Zatera Ul

(OLC invented Steps 1-3 all by herself.)

Step 1: Obtain 1 bag large pearl tapioca.

Step 2: Obtain 1 bag granola.

Step 3: Mix thoroughly. You now have a mixture: substances combined so that they still retain their individual identities.

Step 4: Now, how might you separate the two again? Picking out the tapioca pellets one by one will take a very long time. Consider the physical properties of tapioca and granola; how are they different? (Hint: moments of inertia, i.e., shapes.) How might you exploit these differences to separate them?

Step 5: Obtain inclined plane (aka cake pan), add some mixture, tilt slightly, and gently help the tapioca to roll out of the granola. Repeat until mixture has been separated.

Step 6: Brainstorm some other ways of separating the two substances.

Reading the local newspapers is always interesting. In the last one, there was a story about a guy starting up a hot dog stand or some such thing in a neighboring suburban town.

Points of interest to me:

1. He asked permission from the City Council first (there being no existing ordinances governing hot dog stands).

2. The council members were quite gratified to be consulted beforehand, and immediately jumped into writing up a new ordinance for him.

3. The requirements of the ordinance is a little inconvenient for the guy, but the difficulties are not insurmountable, and it gives him the goodwill of the city. It will also work out well for him in the longer term, because the ordinance happens to limit the total number of food stands that can be open.

So there is an example of working within the system. Another example that this brings to mind is the book The Good Soldier Svejk. (I don’t have all the Czech characters right at hand, but it would be written Schweik in German.) In the book, poor Svejk works within the system, somehow always managing to come out on top. Good book, full of irony, but rather long, and the reviewer’s comment that “the author was probably drunk most of the time he was writing it” is almost certainly true.

Another local article concerned one of St. Paul’s reservoirs that is being retired. Basically a huge underground tank, they are mothballing it because it is actually too big for current needs (between modern water conservation and the disappearances of a brewery and various manufacturers) and because they don’t want to pay for repairs. They ran a picture, and it looked just like the part of Dwarrowdelf with all the pillars, except shorter. Would’ve made an awesome underground skate park.

More locally, I recently read that one of the local charities has six hundred volunteers. Considering the size and relative affluence of the city, I think they are in danger of outnumbering the people they are trying to help. I remember the local Target donated gift cards for volunteer appreciation gifts, of all things. It does seem like the volunteers for charities are usually the ones who get helped first; this is probably unavoidable, given the social dynamics. I spent many hours of my poor student days working away at a couple of worthy causes, and received many good meals in return.

Coffee Tea Books and Me has a good series up about taking steps off the financial grid, by learning how to do things yourself. Since they kind of relate to a series of predictions that I was planning to post, I thought I might as well get started.

First, a warning about predictions in general: They can be wrong. Sometimes very wrong. No one can take everything into account; present knowledge is terribly imperfect, and who knows what might spring into existence tomorrow. But most of what I am predicting is already starting to happen: “TSIAH!” means “This Stuff Is Already Happening!”; it is the cry of my skittish little internal danger-meter, whose job it is to start panicking early, and give warning while there is still time to take action.

Prediction One: Many more do-it-yourself activities will become illegal or impractical. Safety nazis pushing for new regulations, plus governments desperate to perk up their tax receipts and extend their regulatory reach, plus corporations who would like you to purchase their ready-made answers to your every need, plus trade associations lobbying for their members’ financial interests, plus financial outfits who are eager for opportunities to charge interest and fees at every turn, plus an educational system that now teaches hardly any useful skills at all, plus snobby losers who look down on the more self-sufficient as being low-class, plus media horror stories about how some do-it-yourself-er managed to achieve an EPIC FAIL!, equals considerable pressure to stick to the day job, and hire out everything else while you spend your evenings sitting slack-jawed in front of a screen. TSIAH! Look around!

I am particularly watching for initiatives against home canning and Linux.

…that we have more books per square foot in our apartment than our local library does.

My monitor is starting to die. I also tried taking some over-the-counter allergy medicine, to see if it helped, and it did. Both have pushed me to spend more time away from the computer, so I started spring cleaning in the dining room.

I went through it and dusted every single thing, and found some things that could just as well go away. I washed the vertical blinds and put them away and put up a curtain. Trimmed all the dead parts off the plants, and repotted the ones that needed it.

I also moved the table. We have a small dining room and a long, narrow table and I never thought that there was enough room to turn the table the other way, but there is!–if I put one end of it right up to the window. This also frees a little floor space at the end of the room. So now it feels like a whole different room to me. Now when I look into the dining room from the kitchen, I see the table end-on, and all the books and trivets on it don’t dominate the view.

I made a start on the living room, but it has been slower going, because MFH has been home sick most of the week, and also I’ve been thinking ahead to what I want to do in some of the other rooms.

Lately, I have been reading lots of home design books, analyzing floor plans, and thinking about what we will need in our next home. It’s clear to me now that our current apartment is actually too big for us, in some ways. The bedrooms are too big, it’s a long trek across the kitchen with a baby clinging to your leg, and we don’t really need the second bathtub. We do miss not having a garage, or an attic, or a basement, or a laundry room, or a yard. Everything we have is right in our living space.

We recently signed up for a farm share. We are trying a different farm this time. Last year we didn’t get a farm share, and often had a hard time getting over to the farmer’s market, every Saturday. Buying the farm share automates this; fewer choices involved, we just pick up the box every week, so it is more likely to get done. There is also an element of challenge in learning about new foods, and how to cook and enjoy them.

Which reminds me of a book I just read: Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity , written by a guy who turned his habit of scribbling little cartoons on business cards into almost a livelihood. The book is very good, and you can see how playing within the constraints imposed by the physical properties of a business card has, ironically, been very freeing for him.

Every artistic medium has its own built-in constraints, and I’ve noticed that having too many choices left open can be rather paralyzing. Choosing whether or not to go to the farmer’s market was often draining for us. So now we have imposed the constraint of the farm share; whatever comes in the box each week is what we’re going to eat.*

The good thing about this constraint is that it is voluntary. I think the day is coming when we’re all going to get our produce by the box, whether we want it or not. The hippies are certainly being trained to eat their beets, turnips, and soy. Just wait until the government decides to impose a healthy diet “for our own good”. The farm share is a good way to practice cooking and eating simpler foods, before the other shoe drops on the economy.**

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*I received practically no art education in school. I particularly remember fifth grade, when there was a string of snow days that fell on the day of the week that the art teacher was scheduled to come to my class. As far as I can remember, that was the only year I ever had an art teacher at all, and my little half-cup of artistic talent certainly didn’t get nurtured. Later on, I gave myself permission to be an artist, and to craft a better life for myself and my family.

**We’re going to can some of the excess farm share produce; canning is another skill we are teaching ourselves, though I rather expect that home canning will be made illegal within my lifetime, “for our own safety”.

Last week we took a whirlwind tour around to see various friends and relatives. We stayed four different places in the course of a week. I am glad that I got the apartment relatively clean before we left, it was nice to come home to our own space. The roads were great the whole way, and the children did well in the car for the most part. We came back just as a big snowstorm started.

We managed to cloth diaper TLG the whole time, with no problems. Beforehand, I cut up an old T-shirt and made some throw-away diaper liners. The liners worked well, but the plastic bags that I put the dirty ones in didn’t contain odors well.

When we got back, I felt like sewing, so I finished up a few more cloth diapers that I had started a long time ago. Which he needed right away, until I got caught up on washing diapers from the trip.

I also finished making over a corduroy hat that I liked, but was just too small. I took out the sides of the hat, and put in bigger ones, and a new lining. I kept the top of the hat and the brim.

Finally, I whipped out a couple of cloth bags, since MFH wants some for storing produce without using plastic bags. I made them with French seams, which I am learning about for a future blouse project.

Today we put together a gingerbread house kit; a “party house cake” according to OLC. We’ve known for a while that artificial colors make her bounce off all four walls and the ceiling as well, so the rest of today should be interesting. (We’ve discovered artificial colors in children’s vitamins and in toothpaste, too.) Usually the first thing she does when she has had some artificial colors is to get into something that has some more.

TLG is walking better, but he still has a whole line of bruises on his forehead from falling down. He has been learning how to put things into containers, and how to blow a kazoo.

OLC’s number sense is improving. She used to ask for two of something that she really wanted, then three; now she asks for five.

MFH and I did a lot of talking and thinking about subcultures, and where we want to live when we escape from the big city. It’s not an easy question, because we belong to several distinct (and non-adjacent) subcultures, and one of our God-ordained roles seems to be to carry good ideas across subcultural boundaries.

Renters in Minnesota, give your Certificate of Rent Paid (CRP) a close reading this year. Your friendly state government has stolen some of the renters’ property tax refund money to balance the budget. Instead of estimating property tax as 19% of rent paid, they are using 15%, and the money to pay the difference is currently “unalloted”. A lawsuit over the legality of this is pending, according to the CRP.

Practically, what that means for my family is that the state will not be giving us about $100 of our money back, which is equivalent to a 13% increase in our state income tax bill.

But I got some sewing done yesterday: four more pairs of underwear. Sewing underwear is about as relaxing as sewing can get, because the mistakes will all be hidden under other clothing.

TLG has been taking ten-minute naps again. But he sleeps ok at night, as long as you don’t compare him to a fictional baby that sleeps 12 hours straight.

He gave drinking straight from a cup a try, and was very proud of himself. He also learned how to blow in a recorder and make it toot, just like his big sister does.

OLC has been doing a lot of singing and strumming her ukulele, just like Julia Nunes (her favorite youtube celebrity). MFH took OLC to see Julia in concert a couple of weeks ago, and Julia signed both of their ukuleles.

I’m very grateful for the breastfeeding hormones that keep me fairly mellowed out most of the time.

My current project is making-over a corduroy hat that I liked, except that it was just too small enough to be annoying. I’m going to reuse the brim, and make a new crown for it.

I recently read The Alpha Strategy, by John A. Pugsley, which asserts that the best investment in an economy like ours is tangible goods, because of inflation and other eroders of value. A post at Coffee Tea Books and Me outlines basically the same strategy.

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I was reading in Nehemiah how debts with (if I am reading it right) only 1% interest were considered crushing burdens. Back then, they easily could be.

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I finished the bra project, it turned out both awesome and amateurish at the same time. Then I made an apron, which was a simple project, but still took three days. Now I am resting up for the next big project, whatever that will be. I am extra tired because MFH worked 60-plus hours last week, and we ran around a lot on the weekend to compensate for being extra cooped-up.

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TLG hit his nine-month birthday, and really took off walking. Now he toddles here and there, and falls down a lot.

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I did the first pass through the taxes, and we will be able to take the earned income tax credit this year, thanks to TLG. So are we rich (living almost comfortably on one income), or are we poor? Sometimes it is hard to tell.

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Our car has gone a whole year without needing any major repairs, which is a first for us. Why yes, we do tithe. We tithed all the years that we paid thousands and thousands of dollars to fix it, too. I’ve been looking around on the internet, trying to determine whether or not it is actually possible to fit three car seats in the back seat. Some people say yes, some say no way, no how. We have two Britax seats, which sit fairly high, so I think we might be able to squeeze a lower, narrow seat between them. MFH has been able to sit between them for a short ride.

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I started a list of predictions for things that will occur within my lifetime. I am trying to decide whether “Laws will be passed to require car seat installation by a certified technician” should be added to the list. The trend is heading that way, but sometimes people need to move car seats from one car to another so someone else can transport the kids.

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I was holding off on finishing TLG’s birth story until we found out how much our insurance was going to pay for the prenatal care and birth. It turns out that all they will pay for is the lab work. By Minnesota law, they have to cover prenatal care and some other things, but our CPM was an out-of-network provider, and we had to pay a high deductible first, and we got to pay deductibles twice because the pregnancy was not all in one calendar year, and the insurance was pretty stingy on what midwife charges they actually allowed toward the deductible, and they specifically exclude homebirth and most medical care not supervised by a physician anyway. As MaxedOutMama says, “Health coverage does not equal health care!” Sometimes health coverage doesn’t even equal health coverage. Even though our midwife is licensed by the state to provide prenatal and homebirth care, there’s a gap in the insurance coverage statutes there. In the end we came out sort of ahead, because of the lower premiums for the high-deductible plan, and because MFH’s employer kicks some cash into the health savings account to return some of their lower premium costs to him. We also got to pay $100 just for our midwife’s insurance biller to bill our insurance, because “it’s a high-deductible plan and I might not get paid otherwise.” (I didn’t ask how she would have gotten paid for billing a normal-deductible plan, because I computed a zero probability of getting an answer that wouldn’t further tick me off.)

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The same insurance company just sent us the annual plan overview booklet. If we want the actual printed certificate of coverage, we have to put in an order for it, and they had a paragraph in the booklet saying, “If everyone was nice to us and didn’t order anything, we would save $X million in postage and printing costs.” No thanks, I want my $5 worth of real physical official documentation, and they can spare me the guilt trip.

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One of Home Living’s recent posts had a wonderful comment that basically said, “The Lord knows all about the constraints of your situation. Do the best that you can, even if it isn’t that great, and accept God’s grace for the rest.”

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I had that it’s-too-quiet-what-are-they-up-to feeling, and found the children in the kitchen. OLC was dusting her brother liberally with unflavored gelatin. Clearly if we start stocking up on things, they need to be things that are toddler-proof.