things.

I think there are a lot of issues, one of which is that I'm not very patient. I also find it difficult to use language to express actions that I don't usually think about in words. When I crochet, I think about what I am doing spatially, not verbally. It is more a muscle memory than an intellectual process. Telling someone how to do it requires me to translate my actions into language, which is difficult.

My daughter is also a lot more prone to blowing me off than she would be with her teachers at school (or, at least, that's what she's told me), and I am uncertain about when I should correct her and when I should let her make her own mistakes. It is hard to know when I should try to teach her by showing, and when I should just let her do it.

For us, "parent" is a different role than "teacher," and "daughter" is a different role than "student." It's a relationship we need to improve.

Crocheting was touch-and-go at first. She made loops way down the string and didn't know which side of the loop to pull in order to make it tight. But I showed her a little, and let her try a little, and let her ask for some help, and eventually she got to the point where she can make a crochet chain.

Her method is completely different from mine. And I don't know enough to know if it matters. We'll have to see when it comes time to turn and try to make a stitch. It took me almost 20 years to get to that part, though, so even if it takes a while, she will be way ahead of me.

In the meantime, she has made a chain that seems miles long - just like the ones I used to make. We're going to put it on the tree come the holidays and she'll have the joy of having made something we've put to good use.
..........

She asked me, while I was teaching her, what I did with all the chains I crocheted. For the life of me, I can't remember what happened to most of them. I'm sure we made friendship bracelets and whatnot. The one thing that I do remember with some clarity is that I had one that was long enough to wear around my neck. I carried my house key on it on days my mom wouldn't be home when I returned from school in the afternoon.

I told my daughter this, and she stared at me blankly.

"Where was grandma? Why wasn't anyone home? Why were you alone?" She was visibly concerned about seven-year-old me. I reassured her that seven-year-old me turned out okay, despite my occasional status as a latch-key kid.

It's strange to think that, at her age, I was coming home from time to time to a house that was otherwise empty. It didn't happen often, but it wasn't unheard of. It wasn't a big deal.

I would also walk - sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend - to the strip mall near our home. We'd buy gum, or packs of "Return of the Jedi" cards at the local five and dime. Sometimes I would walk to the park and play with friends.

Yes, I had to tell my parents where I was going, but they didn't chaperone these expeditions.

I have fond memories of that independence. But I can't imagine letting my daughter do the same. She hasn't acquired the skills she'd need to be that independent. Because... of me?

Fostering independence in children: it might be an oxymoronic concept (wouldn't independence be something you develop independently?). And I know it is a topic too large to tie onto the end of this post. But I didn't want to leave it unremarked upon.

In this act of passing on to my daughter a skill that I acquired at her age - a skill that, in itself is of negligible utility, but which forms the foundation for a worthwhile pursuit - I caught a glimpse of the ways in which our childhoods are different.

Here is another difference: I'm not going to leave her stranded in the two-dimensional world of the crochet chain. I will give her the opportunity - should she choose to accept it - to turn those chains and explore the world of three-dimensional objects; to double crochet her way to her own blanket or sweater.

Who knows what dimensions she'll explore? Heck, maybe one day she'll crochet something really useful.

I hope it isn't a bikini.

Fixing a Hole

I've been talking a lot about things I intend to do. Which makes sense: most of what I am doing right now is planning.

But there has been some doing as well, and these doings are rich with excitement. Last night, for instance, I darned a sock.

I know... Whoa.

..........
There was a phase of my young adult life during which I always gave my older brother socks for Christmas. There's a back story there that would probably only entertain little sisters who like to tease their big brothers. And who doesn't need socks, right? Darned useful things.

After many Christmases of socks, I was talking to his wife and joked that I should think of something better than socks to give to him. She told me that he actually liked getting socks because socks are useful. And that he didn't understand the underlying teasing. Oh well.

I think that was the year that they sent me some socks in return.

The socks they sent match in pattern but not color; both are a mix of purple, lavender, turquoise and dark blue. They're funky. And nice socks. I wear them a lot, primarily because of their vibrant colors. It's not so much that these are my favorite colors - they aren't. It's the fact that, by virtue of being the only purple/lavender/turquoise/dark blue things in my sock drawer, I can always find the pair of them faster than any other pair of socks I own. It's a mighty helpful attribute.

But one of these socks, the generally more purple of the pair, ended up with a hole in the toe. I'm not the sort of person who tosses out a pair of socks just because of a single hole, but the situation kept getting worse, and I'd find myself in the morning confronting my sock drawer, able to find this one pair, and then scrambling for another simply because of this toe hole. It bummed me out. Not as much as the global economic crisis, of course - but even the small things can seem insurmountable before my first cup of coffee.

A few years ago, when my daughter was younger, I'd just picked her up from the YMCA babysitting room when she took a spill and skinned a big hole in her new pair of tights. After we determined that it was just a flesh wound, we both got a little sad about the hole: for my part, I was bummed about the money that had gone down the tube; she was sad because it had been her new favorite pair. And now, all seemed lost.

Luckily, my mom was visiting at the time. Mom took one look at the hole and said, "Let's darn it." Just as simple as that. And she did. We went home, I pulled out my embroidery thread (I can make an awesome friendship bracelet, FYI) and she made a huge rainbow-colored fix. It was brilliant, and my daughter loved it. She wore those tights for another two years.

It was sort of miraculous, really, the way my mom took an item that appeared to have its functional value diminish to a total loss and, in the space of fifteen minutes, gave it two more years of use life.

You might, correctly, point out that I could have gone back to Target and paid another $7.99 for an identical pair. I couldn't argue with you on that point.

But...

Sigh.

I don't know how to articulate it, really. It's just that I'm trying escape that answer.

So yesterday I went onto YouTube and found a video of someone darning a sock. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n1jTVyBE0

Then I pulled out the sock, some yarn, and a needle, and darned it.

And, you know what? It's all better now.

It took thirty minutes or so to really get it all figured out and finished, but I don't think that's bad for a first attempt. I'm sure the next one will go more quickly. And I've got plenty that I can do: a cashmere sweater that has some moth holes; more socks; more of my daughter's tights.

I know, I know... We could probably just go to Wall-Mart and replace them, right? It would be simple and inexpensive. (Well, not the cashmere sweater - there's no chance we could replace that).

Going to Wal-Mart and buying more socks is, after all, the apparent answer to sock holes in our current cultural moment.

But I don't want to do that anymore. It is the easy answer, but I don't think it's the right one.

So I darned a sock. And, soon, I'll darn another!

And in fixing those holes, rather than chucking and replacing the whole sock, I'll feel the smug sense of satisfaction that comes with tearing one thread of the web that consumer culture and designed obsolescence have spun around us.

A Challenge For You

A few months ago, my friend Jaye Wells blogged about National Buy a Book Day (http://jayewells.com/2010/08/31/national-buy-a-book-day/) a day on which we could support authors by going to a book store and buying a book. In a fact of life about which I rarely thought prior to her post, authors don't make any money when people borrow books from the library or buy them second hand. That doesn't make either of those things bad (I frequent libraries and used book sales - I love them). But, you know, authors need to eat too, and National Buy a Book Day was designed to show them a little love.

Her post, and some comments and discussion that followed it, got me thinking. (I like thinking).

Authors are hardly the only creative people that are not richly rewarded for their work. I know a lot of people who have hobbies, or sidelines, or businesses, or business plans that involve the creation of something. Almost none are making a living at it. I know people who make jewelry, beer, cheese, scarves, dolls, photographs, music, paper, sculptures, incredibly cute crocheted animals, jelly, fruits and veggies, scones, paintings, stained glass windows, and yarn. And that's just a starter list, really.

Almost none of those people are well compensated - or compensated at all - for the time they spend.

I believe that humans create for the joy of it. I believe that the act of generating something new - and beautiful, or useful, or delicious - fills a need that most of us share. We do it because we love it. Because it is part of who we are.

But, let's be honest, even when we are fulfilling our need to create, it's also nice to get some recognition, some appreciation, and - sometimes - payment.

So I came up with this idea. I'm sending y'all on a quest.

Go out over the next few weeks and buy something that someone else has created. If your house is already full of stuff, don't limit it to a material object: buy a song, or a loaf of bread that you will consume. Or show your appreciation for someone's work by exchanging it with some of your own (thereby reducing your own pile of stuff: win-win).

I don't want to limit it by setting too many parameters - in large part because I want to see how creative everyone can get with this - but I'll toss out a few examples. You could:

Buy a turkey directly from the farmer who raised it;
Ask the person playing the pickle-barrel drums on the corner for a specific song and then put money in his money jar;
Buy a glass of lemonade from the kid selling it on the corner;
Hire someone who loves to cook make you a special meal;
Hire a string quartet to play at your holiday party;
Offer a child some money to create a piece of art for you (someone did this for me when I was a child - a gift for which I am still grateful);
Pay someone to teach you a creative skill;
Arrange for someone to write you a poem;
Hire someone to hand-make some of your holiday cards.

The two important things are that you seek out something that has been created by hand and that your economic transaction is with the person or persons who have worked to create the beer/poem/cheese/jelly/scarf/artwork. It is about both the creative act and the personal nature of the economic interaction.

And then come back and tell me about it.

I look forward to hearing your stories.

Boxing Day

If there is one notion that underpins my self-sufficiency project, it is this:

There's an awful lot of important and useful stuff I didn't learn when I was growing up.

With this project, I'm setting out to learn those skills now. Better late than never.

And I thought (don't laugh!): "Maybe my kids would appreciate having the chance to learn some of these things while they are still young. It'll save them from having to acquire these skills later!"

Seriously. Stop laughing.

Before I had children, I had this idea about what my kids would be like. Sort of the Platonic Ideal of children. Clean. Well-behaved. They would listen to everything I said. Always fun to be around. Psychic (Yeah. Really. I mean, I realize now that that would really screw up the whole Santa thing, but what did I know back then?).

Perhaps you will observe, based on this list, that I was completely unfamiliar with the entire concept of children prior to becoming a parent.

We can add that to the list of things I didn't learn about growing up.

Now I recognize that I was envisioning my then-nonexistent children as extensions of myself. They were smaller, more perfect (and psychic!) versions of what I wished I could be. They would do what I asked because these fantasy mini-mes would want the exact same things.

Several thousand reality checks later, it's abundantly clear that neither of them is a small version of me.

Which is a fantastic thing.

My kids are great. They are funny and interesting, they have cool imaginations, enjoy reading, and don't complain too much when forced to listen to music that I like while we are driving in the car. Their listening skills are lacking... but if I weren't the one who has to clean up after them, force them to eat healthy foods, disappoint them daily with my failure to provide them with an endless supply of plastic toys, and nag them both into bed and out of it on school mornings (because, helpfully, they are always up that the crack of dawn on weekends), I think we'd be friends.

But we aren't friends.

I'm their well-intentioned (but often sorely mistaken) mom.

And sometimes things don't go quite as I'd planned.

..........
So, I wanted to bring them along on this journey to self-sufficiency, and I cast about in my mind for a while to come up with a project that we could share. Eventually, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to give each of them a garden box in which they could plant whatever (legal) plans they wanted to grow come the spring.

I still think this is a really good idea. It is a way that they can be invested in a project, see it from beginning to end, and enjoy the literal fruits of their labors. Yes, I know that the odds of inducing them to consume veggies without an undue amount of angst are approximately 3,720 to one. Never tell me the odds!

A connection to the plants. A sense of pride in ownership and production. These will be the tools I use to facilitate their peace with the peas.

When I told them of my plan, they exhibited a great deal of excitement. They are super-cute when exhibiting a great deal of excitement.

Excitement! Fantastic! It was time to figure out how to make a garden box. And then, after I completed them with the loving assistance of my children, I'd blog about learning to make a garden box. Score.

If you have read my Projects post, you will already know that I have absolutely no experience building things, and that garden boxes were first on my list. It was a good choice for first project because it was - even for me - really simple.

Especially since someone else did the hard work.

I feel like I should talk more about the fantastic landlord that I have these days. The rental experience in which I was embroiled immediately prior to this one would have made me appreciate a simple scenario wherein we had a landlord that took our money in exchange for providing decent, safe, pleasant housing and a reasonable response time to problems.

We had a low, low bar.

It appears that I paid off some vast karmic debt with that last one because we have lucked out now with Lou and Don.

Among the many fantastic bonuses that come along with living here is the fact that, when I asked Lou if they had any wood from which I could build some garden boxes, I ended up receiving expertly sawn wood (and, yeah, I don't know what kind - 2-by-somethings? - probably a fact I should figure out if I'm going to build something else), screws, and the loan of one heck of an awesome drill.

Once everything was delivered to my back porch (yes! delivered!) it took about ten minutes to get everything screwed together. My son even helped with the drilling part, exhibiting a four-year-old's innate love of dangerous power tools.

It didn't take much longer for the whole kid-participation part to go to Hell.

I could tell you all the different topics about which my children fought over the course of the next hour as I tried to get the boxes positioned, weed-free cloth placed in the bottom, and horse poop piled inside...

Okay, actually, I couldn't tell you all the topics because after a while the different topics just all sound the same. And - since I didn't go into this part earlier, I'll tell you now - I had started the day by asking my daughter to fold her clean clothes and take them to her room ("That's so unfair, mom! Why should I have to do that?"), a request that culminated in an argument about chores, followed by a denouement of cleaning out her room (to the tune of my endless rant about endless piles of little plastic toys), before we even made it to Lou and Don's to get started with the garden boxes.

So, it hadn't been the best morning ever. And, from an interpersonal standpoint, it still had some downward spiral to travel.

The culmination came when I heard my daughter sobbing from inside the house (I'd given up on getting them to help shovel poop). I went inside to find her dressed in a bridesmaid dress I wore at a cousin's wedding over a decade ago and crying over a dead monarch butterfly with a crumbling wing. Her father had given her the butterfly years ago and she has treasured it since. The wing damage, she alleged, was due to her little brother - but it is hard for me to tell how hard one would have to joggle a butterfly that has been dead for years in order to get it to fall off.

In any event, both children had devolved to a state of tears and hysteria.

There was approximately zero interest in garden boxes at that point. And no interest in family activities. Or in what we might or might not grow the following summer.

Eventually I got both of them settled, to my chagrin, in front of the TV and watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was the one thing they seemed to agree on during the course of the day.

I got the boxes to a good stopping point and threw in the towel. The remaining horse poop will have to go in later this week.

It felt like a pretty big failure. Not the boxes. They are great. But the attempt to involve my children in this larger project that I would like to use to connect us to each other, and our environment, and our larger choices as a family.

..........
Then, on the way out for the evening, my daughter got to talking about what she was going to grow in her box. Apparently it's sugar cane. And flowers.

My son chimed in, excited about tomatoes, carrots, and peas (all things he would disdain if I placed in front of him for dinner).

I realized then that this project that I am undertaking is not an event: it is a process.

So they lost interest after the first screws went in. Maybe they just felt more like bickering that day. But there will come a day when we choose the seeds to plant, and start them inside in their little peat pellets. There will be days when we plant the seedlings out for the year, days when we water and pull the weeds. And then there will be the days when we harvest our crops and I have to force the kids to eat them.

There is a long road ahead of us: with this garden, with this project, with our lives together. It's important that none of us let the bad moments define us.

Let it go. Focus, instead, on the coming miracle of sugarcane in Vermont. And how I'm lucky to get to share this project with two wonderful, funny, annoying kids.

..........
I've edited to add a picture of the final product, filled and ready for the spring.

Projects

A few months ago, I was at the doctor's office. The sleep doctor. I snore.

Or, I did snore: now I have a CPAP machine. The woman scheduling at the front office informed me that I would need to make an appointment for six months in the future.

"What," she queried, "is a good day for you in December?"

"Uhhhhhh...."

How on Earth, I wondered, could I say with any certainty what day I would have free in six months? Does anyone know what their schedule will look like that far in advance?

I feel the same way about coming up with a list of projects that I'm going to do over the next year. How on Earth can I speculate with any accuracy as to what I'll have time for next August?

Oh, yeah. I'll have time for it next August by planning it now. Right?

Without making a to-do list, I won't have anything to work towards, and I won't have any way of measuring my progress.

Plus, there are things that I know I want to try, and maybe some of you have insight you can offer on doing them.

So, with the caveat that this list is sort of a moving target and things might get shifted around somewhat, I am hereby presenting a list of planned projects.

Updated to add: I have changed the text of the projects that have been completed to green and, when I have also blogged about the results, I added the individual post title. Enjoy!

Construction:
Garden boxes - see Boxing Day;
Duck pen;
Shoe shelf/bench;
Entryway furniture;
Futon frame.
Playhouse?

Gardening:
Grow veggies from seeds;
Try growing some new veggies/fruits;
Save seeds.

Food Prep
Cook the food I grow (a topic ripe for exposition);
Make kids eat food I grow and then cook (dream on, mom!);
Preserve food (I have a dream of organizing a class - another topic for exposition).
Try making some cheese?
Get back to making yogurt?
Beer/wine/spirits?

Sewing/Mending
Learn to fix holes in socks - see Fixing a Hole;
Sew next year's Halloween costumes;
Make NPS junior ranger pin banners (long story, but the short story is we're dorks);
Figure out how to mend Rick's pants, or what I can do with them (long story);
Make something for each member of family to wear;
Improve crocheting - I've done some - see The Chain.
One big project, to be determined...

Animals:
(I know I want to try some of these things, but it is hard to say what I am going to be able to make work).
Try beekeeping?
Raise ducks?
Maybe chickens or guinea fowl?
Find someone with other animals and learn from them about care.
Learn about slaughtering/processing?
Hunting?
Try dairying with goats?
Try to get some wool or fleece?

Weird and random stuff:
Wild food investigations;
Preserving hides;
Take a fleece from sheep to final product (except not a sheep because of the lanolin);
Use up all my basket-making material;
Alligator wrestling (because Gavin said it was inevitable);
Should hunting and butchering go here?
Loose tons of weight (because it goes on all my lists).

Writing:
Finish three short stories, shop them around;
Blog at least once a week.

Okay.

I am sure that there is more. I know there is. But this is the horizon thus far. If there is something you think I'm missing, let me know.

Now I should probably go and find out when I scheduled my appointment with the sleep doctor. December, and the date when I alleged to be free, is almost here.

Get Out the Map

I'm not the world's biggest planner these days. Probably everyone has heard that life is what happens when you are busy making other plans, but I've also found that life keeps happening whether or not you bother making plans in the first place. I don't think I was always so ambivalent about long-term plans but, after a decade married to someone else's NPS career - a life where you truly cannot predict where in America you might end up next, let alone when that might be - my ideas for the future have come to seem a bit moot.

I'm trying to view this project a little less lackadasically. I'm serious about this, and being serious requires a plan.

With that in mind, I've been thinking about the process I'm going to follow in this project. I've realized that my ideas about process are largely conditioned by the years I spent in school and the structure of an educational program. Therefore, what I'm planning seems - to my mind at least - conceptually similar to I went through in obtaining my Master's degree. It involves four overlapping domains: research, classwork, projects, and writing.

Research:
There isn't any need for me to reinvent the wheel in learning skills for self-sufficiency: other people have attained, practiced, and written about these skills already. It would be ridiculous not to make use of what is already out there.

Columbus Day was a couple of weeks ago and it brought with it the usual musings of why we celebrate the "discovery" of the Americans when both continents were already inhabited by a large, diverse population of humans who had spread into every available niche and developed some complex, dense, and fascinating cultures.

I am, in essence, the Columbus of my planned project. I'm exploring the continent of self-sufficiency: it's a place that many people, both past and present, have spent their entire lives. Unlike Columbus, I am fully aware that the place I am exploring isn't new, uncharted territory, and I am not going to plant my flag claiming that I own it. My goal isn't to conquer anyone, give them smallpox, or look for their vast, fabled cities of gold so that I can dismantle them.

So, maybe I'm not Columbus after all. I'm more like an anthropologist (shocking revelation, that). A visitor from a culture based in the consumption of mass-produced products, here to learn about the noble savages of self-sufficiency and to produce an ethnography that records and preserves the quest. The journey!

Tangent A: And so this quest, like so many others, begins with the fool setting forth...
Tangent B: I vaguely remember someone quoting about the waves of conquest beginning with the explorers, followed by the missionaries, military, and merchants. And then the anthropologists. Perhaps I've got that wrong. In any event, I feel like there is something to delve there, even if I can't figure out what it is at present. Perhaps the notion that I will start out studying the culture of self-sufficiency and end up either try to sell it or evangelize it.

A few days ago, I was pondering tanning a deer hide and, in looking into it, I realized that there are several different avenues I might travel in attempting the process: urine, brains, tannins from acorns or bark, and - oddly - fells naptha soap. It's possible that there are other ways as well. It seems obvious, now that I have thought it through, that I need to make some decisions before I set out randomly to tan a hide. Choose one or more methods; decide if I want to experiment by splitting a hide and testing different methods at the same time, or if I want to focus on one method; learn whether the final intent for the hide - what I will do with the leather - should condition this choice; find a stretcher, or some trees between which I can stretch the hide; gather my tools and materials. Once all that is done, it'll be time to get going.

I have a tendency to jump into things feet first. It can produce some interesting and amusing results, but I think that this whole project will be more interesting - if less amusingly laughable - if I put the research before the experiments.

So... Research first. Most of the time.

If anyone reading this has some suggestions for books that would make interesting background research, please let me know.

Classwork:
I'm very lucky to live where I do right now: this is the perfect place to undertake my project because there are a lot of educational resources available on the topics in which I am interested.

To start with, I am planning to take some classes from a group called Cover over the coming months.

http://www.coverhomerepair.org/EducationProgram.htm

They have an educational program that includes instruction in some of the areas that interest me and are topical to this project: basic construction, refinishing furniture, electrical work, plumbing, and car repair. Obviously I won't become an expert in anything through a single class, but I'm such a novice that anything I learn is bound to be new, and I have a good chance at making connections to people who can point me in the directions of the next step.

I'm hoping to find similar classes on different topics that I'm including in this project: animal husbandry; beekeeping; sewing and/or clothing construction and repair; gardening and food preservation; local, edible, wild plants; and the hunting and processing of meat. To name a few. I'm going to lay out the individual project goals in a different post.

In some cases, I'm going to be better served by simply finding one person who is familiar with a task and asking them to teach me one-on-one or as a member of a group. Even if it isn't formalized, it will still fall under the heading of classwork. There are a lot of people in our area who have specific and interesting sorts of knowledge and I hope to track them down and get them to open up and teach what they know. Strengthening community and learning about the personal histories of the people who work with me are also among my goals, and I think informal teaching is going to be a way to accomplish those aims.

I also have a vaguely nascent idea about going out and finding out what would be taught in a high school-level shop or home economics class and putting something together based on that. Maybe even try to get some grades. I always worked harder for good grades.

Projects:
This process is all about achieving some level of proficiency in necessary tasks, so it would be largely pointless to stop at the theoretical without delving deeply into the practical. I could write all day about gardening, but until I actually dig a garden and grow some food, I haven't really demonstrated whether I'm capable of providing for myself. I'm going to (attempt to) demonstrate my capabilities through projects.

I mentioned above that I am coming up with individual project goals related to self-sufficiency. I'm going to elaborate more on them in a separate post (largely because I haven't come up with all of them yet - I think they'll be better after I do some research...) but my basic idea is to plan projects of increasing complexity to try and accomplish them over the course of a year (more or less).

For example, in regards to construction, I'm going to be working in the immediate future on some (presumably) easy garden boxes to use as raised beds in the spring. I also want to work on setting something up so that, in the future, if I get a shot at processing a deer hide, I'll have a place to stretch it. There are a few pieces of furniture that I need for the house and would like to take a shot at (a futon frame, for example) but that's a bit down the road from where I am now. Our landlord is sounding like she is going to allow us to get ducks, and we'll have to build some sort of duck shed. Eventually, I'd like to be able to build the kids a tree house. I think, in general, these projects build upon each other and, once I've gotten some classwork out of the way, I should be able to tackle them over time.

Now, obviously, I'm not going to become a master woodcrafter in the course of a year. Especially while I am also darning socks and digging a garden... and doing all the other stuff that I do in life (like checking Facebook and child care). But the goal isn't to become a skilled artisan in each of these crafts - it is to lay a foundation for doing them on my own. I started this post out by saying that - because of my husband's job - I never know where I might be three years ahead. And it's true that I don't. But, even with that uncertainty, I don't want this process to be something I pick up and try out for a year and then forget. I want these to be foundation skills that I continue to build on throughout my life. So, yes, I am aware that - in a year - I won't be an expert anything. I'll just be a more accomplished Jack-of-all-trades. Or, possibly, a Jack-of-more-trades-than-at-present. That's the goal. Not mastery.

So, you can expect a post that is a bit more specific, and that will have more information on a wider variety of topics, soon. For now, just be aware that I'll eventually write quite a bit about what happens when I put hammer to nail, spade to garden, tomato to can, and so forth. This is not the sort of project where theoretical knowledge alone will do. It's about becoming proficient.

Writing:
I think it would be interesting to learn to practice self-sufficiency whether or not I was sharing my journey. The skills are the primary goal.

That said, writing about the process, sharing it with others who are interested, comes in at a close second.

When I started college, I was an English major. When asked (as I often was) about what I wanted to do with my life, I would usually reply: "I want to be a writer." And it was true. I wanted to write.

So I got to college, registered as an English major, got a brand new computer, sat in front of the computer, and...

Nothing happened.

Sometimes I would write a couple of lines, or even a paragraph about something. Then I would go back and read it. It was terrible. So I would erase the whole thing and write some other lines - mostly similar but maybe sort of different. Then I would read those and erase them as well.

I couldn't come up with a single thing to write about. Even more confounding, I had no idea how one would even go about the process of writing something as big as an actual book. I had the desire, but I had nothing to say and no way to say it.

A year later, I was an anthropology major.
A move I assumed would end my (nonexistent) writing career.

Anthropology, however, gave me something to write about. I've now written, well, lots of stuff. Some of it long and ponderous, like tomes about studies of garbage in Yosemite. Some of it short and technical, like environmental compliance documents in Death Valley. Eventually, I started writing bits and pieces of fiction again and, while it is not a quick process for me, I have hope that I will finally manage the long, slow labor of delivering a story from my mind (where they exist in a relatively complete state) to a piece of paper.

I like to write. I don't know that I'm great, but I'm not bad, and I think that continuing to write and organize my thoughts on paper is an important process for becoming a better writer, whether of archeological reports or fantasy fiction.

Finally, as I've mentioned before, I have a lot of ideas that feel like the hold together as a related whole. Because I don't keep all my writing in one place - or even manage to get everything written down when I am thinking it - the ideas that I want to put together and examine as a whole seem to slip away before I can get a glimpse of the larger picture. I think that organizing them in the format of a blog is a way to pin them to a board, like an insect collection, and see if they actually do interrelate. I think that the topic I have chosen, skills for self sufficiency, will work well for getting all these ideas out in the clearing.

And, finally, I also think that this whole project is meant to be shared. It feels important to me and I hope that other people will find it important as well. I'd love to have comments, feedback, and discussion. A blog seems like a good format for all of that.

Whether or not it turns out to be, only time will tell. But it's nice to start out with optimism.