Posts from — July 2010

A friend sent a link to a listserv I’m on about the idea of small living.  It’s a branch of sustainable living focusing on only taking the space and possessions you need.

There are a slew of these websites, all dedicated to creating and living in these tiny houses, some only 8 feet by 12 feet.  And when Jay Shafer says in the video that he wanted to do more than work for cash in order to live, and points out how little he needs to earn in order to get through the year, there is something massively appealing about small living.  Especially because this link came to me in the middle of my parent’s house move.

It would free us from constantly worrying about work, about employment, about paying high utility bills and a mortgage.  We would be ensured a place to live and room to float by until the next paycheck came along.  It would allow us to save an enormous amount of money, eliminating many of my fears.

Josh and I focused on the word “need.”  What do we actually need?  Obviously plates so we can eat food, and utensils, and a few pots and pans.  We need a place to sleep, and some clothing, and toiletries.  A telephone.  Though once we added things on the “need” list, we also spoke about how a person could actually live without these things until it got to the crux of this reductive argument; that people really only need some water and food and shelter from weather and we can exist–even happily.

If I looked at what I emotionally need–the photographs and computers, the boxes of old papers, the books and fancy kitchen equipment–then small living becomes downright impossible.  I would have to change my emotional make-up in order to live in such a small space.  I am in a constant state of reducing my possessions, but I always hit a plateau and then it builds up again.  There are too many things that seem as if they will be useful in the future, and they often are.

Could you live in a tiny house?  What items are stopping you from being able to move into a small space because you couldn’t take them with you?

One Roundup away — which means one week away — from the great Cake Extravaganza.  Since the linky tool worked well last week, next Friday, upload a picture of a piece of cake (and don’t get hung up on the words “a piece of cake” — if you want to bake a whole cake or celebrate with an oreo or simply walk by the bakery and take a picture and not put anything in your piehole, it’s all good) and then link to your blog post.  It would be lovely if you wrote something about what community means to you.  Why you love being part of the ALI community, and how you feel when you read a particularly satisfying blog post.

So get to it — you have one week to set up your celebration and I’ll meet you back here to have a virtual party.

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Wait … don’t go run off and take pictures yet.  We still have to do the rest of this week’s Roundup.

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Speaking of great posts and driving readers to them (since that is the purpose of the Roundup), while we stopped doing the Kirtsy’d Pick O’ the Day for the time being over at the LFCA, I have been Stumbling posts daily with decent results.  Sometimes, the post only gets 20 additional reads, but sometimes, the post gets several hundred additional reads.  If you clicked over and looked at my Stumbling line and it isn’t impressive, you’re probably looking at it early in the day.  I tend to Stumble a lot in the morning and it keeps all those posts at “1 view” for a few hours before the hits start happening.  But scroll back a day or two and you’ll see that I generally have a bunch of reads on each post that I Stumble.

Why am I telling you this (beyond the point that I want you to picture me with my morning coffee, scrolling through great posts)?  Because if you see a great post (especially one you wrote yourself) that you want me to Stumble, pass it my way via email with “Stumble” in the subject line.  Why do I want ones that you wrote yourself?  Because I’ll know then that the author is totally cool with me Stumbling it.

I do this almost every morning, so feel free to send me stuff as often or as infrequently as you wish.  It can be ALI-related or simply a kick-ass recipe or photograph you found.  I just like to find good things and send them back out there again.

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The Weekly What If: What if you could be locked inside one store all night, utilizing the merchandise (or in the case of food, consuming it) without needing to pay?  Which store would you choose for your lock-in and why?

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And now, the blogs…

Just Being has a post about Hope’s tenacious hold on our heart.  She explains that you cry in the beginning because you actually have hope each month that each cycle could be the “one.”  And then time passes.  She writes, “You’re two years older. Your ovaries are probably older even than that. And you feel a hundred. And a part of you has died. You never cry when you get your period, you never talk about how exciting it would be if it were ‘this month’.”  You need to read the post in full to get the arc of Hope’s life-span.

Bottoms Off and On the Table has a post about a dream where she argues herself back into reality.  I can’t say much more without ruining the emotional impact the post has when you read it in full.

Single Infertile Female has a heartbreaking post explaining her anger.  She deleted a recent post upon rereading it and states that while the anger felt out-of-character, there was a lot of truth in the words.  My heart broke with her words: “It isn’t supposed to be this difficult.”  A lot of the post may ring true for you too.

Thinking Miracles has a post about what she has been sweeping under the proverbial rug.  She writes, “I’ve been shoving lots and lots of stuff under there, and I think it is about to hit critical mass. The silliest things set me off. Someone will say something completely harmless and in my head I go into meltdown mode.”  It’s an honest, well-written post — complete with graphics.

Lastly, Working on It has a post about the direction of her blog (I am hyperaware that I love blog posts about blogging.)  She writes about her desire to start a new blog, “I’m starting to think that part of my desire to make a fresh start with blogging is linked to my new-found desire for order generally. I used to be very comfortable with a certain amount of disorder, mess, open ended-ness. But something has changed now.”  It’s about trying to find order in the chaos of life, of finding yourself through words, of allocating your time.  And it’s just a wonderful post.

The roundup to the Roundup: One more week to the 300th Roundup and the Cake Extravaganza to celebrate.  Send me stuff to Stumble.  Answer the Weekly What If.  And lots of great posts to read.

Harry Potter is turning 20 on Saturday and I have no idea what to get him.  I mean, what do you get the boy wizard who has everything including the Deathly Hallows?  A handful of chocolate frogs?  New dress robes?  Something from Zonkos?  A subscription to Playboy?

Have you ever thought about a friend across the country because you see something that reminds you of her, and when clicking onto her Facebook profile to leave her a message, learn the most perfect word you never knew:

Mamihlapinatapai: (from Yaghan) “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”

Looking up the meaning brought me to an old NPR article on untranslatable words or concepts, including

• ilunga (Congo): “a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first time and then to tolerate it for a second time, but never for a third time.”
• meraki (Greece): putting something of yourself into what you are doing–when your personality is incorporated into the end product.
• esprit de I’escalier (France): a great comeback that only occurs to you after the fact.

What are your favourite words that have no equivalent in another language?  Your favourite English words that perfectly encapsulate their definition?  Words you wish existed?

warning: this post contains a graphic description of an accident

There is a very thin line between what happened and what could have happened.

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On Saturday, we were driving up to Pennsylvania, and a motorcyclist pulled in front of us on I-95.  He was shirtless and helmet-less.  He was probably in his mid-70s.

Josh asked if I thought that this man considered himself hot; if he imagined himself to be an older Matthew McConaughey.  I shrugged and said, “I’m not getting a sense that vanity comes into play with this.  He just feels like being shirtless, so he goes shirtless.  I don’t think he gives a shit–I think he’s just doing what feels good.”

For some reason, this man was remarkable enough to come up later in conversation with my in-laws and we all mused about the shirtless man and what would drive a person to ride their motorcycle without any ounce of protection in sight.

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On Sunday morning, I swung by Two Buttons to get a bracelet for a friend, and while I was there, I looked for a necklace for myself.  I wanted something red–I imagined the perfect necklace would end slightly above the V of my shirt, and would be a series of red beads with a small, South Asian coin hanging from the center.  I couldn’t find what I wanted, but I threw a wrist mala into the purchase and a bangle for the ChickieNob.  As we were leaving the store, I saw the perfect necklace by the front door, and Josh and I decided that we’d return after our next stop to get the red beaded necklace.

After we visited his aunt, we missed the turn-off for the store, so instead, we ended up having lunch and saying goodbye to his parents, and then started back towards our house.  It was storming out, this strange rain which changed intensity every few seconds, so the windshield wipers were never right.

As we passed the store, we decided to go in and I tried on the necklace for Josh and the twins, who immediately announced it perfect.  We turned to pay and the Wolvog started whining about how he wanted to stay by the door.  I probably argued with him for ten seconds before giving up and moving over to the cash register.  We passed by the bracelet I bought for my friend, and impulsively, I grabbed one for myself.  Life, after all, is short.  And it should be filled with reasonably-priced, pretty things.

As the woman rung up the sale, I thought one of the tines on the bracelet looked broken and I paused for about 5 seconds to comment on it and looked at the display rack and then wave her on to finish the sale.  We exited out the store with my purchases and started driving again alongside the river.  The rain continued to fall.

I am usually fairly anxious when we’re in this area–it’s my location casualty–and my stomach had been in knots for the entire visit due to bad memories.  I slipped on the wrist mala, and I was fingering the beads while thinking about how horrific I always feel when we’re in this area, remembering how depressed I was during that first visit.  And that’s when it happened.

A deer ripped across a field, a blur of brown, and arced through the air in a flying leap, knocking directly into the motorcyclist traveling in front of us.  He was the last motorcyclist in a pack of 6 or 7 bikers.  His body and bike flew through the air, together for a moment, and then separating.  His body fell face down on the grass, his bike upside down about 2 meters away.  The deer landed and lay on her side for possibly a minute.  Josh swerved to the side of the road–there was miraculously a patch of grass where we could rest our car–and we both jumped out into the rain, racing past the deer and to the man who was not moving in the grass.

I called 911, and their first question was calmly inquiring my location.  I just stood in the rain, staring at Josh and the man in the grass, and screaming, “I don’t know.  I don’t know.  I’m not from here and we’re on this road and I don’t even know the nearby towns, what state I’m in.”  Josh read the signs and began to call back information and I relayed it to the dispatcher, and everyone on the line was calm, everyone was talking as if we were dry and well and inside a government building, just trying to get something taken care of.  Another man stopped and then another, and people called out their car window to me if we needed more help, if I was on with 911.  An ambulance was dispatched and I continued to stand in the rain.  The man in the grass became conscious and he tried to get up, the back of his shirt soaked in blood.  Josh stayed with the others who were trying to keep the man immobilized for the moment and I ran back to our car, where the twins were sitting silent in the backseat.

They had a few questions, and then they didn’t really speak for an hour.  The Wolvog was horrified that such a thing could even happen–he had seen the man’s body float into the air like tossed petals, and land on the embankment–and the ChickieNob seemed unsure of what she had seen.  Josh came into the car, drenched from the rain, and told me that while the man wasn’t speaking, he was responsive.  The impact had dislodged his dentures and blood was coming out of his mouth.  His back was probably where the deer’s body made contact.  He told me the man was probably in his late 70s; that his life had been saved by the helmet and the blind luck of landing on the grass; of the bike landing so far away from him.

The police asked us to stay and fill out a report since were the only ones who had actually seen the accident take place.  But at this point, the man’s motorcycle companions returned having realized that he was gone.  They went to wait out the storm under a nearby bridge.  They said they would return for his bike later on.  The police officer pulled up his car alongside our car and asked us to recount what had happened.  He wanted to know if the man had been driving well, if he had been speeding, if the man played any part in his own accident.

But the answer to all of those questions were no.

There was nothing this man could have done.  To give you a sense of how quickly this deer moved; the next man forward in their motorcycle pack, a man traveling only a motorcycle length or two before the other one, continued to ride away, oblivious that anything had happened.  The blur of brown was literally only visible to our car; the motorcyclist couldn’t respond because there was literally no time to respond.  He was riding slowly, carefully, in the rain.  And this still happened; even with doing everything right.

When the police released us, it was about a half hour or 45 minutes after the accident, and we continued to drive slowly towards home.  As we passed under the bridge, I looked at the man’s friends, and amongst them was the shirtless, helmet-less man from Saturday, shivering in the windy rain, his crazy, thin hair blowing behind him.

One second.

That was all that separated us from being the car tossed by the impact of the deer.  It could have been the red necklace or the extra bracelet or the whining of the Wolvog or thinking I saw a broken tine.  It could have been the pressure Josh’s foot delivered on the gas.  If our car had traveled one second ahead, I wouldn’t be telling you this story right now.  It is horrific to realize when you are so close to something horrible how thin a line divides what happened from what could have happened.

Seeing that man’s body tossed by the deer was one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen.  I have witnessed life threatening situations, but they were always couched within a moment of danger.  And this came when death was the furthest thing from your mind; when you are considering the lush greenery and the river and the wondering what you will have for dinner that night.  And then suddenly, with a blur of brown, life changes.  The scene changes.  It was so wholly wrong that it took several moments for my brain to catch up, even though my body reached for the phone and jumped out of the car as if on auto pilot.

I had to write this out of my brain.  I have been unable to get past the continuous loop of an image of the man sailing through the air.  The police officer told us the man would be okay, and I’m sure his body will be.  But I have no idea how you’re supposed to drive without continuously thinking of that thin line between what happened and what could have happened.