Nipples, Crochet Hooks, and 110 volts

Seven or eight years ago, my mother bought me a pair of lamps for my birthday. They're the kind that mount to the wall and swing out on an arm, and they're mounted on either side of our big sleigh bed. A month ago, the lamp on my side had begun flickering in an impertinent manner every time I turned it on. Finally, while sitting in bed reading one night last week, I noticed the carbon-y smell of burnt marshmallows and asked the Pirate if he smelled it. He didn't. I looked over at my lamp and went to shut it off when I realized that the entire fixture - the bit that the lightbulb screws into - was hot to the touch.

After turning the whole thing off and taking out the bulb, it became evident that it was in the process of shorting itself out, and the fixture was no good. The place where the bulb contacts the lamp proper was all carbonized and I knew that a new bulb would fare much the same, and probably even more quickly.

The Pirate offered to buy me a kerosene lamp and in fact ordered it, but after a couple of nights with candles as my bedside reading lamps, I realized it was no good. I wanted my old electric light back. Here's why: an electric lamp is a one-step thing. In the dark, you merely reach out and flick the switch and your entire room is illuminated. With non-electric lighting, first you have to find a flame. You can keep a lighter by your bed, but on a bedside table like mine you have no guarantee of finding it again once you've set it down. And once you've found a flame, you must then set it to your actual light source. In the case of kerosene lamps, you still have to wait five or ten minutes for the mantle to heat up before you can illuminate an entire room. If you have, say, accidentally poured the contents of your bedside water jug onto the floor, waiting ten minutes before you can be sure you've mopped it all up (and meanwhile giving it ample time to soak into the rug) is annoying.

Now that I know that I want my electric lamp back, my choices are these: 1) I can throw out this lamp and buy another one just like it. Difficult, because this type of lamp comes in sets of two. 2) I can buy a different lamp. While that's not a terrible idea, I like the look of the matching lamps, and I do insist that whatever I buy be mounted to the wall (see above comment about the obnoxiously crowded state of my bedside table). 3) I can fix the one I have.

I figured that I would at least take a poke at #3, since it was already dead and I couldn't hurt it any more. Worst-case scenario, I would declare the whole thing a loss and buy a new lamp and my bedroom will look as eclectic as the rest of my house. The word "eclectic" here means "nothing matches because I tend to buy furniture and dishes singularly when they're on sale."

I took the entire thing down from the wall and started trying to take it apart. The housing of the lamp consisted of two hollow metal tubes, fastened in the middle with an elbow that swung back and forth, and at the wall end with a similar connector that fastened it to the wall bracket. Here is a picture done by someone who's selling them, so it looks very nice. Behind the wall bracket bit was the part where the cord connected - the cord that plugged into the wall was a different cord than the one that went to the bulb. The two were fastened together with clever little connectors that you pushed the two wires into and snapped together.

I unconnected everything, but pulling the wire out of the lamp was tough - the part that had been connected to the bulb was all melty and the cord was stuck. It took pushing, pulling, prodding, and finally mangling one of my crochet hooks to pry the old cord out. What made it tough was what was going to make it tough putting it all back together - the fact that you have to make plastic coated wire go over a large number of sharp angles to get to its final destination.

The Pirate went to the hardware store, and for less than ten bucks got all the stuff we needed - new lamp guts, a new bulb and new wire. It took us a few tries, but we finally wired it all up again and it's now working great. Yes, the first time I realized that I'd put the base on upside-down and that the cord would be coming out of the top, so I had to take that piece apart and put it back together. Yes, we realized after we'd got the lamp guts wired that we should have screwed the housing on first, and THEN wired the lamp guts within the housing, so we had to undo it and put it back together. Sure, once it was all back together we realized that one of the nipples was screwed in a little too far so that now we have a little plug that's supposed to cover a hole, but it won't fit because the nipple is in the way. That's okay. I read that you always have parts leftover after any DIY job, so I'm feeling that it's a marker of success. And I'll do with it what I do with all leftover parts. I'm putting it into that drawer in the kitchen where we have screws and rubber bands and plug adapters and twist-ties and felt feet for furniture and all those other odds and ends.

So, as with all of these projects, I now have a new skill. I've fixed an expensive lamp. That means that I've saved something from the landfill, and that I've kept from buying a new thing I didn't need to buy. YAY! The downsides are two: I'm going to have to take the Dremel to my mangled crochet hook if I ever want to use it again, and I'm now looking around my house at all the tchotchkes and thinking "What else can I make into a lamp?"

Hippies and Free Range Children

We just turned the electricity back on, but it was tempting not to. Something happened today that would have made Day Without Electricity worthwhile even if it were horrible: without being nagged into it, without even being ASKED, my kids went outside to play.

We're constantly bawling our kids out when they get rowdy in the house, telling them "Take it outside!" But normally, inside has movies and computer games and the phone, and it's just so tempting to stay in. We live in the middle of the redwoods on a beautiful creek, and my kids seem content to look at pictures of it.

Granted, today has been the first really fine day we've had in a while. We'd spent the morning running errands and knew that the sun was out, the air was warm with just a hint of breeze, and everything outside was in bloom. I was in my room trying to nap off a headache and heard the girls running outside. I went out there to see them sprawled in the driveway listening to music and playing with stuff. The little one came in just as dusk was settling over the mountain to ask whether tomorrow, she might be allowed to climb on the fallen trees over the creek. Allowed?! I think it'd be the coolest thing EVER!! (Don't worry - she's a great swimmer, and the creek is ~3 feet at its deepest.)

That was the best thing in the world. The second best thing was last night just after we'd turned the electricity off. I'd decided that, since it was dark, I wanted to finish the book I'd been reading, and encouraged the little kid to join me. We put the kerosene lamps in the bedroom, and Peaches, Badb and I sprawled on the bed while the Pirate sat on the floor finishing his book.

The closet takes up one entire wall of our small bedroom, and it has sliding mirror doors. When we moved here, I thought they were both ugly AND impractical, but now, I have discovered a new appreciation for them. When your sole source of light is one or more candles, anything that amplifies that light is welcome indeed. Suddenly, the hippie decor of candles and mirrors seemed quite sensible! I ended up tacking a piece of aluminum foil behind the kerosene lamp, and it worked beautifully as a reflector, upping the amount of light coming back into the room.

I'm still not a fan of the patchouli incense, though.

Earth Hour

I'm disappointed. I've been inundated for the past few days with reminders that this coming Saturday, people around the globe are celebrating Earth hour by turning your lights off for a single hour on a particular day of the year. To that I say "Where's your commitment? Put your money where your mouth is! Turn off your lights, your appliances - unplug everything and just give it all a rest!" But you, faithful readers, you know this.

The reason that I'm disappointed is this: we've discovered, in our Day Without Electricity experiments, that there are some minor adjustments to make in shutting down for one day a week. That there are tiny things to consider when shutting down all electricity to our house for 24 hours. But what's involved in just turning off the lights for an hour? It's not the "bold statement" that the marketers are trying to make you believe. It entails no re-thinking of choices, it calls for no sacrifice from anyone.

I challenge anyone who's jumping on the Earth hour bandwagon to challenge themselves to REALLY change things. It's not enough for companies like Coca-Cola to turn off their lights for an hour - they're turning the whole thing into a marketing event, handing out commemorative mass-produced flashlights to visitors to their plants so that we all know that they shut their lights off for an hour. They're spending more money and wasting more resources making sure that we know about their participation than they're saving by turning off the lights for an hour!

That's the problem with events like this. The fact that for any event you care to name, there's a guy out there trying to figure out how he can capitalize on it by getting you not just to buy into it, but to BUY it.

Don't buy it, guys. While you're sitting there in the dark, perhaps with other folks sitting in the dark, start talking. Talk about the fact that you're not sitting alone in your house, in your town, in your state - you're sitting on a planet with billions of other people who are all dependent on each other. The choices you make EVERY DAY impact the choices that other people in other parts of the world have. More for you, less for them. Is that the person you are? Is that the person you want to be?

Don't do it because some celebrity told you to. Don't do it because everyone else is doing it. For crying out loud, don't do it because someone's going to give you a flashlight or commemorative t-shirt. Do it because you know that it's the right thing to do. Then - keep on doing it!

More Lessons from DWE

Our second weekly Day Without Electricity was Sunday, 3/22, and it seems that every time we go through this exercise, we learn a few more things. What did we learn this time? Don't do it on Sunday.

Every time we turn off the electricity, we can see the spinning disk that counts up the kilowatt hours we're using slow down and stop. That's really gratifying. What's less visible is the way that anxieties and distractions similarly slow down and stop. Sure, my brain is working just as hard and fast as it ever was, but now it's on the problems I have right in front of me. Not some artificial, self-induced datacrisis that comes because there's drama on Facebook or not enough people are following me on Twitter. Usually, I'm faced with an actual problem like "How can I make an oven that works without electricity and isn't solar?" "How can I build a brick wall on a sloped surface using only the tools I have?" These problems require me to sit down and bring a lot of focus to bear - to look at the stuff I have available to me in new ways and be scrappy about solving my problems. Every time we do this, I end up asking myself "How much more can we do without?"

Here's another thing that happens. You can't charge anything. Sure, I can spend all Saturday listening to books in my iPod as I work, but by Saturday afternoon, it's dead. If I don't charge my phone Friday, it's dead by Saturday, so it's just as well to shut it off. And if you can't charge anything, things are dead and nothing tweets, beeps or pings at you. This means that Saturday morning, when my phone still has a charge and there's nothing else to distract me, is a great time to call my mother.

When you're not distracting yourself minute by minute with tiny things, time slows down. An hour spent talking with a family member, or a friend; an hour spent on a task (or two or three) is a long time. Longer than you probably need, but the luxury is that you have that time to take. It's beautiful.

Right now, the Pirate and I are working on the outside of our house. We've got three projects defined, and about half a dozen more sort of in the queue. These are all things that have needed doing for months if not years, but we just hadn't gotten around to them. It seems, though, that the simple act of turning off the electricity has slowed down time for us. Suddenly the time is there and these things are getting done.

It's sort of like a miracle. We've made a miracle.

But then...you have to turn it all back on. You have to speed back up and do everything with fewer cycles. You have to make the switch from one thing to another at the speed of packets moving across the ether. That's a tough switch to make all at once. When we did it last Saturday, and on previous Saturdays, we turned things back on Saturday night. We checked our email, we did our blog posts, we caught up on all our cyber-tasks and were back in the game bright and early Monday morning.

This time, the breakers all went back on at ~7 Sunday night, right in the middle of making dinner, getting everyone ready for the next day, trying to get to bed at a decent hour. We went to bed and woke up still half in that slower, more considered mindset, but there just wasn't time for it and it felt like it took forever for my brain to get up to speed this morning.

So, that was the lesson. That, and when I asked the Pirate "What bad thing would happen if we just never turned the power back on?" he was right there with the answer.

All of our frozen foods would melt, and we'd never be able to telecommute again.

Day Without Electricity - How It Went

Well, we've had another Day Without Electricity. The thought behind this is really because electricity is unreliable here (the lines are all above ground, we live on a windy, twisty road, and drunk people are attracted to power poles) and it's always good to know that when the supply is interrupted, your life isn't.

We were having pizza for dinner, so we decided to shut down after the pizza was done baking (our oven is electric). By 8:30, all the lights in the house were already out and the kerosene lanterns going. We'd shut down the UPS for the computers and I'd remembered to empty and turn off the ice maker. The Pirate went out and switched off the breakers, and he, Peaches and I settled in for pizza and a heated game of Super Munchkin. I won.

We turned out the kerosene lanterns and, carrying our individual candles in their brass holders (which are not only nice looking and make carrying easy, but also keep wax spots off the carpet and furniture), we brushed our teeth and went to bed.

Just before I fell asleep, I realized that my iHome alarm clock (which has a battery backup) was still set for 5:45am. That's fine for weekdays, but I like to sleep in until 7 on the weekends, so I tried to turn off the alarm, only to find out that while it's in battery mode, you can't really change its state. You can't reset the time or turn off any of the functions. Drat!

Got up Saturday and created the Big List of Chores. This is something we do every Saturday, and we write them on the dining room window with window markers. I must say, these things have become indispensable in my life. One entire wall of my house is windows, and it means that this surface is effectively a white board for lists, ideas, etc.

ANYWAY...we put on the grubbies and got to work. My chosen task was shifting a 9' x 3.5' stack of concrete tiles from next to the driveway to the side of house near the trash bins. We're hoping to use the area next to the driveway for more parking, and the concrete tiles had been creating an artificial wall that made the space less usable. The tiles are about 12" x 9" and weigh probably 4 pounds each. Not a big deal until you've stacked 15 of them into a wheelbarrow and pushed it uphill. Fifty times.

Meanwhile, the Pirate was finishing the terracing for the new garden, and putting drainage pipes in the terraces to divert the water from the terraces below. Peaches kept herself busy pulling weeds out of the bed along the asphalt path up to the house, including pulling out some French broom trees that were taller than she is.

I took a break in the middle of the day to host the Girl Scout cookie sale in front of the local supermarket. Ironic, considering that my own little Brownie was not in evidence. The other mother there told me that her husband had just been laid off. They were telling everyone they knew, because that's what one does when one has been laid off. You get the word out so that people can help you catch on somewhere else.

Eventually the topic drifted to Day Without Electricity, and she thought the idea really interesting. We then talked about things like home canning and keeping chickens - things that the Pirate and I do because they're fun and cool. We've learned a lot about how to preserve food, and I invited her over to learn how to can. I also turned her on to Freecycle (passing along the incredible gift given me by my friend Chia) where you can get stuff you need and pass along stuff you don't want. Finally, I told her about my own experiences with joblessness, and how they never lasted long (I hope I haven't jinxed myself, here). She went away feeling, I think, a little more hopeful about their situation.

I came home after the cookie sale and continued shifting the enormous pile of concrete and helping with the weeding. Our former neighbors were, it turns out, pigs. Peaches went up on the hillside to pick up the visible trash (it falls down from their property onto ours) and threw down a 2' x 3' wire cage (the kind you'd keep a rabbit or guinea pig in), all rusted and bent, innumerable pieces of plastic sheeting, bottles and cans, wrappers of all descriptions, and one ~12' piece of 1/2" rebar. Thanks guys! Nice of you to have left us something to remember you by!

The thing about being outside and doing all this work is that it calls out the need for doing MORE work. I want to build a retaining wall along the pathway leading to the house. I want to take out the grass in one bit, covering that ground with wood chips and putting in plants in barrels. There's so much to do, and when you don't have electricity and electronic things to distract you, it all becomes much more possible.

Afterward, we call came inside exhausted and filthy. The Pirate had been good enough to make us reservations at the hot tub place, and we all took some ibuprofen and headed out for some well-deserved relaxation. Peaches had her own tub room, and apparently fell asleep in it. Heh. Poor baby. Home again, home again to turn the breakers back on and go back to the world where the lights come on with a flick of a switch. The problem with that world is that they also go off with a flick of a switch, and we too often forget that second flick.

This exercise, as the last one, was very instructive. There were more lessons learned:

• Turn off the alarm clock BEFORE turning off the breakers


• Always have a fire going. Even when it's not cold in the house, there's always a need for heating - things like hot water for coffee, hot water for washing people and dishes, etc.


• We need to work out some kind of oven. One that can be used after dark, as well.

Before going to sleep Friday night, the Pirate and I had a long talk about our experiments of non-electricity. We've already made the infrastructure investments (kerosene lanterns, wood stove, cookpots that can double as dish sinks) to make some of this possible, but there are other things we can do to further our experiment.

Outdoor shower. I'd read somewhere about a cheap, DIY solar water heater, and was thinking that one of the things that goes down when you don't have power is the water heater, which has an electric ignition. The heat itself is propane, but without electricity, it never comes on. But without electricity, we tend to work outdoors more, and get really filthy and hot showers are, let's face it, GREAT. We thought of rigging up an outdoor shower, using this type of solar water heater. It will involve putting a new water barrel on the upstairs deck, and installing a hand pump so that we can pump water from Cistern Joseph-Ann (our 1100-gallon rainwater cistern) and let gravity feed it down through the solar coils. We've already got a pvc-pipe structure that the Pirate built for the blackberries, but they never really moved in. That could easily be adapted into a shower stall. The rest just involves being okay with standing outside the house naked.

The Pirate and I were talking about building the outdoor shower and about making other changes, and he said "Well, we can buy this and hook up that..." and I told him that I didn't want us to over-resource things just so that life without electricity would look and feel exactly like life *with* electricity. What I wanted was for us to adapt our life to the resources available.

The latest issue of Ode Magazine has an interview with British journalist Nick Rosen who argues that the concept "green" has been co-opted by every product manufacturer in the world, and is now doing more harm than good. Remember "reduce, reuse, recycle"? Products that use slightly less packaging or are made with renewable resources like bamboo are still manufactured products that their makers are encouraging you to buy, rather than going without, repurposing something you already own or re-fabricating components of old things. As long as a package says "green" on it, people will buy it and feel smug about it.

I found myself feeling that this guy was voicing what I've been thinking for a long time. If society is to survive, people have to stop consuming ready-made goods and start learning to make for themselves. While it sounds preachy, it's just not as hard as people think. To that end, the Pirate and I have decide on an experiment. For the next few months, EVERY Saturday is going to be a Day Without Electricity. The breakers go off around sundown Friday night, and come back at sundown Saturday night. It'll be interesting to see what lifestyle adjustments we end up making, how much progress we make on those things that require long, uninterrupted bouts of work, and (and this is not at all inconsiderable) how much we save on our electric bill. Our electricity (and very likely yours too) is billed on a graduated scale. You pay a smallish amount per kilowatt hour for the first few kilowatt hours, a slightly larger amount for the next few, and so on. The more you use, the more you pay per kilowatt hour. This means that for each kilowatt hour you DON'T use, you're saving money off the top of the fee scale. Assuming that there are 4 Saturdays in a month, and that the month is 30 days, shutting of the power on Saturdays means we're using 13.3% less electricity. The experiment will prove what that means in terms of dollars saved.

The last thing I want to say is that, while having a smaller carbon footprint and being more environmentally conscious and saving money are all really good things, there is something even more immediately valuable. By Friday afternoon, the Pirate and I were grouchy from a long, stressful week. I was ill for much of last week, and the Pirate has been not only working on a big, involved project at the office, but picking up the slack for me. We've both been feeling fragile, needy and stressed. By Friday, I was pointing out that our habits of staying plugged in 24/7 - his obsessively checking his work email after hours, my phone constantly announcing my friends' Twitter updates, etc. - weren't helping. The more info you get, the more you begin to think that you need it. You start twitching with the constant, nagging feeling that somewhere, somehow, you're missing something important. The irony is that the important thing that you're missing is YOUR OWN LIFE. That thing that's happening around you while you're plugged into your computer/phone/Wii.

By this morning, the Pirate and I are feeling as though we've had a week's vacation. Calm. Happy about our achievements. On better emotional footing. And I attribute it all to shutting off the constant stream of information and attending to what is in front of us.

It would be great if other people participated in this with us. I could just see everyone in my little town shutting off their breakers on Friday nights. In fine weather, we can walk downtown and visit with one another. In less fine weather, we can meet at each other's houses and drink mulled wine from the ever-present pot on the fire. Or we can just stay in, reading our favorite books by the light of our little candles. I predict that if everyone did this, widespread happiness and contentment might just be the result.

Gosh! What if THAT happened?!

Day Without Electricity (Again)

We'd gotten out of the Day Without Electricity habit, and I realized a few things:

• If I let them, Twitter and Facebook will swallow up my entire life
  
• I get more done when I'm unable to distract myself with SHINY, BLINKY LIGHTS


• The kinds of things I do without electricity are fundamentally more satisfying to my soul than the ones I do with it

"Wait!" I hear you cry. "What about writing?" I would remind you that I have been capable of writing without electricity since before home computers were a thing. I have a wide variety of writable surfaces and writing instruments. I'm set, thanks.

Someone asked me what the "rules" were for Day Without Electricity, and while I hadn't really codified any, now might be a good time:

1. Day Without Electricity extends from sundown of one day to sundown of the next day (much like a Jewish holiday). This means that it spans 24 hours, ~9 of which are nighttime, but doesn't require staying up unreasonably late (and in fact encourages getting to bed early)


2. It means turning off the breakers to the house. This means that any critical system (like the heater for the hen house in winter) can stay on, while the rest of it goes. Yes, even the fridge. If you don't open it overmuch, your food will stay perfectly well in the fridge for 24 hours. As we observed before, though, if you have an icemaker, empty it first. You'll be glad you did.


3. You can use your gas stove if it doesn't have an electric ignition system. Same for your water heater.


4. You can use your car. Make "Day Without Gasoline" some other day.


5. Consider this as a drill for a future time when electricity is not guaranteed. Take notes of things you might change. (Would you buy an older, corded phone? A rotary egg beater? Learn to play ukulele?)


6. You MUST spend some of Day Without Electricity at home. Enjoy the quiet. Get to know your family. Play a board game or read to one another. Merely leaving home for 24 hours really doesn't count.

I'm sure there are more rules, but I don't think this is about rules. I don't want to be the kind of person who insists she's more "authentic" than someone else. This is about cutting back a little on your carbon footprint. About acknowleging that at any time, your lifestyle might change drastically. About being more present in your life. It would be cool if more people could do it and post about their experiences!

Bird Watching

My kid has a friend named Autumn. That's perfectly precious, but Autumn has a brother named Odin. Autumn and Odin have 4 other siblings, including Indigo. I love this family.

ANYWAY. That is NOT the subject of this post. The subject of this post is that one of Odin's classmates is moving rather suddenly, and they're having to give up their chickens. I told Odin's mother we'd at least foster the chickens and find new homes for them. I didn't hear and didn't hear, then got a call from the guy. I tried calling him back, and again, nothing for days.

Turned out, he was moving his family back to SoCal in stages and so just wasn't home (where I'd been calling) for days at a time. Finally, today, we went out to the house after he and his family had left. It was weird to go to some strange person's house after dark and carry their livestock out, putting them under a tarp in the back of the truck.

It's cold here, and windy. I kept admonishing the Pirate to drive more slowly, worried that the cold wind under the tarp would stress the chickens out and kill some of them. Luckily, they all made it here just fine. Peaches and the Pirate unloaded the new chickens while I put the Badb to bed. Chewbeet had to let the new roosters know that he is The Man.

One of the new chickens is a cochin (they have mukluks), and a couple are bantams of different breeds. There are some araucanas, and some that are a dark auburn and black that I'll have to look up. From what we found in the henhouse, some are white egg layers.

Sadly, we don't have enough room to keep them all. We can keep 20, but the rest HAVE to go. If you know of anyone who's interested, by all means, email!