It’s not an easy task.  People are deeply, instinctively attracted to theories and legends and plans.  They want to be part of a story that makes their existence meaningful. And no matter how deep or shallow that identity is–from being part of a 5000-year old religion to following the latest, greatest version of the grapefruit diet– the ideology tends to occlude as much as it explains.  It makes us ignore the experience of our senses.  And occasionally it makes us insufferable new converts, robotically parroting the party line, immune to any new input, whether we’re born again Christians or diehard Apple or Linux users.  (Is anyone a diehard Microsoft user?)

That’s why I was so pleased with a new book about the hot-button topic of the day: barefoot running.   Barefoot running has been lighting up flame wars on fitness blogs and the Runner’s World forums for the last year (where I admit I’ve been spending way too much time).   The main topic of contention is ostensibly which form of running (barefoot or “shod”) is more natural or suited to our existence today, and less likely to cause injury.  However, my gut feeling is that the likeliness of injury is individualistic–and the passion in this argument is not so much about medicine but instead about a clash of personality types.

My own individual experience comes down very much on the barefoot side.  When I started running, in thick motion control shoes, I was trying to lose weight, and running was painful and miserable. I was injuring myself and going to physical therapy.  I tried to blast through the discomfort by cranking up my mp3 player.  I didn’t lose any weight on that plan.  Then I learned an “alternative” running form called chiRunning, but used thinner shoes. I didn’t lose any weight this way, either but at least I stopped hurting myself.  Then  I dedicated myself to running barefoot, and actually started enjoying running.  I found the mp3 player was a distraction; it was more fun to listen to my feet and the birds.  And I stopped trying to lose weight.

Here was the turning point.  I had a weekend to myself, and I found myself saying, “Oh boy, a whole weekend with no responsibilities! I’m going to treat myself to 6 miles in the mud and a beer afterwards!”  I looked forward to figuring out a path through the rocks; I looked forward to the feeling of mud between my toes; I looked forward to adapting and flowing by whatever obstacles were out there on the trail.

When that train of thought crossed my mind I knew I had become a different person.  Running had stopped being a “workout” and started being a way I learned to appreciate my own body and notice the world around me.  I don’t seem to be the only one feeling this way.

Jason Robillard’s The Barefoot Running Book is a guide to discovering that kind of running. It’s a simple how-to guide to adapting your body and mind to run barefoot. I don’t disagree with a single sentence of his advice, so I won’t repeat it here, but I think this book is especially relevant to anyone who is an experienced runner and wants to switch to barefoot or minimal shoes.  My gut feeling is that the transition will be harder for those runners, because they’ve spent years doing it a different way.

What’s remarkable about the book is what it doesn’t talk about.  It’s an embodiment of the real idea of barefoot running, which to me isn’t about shoes (or lack thereof) but making running a discovery rather than a trial.   Robillard doesn’t claim to be a champion runner or a martial arts master, or curiously, even claim to be very good at anything.  There are no diagrams of the perfect form.  There is no talk of winning.  Only in the last chapter is there anything resembling a standard running training plan with mileage counts and so on.  Instead there are short paragraphs about key concepts, such as running lightly and using a higher cadence.  The prose is mostly plain and artless, but it is 100% clear and (this is the great thing about his style) functions as a perfect setup for an occasional jokey aside.  When running like a ninja, he advises, “it is not advisable to actually dress like a ninja.”  The author does not take himself too seriously, which shows that he just might be the perfect teacher.

In a world where everyone is so much holier-than-thou, telling you what’s wrong with your body and how badly you’re taking care of it, this book gives you a little glimpse of what it’s like to be free of all that.   That matters a lot more than exactly what you’re wearing on your feet.

Fireweed (native), penstemon (native), and day lilies (not) under an Oregon white oak.

Black locust “Frisia” (“naturalized” in Oregon but not native)

Clockwise from bottom left: cultured variety of ninebark (a native), strawberry bush (similar to madrone, a native), hops on gate arbor, day lilies and Oregon white oak (native), low tech “rain garden” (read: glorified bucket surrounded by rocks and native rushes) and streamside lupin (native)

The sign

This sign was the answer to a bourgeois little quandary I’ve had: how to explain to the neighbors what I am doing (or not doing) with our “garden”?  Without lecturing anyone, that is.  Sometimes our yard is gorgeous, sometimes it’s messy, but at neither extreme does it look like a standard urban yard, even in liberal Portland where perfect manicured lawns are not expected. And I’m tired of the looks we get from passers by… sometimes jealous, sometimes confused.  It’s easier to have a sign than to say I’m trying to create a low-maintenance, year-round outdoor room that brings the entertainment and solace of wildlife to me, without constant watering or pesticides, you #@#$#?* ! (Also, I am lazy, so pruning and weeding are going to come in occasional angry spasms if at all.)

There are several certification programs out there.  The National Wildlife Federation’s certification program comes up first on a google search, but after starting an application I felt it was too easy.  It was basically just a questionnaire, with lots of good ideas on it that definitely seem to be inspiring people around the country.  But there is no confirmation visit to verify you actually did or understood the things that might increase your yard’s value as habitat.  And there was little emphasis on using native plants as the basis for supporting an ecological web.  The Audobon/Three Rivers program actually involved a site visit, and their criteria were fairly substantial.

Actually, I just missed Platinum level by, like, one, eensy, teensy, little percent.  I needed a very large native tree to get to Platinum (I do have small, medium, and large).  But there’d be no room, unless I take out my treasured black locust, and they’d have to pry that from my cold dead paws.  :)

It was finally time to realize a scheme I’d been mulling for a while: making a tiny little home theater PC (HTPC) that would allow my household to go diskless.  Here’s how I did it and how it’s working — which is great, even if some providers of content and software seem determined to keep users stuck in the past.

I got a little Acer Aspire Revo R1600 computer.  It is really small, about the size of a book, and even with some accessories could hide behind the couch invisible.  It uses a tiny amount of power — probably about 10% of the old desktop I was able to recycle. While the processor doesn’t look impressive, it’s aided by an Nvidia Ion video card and an HDMI port.

I hooked the PC up to my LCD TV, and promptly repartitioned the hard drive so that I could install Kubuntu alongside the Windows XP that came with the device. After getting the Nvidia drivers working, I installed Boxee — a sweet piece of software that integrates all your local and online video watching activities, sucking in whatever you want from Hulu, Youtube, Vimeo, Pandora radio, etc., not to mention your local drives. Its big, friendly full screen interface helps you forget about the OS, so you feel like you’re using an entertainment center, as opposed to a work device that can show movies.

Kubuntu 64 bit and Boxee worked beautifully together for many sources, playing local files brilliantly and many online sources, including PBS, very nicely in full screen.  I stored my local movie files on a shared partition that could be accessed from any machine in my SOHO network.  This inexpensive setup was certainly not acting like a cheap computer, even with only 1GB of memory.  In terms of performance and security, Linux 64 had clearly left Windows in the dust.

I set up a user account explicitly designed to be safe and kid proof, and the fam took to it avidly, using it every day.  Besides helping us veg out to shows like Fringe, the setup was actually a pretty good educational tool.  Say the kid wanted to learn about Ferris wheels — we’d look some up on Youtube, then turn the thing off and start building a little one of our own.

But then we discovered that using a sweet cutting edge system brought unexpected problems, not from the machine’s technical capabilities, which were more than sufficient, but from lack of Linux support from unimaginative corporations. Hulu playback was very choppy, because Hulu wants Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1, and that is only available for Linux 32 bit.   And worst of all Netflix streaming would not play on Linux, Boxee or no Boxee, because Microsoft has not allowed its DRM (which is used by Netflix) to be used for that purpose.

I agonized about what to do.  I’m computer-literate enough I don’t really need Netflix that much; if I wanted, I could download pretty much anything I want from BitTorrent.  But I don’t want to be that kind of person; I want to give artists access to some revenue stream.  So I don’t mind ads on Hulu, and I want to subscribe to a service like Netflix.

On the other hand, Netflix’s obstinancy in not supporting Linux desktops — and indeed, forcing me to boot up into Windows XP, an operating system that is a decade old and really vulnerable — is just silly.  It’s not a technical impossibility, since there are Linux devices that stream Netflix, like the Roku box.  And there must be a lot of Linux netbook users out there who are shut out, despite some valiant attempts at workarounds.

I grudgingly started booting up into XP, with Boxee, partly because my family wanted Netflix to work painlessly.  But the performance stank; I had to add 2GB of RAM to make it acceptable.  I did two things in protest: I switched to a less costly Netflix account, and I called customer service there and asked them to support Linux.  There is also an online petition, but my guess is that direct requests from actual customers will have more effect.  Won’t you join me in bugging them?

I embarked on my own amateur analysis of kitchen flow and modded my kitchen to match.  My work began with this kitchen work flow diagram:

I’m not much of a graphic artist, but it succinctly shows why it can be so hard to do work efficiently in the kitchen: so many things need to be connected.

The two basic things you need to do in a kitchen (what you want to do there is a different story) are prepare food and clean dishes, and those activities both require you and your workspace have access to at least 7 different resources. They are: cooking devices like the stove or coffeemaker, food in cabinets, food in the fridge, frequent use items such as salt, dishes and utensils, the sink, and the trash/recycling.

Note this diagram immediately suggests several things.  There are so many resources you want to be adjacent that it’s definitely going to be a challenge to arrange them. Just arranging the sink, stove, and fridge into a “kitchen triangle,” as promoted by many vendors, is too simplistic, because it ignores items like the trash which are in frequent use.  But to the extent these things can be arranged nearby one another, and a usable workspace maintained, tighter arrangements should be better, because less motion will be required.  I’ve heard many good cooks say they don’t mind or even prefer small kitchens.

IDENTIFYING PROBLEM AREAS

The diagram also suggests a way to quantify kitchen labor: the total number of motions required to reach all 7 resources.  If everything is perfectly connected, and I access all 7 resources once, it will total 7 motions.  A “motion” here basically means a step with the foot, a grab with the hand, or both.

Before my modification, my kitchen was a poor performer, coming in at about 15 motions required to reach all the different resources.  The serious trouble spots came from:

- the location of the refrigerator, which was far away and whose door oriented the wrong way (2-3 motions per access)

- the placement of the trash/recycling under the sink and behind cabinet doors, which required a complex dance of 4-5 motions per access (step back, swing open door, deposit item in bin, close door, step forward) to recycle one item.

- the location of the dishes and pans in 2-3 different places: a hand-wash dish rack on the counter with the most frequently used plates, cups, etc; a cabinet somewhere else for dishes that would not fit in that rack but we still needed often, and a rack above the range for pots and pans.

THE SOLUTIONS

The modded kitchen doesn’t look too special, but it’s considerably more efficient.  I’ve gotten the work metric down from 15 to about 8.5 motions, without any architectural changes.  That is, I’ve nearly halved the work of cooking or cleaning.  Here’s an annotated view:

After moving the fridge to just off the left side of the picture, I had a traditional kitchen triangle with the sink in the middle and a workspace on either side of the sink: the right-hand one toward the range, and left-hand one toward the fridge.  The right-hand workspace is smaller, but I got a cutting board that fits exactly on the sink and expands it nicely.  The left-hand one has the coffee-making supplies and can be used for anything that doesn’t require the range.

After creating the triangle, I addressed the major kitchen chore: dishwashing. A full-size dishwashing machine is efficient in terms of energy and water, but will not fit in my kitchen without a major renovation.  Also, dishwashing in a machine can represent a lot of wasted motion because dishes have to go from the sink to the dishwasher and then from the dishwasher to the storage cabinet.

In terms of labor it should make more sense to simply store the dishes where they air dry, in a hand dish rack.  It’s the way my grandma did it, on one of those huge old farmhouse drainboard sinks, and she knew something about working in the kitchen.

I followed that example, and replaced my drop-in sink with a new “Boholmen” sink from Ikea ($99 because it was in the dented area) that has 2 basins and a large drainboard.  I put a drying rack on the drainboard, and directly above the drainboard mounted a porous shelf ($15, Ikea).  Now I have a usable set of dishes and pots and pans all in one place, all above a drainboard.  They will be stored where they air dry.

The aesthetic problem with this no-cabinet drying-and-storing strategy is that it can look messy. I addressed that by getting all the materials in stainless steel, not plastic.  I also restricted the number of dishes and pans we have around for daily use to roughly the quantity that will fit on the racks. There are 3 people in our house, so we don’t need 20 mugs or 10 plates to pile up unwashed. (Guest dishes are ready in a special box just in case a collection of dwarves shows up.)

Finally I addressed that problematic trash.  I had a cabinet opening near the sink, and near both workspaces, that had no door.  So inside it I mounted a pull-out shelf unit with two cans ($33 total, Ikea), one for garbage and the other recycling.  When I’m cooking or cleaning I just pull it out with my toe and leave it there.  I can toss things in with only a single motion.  I can’t tell you how much easier this is already.

Yes, the trash is visible through the cabinet opening, but this isn’t a kitchen that is made to show off or to socialize in.  It wouldn’t be pretty even if it was covered in gold leaf.  I’ll settle for some pretty good functionality.

Photo by egazelle of a volunteer at the recent Hood To Coast event.  You’ve got a lot that’s good about Oregon in this picture: someone who is not being paid, and yet is completely at ease standing in a burned over clearcut, in the mist, by a cone, with a backpack and a bullhorn — which they are not afraid to use.  :)

The Goat Justice League advocates and educates on behalf of urban goats, who can be pets and milk producers (or wanderers).  In contrast, the goat above was actually more of a professional, part of a weeding crew cleaning out a construction site in Seattle, according to the photog.  Thanks Courtney!

We don’t need a private car anymore (we still use carsharing a few days a month to go out of town and on special errands), so we don’t have the impulse to do stupid life-sucking errands like you do when you own a car (my personal weaknesses:  going to the hardware store to buy 1 bolt, or to Burgerville for a monster snack). It’s so much more relaxing when you don’t do that stuff.

But still, we need to carry stuff, right? Here are a few things we’ve carried:

• an army’s worth of groceries
• a frat party’s worth of beer
• a case of wine from TJ’s
• a kid and his TWO bikes, while talking easily the whole way
• adults as passengers — this is surprisingly romantic and hilarious
• two 60-pound bags of concrete
• and oodles more, as other riders can tell you.

Some days we’re competing for the bike; we almost need two.  This bike has actually made our life better.  Wow!

Read all about it at myspecies.wordpress.com .

Twenty-ton airplanes fly, and we don’t blink an eye.  Lettuce seeds buried in the ground, angled every which way, somehow, amazingly, detect gravity to send their shoots straight up to the sky every time, and then we complain they’re not big enough to eat yet.  Mothers love us no matter what, and you know how we treat them.

And then there’s Cubespace.

Cubespace is a shared workspace so perfectly functional and Portlandesque I’ve rarely thought about how extraordinary it is.   The idea is “coworking“: an efficient yet social workspace arrangement for serious freelancers, a step up from working at the cafe.

I suppose someone could set up a collection of desks and phones and printers anywhere and call it coworking, but Cubespace’s proprietors Eva and David have truly generated a positive and comfortable atmosphere.  They know what a freelancer needs: reasonably priced office space, a tireless, fully automatic espresso machine (complimentary for paying customers), a quiet room for when you need to focus, and, for when you need a sugar rush, free Capn Crunch.  No wonder I feel at home there.

Now Cubespace is threatened with eviction.  I won’t bang the drum too loudly here, because David and Eva are negotiating with their landlord currently, and David has summarized the plot succintly here.  But I am encouraged that the news led to a flash flood of direct support, including a fundraising site that’s collected about $5000 in just a few days.  I won’t take Cubespace for granted any longer — nor the twenty-ton airplanes, nor the gravity-detecting lettuce shoots, nor the long-suffering moms. Well, maybe just one mom…

Update: June 2009.  Cubespace is closing, but it’s hard to say that it failed.  Have a good summer, guys.

Some new stuff from the artist here and here.

I refit this end of the attic in my 1922 house as a play area for my son.  I wanted this attic to continue to feel like an attic, even though I was finishing it off.  So I did the walls and ceiling in tongue & groove beadboard, a material which was also used when the house was built.  It has new fireproofing and insulation underneath.  Other features inlcude: marmoleum sheet scraps for flooring, with soft padding underneath; an antique star-mullioned window to suggest a sunset; a Velux roof window for emergency egress; low-temperature LED light fixtures; a verdant-brand thermostat with an occupancy sensor, controlling a “hydronic” baseboard heater; and a tent-sized nap bay.

More pics on flickr.

In the house, technology can obviate the impulse to nobly suffer to save energy (remember President Carter in his sweater?). Probably the first thing I installed in my family’s house when I moved in was a programmable thermostat.  It saves energy by lowering the thermostat when I’m not likely to be home or wanting heat, and raise it when I know I want it to come on. No more running across a freezing floor at 5:30 AM to turn the heat on.

Now comes a thermostat that takes this idea one step further – incorporating motion and thermal sensors to detect when someone is using the room. If the room hasn’t been occupied for a few minutes, it can lower the programmed thermostat temperature (“setpoint”) by a few degrees.  If the room hasn’t been occupied for hours, it can lower the setpoint even more.  When someone returns to the room, it returns to the programmed setpoint.

It’s a truly simple and promising idea that in some dwellings could save huge amounts of energy.  It comes from Verdant, a company with a Montreal address and a still-incomplete website. There you’ll find a study from a hotel setting where this technology saved 40% of energy consumption.  Of course people act differently in hotels. (I, for one, tend to crank up the heat and luxuriate.)  But you can see the promise.

I’ve been testing a consumer model of their thermostat (the Verdant V8-BB-7S) for about a week and can report that it pretty much works.  This model controls heat for 120-240 volt systems, so it’s a good match for a radiant floor or baseboard heater setup — ideally one powered by green electricity.  (I can’t find any model available for lower-voltage wiring typically used to control household furnaces.) However at least one of the claims on the box is a bit overblown.

The test environment was a newly renovated attic room not served by my house’s main furnace.  It is well insulated with solid panel insulation faced with radiant foil, and has fairly good air sealing.  The room contains a 750 watt hydronic baseboard heater.  I used the thermostat to control this heater.

I was curious about several claims made in marketing the thermostat.  The box says the product can “save at least 30%” on energy consumption, and features “100% reliable occupancy detection.” The prothermostats.com web site adds the claim that it will detect you “even when you sleep.”

I found the thermostat reliably detected my presence or absence on the basis of motion, and prevented the heater from coming on many needless times. I can believe a 30% reduction in consumption could be achieved. If I had been gone a few minutes, it lowered the setpoint 4 degrees.  If I had been gone an hour, it lowered the setpoint all the way to 40 degrees F. These parameters are adjustable by the user.

However, the “100% reliable occupancy detection” was a stretch.  The thermostat did NOT detect occupancy when the room was used for a nap by a small boy. That meant the heat turned off when it should have been on. He was sleeping in a bay of the room out of direct line of sight from the thermostat, but still only about 10 feet away. Not a big problem, IMHO, but a bit of a disappointment for a sensor system that claims to be “100% reliable.”

That little failure raises some interesting questions. Can or should a thermostat be able to distinguish between humans and other living things, such as pets (or extremely bad children, who nominally qualify as living :) ) ? Are there any sources of motion or heat (for example clocks, appliances) that might fool the thermostat into thinking the room is occupied?  Perhaps Verdant needs to add some sort of sensitivity control rather than, in effect, claiming its product has ESP.

(Journalistic note: I sent an email to Verdant asking for clarification of these details, but as yet have received no response.)

I think this is a really useful and promising product that in its present form could save a lot of energy and money. But it’d be helpful if the manufacturer could clarify the capabilities and limitations of what it’s selling.

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The geeky background: According to a comprehensive study sponsored by the Union of Concerned Scientists and published partly in The Consumer’s Guide To Effective Environmental Choices, housing and transportation combined represent 65% of the typical American’s contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, while personal items and services (yup, all of them except food) represent a twiddly 6%.