Wine Corks

Day 252: Wine Corks

We don't drink wine, or at least not much. We never have more than a bottle on hand; the bottle we have now is from weeks ago, the last time we had guests for dinner. If we do open it, it's unlikely we'll finish it. After a few days, it will become cooking wine. I think it's okay to get rid of these five wine corks. We still have three prettier ones in the cupboard. 

Emma Jane says I'm grasping at straws.

Casserole DIsh

Day 251: Casserole Dish

Sometimes when you let something go, it comes back. Today Emma Jane is coming back, at least for Thanksgiving. I'm leaving in a half an hour.

And so we kick off the holidays. It seems an apropos time to get rid of a casserole dish. I got this one as a free gift with a Bank of America savings account I opened in San Francisco in 1987. I've used it very little ever since my sister handed down a set of retro Corningware to us a few years ago. Getting rid of this will open up a little space in our cupboard.

Food is the theme for the coming days. The holidays certainly provide much food for thought. If anyone would like to guest blog during this time, I would welcome hearing your voices about stuff and the holidays!

Whistle

Day 250: Whistle

I read an interesting article in the New York Times about people who visit every Disney park. There are fourteen, in places as far flung as Tokyo, Paris, and Orlando.

The article was surprisingly relevant to the stuff project. It quoted a professor at Oxford, author of "Understanding Fandom, who said that people love to collect, and that "obsessive niche travel" (as he called it) is a form of collecting.

Question: is getting rid of one thing every day for a year a form of collecting experiences? Now there's a paradox. Almost on a par with Spock speaking to his younger self in the most recent Star Trek movie.

I'll take it even deeper. Some people collect the experience of collecting experiences. Like A.J. Jacobs, who wrote The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible AND The Know-It-All: One Man's Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World AND My Life as an Experiment: One Man's Quest to Improve Himself AND Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Quest for Bodily Perfection. A.J. (the recipient of the only fan letter I've ever written - and he answered!) actually transformed himself and his life for each of these experimental years, at great cost to himself and his family. In The Year of Living Biblically, he never shaved his beard for God's sake! (Get it? For God's sake?)

A.J. Jacobs was the inspiration for this blog. His agent even said she might be interested in helping me find a publisher for a memoir about this year. I'm not sure how that will pan out. So far nothing I've done is cutting anywhere near as deep as not using zippers and stoning adulterers. Even so, I've fantasized about what my next resolution will be after I finish this project. My current idea: a year of whole foods. So maybe collecting experiences is addicting, like the professor said.

A clinical psychologist in the article speculated that obsessive niche travel fulfills the need to feel superior. Do I feel superior? I hope not. That would be against my own religion, such as it is. We Unitarians-Universalists believe first in the worth of every human being, and second in justice, equity and compassion. Feelings of superiority are to be guarded against.

One obsessive niche traveler (i.e., somebody who was aiming to visit all the Disney parks) talked about completion anxiety: once you've invested a certain amount of time and effort in an endeavor, you don't want to cheapen it by giving up. Well, on day 249, with nothing but a whistle to give away, I can certainly relate to that.

Completion anxiety. Yeah.

Rain Barrel

Day 249: Rain Barrel
Do rain barrels really help reduce storm water runoff? Based on how instantaneously mine fill up, my guess is, no. It's certainly common wisdom that rain barrels represent green storm water management practices, but how much rain can mine be keeping out of the system if they fill up after ten minutes of heavy rainfall? And if it's a wet season like this last year - when reducing runoff might be especially useful - I won't be emptying it out before the  next rain because I don't have much need to water the garden.

As with so many other things, it seems I'm wrong. Preliminary EPA research indicates that rain barrels do help reduce runoff, by as much as 20%, in areas where at least 50% of the neighbors have them. They have the added advantage of giving my garden high acid water instead of high alkaline water, which my plants like because many of them are exotic ornamentals (yes, I admit it!), not bred for our high alkaline soil. This is like a Robert Parker rating of 98, only the price doesn't shoot up.

Using rain water in the garden also reduces the waste of clean potable water. Many rain barrels are simple repurposing of shipping containers that would otherwise become part of the waste stream. In short, there's really no downside to it.

However, this rain barrel is not doing anybody any good. See the gaping seam on the side? I bought from Whole Foods for $60 and liked it so much more than the $50 kit I bought from TJ at the botanical gardens. It's a nicer color. I should have known that anything TJ built would be a thousand times sturdier than an old olive container. TJ's rain barrels are made from soda syrup containers and don't have seams; that is the key difference.

Lesson learned: do not choose garden tools based on color.

Fish Wind Sock

Day 248: Fish Wind Sock
Our fish wind sock is a tiny little contributor to the trade deficit with China. We bought it on our first trip back to San Francisco after we moved to Ann Arbor. It has been a friendly placemaker on our front porch for many years, a point of reference and a bright spot. Such things aren't sturdy; one expect them eventually to become tattered and tossed away, like Kleenex in a pocket.

The U.S. Trade Overview by the Department of Commerce surprised me. I was surprised that the U.S. is the largest exporter of services in the world, and the second largest exporter of goods. The trade imbalance is improving. Exports comprise 30% of our GDP and support over 11M jobs. All that is quite different from the trade imbalance news that I'm accustomed to hearing, which generally pits the U.S. specifically against China. The U.S. Census, for example, reports the 2014 trade imbalance with China at $251B.

I am not an economic analyst, but all this raises a question in my mind about the usefulness of comparing two countries. Is international trade an arm wrestling match, with high stakes and a single winner? Or is it trick-or-treating, where the kids with the most motivation, the greatest speed and the latest curfew collect more candy, but everybody comes home with something in their plastic jack-o-lantern? No doubt, a smaller bucket of candy doesn't make a story.

Another interesting thing: the top three U.S. exports in 2013 were machinery, electronic equipment and mineral fuels. China's are electronic equipment, machinery and knit clothing. I picture shipping boats loaded with flat screen televisions passing each other in the Doldroms while the Chinese crank up the heat and Americans make do with warm sweaters.

Plastics ranks high on both the lists, and I suppose our nylon fish wind sock falls into that category. It's made of polymers anyway, just like plastics. I have often thought of Chinese factory workers making strange plastic items for export to the U.S. and other places. Now that I know plastics are big export items for both the U.S. and China, I'll need to expand my imagination to include U.S. assembly-line workers manufacturing little plastic bits that will disperse through the world like fireworks.

Speaking of which. Fourth of July fireworks may seem as American as the National Anthem, but 93% of our patriotic firecrackers are made in China.

Bird House

Day 247: Bird House

Winter is a pleasant thing when you work for a botanical garden and arboretum. Where before, you would grumble about gray skies and cold temperatures, now you welcome the long vistas, visible now with the leaves fallen from the trees. Where before, you would complain about all the things you couldn't do in the winter, now you welcome the things you can do. I don't mean things like cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, although of course those are fun too. I mean seeing for the first time a wasp's nest revealed in the upper branches of an oak tree you've passed a thousand times, like invisible ink under a flame. Or robins flocking like an extended family gathered for the holidays. Or animal tracks, crisscrossing the landscape like quilting.  Before, you thought winter lasted a full six months, starting at the first snowfall and continuing all the way through April. Now, you realize that autumn continues until the last leaves fall in December: you still have carrots and kale buried under the snow and organic matter for compost, if only the city hadn't stopped picking it up. Spring begins in February, when the first skunk cabbage pokes up through the wetland ice, a joyous harbinger in the chilly landscape.

Part of this, of course, is your co-workers. Usually it's right around Valentine's Day when the all-staff emails start coming. Somebody glimpsed the scarlet flash of a redwinged blackbird. The chickadees and cardinals are starting to sing. The stems of the red osier dogwood are bright red, almost glowing against the gray landscapes. The sap is running: somebody comes in with homemade maple syrup.

Birdwatching is excellent in the winter, birds bright as confetti and quick as falling water. Sam and I made this birdhouse years ago, in my dad's woodshop in the UP, out of scraps and hinges. No birds ever moved into it. We tried widening the hole with a two-inch drill bit - it was sized for sparrows - but with nothing for the bit to bite, the widening didn't take. It's been sitting outside on the ground for a few years, a disintegrating reminder of a pleasant afternoon many seasons past. My winter garden, with its seedy coneflower and swaying grasses, attracts birds better than any built object.

Bring on the cold. I'm ready.

Community High Jazz Band Treasurer Volunteer Job

Day 246: Community High Jazz Band Treasurer Volunteer Job

Silly me. I thought this would be a good year to expand my circle of acquaintances - and my professional contacts - by raising my hand for a couple of volunteer jobs. With Emma leaving for college and Sam getting a driver's license, I imagined that I would have a lot of free time on my hands. I picture sitting around at home, long empty evenings with nothing to do but feel a little empty, like a shallow pond at the end of a hot dry summer.

So I agreed to two things. I would serve on the board of directors of a small private K-8 alternative school, and I would be the treasurer of the Community High Jazz Band.

All this before I knew the University would hand me an entire second job as administrative director of another unrelated unit, a job that could very easily itself be a full-time job. I'm not complaining. I like challenge, and learning new things, solving new problems, helping people and getting to know them. But like any new job, it's tiring. Like speaking French for a day or a week or a month in Paris, before something clicks in your brain and all of a sudden, you understand passing comments on the street and telephone conversations and you are thinking and dreaming in another language. But before then, man oh man, you are tired. Nothing sounds better than a trip across the Channel and a conversation in your native tongue.

The Community High Jazz Band treasurer turned out to be so much more than I had thought. Not just reconciling a checkbook, but creating a system for collecting RSVP's on a major spring trip to music camp, then collecting, depositing and tracking parent payments, and addressing financial aid needs for the parents, and fundraising for scholarships to support the half dozen kids who need help to be able to attend.

To add insult to injury, Sam dropped out of jazz band before the school year even started. The kid plays the stand-up bass (very well, I might add). The program director is a saxophonist with a deep and abiding passion for Charlie Parker. Sam got assigned to learn one Charlie Parker solo too many. No doubt Charlie Parker is a master, but there are a thousand outstanding stand-up bass solos that will bring tears to your eyes. Learning a Charlie Parker saxophone solo on the stand-up bass is more like a hazing ritual.

I stuck with the treasurer role, though. I didn't want to leave the teacher in the lurch. I said I'd do it, and I wanted to follow through. But I began to realize it was too much. I set about accomplishing some intermediate steps - collecting the last of the initial payments, creating a fundraising team - and then I solicited among the parents for a new treasurer. I've got the last check in an envelope now, ready to go to the bank tomorrow. The parent board has voted, I've transferred the account signing privileges to the new treasurer and shared the last Google docs.

Nobody stepped forward to volunteer to be the fundraising chair. I won't give up on the fundraising until I know the money will be raised. $2,500. I believe that all the kids who want attend should be able to, regardless of how much money their parents have. Compared with the $2.5 million I'm trying to raise for a hiking-biking trail along Dixboro Road, I should have no problems.

RIght?