Little Green House in the Town on the Prairie

Even though I hadn’t been on a bicycle for (gulp) probably eight years, I hopped right on my new bike and took off. Like my dad would say, I rode like the wind. I guess it turns out that riding a bicycle is just like, erm, riding a bicycle. Hey! That’s where they get that saying.

Yup, I got a new bike. I couldn’t hold out for a good find at a garage sale. So instead, I bought a new one at a bike shop. I love it! (Picture of me on it coming soon!)

Today I even took two carbon emission-free trips to do a few errands. The first time I rode to the bakery and picked up a loaf of bread. (I stretched out the quarter mile trip to about a mile and a half because it was so fun.) Then this evening, I rode to the grocery store to pick up a few things for Ryan’s work lunches this weekend.

On the way back from the grocery store, I saw something that made me very sad. There was a small herd of cattle gathered near a fence at the side of the road. I was just chatting away with them (yeah, I’m weird, I know) when I noticed that one of them was chowing down on a plastic grocery bag. I stopped to try to coax it away from her, but as soon as I stopped the bike they took off running. So anyway, I just saw your cheeseburger eating a bag. How gross is that?

Out in the backyard, exciting things are happening. Our potato plants are growing nice and tall, and the corn, peas, and beans have all popped up. No sign of any carrots yet, and we’ve given up on the onions ever sprouting, so we’re going to go and buy some bulbs to plant.

And the willow house is budding out!!! This is super exciting for me. Once it gets a bit more impressive I’ll snap some pictures of it for the blog.

Back to the subject of bicycles, here is an inspiring page with pictures of Dutch people riding bikes. I love the pictures of all the women in heels and skirts, with kids piled all over their bikes looking extremely bored. It makes me feel good about my plan to pile my own children all over my bike and ride around town in flip-flops.

I’m drooling over these bakfietsen. They are a Dutch cargo bike that can hold two to three children, groceries, and whatever else you can think of to cram in there. The difference between a bakfiets (It’s pronounced BAHK-feets and is Dutch for box bike) and most cargo haulers is that instead of putting the kids in a low trailer behind the bike, they are right in front of the handlebars.

How cool is that? Unfortunately, the price pushes them a tad out of my price range. How much, you ask? Oh, a mere $3,000…plus shipping from Portland, Oregon, the only location in the US that sells these bikes. And since my price range is roughly $2,800 less than that, I guess I’m just out of luck.

But I do want to get a bike and start running my errands on my own power. We only have one car, and it would be very handy to have a second “vehicle.” I’ve decided that since I can’t have the fancy awesome Dutch bike, I want an old school retro bike. Something like this:

So I’m going to be scouring garage sales this spring, in search of the perfect (and cheap!) vintage bike. They just don’t make things like this anymore, anyways, if they do, they don’t sell it at Walmart in the bike section. Besides, buying used is always a green thing to do!

This is a question that was posed by an online friend of mine. And lately, it kind of seems like it is.

First we’ve got the biggies, that we’ve been hearing about for awhile: global warming, crazy high gas prices. We’ve got the tanking economy, with real estate prices in the pooper, the lousy exchange rate of the U.S. dollar. Now the food shortage. Sam’s Club and Costco are both putting a limit on how much rice people can buy. I look into my nearly bare cupboards and feel a little uneasy.

Now, I’m not panicking. I’m not rushing out with the shovel to dig a fallout shelter in the backyard. Yet.

But seriously, when is it going to end? Was I just oblivious as a kid or what? Was I just trotting around in the 80s, swinging my Strawberry Shortcake lunch pail in one hand and Cabbage Patch Doll in the other, completely unaware of things going on in the world? Because I do not remember the kind of natural disasters and money worries that we are seeing today.

Even in high school in the 90s, when I was slightly more cognizant of my surroundings, I don’t remember this kind of thing. Earthquakes in the Midwest, hurricanes nearly wiping out major cities, busy bridges collapsing…I just don’t remember any of it.

I’m sure a quick Googling would tell me all I need to know about what I missed when I was paying more attention to the cute boy in English class than I was to the morning news. But I’m not going to bother. I know that no matter what happened back then, all I need to worry about is what’s going on today. I have my kids to think about, and damn if I’m not worried about what’s happening to the entire world.

I don’t want to start hoarding food, because I’m afraid that we would be adding to the shortage. However, I do think that I’m going to keep at least a small stockpile of non-perishable food on hand. Not just in case all hell breaks loose and horrible things start happening (more earthquakes, terrorists attacks, George W. being re-re-elected to the presidency) but also for more mundane reasons: job loss, food price hikes, unexpected cravings of Spam and canned pears.  

In any case, by keeping food in stock, I’ll save trips to the grocery store. And that’s green, right?

That’s right, garage sale time! I absolutely love going to garage sales. I like holding my own slightly less, but this year, I’m really looking forward to it. Today we started The Big Purge.

I sorted through mountains of baby clothes, and I now have four massive garbage bags full of clothes that will go in the sale. I sorted through all of our kitchen stuff, went through both Ryan’s and my clothes, and have an enormous pile of baby paraphernelia in the bedroom, all ready to be sold in one fell swoop on the front lawn.

I’m a little overwhelmed at deciding on prices for everything. I don’t want to overprice anything, but I want to get my money’s worth, too! How much do you charge for a onesie? A crib? A maternity shirt? Gak! It’s too many numbers! Math was never my strong suit.

We’re basically trying to scale down most of our belongings so that we can fit into our tiny little dream home, which doesn’t exist yet. Once the house is less bloated, we’ll be calling our real estate agent to come over and tell us how much our house is (or isn’t) worth. This is what I’m most nervous about. I’m terrified that we won’t be able to sell the house for enough to get out of here, and we’ll be stuck in the house indefinitely. Blast you, crappy housing market!!!

Do you want to know what the toughest thing was about our Earth Day Experiment? Staying away from the computer! I swear, I’m addicted to the Internet. A ‘Netaholic, you might say. There’s this episode of South Park, in which everyone in town loses their Internet connection. People start freaking out since they can’t check their e-mail, purchase books from Amazon.com, or look stuff up on Wikipedia. One of the characters, Randy Marsh, suffers from a cough and fever, but since he can’t get on WebMD, he doesn’t know what’s wrong with himself. Anyway, that’s kind of how I felt on Earth Day, staring at the black computer screen. Erm…I think it’s probably a good thing I shut it off for a day.

Other than the withdrawals I suffered from the ‘Net, our experiment went pretty well. We even walked instead of driving to the bakery  to buy bread, and while we were there, we ate some of the most delicious sub sandwiches we’ve ever eaten in our lives. Yum! Well worth the long walk. In fact, we think we’ll make that walk a little more often.

Of course, later that evening, Ryan was invited to a baseball game. So they drove to The City, totally negating anything we’d done earlier in the day. But I suppose since it was the first ball game he’d been to since he was ten, he was entitled to go.

All in all, it was a really great experiment. Next year, we might try to go even farther with it, and completely do without any electricity at all.

Where we live, trains go roaring through no less than twenty times a day. They clog up the crossings, and in my mom’s town, when a train is across the tracks there is no way out of town.

The trains do nothing for our communities anymore. We can’t travel by them, they don’t deliver goods to us, and they don’t take goods from our towns.

The other day, my parents, husband, and I were all doing our usual complaining about how obnoxious the trains are through town. We all said we’d find them much more agreeable if they benefited our community in some way. Because my mom lives in a teeny tiny towns, thirty minutes drive from the nearest large grocery store or shopping of any kind, and gas prices are sooooo incredibly painful right now, we all thought it would be awesome if they had passenger cars on the trains.

How nice would it be to be able to hop on a train and go shopping? The trains pass right through the towns anyway. If enough people would actually use it, it might really cut down on the number of cars on the road. Plus, it would be a lot of fun.

Because tomorrow is Earth Day, Ryan and I decided we needed to do something to celebrate. Planting a tree is done to death, so we want to do something a little different. We’ve decided that we aren’t going to use any electricity (with a few exceptions) or drive anywhere.

Our exceptions to the electricity rule are: the refrigerator, the fans we run for white noise while the kids sleep, and Ryan’s radio. He’s agreed to give up television and his PlayStation for the day, but he just can’t live without the radio.

We’ll turn everything back on tomorrow night so I can get back on the computer and update how our experiment goes. I imagine it will be interesting!

We’ll also be wearing our new eco shirts. Yes, they were bought from the Evil Megastore. But they are made with transitional cotton, which means they were grown with no pesticides or fertilizers. The cotton is grown in fields in transition from regular farming practices to organic fields. My shirt says, “Endangered Species” and has a stick figure of a human. Ryan’s says, “Save the planet. It’s the only one with beer.” The kids both have shirts, too. They say things like, “Little Treehugger” and “Save my planet!”

Today we planted the rest of our garden. We already had potatoes and onions in the ground, and today we planted corn, carrots, green beans, and peas. Of course, Ryan is watching the news as I type, and they just reported a possibility for frost later this week. DOH! I hate midwestern weather.

During World War II, the American people rationed everything from gasoline to meat to clothing. They gathered up scrap metals, planted Victory Gardens and made do with what little they already had. They found bizarre uses for strange objects, such as saving waste fat from cooking for bombs. They sacrificed car bumpers, started car sharing clubs, and gave up travel.                                                  

They did this because the world was in crisis. They sacrificed so the soldiers could have more. Americans at home were as much a part of the war effort as the soldiers in Europe.

Why can’t we do this now? Not for the War in Iraq, but for our world, our environment, in crisis? What our world is facing today is far more serious than any war we’ve ever faced in the past. We’re facing complete and utter extinctinction of the entire human race.

Does that sound far-fetched? Paranoid? Fear mongering?

I don’t think so. I’m not talking today, tomorrow, or even one hundred years from now. But if we keep consuming at the current rate, it will happen, and probably sooner than we think.

Look at the facts. Remember that plastic island in the Pacific Ocean I talked about a few weeks ago?

Plastic was invented in the 186os. It only came into popular use in the 1920s, and has grown since then. It’s now nearly impossible to buy anything, from clothes to food to toys to vehicles, that aren’t made in some part from plastic. So in less than a century, we’ve created a massive continent of plastic in our oceans, filled our landfills, and poisoned our bodies.

Of course, plastic is just the tip of the ice burg, so to speak. The little things we do every day: turn on a light, fill our cars with gasoline, and take a shower…they all have a big impact on our planet.

We can all save and conserve all we want, but until our government steps behind us and forces big corporations to do the same, we won’t see any big changes. Sounds depressing doesn’t it? Does it make you want to give up? Put regular light bulbs back in your sockets? Throw out your shopping bags and answer “plastic” when asked the predictable question at the grocery store? Quit recycling?

I certainly hope not. That’s not my intention! Because without the little people doing these small efforts, we won’t inspire our leaders to make their own sacrifices. To inspire them to stop thinking only about money, and to start thinking about a real future for our world.

Our government has inspired us to do without before, and we were happy to do it. Why won’t they get behind the scientists and environmentalists and do it again? No, they are too busy encouraging us to get out there and spend, spend, spend. There has to be an solution to our environmental problem that doesn’t involve simultaneously killing our economy.

We have to do something NOW. We all need to work together. We’re all on the same team here! There is no evil Gestapo doing this to us, we’re doing it to ourselves. We won’t find the perpetrator hiding out in a cave, and we can’t solve the problem by blowing things up. We CAN do it, I know we can.

Life appeared on earth four hundred million years ago, and in only two centuries of industrialization, we’ve poisoned our world. We’ve filled our skies with smog, rivers with pollution, and drained many of our resources. What could we possibly do if given another two hundred years?

(This post was inspired by my mom and a discussion we had about the WWII rationing. Thanks a lot, Mom!)

My blog gets several hits each day from people searching for information on small houses. In fact, this has surpassed ‘making butter’ as the top search term that leads people to my page.

It looks like I’m just jumping on another trend here, the trend of downsizing. I’m certainly in good company. It seems that with the current economy, with people losing their homes left and right, and paying out the ear for gas and milk, that people just can’t afford that McMansion in the suburb, and even if they can afford it, they are done with it. They are done with the old American Dream of a hefty mortgage payment to pay for that four bedroom home with the postage-sized yard and wall-length television set.

No, the new American Dream is owning your own home-actually OWNING your own home- rather than paying the bank to let you live there.

Ryan and I have been talking every single day since we came up with the idea about our small house. We talk about exactly what we want: a small private bedroom for us, big enough for a king-sized bed; a small kitchen with a large pantry; enough room for a washer and dryer. But mostly what we talk about is the land we want to build it on. We want about five acres, preferably with water already nearby. We want trees, and maybe even a little creek. We’d like it to be near town, but secluded enough to feel private.

Obviously, this isn’t going to happen over night. It could be years off down the road, but I truly hope not.

Some people have expressed concern about how we’ll manage living in a such a small house. What will we do? My answer is, “Whatever we want.” With a smaller mortgage payment, we’ll be able to afford to go places, so we won’t have to stay at our house all the time. We’ll play outside more. Of course, I don’t think it will be difficult to manage. Our current house may be 1200 square feet, but the four of us can generally all be found in our 10 x 12 third bedroom, which we use as a family room.

Our first step towards this move is a garage sale. As soon as the weather cooperates, we’re having a massive garage sale to get rid of a ton of stuff. We currently have a garage so full that we can barely pull our car into it, and a master bedroom that has so many outgrown baby items stacked around it that there is just a path from the door to the bed.

After that…well, I suppose we’ll see what comes next!

My mom called me up this morning to tell me about a song she had listened to. It’s a country song by Alabama, so the likelihood of me running across it on my own was pretty much nil. But after reading the lyrics, I really like the message. It’s a bit more honky-tonk than I usually like, but I can deal with it for such an environmental anthem.

We live in the land of plenty
But many things aren’t plenty anymore
Like the water from our sink
They say’s not safe to drink
You gotta go and buy it at the store
Now we’re told there’s a hole in the ozone
Look what’s washing on the beach
And Lord, I believe, from the heavens to the seas
We’re bringing Mother Nature to her knees

Now we all oughta feel just a little bit guilty
When we look into the eyes of our kids
‘Cause brothers it’s a fact, if we take and don’t put back
They’ll have to pay for all we did

Sometimes it seems like some of the older generation aren’t concerned about passing it down to us. Truly, I don’t want your money. You can keep your jewels and family heirlooms. I just want clean air, trees for my children to climb, and fresh water. I want my grandkids to ice skate on ponds, ski down hills (as long as they don’t also inherit my less-than-graceful abilities) and wade through creeks.

My mom was telling me about a time she went out to lunch with her grandmother. As they drove home, my great-grandma started to roll down her window. Mom spied her cup raised in one hand and quickly said, “Grandma, what are you doing?” Granny said, “I’m just gonna toss this cup out the window. It’ll just blow to the side of the road.” Mom was appalled, and quickly offered to hold the cup for the rest of the three minute drive back to the house, where she could put it in the trash.

I’ve heard people say casually, “Oh, well. I’m old, it doesn’t matter.” They spend their lives building up their fortune to pass down to their children, yet they aren’t concerned about the world those children will have to live in. Sure, those kids may end up with a bundle of dough, but if they have to wear gas masks as they head to the store to spend their money, how much fun will that be?

Everyone needs to be concerned. People in positions of power, old people on social security, toddlers in diapers…we all need to take care of our planet. The problems we are facing aren’t going to go away on their own.  We all need to work together to help to correct some of the damage we humans have done to the earth.