I Lost Weight and Don't Have Gas Anymore

I lost roughly 2,500 pounds and got rid of my annoying gas problem by going from this (no, not the chicken, the car behind the chicken):

My Ford Expedition, and my now-eaten rooster.

to this:

Leafy the Nissan Leaf, eating it's breakfast from the wall charger.

This is my sub-compact Nissan Leaf, the smallest car I have ever owned, and the first car (instead of SUV or minivan) I have owned since 1998. I am in love with not going to the gas station, it's fun to drive and full of cool gadgets that my older car didn't have. Plus I charge it right in my garage.

This is more proof that downsizing is a better path to happiness for me than "upgrading". My smaller house and smaller car suit me much better than my bigger house and bigger car did. I spent the money where it mattered: for the car it was technology that saves me money in the long run, and for the house it was 3 acres of land with smaller house.

What's next to downsize? Not sure yet but I am tempted to do some monthly challenges inspired by a great, fun little book I read, 7: An Exprimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker. Over the course of 7 months the author downsized to 7 things in various categories. Some that sound fun to me are:

Spending money in only 7 places
Wearing only 7 items of clothing
Eating only 7 foods
Give away 7 items per day

After downsizing a car and a house, these should be easy, except that doing something every day requires a different kind of commitment than doing something once and moving on. As the author notes, it's a kind of fasting, like Lent. I tend to believe fasting is good for people, so I think there should be room in my goal-setting for 2013 to find a way to do some more of it, whether it's with food or media or clothes or restaurants or whatever. I'm currently abstaining from sugar for at least 30 days, which becomes easier and easier to do the more I do it (this is my third 30 day or longer sugar fast). I find it freeing rather than confining. I am FREE of sugar rather than being WITHOUT it.

Anyway, for now I'm happy with my little car and my little house. I feel I am going in the right direction. The path to happiness is not found in getting things, it's found in elimination. From my favorite book of 2013 so far, Antifragile:

If true wealth consists in worriless sleeping, clear conscience, reciprocal gratitude, absence of envy, good appetite, muscle strength, physical energy, frequent laughs, no meals alone, no gym class, some physical labor or hobby, good bowel movements, no meeting rooms, and periodic surprises, than it is largely subtractive (elimination of iatrogenics). 

(Iatrogenics is harm caused when trying to help, i.e medical intervention or helicopter parenting). What can you eliminate to make your life better/happier? Media, unhealthy food, excessive work hours or other time commitments that don't add meaning, internet usage, women's magazines, wheat, porn, clutter, tv, people? All of the above?

Churchill on Liberalism and Socialism

I'm reading my first book on Winston Churchill finally. Churchill has been on my "I'm Intrigued" list for awhile and so far his story is NOTHING like I expected.

I read this quote today and it immediately got transcribed into my reading journal for future reference. I find it fascinating and though provoking:

"Socialism seeks to pull down wealth, Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty...Socialism would kill enterprise; Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference."

Well, I agree. What has gotten me so deep into thought on this is how completely opposite public perception is now on this issue in America. Most people seem to think that liberalism and socialism are one and the same, whereas Churchill portrayed them as opposites. Also, it seems that in our country, it's exactly true that our capitalist system now needs rescuing "from the trammels of privilege and preference".  Yet to suggest that now suggests socialism, whereas to Churchill is suggested liberalism.

Churchill espoused a political philosophy that allowed for unlimited growth (wealth of the individual) but not for unlimited poverty; a capitalist system in which individuals could gain as much as capitalism would grant for their efforts, but not allow for boundless poverty that was impossible to escape. Sounds like a, gasp, social safety net. Hopeless poverty is bad for individuals but equally damaging to societies, as his fight for prison reform demonstrated.

What I see in our own country, 100 years after Churchill said the above, is a class of people who ARE stuck in poverty without a systemic hope for a different future. Yes, some people make it out, but they are the exceptions. They don't make it out because of the culture they live in but despite it. And I don't know anyone who would argue that the privilege and preference of big business is trammeling on our democracy and capitalist society in some ways.

Perhaps I read this quote and related it back to another book I just read on the Civil War and southern culture. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation. We are still on a journey to equality in this country, and I believe in my heart that Churchill is right - where there is inequality on a broad level, it's hard to have a democratic capitalist system without built-in restrictions on privileged gain.

What I want to see is an answer to that, from either side of the political spectrum. And an answer to why I voted for the Libertarian candidate in the last presidential election. Because that doesn't make much sense in hindsight, does it?

The Dude Abides

I think I heard from a Fresh Air episode (btw, I have a secret fantasy that I have never shared with anyone to some day be a guest on Fresh Air for something. I have even practiced in my head how I will respond when Terry says "Welcome to Fresh Air") that Jeff Bridges had written a book with his Zen master a few months ago. Although I am a huge Big Lebowski fan, the book didn't excite me much. However, as soon as I saw it in the library I picked it up and brought it home. I am SO glad I did, because while it is short and light-hearted, there were some parts of the book that were so profound I had to put the book down and reflect. In fact, one section seemed so profound to me that I started to cry and had to explain to Andrew that I was crying because I read something profound about the Dude and Walter. I was pretty embarrassed, but as the book says - we could all stand to take ourselves less seriously, so I let it flow.

I am going to write the words that I read here, although I am sure that they will seem trivial when I write them and I won't understand what it was that moved me so when I first read it. That's just the way things work. I need to write it down anyway. Which brings me to another point - I really wish I had been keeping a reading journal as I went through my 100 book challenge. I wish I had kept notes on the great things I have read, how each book seems to find a connection with the book that follows it, how they all come together to create new ideas in my head, and of course the sections like the following that I need to write down so I can go back to them from time to time. Since I am just about to reach the half-way point of 50 books, it's not too late. I am going to start my notebook now and will see where it takes me as I start on my next 50 books.

Here is the excerpt from the book "The Dude and the Zen Master" by Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman:


     "There's no perfect place anywhere. One of the Buddha's first teachings was that life is suffering. He didn't just mean heartrending, painful, traumatic suffering, but something more basic than that. It doesn't matter how good we have it now or how basically happy we are, things arise every day that leave us feeling discontented or disappointed.

     So the movie opens up with a bit of suffering for the Dude because somebody peed on his rug, the rug that ties the whole room together. Till now he was just rowing his boat merrily down the stream, taking his baths, drinking his White Russians, listening to whales, and bowling. But now something happened, so he makes an adjustment, goes out to meet the wealthy Mr. Lebowski, and the movie goes from there. At exactly the point when the rug doesn't bother him anymore, something else comes up. And when he's no longer upset about that, there's something else. Things keep happening and the suffering gets deeper. Why? Because the Dude expects that nothing else is going to go wrong. He's like everyone else, thinking that around the corner is some perfect place where everything will be okay; all he has to do is round the corner. Then something comes up, and something else.

But the Dude abides, so it doesn't take him too long to be at ease with the new situation. Not so his blowing buddy Walter. Walter plays the Dude's great foil: This won't stand, man. He's like all the rest of us. Someone just found out that he has cancer, or that his wife left him for someone else, or that he lost his job. Unexpected things keep happening, which is what the Buddha referred to when he talked of suffering. And what do we say? This won't stand, man. But that's what life is, constant change, ups and downs. And like the Dude, we have to abide. Walter, on the other hand, can't accept that life is this way, so he keeps on suffering. "


The Dude abides. Buddhist philosophy in that one sentence. Maybe it won't make you cry, but damn, it sure made me shed tears and bury my face in a pillow for 5 minutes.

Reading Goal Update

My Goal: 100 books in 2013.
Status as of 4/9/13: 41.5 books.

Happiness I have. I am loving this challenge. Here is one big reason why: even when I am sitting around wasting time and being unproductive, I am WORKING ON A GOAL! Because instead of surfing the internet or watching TV, I am reading. Also, once I really started reading a lot I got to a place in LEARNING where one book sills into another, one idea enlightens another, and I can chew on all these mixings and stewings of ideas and thought in a really satisfying and delicious way. It's hard to describe, but truly the great joy of reading.

Now, a bit on where my reading has led me. Mostly, I want to read more philosophy. So today I dug around in MY OWN HOUSE to see what I had. Now, I must say I own a lot of books that I haven't read. But still, I had no idea that while I have been going through the public library looking for stuff and printing stuff off the internet to read, I already had some of it not 10 feet away from me on my own bookshelf! Here is what I found:

 From a collection I took from my dad's house a long time ago and I think belonged to my grandmother. These are all small books and were intended to introduce the reader to important thinkers.

Kinda dark picture- we have a history of philosophy, Aristotle, Plato's Republic, Early Greek Philosophy, two Nietzsche books, and a book on Zen buddhism, and two Confucius titles, although one may be an excerpt from the other. A couple of these are Andrew's college books. The others belonged to either my dad, my aunt, or my grandmother, so I guess it's in my blood!

I probably won't read all of these, certainly not any time soon. But there are some I am eager to read now. Perhaps I need to add an amendment to my 2013 reading goal that a certain number of my read books need to be from my own library! Perhaps 20 would be a good goal.

Why Perfectionists Hate Goal Setting

I tend toward being a perfectionist. It's a horrible and useless character flaw that does nothing but create continual discontent.  Somehow I think there are a lot of triathlon readers out there that call themselves perfectionists, too. This post is for you.

The idea for this post started over a cup of coffee with another perfectionist. We were talking about goals and admitting to each other that we hate goal setting. Yes, we know it's important. No, we don't want to go through life acting without intention. But if that involves sitting down and goal setting, well......maybe tomorrow.

Perfectionists set the bar too high. That's what we do. We take a bar, put it up where we can't reach, then move it higher when (if) we get too close. No matter what we do we have failed to meet our own expectations. Well, what is goal setting? Reviewing what you have done already and then making new targets. Perfectionists don't want to review and face our demons, so that part sucks. And setting new goals is like taking off your clothes and sitting on a fire-ant hill - it's masochistic.

If I have to sit down and review what I did last year, I am going to be depressed and think I didn't do a damn thing. I am going to see all the things I didn't do and go sulk in the corner. Then I am going to create big hairy goals that I have no chance in hell of completing and begin feeling like a loser all over again.

Well, the first step is admitting you have a problem. I am happy I realized this about myself and that I have other crazy people like me to talk it over with. Now when I sit down to do my goals (my goals workbook has been waiting for me for 2 weeks), I will try extra hard to see what I have accomplished and how far I have come this year. I am gong to put every little thing I did on that list, from getting chickens to getting married. I will intentionally make this as long as possible to block the perfectionist in me from coming to the party. Then I will work on my goals for this year and I will SHOW THEM TO SOMEONE ELSE to prevent perfectionist goals from creeping in. If I decide that I want to land on the moon this year and also climb Mt. Everest, my goal setting partner will hopefully encourage me to pick just one of those.

We all need someone like that to balance us, even if we aren't perfectionists. Maybe you need a cheerleader or maybe you need some tough love.   Maybe you have a friend who needs that, too! Why not recruit a friend to be your accountability partner? See if it can balance your perfectionism and help you set and achieve realistic goals this year. Checking in with someone once a week or once a month is certainly going to encourage a longer commitment to your goals than doing it on your own. And remember Rule #1 of goal setting: be good to yourself.

My 2013 Goals. Part One: Media

When I did my goal setting for the year, I broke it down into categories such a marriage, family, house projects, work, and personal goals.  From those categories I have action items that I can add to my weekly to-do list so I know that on a week by week basis I am inching toward my overall goals.

One of my personal goals was to address media consumption. My intention was to limit my exposure to TV and the internet and to be intentional with what I choose to expose myself to. In the month or two since I established those goals, my ideas about this category have expanded and it's become more than just the minor goal category it started as. This is partly due to the amazing book I just finished: Antifragile by Nassim Taleb.

Taleb stressed the point that the more we expose ourselves to media (noise) the less we can hear the important stuff (signals) when they happen. If you have the Today show on in the morning, watch Fox news or CNN all day long at work or home, and then watch entertainment shows in the evening, you are constantly being exposed to noise. All these stations, especially the news, need to have stuff to tell you. It doesn't matter if it's a slow news day or a big news day, these shows still need to fill out their time with stuff. Just about all of it is useless noise.  I believe that if there is something I really need to know, it will find it's way to me. Everything else isn't worth knowing, and in fact too much media can trick me into thinking I know more than I do. It is much more valuable to develop your own ideas about things than to know other people's (news pundits) ideas about things.

Taleb's book forced me to analyze my media habits more carefully but also gave me permission to trust myself with my own education. As a fellow bibliophile, his assertion that books educate more than any other medium deeply resonated with me. I can't be tricked into thinking that avoiding mainstream media will make me uneducated. In fact it will do just the opposite. The more I read, the more I will be able to think about and contemplate the world around me. And that's how my media avoidance goal and my book reading goal have now merged. The reason I can aim for 100 books this year (23 and counting) is because I am eliminating the noise.

I started my "Media Goal Setting" in a pretty good position. We don't have cable TV (it's been at least 3 years). We have an antenna on the roof and a cord that snakes across our living room that we drag out when we want to watch something (football). We also have Netflix, and until recently we watched quite a bit of TV shows and movies (without commercials at least). When Andrew got back from his meditation retreat in October, his TV watching habit was broken and it hasn't come back, which suited me just fine. We will watch a TV show if we want (this week we watched 3 episodes of Treme on CD) and we usually watch 1 movie per week with the family on Friday night and/or 1 movie on Wednesday night (this week is was Flight on Wednesday and Here Comes the Boom on Friday, which killed about 1 billion brain cells). I am comfortable with this. So, without TV to worry about, what media did I think I wanted to avoid? Here are some things I initially addressed:

Facebook/social media
Internet forums
Newspapers/News websites

These don't need much explanation. Who doesn't find Facebook's version of humanity to be tiresome? We all know how internet forums are - all talk, all distraction, all the time. All of these media outlets are 99% noise, 1% signal. So these things were easy to limit (FB and news) or totally avoid (forums).

Now that it's mid-February, I find myself going deeper, addressing radio habits.
I had a free 3month subscription that ended this week. Having XM has been useful because it weaned me off local radio and NPR news but it isn't good enough to compel me to keep it. In the end it's helping me transition totally to only listening to podcasts and my own music. Self-selected material will teach me more about a wide variety of things than anything I will hear in mass-market media.

RSS feeds.
RSS is amazing but it tends to get cluttered and overgrown like everything else. I subscribe to too many feeds. I think I can eliminate 80% of my feeds in each category and not lose anything as I don't read most of it anyway. I've already started this process and so far I am not missing anything I've deleted.


Bottom line:
Mainstream media wants to tell me what's normal, what's desirable, what's acceptable, what I should be aiming for and dreaming for, what I should covet, how I should view the world, how families and friends are supposed to interact, how and why things happen and what is going to happen in the future, and who my enemies are. The more I want to decide these things for myself, the less I should expose myself to mainstream media. The more I want to explore these topics out of genuine interest, the more I should read books. The less time and energy I spend on mainstream media, the more time and energy I have to devote to actually learning (which for me means reading).

The book I am currently reading is about math but has this aprapos quote from Thomas Jefferson that he wrote to John Adams after leaving politics:

I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier".

If the author of the Declaration of Independence had no use for politics, than certainly I can be excused.

Our Baby Tornado

The chickens liked the mess

On Jan. 30th at 3:30 in the morning a tornado went through our yard. It touched down across the street, ate a barn and a garage, and threw it up across three houses on our side of the street as it traveled through our property.

It woke us up and we jumped out of bed and got downstairs as fast as we could, but it was gone by the time we got down there. Andrew and I left the kids downstairs to fall back asleep on the couch and went to look outside with our flashlights. We could see some damage, mostly trees down, saw that the animals appeared to be alive, didn't think the house had been badly damaged, so we went back to bed and tried to sleep. In the early morning hours around 5am the firetrucks started gathering in front of our neighbor's house and we figured there was a lot of damage there. Then the emergency management trucks started slowly driving up all the long country driveways on our street shining their searchlights everywhere looking for damage and knocking on doors checking on everyone. It was very creepy to sit int he dark (no power) waiting for sunlight to show us what had happened.

We got off easy compared to our neighbors. The house directly across the street from the barn and garage took 90% of the debris. There was metal roofing hanging from the power lines and huge pieces of roofing wrapped around the trees at the street. It looked like someone had picked up the garage, carried it high into the air, and dropped it in the neighbor's yard. Once the tornado dumped the debris there, it torn down some tree limbs, knocked down a 30 foot section of fence, and entered the next neighbor's field. It crawled up his field and knocked off a bunch of his shingles and shutters as it moved onto our property and destroyed our back yard and did some damage to our house. From there it traveled into a neighborhood behind us where it ate up some more trees.

Of course we didn't know it was a tornado until late the next day when it was confirmed (it was an F-0 tornado, which I didn't even know existed).  It got me pondering the power of language and how just calling that storm a tornado made it more horrible in hindsight than it felt when it happened. It made me think so much more about the "what ifs". What if it had knocked that branch down in the other direction and it had hit one of the kids' bedrooms. What if it had been stronger? I certainly learned my lesson that night when I experienced first had how quickly these storms can arrive and depart - quicker than I can get my kids down to the basement.

We lost our wooden swingset and fort, our chicken coop got damaged, we lost shingels and fascia and gutters, we lost way too many trees, and we have tons of debris still in the yard. But we are all ok and that is something I am incredibly grateful for. Here are some terrible iPhone pics I took as soon as the sun came up that morning:

Back Yard

Front Yard Tree

Back Yard Looking Toward Swing Set

Front Yard with Neighbor's Tipped Over Horse Trailer

Goodbye Swing

Back Yard

Uprooted Tree

More Mess in the Back Yard - the line of pines all snapped

Trees and garage debris from across the street

That pice of fascia is still hanging over the power line almost 2 weeks later

The wheelbarrow and kayak traveled from next to the garage door to Mason's car, along with wood and metal roofing from across the street

The wind blew the top off my gardening station but didn't blow over the grill