Moving Off the Grid

Last night during our weekly knitting group, one of the newer members mentioned that she lives entirely off the grid.  Intrigued, we spent most of the rest of the night talking about it, and I learned a lot on the realities of life off the grid.

"Living off the grid" is a popular fantasy, and has been for many years.  It is equally popular among survivalists, back-to-the-land hippies, and the ridiculously frugal.  There aren't many things for which that is true! 

"Off grid" is defined as, no municipal water supply, no municipal sewage services, no municipal power lines, no cable TV, no nothing.  Basically, no wires or pipes that cross your property line. 

Many rural residents are halfway there already - for example, my water comes from a well, I heat exclusively by wood stove, and I'm on a septic system.  (And our road was only wired for cable two years ago, which I realize doesn't count, but still.)

The final step for most people is to secure an independent power supply.  Solar is the best option, even here in the Pacific Northwest we get enough juice to run an entire house - with the aid of solar batteries, of course.  A gas generator as a back-up is also very common, if only as a safety net.

If you are planning to go off grid, outfitting your home for propane is almost a necessity.  A propane tank can take care of your home heating, run your hot water heater, and provide you with a gas stove as well.    Propane is getting more expensive every day, but considering the power draw of electric hot water heaters and stoves, it is a valuable addition.

Life off the grid is a constant set of trade-offs.  You only get so much electricity each day from the solar panels.  And you don't want to go outside and fire up the generator unless you have to - aside from the expense of the gas to run it, there's the smell, and the noise which can be very distracting.

You learn to budget your electricity usage in surprising ways.  For example, my friend and her husband had to make the difficult decision to forego a coffee machine.  Instead, they make coffee using a French press, since they can boil water atop their gas stove without having to use any electricity.

It requires some sacrifices, as well.  Major appliances like a dishwasher, clothes washer, and clothes dryer are massive drains on the system.  Most people who live off the grid have opted to forgo all three, washing dishes by hand, and hauling laundry to the laundromat in town instead. 

You can get internet services just about anywhere these days if you have the right cell phone data plan, and an AirCard.  If you work in an office, you can charge your laptop and cell phone at work.   (Why not?  It's free!)  Their house is within range of a cell phone tower, although many remote properties are not. In which case, a satellite phone is a reasonably affordable alternative to no phone at all - and getting cheaper every day.

These sacrifices may seem major to some, but consider the benefits!  She estimates that their system paid for itself after seven years.  Everything since then has been gravy! 

Photo credit: Flickr/Canadian Veggie

How To Handwash Clothes, And Why

I don't know if you've noticed, but it seems like clothes are being made more and more shabbily.  Maybe it's because sweatshop labor is so much more common, or maybe it's simply a function of clothing companies finding ways to bring down costs while keeping price the same. 

At any rate, clothes seem to fall apart a lot faster than they used to.  One big cause of failure is the laundry cycle.  If you have a top-loading laundry machine, your clothes are being thrashed unmercifully at laundry time - even if you use the delicate cycle.

For this reason alone, I always handwash my "important" clothes.  You know - ThinkGeek shirts, my last pair of jeans, that kind of thing.

You also want to handwash certain "delicate items."  Sure you can use a mesh bag in the laundry to wash your bras, but this is still a little hard on them.  I often find the hooks get snagged in the mesh, which leads to twisted hooks, which leads to either a broken bra or an ouchie scratch from a sharp bit of metal.   And don't even get me started on underwires!  Those things can kill you.

Done right, a batch of handwashing will take practically no time at all.  All you need is a bucket, laundry detergent, and water.

I like to do three "cycles," one soap and two rinse.  For each cycle, just fill your bucket with tepid to cool water, and let it soak.  You can swish it around a few times - I like to push my hands into the bucket in a plunging motion. 

Soap Cycle: add just a little bit of your regular laundry detergent.  One scoop or capful of detergent is enough for the 40 gallons a washing machine holds.  If you're using a five gallon bucket, obviously you'll want to use an eighth the amount you usually use to wash a load.  Just a little dash, in other words.

Half an hour is more than enough time for the soap cycle.  When you dump out the water, be sure that as much of it drains out of your clothes as possible.  I like to set the bucket on the kitchen counter so that it's draining into the sink, and leave it there for a few minutes.

Two more cycles with just clean water, and you're set! 

Next, you'll want to hang your clothes to dry.  This can be very sloppy and splashy, so if you can hang them outside, it's helpful.  The curtain rod over your bathtub will work, although you may want to lay down towels along the outside of the tub to catch any stray drips. 

Whenever I walk past my hanging laundry during this stage, I'll stop and try to squeeze as much water out of the clothes as I can.  The faster you get through the drip, the faster your clothes will dry!

In my climate, it takes about 4-8 hours for the active dripping to stop.  Then it's just a matter of hanging everything where it will get good air circulation.

Photo credit: Flickr/oskay

BPA: Toxic Receipts

The SF Gate is reporting that the National Institutes for Health are recommending that we follow rat studies regarding the toxicity of BPA.  Bisphenol-A is found in plastics, including water bottles, receipts, Tupperware-style food containers, and as a lining in cans. 

Previously the plastics industry has argued that rat studies should be ignored, because rats aren't people.  An understandable argument, if a suspicious one, coming from the plastics industry!

BPA is an endocrine disrupter, which means that it throws your hormones out of whack.  It mimics estrogen, so repeated chronic exposure to BPA acts like a long term low level estrogen dose.  BPA is the suspected culprit behind a variety of problems, including early onset puberty in children and low sperm counts in men.  And as a known carcinogen, it is known to be a cause of breast cancer.

The real problem is that, in case you hadn't noticed, we are a society which runs on plastic.  Trying to reduce or eliminate your "plastic diet" is difficult; occasionally impossible.  I doubt there's a single thing an American touches or consumes in a day that hasn't been wrapped in plastic at some point.

The news about receipts is particularly alarming.  It turns out that thermal receipt paper is just reeking of BPA, and that people who handle receipts for a living - like grocery store clerks - have measurably elevated levels of BPA in their systems.  The Environmental Working Group found that two out of five receipts they tested had ridiculously high levels of BPA - up to 1,000 times more than what you would find in a can of food.

Very little noise is being made about this, from what I can tell.  I wonder what would happen if we learned that Blackberries give off as much BPA as receipts?  Or button-down Oxford shirts?  I imagine the outcry might be a bit more substantial.

This is an interesting aspect of public health: it is often not fair.  Just look at the way that maps of toxic waste dumping overlap with maps of poverty areas.  It's the poor and working class who often have to suffer these health hazards. 

One thing I have noticed about articles regarding the BPA in receipts is that they are almost universally written for the consumer.  They have advice like "wash your hands when you get home from the grocery store" and "don't let your child play with your receipts."  I guess the reporters imagine that grocery store clerks don't read the news?  That's pretty rude.

If you work with receipts for a living, speak to your manager about replacing the thermal paper with a BPA-free alternative.  (They do exist!)  If you don't want to be labeled a freak or a complainer, send an anonymous letter to your regional headquarters. 

Worst case scenario, always wash your hands after you leave the register.  Although Bisphenol-A can be absorbed through the skin, the big exposure comes when you touch your fingers to your mouth, or to things that you put in your mouth.  Luckily, it washes off well with soap and water.

I trust that if you work with the public, you're already in the habit of washing your hands after you clock out and before you eat or smoke.  Let this be a little added incentive to practice good hygiene!

Photo credit: Flickr/ben_onthemove

Coupons: An Evil Lie

A recent post on the Consumerist blog is the perfect illustration of the problem with coupons.  In fact, it's such a perfect illustration that I can't help but think that's exactly why the Consumerist folks posted it in the first place.

Consumerist forum user LadySiren, "married with five kids," managed to buy 51 items for $45.46, saving a whopping $99.48 with coupons.  The problem?  With two exceptions, there isn't any, you know, FOOD in there.  Just an awful lot of what Michael Pollan calls "edible food-like substances."

Problem #1: Coupons are rarely for food.  Usually, they are for crap. 

LadySiren's take includes Spaghettios, Pop Tarts, ice cream, bottled sweetened iced tea, Snickers bars, tubes of Pillsbury cookie dough, Tuna Helper, Fudge Shoppe cookies, Progresso soup, and more.  The caloric value of her haul is staggering - and not in a good way.  The fat, sodium, and sugar is terrifying to contemplate.

I'm not interested in castigating LadySiren as a person, or as a mother.  We all make choices every day, and sometimes those choices aren't the best.  My point here is just that coupons entice you to buy stuff that you don't need, shouldn't eat, and that will eventually kill you.

Problem #2: Coupons only make you think you're saving money.

This actually breaks down into two sub-categories:
2A: foods you should never ever buy.  Like Pop Tarts.  No one should ever buy Pop Tarts.  The fact that we all occasionally buy a box of Pop Tarts is cause for shame; it should not be encouraged.

2B: foods you can cook a lot more cheaply on your own.  The false thrift of a product like Tuna Helper is astonishing.  Not only does Tuna Helper not save you any money versus making tuna casserole from scratch, it also adds a ton of salt, fat, and weird chemicals you don't need.  

Iced tea is pretty darned easy to make, and better for you to boot.  Your own iced tea won't have all the artificial sweeteners and preservatives, and it will have a lot more antioxidants compared to the manufactured pre-bottled kind.

Problem #3: Coupons favor high-waste items

Most of the things you buy with coupons are highly marketed, and thus heavy on the packaging.  Most of the things in LadySiren's picture have at least two layers of packaging, very little of which is recyclable.

As a culture, we need to get away from single-use plastic packaging.  It leaches harmful chemicals like BPA into our bodies, wastes natural resources, contributes to climate change thanks to petroleum processing, and either takes up space forever in a landfill or blows off and clogs our waterways and oceans.

Also, that packaging isn't free.  You're paying for it, even if you don't realize it.  Ever wondered why bulk food is so cheap?  It's because it's not individually shrink wrapped into single serving packets, which are stacked in a plastic tray, in a cardboard box, inside a plastic shrink wrap, with a cartoon mascot.

(Incidentally, cans have an inner layer of BPA plastic.  And canned food tends to be very acidic, thus leaching more BPA into the contents.  But on the up side, cans make for good recycling.)

Photo credit: Flickr/sdc2027

Celebrate Captain Planet Day!

“We’re the Planeteers, you can be one too, ‘cause saving our planet is the thing to do!” It’s too bad that Captain Planet’s message didn’t catch on when I was a kid; maybe we’d have a lot less things to worry about and a lot more solutions—electric cars, plastic bag bans, that kind of thing—in place. Still, he was always fun to watch. Who was your favorite Planeteer? I always liked Gi and Ma-Ti, because they always seemed to be closest to the animals. Wheeler always pissed me off—what a cocky kid.

Since Captain Planet is turning 20 this year (it feels like he’s much older, doesn’t it?), he’s being honored with a holiday. Captain Planet Day will now be hailed on September 15, courtesy of the Captain Planet Foundation. (Did you even know they exist? I sure didn’t. They educate youth about planetary and environmental issues.) At the link, you can join as a “Planeteer” and find volunteer opportunities near you.

Here are some other ways to celebrate Captain Planet Day…

Go around saying, “The power is yours!” Bonus points if you say it to complete strangers.

Wear green face paint. In fact, make a whole Captain Planet costume—and then wear it for Halloween, too.

Have a Captain Planet marathon. Watch the videos on YouTube, or if you have them at home, watch them with your kids. Introduce them to the Planeteers—see which ones are the most popular in your home and which ones your kids don’t like.

Plant something. It’s a great time to plant many bulbs and fall flowers in the Northern Hemisphere. Bring some plants inside to treat your home with cleaner air and added color.

Dress up like Gaia (another favorite character of mine) or Mother Earth. “Bless” all of the people around you with flowers.

Buy reusable shopping bags for all of your family and friends and pass them around.

Help people learn how to recycle. Petition your city for a recycling program if it doesn’t already have one, and help educate people about what things can be recycled and where.

Start a carpooling program. My husband recently started carpooling and it has cut our gas budget in half!

Make yourself a Planeteer t-shirt and proudly wear it around the community. Make extras and give them away.

Build some additions for your yard, like a birdbath or bird house, for guests who are sure to stay this winter.

Jane Patrick, "Time To Weave"

For reasons unknown, I have been smitten with the idea of weaving stuff.  I live in a wooded/rural area, so there's plenty of raw material lying around.  The vine maples alone send up enough canes to make a thousand chairs a year, and that's just the ones that insist on sprouting out of my lawn.  Not to mention the willow tree in the front yard.  The less said about which the better.  ("Unkempt" is probably too kind a word.)

Baskets.  Room dividers.  Plant supports and trellises.  I don't know… neat stuff.  What else do you do with basketry?  I'm not really sure, but I'm itching to try it.

The last time I went to the library, I checked out two books on basket weaving.  This is the more project-oriented of the two.  Subtitled "Simply elegant projects to make in almost no time," it gets right to the meat of the issue and focuses on patterns and instructions.

There are a lot of things to like about this book.  First of all, the projects are all super contemporary.  There isn't a single project here that wouldn't look out of place in an Ikea, and I mean that as the highest form of praise.  Lots of cutting edge materials, and a graphic aesthetic that's both clean and attractive.  

When you think "basket weaving" you may (as I did) think of fussy little baskets that weird old ladies line with lace doilies and fill with teddy bears, for decorative purposes.  (My friend's mother has several of those.  Another is filled with fake harvest fruit, year round.  She also has a small ladder the sole purpose of which is to serve as a decorative place to display teddy bears.  But I digress.)

The stuff in this book is the opposite of that.  The antidote, really.  Just check out the woven cork trivet, so Danish Contemporary!  Or the white paper cards with woven cut-out heart on the front, so clean and crisp!  Or the "Tile Wrap" project, where raffia string is woven across a worn quartzite tile, and displayed on the wall - very zen, very Feng Shui.

The instructions are clear and friendly, and walk you through the steps without getting intimidating.  As with so many books from Interweave Press, the text is lightened up by the inclusion of pull-quotes, pictures, and the occasional friendly aside.  

A wide variety of projects are included, from knotted cord placemats and ponytail holders to weaving a basic tote bag on a frame loom.  "Weave" is obviously a vague word, and in this case includes everything from tying decorative knots to, yes, making woven baskets.

Part of what attracted me to this book is the variety of materials it uses, and the potential for recycling.  For example, the aforementioned woven baskets are created from plaited paper.  The author suggests using paper grocery bags, which creates an origami-like tubular basket with flashes of color from the store logos.  Alternative materials include newspaper, and discarded iris leaves from the author's garden.

Amazon Innovates Non-Evil Packaging

Plastic clamshell cases: You know them; you hate them.  They are impossible to open without at the very least a pair of scissors.  The last time I was presented with one, I gave up trying to cut it with scissors, and resorted to using a serrated bread knife to slice off the top.

Those big showy cases have two purposes: they show off the goods, and they help prevent sneaky shoplifters from stealing the item out of the package and returning it to the shelf.  

(Or so we are told, anyway.  Does this really work?  I remember when CDs started coming in giant cardboard boxes back in the late 1980s.  We were told it was to prevent theft. But people just folded the big boxes in half and stuck the whole thing down their pants.  

Obviously the big boxes were just to co-opt more shelf space and provide more surface area for branding.  I don't half suspect the same thing is happening with plastic packages.  Every square inch bigger you make your clamshell pack, is one less square inch that your competitor's product can claim on the shelf.)

Neither display nor theft prevention is an issue for Amazon, of course.  And yet, most products ship from Amazon in the same package you'd buy at the store.  Now Amazon is working to stop this practice, with its new "frustration-free packaging" movement.

Frustration-free packaging is a win for everyone involved.  The New York Times points out that when Philips designed frustration-free packaging for its Essence electronic toothbrush it saved money, got better customer reviews (because people could open the dang box), and reduced its carbon footprint because the new packaging was recyclable.

Ever since I moved to my current home, I have become exquisitely attuned to the volume of trash we buy every day in the form of packaging.  Why?  Because I live beyond the range of garbage pick-up, so I have to take my trash to the dump.  Believe me, when you start having to pay by the pound for your own trash, not to mention hauling it all out there yourself, you start noticing these things.

I never noticed packaging when I lived in apartments, because you just take the trash out whenever you like.  Just drop it down a chute, or toss it into a dumpster, and you have no idea how much you're really generating.  But once you start trying to go on a "trash diet," the first thing you notice is that at least 75% of your garbage is just the stuff your stuff came in.

In fact, I'm so excited about this frustration-free packaging that I'm thinking about buying things through Amazon that I normally wouldn't.  For example, Duracell sells its batteries in the store in clamshells… but if you buy them through Amazon, they come in a recyclable cardboard box.  Hallelujah!

The two biggest problems with packaging is their manufacture (made from petroleum; chemicals, shipping, etc) and their disposal (almost no plastic packaging can be recycled).  Vote with your debit card, and start encouraging companies to offer frustration-free packaging through Amazon!

Photo credit: Flickr/Hendel

Math "8008S" Calculator T-Shirt - $6.98 Shipped

What is that there on that calculator? I guess it just says 58,008 ... oh heavens - until it is upside-down that is!

Feeling a little immature and want to express this on a t-shirt? Well you are in luck! Tanga has got you covered with the "8008S" ("BOOBS" - upside down on a calculator) shirt! You can pick up this great little upside-down calculator joke shirt for $4.99 with $1.99 shipping! - this is a must have shirt for all of us who long for the days of grade school math - before life got so hard, before all the complicated mumbo jumbo of daily life, and most importantly when all we needed was a calculator and an imagination to have a good time. I guess this shirt can take us all back to a time that was more simple, a time of "8008S".

I can not think of a better shirt with more positive message than this one - oh sure this shirt will not "save the world" but it can help out those of us with a sense of through our daily lives.

Now who didn’t do this age-old joke back in elementary, or hey for some of us even high school! It’s one of the classic ways to turn a boring math problem into a funny joke for the whole class. Screened on our 100% cotton T-Shirts. Available in sizes Small, Medium, Large, XL, XXL, and XXXL. Please note that XXL and XXXL sizes cost $.99 cents more per shirt!

Pick up yours today (while supplies last)!

No reasons for concern, says NASA

Item from the Associated Press -- "NASA says two small asteroids discovered just days ago will zip harmlessly past Earth on Wednesday ..."

Yup. Discovered just a few days ago.

What else would they tell us? I don't ever expect to see a bulletin like this: 'Issuing non-bulletins from an abandon mine shaft, NASA brass have no comment on that giant shadow covering our planet earth.'

The AP item concludes -- "Asteroid 2010 RX30, thought to be 32 to 65 feet long, will pass within 154,000 miles of Earth shortly before 3 a.m. PDT Wednesday. The second one, dubbed 2010 RF12, will fly by about 11 hours later at a distance of about 49,000 miles. NASA says the second one is 20 to 46 feet long."

Huh, huh.

We are really exposed. We hang out in space with no real defenses against anything that happens along, that might smack into our planet.

Tide Commercial Fail

Tide, I think we get that you’re trying to be hip and cool with your newest commercial about a mother borrowing her daughter’s lime green shirt to go out on the town with her friends.

It’s nice to give a nod to mothers, I agree, and to suggest that they, too, deserve a social life filled with fun. Having recently had an “adult” party with several friends—and my child and husband notably absent—I can vouch for how much fun it is to remember that you’re a grownup, and how important it is to have a night out with your “girls.”

But then we get to the part of your commercial where the mother lies to her teenage daughter about borrowing her “missing” top—recollecting that she had, in fact, stained it while out on the town, after which she buried it in the clothes hamper—you pretty much miss the mark. Instead of making it a conversation piece between mother and daughter—acknowledging the mother’s presence as, yes, a person in need of recreation as well—you keep her a matronly caregiver, complete with bathrobe, who claims to be clueless about the location of said shirt. This would have been the opportunity to establish Mom’s real personality and humanness—but instead you stick with the whole idea that mothers are not humans, but on a separate plane from their children—void of personality, of needs, and definitely of errors. Of course, it’s really her “little secret,” which might have been designed for mystery rather than light misogyny; the design, however, failed.

Not only is this problematic, but so is the idea that it’s perfectly okay to lie to your children. Instead of owning up to borrowing the shirt—which, of course, is usually the other way around in most portrayals of daughter-mother relationships—and admitting, again, to being human, the mother puts on a perplexed expression, feigning cluelessness. This is supposed to be charming; instead it perpetuates the idea that it’s perfectly okay to be dishonest with children, even though we expect them to be honest with us.

Overall, the commercial failed to make me want your glorified, likely environmentally harmful product, Tide. Even if I were a Tide buyer, this ad would not prompt me to seek out your supposedly miraculous elixir; instead, it makes me question just what your company believes about mothers and families, as well as ethics—particularly honesty—in general.

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