Ask Santa for concert tickets or a trip to the museum

I have always believed you get more from an experience than you do from an object.  Turns out a study published in 2003 supports my theory.

Assistant professor of psychology Leaf Van Boven at the University of Colorado at Boulder concluded from a series of experiments and surveys over the course of several years that people receive more pleasure and satisfaction from an experience.  The researchers believe it is because people can internalize experience and their feelings during the experience.  For instance, my sister and I took our children camping.  Over the course of the trip and being novices, we didn’t sleep well due to the oppressive heat, had to swim across the lake to rescue our children and the canoe they were attempting to steer and had an encounter with a venomous snake and ax wielding neighbors determined to save the “little women next door.”  We ended up cutting the trip short and leaving after dinner on the second evening of our trip.   We all concluded, as we fell into our respective beds exhausted and disillusioned from the experience, that we were not cut out for camping.  However, we all look back on that trip now as a wonderful experience.  We overcame obstacles and realized we could do it all without the “men” and we have hilarious stories to tell especially the one of our kids sitting in the middle of the lake paddling in circles. 

The research suggests that perceptions of experiences change overtime making the memories more enjoyable.  According to Van Boven, the perceptions of an object never change, an object remains just an object. 

So when you write your wish list to Santa this year remember that you may get far enjoyment more from a pair tickets than a pair of shoes. 

Some experience ideas:

Arrange a family picnic

Attend a music concert

Take a trip you have been longing to take

Learn a musical instrument

Learn a foreign language

Visit a museum

Take a hike, literally, with your family through a nature preserve

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Resource: The Public Library

This should be obvious but I am going to mention it anyway – it fits green living, minimalist lifestyles and frugality.

One way to reduce resource waste is to visit your public library rather than purchasing books or videos.  Since the library is free, it is also a big money saver.  Most public libraries now have Internet search and reservation options in which you can search for and reserve a title.  Once the title has been secured, you will be notified of its reservation and location, as well as how long they will hold it in your name.   The Internet search and reserve function saves a great deal of time and resources in fewer trips to the library.

If your library does not have a title you are interested in you can usually search and reserve through the inter-library loan program.  Most libraries participate in this option in which you can borrow titles literally from libraries all over the United States.  Odds are if your local library doesn’t have a specific title, a library somewhere else does.  

Libraries don’t just stock books.   They subscribe to newspapers from across the globe, monthly magazines, and resource materials.  If you wish to learn a foreign language they often have language tapes or cds.  For the sight or reading challenged, they often stock books on tape/cd as well as large print additions.  Videos and music cds, including classics, new releases and how-to videos, are another big commodity.  Finally, they often host community programs including story times, book clubs, author lectures, and writing workshops.  Thanks to governmental grants, all libraries have high-speed Internet stations available to the general public.

All of these resources are available to you free because of your already contributed tax dollars.

Recycling Resources

Earth 911is an excellent Internet resource for finding recycling options.   Simply enter your zip code in the box indicated and it will list the recycling centers located in the surrounding area.

Living Cheaper

With talk of a global recession, everyone is understandably nervous and looking for opportunities to cut back on every day expenses.   Here is a tip.  Live lightly.  Be a conscientious consumer.  Don’t fall in the marketing trap.  

Making conscientious choices can lower your carbon footprint thereby helping the earth but also lessen the wallet squeeze, helping yourself. 

1. Install a clothes line. Your clothes drier is the second largest energy consumer in your home.  
2. Unplug unused appliances.   Appliances produce what is called a phantom load.  This is energy used while it is plugged in and idle waiting use.  Research shows that unplugging televisions and appliances when not in use will reduce energy bills by up to 40%.
3. Invest in LED lights at Christmas.  To decorate for the holidays, use LEDs that consume up to 90% less energy that traditional Christmas lights.
4. Invest in florescent. Florescent lights consume up to 80% less energy than their incandescent counterparts. 
5. When you save energy you are shrinking your carbon foot print but also SAVING MONEY!
6. Rethink conventional household cleaners.   Common house hold cleaners are full of synthetic and possibly toxic chemicals.  Switch to baking soda, vinegar and soap and water.   You will significantly reduce the amount of resources used in packaging by choosing not to consume these products in plastic bottles.  You will also keep far more money in your wallet as the cost of a few products is far cheaper than many separate cleaners.
7. Switch from paper to cloth.  Invest in quality cloth napkins (preferably made with organic cotton).  These last far longer, use far fewer resources and are FAR CHEAPER than their paper counterparts when used over time.
8. Don’t drive unless you need to and then combine errands for maximum fuel efficiency.  Not only will you reduce the amount of ozone depleting emissions you contribute to the environment, you will also reduce the amount of money depleting trips to the gas station.
9. Ride your bike on errands within 2 miles of  your home.  Again saving emissions released into the environment but also saving money on gym membership fees and health care costs by being fit.
10. Lower your thermostat in the winter and raise it in the summer.  Again you will save energy which will in turn save money on energy costs.
11. Eat locally grown food whenever possible.  Locally produced, organic foods, contain more nutrients and are better for you than store bought foods that have to be shipped from long distances.  This results in saving money in health care costs.
12. Exercise, play with your kids, and laugh….this all reduces stress which in turn will reduce your health care costs.  Happy, healthy people visit the doctor far less than overweight, unhappy people. 

Recycling ideas – Newspaper

I scoured the web to find ideas on what to do with my growing mound of newspaper – besides the obvious recycling.   Here are a few ideas, some useful, some fun. 

Fireplace logs – winter is coming and instead of buying pre-made fireplace logs, make your own from discarded newspaper (or I suppose any paper you have around the house – could be a good option for junk mail!).  http://familycrafts.about.com/cs/homecrafts/a/blhglogs.htm

Made beads for necklaces, bracelets, earrings or just for fun –  These beads have a very earthy quality. It looks like a great project for those long winter days with tween girls at home.  http://www.astorybooklife.com/how-to/paper-beads/

Newspaper structures – I just stumbled on this fun project, create structures out of newspapers. http://pepperpaints.com/2008/05/13/newspaper-hut/   I am going to enlist my husband, the structural engineer, and our son for a day of structure building!

Work-Life Balance

True freedom is waking up and deciding what you want to do with your day.  – The Color Purple.

Europeans, on average, live longer than Americans even though they smoke more, drink more and eat all the foods we can’t like real butter, rich and creamy sauces and white flour in their pasta, pastries and breads.   How do they do it?  They know a few things about balance.  

Europeans value time off so much that many countries have a mandatory five week paid vacation allotment for all workers.  In the US we are lucky if we get 2 weeks a year and most don’t even take it when it is offered.   Unlike the rest of the developed world, we call people that work less than 50 hours a week slackers – a negative connotation to be sure.  We feel guilty taking vacations and we carry our Blackberries and cell phones as if the entire free world rests upon our shoulders.  I have a secret…it does not. 

We pay a lot of lip service to family values, but what do we know about valuing families?  Yesterday I was fortunate to be a chaperon on my son’s fourth grade field trip.   At each station, as the kids were learning about pioneer life in our area, at least one parent was busy on their electronic appendage.  I don’t fault these parents, they are tied to their jobs by the electronic revolution.  Bosses provide these tools and expect them to be available and to keep their jobs, they are available…but meanwhile their kids are missing out; missing out on a parent that is fully there ‘in the moment’ just for them. 

Europeans know that families are important and family life is important (which is why they typically have shorter work weeks and longer maternity and paternity leaves).  They know that time off and relaxation are vital to healthy, happy workers.  They know that a long healthy life must have balance.   They know that workers shouldn’t have to choose between making a living and being with their families.   They support and pay higher taxes to ensure that no one has to work two weeks after having a baby, to provide paid vacation, paid maternity leaves, and basic health care for one and all. 

In other words, Europe works to live.  America lives to work.

Balance isn’t easy to achieve in this tumultuous time.  We are told that to keep our jobs we have to work more, be in the office more, stop working at home and generally sell our souls to the company just so we can keep our livelihood building other people’s riches.

October 24th is Take Back Your Time Day.   Visit www.timeday.org to find out what you can do to promote public policy that helps American workers find a reasonable work/life balance.

Borrow – Don’t Buy

Green resource: 

An excellent website that links people who have stuff with people who need stuff.

www.loanables.com

If you have something that you aren’t using regularly rent it to your neighbors who may need that particular item.  If you need something like a saw or a canoe or truck even…do a search on loanables to see if someone has one in your area that you can rent.

A day late and a dollar short

I am making an early new years resolution…stop procrastinating and post more, damn it! 

As for the dollar short….well, aren’t we all these days?  Can you believe what is happening in the financial world?   The fun and games of a few rich men, at the top of the heap are George W. and his band of criminal cohorts in congress, have thrown the entire world into chaos. Nice.  What a legacy.   An unending war that eats billions of dollars a day that we have to borrow from China so the rich don’t have to pay their fair share of taxes and a financial crisis to rival the early days of the Great Depression. 

But I suppose it is just, the rich have their mansions and million dollar parachute clauses while us poor bastards that do the majority of the living and working and dying in this country get to sort out the mess.  (okay, I did steal part of that line from It’s a Wonderful Life but it is a great line).  Meanwhile there are millions of us that cannot get basic health care, cannot afford to send our kids to college any longer and will lose our homes if we get cancer even if we are insured.  We let that happen and that disappoints me on so great a level. 

My day job is public policy.   I have been watching this train careening on the tracks headed for the cliff for a very long time.  When my husband came home the other day overjoyed to have been reassured by a colleague that we are in a ten year economic cycle and that we are simply feeling the pain, I unleashed all of the anger that I have been building watching this disaster in the making. 

It saddened me….even my husband, a well educated man proved…when we are desperate….we will believe anything.

That 10 year economic theory may feel nice but it is hardly the truth.  That theory gives us leave to believe that we had no control, that this is something that is just happening to us.  To believe it means that we, as a government, as a nation, as citizen consumers, had nothing to do with the mess that has landed on our plates.   The truth is this country turned it eyes to irrelevant topics bandied about by the neocons from the far right of the republican party and let them raid the treasury – and we gave them the keys.    We were too caught up in our self-righteous ideals on how other people should be living their lives i.e. abortion and gay marriage that we completely abdicated our responsibility to police our government.  For that, we should be ashamed.

Once the thieves were elected they set about to bankrupt the nation – and make no mistake, this was their plan from the very beginning.  This mess is no accident.   First they began what Reagan started with his trickle down economic theory, which means if the rich have all the money, it will spur investment and eventually trickle down to the rest and economic prosperity will reign  (for those that are unaware this is Reaganomics- which had been proven a bust by the last enormous deficit and bank scandals – i.e. the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 80’s).  A  nice theory but doesn’t actually work in reality.  Reaganomics belies the fact that under Clinton/Gore, when taxes were higher there was economic prosperity and massive investment in the technology fields (that did eventually create a bubble that had to bust but did not do so as to affect every single American to such a massive degree).  It also fails to recognize that other developed countries in the world have higher taxes than the US has ever experienced yet still have investment by both their own national corporations and US corporations operating abroad. – In other words Dorothy – if you want to get back to Kansas, listen to the booming voice but do NOT look behind the curtain for surely you will find everything is not as you were led to believe.

How did they do this?  Here is the simplified outline.  Start with deep tax cuts for top 1% of the nation.  With that in place, there wasn’t enough money to run the current government programs. In essence the goal was to “starve the beast”.  The idea was to ensure the government couldn’t function so people would lose faith in the government programs and demand they be revoked and therefore would have less to pay for and so the rich keep more of their money.  The FEMA Katrina disaster was the culmination of that effort – that program was set up to fail by appointing people with no disaster management experience to run it and stripping its budget to the bones.  They were successful, FEMA failed most spectacularly. 

Finally, with the money back in the hands of the rich and the government limping after having been thrown under the bus, they set about the last phase of the plan – relax government regulations and allow private enterprise to police themselves – because, as Katrina proved, clearly the government was too incompetent to function in that role.   They literally repealed the majority of banking regulations put in place as a direct result of the Great Depression.  Without rules, the banking industry went wild as they did before the Great Depression that resulted in rules in the first place.  They issued loans to people who would have never, under the old regulations, been able to get loans.  They preyed upon the vulnerable (the poor and less educated) and tied them to the company store through crippling mortgages while televising commercials espousing the great American Dream of home-ownership. 

People who were brought in under low mortgage interest rates with ARM loans found that once the house of cards started falling, they couldn’t afford the higher shifting mortgage payments as interest rates started creeping up and that began the unprecedented level of foreclosures across the country.   Then the banks, having leveraged these loans, found themselves holding a bunch of houses and no income.  They didn’t have enough capital coming in to cover what they borrowed against the projected income of these loans and so they too started falling – and failing. 

Now the question is, should the government have bailed them out?  Well, if they didn’t it could very well end up in the second great depression.  But they did and yet, the sky continues falling.  It may have been too late.  We may not see the end of this for a very, very long time.

What is the moral of this story?  Corporations need rules and the entity (government) whose job it is to provide those rules abdicated its responsibility and left us to the wolves – with our consent seeing as we elected them in the first place.  But make no mistake, this did not happen because  government itself is too inherently bad or corrupt to function, it happened because a few people MADE the government unable to function through deliberate undermining of programs and appointing people with no experience.  When staffed appropriately with experts rather than cronies and funded adequately it can function just fine. 

Taxes are important to keep the country running.  No corporation could expect to run on limited means, and so no government entity can do it either.  I am not saying this from a self righteous position of someone that falls into a low tax bracket. My husband and I are firmly in the top 8% of the nation with regards to income.  This means we pay a fairly healthy tax bill with every paycheck and sometimes at the end of the fiscal year.   But we do so with the knowledge that when our country faces a natural disaster, there is a program that will assist. When someone cannot afford to eat, we will feed them.  When someone cannot afford to educate their children, we will take that duty upon ourselves.  When we have to go to war (and I specify have to not want to as in the case of Iraq) we can send our soldiers knowing they have proper equipment so they can safetly return home again. 

Private companies are entities without morals (not meaning they are bad, but they are things and things cannot have morals).  A corporation’s job is to look at the bottom line of their company – and that definitely has its place.   However, without someone looking at the bigger picture (the government) to look out for the continued interest of the country as a whole, the puzzle is not complete and chaos reigns. 

But the President and his crooks, I mean cronies, aren’t the only ones that deserve ire for our financial predicament.  There is plenty of blame to go around from greedy financial institutions to every single person that lived beyond their means, consuming as if there is a never ending supply of money.  Our irresponsibility has put the entire world into jeopardy, from the pollution we spew to keep up our never ending need for oil to the products we buy and dispose of without thinking about where the resources and cheap labor were obtained.  Sure we were sold a bill of goods by our government that created an economy nearly entirely based on retail consumption requiring more and more consuming to keep up the the demands of the economy.   We also saw millions of pictures every day that equated goods with happiness, prettiness and the perfect life….but you know…like our mothers used to say, if everyone is jumping off a bridge, would you do it too?  In other words, don’t we bare some responsibility for failing to think for ourselves?  Don’t we have an obligation to do what is right rather than what we are “told” is right?

Clearly, living lightly is something we, collectively as a society, have needed to do for a very long time and it looks like we will all get the chance.  Overall, we can look on the bright side, okay perhaps the less dark side, and see that we, who have become a consumer nation, will have to stop consuming.  We will have to go back to our roots, perhaps plant gardens and reuse those once disposable yogurt containers and butter tubs.  Already today I saw an unprecedented attendance at our neighborhood garage sale.  I am seeing more and more bikes on the roads and have joined the ranks for short trips around my neighborhood.  I stopped in at Goodwill on a tip that I can find great jeans at cheap prices…and this from an upper income neighbor.  You know what?  I wasn’t in there alone.  The place was buzzing with middle class ladies browsing the used clothing, kitchen items and second or third hand books.

Winston Churchill once said “You can count on America to do the right thing…after it has exhausted every other possibility.”   I think we are there.