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My Mechanical Keyboard Experience

2015-02-15T21:35:00.002-05:00

My Mechanical Keyboard Experience

I’ve enjoyed typing since I was in 6th grade and learned it in a

class on one of those old fashioned mechanical manuals. As much as I enjoy the satisfaction of thumping away on my Hermes or Olympia vintage typewriter, there just isn’t any opportunity to use these in real life anymore. In recent years, my work environment has moved over nearly 99% to data entry and eliminated handwriting nearly completely. This is a sad state of affairs for fountainpen enthusiasts like me, but all good things must end. The opportunity for me to use a lot of my pens now is in journaling which is more enjoyable, but I’ve been looking to make my work experience better. So I’ve reluctantly been trying various species of mechanical keyboards over the past 4 years and I believe I’ve found the one worthy one. The Topre RealForce Hi-Pro from Tokyo Japan.

My understanding of the Mechanical Switches in Keyboards

This is something like the keyboards from the seventies and eighties. I spent 2 years doing data entry for a research lab when I was an Undergrad on one of those IBM model M buckling-spring keyboards - they are different from these Cherry MX switches in feel - they had heavier actuation weights, but probably felt cheaper in construction quality somewhat, but overall gave a confidence-inspiring feel to each keystroke, allowing precise data entry. You can still buy those model-M keyboards as they’re produced by Unicomp of Kentucky using the exact same technology in the switches. But the Cherry MX switches which come in 28 different types, and created by the Cherry company now based in Bavaria, Germany are probably the most famous mechanical keyboard switch makers in the world. I preferrred the brown, then the blue switches (turns out I’m conventional - these two, in that order, are the most popular by the general population also). At work I use a brown switch keyboard, but at home I enjoy the clickety clack of the blue switches and so does my wife. They have really precise entry and allows high speed entry. Once you go mechanical switch, you can’t really go back. Or so I thought.

I’ve read of the Topre switches of Tokyo Japan and turned away at their $300 prices, but in the overall scheme of things, why not spend $300+ on a keyboard - the keyboard is in fact the direct point of contact with your computer system - like a good fountain pen, it’s thus one of the most important tangible features of your computer system. Also $300 really isn’t that much money when you’re getting premium quality goods. I researched Topre switch boards and was tempted at the new Cooler Master Novatouch boards since they use Topre switches but have the central cross connectors allowing keycap changeouts with those made for Cherry MX, but I figured I’m not going to look for other keycaps for decorative purposes anyway, and the Topre RealForce with Hi-Pro already has the best keycaps: PBT w/dye-sublimation printing on them. Though it takes a while to get used to, these spooned out keycaps give an extra special ergonomic feel to typing that is indescribably enjoyable after a while of getting accustomed to them. I found that EliteKeyboards still sold them and grabbed one - I got a keyboard roof also to protect the keys from dust & liquid spills. I’m now tempted to buy another just so I have one as a spare in case this one goes kaput and these are no longer available in the future.

My Rosewill Apollo (NewEgg LED backlit one) was not only too much bling, it wasno't made properly - the switches, the plug ins (USB ports x2, mic & headphone connections) just don’t work reliably - buggy piece of crap. I like My wife’s plainJane Rosewill 9000 series keyboard better. For a decent cheap mechanical keyboard I’d suggest looking at these. The feel of the keys are essentially the same, and if you don’t care about cosmetics or backlighting, or various features, these cheaper ones are all you need. The higher priced ones from Deck, DAS, Vortex or Filco in Australia, or Ducky in China give you some feature choices for keyboard geeks that most people don’t know or care about like various lighting programming features, programmable keys, cord plug options, USB port options etc. The construction on these are also higher quality, but none of these can beat the Topre or Happy Hacking keyboards’ build quality. Typing on the Topre realForce is like driving a premium car - solid nesting pleasure with everything designed for ergonomics and quality, with the quiet subdued feel of nonostentatious luxury.

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iOne XArmor U9W wireless mechanical keyboard with MX cherry brown switches

This was my first experience with mechanical keyboards. Around 2011 - I read various blogs by keyboard aficionados about the virtues of the mechanical key switches by Cherry. After perusing the feel and pros and cons of the blues, reds, and browns, I felt like the brown switches seemed most reasonable. I already had a couple failures with Logitech wireless keyboards - balky, connections blanking out etc - shorting or whatever was occurring and I decided to try one of these. They had a rubberized surface texture to the cases, the keyboard was beefy and heavy - a feeling of high quality. The wireless connection was bluetooth radio signals carried by a 2.4Ghz dongle - no software included - apparently self-connecting. I found it connected up perfectly from the start. But then troubles began, but more on this later.

The clicks definitely made typing on it more confidence-inspiring, more reassuring that the right buttons are pressed, but the speed wasn’t much better initially. This one is the cherry BROWN keys that click, I thought I had gotten the quiet keys, but being used to cheap dome membrane keyboards by Logitech for several years, it seemed very loud comparatively. The cherry BLUE keys were supposed to be better in feel, though even louder - I got a Rosewill 9000 board from newegg shortly to try that one out - it was stentorian - I gave it to my wife who loved it. It continues to torture me to this day with its obnoxiously loud keys. I offered to put rubber bands under its keycaps for her, but she enjoyed the loud clicking, like the smacking of gum - enjoyable to the chewer, torture to those living around it.

Back to the XAmor U9W - I tried it with the wrist rest, and it’s not much better, so I removed it, as it took up enormous desktop real estate with the plastic wristrest.- it’s a standard, full-size layout with the arrow keys and the numberpad - useful at taxtime. No odd-sized, oddly-placed buttons like the previous Logitech M520. I placed Lithium Energizer batteries in it. Heavy and sturdy. Rubberized surface. Keycaps felt somewhat textured, but when pull out - they are ABS (cheaper Lego plastic) - no big deal. Can tell ABS from the better PBT plastic by floating the ABS in water - PBT tends to sink. Also acetone smears the ABS plastic. PBT is usually thicker, higher quality, withstands 323F temperatures compared to only 212F for ABS. PBT is denser, heavier, higher quality and would last longer, much more expensive plastic. Usually texturized and feels much better in quality. I dreamed of PBT keycaps.. someday you shall be mine. But this trivial bit of lechery was unnecessary.

I used the XArmor U9W with pleasure for about 13 months, enough to use it past its warranty period. A great board. Then one day, it went out on me. A repeated glitchy disturbing error tone on my computer speakers - maddening and I couldn’t figure out what from, but I noticed the keyboard wouldn’t register. Having lost the instructions for the keyboard I frantically looked all around the house for it - finally searched online for the instructions and found some. (later I found the original instructions with the box in the attic). I went through the procedures, re-linking my keyboard to my computer and the dongle - seemed to work, then the signal was lost again. Again and again I tried to reconnect it in vain. Would work for a few lines, then bonk, gone. I opened up the keyboard, looked at the little controller deck on the upper left corner - no obvious fizzled connections. I tried it on different computers, nothing. I tried to pry off the switches - nothing. I tried new batteries, different dongles, nothing. The keyboard was lost. That was it, forget wireless keyboards.

Rosewill Apollo RK-9100XB, with Cherry MX Blue switches

A year ago I went for a connected, grounded Rosewill Apollo RK-9100XB board from newegg - the king of the newegg mechanical heap. With USB ports, headphone, microphone ports, adjustable illuminated keys, braided cording, the whole works. Cherry Blue MX switches this time. We’ll see how my wife likes the maddening clickiness of blues. This board was full of bling, but from the very beginning I noticed the letter “A” switch was off - it repeated randomly, it failed to capture occasionally, though half the time it all worked ok. I kept using it for almost a year, before being driven mad by this halting, balky “A” keyswitch. I opened up the keyboard, unfortunately noticed the switches were mounted on a steel plate rather directly on PCB board, making it difficult to remove the individual switch. I’d have to desolder the connectors to get the switch out. I was tempted, but noticed I was still within the 1 year warranty period, just barely, so I emailed to see if I could get this thing repaired by newegg. I decided enough with the economy boards; I researched furiously and looked at Deck Hassium Pro keyboards, Cooler Masters & Corsairs, Ducky Shines, Filco and Vortex ones from Australia, the ubiquitous DAS keyboards from Germany; I looked at the common keyswitches by Cherry - decided I preferred the browns to blues and reds, didn’t like the clears, blacks, greens or the rarer MXs. I looked back at the old loud buckling spring keyswitches of IBM/Lexmark and Unicomps, as well as the various ALPs keyswitches from the 1990s before deciding I’ll go to the top of the mountain - Topre switches and keyboards from Japan would be my next keyboards. After looking at the compact but pricy Happy Hacking boards, I much preferred the full-size boards and especially appealing was the beautiful HiPro ergonomic RealForce 104UG. It had everything I wanted including the sleek understated look, the PBT keycaps, the total absence of useless bling. After looking for a few weeks for a deal on ebay and various auction sites for used ones, I decided to get a new one from the reliable elitekeyboards.com. The price was steep but my lust was steeper.

Nearly all keyboards sold with computers use rubber domes under the keys. This is the same technology used in cheap TVremotes. With mechanical keyboards, you don’t have to bottom out the keys to the bottom of the rubber plate to register your strokes. This saves a lot of energy, reduces fatigue in typing. Mechanical key switches are designed so that they register before you bottom out the keystrokes, so you need only apply as much force as is necessary to actuate it, not wasting any energy in the process. There are several types of mechanical keyswitches to pick from. Once to you try mechanical keyswitches on typing keyboards, you can’t go back.

One of the disadvantages of the mechanical keyboards, especially with USB ports are that it typically supports only 6 key rollovers - beyond 6 keys pressed at once, the other entries are blocked. This is rarely useful except for maybe certain gaming situations. The Cherry MX switches have a 5ms debouncing time - each key is delayed by at least this much, but most non-superhumans could not type much faster than this anyway - we’re talking 300wpm speeds.

The average rubber dome keyboards require 55g-60g of force to actuate. 1g of weight applies about 1 Centinewtons of downward force. That’s 55-60 cN-rated.

Cherry MX Black switches have a 40-80g (60g) actuation force - gives a smooth feel, good for gaming, but not so good for typing, not much of a tactile bump. Cherry MX Brown switches have 45g actuation force, and a peak force of 55g. These are a middle-ground between gaming and typing switches. They have a light tactile feel halfway through the keystroke - thus they give you an indication of when you can release. The reset and actuation points are close enough together that you can “float” at that point enabling you to double tap faster. The Cherry MX Blue switches have peak force of 50g, with 60g peak force. These are the best for typing. The tactile bump is easily felt, and the resistance is similar to the average mechanical keyboard. The release point is above the actuation point, so double-tapping for gaming might be more troublesome. Other Cherry MX switches are the “clear” switches which are like stiffer browns, the “red” which is a lighter version of the black requiring less force (45g). The top-of-the-line mechanical keyboards use the “Topre Key Switch” with the tactile capacitative switch of 30-55g actuation force. They are quieter than the Cherry MX, or Alps, or Buckling Spring switches, with the smoothest force gradient.

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Topre RealForce High-Profile keycaps - RealForce 104UG HiPro, Model YK2100

the Topre switches are faster: 3x faster Debounce - the time it takes a keyboard to register a single switch digital signaal. (5-8msec vs 19-25msec for a cherry MX). Steel backplate keeps board rigid and sturdy solid feel. Cooler Master came out with the NovaTouch which uses Topre switches, but with the Cherry MX compatible central cross allowing Cherry MX array of keycaps. Detachable cords (but microUSB plug, which could unplug easier than standard).

No LED, no USB, headphone, speaker plugs etc. (just bling anyway).

The XArmor U9w was outstanding on my old computer, but suddenly became useless - wouldn’t connect, wouldn’t type consistently, skips, skitters, repeats. Not sure what happened, but scared me away from wireless mechanical keyboards. But the shitty Rosewill Apollo was the worst experience of my life in keyboards.

I also went in on the $88 PLUM keyboard massdrop earlier - this one’ll arrive sometime in early March maybe - I plan to take this one to work perhaps.

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After I Finally received the much awaited Topre RealForce Hi-profile keyboard - in unique dark grey board with lighter grey/beige PBT sculpted keys. scooped-out profiles overall, and scooped-out touch surface on most keys, but with a variance to it that is unique. For instance the ~ to + row including the 1-0 keys are angled forward in a unique way that makes reaching them easier than whatever so that 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, 11,12 13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20, etc. Perfection.

There’s no indexing rise on the F & J keytops like most keyboards. Rather, the scooping depth to the A, ; G & H keys are shallow like most other keys, while the sdf and jkl keys have the most pronounced scooping depth. This allows one to feel one’s way into position - thoujgh it takes some time to learn. One has to become loyal to this keyboard to learn this by feel, but with such a luxurious board, one can’t help but want to be one with this cup rubber as much as possible.

I get some hangups like others have said about this board such that my typing speed was not great - 109wpm on typeracer. I’ve hit 115 or higher regularly on my XArmor Cherry Brown couple years ago. I’m biased against the Cherry Blue, mainly because the Apollo Rosewill was such a piece of shit with the hanging A key - the plating making the replacement of this switch a pain the ass - I’d have to desolder it, resolder another switch for instance. But I think I can definitely get used to this keyboard. I’m getting lots of mishits, but I think the cherry blue apollo piece of shit has given me the yips. Will need to retrain myself.

The keyboard roof is truly nice piece of acrylic, clear 3.44mm thick piece - lies atop the keys only - protecting from dust, liquid spills etc. damage. Bonus - I can lay it on the board, put my journal on top of it at a slant and use it as a slantboard for writing more comfortably as well. Is this roof worth $30 form elitekeyboards - it is for me now, but ask me again a few months later.

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EliteKeyboards Full Size Keyboard Roof

§ Clear acrylic Roof/Cover protects from dust and spills

§ Fits Leopold 104-key and Realforce 103-key Keyboards

Model: RF-EK Stock: YES Price: $30.00

A bit of a pain as to where to store it.

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On cardboard box:

REALFORCE

Topre REalforce

Keyboard Specifications

Much better Operational Performance by

Electrostatic Capacitative System.

Superior endurance of 30 million key life cycle.

Good feeling of oneness with cup rubber.

On bottom of box:

Topre

Japanese lettering

http://www.topre.co.jp/

MADE IN JAPAN

On right-side end of box:

REALFORCE 104UG-HiPro

MODEL No.YK2100

Topre Corporation

SKU bar: 456029934041417

Item Specifications

Switch System Electrostatic Capacitive System

Stroke 4.0 mm

Layout type US Layout 104 keys (Black)

Press Attributes 45g Soft Tactile Feeling (+/-15g)

Interface USB Interface

Cable Length Approx. 1.5m

External Dimensions 456mm(W) x 169mm(D) x 39mm(H)

Weight Approx. 1.4kg

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Not such a tactile feel as compared - can be silent - the bottoming out sound is more a pleasant click. When actuating without the bottom contact, it can almost be silent. aaabbbcccdddeeefffggghhhiiijjjkkklllmmmnnnooopppqqqrrrssstttuuuvvvwwwxxxyyzzz111222333444555666777888999000.

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Typing on this board feels like nothing else - the rubber dome keys of membrane mid 1990s Dell boards feel similar in terms of the pressure gradient pop. The Cherry brown switches on a plate is the closest match in terms of sound, but the tactile feel is entirely different for both. Cherry MX switches feel very linear in resistance - You feel a pressure whether hard or soft throughout the stroke til the break. On a membrane board, you feel a bubble pop feel at the top of the stroke, but as it gives away, there is nothing - also there is a plasticky cheap chiclettiness to membrane boards that is very unsatisfying for extended typing sessions. A dull monotony. With the Topre switch, because the finger and keycap switch is floating atop a rubber dome, it feels like your finger is being pushed back as it pushes forward - a floating feeling. The majority of the resistance at each switch is therefore near the top of the press, then you feel the pressure clearly give away, a silent popping feel that is very addictive and pleasurable. I reminds one of that feeling you get pressing against a bubble in bubblewrap. If you can learn to not press the key all the way to the bottom point, you can type very quietly. But for those of us trained on mechanical typewriters, the fingers tend to press with more force than the Topre switches require, thus the bottoming out sound and low-pitch click with a woody pleasant timbre to it. The scooped out profiles are more pronounced in the primary asdfghjkl; row, less pronounced in the rows above and below. In the numbers row above the alphabet keys, the keys are scooped but leans forward toward your fingers, allowing a more ergonomic reach to these numbers. Almost makes the numberpad unnecessary. The remainder of the keys including the function keys, numberpad, arrow array and the printscreen to pageup/down array have the intermediate scooped profile. The keys toward center of the board requires more force to actuate than the keys toward the outside of the central key array. 3 weights. This variable weighting creates a more even psychophysics of typing in the same way that the well-tempered keyboard demonstrated by Bach creates a more even tonal centering sound. Generally it all works well together to create a keyboard ergonomics unlike any other board; in fact accounting for features and feels that other keyboarding makers probably have never even remotely considered.

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The keys are PBT(polybutylene terephthalate) , which is a premium I didn’t appreciate too much - but is clearly superior to ABS (lego plastic) - higher melting point, thicker plastic, longer lasting form. (Spacebar is ABS). Long life dye-sublimated keycap labeling (Black)

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Substantial feeling to each key, to the board itself, to every connection and switch. A surety of construction that gives one confidence that though one’s mind and fingers may falter, this machine will not. A sense that it will last one’s lifetime. That it may possibly pass down the generations even.

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There’s a pleasant matte grain to the surface textures of the board itself, and to each keycap.

There’s a pleasant simplicity of design - a luxurious simplicity, like a vintage Mercedes Benz from the mid 1980s. Looks German in the design.

For this combination of luxurious, decadent design, build, and well-thought out subtleties, along with the sophisticated tactile popping feel of typing on this board, one must pay a premium. ~$300 shipped. I got an acrylic keyboard roof from elitekeyboards for an additional $30 to protect this investment. But since the majority of the time one spends in front of a computer screen is time spent interfacing with a keyboard - this time is best spent in pleasure, flying across keycaps and switches built for pleasure and speed.

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2012-09-07T09:11:00.003-04:00

pelahale@gmail.com

2012-08-20T16:44:00.001-04:00

pelahale@gmail.com

2012-08-06T17:43:00.001-04:00

Thought for the Day

long-time, no blog - I'm going to try to do something different. Ever since I've been a child, I've read comic books, and ever since I've been a kid, I've been obsessed with things, objects, gear. I'm going to combine the two by blogging cartoons on this type of topic, or at least give it a shot. Here's my first:

pelahale@gmail.com

2006-03-15T21:35:00.000-05:00

We bought a Honda Odyssey

My car purchase history is 1991 Honda Civic Wagon, 1994 Toyota Celica (kept ’91 civic wagon for my wife), 1997 Honda CRV (traded in the ’94 Celica – bad car for toting babies in), 2002 Honda Pilot. My wife’s Honda Pilot got crunched by a large white delivery truck while my wife was at a stoplight. The size/heft and safety features including the “marginal” rear-crash rating of the Pilot saved both my wife’s and my daughter’s life (please see the picture above for the damage from behind). It made us want to buy another Pilot, especially as it had been an absolutely flawless performer with absolutely no problems since the day we bought it. However the big downers on the Pilot were difficulty getting the 3-year-old in/out of it, bad gas mileage, uncomfortable 2nd row seating and impossible 3rd row seating. Things we liked about the Pilot were its rear back-up sensors and the rear DVD entertainment system (to keep the kids from fighting during long trips). I also liked the high vantage point while driving as well as the high ground clearance (though this made the car theoretically less stable and more prone to rollover). Also the Pilot was just simply a “cool” car among the geeky parents-with-small-kids crowd.

However, the Odyssey was the inevitable car for us at this stage of our lives with an 8-year-old and a 3-year-old. We scoured the specs/numbers at NADA and Kelly Blue Book sites, we read the entire sections in Consumer Reports on Minivans and ordered price reports to make sure the NADA and Kelly Blue Book and Edmunds.com prices weren’t missing something (they didn’t include dealer holdbacks of $500 to $1500). We looked long and hard and did almost go for the Toyota Sienna XLE Limited, but we were dissuaded by Toyota’s specifications including inferior gas mileage and the recommendations to use Premium gas, and ultimately Toyota’s inferior crash test ratings (it’s rear crash ratings are POOR, versus the Odyssey’s MARGINAL) ruined the Sienna in for us. The Sienna however was clearly the “cooler” car and more popular with the kids, but for us safety and gas mileage trumped all. The dealer told us the Sienna Hybrid was just around the corner (maybe next year - 2007), but from the size of the Sienna, I can’t imagine that it would make a huge difference in mileage, maybe ratchet it up by 5 or so miles per gallon. It would be then marginally better than the Odyssey EX-L and Touring models, but I’m sure at the price of several thousand dollars more. And despite advertising to the contrary, I have a pet theory that those big batteries run by the hybrids will need to be changed out after about 5 or so years at a cost of thousands of dollars, thereby obliterating the price savings from the hybrid mileage. The trim line of Odyssey we bought (the Touring) comes with the VCM (variable cylinder management) system which shuts down half the 6 cylinders when the vehicle is cruising at low speeds or decelerating, and the Ody club forum database seems to confirm mileages in the 20city/28hwy range – not bad for a hulking vehicle. The front dash multi-information display shows you approximated real-time mileage as well as how many more miles you can drive on the current level of fuel available (an awesome feature). Additionally, I have received absolutely stellar service and honesty from 4 different Honda dealers and repair/maintenance while I’ve received only sleazy service and dishonesty from the two Toyota dealers where I serviced my ’94 Celica. The sales tactics at the Toyota dealerships I’ve visited also were a turn-off.

I remember about 10 years ago thinking how stupid-looking and ugly minivans were and I said to myself that I’d never spend my own money on abominations like that. Well if I didn’t have kids, I’d go for a nice Honda Accord/Civic Hybrid, maybe the Prius, but with 2 little ones to tote around for at least another 13 years, the Minivan makes a lot of sense, especially the Odyssey. In any case, I've accepted the fact that I am middle-aged now, over-the-hill, about-to-die, etc. So being "cool" means nothing to me anymore. Either that or my now middle-aged tastes finds that the Odyssey is indeed "cool" for my frumpy set.

Once we decided on the Odyssey, the anti-affluenza-izing part of us wanted to go USED and wanted to go LX, well we looked at various USED cars and looked up records by VIN on CarFax and we ultimately decided that surely we could get a decent vehicle at a decent price, but we’d probably still be paying around 85% of the price of a new car for a vehicle which we’d always be nervous/anxious about due to its lack of good warranty. We had a friend who actually sold used cars including Odysseys, and after checking various used vehicles out (especially the ones just coming of lease from 2004), we decided to go ahead and spend the extra 15% for a new one with full warranty. We’re talking about the difference between paying say $30,000 for a new one versus $25,000 for a used one – definitely a big monetary difference, but considering the psychological and the potential sub-LEMONal factors involved, we decided to pay the extra $5k and sleep better at night.

Once we fell down the slippery slope of getting a new Odyssey, it became relatively easy to convince ourselves that we needed the Touring line of Odyssey. What the Odyssey 2006 Touring has over the next best Odyssey, the EX-L are: run-flat tires with constant tire pressure monitoring systems, the automatic open/shut rear hatch (huge and heavy) with the auto obstruction sensing features on both the side sliding doors and the rear hatch. With small kids running around these safety features are unbeatable. I have had 2 friends who were killed on highways from probably high-speed tire blow-outs. The Honda Odyssey Touring lines’ Michellin PAX system promises to eliminate this deadly possibility. Also, my wife tends to be a do-it-yourselfer and has often changed tires on our vehicles – yet the promise of not needing to do this, especially at night on dangerous highways or dangerous neighborhoods is also definitely worth the price of these tire systems. I’ve read from people on the Ody forum that it would be about $900 for replacement of all four tires on the Michellin PAX system. Compared to the $500 I paid for the cheap Uniroyal Laredo Cross-Country on our last Honda Pilot, the $900 doesn’t seem a high premium to pay for the additional safety features you get. The other great features of the Touring line over the others are the multiple-point parking sensor system surrounding the vehicle. I enjoyed the back-up sensor on the Pilot, but having additional sensing points as well as the rear-view back-up camera to aid in parking/backing-up is a great feature especially for those with limited coordination like me.

The more difficult part to explain is getting the rear-DVD-entertainment system and the satellite-linked navigation system. As I said before we had the rear DVD system on the Pilot and we have found it extremely useful particularly with our very demanding and noisy kids. As much as I despise TV, the ability to keep the car relatively calm and quiet during long, long trips actually provides another safety feature to the driver as well as lowering stress levels. We can be very choosy with our DVD choices too: the Kipper series are a favorite as we have probably the entire collection. Other ones I like are the Pixar movies, and many of the older Disney movies. The navigation system is something I wanted to get because we have gotten outrageously lost several times and I thought being totally lost especially in heavy traffic in foreign territory (on long trips etc.) is also very much a safety concern. If the Touring line came in a set-up where we could have the rear-back-up camera WITHOUT the navigation system however, we might have gone for a vehicle without the navigation features. I’ve read more and more how useful the NAV is, so I’m thinking that it was a good choice. My intial impression with the car is indeed that the Navigation features is the single most awesome feature of the car. The black leather interior is also an awe-inspiring experience. I can't imagine living without the Nagivation features now - I'll never be lost again (in the Ody at least). The voice command and recognition feature is also pretty HAL-like and fun, but I think I could live without it. The remote keyless entry with the auto dual side sliding doors and the auto rear hatch open/closing is also pretty nice - I can't help but play with it. It's basically like playing with your own toy robot sized large and $36,000+ price-tagged.

The hardest phase is to part with the money. With our wrecked Pilot, especially since my wife was totally faultless in the accident, we got about $25,000 settlement for our crushed vehicle + various expenses (free car rental til we settled, free booster seat, my wife got a day’s pay at work etc.). By using AAA car buying service (which we used to purchase our 2002 Pilot), we were able to negotiate an outstanding price of $35,384 for the Odyssey 2006 Touring with DVD/NAV. After taxes and fees, the total price was $36,666. Thus after factoring in the $25,000 settlement, this vehicle would cost us $11,666. This is a lot of cash to spend especially when we’re trying to sock away money for college savings for our kids and retirement for us. Nevertheless we absolutely will not finance this amount since it is senseless to pay additional hundreds of dollars. So we took out this amount from our stash of cash at INGdirect to pay off our 2006 Odyssey. In a further slide down the slippery slope of Affluenza, in endlessly reading about the Odyssey on various websites etc. I somehow found myself purchasing a set of all-season black rubber floor mats and the rear cargo tray as well as mud splash guards and the “bug” air-deflector for the hood. These expenses amounted to an additional $484, bringing our total for the Odyssey to $12,150.

Here then are the first pics taken of our new car:

In the end, I’d probably preferred that the Honda Pilot was never wrecked and that we could have driven it to 200,000 miles. But since we were dealt a bad hand by fate, we decided to make the best of it by upgrading our vehicle instead of downgrading. I figured that if we took the lower road and got a used vehicle with fewer features, we’d ever after be in whining mode complaining about what fate did to us and reminiscing of how great a vehicle the Pilot was and all that. If we upgraded to a superior vehicle on the other hand, I thought that our loss would only be financial which is something we could live better with by working more and saving more to replace our lost cash. Time will tell whether we made the right decision in sliding totally off our track into the abyss of affluenza again, but thus far I have no regrets (in our current high from spending $36k+ on essentially a giant gazingus pin). Our previous few years of hard saving has given us a pile of cash and we can afford this bit of decadence and still keep most our stash. This is how we justify such an outrageous purchase. As TS Eliot wrote:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell,
and the profit and loss.
They picked his bones in whispers,
as he rose and fell,
entering the whirlpool.

2005-10-11T18:16:00.000-04:00

Our Belated Summer RoadTrip Vacation
Unto The West

Warning: This blog entry is incredibly large as it is a summation of 13 busy days with pictures.

Due to scarce time I've not blogged for months. In brief, I've been stamping out disease and saving lives at work (=3 and changing diapers and attending to babies at home. I've made a decision to change jobs and have been doing much paperwork (will write about the job change soon).

Finally, here is our Out-West trip put-off twice in the past 2 years; this was my blog's original raison d'etre. We took 2 weeks off to take a long ass road trip from our town Cary NC to Wyoming and back. I'm glad we did this in the Summer as gas prices sky-rocketed soon after we returned. My wife and I have driven cross-country a couple of times before, but we now had two babies complicating the road trip: our eight-year old and our three-year old. They made the trip more interesting and more inefficient and expensive. When my wife and I were in school, we could drive around the clock, taking turns at the wheel. We drove from the Grand Canyon back to Chapel Hill in just over 3 days or so. It's not possible to do this with screaming babies in the back seats. We found we had to turn in early and find a hotel/motel soon after night-fall each day. We couldn't go into just any Cockroach Inn either due to safety concerns. We definitely couldn't just plop into a deserted campground and pitch a tent in total darkness the way we used to. In general, once you have kids, vacations are entirely all about them and not about you (life becomes so also). Sometimes you have to go back and see the same thing(s) you saw when you were younger just so your kids can see it - even if it means missing out on something new. we had grand plans of camping out in our tent every night almost, but once we hit the road, this plan became impractical. It's very tiresome to pitch a tent with accessories like blowing up an air mattress manually, scrounging for food for everyone, cleaning up and toileting everyone at night, then taking down the tent with accessories, making breakfast for everyone, cleaning/clothing everyone in the morning - all while trying to make good time driving across the country. Thus follows a synopsis of the trip:

6/14/05, Day 1: odometer reading at 41651, time of departure 08:23EDT (original hoped for departure time of 04:00 didn't materialize.) Above we are about to leave NC and enter into VA - that nipple-like prominence at top is Pilot Mountain in the Mount Airy region of NC (ancestral home of my wife's maternal grandmother)
We stopped at 13:12 in Princeton WV to eat at CiCi Pizza ($12.36) and fill up on gas ($35.73 for 17.022gallons, odometer 41989, mileage 22.14mpg).
We then drove on and finally stopped for the day at 19:15 edt in Corydon, IN - got gas at FastPay for $22.44 for 11gal, mileage 23.43mpg. We checked in Hampton Inn (quoted $85+taxes). We ate at White Castle ($16.18), a droll little fastfood place we've never seen in NC - very tiny hamburger meat slices were placed in what we in NC would call a dinner roll. We played putt-putt at GolfShores for $14. My family stopped up the toilet twice at this unusually clean and nice Hampton Inn - first time the plug (my son's) was so solid that nobody could un-stop it, so we changed rooms - my wife promptly plugged up the toilet in our new room. Our original plan was to visit Lincoln's boyhood home memorial in Indiana, but our late arrival and departure precluded that. We drove 596 miles our first day.

6/15/05, Day 2: We checked out of the Hampton Inn after an ok continental breakfast - we were charged $99 total, we didn't contest it due to the multiple plugged commodes. By 11:20edt we arrived in Illinois. We drove out of our way to see the Gateway Arch in St.Louis MO first:

We thought about going up into the Arch like we did 11 years ago, but decided to keep moving. The long wait to ride an ancient and slow elevator ride up a claustrophobic enclosure for a blurry view of the St.Louis riverfront would not have been pleasant with a screaming 3 year-old on-board. We arrived in Springfield IL at Lincoln's home. We paid $2 for parking, took the tour of Lincoln's home, grounds, and neighborhood, bought souvenirs (bust of Lincoln, a President's book, $21).

Then saw Lincoln's Tomb

We got gas in Springfield for $35, 16.211gal, mileage 21.05mpg. We decided to back-track a little bit in order to see Samuel Clemen's boyhood home in Hannibal MO. We drove back into Missouri and arrived in Hannibal by 20:18edt - we were actually 7:18pm Central Time though. We checked into a decaying Hotel Clemens (quoted $65/night). We walked around Hannibal, saw the Mississippi river (very scenic little town), ate at Breadeux Pizza ($18.54 + $.50 for gumballs for the kids). We drove 456 miles for the day.

6/16/05, Day 3: We checked out Hotel Clemens after a mediocre continental breakfast (free) - paid $71.89 for the night after taxes. Then we paid up for the tour of Twain's boyhood home and neighborhood - saw Becky Thatcher's house, Grant's pharmacy, walked up to the lighthouse, etc.

We bought a refrigerator magnet, got gas for $16.15 for 7.806gal (14.72mpg), Then drove out of Missouri and into Nebraska. We decided on the fly to stop by Omaha to see Gerald Ford's birthplace and Warren Buffet's place of business.

We paid $8.45 for 10 burritos at TacoBells in Omaha. Omaha was a lot more urban than I pictured. I saw that Woodmen's building (remember in About Schmidt). I never knew that Ford was from a broken home - his mom divorced when Ford was less than 1 month old. Ford's biological father's name was Leslie King, so he should actually be called Gerald King. We drove around for over an hour trying to find Buffet's house - I should have brought along his biography so I could locate it better. Here's is a shot of the entrance to his place of business - I went inside and asked to speak with Warren - I was promptly chased out.

We paid $34.34 for 15.904gal (25.3mpg), odometer 43106. We stopped to get gum and chocolates for the babies. We left Omaha at 20:17edt finally. We arrived in South Dakota, still very light out despite the time. We checked in our second Hampton Inn in Mitchell SD at 22:38edt and was quoted $108/night - we had no choice but to take it. We drove 599 miles this day.

6/17/05, Day 4: We ate a good free continental breakfast and my son stopped up the toilet again with another huge bowel movement. We paid $116.64 for the hotel after taxes - a horrible price, but my son's commode devastation provided our family's unspoken commentary on their prices. We paid $15.81 + $5.08 for 10.22gal of gas in Mitchell (19.14mpg, odometer 43302). We drove past the Corn Palace arguing viciously and took some pictures, but didn't go inside - I knew from 11 years ago that this was just an auditorium-type place, nothing exciting inside.

Finally about mid-day, we arrived at one of my favorite National Parks, Badlands SD - we paid $50 for an National Park Pass, thinking we'd visit more than 6 national parks/monuments within the year. we also got a Badlands refrigerator magnet ($3.10).

The views in Badlands were marred by too many tourists and their vehicles. We originally planned to camp here like we did the last time we were here, but the incredible herds of tourists made us decide to pass on it. The number of billboards advertising tourist traps had also exponentially increased - they cluttered and ruined the landscape driving into the Black Hills. Back 11 years ago, I remembered it was very scenic and kind of fun waiting for the next Wall Drug sign along the highway into the Black Hills. Now the huge numbers of copy-cat-road-side-kitsch tourist-trap signs was a nauseating spectacle.

We saw our first prairie dogs leaving Badlands - my kids loved them and fought over the binoculars. We stopped at Wall Drug so our kids could gawk at the spectacle. I bought a semi-functional binoculars for my youngest so she'd stop whining.

We also bought several kitsch toys, a jackolope figure ($30.37 total). We left Wall and went toward Rapid City where we hoped to camp - bought gas for $31.89, 14.502gal (21.4mpg, odometer 43618).

We decided on a place called Horse Thief Campgrounds in Hill City, SD after much shopping around for campsites. We got two nights for $32.13 - the place looked like trailer-park squalor from the entry, but once you drove into the tent-sites, the area was actually quite scenic with the dark granite black hills in the background.

The hot showers and general facilities were adequate, though not spic-and-span clean. We ate at Route 16 Diner (pizza, $27.64), bought some propane at Krull's market ($3.91). We set up our campsite with tent, rain-dining area, etc. Here's a shot of our littlest one the next morning found sleeping in a crevice - she is a habitual crevice-seeker, even at home.

6/18/05, Day 5: We woke up fairly early for SD time as we were still going by our Eastern time. We cooked some ramen noodles and ate this along with leftover pizza from the previous night. We have a MSR Dragonfly stove, but found that for car-camping with kids, the cheap REI-bought Coleman stove with two eyes was much more user-friendly albeit much more bulky.

We drove into Mt.Rushmore and bought a parking pass ($8), toured the facilities, took many pictures, bought a Rushmore magnet ($3.17),

then drove through WindCave National Park where we were greeted with huge herds of bison and many prairie dog towns. It turned out that this was our favorite day of the entire trip as we were literally surrounded by prairie dogs and bison in abundance.

My wife wanted to get out and hike, maybe see some caves, but we had been already had our fill of caves at Mammoth Caves in KY last Spring - I was bored of caves, so we just toured around the surface of Wind Cave, then drove into Custer SD where we ate lunch at Pizza Hut ($21.64). We then drove through Hot Springs SD (where we saw the impressive mammoth bones exhibit 11 years ago) - we decided to bypass the Mammoth bones this time in favor of Deadwood. Along the way to Deadwood I grew tired of seeing the many billboards of the hypocrite Kevin Costner all over South Dakota - for someone who affects being a conservator, his giant self-serving billboards sure did uglify the landscape.
We drove all the way north do Deadwood SD, parked ($2), and toured the kitschy town. We saw where Wild Bill Hickok got shot, saw where he and Calamity Jane were buried, saw a shoddily performed outdoor drama, then got the hell out of Deadwood - it was a dirty town full of motorcycle gangs. It seemed everybody there sported tacky tattoos.

Maybe what gave me a bad taste about this town was that as soon as we got there, my son and I went to a filthy public bathroom next to the tourist office. My son slipped and fell into a 2inch deep cesspool covering the floor of the men's room. We made him strip naked in the car and change clothes as soon as possible - he was very unhappy.
on our way back to Rapid City, we ate at a Taco John's for $12.90, an excellent alternative Mexican fast-food place, somewhat cheaper than TacoBells. We also ate at a dingy Dairy Queen afterward so we could further fatten ourselves up ($10.34). We wanted to see one of the night-time lighting ceremonies at Mt.Rushmore, so we hurried back to camp - it was a dramatic, atmospheric presentation, highly recommended to all patriotic Americans. We logged 266 miles all around the Black Hills for the day.

6/19/05, Day 6: We debated briefly staying longer in the Black Hills, but we thought there would be so much to do and see up North, so we semi-reluctantly packed up, ate some more ramen and left Hill City by 12:15EDT - this turned out to be a mistake. Our first goal was to see Devil's Tower National Monument, then up to North Dakota, and maybe Canada. We drove into Sundance WY where we got gas at FreshStart for $35.35 (17.004gal, odometer 44095, 21.2mpg). I mistakenly thought this was where the film festival was (my wife reminded me it was in Park City UT). We visited Devil's Tower, hiked all around it, bought a souvenir magnet ($2.20) - this is a spectacular monument notwithstanding the movie.

We ate at a Subway's on our way back through Sundance ($19.85) - Subway's is supposedly THE WORST franchise one can buy due to their corrupt system of expansion. As I turned out of the Subway's parking lot and drove off, I was ticketed for speeding 45mph in a 35mph zone, about 300yards of leaving the Subways! I later spoke with 2 lawyers in Casper WY as well as indirectly with the area's district attorney about representing me in court. The 35mph sign was tucked in behind the Subway's and there was no way I could have seen it turning left out of the parking lot. I tried to convince them that such hijacking and speed-trapping was unacceptable, but they were too busy to deal was such a trivial case and I had to pay the fine ($92) in the end. I recommend never visiting Sundance WY, the village of Death. We drove North glumly, our vacation seemingly ruined forever by the speedtrap, and at 21:05edt we stopped at Bowman ND and paid $20.19 for 9.53gal of gas (44316 odometer, 23.2mpg) at the unfortunately named Kum & Go. Despite the time, the skies were still bright as mid-day. Along the highway, you could see several groups of pronghorn antelopes all the way into North Dakota. At 22:30edt we arrived in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

We bought a campsite for $10 at Camp Cottonwoods. We pitched our tent amongst nests of ants and mosquitoes. We attended a Ranger-led talk after night-fall - about 8 groups of people were there including us. The topic was weird though - about Roosevelt's fiance back East. With night-fall, the skies were still very luminescent and clear, and we had a very scenic background of North Dakota badlands. We chose Cottonwoods campground because of our past pleasant experience in a cottonwoods campground at Big Bend National Park in Texas. This particular Cottonwoods in ND however was not quite as good. We drove 482 miles for this day.

6/20/05, Day 7: We had torrential rains overnight and our tent cover was soaking wet. We washed up and ate breakfast - public restrooms here were disgusting, unhygienic, and stank like death. The camp host walked by and admonished us for washing up at our campsite instead of using the bathrooms. We wanted to tell her it was because her facilities stank like death, but we held our tongues. This below is Teddy's cabin where he stayed after graduating college.

We looked at all the Teddy Roosevelt exhibits, then decided to move on instead of staying several days at the South Unit of the park. We dried our tents the best we could and packed the tent into our car despite the risk of molding. We hiked a couple of trails and spotted some bison and even saw a coyote from afar.

We bought a TRNP magnet ($2.13), then decided to go see the North Unit of the park. We stopped in Belfield ND, ate at Trapper's Kettle ($25.59) - a very interesting though forbidding restaurant which was deserted when we got there. It seemed to us that everybody in ND behaved in a chilly and unfriendly manner, but this may be just a cultural difference. Also our attitudes were still flavored with the stench of the speedtrap ticket in Sundance. We got gas at a Conoco in Belfield for $15.35 for 7.046gal (odometer 44469, 21.7mpg).
We arrived rather late to the North Unit of T.Roosevelt National Park - we walked around the ranger station exhibits where my son performed a successful bowel movement. We drove all the way around the North Unit looking for bison (saw about 12 of them), tried to find some bighorn sheep (never saw them). The temperatures were 95+F despite the latitude - I had to buy the babies some Sunkists as they became extremely diaphoretic from all the walking around. We didn't find any favorable campsites away from the sun and heat, so we decided NOT to camp at the North Unit - we went out toward Bismarck (and toward home).

This totally altered our original plans to go see Canada and visit into Montana. But the stifling heat and unfriendly folk (and the speeding ticket) made us want to go home.
We drove past the World's Largest Holstein Cow on the highway and we took Exit 159 to Bismarck - we found and were quoted $98 for a night at Country Suites ($107.91 total) in Bismarck. We ordered Domino's Pizza ($20) and bought $3 of drinks from a vending machine (profligacy). My wife washed up all our dirty laundry (including the cesspool dunked Deadwood clothes) at the hotel for $2. This hotel had a spectacular pool with huge fun-house slides but we were too busy to play (to my son's bitter disappointment). We drove 352 miles for the day.

6/21/05, Day 8: We ate an outstanding full breakfast for free. Overall an outstanding hotel, highly recommended.

We drove into Bismarck, first went to see the Lewis & Clark Center, then paid for and went to see the Ft.Mandan sites ($20). We bought souvenir magnets ($6.31) and my son bought an arrowhead for $.53. This was a very educational, mildly interesting site, but the actual fort is actually sunk deep underwater and the displayed fort is a staged reproduction. My wife liked it, but I didn't think it was worth the price of entry.
We stopped to take a closer look at the ND state capitol in Bismarck - my wife wanted to go inside, but we were running short of time I thought (we probably should have visited this one).

The capitol was very odd - it looked like a standard office building tower. I guess out here amongst nothing, a rectangular boxy 19-story building appears impressive. We bought gas at Tesoro for $36.42 for 16.563gal (20.84mpg). We then took a tour of the Mandan On-a-Slant Indian Village near Jamestown ND. This was an interesting tour and was part of the $20 L&C Center fee. The Mandan earthen huts looked very much like Mongol yurts and harked back to the ancestral heritage of the North American "native" people.

If you look at old daguerreotypes of Indians from the 1800s, you see better their northeast Asian features. It's funny how there isn't much made of this nowadays, but I'd think you could in truth classify the North American "Indians" as North East Asians originally, only later admixed with the Spanish and then the Northern Europeans. So it's not surprising that Columbus thought he had found "Indian" - in fact he had found North-Eastern Asians. I'm sure all Asians looked the same to him. It's funny that the "native" Americans, are now wanting to go back to being called "Indians" - it's all so messed up that it makes your head spin.
We also paid $18 to tour George Armstrong Custer's last home before he set out for the Battle of Little Big Horn. I thought this tour was quite worth it - a very polished University of North Dakota student led the tour dressed in period cavalry uniform. This was in fact a very sad story as told from the perspective of Custer's family and young wife.

We bought more gas at an Amoco in Jamestown ND for $11.75, 5.444gal (23.1mpg). We saw the World's Largest Buffalo. That's not me posing in the picture, just a chubby dude who presented himself conveniently for use as my scale model.

We also saw White Cloud the white buffalo from afar at this small kitschy exhibit. We ate at another Subway's in Jamestown ($17.89), then stopped at a Walmart to buy some DVDs, some junk food ($27.19). We ended up at another Country Suites in Fargo ND ($85.52). With all the touring this day, we only drove 345miles. One of the awesome things in driving around North Dakota was how light it was outside even close to midnight - it must be even more like this in Canada and Alaska in the summers. We could literally see both the sun and the near-midnight moon in the same sky, which made for a very other-worldly ambience.

6/22/05, Day 9: This Country Suites was pretty good, and cheaper, but not as good as the last one - the breakfast was good. we departed Fargo after buying more gas for $10.62, 5.182gal (18.7mpg odometer 45037). We had decided that we were headed home, but I wanted to see Sauk Centre, MN, the home of Sinclair Lewis. One of the great American novels I would recommend to any medical student or aspiring one, is Arrowsmith, a surprisingly forward-looking novel about a medical researcher. We did stop by the Lewis interpretive center, only to find that the tours of his house had closed for the day. The center was still very good, it even had his highschool diploma and Nobel Prize certificate, as well as the funerary urn which enclosed his ashes.

We went by his house anyway to look at his neighborhood. He was actually physically brought into the world by his family (his father or uncle?) in a house across the street from his. His was a family of doctors, as reflected in some of his novels. We visited his shockingly humble grave:

We filled up with gas at Sauk Centre ($25.07 for 12.003gal, 20.25mpg), then drove toward Minneapolis - we stopped and ate at a cheap/good place called Old Country Buffet in St.Cloud MN ($25.79). St.Cloud itself was a dumpy city in the mode of a New Jersey roadside city.
We had hoped to find a great hotel in Bloomington MN, but the entire area around the Mall of America was absolutely stuffed full - I called about 15 different hotels and my wife went into a Hilton to talk to a concierge-type girl who called everyone she knew also. There was nothing except for a smoking room with one bed but they could let us have a couple of roll-outs. So I scouted about and we drove to St.Paul, MN - I called and found out some rooms were available in downtown St.Paul - my wife went in to a downtown Radisson late a night and was quoted $100 (it turned out to cost $131 total including parking and taxes) - we had no choice but to take it. We got a decent tour of St.Paul driving around looking for rooms; here's St.Paul's cathedral at dusk:

Overall a disastrous day. Only 200+ miles driven and most of the day wasted looking for hotels. One of the things we noticed was there was a lot of gas stations selling "gasohol" containing alcohol-admixed gasoline - we found this reduced our gas mileage by at least 10%. Since the price savings were not too significant, this made the gasohol a bad deal in our view, but maybe it's better for the environment?

6/23/05, Day 10: The Radisson was a decrepit stinkhole with non-functioning air-conditioning, but their free full breakfast made it slightly more bearable - this was the best breakfast we'd had the entire trip: hot pancakes and waffles and French toast, fresh scrambled eggs, bacon (though not for me), variety of cereal and juices, fruits, yogurts. And so we went on to visit the Mall of America, an over-hyped gargantua which would turn out to sorely disappoint.

It was basically just another mall with the same set of 36-50 stores we find in every mall we'd ever been to. The Camp Snoopy area (indoor amusement park) was over-priced, bland, and dead. The large Lego-land area was similarly boring, even to our 2 and 8-year-old surprisingly. we did buy a souvenir magnet ($2.08) and got a bagful of Kit-Kats for like $.50 per bar at a bargain outlet. My son and I played some arcade basketball at a sports bar for $2, then we got the hell out of the largest mall in America. I would highly recommend AVOIDING this anti-mecca. My son and baby ate up the 10+ Kit-Kats in the car within a couple of hours as we headed out of the Minneapolis area.
We drove through Rochester MN and glimpsed the Mayo Clinic buildings - my wife had interviewed here for residency and decided against listing it on her match sheets because their entire system was so odd. I interviewed at a similarly decadent system, the Cleveland Clinic. I think both hospitals are outstanding clinically, but they are too "tertiary" (sub-specialized) to make good training grounds for residents and interns. You need a lot more bread and butter medicine and less "zebras" during training. Also you need to suffer and get hammered during residency to learn enough and stay humble - I have since found that most Mayo and Cleveland Clinc trained doctors I've run across act spoiled and pampered and whine easily. We drove past the Spam museum but it was closed.
We decided to visit Pepin WI to see where Laura Ingalls Wilder was born and lived for a time. It turns out her actual log cabin in Pepin is gone, but a reproduction is set in the middle of nowhere. There is also a Laura Ingalls Wilder interpretive center in the Pepin visitor's center, but it's just a message board full of pictures of Laura and her husband at various stages of their lives.

It turns out there are about a dozen or more "Laura Ingalls Wilder" homesites throughout the MidWest and westward - we were originally going to visit the one in De Smet, SD but thought the one in Pepin would be better since it was her birthplace - it turns out we should have visited the one in SD according to the information available in Pepin. Some people apparently do the Wilder tour of every house and homesite she lived or travelled through. Laura's dad Charles, despite her glowing assessment of his prowess in her books, must have been a fairly unsuccessful and struggling man in his lifetime to have moved around so much with a young family. I'll stop short of calling him a loser, but call him a semi-drifter.
We got gas in Pepin for $35.20, 15.652gal (odometer 45605, 20.81mpg). Then on to Iowa. I knew several Iowans from my student days and always had heard good things about the state. In Mason City IA, we got gas again at a Fleet Farm for $16.12 for 7.717gal. We checked into a BestWestern in Clear Lake, IA (quoted $77), ordered Pizza ($22.03) again, and had an NBA championship viewing party in our room with chips and drinks ($9.80) - alas the Pistons got beaten by the Spurs. We drove about 500 miles that day.

6/24/05, Day 11: We ate BestWestern's mediocre continental breakfast - typical BestWestern mediocrity. We discussed what to do next and how to get home from here. We saw unusually large numbers of obese people in Iowa - it made us wonder whether it was merely heuristics, or whether Iowa really is populated by hefty hordes of corn & beef eaters. At 11:43edt we left Clear Lake and drove toward Des Moines. We glimpsed the capitol of Iowa from the car and got lost in west Des Moines looking for an AAA branch to get some tourbooks and maps. We filled up on gas in Kansas City ($35.23, 16.625gal, 19.33mpg) - a truly disgustingly slovenly gas station.
We went by Independence MO to see Truman's last house and place of death/burial

There was a jail where Frank James of the Jesse James gang was supposedly briefly detained - we resisted going for the tourist trap. We went a little bit out of our way to take a look at Lamar MO, the place of Harry Truman's birth - this is one of the tiniest mid-Western towns we saw, basically just a blip on the map, a trivial town only famous because of one man. His birthhouse is enshrined like a holy grounds there.
We got gas at a Conoco near Lamar ($14.25 for 6.957gal, 20.61mpg) and drove out of Missouri forever. we checked into a Courtyard Marriott in Bentonville Arkansas (quoted $61, paid $68.93). We ate yet another Subways ($21.50) as well as some more junkfood ($5.10). We swam in the Courtyard's clean swimming pool. This was one of the best hotels of the trip but no free breakfast. We drove about 465 miles this day.

6/25/05, Day 12: We woke up and visited Sam Walmart's first store and museum in Bentonville, saw his old office (left in original condition), his last wallet and fountain pen, and saw his famous red Ford pick-up truck:

We ate TacoBells at 12:47edt for $9.70 in Lowell AR, then stopped at LittleRock for gas at $31.33 for 15.215gal (21.68mpg). We thought for a second of visiting Clinton's library, then drove on to Hot Springs National Park.
When we arrived in Hot Springs AR, we were disappointed to find the town so run-down and decrepit. There was a campground, but it was as scenic as our backyard. We quickly decided that we'd make a day of Hot Springs, but head home before night-fall. The old bathhouses in Hot Springs were somewhat interesting.

We watched a film of HotSprings at the park's main office. We hiked straight up a hillside to take in a view of HotSprings from it's highest point (dead Chief's Trail). We saw the highschool where Bill Clinton had many ribald adventures. We bought our desultory souvenir magnet ($4.33), looked at all the kitsch Bill Clinton souvenirs (most of them bawdy - like "I did not play Sax with that woman."), then drove out of that grimy, moldy, decrepit city.
We stopped for supper at a Luby's cafeteria in Little Rock ($27.99) - very overpriced for what little we got I thought. We found yet another Courtyard Marriott here (quoted $84, paid $93.66) which was undergoing renovations - I thought the worst Courtyards I've ever seen in my life; it changed my perception of Courtyards forever. We drove about 400 miles this day.

6/26/05, Day 13: We checked out of Courtyards at 12:05edt and drove out of AR and into Tennessee. We got gas in Jackson TN for $32.72, 15.586gal (22.1mpg), then stopped to eat at an IHOP in Jackson ($28.97). We checked into a dirty LaQuinta Inn in Nashville TN (quoted $71, paid $81.24). We swam in a pool again here. We went and saw the TN capitol grounds in Nashville, saw statues of Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, and the Capitol building from the outside. We saw James K. Polk's final gravesite.

We only drove about 300 miles this day as we needed a break before the long drive home.

6/27/05, Day 14: We checked out of the filthy LaQuinta (probably the worst hotel, the worst deal of the trip) and drove out to the Hermitage near Nashville - $27 entry fee and we bought a souvenir bust of Jackson for $32.78. The tour of the Hermitage was poorly narrated by some very uninterested (or uneducated?) ladies - they couldn't answer any questions asked.

Despite his Indian-killing habits, Andrew Jackson was probably the most ambitious American President, one of the most exciting figures in American history, and probably the closest America came to having a "King." One could have made the Hermitage and Jackson's narration very exciting, but none of this was reflected in this dreary tour. I've found that none of the tours of President's homes we've done in the past couple of years have been particularly exciting - we toured Washington's Mount Vernon, Jefferson's Monticello, James Madison's Montpelier, as well as the President's homes mentioned in this trip like Lincoln's Springfield home. My favorite was probably Washington's Mount Vernon. In any case, the Hermitage was par-for-the-course as far as presidential homes are concerned. We did see Jackson's tomb and his plantation etc.
We got gas at a Pilot in Cookeville TN for $20.67 (22.145mpg), then drove out of TN and into western NC, a welcome sight. This trip was starting to become a pain in the ass and everything we saw started to look boring; we just wanted to get the hell home. We stopped at an NC tourist center near Asheville and emptied our bladders into their toilets. We drove into the triad area of NC by 19:41edt and filled up at an Exxon in Kernersville for $34.32 (16.043gal, 23.2mpg). We stopped in Elon NC at a Golden Corral for our end-of-trip dinner ($22.28 - it was fortuitously kids-eat-free night). Thus our trip ended and we arrived home to Cary NC by 22:30edt to find everything safe and sound.

Here is a scene from a rainy July 4th in Cary NC a couple of weeks after our trip:

We had driven 5,192 miles over 13 days. We had spent $2,349.96 on this trip. A lot of weight was gained eating all the junk and restaurant food - never again, please.

Toward the end of our trip while we were driving home, we decided to take a poll ranking the places we visited on a scale of 1-10 ("10" being outstanding, unbeatable, and "1" being total SUCK). This may reflect our psyches more than anything else, but I thought it might serve some purpose (in the way rottentomatoes may help decide which movies are worthwhile). Only our 8-year-old, my wife, and I ranked the places, our 3-year-old was sleeping.

Favorites (ratings of "8" to "10"):
--our son's favorites: Hannibal MO, Wall Drug, Wind Cave National Park (bison herds), Mt.Rushmore, Devil's Tower WY, George A. Custer's last home. Wind Cave bison herds were rated a "10"
--my wife's favorites: Hannibal MO, Mt.Rushmore, Wind Cave NP, Devil's Tower, Lewis & Clark center and side trips in ND, George A.Custer's house. Her highest rating: a "9.5" for Mt.Rushmore.
--my favorites: Hannibal, MO, Badlands SD, Mt.Rushmore, Wind Cave NP. My highest was a "9" for Wind Cave's bison herds and prairie dogs.

So our family's favorite place was defnitely the Black Hills of South Dakota with Wind Cave National Park and Mount Rushmore as well as the camping out there. We would have stayed at Horse Thief Campground the entire time if we had a retrospectoscope.

Least Favorite Places (ratings of "4" or less)
--our son's worst: Golfshores in Corydon IN, Omaha, Corn Palace in Mitchell SD, Sauk Centre MN, Truman's house of birth and death, Hot Springs National Park. His worst was a "1" given for Corn Palace.
--my wife's worst: Golfshores in Corydon IN, Omaha tour, Corn Palace, Badlands SD, Deadwood SD, Sauk Centre MN, Pepin WI, Truman's Independence and Lamar. Her lowest rating was a "3" for Corn Palace.
--my worst: Omaha tour, Corn Palace, Sauk Centre MN, Pepin WI, Truman's Independence and Lamar. Lowest ratings were "3" for Corn Palace, Sauk Centre, Pepin, and Truman's places.

The voting was flavored by the fact that we were arguing viciously during the Corn Palace stop - otherwise this should not have gotten such a low score. If Sinclair Lewis' home were open for the tour it would not have gotten such a low score either. Same with Truman's home in Independence and Lamar. The experience at golfshores was ruined because my son had to run off to do an emergency bowel movement - he stopped up the toilet in the hotel room remember. So taking all those by-lines into consideration, I'd have to say that Pepin WI was probably the biggest waste of time.

Quick Summary of the Major Places seen:

National Parks/Monuments
St.Louis Gateway Arch
Badlands National Park, SD
Mount Rushmore monument, SD
Wind Cave National Park, SD
Devil's Tower National Monument, WY
Theodore Roosevelt National Park, South Unit, North Unit, ND
Hot Springs National Park, AR

Presidential Sites
Abraham Lincoln's home and Tomb, Springfield, IL
Gerald Ford's birthsite, Omaha NE
Theodore Roosevelt's western cabin home, TRNP ND
Harry Truman's birthplace (Lamar MO) and deathplace/tomb (Independence MO)
Bill Clinton's highschool (Hot Springs AR), and presidential library (Little Rock AR, driveby)
James K. Polk's tomb (Nashville TN)
The Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's home and tomb, TN

State Capitols seen
Charleston WV
Springfield, IL
Bismarck, ND
St.Paul MN
Des Moines, IA
Little Rock, AR
Nashville, TN

Miscellaneous Tourist Sites
Mark Twain's boyhood home, Hannibal MO
Corn Palace, Mitchell SD
Wall Drug, Wall SD
Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane's tomb, Deadwood SD
Ft.Mandan/Lewis & Clark Center, Mandan ND
Mandan Indian village, George A. Custer's home in Ft.Lincoln State Park, ND
World's Largest Buffalo and White Cloud the white buffalo, Jamestown ND
Sinclair Lewis interpretive center, home, gravesite, Sauk Centre, MN
Mall of America, Bloomington, MN
Laura Ingalls Wilder birthplace, log cabin, and center, Pepin, WI
Spam museum
The first Walmart

2005-05-31T03:28:00.000-04:00

Ennui and the Profusion of Hobbies that Follow - A Road BACK TO AFFLUENZA

Above you see our Square Foot Garden as it appeared at the beginning of May. We've already eaten salads created from this garden, harvested the spinach, Swiss Chard, Romaine lettuce, and Basil leaves several times. Now at the end of May the tomato vines are pushing up against the top of the cage and stands about 5 feet high with thick stems. We’re still waiting on the onions, carrots, broccoli, peppers, and tomatoes. The broccoli plant is exploding and threatening to shade up the entire garden. We are giving about 6 cups per 12" square per 5 days of water (water saved from changing the water from our 75gallon aquarium). It's almost too much produce for us. Because this is a raised garden with rocks/gravel separating it from the ground (and pests), with soil mixed from scratch by us, we are seeing absolutely no weeds, no pests thus far. The enclosing wire cage is keeping all the birds, squirrels, rabbits, etc. away.

The initial labor was steep, the upkeep is becoming almost boring. That's the thing about hobbies, if it gets too easy and there is no scrambling about trying to figure things out, the hobby loses its appeal. Since I mentioned our aquarium, fish-keeping is another hobby of mine which has lapsed into something vaguely uninteresting. My first fish tank was a gold-fish bowl in which a series of common goldfish died - this was in 1971-1972. Over the past decade, for about 6 years I was literally obsessed with fish-keeping and all things aquatic. I have a couple of 6-foot high bookshelves filled with aquariology books I've read along with several years worth of fish-keeping magazines. I own nearly a thousand dollars-worth of water-testing equipment - now sitting dusty and out-of-date. My basement as you can see in my house-tour, is filled with hundreds of pieces of PVC piping, home-made aquarium stands, old fish-breeding equipment, filters, and various fish-tanks - all remnants of a mad obsession over a fish-keeping hobby. After a while, I began to lose interest in the whole fish-keeping enterprise -

I felt like I could routinely keep, breed, manipulate genetically etc. a couple of the challenging breeds of fish. But the time it took away from my kids and the other aspects of my life made it not worthwhile. I believe when my children are grown and I become bored with life, I can take it up again.

An Die Musik

Ever since I was about 10 years old, I’ve been a classical music aficionado. In fact my mother can’t stop telling everyone of how I used to be able to hum several dozen complete songs before I was two years old (and before I could talk). My maternal grandfather was a musical performer in his younger days playing piano, guitar, violin, viola, and the accordian in jazz clubs before he became an entrepreneur. My mother was a classical violinist and for a few years had a her own radio show where she participated in a moderated discussion about some aspect of music, then played a series of Mozart violin sonatas. She led me to my interest in classical music, initially of the popular classical pieces: Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.6, Brahms’ Symphony No.4, Mozart’s piano concerto No.21 etc. Eventually I went deeply into the most abstract pieces by Bach, pretty much memorizing every detail of his English Suites, Well-tempered Clavier Book2, his Toccatas, etc. I spent most of my high-school years listening to Bach, Scarlatti, Brahms, Schumann, Scriabin, Mahler, Bartok. I learned to master a stupid musical instrument, the clarinet – my mother allowed me to play it instead of the viola which I asked to play because she did not want me to become a musician as she clearly and repeatedly stated (--musicians starve--). I went to NC all-state bands and Governor’s school with this stupid instrument. I won trophies and awards, and I played in musicals on local tv and with town orchestras and town bands with this stupid instrument. During College I played two years with the Penn wind ensemble, but as my clarinet began to decay and became unplayable, I couldn’t justify buying another one as my interest in it began to wane with the instrument. I increasingly longed pathetically to have been a string player, or even a pianist. I became focused on listening to most of Schubert’s songs, I drifted away from performance and became only a spectator of great music performance. This was all rapturous stuff and I couldn’t understand how people could live lives devoid of such nectar of the Gods. When I was in Philadelphia during college, instead of studying my heavy Pre-Med coursework, I used to visit the Curtis Institute of Music to hear the free concerts which were given 3-4 times a week by the pre-adolescent prodigies on display there. I used to go to the Academy of Music to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra and the bevy of international superstars perform there at least once a week. I believed it was better to score “B’s” on my physics and chemistry tests and partake of this music than to make “A’s” and forego the experience. In fact, one of the top reasons I chose to go to Penn was precisely for this reason (I don't otherwise have a great explanation for why I chose to go to Penn). I went to music festivals to hear Boston Symphony at Tanglewood Massachusetts, to hear young (and old) superstars at Marlboro Vermont, and of course at Philadelphia’s Mann Center in the Summer. My college grades continued to suffer as a result. I increasingly came to feel like a “groupie” as I hung around with my mother’s old musician friends (who were members of Boston Symphony strings and Philadelphia Orchestra strings). My cousin was a graduate and a cello performance instructor at the Vienna Conservatory – I stayed with her and her husband and I drank in the atmosphere of the city of Schubert, Brahms, and Mahler. I finally drifted away from the entire musical world when I moved down to Chapel Hill for Med school (the “sticks” in term of the musical world).

Astronomy

Here's another hobby in which I was briefly obsessed, one I've been interested in since I was 12 years old. I owned a 10x50 Bushnell binoculars and a dimestore 4" telescope which didn't work well when I was a child. I never understood much about astronomy, sky-watching until the past couple of years when I re-discovered my interest. I read about a dozen or so well-known astronomy hobby beginners' books such as NightWatch and Backyard Astronomer's Guide and Turn Left at Orion and half a dozen me-too type hobby books such as Practical Skywatching (the best of them I think). After a solid year in which I tried to learn most of the common constellations by sight and time of year, I ended up purchasing a used Meade 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain scope for $750 along with maybe $500 worth of eyepieces from Orion. I borrowed most of the books I read from the library in keeping with Tightwadding, but I did end up purchasing Turn Left at Orion, Burnham's Celestial Handbook volumes and 2 current skyatlases (the Norton and the Cambridge). With my new equipment I've seen Jupiter and its Galilean moons, Saturn and Titan, the Great Orion nebulae, various deep space object (smudges), and galaxies, and I believe this has been worthwhile and will continue to watch the skies for the rest of my life. Astronomy is one of those hobbies which is not only extremely expensive if you want it to be, but can be thrifty if you choose that path - the technology (and the potential spending on it) is limitless, but the information, knowledge that can be gained is also boundless - a very worthy life-long hobby I think. When you realize that one of these days, a massive comet or asteroid is probably going to smash the Earth into oblivion, it's even more important to keep looking out into the skies.

And now the most shameful hobby which I have unfortunately indulged:
fountain pen collecting (no laughing please).
I don't know why I've been fascinated with fountain pens since I was about 9 years old. I think it might have come from watching old 1920s silent movies by Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and King Vidor. When I was in 4th grade I used to write in a diary with a leaky Sheaffer cartridge fountain pen which I purchased from a Kroger grocery store. I had a room-mate in college who used a fountain pen as an affectation - I simultaneously despised and envied it. After many years, my appetite for fountain pens was finally fully re-awakened in 1997 when I saw a mail-order catalog (I believe it was Levenger’s) which sold fancy Montblanc fountain pens. I decided to order a $350 fountain pen from a store in Michigan – a burgundy-colored Aurora Optima made in Italy - a very smooth writer. I scoured some flea markets around Raleigh, Charlotte, even in Charleston SC for old pens – I found it extremely difficult to find any good fountain pens this way – flea market vendors always over-estimated the value of their junky fountain pens. This immediately got me onto a train of purchases of increasingly expensive pens culminating in the purchase of a $400 Pelikan Souveran M1000, a $400 Omas 360 and a $500 Krone special edition button-filler pen. Along the way I picked up several antique pens also. My excuse was I would use these pens to write up my tedious history&physicals and orders for my hospital admissions at work. I did in fact use it some for this, but this stopped when one of my expensive pens (a Parker Duofold Centennial fountain pen) was stolen by one of my patients – this caused me to lose all trust and hope in mankind. I was able to wean myself off this horribly decadent hobby over the past several years but I had a final little frenzy this past year when I got my Pelikan M1000 Souveran’s tip ground into a stub and got my 90 year-old Conklin crescent-filler restored to perfection by Richard Binder. I sold the Krone and Omas fountain pens on ebay at a loss to rid myself of some guilt, but while researching this, I ended up purchasing another antique restored pen, a brown marbled rubber circa-1920s Mabie-Todd Swan lever-filler from a physics professor in Missouri. Once you write with a smooth flexi-nib old-fashioned fountain-pen, you can never ever again be happy with writing with ball-point and roller-ball pens. I do a lot of writing in my line of work, and sometimes the prospects of writing with a fountain pen can imbue my work with some degree of pleasure.

Over the past few months, I’ve been stricken with another deadly expensive hobby-fixation:
digital photography.
In fact I’ve been flirting with this hobby for the past couple of decades, but never committed to it because I didn’t like the mess of dark-room photo development. I did in fact do some dark-room work in a lab in medical school, and I didn’t enjoy it at all. I took many pictures with point-and-shoot Nikons since I was in high school, finally got a Nikon 35mm slr around 1996 (a $400 N60 kit). In late 1999 I bought my first digital camera, a very expensive Olympus C-2500L (cost $1500 at the time). Ignore that review, in real life, this camera absolutely sucked. After many slow subpar pictures, it finally conked out for no apparent reason in 2002. I bought a Canon G2 which is a fantastic point-and-shoot camera which can also do some manual work. It is very slow to cycle however and can’t give you pop-out crystal-clear pictures as many examples in my blog shows. Just before going on a week-long trip to Washington DC, after some encouragement from a friend with a Nikon D70, and after much reading and reviewing online, I finally gave in and bought a
Canon 20D. This camera is a quantum-leap in technology and ability from the G2 and I believe can take a picture the equal of if not superior to 35mm film SLRs. This camera can unfortunately hook up with a long line of frighteningly expensive lenses such as the Canon 70-200 f/2.8 IS which currently sells for $1700 from cut-rate online NYC vendors. The lenses I chose after experimenting with the $600 Canon 17-85mm IS, is the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8, the Canon 85mm f/1.8, and the Canon 50mm f/1.8. All three of these lenses are spectacular. I also had to purchase the Sigma EF-500 DG Super E-TTL external flash and a couple of expensive B+W multi-coated protective filters. I sold back the 17-85mm lens on ebay and my total digital slr expenditures over the past 2 months have been $2792. This is not thrifty at all. And furthermore, I find that with the copious memory and computing power required by this beast of a camera, I am now looking at upgrading my 7 year-old computer and monitor. This is not good at all for a tight-wad lifestyle – Amy Dacyczyn would not approve believe me. Yet, take a look at the high quality images – here’s an example of one I took in a dark hole:

How can you say no to that? I’m in the midst of a frenzy of reading again. I’ve read mostly very bad photography books such as Lee Frost’s Teach Yourself Photography, John Freeman's Practical Photography and John Hedgecoe’s The Complete Guide to Photography. I’m about to read a couple of National Geographic photography series books which I’ve heard are good. I think there might not be any really great photography books just as there are no great books about “how to paint” or “how to write a book.” Most of the information is redundant and about things I already know about: apertures, shutter speeds, exposures, composition, photographic equipment and technology etc. Anyway this is my current obsession and hopefully this will lead to me being able to post better pictures.

When I was crazed about aquatica, I went to my local fish club meetings and went to several auctions in North Carolina and even up to the DC area. What I saw was a sad collection of lonely older unmarried people, childless couples, lots of middle-aged poorly socialized types, a few young people (the type their peers would classify as “nerds”), and a few dynamic con artists out to make money off these people. In general the demographics of the “fish-keeping crowd” is pretty depressing. They seem in general to be a middle-class lot, a very few with probably some wealth, none of them multi-millionaires, none of them destitute. In looking at the demographics of the “sky-watching crowd” by perusing various online astronomy websites, I could see that the type of people attending these so-called “star parties” are essentially the same as these fish-keepers. Gung-ho gardeners seem to fit the same profile, as do obsessed photographers. A recurring theme: loneliness begets hobbies. Contrari-wise, what you find with the super-socialites is that they seldom have deep, obsessive hobbies. They certainly have interests in various things, but their interests are very superficial. They dabble in some decorating, or some gardening maybe. But they are not likely to be able to expound at length about the details of the growth cycle of the cut-worm, or of the biochemistry of soil etc. I thought Chris Cooper should have won an oscar for his performance as John Laroche, an obsessed Orchid keeper (and former fish-breeder) in Charlie Kaufmann and Spike Jonz’s Adaptation - his portrayal is so true-to-life and reminds me so much of several such obsessed hobbyists I’ve seen in fish-keeping (I’m sure he mimics the profile of many such archetypes in all types of hobbies). Some similar ideas found in Adaptation are espoused in Kaufman and Jonz’s earlier Being John Malkovich. A 1994 film made by Terry Zwigoff shows a famous example of such a real person in their real life settings but pretty much the same character archetype I'm talking about - the spectacular documentary Crumb. American splendor is about Harvey Pekar, a former Crumb associate - his life and world is again peopled by the type of obsessed, bizarre/neurotic, yet common-place real-world characters I'm talking about. I’m definitely more the obsessed hobbyist nerd than a fluttering/preening socialite. I think if the wind blew in a slightly different direction 10 years ago, I would easily be one of those unmarried (and never to be married) asocial lab trolls obsessed with various hobbies, scurrying about dark rooms over-stuffed with technical books and journals, cluttered with expensive equipment - lonely and pathetic, yet busy and only obliquely engaged with the world in my own strange way.

2005-03-16T13:55:00.000-05:00

Spring is Coming - Plans for Our Third Garden

"...the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity..."
--Henry David Thoreau in Walden, "The Bean Field."

Our First Garden:

Back in 1998, we made an attempt at our first garden after purchasing a house. This was in Concord NC just outside of Charlotte. We had a large flat treeless backyard with too much sun, no shade. The soil was rocky, somewhat sandy and clay-like, having been trucked in from who knows where in about 1990 according to our neighbors who were the first to live in that neighborhood. We dug out first a polygonal quasi-triangular corner plot bordered with bricks and about 8-12" deep, perhaps 75square-feet in area and amended the soil with perlite, peat-moss, and various "soil conditioners in a rather haphazard way. We created another rectangular plot roughly 2feet by 14 feet bordered with bricks, but shallower, about 6inches deep. Between my wife and me we might have read 1-1/2 gardening books at that time. We planted partially grown tomato and pepper plants (about 8) in the large triangular plot, a few more tomato plants and strewed some giant Russian sunflower seeds along most of the rest of rectangular plot. We fertilized using synthetic stuff (blue Peter's powders) and plentiful tap water using sprinklers. By the end of the summer we had so many tomatoes we let most of it rot on the vine. The giant sunflowers grew to a fearsome height as the following picture shows:

After many years, we decided to try a vegetable garden again this year. By now my wife and I have read probably a dozen or so gardening books. The best of which is probably Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening. I like his engineer's sensibility to gardening. He describes every detail of setting up and cultivating a garden and doesn't throw out the usual trite and unuseful homilies like "water an inch" - (what the hell does an inch mean, unless you specify the conditions and the containers which enclose that inch?). His book is greatly recommended as is his website.

Late Winter Pre-Gardening
To gain an advantage over nature, I set up a mini-greenhouse using an old 55gallon fish tank and 2 fluorescent lights (80Watts of about 6000K light 14hours/day). I put aluminum foil over the back to reflect light and tried to raise the seedling dishes toward the light. I figured the tank with top should retain moisture and the lights should be adequate:

It turns out we either didn't have the inclination or time to care for these seedlings well as they grew tall and sickly and rootbound and fell over before we had a chance to re-pot them. Hopefully the pepper seedlings might make it as they are the most crucial time-wise.

Following Mel Bartholomew's advice:
I made a wooden box using 4 pieces of 2"x8"x10' fixed at the corners, then painted with latex for some weatherproofing. For the bottoms, I used composite board (extremely expensive) and screwed on the bottom with 1/4" spacing between for drainage. We painted the box, then let it dry a week.
Here's my daughter helping paint the box:

My wife and I lay the box out over cinderblocks and dirt and gravel to level it the best we could on a hill (we live on a steep hill). I stapled in black landscaping fabric to the bottoms and sides of the box to act as a filter, then dumped in 4cubic feet of perlite, 10x 2-1/2 gallon bucks of all-purpose sand, almost 6 cubic feet of peat moss, about 4 cubic feet of mushroom compost, 4 cups of pelletized lime, 4 cups of "organic" chicken manure. Mixed and watered the mixtured as per directions, then covered the whole box with a large square of clear plastic to "heat" the soil for planting.

Our plans are to plant 3 tomato seeds ( 1 cherry, 2 beefsteak), 1 pepper, 16 carrots, 16 onions, Swiss Chard, Romaine lettuce, Basil. I plan on building a cage of tomato wire and chicken wire to ward off squirrels, rabbits, cats, and cover the cage with clear plastic for frosts. We'll see how this project turns out. My wife and I have proven ourselves to be rather careless gardeners in the past. Here's the breakdown in cost of the project thus far:

Lumber:
4 of 2"x8"x10' - $9.58 x 4 = $41
4 of 8' length of composite board - $23 x 4 = $98.50
Soil:
peat moss 3.8CF for $7.53 - 2 bags = $16.11
perlite 4 CF for $16.99 = $18.18
sand 60lbs (5gallons) for $2.94 - 5 bags = $15.73
mushroom compost 40lb bag for $3.99 - 6 bags = $25.62
lime 40lb pelletized bag for $2 = $2.14
chicken manure 40lb bag for $5.99 = $6.41
woodashes/charcoal - can't find
Wire/Fencing:
chickenwire 50' of 24" $7.93 = $8.49
Seeds: .97 - $1.49 per packet = $10.70
Misc:
paint brushes, paint: $20.81
large turnable 60gallon enclosed composter: $139.09
Total costs: $402.78 - AMEXgift check (100) - gardencenter giftcard(33) = $269.78
additional expense to be spent: metal supports for tomatoes/peppers, tomato wire for protection: ~$30

The only way to justify this nearly $300 of net expenditure would be that we will use this set-up every year for at least 5 years and that the produce resulting will be healthier, cleaner, safer, etc. And that it will provide therapeutic and life-enhancing benefits unquantifiable otherwise. We could have spent much less for material - for example, we could have just fixed up a compost pile using discarded pallet crates for free (saving $139.09), and we could have used scrap lumber and no composite board (saving $100-$141) but we were thinking we will use this method and materials annually thus the investment in lasting materials was considered worthwhile. Also as noted above, my wife had a couple of giftcards worth $133 which helped reduce this expense from over $400 to under $300.

Organic Produce - What are the issues and is it worth it?

Of course you'd have to compare the cost of the vegetables (assuming we get results from our garden) only with good "organic" produce from a place like Whole Foods. If you investigate the benefits of organic produce, you can find as many negatives as positives. Here's a page framing the debate. Does the price of organic produce justify the benefits? Maybe not - the main benefit of organic produce which does hold up to scrutiny is that in general organic produce tend to have significantly less synthetic pesticides like organophosphates. The organic producers tend to downplay the fact that organic produce however contains significantly higher amounts of organic pesticides which can be also toxic to humans. It also raises the question, why is organic produce contaminated with pesticides at all? One fairly done study shows that ~25% of organic produce is contaminated with the synthetic pesticides which were measured. This is probably because these residues are present in our water table, in the air from overhead spraying, and in the general environment - can we avoid organophosphates and other pesticides at all? I'd say no - it's simply a matter of quantity of exposure. Is it worth paying x times as much for produce for a questionably lower levels of only certain types of pesticides? Also, can we trust "organic" farmers to be assiduously meticulous and conscientious about their farming methods? And can we trust the federal inspectors to properly certify various farms as "organic?" - probably there is a lot of corruption and/or laziness here also.

I know that there is a great deal of money being made in the organic certification process and in general this organic certification business is necessary - yet I can't help but be extremely skeptical about the whole process. I suspect there is a whole lot of bullshit going on in this business, as much if not more than in the meat industry.

The entire pesticide issue has become laden with an eco-terrorist zeal which becomes increasingly uncomfortable to debate. I like the general liberal approach to our world and ecology, but this is one issue where opinions like this and this needs to be more prominently pushed. And organic people tend to lose sight of the fact that produce contaminated with fecal organisms (from "organic fertilizers" like manure) is probably a greater danger to our health than synthetic pesticides - also read this reasonable overview article about some of the points in the debate in general. This is why cultivating your own garden as Voltaire suggested is probably the best way to reduce all the concerns on both sides of the issue.

Summary From My personal Garden Price Book

I did examine the total costs of the material by "price-booking" at the following stores: Lowe's, Walmart Garden section. Basically the only places you could find decent stuff was Lowe's, Home Depot, and Logan's Trading Co. Logan's Trading Co. was almost always more expensive, the Lowe's and Home Depot had pretty much the same price on everything. The local garden stores had everything priced exorbitantly - the only reason we bought a lot of stuff at Fairview was because of our gift card which could not be cashed.. Here's the price book breakdown on the main ingredients:

..................Lowe's..........Home Depot....Logan's Trading Co......Fairview
pbarkmulch.......(1.16/cf)...........(.94/cf).................(1.26/cf)..............(2/cf)
peatmoss.............(1.98/cf).........(1.98/cf).............(3.42/cf)...............(2.7/cf)
perlite...................(.36/qt).............(.37/qt).................(.14/qt)..............n/a
sand....................(.053/lb)..........(.049/lb)...............(.08/lb)................n/a
m.compost...........3.97/40lb.........2.85/40lb...........5.99/40lb.............n/a
pell.lime...............2.23/50lb.........2.00/50lb...........4.49/40lb..........6.99/40lb .
wood..............2"x8"x10' 9.58.....2"x8"x10' 9.58...........n/a.................n/a
seeds................0.97/packet................................1.69/packet.....1.09/packet

Our composter was a "gazingus pin" which we thought was a good investment after reading about composters in various books and looking at online information like this. In speaking with friends and neighbors, composting out in the open attracted squirrels, raccoons, rats, cats, dogs, and other even worse night animals - manually turning the compost with a shovel or fork was also apparently back-breaking labor. Our Canadian-made turn-o-matic enclosed composter was a breeze to turn, had a tight lid which was animal proof, and kept the compost discretely. In pricing various composters of this size online like this one or this one we decided the one we bought (from Logan Trading Co) was a good deal. In general, I would recommend that all triangle area gardeners flock to Logan's Trading Company for their rich store of gardening material and supplies, however, one should be aware that you pay more for the basic supplies. I'd hate to see this company go out-of-business so I'd be willing to spend extra to keep them around. If you look at many of the prices at Lowe's Hardware and Home Depot - one can't help to wonder they arrive at such similar pricing - either they are blatanly in cahoots with each other to fix prices, or one or both have price spies to keep their products priced in line with the other.

2005-02-01T06:31:00.000-05:00

Marketing to the Masses: Amorality and Civil Anarchy by Corporations

Within modern corporate culture there exists a beautifully regimented theocracy - the God of this corporate governance is Money. All other considerations are subjugated to the Primacy of Money. Here are a few books I've read in recent months (and one movie) which expand on this theme:

1. Born to Buy : The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture by Juliet B. Schor

2. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser

3. Super Size Me - "documentary" by Morgan Spurlock

4. The Laws of Choice by Eric Marder

Juliet Schor, author of The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need and Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, put out Born to Buy last year which completes her trilogy on on the American Middle-Class Malaise. Speaking of threes, the triumvirate of Middle-Aged Women Moping about the Malaise of the American Middle Class are Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Warren, and Juliet Schor.

I talked a little bit about Ehrenreich's books here. I discussed Elizabeth Warren's book briefly here. Schor does a good job reporting about her analysis of American middle-class problems. Her current book puts forth the thesis that corporate amorality has damned the recent generations of Americans to behave almost as automatons enslaved by Materialism. She interviews marketing executives past and present, parents, children, ad-men and documents research (her own as well as pre-existing) demonstrating the behavioral effects of such marketing on children as they grow up. She tries to refute the claim by marketers that "associations not causations" underlie the links between their marketing acts and the growing pestilence of fatness, stupidity, laziness, materialism, substance abuse, violence, and psychiatric disorders (anxiety and depression mainly). She claims her research on two cohorts around Boston (one affluent, the other inner-city poor) forges a sure connection, causality, between the marketing of products and such behavior by American kids. She decries the commercialization of the public school system with the expected diatribes, well researched. Starting initially with good intentions, she writes about how Advertisements have infiltrated the school systems compromising education and stealing large chunks of time daily. Channel One is again attacked, as they should be, and she talks briefly about the groundswell of opposition against Channel One (see Channel One Removal Kit).

She describes the chilling methods employed by Marketing companies in order to capture or seduce small children into becoming agents for their products. Particularly striking are the descriptions of the "Viral Marketing" techniques and the use of children as "spies" within their peer groups - e.g. the GIA (the girls intelligence agency) which infiltrates the typical suburban pajama slumber party of pre-teens with a school girl who has the assignment of obtaining a laundry-list of information from her school/classmates during the party, all for the marketing edification of corporate conglomerates like GAP, Levi-Strauss, etc. Also interesting is the evidence presented which show that large corporations now believe that it is to their benefit to market alcohol, cigarettes, and even such items as large appliances, automobiles to children more than to adults. Schor portrays us consumers as mostly pawns and victims, reminiscent of Elizabeth Warren's book The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. For the majority of Americans this may be true unfortunately.

Fast Food = Death
Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation is a tour de force of the fast-food industry, an excellent, entertaining, and fairly-well researched book which I wished I could make all 220 million or so adults in the US read.

He begins with the story of Carl Karcher, Richard and Maurice McDonald + Ray Kroc describing the birth of the hamburger industry in California in the early 1950s. He covers the marketing to kids including examples of outrageous public school marketing plans just as Schor did and draws parallels between Ray Kroc and Walt Disney - their early friendship during WWI, Kroc's early flirtation with Disney, later enmity, and the ironic posthumous partnerships of their companies. The overall theme of Schlosser's book would have to be Exploitation of the People by large corporations. He shows how franchisees are exploited by the big companies McDonald's, Subways, Burger Kings. He shows how high-school teenagers are exploited by the minimum-wage fast-food job market. He talks briefly about the fattening and the blighting of the health of the Nation and the World. He shows how Idaho potato farmers are exploited by the Ore-Idas, Simplot and Lamb Weston companies - he interviews the aged multi-billionare J.R. Simplot himself who grew his fortune by learning to dehydrate potatoes, then selling the idea to McDonalds. He shows how slaughter-house workers, mostly migrant workers, many illegals, are exploited, trashed, and discarded by the giant slaughterhouses like IBP and Conagra. The most striking parts of this book are the descriptions of the abattoirs in the midwest which he visits. He interviews many managers, workers - he describes routine amputations, decapitations, and workers' bodies falling into the machinery - the ongoing production of meat continuing nevertheless.

He describes the filth, chaos, and brazen anarchy in the meat-packing industry, the impotence of OSHA and all federal safety inspectors as the USDA is now controlled by the cattle industry (with the actual president of the cattle industry acting as the head etc.). He gives a thorough reporting of the Ecoli 0157:H7 contagion spreading throughout the country with emotional recounting of the deaths of six-year olds as told by their parents from eating spoiled hamburgers (remembering the Jack-in-the-Box incident in 1997 as well as the well-covered-up incidents involving McDonald's and Wendy's). As he writes on p197: "The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms...Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat." He includes one statement which seemed poorly researched (based on examining the "Notes" he includes in the back): he implies that Charles Gerba, microbiologist at Univ of Arizona found more fecal bacteria in the typical American sink than in the typical American toilet - he states that you'd be better off eating a carrot that you drop into a toilet than one that you drop into your kitchen sink. This may be true in your kitchen sink, but not in mine (in your face). In general, you'd have to conclude that he has an activist agenda against the Fast Food Industry and that he is unlikely to provide much positive information on this industry - nevertheless the information he provides is extremely entertaining, very important and very believable for the most part. He ends with a chapter on the globalization of the American fast-food industry and its portentious consequences.

Fast Food is Disgusting

Morgan Spurlock is a "dumb redneck" from West Virginia, now living in Manhattan, who stars in and produces Super-Size Me, a mockumentary on the Fast Food Industry, mainly designed to induce disgust in fast foods. Most of the scenes shown are pointless, but the film is fairly entertaining and provides some very good information in a format chosen for mass appeal, thus may offer the promise of exposing the most fast-food-prone people to its influence. Spurlock reveals in an extra feature on the DVD that Schlosser's Fast Food Nation was the predominant progenitor of his film and his interview with Eric Schlosser is a nice bonus.

The Science of Marketing
When I was at Penn, I spent some time at Wharton's Business School where I first became acquainted with Eric Marder's The Laws of Choice. This is a book I would not recommend to anyone due to its very non-riveting writing style. It mainly describes the STEP (strategy evaluation program), VEST (volume estimation test), SUMM (single unit marketing model) which are measurement tools used in the marketing of products by just about all the large corporations. It provides specific examples, many equations and graphs which allows you to calculate the probabilities of market share, market penetration, and describes specific product testing and measurements of such, describing the links between the product testing and the actual market performance and how the two correlate based on the performance of testing. He describes the Principles and "Laws" governing product choice, product performance, and product sales in the real world as captured and "pre-described" by the STEP, VEST, SUMM tests. It is initially extremely boring, yet at the same time fascinating, and ultimately, the realization comes upon you that marketing, the human behavioral response to influence peddling, is in many ways, a true Science.

Money is so all-powerful in the US that it buys everything - from the Presidency, down the various levels of government, to the public school system, and even the minds of your children, and you yourself. It's always sickening to watch the influence of money during the Presidential election cycles. I think many Americans, and the Corporate mindset especially, will compromise all their ideals of Democracy and most of their personal beliefs when seduced by the power of Money and the promise of Great Wealth. Juliet Schor interviewed a couple of former marketing executives who admitted they "should burn in hell" for what they did (advertise unresponsibly to small children). Money from the Great Corporations such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Disney, Nickelodeon has corrupted our nation, has purchased the influence of our Congressmen and Senators. Government's major purpose is to keep its citizens safe; the widespread corruption of the individuals elected to serve as cogs in governance has nearly broken apart Government's justification for existence. In the inner workings of our government, He Who Has the Most Money wins. Thus laws which should by all reasonable minds by adopted are repeatedly shot down - forbidding advertising aimed at children was deemed "impractical", the safety nets for the food supply have had giant holes punched in them by people in the USDA and the cattle and meat industry (and others). The existing regulations are largely window dressing which deceives the American Public into believing that they are indeed being protected, and that their taxes are being spent responsibly to pay responsible people charged with running the large government agencies. There are good people in the government and over-generalizing is histrionic, but unless Government does its Primary Job better - that of acting as the control valve, this worship of Money will continue and this Anarchy of Greed will reign.
Here's something:

They Will Say

Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between the walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.
--Carl Sandburg

2005-01-07T13:16:00.000-05:00

Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs Re-examined

Reviewing our electricity usage over the past year and over the past 2 years, and keeping in mind my previous discussion regarding the use of compact-fluorescent light bulbs throughout our house (see right side bar, or click http://septembersong.blogspot.com/2004_06_30_septembersong_archive.html), I’ve found a significant reduction in our monthly and daily electricity usage over time. As you can see in the raw numbers below, if you compare the Kilowatt usage averaged daily from 6/2/2004 to 1/5/2005, and compare to 6/3/2003 – 1/5/2004, you’ll see the difference. On 6/3/2003, the average temperature was low, 66F, a rather cool late Spring month – yet we used 2065 KWh or 65 KWh daily averaged. On 6/2/2004, the average temperature was higher, 74F, yet we used just 1515 KWh that month or just 54KWh averaged daily. The next month comparison, 7/2/2003 vs 7/2/2004 shows temperatures of 74F vs 76F (i.e. warmer this past year thus you’d expect again more air-conditioner use etc. thus more electricity use). Yet KWh usage is 1912 vs. 1526. The comparisons break down like this:

Compared months........ avg Temp’03vs’04....... KWh used... Avg Daily KWh use

June 2003 vs 2004............... 66F vs 74F............ 2065 vs 1515........... 65 vs 54~

July 2003 vs 2004............... 74F vs 76F............. 1912 vs 1526........... 66 vs 51

August 2003 vs 2004........... 78F vs 79F............. 2213 vs 1850.......... 71 vs 58**

Sept 2003 vs 2004............... 79F vs 75F............. 2443 vs 1670........ 76 vs 56~

Oct 2003 vs 2004................. 69F vs 71F............. 1397 vs 1310........ 48 vs 44

Nov 2003 vs 2004............... 60F vs 62F.............. 904 vs 657........... 31 vs 23

Dec 2003 vs 2004................ 56F vs 55F............. 1006 vs 770......... 31 vs 23**

Jan 2004 vs 2005................ 41F vs 43F.............. 1246 vs 932......... 42 vs 31

I’ve marked with ~ those months compared where the temperature difference is 4degrees F or greater, thus allowing one to argue that the comparison is somewhat confounded. I’ve marked with ** those months where the temperature difference was within 1 degree F, thus making comparison more believable. In those ** months, you can see that the difference in average KWh usage is 8-13KWh or 18-26% less. Averaged over these 8 months compared, the difference average is 22% less Kilowatts per hour used. And furthermore, there are no months where we spent more this past 6 months than in previous 6 months periods of the same time frames.

The difference in terms of money spent?

Compared months.... billed difference.... how much less?... Percentage less?
June’03 vs ’04............. $165.05 vs $123.75......... $41.30...................... 25%
July ’03 vs ’04............. $173.03 vs $140.32........ $32.71....................... 19
August ’03 vs ’04......... $199.17 vs $168.63 .........$30.54 ......................15
Sept ’03 vs ’04............. $219.15 vs $152.90......... $66.25 ......................30
Oct ’03 vs ’04.............. $128.30 vs $121.44......... $6.86........................ 5
Nov ’03 vs ’04............. $76.88 vs $58.77........... $18.11........................ 24
Dec ’03 vs ’04............. $84.35 vs $67.68............ $16.67........................ 20
Jan ’04 vs ’05............. $103.01 vs $80.46.......... $22.55 ........................22.... avg 20%less

data compared to 2 years ago’s numbers:

June’02 vs ’04............ $146.00 vs $123.75........ $22.25....................... 15
July ’02 vs ’04............ $197.96 vs $140.32 ........$57.64 .......................29
August ’02 vs ’04....... $205.57vs $168.63......... $36.94....................... 18
Sept ’02 vs ’04 ...........$175.31vs $152.90.......... $22.41....................... 13
Oct ’02 vs ’04 ............$159.05 vs $121.44.......... $37.61....................... 24
Nov ’02 vs ’04 ...........$106.41vs $58.77............ $47.64...................... 45
Dec ’02 vs ’04 ............$119.05 vs $67.68........... $51.37 .......................43
Jan ’03 vs ’05............ $147.05 vs $80.46........... $66.59...................... 45 ....avg 29%less

Speaking cumulatively, we’ve saved $234.99 over this past 6 months as compared to the same time frame 2 years ago. Averaged, we are saving $29.37 per month compared to the previous year’s data, and saving $42.81 per month compared to 2 years ago’s data ($342.45 total). The critique in the argument might be that the temperatures are different, but if you look at the data, the temperatures differ by an average of 4% between years ’03 and ’04 month-by-month with a range of 1-11% difference, and most importantly, the temperatures are not consistently higher or lower month by month but differs randomly (additionally, the lows and highs averages are very similar year to year also). In any case the 20-29% savings is not explained by temperature differences of 4%. The other critique could be that we are behaving more frugally and thus cutting back significantly in our electricity usage. This definitely has some merit as shown in the following graph provided by my utility company:

As you can see, we have been using electricity less in the just completed past 12 months than in the previous 12 months, thus demonstrating our renewed commitment to frugality. The temperature curves overlaying also once again shows that the temperature difference is not what explains the differences. Yet the difference in the bar graphs in the 6 months prior to our changing over to compact-fluorescent bulbs is visibly MORE than in the most recent 6 months!! I can believe that we have been much more frugal this past 12 months, but were we such horrible spendthrifts in the previous year with electricity? Based on this graph, you would have to say YES! Yet we’ve also tried to save on water usage by not wasting it. In fact my wife and I are pretty reasonable people overall in terms of not wasting resources, so I’m a bit surprised at the difference that a little bit of extra care seems to have made in terms of our utility bills. In fact, when looking at our water bill over the past 6 months compared to the same 6 month time-frame years previously, I find that there is not a big difference and in fact there are more months this past year where we actually spent more water than a 6 months period a year previously (4 of 7 months) – this potentially blows a hole in the argument that we have been behaving less frugally over the past year than before in terms of utility usage.

WATER USAGE DURING THIS TIME PERIOD

Comparison period..................#Days................Daily Usage...........Total Usage (gal)
June 2003 vs 2004.....................30 vs 31...........146.33 vs 111.94....... 4390 vs 3470
July 2003 vs 2004......................30 vs 29............76.33 vs 100.69..........2290 vs 2920
August 2003 vs 2004..................32 vs 31...........99.06 vs 109.35...........3170 vs 3390
Sept 2003 vs 2004.......................28 vs 32...........122.86 vs 139.06........3440 vs 4450
Oct 2003 vs 2004........................30 vs 30...............127 vs 128...............3810 vs 3840
Nov 2003 vs 2004........................28 vs 32...........151.07 vs 107.19.........4230 vs 3430
Dec 2003 vs 2004........................29 vs 29...........120.34 vs 138.97........3490 vs 4030

But water usage is difficult to alter too much short of not flushing toilets and other unsanitary behaviors. And water usage may have gone up for us because our children have been growing up and requiring more baths, more dishes with eating, etc. Though this argument should go for electricity usage too. In any case, a max of $43 per month saved on electricity is nearly the cost of our cable-modem fees, and more than our local and long distance telephone bills, more than our average natural gas bill. So we have potentially saved the equivalent of this monthly averaged out over the year mostly by behaving more frugally in terms of our electricity usage. Importantly, I also began actually reading the dials on our electrical meter and calling my utility company to let them know if there was a difference so that they could come and re-read it (– I made them come by to re-read twice). This served the purpose of mainly letting whomever at the utility department and my meter man know that I’m watching the meter and their performance as well (so that they won’t try to rip me off). In general I’ve found over the past half year that the meter man reads pretty much on the money so that I could probably let that part of it go until I get a very anomalous reading.

Summation: Should you go change out all your light bulbs to compact fluorescent? I think you should, mainly because it sets you in the frame of mind to conserve as well as the potential savings of $62 over the life of the bulb versus equivalent lumens of incandescent lighting (According to http://www.newdream.org/consumer/cflfactsheet.html ). Does CF lighting definitely save you in monthly electricity bills? I would have to say it seems to in superficial analysis as above, but there are many confounds and like I said, CF bulbs sets you in the frame of mind to conserve, thus you may be conserving electricity in other ways too which would confound the comparison – being willing to tolerate more heat and cold, turning off lighting more often, using your appliances more efficiently, turning off TVs and computers more frequently, etc. These other measures in combination is probably going to surpass the savings you get directly and solely from changing out your light bulbs. So what part of the 20-29% savings we saw could be directly attributable to the change to CF light bulbs? I wished I could spout a believable figure but based on looking at the raw data and the bar-graph comparisons, I could guess that it is the low end or 20% which could be believable. Or I could guess more conservatively that it would be something like half that or maybe 10% savings, maybe even less.

Remember from my previous post on installing CF light bulbs, I spent $361.30 total to purchase all those CF bulbs for the house. It looks like I've almost saved that much in half a year through the use of CF bulbs throughout the house and (maybe) other frugal behaviors. In any case, I'd say that you could safely assume that you can make back the initial investment in compact fluorescent light bulbs within 1 year, and by 10 years (if these bulbs do last that long), I could potential have saved thousands of dollars! We'll have to see.
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LET ME GIVE AN EXAMPLE OF A NON-SAVINGS

I've heard that All-Clad pots (http://www.allclad.com/) are good because it heats food faster. This I've shown to be not true. I took an All-Clad stainless with the aluminum core 3 quart pot and a Revere 3 quart stainless steel only pot, place 6 cups of identical cold water in each, put one on an identical sized oven eye and simultaneously turned on the stove to HIGH for each eye.

The All-Clad pot took 13 minutes to boil the water. The Revere el-cheap-o pot took 10 minutes to boil the water.

Just in case one of my oven eyes were bad, I switched the pots after allowing 3 hours of cool-down time:

Again the exact same result: The All-Clad pot took me 13 minutes to boil 6 cups of cold water, the cheapo pot took me 10 minutes to boil the 6 cups of cold water. So All-Clad stainless pots take longer to heat water, I assume because of the 3-ply construction, thus taking the contained water further away from the heat. Their Cop-R-Chef collection might boil water faster, but I'd be skeptical of that too. The main proclamations by All-Clad themselves I've found is not that they heat food faster but that they heat food more evenly, thus causing less searing and burning; that they impart no metallic tastes to the fo0d; that they become heirloom-like items lasting several generations. Perhaps these are true. But can you justify $635.00 expenditure on basically 7 pots/pans with lids for 3 of them? I somehow did and purchased them, but I think this is an example of affluenza without any obvious evident benefit except for the Luxury quotient.

2004-12-15T01:06:00.000-05:00

De-Cluttering

I've been getting rid of a bunch of stuff that sits around the house un-used. Over the past 15 years I've accumulated an enormous mound of useless garbage. I received an impetus to start getting rid of major items when I checked out Material World: A Global Family Portrait from my local library. I first heard of this book back in 1998 or so on the documentary Affluenza on PBS - for an excellent website which organizes some of the ideas in those documentaries click here. I had to wait 2 months to get this book as there was a qeue of something like 10 people in Wake County looking for this book! It shows a spectacular disparity of possessions among various peoples around the world - it would have been even more interesting had the authors included many more countries. They were trying to get the "average" family in a given country to display their entire material possessions in front of their residence. I was trying to imagine what my family's possessions would look like displayed in front of our house and it was an ugly scene to imagine. It made me decide to get rid of all the little junky crap my wife and I seem to horde. I set up a seller's account on ebay and promptly sold 8 items over 2 weeks and netted a profit of $688 after paying ebay fees, shipping fees, and paypal fees. It was actually quite fun to sell on ebay and I may resort to this again. One interesting turn of events was that I was forbidden by email from ebay from selling any medical equipment. There is an enormous bureaucracy behind the selling and re-selling of health-care related equipment - an example of government control over a field of activity gone amuck. Meant to protect a patient from bad medical devices which could harm the patient thus resulting in the patient sueing the pants off the manufacturer and the government, this FDA branch prevents someone like me from selling a spirometer or a simple diagnostic equipment to another health care provider - a ridiculous waste of everybody's time and energy. I failed to sell a set of 5 Simpson's plastic dioramas with figures - an immature use of my money on a trendomatic, worthless waste of money and space - I guess everybody else feels the same way about the Simpsons now. In any case these are the 8 items I did manage to sell:

1.my old cellphone/PDA device (the kyo 6035)
2.my over-complicated multi-battery charging device which I've hardly used
3.a set of 5 Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are plasticine figures (too scary for my kids)
4.a cash register
5.my old credit/debit transaction terminal
6.an old fountain pen
7.an un-used nebulizer machine
8.a time-stamp clock

I also donated items with abandon to various charities in my neighborhood. To Dorcas Thrift Shop (Christian Communities in Action) I gave:
1.My son's 8-piece drum set (received from Santa Claus last year, he played with it 3 times)
2.A Sanyo VCR
3.Lamp Shade
4.A heavy steel trash can
5.A box of about 20 mugs/cups
6.A box of trashy novels/garbage books
Dorcas turned down my offer of several garden hoses and a Xerox XEfx90 all-in-machine

To GoodWill I donated:
1.that Xerox XEfx90 all-in-one machine
2.Component stereo system: Pioneer turntable, Pioneer double-cassette deck, Sony Receiver/amplifier, 2 AIWA speakers - remember these ancient stereo systems every "audiophile" had to have? Who needs them now?

To Guardian Angel Thrift (Alzheimer's research) I donated:
1.30gallon aquarium with top (this leaves me with still 7 more aquaria, a 5g, 10g, 20g, 40g, 55g, and two 75gs, only one 75g and one 40g is in use now)
2.3 Aquamaster 350 aquarium filters nicely cleaned and bleached out
3.Sears 3hp gas-powered edger
4.An abdomenizer (my one and only purchase from a TV-infomercial con-job - 1994)

To Habitat for Humanity I donated:
1.2 clean toilet seats
2.A brass chandelier
3.2 sets of black track lighting

I plan to call back Habitat for Humanity to donate: a large Pappasan and ottoman my wife bought from Pier-1 back in 1994 or so, my wife's old student oak kitchen table for two with 2 oak chairs, 3 black leather and chrome/steel stack-on chairs from Target, 2 butterfly chairs, 2 plastic out-door fold-up chairs, maybe a child's play table with 2 chairs (plastic), maybe 4 heavy office-wall dividers, maybe my wife's old Perception kayak with oar and skirts etc equipment. There is also a beaten up, run-down old ugly wooden rickety office chair and a rusty old metal two-seater porch swing which our former neighbor gave my wife 6 years ago which she absolutely refuses to give away now that he is dead (he was an old man) - I would do almost anything to get rid of these items.

My wife has been fighting me all-the-way to try to keep most of these items as she is a greater pack-rat than I ever was. My son is also a bit of a pack-rat like his mother. Therefore I've had very little luck trying to rid our house of toys. Last Spring I convinced them to sell off many useless large toys at our yardsale, but they are not budgeing on the remaining gargantuan stash of toys. They are actually adding on as I speak. My wife said tonight that my decluttering is creating a vaccuum which makes her want to purchase more stuff to fill in the emptiness. As you can see from the lists above all the junk I'm trying to rid are items I can't imagine us using any time soon. I also sold several dozen of recent sellable books to Edward McKay Used Books and Mr.Mike's Used Books - I got a couple of books in return as well as some money - the danger to trying to sell books for me is that I often end up acquiring even more books simply by going into a used book store. I've made a habit of acquiring vast collections of used books since I began frequenting an Edward McKay Used Book store in Fort Bragg and Fayetteville NC back when I was a middle-schooler. As I went through my book collections, most of them were books which nobody else would ever want - what I've found is that the used book stores in the area no longer want those old 1960s binding books. They all want the recent best-sellers or prize-winners which I'd tend to hold onto for a second reading sometime. I considered selling these books on Amazon.com which seems to sell well, but the thought of such hundreds of nickel-and-dime transactions is just mind-numbing. What I've found is that the thrill of selling and shipping off the items at my local UPS store becomes stale after about 8 transactions.

My greatest hope is to be able to get rid of most of my medical equipment. I own a $4200 EKG machine on a rolling cast-iron cart, a $2900 vital signs monitor on wheels, a $2800 portable spirometer, a $2500 cholesterol screening machine, a $1400 cryosurgery system with 20lb N2O tank, a ?$1000 autoclave, a $650 urinalysis machine, an $800 exam table with vag illumination system, a $700 audiometer, IV pole, instrument table, 2 exam stools, an orthopedic exam bench, exam light, also I own 4 cabinets full of medical supplies such as sutures, needles, syringes, bandages, ace wraps, KY jelly, scalpels, iodine, drapes, tongue depressors & cotton swabs, alcohol wipes, forceps and clamps, some very expensive (and expired) medicines etc. Probably >$16,000 worth of equipment which clutters up the house. I tried to ebay equipment as I mentioned above. I got fast bids on an item before ebay shut down my solicitations. Apparently I forgot to mention that I don't have the original boxes for my equipment - without the original boxes, the FDA forbids resale of the items - quite a silly rule for the type of equipment I was selling. I could try selling the equipment on labX at high cost, or I could just hold onto them as I will never get back the money I paid for them. I've already used these items quite a bit as a favor for family and neighbors believe it or not. How did I end up with this decadent stash of medical equipment? My father retired from practice around 1995 and left me with a bunch of stuff, then I closed my own private practice in 2002 and joined a group as an employee (as a scut monkey). Overall I enjoy being an employee more than being an owner - my personality was not suited to be an owner. As an employee, I can leave my troubles behind when I leave work - a priceless commodity. I believe I have a latent fear that I must one day work again self-employed, therefore I am holding onto all the equipment, but I think more and more that I'm better off as an employee indefinitely. It takes leadership skills and lots of self-motivation to own your business - alas I do not have such qualities. A decent movie, About Schmidt, addresses the pathetic notion of such mediocrity: especially the case with the no-good son of Kathy Bates who has his room wall plastered with "participant awards" from his childhood; not even a 2nd place showing in sight. I'm not quite that pathetic, but could probably sympathize with that kid more than not. There hasn't been a whole hell of a lot I've been "number 1" in - perhaps in my high school class I was not bad, but once in college, I've been simmering ever-since in the cauldron of mediocrity. My 3.2 GPA from my undergrad school, itself a mediocre Ivy-League school (Penn), attests to it, as does my showing in the bottom of the top third of my medschool class, as does my "competent" but not spectacular showing during my residency. Confucius teaches us to strive for the Golden Mean and I believe I have attained that quite well. Another movie (since I'm talking movies) which addresses mediocrity is of course Amadeus seen from the perspective of the mediocre Salieri - and I am Salieri.

In my mind, mediocrity and clutter somehow are entwined, but it's hard for me to articulate this principle precisely. Maybe it has something to do with my mediocrity causing a feeling of emptiness inside me and my attempts at trying to fill the void with something of substance, just as my wife said "to fill the vaccuum with more stuff." In which case then, why am I trying so hard to declutter my house? Maybe I'm trying to get back to the center of my void in order to understand it? Maybe I'm hoping that I can learn to accept and be happy in my mediocrity once I can see it clearly? It reminds me of something by Nietzsche, like his Human, all too Human. I think looking over that Material World book made me think that our possessions are helping us delude ourselves into thinking that we are better than others (or more superior). When once we are stripped of our possessions, we are naked and nothing but humans like any other person in the world, no better, no worse, just a "mediocre man."

2004-09-20T16:17:00.000-04:00

The Negatives of TV Viewing
stolen directly from p.125-129, Marie Sherlock's Living Simply with Children (Three Rivers Press, 2003)

"
1.TV Transforms Our Kids - And Us - Into "Consumer Units"
If there was ever any question about the relationship between TV viewing and kids wanting more "stuff," a study reported in the June 2001 issue of Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics concludes that, yes, indeed, kids who watch more TV bug their parents to buy more toys. The study involved a school-based effort to reduce television. By the end of the school year, those students who'd watched less TV were 70 percent less likely to have requested a toy during the previous week.
TV advertising works on adults too. A survey by economist Juliet Schor concluded that respondents spent an extra $208 annually for each hour of television they watched weekly. Betsy Taylor, Executive Director of the Center for a New American Dream, aptly calls the television a "direct I.V. of manufactured want."

2. TV Gives Us inferiority Complexes
The premise of most TV advertising is to make the viewers less-less cool, less attractive, less popular - if we don't buy whatever they're selling. The message is that, by buying these items, we'll be complete, we'll be part of an "in crowd."
And the "in crowd" has changed too. Television shows and movies aren't portraying the Cleaver family anymore but a very upscale Jones family. We essentially need to keep up with ever more affluent reference groups. Consequently, we need ot spend more and more to keep from feeling "out of it."

3.TV Promotes Violence And Other Negative Values
Remember the statistic quoted above about the 200,000 dramatized acts of violence and 40,000 dramatized murders that our children, on average, witness on television before they turn eighteen? According to a variety of sources, there is overwhelming evidence that violence on television - and at the movies and in video and computer games - is one of the causes of violent tendencies among young people.
Any doubt about the cause and effect of violent programming was put to rest by a joint statement in July 2000 by the Amercian Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. They said: "The conclusion of the public health community, based on over 30 years of research, is that viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values, and behavior, particularly in children. Its effects are measurable and long-lasting. Moreover, prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life."
It isn't just the violence on TV that is harming our kids. Other negative "values" are reinforced on television, among them disrespect, greed, the notion that looking good and being cool is of paramount importance, and an attitude of entitlement and selfishness.

4. TV Induces An Addictive, Trancelike State
Another reason to be TV-free involves the psychological effects of television viewing. A number of studies conclude that the simple act of watching TV is harmful to children, whether it's "Sesame Street" or "NYPD Blue." Among the many negative effects that television viewing has on children is the trancelike state it produces, the sensory overkill, and its addictive qualities. The pernicious effects of viewing are amplified by the quantity of TV the average American kid watches. A twenty-year longitudinal study conducted at Yale University concluded that children who watch excessive amounts of television tend to be less imaginitive, more restless, more aggressive, and have poorer concentration.
Television's hypnotic, addictive effect is only getting worse. In his book Culture jam: The Uncooling of America, Kalle Lasn explains that television content contains "jolts" that he describes as "any 'technical event' that interrupts the flow of sound or thought or imagery - shift in camera angle, gunshot, cut to commercial." In 1978, television shows contained about ten jolts per minute; by 1998, the number of jolts had doubled. some channels and programs deliver many more of these "technical events," like MTV with sixty events per minute. Lasn and others contend that jolts release hormones that trigger the fight-or-flight response, and that the viewer's attention is riveted by upping the incidence of jolts, inducing essentially an addiction to that release of hormones.
The real world does not work this way, notes down-shifted mom Debbie Newman. She believes that this aspect of television programming may even be the cause of the "epidemic" of kids with ADD and ADHD. "If we were going to take, say, an alien from outer space and train him to have a short attention span, what would we do?" she asks. "Probably we would sit him in front of a screen and flash pictures in front of him that change every fraction of a second." Just park him in front of the tube - instant attention deficit.

5. TV Creates Couch Potatoes
Excessive TV viewing contributes to weight problems in children. According to the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the more children viewed TV, the heavier they were. Children who watched four or more hours of television a day were, on average, 17 percent heavier than those who watched less than two hours per day. A recent study at Tufts University revealed that kids who watch a lot of television end up eating more of the types of foods advertised -- that is, fast foods, convenience foods, candy, and soda - than children who don't watch as much television.

6.TV Inhibits Learning
Too much television also leads to poor academic performance. A number of studies conclude that the less TV a child watches, the better that child will score on achievement tests. Similarly, as TV viewing increases, reading ability decreases.
The negative effects of television on young children are so pronounced that, in 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement recommending that pediatricians "urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years."

7.TV Is A Time Vampire
So far the negatives I've listed have, more or less, been related to the programming, advertising, or psychological impacts of viewing television. But there's another, more straightforward and potentially much more negative impact of television viewing: the simple amount of time it takes away from other activities. A 2000 study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that kids ages two through seventeen spend an average of 4-1/2 hours each day in front of screens - TV, computer, video game systems.
That it takes away from time spent on physical activity and reading is implied in the last two negatives discussed. But there are many other activities that are lessened and sometimes obliterated because we're zoned out in front of the tube.
Family time together is a huge one! A 2001 study by Professor Barbara Brock of Eastern Washington University revealed that TV-free families spent an average of 385 minutes each week in meaningful conversation with kids, ten times the national average. Families without televisions spend much more time playing, creating, and just "hanging out" together than their TV-immersed peers. TV-free families also have more time to spend getting to know neighbors, helping younger siblings, working around the house, learning to play an instrument, volunteering - in short, virtually any of those activities listed later in this chapter and in Chapter 12. This failure to spend time on pleasurable, relaxing activities could explain why, as a 1999 Kaiser Family Foundation study revealed, youngsters who watched more TV tended to be less content than their TV-free peers.

...And Yet We Watch
Marie Winn has written extensively on the effects of television on us and our kids. In 1974 she instigated what may have been the first "TV free" experiment in Denver, Colorado. Fifteen families turned their televisions off for a full month and kept diaries on the results. The improvements in family dynamics and happiness seen during that month were impressive. The families reported better communications between children and adults, a more peaceful atmosphere in the home, greater feelings of closeness as a family, more help around the house by the children, more leisurely meals with more interesting mealtime conversations, more reading by both parents and children, and more real play among children. The negatives says Winn, were minor. Some family members missed their favorite TV programs, some kids mentioned experiencing a "weird" feeling (coud it have been withdrawal?), and parents reported a few discipline problems without TV deprivation to use as a threat!
The positives of doing without television are noted over and over again by experts. Family therapist and author Mary Pipher notes that her standard suggestion for families in crisis is that they turn off the TV for a at least a couple of nights a week and, instead, watch the sun set or take a walk.
But here's the rub: Having experienced all of theses benefits - and with knowledge of the many negatives of TV viewing - all fifteen families in Winn's Denver experiment returned to watching TV to some extent after the experience!
With virtually no positives to recommend it and numerous negatives, television continues to hold the country in its viselike grip.
It doesn't have to. Simple living families almost universally have taken one of two actions with regard to television viewing: Either they have no TV in their home or they strict limit TV viewing. Here's a look at each of these alternatives.
"
...continues on in "Reclaiming Your Kids, Part II"
More on this topic written by others are here, here, and here.

2004-08-11T02:04:00.000-04:00

School Is In Session

So I now have a couple extra hours of free time in the daytime. My 7year-old goes to school 8a-3:30p. My 2 year-old takes a 2 hour nap daily. My son just changed schools - from a private Montessori school to a Charter School Montessori. Both he and I like this Charter school much better. Private schools from our 2 years of exploring and interviewing at various ones around town were not at all impressive. Their biggest attraction is that they can expel kids at the drop of a hat for various infractions, so theoretically, you keep all the punks and disruptive kids out of class. What you see in real life however is a class of fairly conservative/conforming, well-to-do white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant kids. You also see a lot of wimps and basket-cases who couldn't cut it in the real world of public schools. Surprisingly, you don't see a lot of smart kids in private schools. I attended private school from grade 5 to 12th grade (graduated from one). I had the same experience as described above - a bunch of spoiled rich stupid kids. I have to admit though that the sheltered environment made for a fairly stable, safe environment with very little fighting or other violence. Our plan is to let our kids attend well-selected public or charter schools at least up through middle school or so. This not only is the frugal way to go, but I think provides the better, more diverse and grounded educational environment.

As many parents who send their kids to Montessori schools do, I read most of the recommended Montessori books. Maria Montessori's The Montessori Method and her the Absorbent Mind are the best of the bunch. Her history, her theories and practical applications and her descriptions of her teaching methods make the Montessori method incredibly attractive. I can't see how any parent would look elsewhere once they read her books. The many books by her disciples and adherents (Lillard, Gettman, Hainstock etc.) similarly make this educational method seem unbeatable. But of course, the reality does not fit the hype. I've seen some classes where the method is closely followed and the children seem to behave in the ways described. But more often, the teachers of the Montessori method do NOT adhere closely to the methods - they take liberties here and there and improvise their own "take" on the Montessori method. The final corrupted product often leads to poor results - you can end up with an unfocused, lazy, overly-concrete and uncreative child who can't take standardized tests well. You have to realize the short-comings of the Montessori method - this method was originally designed to work in a day-care-like setting among kids whose parents were working all day long and unable to bring up their kids well.

As such, the "teachers" use efficient techniques to corral and organize learning activities individually assigned to each child - they minimize their interactions with each child partly because there are too many children and not enough overseers. Therefore a very curious, bright, out-going child might do poorly in this environment where they are unable to obtain maximal attention from their "teacher." Of course the Montessori teachers would say this method of supervision is designed to encourage independence and self-motivation etc. There are kids whose personalities fit the Montessori method absolutely perfectly. I think more often this method comes up somewhat inflexible and more kids than not lose by it if this method is used alone. There is also no evidence that this method works at all beyond the middle elementary years. John Chattin-McNichols describes most of the recent research on the method in his The Montessori Controversy - what you find is that not a lot of research is out there and what there is doesn't reflect too favorably on this method when it comes to actual testing.

Homeschooling is a great option if you as a parent are adequately trained, educated, and motivated. I think ideally you need a deep, broad and solid background in childhood education. You also need to be very proficient in the various mathematic fields, the sciences. You need to know the details of world history, you need to understand, not just appreciate all the great movements in the Arts, Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Music. You need to be extremely well-read. If you are not, you are potentially short-changing your own kids. You of course need to have the free time to run a "school" in your home. Also, you need to have the type of sunny disposition and great relationship with your kids that can allow them to tolerate sitting and taking lessons from you for hours a day everyday for years at a time. If your local school district does not have well-trained teachers, then homeschooling might be an acceptable, though not always optimal, solution. From what I've seen many home-schooled kids turn out very well, and the WORST home-schooled example is very likely to turn out better than the WORST public- or privately-schooled kid, and the BEST home-schooled kid is also likely to out-perform the BEST product of the public/private schools. But I think there is quite a bit of selection bias here - the failed cases of homeschooling are likely to go into hiding and not announce what happened. Also the most uneducated, unreasonable, and frankly, most stupid parents often have no insight into their own inadequacies and therefore will inflict their own homeschooling on their unfortunate kids. Conversely, often the most ideally educated and trained parents I've seen often suffer from feelings of self-doubt and will NOT homeschool their kids for this reason and because obviously, the most highly educated parents often can and will earn much more money in the work force rather than staying at home with their kids.

What we've settled on is letting our kids go to public or charter schools, do additonal "homeschooling" at home to reinforce and confirm what they know/don't know. We're going to give Montessori methods more looks before giving up on them.

A new school year is so exciting in so many ways - especially when you change schools like we just did. I changed schools 7 times before I hit 4th grade so changing schools was pretty unremarkable for me. My wife only changed schools at the elementary-middle and middle-high school interfaces so changing schools seems much more traumatic to her. We are also for the first time Car-pooling with 2 other neighborhood families. This is to save on our commuting costs in terms of time and money (no school busing at charter schools currently). It's still early (just 2 days) but it''s working out so far. Overall I think the whole situation fits into our simple living ideologies well. My wife wants to take the results of two recent tests (WoodCock Johnson and Iowa) my son took to his teacher to show her that he is pretty much an "academically gifted" child - I'm worried this is going to only cause troubles for him. I think many teachers don't really enjoy the smarter kids in class - the conforming middle-of-the-road students are so much easier to deal with. I can imagine how a long-time jaded teacher could prefer a class full of mediocre kids who do what they are told and turn in the results expected - punch in, punch out, go home and worry about my own life instead.

I used to fantasize about how I could be a spectacular teacher and have a handful of brilliant and talented students who endlessly stimulated each other and our class. In real life of course, I'm much too reserved, introverted and non-dynamic to be any good as a teacher. When I was a resident I think I did a better than average job as a teacher to medical students and interns on the wards, but I was never the spine-tingling dynamo of a teacher I fantasized about being. Teachers in the Wake County region are paid ok, I've read something in the range of $35,000/year - far better than they used to get, though admittedly they should be able to make much more IF THEY ARE GOOD. Compared to say what a medical resident makes after completing medical school, this is not bad. I made $31,000 as an intern just out of medical school and I thought that was pretty good money at the time (of course I had never made any real money to talk about previously so my perspective on money was skewed downwards). I was looking at various governmental jobs online and what they offered - typically we're talking salaries starting around $20,000 or less right out of college with no job experience. These are for jobs requiring you to forfeit your entire day Monday through Friday - a pitiful sum seen in this light. I know that college professors can make greater than $100,000/year once tenure is earned and their track record is established. From what I've seen from my college years (Univ of Penn), I can't say that many of my professors deserved a six-figure salary. The ones that earned that kind of money really seemed to perform minimal duties and the the hardest workers, usually the graduate students or junior faculty, seemed to do most of the work.
Whenever this time of year comes around I get little tingly feelings of excitement and anticipation, even though I've long finished my schooling. I almost want to start back in 2nd grade like my son and do it all over again. I think I was not like other kids because even as a child, I never hated school - I used to have trouble sleeping at night because I would get so excited thinking about going to school the next day. I had perfect attendance from Kindergarten to 12th grade - I missed the very last day of my Senior year (the Awards Presentation Day) out of some bizarre sense of rebellion and rejection of my perfect attendance record. I actually ENJOYED taking tests and preparing for them! These are all things that I would never confess to my own friends. School was always a wonder for me - the babble of kids and all the clashes of personalities and histrionics, the lessons and tests, and the goal of trying to get "100"s on all the tests - the sheer satisfaction of seeing that "100" with a smiley face on a difficult Pre-Calculus or English or Biology Exam. Later in college, the studying was much more difficult but the satisfaction of seeing an "A" on an Organic Chemistry Exam was so much more exalted. My college years were much harder and while I was doing them, the years were much more miserable than earlier, but in looking back my college years were so much more intense and wonderous. Medical school and residency was mostly fun and really not as challenging as my undergraduate education. I hope I could take some courses at a local college when I'm retired years from now - maybe I can get another degree purely for fun. They say Youth is wasted on the Young. I think School is wasted on the Schooled - if they only knew how rich their school years are.

2004-08-10T03:18:00.000-04:00

Contemplating the Passage of Time

Someone asked me whether I remembered when I was in Kampala this weekend. I didn't know how he knew I was there at all, but I've since realized I once spoke about it in small-talk with a gastroenterologist - he must have spread this news. It's funny that the first thing I told him was that I remembered monkeys in the trees - I was between 8 months old and 2-1/2 when I was in Kampala and I don't remember much. But I do remember this and I also remember being inside an automobile going down a rough dirt road and watching the passing trees as I drifted in and out of sleep. I remember some dreams about Africa also. It is peculiar to think that I actually lived in Africa at one time in my life. My father was a surgeon working for a British hospital there - he describes doing C-sections on tribe-women in such huge numbers that it was like working on an assembly line. At some point he had his fill of this type of work and we all came back home.

In fact those earliest of memories stand out for me and seem to be time standing still stretching backwards infinitely. It's like the cliche of time accelerating as we age. My life does seem to be leaping by in large chunks of weeks nowadays. I'm sure time will be humming past in monthly blocks for me within the next score of years.

What struck me about being asked about Africa was that I had recently been reading about how hopeless this continent seems to be in Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague, the tome detailing the litany of diseases which have struck and is yet to strike mankind over the past hundred or so years. It describes more than Africa but the most interesting parts of the story is about the "Andromeda Strain"-like viruses endemic to this region particularly. Nowhere else has viruses like the Marburg or Ebola killed so many thousands of people. It makes it seem so inevitable that in the long view, we will be wiped out by a final incarnation of an aerosolized zoonoses developed from a rodent or ape. Last week I read Philip Ziegler's Black Death which is an old 1960s book about the Bubonic plagues which swept through Europe in the mid 1300s wiping out about 33% of the European population - tens of millions of people. It is so interesting how mankind can at one moment be so shocked and outraged over a single murder by a husband of his wife (as with the cases going on in Utah and California currently in the news), yet in another time and space, mankind can become so inured to hundreds of dead bodies littering the streets of his own neighborhood. Philip Gourevitch's haunting description of the events surrounding the Hutu-Tutsi genocides in Rwanda in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: is a perfect example. Not that Africa owns a monopoly on genocide - we all know about the Nazis, and Stalin, maybe we need to talk more about the KimIlSung-KimJongIl regime. Kang Chol-Hwan's The Aquariums of Pyongyang recounts the horrors of the current regime's silent genocide. I think it was Stalin who said when you kill one person, it is murder, when you kill thousands, it is a statistic.

6 years ago I applied to work overseas for Medecins Sans Frontieres, an organization which I thought at the time was admirable. I was promptly rejected for lacking foreign language skills required and they urged me to seek further training and re-apply. Since then, my family life has interrupted this mode of behavior. When I was in college I was quite a liberal - I put up posters for Amnesty International. I voted for Dukakis, then Clinton twice. Over the past decade I've taken a More Thomas Hobbesian view of civilization, Maybe a touch of Adam Smith. Was it Turgot who described first the principles of laissez faire? Maybe I've got all my political philosophers all mixed up. In any case, the World's problems seem both more hopeless and less important to me at the same time. Voltaire keeps repeating the phrase "you must cultivate your own garden" in his Candide - I'm coming around to this way of thinking more and more. I think this is why I voted for GW Bush the last election - the first time I voted Republican. As unadmirable as GW is, you have to admit he provides the requested benefits for his constituents. When all the world is falling apart, it can be comforting to pick lint out of your bellybutton. And so I'm now thoroughly domesticated, tending to my suburban bourgeoisie Capitalist life here in NC. Last week while emptying out our safe deposit box, I came across my passport which showed it had recently been renewed. When trying to recall why I had so recently renewed, my wife reminded me in an offended tone that I had planned to skip out on the family by going over to serve with Medecins - it was a jolt to realize that I had actually intended to abandon my way of living in that way so recently. In fact, I was probably under a lot of stress and was looking for an escape hatch; I was probably too apathetic and lazy even then to actually go into a warzone.

When you think about the mass death of humans in the various parts of the world at this time, you must balance this fact with the problems of global warming, global over-population, and the overall inexorable destruction of the Earth from the by-products of human industry (as described perfectly in the film Koyaanisqatsi).

If you believe Adam Smith, there is a guiding hand in all this, but this is magical thinking. I tend to favor a Darwinian view over all this so I don't think humans are any more favored to survive than the Dinosaurs. If you'll detach yourself emotiaonally from it all, it's almost an artistic denouement to imagine that the "cradle of mankind" is where the seeds of mankind's destruction may spring from - this is assuming Garrett's fears outlined in her Coming Plague comes to fruition. With the super-resistant species-jumping superviruses boiling over in Africa and Asia, why do we continue to prescribe antibiotics, anti-virals, and anti-fungals to hopeless vegetative patients in nursing homes to deflect lawsuits or to persistently irritable children to allay whiny parents, or to hordes of animals in stockyards in order to maximize meat profits? But then again, we will lose the war against disease in the end anyway won't we?

2004-07-06T14:35:00.000-04:00

WHY SHOULD WE DRINK TEA?

The early history of tea is shrouded in myth - it is said an emperor/scholar Shen Nung in 2737BC sitting under a Camellia senensis bush was drinking hot water when a sprig of a leaf fell in his cup - Eureka. Kuo P'o first describes the drinking of tea around 350AD and around 780AD Lu Yu wrote Cha Jing - "the Classic of Tea" commissioned by tea merchants of the time. Brick Tea spread via the Silk Road around 618AD into Turkey, India, Russia, and the West. Our current leaf tea steeped in boiling water was developed during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) - the first teapots were also developed as they are used now during this time also. Around 1644 in the Quing Dynasty, tea makers discovered the secrets of controlled fermentation (oxidation) and the first red and black teas were developed. The Portugese discovered tea around 1516 and the Dutch and the English discovered the pleasures and benefits of tea around 1615. Tea plantations were first established by the British in India by early 1800s.

Tea can only be made using the fresh tips of the Camellia plant - the scarcely opened buds that start to grow in Spring. Once a leaf is fully developed, it becomes too coarse for use. The drying of tea leaves must be done within 24hrs of picking or the juices will begin to oxidize. The main difference between Green Tea and Black Tea is in the lack of oxidation in Green Tea. In the preparation of Green tea, warm (not boiling) water must be used or a bitter taste is developed - ideally around 160degrees Fahrenheit is recommended. With Black tea boiling water should be used in steeping in order to release the flavors.

There are many rituals and traditions which have developed in the Far East with regard to tea preparation, presentation, and consumption, but I prefer the JUST DRINK IT protocols instead. Here's what I do: I put 2 or so heaping teaspoons of my favorite tea leaves in a tea ball - I pump in boiling hot water and set a timer for about 4-5 minutes. I pull out the tea ball (I re-use 2-4 times depending on what type of leaves - you can use green tea leaves 4-6 times), then pour the tea through a Kensington strainer into my tea cup - I'll sometimes add a teaspoon of sugar. I begin with pure water - I have a reverse osmosis/deionization water filtration system in my basement which produces water of 0 conductivity (distilled quality) at 200gallons/perday rate when I need it. I keep a water cooler in the kitchen filled with this water at all times. This is the water my family uses to drink and cook with also:

WHY DO I FILTER AND PRODUCE MY OWN DRINKING WATER?
Simply put, you can't trust anybody including Spring Water peddlers, your municipal water supply, etc. Here is a test I ran a year ago after I went to my local grocery store and purchased a sample of every water brand they were selling:

..........Chlorine(ppm)..Ammonia(ppm)..Nitrates (ppm)...Conductivity(μS/cm)*
“Spring Waters”
CrystalGeyser...0.........<2.5..........5...............232
1.9¢/oz
DeerPark........0.........<2.5..........<2.5............193
2.6c/oz
Evian...........0.........<2.5..........<5..............556
3.7¢/oz
FoodLion........0.........<2.5..........15-20...........236
1¢/oz
Nestle..........0.........0.25..........10..............521
0.8¢/oz
“Filtered Waters”
Aquafina........0.........0.............0...............8
3.9¢/oz
BlueMist........0.........0.............0...............0
2.3¢/oz
Dasani..........0.........0.............0...............51
3.8¢/oz
LeBleu..........0.........0.............0...............0
2.9¢/oz
My RO/Deionized.0.........0.............0...............0
~0.1¢/oz
Tap Waters
Cary(Aug 2002)..2.6.......1.0..........2.5.............313
Cary Jan 2003)..5.........1.0..........0...............194
Sink Carbfilt...1.0.......0.25.........0...............193
source: JordanLake (CapeFearRiverBasin)
Holly Springs...<0.2......trace........5...............279
source: Cape Fear River & Falls of Neuse Lake
Raleigh.........0.8.......0.5..........<2.5............256
source:Falls of Neuse Lake
Apex............0.........0............<2.5............166
source: groundwater, well

Back to Tea again...What are the Properties of Tea?
The primary beneficial aspect of Tea is in the antioxidant activities of the Camellia sinensis plant leaf. This activity can be measured using cumene hydroperoxide/hemoglobin methylene blue method - this measures the activity of the various polyphenols present in tea. A King's College study in 10/2002 documents several of these polyphenols found in teas: EGCG, 4 different Theaflavins, epicatechin gallate, alpha-theagallin, quercetin-3-rutinoside, 4-caffeoylquinic acid, flavon-3-ols, flavonols, gallic accids, hydroxycinnamates, etc. According to a report in the Japanese Journal of Clinical Pathology [51(9):859-63,2003Sept],
here are the antioxidant activities of:
heated Green Tea = 207 nmols/ml
non-heated Green Tea = 280 nmols/ml
powdered green Tea = 481 nmols/ml
black Tea = 215 nmols/ml

Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemisty [51(15):4427-35,2003Jul16] documents in 45 samples of various teas how green tea has higher contents of catechins than black or Oolong teas also. They show that the oxidation process reduces the levels of the catechins but actually elevates the levels of gallic acids. In general polyphenol levels were less in oxidized (black) teas.

What is the in-vitro and in-vivo effects of tea? There are several polyphenols in tea of which epigallocatechins (EGCG) are the most studied. Tea has been shown to cause a ~2mmHg lowering of systolic blood pressure in women, to inhibit bladder tumor growth, to inhibit the growth of prostate and breast cancer, and cause anti-leukemic effects on leukemic cell lines.

According to Antiviral Research {58(2):167-73,2003Apr], EGCG has anti-adenoviral activity via several mechanisms both inside and outside the cell.

EGCG has been shown to inhibit platelet aggregation in an Austrian study in 2002 following women using black teas for greater than 1 month.

An Indian study in April 2003 on the hot water extract of black tea seems to demonstrate an antidiarrheal effect on all models used.

A Case Western study from 10/2002 showed EGCG inhibits the cartilage resorption in arthritis suggesting possible benefits for arthritis sufferers.

An NYU study in 1/2003 using Black Tea on teeth showed the exposure to regular black tea reduced caries 57% on subjects with regular diet, and reduced caries by 64% on a cariogenic Diet - so tea may work as well as brushing with fluoride.

Archives of Internal Medicine [163(12):1448-53.2203Jun23] reported in a Vanderbilt Univ study that with use of a capsule of theaflavin-enriched green tea extract (375mg) vs placebo for 12wks, levels of LDL fell 16 mg/dL, total cholesterol fell 11mg/dL, and levels of the "good" HDL actually rose 23mg/dL. These results are comparable to low doses of the hundreds of dollars a month HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors like Lipitor, Pravachol, Zocor etc.

A recent Asian study demonstrated that Tea increases the 24hour energy expenditure and thereby helps in weight reduction. Anti-aflatoxinogenic properties were noted in coffee and teas due to the their levels of tannins. Regular consumption of Green Teas have been shown to reduce chronic halitosis significantly, mainly by anti-bacteriogenic properties. In-vitro studies have shown an insulin-potentiating effect of tea's EGCG, tannins, and theaflavins. Interestingly the addition of milk (5g of 2%), non-dairy creamers, and soy milk decreased this potentiating effect by 33%. Therefore to obtain maximal anti-diabetogenic benefits of tea, you should drink it black (or green).

Several mechanisms have been proposed as the basis of all of these activities:
1.epicatechin may bind and activate an allosteric site that enhances P-glycoproteins overall function and efficiency. P-glycoproteins transfer a wide variety of compounds from the cell interior across the lipid bilayer membranes. This includes drugs, toxins, xenobiotics, carcinogens.
2.GTE or EGCG interferes with signal transduction and activities of avarious protein kinases are thereby inhibited. The expression of nuclear proto-oncogenes declines thereby and the activity of ornithine decarboxylase is reduced. Ornithine decarboxylase catalyzes the rate-limiting step in the biosynthesis of polyamines and is closely linked to cell proliferation and carcinogenesis.
3.Increased polyamine depletion bhe the polyphenol activity of tea extracts could also be the mechanism.

What are the Potential Negatives?
Tea is a fairly strong stimulant. A Mayo Clinic Trial in 2003 in patients with metastatic prostate CA tried Green Tea in large doses (6 cups/day) - this tended to reduce the PSA levels over 2 months possibly but toxicities were noted including Insomnia, Nausea, Diarrhea, mental status changes.

If you thought tea might reduce the risk of colo-rectal cancer, there was a trial published in the US follwing tea consumption and colo-rectal cancer incidence over time. There was no association in this large study - neither a slight + nor a slight - effect.

Green tea extracts used in large doses have raised concerns over binding non-heme iron and thereby possibly worsening anemia in people who may have this problem. The Am. J. Clin. Nutr. [2001 Mar;73(3):607-612] article that raised this concern did not study black teas.

There have been concerns over organo-phosphate pesticide levels in the old-fashioned "brick teas" (levels 1000mg/kg), but levels as high as 500mg/kig have been measured in some green teas as well. More studies will need to be performed but in general, pesticide use has been reduced and regulated for most large tea plantations.

The caffeine content (the stimulation effect) of tea is viewed both positively and negatively by people. Using Fourier transformation infrared spectrometry, the caffeine levels of various tea samples can be determined easily as published by Analytical & Bioanalytical Chemistry [374(3):56-5,2002Oct]. In general the levels will vary with tea leaf brand, preparation method, concentration used etc. But using the general "One heaping teaspoon of tea leaves per 6 ounce cup in fresh boiling Spring Water" instructions most use,
The Caffeine Content of TEA/COFFEE Comparison (per 177ml = 6oz cup):
milligrams of caffeine.....Beverage
60-90......................Espresso coffee
60-180.....................Drip coffee
6-16.......................Green Tea
12-55......................Oolong Tea (Semi-black)
25-110.....................Black Tea

The beauty of tea is that you can easily "decaffeinate" your product. 90% of the caffeine content of tea is infused out of the tea leaves in the first 30 seconds of steeping. So if you pour off this first infusion after about 30seconds, you have a 90% "de-caffeinated" product - this removes 35mg of caffeine and as a bioproduct you lose 4-10% of the flavor of tea. I found this information from the website of a tea connoisseur.

So What Type of Tea is Good?
There is as much connoisseurship when it comes to tea as there is with wines and beers. The primary producers of tea in the world are in India (28% of world's tea), followed by China (23%), Sri Lanka (10.4%), Kenya (8%), Turkey (5.8%), Indonesia (5%), Japan (3%), Argentina (2%), Malawi, Zimbabwe, etc.

The undisputed highest quality teas are produced in Japan - the "Matcha" produced in the Nishio region in Aichi (on Honshu Island) Japan and regulated by the government in terms of standards/quality is a shade-grown green tea consumed in powder form and used in the Chado (tea ceremony). In Japan and Korea, only green tea is used even today. In China, green and Oolong Teas are favored.

The highest quality black teas, the type of tea preferred by the British, Europeans, and Americans, are probably produced in India - the Darjeeling Teas produced in the foothills of the Himalayas is a very refined black tea with light oxidation and high polyphenol activity. The Nilgiri teas are produced in the southern hilly regions also resulting in lighter oxidation. The "Ceylon Teas" of Sri Lanka are also famed for their refined flavors - the Kenilworth, St.James, Nuwara Eliya, Galaboda, and of course America's favorite Lipton Teas. China is famous for the delicate Keemun tea which also makes a good ice tea, smoky Lapsang Souchong, and the old standy "Gunpowder" Teas so-called for their balled tea-leaves.

We currently have vaccuum jars of Darjeeling, Nilgiri, and Japanese Sencha Green Tea sitting on our kitchen counter. I used to drink a lot of Keemun tea but I prefer to spend the money on Nilgiri or Darjeeling teas instead. My wife and mother notices that when I drink a lot of green tea, my breath smells fresh and good. We own a 8cup capacity "Brown Betty" earthenware teapot produced in England which we use to infuse all our tea. I never wash it according to directions, simply rinse out quickly in tap water and let dry. The antibacterial anti-oxidant activity of tea elixirs prevents any mold or bacteriosis in this pot.

A good convenience, though blasphemy according to tea connoisseurs is using a "hot pot" on standby:

Mine is a "Tiger" Brand made in Japan and has been in service for over 3 years. Zojirushi produces the most famous of these.

I've read maybe 6 or so books about tea, I heartily recommend Okakura's Book of Tea which can be purchased, but borrowing from your library is recommended. John Blofeld's Chinese Art of Tea is a good book as is Jane Pettigrew's the Tea Companion.

2004-06-30T02:59:00.000-04:00

WILL CHANGING OUT ALL LIGHTBULBS IN MY HOUSE TO CF MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

According the FTC.gov website for lightbulbs 90% of the electricity used by standard incandescent lightbulbs is lost as heat. Standard light bulbs (incandescent) burn about 750-2000 hours whereas compact fluorescent (CF) bulbs tend to burn about 10000 hours - i.e. 10 times longer than standard bulbs. The light output of a 60Watt regular incandescent bulb yields about 855lumens; a 15Watt CF bulb yields about 900 lumens (brighter at 1/4 the watts used). The upshot: "The benefits of compact fluorescent bulbs are clear: lower operating costs, longer operating life and more efficient use of energy." The ftc website estimates that a 15W CF bulb would cost you $1.20/year to operate versus $4.80/year for a standard bulb when you factor in the cost of electricity. The downsides of the CF bulbs: 1. the expense (they can be very expensive especially compared to the cheap standard bulbs) 2. CF bulbs contain a trace of mercury (Hg), so special disposal is recommended - take to hazardous waste disposal sites in your town/county 3.CF bulbs have a slight "delay to full brightness" effect, though much less than standard fluorescents (those long tubes used in most schools and offices) 4.Some CF bulbs have a tendency to buzz slightly - usually defective ones.

With the summer coming on, I was thinking that replacing all the incandescent bulbs with CF bulbs may also reduce the amount of heat generated within a room, especially if enclosed, and also reduce the fire hazard of hot burning bulbs. It might even potentially reduce the air-conditioner usage (?!) by not generating additional heat in the house? Who knows. I had always tried a few CF bulbs in various fixtures, and I always used CF bulbs to light aquariums with plants and I found these CF bulbs lasted years and years - decades in fact, though the light output would very gradually diminish over time. While perusing various lighting websites, I came upon a Kansas store called lightbulbs etc. or lightbulbs direct and found a decent deal for mini-spiral 60watt bulbs - $11.98 for 4. I impulsively decided to go for the gusto and buy a CF bulb for every damn fixture in my house. It turns out that lightbulbsdirect.com did not have a good deal for candelabra bulbs (as compared to my local hardware store I'm saying), but I went ahead and purchased all of them from this one store http://lightbulbsdirect.com/. It took a good 10 days for them to deliver the bulbs and the shipping charges were fairly high. My total cost for all the bulbs were $361.30 to replace every damn bulb in my house.

Here's how the bulbs came:

And here's a comparison of a mini-spiral 4Watt next to a 60W standard bulb, and a "torpedo" candelabra base 4Watt CF bulb next to a standard 25W candelabra base bulb:

Another thing I worried about was that for some of the decorative fixtures in the house, the CF bulbs might ruin the "decorative" aspects of the lighting. I think overall you tend not to notice it unless you are really watching for it. Here are two examples. One is a ceiling fan light, another is a candelabra fixture, both with the CF bulbs installed on them:

Though I ordered about 75 CF bulbs total, I found only 1 defective light bulb in the whole lot. And only that one defective one "sang" with the rumored buzzing before burning out within a month. I'd say a decent quality control overall for generic CF bulbs.

Here's how the costs sorted out for my house. Using lightbulbdirect.com's own prices (to be fair in comparison), though I think prices can be higher for both standard and CF bulbs at my local home depot or Lowe's, I found:
Standard Incandescent set-up:
60watt bulbs - 31 bulbs x $.30 = $9.30
25watt candelabras - 31 x .47 = $14.57
100watt 3yr bulbs - 4 x 1.85 = $7.40
40watt Globe bulbs - 4 x 1.05 =$4.20
25watt miniGlobes - 2 x .79 = $1.58
150watt floodlight - 1 x 3.49 = $3.49
50/150/250w 3way bulb - 1x2.99 = $2.99
50/75/150w 3way bulb -1x1.79 = $1.79
75watt bulbs - 3 x .30 = $0.90
40watt bulbs - 1 x .30 = $0.30
total wattage: 3885watts total cost of these bulbs: $46.52

Whole-House Compact Fluorescent set-up:
Like I said, I spent $361.30 including shipping for 48 mini-spiral 15watt bulbs, 24 mini-torpedo candelabra 4watt bulbs, and 1 75watt reflector bulb. Total wattage as installed in the house: 879watts total. So the immediate painful drawback is in spending an extra $314.78 which included a bunch of shipping and handling charges. The immediate payoff is in a brighter house overall and in the knowledge that I am using 3006 fewer watts potentially throughout the house.

Fortunately, my electric company (Progress Energy) allows me to follow my usage and billing history online. This will help me better judge in real time the difference in my kilowatt-hour per month from when I was all incandescent to now that I am all compact-fluorescent. This comparison is complicated by the fact that until this past December or so, I and my family were spendthrifts not only in terms of eating out and recreational shopping, but also in how we used electricity for air-conditioning, lighting, etc. Since we made a concerted effort to be more frugal and simple, we've been trying to reduce our lighting, we've been shutting off the oven or stove a couple minutes before cooking is "complete," we've gone out and taped extra insulation around our outdoor air-conditioning unit's tubing and our indoor water-heater tubing, we've dialed up our AC thermostat from our previous 72-75F to our current 81F (and plan to dial down our winter heating thermostat from our previous 75F to about 65-68F), we've been dialing our dishwasher to rinse in cold water, we've been trying to take lukewarm to room-temperature showers instead of hot showers, we've set our hot-water heater to heat at 122F. All these efforts have made a notice-able difference in our KWH usage, but has made a smaller difference in our monthly charges due to the rising cost of electricity in the past year. So as you can see, the comparisons are going to take some fine discerning and counter-compensating.

In any case here are the raw data for a 4 month period last year (when we were all incandescent and all spend-thrift), versus a 4 month period this year (when we are all-CF and more frugal):

We were Spendthrifts, We were Incandescent:
Month ..KWH/month usage..electricity bill..avg climatic temp
April 2003........1794...........$144.30......53F
May 2003..........1843...........$148.03......58F
June 2003.........2065...........$165.05......66F
July 2003.........1912...........$173.03......74F

We are Frugal, We are Compact-Fluorescent:
April 2004........991............$83.36......52F
May 2004..........936............$79.11......61F
June 2004.........1515...........$123.75.....74F
July 2004.........1526...........$140.32.....76F

These comparisons will need to be charted out for the next year and I'll have to come up with some reasonable way to factor out our additional frugality measures and also to factor in the rising cost of electricity along with temperature patterns (this is actually done for me by Progress Energy on their website). I think I see real savings in the utility bill already but it'll take a few more months of comparing and figuring/factoring to determine a ballpark "percentage figure" of savings per month, per year, and per life of CF bulb.

Hey, this is just one of the "frugality measures" I'm trying out - whether it turns out to be a failure or not, I don't know. Some frugality measures don't really give you a good bang for the buck. My wife and I have always calculated gas mileage whenever we fill-up our cars by dividing our odometer reading since last fill-up by the total gasoline filled(used). I've found that I can add about 2 miles-per-gallon to my usual weekly work commute by NOT using any air-conditioning during the drive - actually a borderline trivial difference in terms of cost even with gasoline in our area at about $1.919/gallon, especially considering the sweaty misery you pay for in exchange for the higher gas mileage.

The loose ends to this story is this:

That is, what do I do with the 74 standard incandescent light-bulbs I have left after changing out all the lighting in the house? Here are some possibilities: 1.Try selling them at the next yardsale (?who would buy used bulbs? How to price them?) 2.donate them (?who would accept used bulbs in donation? How much should I deduct for tax purposes?) 3.keep them around to use as emergency replacements 4.Use them to stop traffic (Spanky did this on one of those old 1930s "Our Gang" movies - here's how it works: you throw down a light bulb and it makes a popping sound and makes everyone on the road stop and get out to see if their tires popped - problem is modern tires don't pop that easily and modern drivers couldn't hear such outside noise in their hermetically sealed driving environments).

which makes me wonder why those old Little Rascals comedy shorts are no longer to be found anywhere on TV. I was thinking that the politically-correct-police made all networks forego airing those episodes, just as theatres and video outlets no longer will show Disney's Song of the South, or many of those old Looney Tunes cartoons, or the old 1940s Superman cartoons, or any more Benny Hill masterpieces etc. A great loss for us all.

2004-06-23T03:08:00.000-04:00

We've Been On Vacation

Though not the one I was thinking we would go on. When I started posting these weblogs, I had mentioned that we planned a long 2 week West trip but several factors interceded to make us change our minds. 1. We have a 23 month old baby who absolutely hates taking trips longer than 20 minutes in a car - she whines, bawls, screams without giving it up for up to 3 hours at a time before she will collapse from fatigue. 2. With the recent upsurge in gasoline prices, several hundred dollars would have been added on to an already costly trip if you take into consideration that those weeks I do not work amounts to so much loss in pay. 3. Taking long, self-indulgent, extravagant voyages do not fit appropriately into the simple lifestyle and is discordant with our changed (hopefully) outlook on our life.

So instead of driving out west toward the Dakotas to visit Roosevelt Natl Park in N.Dakota, we went instead to a place which ironically is an absolute den of affluenza - Myrtle Beach, SC. We did this because it is within a few hours drive from our house and we hoped to be able to stay there relatively conveniently and be "fun" for our 7 year-old and 2 year-old. Driving through I-95 you see one of the most dastardly self-evident tourist-traps on the East-coast:

When I was a kid back in the mid-1970s, my family stopped here and we purchased dozens of over-priced souvenir items for no good reason. My parents weren't doing it for comic effect or out of sardonic glee as many who frequent "Roadside Kitsch" do nowadays. They were simply naive and were honestly impressed with the roadside billboards set-up for hundreds of miles along I-95 proclaiming the importance of this monument - when we finally arrived, we all jumped out of our car to exult in this promised land of Kitsch. As Kitsch goes nationwide, South of the Border is unusually low-quality Kitsch - by this statement, I'm comparing SotB to other Hall-of-Fame Kitsch sites nationwide I've visited: The House On The Rock in Wisconsin (near Madison), Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota and the Crazy-Horse monument in Western South Dakota, Niagara Falls area near Buffalo NY. Each site of Kitsch I've visited I can claim honestly I entered without the slightest clue that I was about to be bombarded by kitsch. I've been very naive about such things throughout my life and I came to realize that people throughout the world are prone to erect monuments to bad taste only after visiting dozens of such sites, all in good faith. Last year I discovered roadsideamerica.com and perusing this site, I decided to re-visit many of these sites again, this time with a more appreciative eye for kitsch. This was part of the reason for the grand Western trip I had planned, but decided that it really was a waste of time and effort, and would have been exhausting and obnoxious for my kids.

So we went for Myrtle Beach. Driving through Conway, the run-down little town attached to this tourist mecca, you can't help but notice how hopeless the South Carolina economy seems to be. They do attract the occasional large car-factories etc. but in general, this is a state which is unable to drum up any of its own business very well. The economically depressed, semi-rural, failing strip-mall towns dotting South Carolina is very typical of the deep South. You some of these in Eastern and Mountain-region North Carolina and Virginia also, but not nearly in the quantity you see in SC, TN, GA, AL, WVa, MS.

Once we were at the beach I'm afraid to say we indulged in the decadence of a "Resort hotel" - though I partially blame this on catering to my kids. The "resort hotel" however was not of the 4 diamond variety, but rather a seedy set-up along the raucous South Myrtle Beach streets (The Yachtsman Hotel). South Myrtle is a haven for teenagers and as such offer relatively cheaper lodgings. The strip along the "Grand Strand" is full of low rent stores such as tattoo and piercing parlors, bars, chintzy amusement parks, Ripley's believe it or not tourist traps, etc. We avoided all of these places and stayed around the beach and our hotel pool. One interesting thing - my son and I were just absent-mindedly putting together a modest sand castle using a couple of buckets and our hands - it may have taken us 30-40 minutes to do it and the product was rather mediocre, though a marvel for my 7-yr-old son. Well, within minutes this thing attracted several (5-6) groups of people passing by and they felt the need to gawk at it and compliment us as if it were one of those masterpieces you see produced by artists at beach festivals. It made me wonder if one were to sit down near Washington Square in NYC or at that Piazza San Marco in Venice and started drawing little childish stick figures whether you could attract a crowd to gawk at your (absence-of-)talent.

This is the actual thing that seemed to draw passersby.

The Special Forces Museum

On the way back from the beach we stopped by the dreadful city of Fayetteville NC where I spent a large part of my childhood. We did this because my wife and son wanted to see the Special Forces Museum which is located in the downtown area. I warned them that the Fayetteville area is not a great place for kids - and to bear me out, on our way out of the parking lot a Schizophrenic army vet bicycled up to us and frantically started showing us a stained & ripped piece of museum brochure. I reminded my wife again that Michael Jordan's dad was shot and killed near Fayetteville NC. In any case, the Special Forces Musuem was FREE and probably worth a visit, though strewn with much propaganda. The museum is large, very clean and well-set-up. Here's a close-up of a parachute frozen in deployment:

Here's a shot of the underside of an actual C47 in the Normandy, D-Day exhibit:

Genealogy

One of the other things my wife and I have been hooked-on recently is the idea of tracing one's genealogy the best you can. My wife's lines we thought would be relatively easy since her family on all four lines were all in North Carolina since the 1700s and many of their graves were nearby. It turns out nothing is very simple. When we visited the NC State Archives, we were disappointed to realize that once you go back to pre-1900s and before, all census data, marriage records, death records, land deeds, wills, etc. were written in long-hand, usually cursive, with a fountain-pen or quill-pen. In fact, even blown-up on microfilm, it can be very difficult to decipher with certainty what you are reading. It takes a lot of detective work and much corroborative and redundant pieces of evidence to convince yourself that something such as a birth or marriage date is an absolute fact. Many times the dates are off by a year, or by a day, purely by the vagaries of the person entering the data. It would turn out that some scribe re-copying information collected during a census would read "Sarah" written by an individual in the field as a "Mary" and confidently write it as such on the official records - exasperating. What we found to be the source of greatest certainty is often the family Bible. Here is a copy of my wife's maternal grandfather's:

It seems old folks used to write in birth, marriage, and death dates into the middle of these bibles on pages duly meant for such purposes. Again an ancestor's bad penmanship ruins any efforts at properly confirming these records also, but fortunately these were much more legible.

Besides communicating with many of the older members of the family, an exciting aspect of genealogy tracing is visiting old cemetaries. It takes a lot of good research to locate the place of burial of a long-lost ancestor - we were able to track several down by reading a newsletter written by one of my wife's great-aunts. It actually took a trip into a local (county) library where we thought the cemetary was located to ascertain the actual location.

This is the Randolph Library in Asheboro, NC.

We found that there were two churches with identical names located within 30 miles of each other, Tabernacle United Methodist Church - by happenstance, we had wasted an afternoon rooting through the wrong church cemetary. By looking through the cemetary rolls at the county library, we discovered that there are ladies who go around every 50 or so years or and read tombstones and record what they read - by looking through these readings, my wife finally located a cemetary where several of her direct ancestors were buried (not in Randolph, but in Guilford County, NC). Once we arrived, we were shocked to find the condition some of these 200+ year-old tombstones were in:

We were gratified to be able to read (via tracing on paper over the markings) some of them and confirming the birth/death dates we had researched from family bibles and state and county archive records. It turns out that doing "tombstone rubbings" is bad for the delicate old tombstones - there are better ways to read it using tangential lighting at night, or with water, etc. Here is an impressively well preserved tombstone of a great(5)grandfather of my wife who was born 1775:

His wife Hanna Fields buried next to him was grand-daughter of a Christopher Vickery who fought with George Washington in Valley Forge. It seemed like none of the tombstones much older than this, and many of the tombstones even a hundred years younger were easily legible. I guess limestone was used for some of the worst ones because it was cheaper than granite or marble. It looks like really tracing out one's genealogy and keeping up with all 4 grandparents lines with all the children in all branches will be a nearly lifelong endeavor. We'll be writing it into a genealogy software program and hopefully publish it onto our websites to share with family if we ever get on with it.

2004-05-05T14:13:00.000-04:00

Swan Chicks

We've been busy thus far this Spring, hiking, doing school projects, working, etc. Above is a picture I took hiking around our neighborhood - there is a group of Swans which hatched out some young around a lake - these young chicks looked very hardy but within a week only a couple were left and all were gone within 3 weeks - I wonder if neighborhood cats might have eaten them.

Our Very First Yard Sale
Last month, one of our neighbors suggested they were thinking about yardsaling and we jumped on-board (actually my wife did). Someone else in our neighborhood had taken out a newspaper ad in the local papers to run a yardsale in our neighborhood, so we took advantage of this fortuitous free advertising to go for it. We gathered up a whole bunch of junk we thought might be sale-able and tagged them as to price (this took all day).

Here are some photos of the junk we were setting out in our garage the night before the yardsale:

It took 3-4 good truck-fuls to drive down the hill to our neighbors house for storage overnight. Apparently the yard-sale went from about 07:30 to about noon-time. This was our very first attempt at a yard sale and we didn't know that most yard-salers were looking for items in the 25cents to $3 range. We tried to unload our Sears power edger, our push-reel-mower, and things like that and they didn't sell at all. We got rid of a lot of my kids' junking plastic toys though as well as a huge plastic toy boat/sand-pit monstrosity (this huge item sold for $6). In the end, she ended up bringing back about 2-3 truckfuls of stuff which didn't sell. We were surprised at what did and didn't sell. For instance, nobody would buy the highest quality items like new-appearing Gymboree toys or furniture, but would buy the junkiest junk (like an ancient Pentax camera with scratched lenses). My wife was very stressed out over this yard sale so I don't know how often or if we'll do this again. I unfortunately work most weekends so I couldn't help much. She made about $184 for all this effort - the biggest benefit of it was actually in freeing up some free space in our attic and garage. We still have a basement and attic full of junk to get rid of. We're thinking of donating some of our inappropriate furniture to Habitat for Humanity later this year.

Changing Schools for Next Year

Good news is our son was accepted into a local Charter Montessori school for next year. Our son has been going to a private Montessori school over the past 2 years. Though he enjoys his school and has become quite attached to his classmates, we couldn't justify the thousands of dollars a year in tuition and expenses for a school which frankly we didn't think gave us good value for the money. We had our son tested recently by a neighbor who is an academically-gifted programs instructor for our local county school system. We had him tested because we were honestly worried that he was lazy, unmotivated, and slow to respond to questions about math and reading comprehension. However, he was always a quick study on various matters and usually remembered things well. We were concerned that he needed a more "standard" and goal-oriented program of study, including more testing and competition than a Montessori education could offer. I've read several Montessori books including all of Maria Montessori's fabulous original works and the system seems almost too good to be true. I'm convinced now however that the drawbacks of the system is in the lack of teaching to the real-world of test-driven education. It would be great to be able to get into a good college or high-school without having to submit standardized test scores, but this is not how the world works anymore. Well the good news was that our son tests so well on the 3rd grade level tests (though he is only a first grader), that our neighbor tells us that these IQ and achievement tests are unable to measure his skills adequately. Hopefully he'll be a good test-taker in the future as he seemed to genuinely enjoy taking these batteries of tests. Speaking of testing, I don't know why the College Board folks wanted to change the SATs now into a completely different format - if I were on an elite college admissions board, I'd want some kind of test to show me how intrinsically smart a kid was as well as how active and well-rounded he has been throughout his school years. With this politically-correctoid change in the system, it looks like most college boards might have to resort to a standardized IQ test like the Wechsler test to get this information - what a waste of resources. I saw that Frontline show on the SAT a couple years ago and I can see the problems inherent in the test, but you're not going to be able to ever create the perfect test and the SATs have been in place for so many decades now that it has created its own history and culture. Everybody knows what you mean when you say "my girl scored 1580 on the SATs" or "my son scored 1100" - you automatically start thinking various subsets of colleges when you couple their scores with their high-school grades and activities profiles. Now with this standardized test score totally tabula rasa, it's going to be very difficult for everybody to figure a kid's near-term future out.

The best news for us in the change to a charter school is that this school is free, and thus fits into our new goals to live a frugal lifestyle. It will also free up money we could invest into a college/private high-school fund for both our kids. I'm either going to go ahead and call up a Schwab broker to set something up myself in the near future or maybe call up an old friend of ours who is a successful lawyer/financial advisor to help us.

I read some books recently which I wanted to comment on:

1. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich

2. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, by Barbara Ehrenreich

3. The Wealthy Barber, by David Chilton

4. Frugal Families: Making the Most of Your Hard-Earned Money, by Jonni McCoy

Barbara Ehrenreich is a liberal sociologist who writes mostly about American culture. She makes some very interesting observations and meta-analyses political movements and media behaviors. Her approach is sympathetic to left-wing causes and her Fear of Falling is I think a very good book to read alongside Bernard Goldberg's very provocative Bias : A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. I enjoyed her Nickel and Dimed book the most as it was mostly a voyeuristic recounting of her experiences as a minimum-wage worker. I couldn't help but think that most of these minimum wage-earners ought to read Amy Dacyczyn's Tightwad books and Dominguez's Your Money or Your Life to help themselves to a better life.

The only thing I have to say about the Wealthy Barber and Frugal Families is that these are two fairly inferior publications. I think if you know nothing about managing your money the Wealthy Barber is something you could pick up, though there are many better books of its type. Jonni McCoy's Frugal Families, like her Miserly Moms book is a copy-cat frugal lifestyle book in the tradition of Heloise or the Tightwad Gazettes.

Our Food Bill is Getting Better

By trying to copy many of the tips and tricks from all these frugality books, we've been having some good results with our grocery bills.
Here are our grocery bills from 2003:
Jan - $742
Feb - $732.90
Mar - $742.98
April - $621.20

Here are our grocery totals from 2004:
Jan - $330.97
Feb - $459.47
Mar - $491.93
April - $316.43

In addition, our dining out bills for 2003 were, as I've said before, astronomical - we never kept up with all our receipts and never counted the stray can of ice tea from a vending machine for sure. I'm estimating from our past receipts that we might have spent $500 to $1000 per month on dining out last year. Check out our dining out totals for this year thus far:
Jan - $137.65
Feb - $33.06
Mar - $75.80
April - $54.17

These figures do include every penny spent - including our son's weekly "pizza day" at school and meals we paid for to celebrate birthdays and for when friends or family came over and wanted to order out pizza (i.e. things which would have been nearly impossible to avoid without an ugly scene). I think practically ~$30/month is as good as we're probably going to do, though we'll keep trying to do better.

Here are two big expenses for us this May: our son's taekwondo program costs about $150/month if paid monthly, $119/month if paid annually, $109/month if paid 2 years at a time, and $99/month if paid 3 years in advance. We've decided to go for the 3-year program after talking at length with our son. Our son's taekwondo is advantageous not only for its fitness promotion and acculturation to his ancestry, but we feel could become an asset in term of self-defense, self-confidence, and future admissions to competitive schools. He has already won a medal and two trophies from local competitions. He is very eager to continue it even though I have suggested to him to quit if he is losing interest (said in a moment of "simple/frugal life" ethos excess). This is going to cost us around $3600 but we happen to have some extra cash in our accounts and though this is clearly not a frugal move, we believe it is a good investment in our son's education and future.

The other big expense is that we are going to pay off our 2nd car (the Honda Pilot) - about $3000 left on the purchase from last January 2003. This behemoth cost us about $36,000 with all its fittings and options. By paying off this car, we will deplete our savings over the past year, but we will be able to re-set our expenses to exclude the "car loan" line which has been between $658 to $1200 monthly. This will get rid of our 4th largest monthly expenditure (after mortgage, kid's education fund, and retirement). In the future, I've vowed to never purchase a car with financing every again. Also, we are never going to purchase a gas guzzler ever again. Our Honda CRV guzzles gas at the rate of between 20 and 25 mpg (all-around usage). Our Honda Pilot guzzles gas at the rate of between 17 and 21 mpg (all around usage). With gas prices around 1.72/gal at our local warehouse clubs' gas pumps, that figures out to a couple hundred dollars a month on gas! Gas at our corner station is being sold at a criminal $1.96/gallon. We are monitoring with great hopes to the future of hybrid cars like the Toyotal Prius If only their Consumer Reports repair records, NHTSA/NCAP crash records, insurance institute crash tests, and Edmunds.com reports within the next coming years come out favorably disposed toward these vehicles, we hope to make them our next automobile purchases. When our kids are grown and out of the house, I think my wife and I could easily get by on one small automobile (for long trips), and maybe a scooter - kind of like the one Jim Carrey used on Dumb and Dumber.

2004-03-29T22:22:00.000-05:00

Stepping Off the Consumerist Track

A couple of books which everyone from teens onward need to read before entering into our Society today:

1.Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin

2.The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn

3.The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley and William Danko

4.Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin

5.Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John De Graaf et.al.

De Graaf and Elgin approach the consumerism of our American society with a left-wing liberal stance while Amy Dacyczyn approaches it from a very pragmatic and conservative perspective. Joe Dominguez is probably somewhere in the middle in his approach, but more conservative than liberal. No matter what your ideology may be, these books carry the common thread that WE HAVE TOO MUCH STUFF cluttering our lives - that we have let ourselves become puppets in a game played by Marketers. Why do we need to upgrade the Microsoft Windows program every 2 years? Why do we need 100 television channels (all garbage)? Why do we need a 52" plasma-screen TV? Why do we need new clothes every year? Just a cursory review of one's values and a moment's thought will convince any reasonable person that he needs none of that garbage.

There is a very brief and trendy book written by Elizabeth Warren and her daughter (The Two-Income Trap...) which tries to enable the modern consumerist behavior of Americans by providing several lame excuses. In typical liberal fashion, the Warrens point the blame for such behavior on everybody and everything except on the perpetrators themselves. According to them, we have already done the best we can - shopping and overspending are all justified in the name of our own well-being. According to them Banks, large Corporations, and governments have led us ignorant pawns into debt traps - we must change the laws instead of our own behavior in order to help ourselves. This is all drivel - I'm certain anyone who decides to purchase something they can't afford realizes they are making a mistake. This type of over-spending is a disease, a pathological behavior, not an inevitable series of decisions made for justifiable reasons as the Warrens claim.

Of all these books, probably the most life-transforming book is Joe Dominguez's unfortunately & kitschily-titled book (Your Money or Your Life) - this books looks very much like one of those self-help-pop-psycho-babble financial-gurued-Ponzi-schemoid-looking rags and its appearance and title might be off-putting to people who believe themselves to be too good for this sort of advice. This book nevertheless distills in very concise and simple terms the essential philosophies and actions one must take to transform oneself from a mindless automaton who shops recreationally and spends his life energy away into a person living with common old-fashioned sense. Some of the advice in this book is a bit too simple, maybe too inflexible, but the essential points in the book are worth millions of dollars to anyone: that one must keep track of every penny one spends, that one must live with near-term and long-term financial goals in mind, that there is more to life than making money, that one must live with frugality and wisdom.

My favorite book of the above however is Amy Dacyczyn's Tightwad Gazette - her approach is so revolutionary and her example is so inspiring that this book has caused my wife and me to make spectacular changes in our lifestyle. Last year at this time, our typical day began with deciding where to eat for lunch - typically someplace like Quizno's subs where we gobbled down about $15 worth of fast-food with sodas. We'd then drive around our local mega-shopping conglomerations, touring Target, Dick's Sporting Goods, BJ's Warehouse, Best-Buy, Home-Depot, and maybe our local mega-mall as well. We might have a specific item we would consider purchasing such as a $600 set of All-Clad cookware and look at some prices at various places, but not buy them and so consider ourselves good shoppers. Yet we'd along the way pick up a stray $10 toy here, and some unnecessary $18 stationary items there, and maybe some baby clothes here, some toiletries there, etc. By the end of the day we'd rack up $50-$100 in meaningless purchases. After picking up our son from school, we'd discuss where to eat supper and typically dine at maybe an Italian restaurant where we'd ring up another $35 meal before heading home tired and inexplicably frustrated. Since reading those books above, and especially Amy Dacyczyn's books, we make our own meals (~98% of the time anyway), we have found an ALDI Foods store in Raleigh where we can purchase an all-generic high-quality super-cheap groceries. We've shopped alternatively at a bread outlet store. We've decided to forego our nearest Harris-Teeter (our erstwhile favorite high-priced grocery chain). Yes, we've put together a grocery "PriceBook" per Dacyczyn's advice (I had 5 - that's right FIVE - managers at one grocery store accost me angrily while I madly scribbled the price of almost every item on their shelves). My wife even went to a yardsale last weekend where she purchased a half-dozen outfits for our 2 year-old at 25cents each. These behaviors are unheard of for us - we were inveterate brand-name and label readers. Our favorite phrase used to be "you get what you pay for." But on further investigation and experimentation, we found that many of Dacyczyn's advice rang true - just as with most pharmaceuticals, many generic products perform just as well as their brand-name brethren costing much more. As an example a generic Aldi vanilla wafer costing less than half Nabisco's Nilla wafers taste just as good. A slice of 55cent per loaf honey-wheat bread taste just as good as Nature's Own Honey Wheat slice costing $2.39 per loaf! There are certain items where a specific flavor may be so imprinted into my chemoreceptor-memories such as Heinz's ketchup or Tabasco sauce, that a generic will not suffice. But these items are few. I've calculated that we could possibly cut into our monthly food bill by another 33-50% if we followed many of Dacyczyn's techniques (such as "shopping to stock your pantry" rather than shopping to fulfill certain meals). We used to spend about $1000 per month dining out on top of another $500-$600 on groceries. We were able to cut our monthly grocery and dining bill to $400-$500 thus far, and can project that we could eat happily and comfortably on between $250-$300 per month - Amy Dacyczyn would scoff at such numbers since she has fed her family of 8 on $180 per month. But for us, this is tremendous. I've placed an order for TVP (texturized vegetable protein) - a dry soybean by-product substitutable for meat in many dishes, cheaper than tofu and all meats. My local small health-food store is letting me have a 25lb bag of this stuff at 10% off their $1.09/lb price.

We went to the Wake County Libraries annual booksale last week - it was quite an extravaganza. There were literally hundreds of people lined up around the block waiting for the warehouse to open - camera crews from our local WRAL newsteam were there filming hundreds of tightwad nerds near-rioting over used books. Hardbacks were going for $4 each (no bargain), paperbacks for $1 each (ok deal) the first night. The weekend promised BOXFULS of books for $5 or bagfuls for $2. Needless to say, we got ourselves a buttload of books this weekend. We actually spent $25 total in books, but got a load of books - What Color is Your Parachute 2001 edition, Motley Fools' Investment Guide, The Frugal Gourmet, Betty Crocker's Cookbook, about a dozen children's books, several medical books, etc. including an entire set (I,II,III) of Amy Dacyczyn's Tightwad Gazette books! (we read from library copies and didn't have our own copy til now). We plan to eventually resell most of these books to our local used bookstores for credit or cash. Since we didn't really need any of these books, I guess this was a very consumerist thing to do and only added to our clutter and affluenza, but this was a hell of a good time and served as good entertainment as well.

My near-term goal is to participate in a yard-sale where we actually are selling our own stuff instead of buying other people's junk. We have so much junk in our house that I believe yard-salers would salivate over some of our stuff. According to the Millionaire Next Door book's research, physicians are horrendous spendthrifts and are almost always "Under Accumulators of Wealth" for many reasons enumerated in that book. The reason that most rings true is that we are expected to live in a certain lifestyle and behave and appear at a certain level toward our public and our patients. Just as Realtors must "look successful" in order to be successful, doctors must appear affluent and successful. As a result, as described in that book, a surgeon earning $700,000 a year, might have $300,000 in annual basal expenses and so after taxes end up with the "Big Hat, No Cattle" syndrome. Well, we are determined to break the mould - neither my wife nor I give a shit about what others think about us, including most of our patients honestly. Both my wife and I dress like we did when we were in college - typically in T-shirts and sneakers. We will honestly never purchase a luxury car. We will try to avoid cavorting with our physician friends and colleagues. In fact, we try to avoid letting anyone know we are physicians because we know that doctors get crapped on everywhere they go. For example, at a typical Medical Conference, our medical societies would tip us off that we will get cheap rates at the hotel if we tell them we are with them - of course when we fall for this sucker-bait, we are indeed offered the "Special Rate for Doctors Only" - gee thanks for the special deal guys! Physicians are one of the most likely to get audited by the IRS, we get one of the highest automobile insurance rates, we are the most likely to get sued (I've been sued already once and had to endure a grueling 2 week trial last year - more about this later), and this book shows us that physicians are one of the people least likely to become millionaires. Despite this, the public believes all doctors are rich and live like Orthopedic and Plastic surgeons to the Hollywood stars. After finally climbing out of debt 18 years after highschool, this poor physician couple (both primary care) are happy to be living paycheck to paycheck. Sure we could have done better had we lived frugally like Amy Dacyczyn, but we are surrounded by Affluenza-stricken, consumerist spend-thrifts, bad advisors, and most importantly, "the inner desire for More" within us which we kept caged within during our poor college years and medical-school years, through our overworked-yet-still-poor-as-hell residency years (while our friends who began work out of college were socking away thousands in their 401ks and making big bucks during the dot.com boom/bust cycle). The mantra of "delayed gratification" which keeps many student-physicians going through residencies and fellowships lasting decades will often lead to a burst of wild spending upon landing their first jobs. This self-destructive spending post-education often entrenches young doctors into the under-accumulator-of-wealth track - we are one of the thousands of examples. Upon careful calculation, I have determined that my wife and I will never be rich, but we also will never be destitute, and we are happy enough for that. My long-term goals: to stay married (never divorce), to reasonably fund my two babies' college education using the 529 college savings plan, to try to pay off my mortgage as soon as possible (before 14 years), to sock away as much into retirement as possible before I turn 60 years old - so as to generate an amount providing financial independence as defined by the late Joe Dominguez.

2004-03-08T23:17:00.000-05:00

How to Make Banana Pudding, Sloppy-Tofu

First the Banana Pudding, a Southern staple dessert.
1.My wife separated the egg yolks from the egg whites, then beat the egg yolks,
and finally poured 3 cups of milk into the beaten yolks:

2.Combined 3-1/2 TBSP of all-purpose flour, 1-1/3 cups of sugar, a dash of salt in a deep pot, then
poured the above milk/egg mixture into this pot and cooked over medium heat stirring constantly til
smooth and thickened, this is your banana pudding base:

3.Then removed from heat and added 1 TSP of vanilla extract.

4.In a presentation dish/pot, you start your layering of Nilla wafers:

5.Add 2-4mm slices of bananas:

6.Pour some of the pudding base onto this, then start your second layer:

Pour more base and your ready for your final layer. You arrange some Nilla wafers
circumferentially and you're ready to whip up your egg whites into a meringue:

7.Gradually add 1/4 cup + 2TBSP of sugar slowly while beating your egg whites til foamy.
Add 1 TSP of vanilla and beat til blended:

8.Then spread your meringue over the custard and seal to edge of dish. Bake at 425F for 10 minutes.
Here's the resulting Banana Pudding:

9.Place this into your refrigerator to cool, and get ready to make some

SLOPPY TOFU:

I.This is easily done using Hunt's Manwich sauce. First get two blocks of extra firm tofu - like
Melissa's. Dice the tofu into 1/2cm bits or smaller:

II.Fry up for 10-15minutes after draining as
much water out as possible in a frying pan with some canola oil. You can tip the frying pan
slightly and spoon out as much of the water as possible during this frying also.
When the tofu bits are looking fried and less jiggly, you're ready for the Manwich sauce.

III.Pour on the Manwich sauce and mix into the tofu bits. (If you're not vegetarian, you can also
add scrambled egg bits, bits of chicken, turkey, or groundbeef, whatever).

IV.Stir and mix constantly in the Manwich sauce for about 4-5minutes, then let cool another 5 minutes.
While the Manwich mix is cooling, you can toast some buns and put a slice of cheese on the bottoms
(to hold in the Manwich sauce). Here's the final Manwich sauce vegetarian sloppy joe's - SLOPPY TOFU:

This tofu-Manwich meal with Banana pudding dessert takes maybe 1-2 hours to make depending on whether
it's just one or two people making it. It serves up to 4 Jethros. This might be the last recipe entry in my journal for a while. But here are some other plates we fix up for ourselves when we feel like it. The one I
was most tempted to do as my next "recipe" was the Inari Sushi dish which is very excellent and easy to make Japanese item:

You could fry up some Tempura with dipping sauce, some California-rolls to go with it all. It makes an
excellent dinner which all kids will eat once they try it.

Here are some other simple plates we fix for ourselves:
Ramen:

Pancakes and sausage (and scrambled eggs, hashbrowns in ketchup):

Tempura - vegetables lightly fried in batter served with tempura sauce and rice:

So this will probably be the last of these menu items on my weblog. But I hope you can see
how and why we don't need to go out to eat anymore.

2004-03-05T19:21:00.000-05:00

Baked Ziti (and mashed potatoes)

Today we made baked ziti. Here are the ingredients:

This is a recipe I from from someplace I forgot. We've been making ziti this way since around 1997.
First you boil some filtered water - about 4-6qt, enough to cover all the ziti that comes in one of those 16oz boxes. At the same time, you can heat up the sauce on medium to low - avoid burning it, just roil it enough to kill off any remaining bacteria if present. You can also get your baking pan oiled up with olive oil, bring out some butter to soften:

Once the water gets boiling good, turn the heat down from high to about 7, pour in the ziti and let cook about 12 minutes, stirring occasionally to avoid sticking on the bottom. Once the ziti is cooked, pour it into a collander (an absolutely necessary cooking item, even if you are a non-cook bachelor - I've had mine since I was in college). Turn your oven to 350F and set to bake for 19minutes.

Now to make the ziti sauce, throw about 1 tablespoons of butter onto the pot you just used to heat the ziti - set the heat to about 4. Pour about 2 cups of milk into the pot, add about a teaspoon of salt, break out the mozzarella cheese, and add about 1/2 of an 8oz packet of this into this concoction, allow to simmer until numerous small bubbles show on the top and all the cheese and butter is melted. Add the SECRET INGREDIENT: 3 good squirts of French's golden yellow mustard. Turn off the heat and allow to simmer about a minute or so with constant stirring. Add about 1/2 cup of cornmeal mix (or self-rising flour works ok too). Now add the cooked and drained ziti into this concoction carefully and stir and mix up and pour onto your baking plate:

Stir-up some more in this baking plate (pre-oiled) and ladle on some of your tomato sauce on top, then add the rest of the mozzarella from your packet and you're ready to put the plate into the oven:

Go ahead and put it in. Now let's make

Mashed Potatoes

This is SO easy to make. I'm going to make 6 servings of it here. You boil 2 cups of filtered water with 3 tablespoons of butter in it. As soon as it starts boiling well, turn off the stove, and add 2 cups of "instant mashed potato flakes" and 1/4 cup of milk:

You stir but not too vigorously and within seconds like magic you see mashed potatoes forming. All children like this stuff. You can also add this sidedish to the vegetable plate we made a couple days ago.
Within a few minutes the timer for the baked ziti will beep and it's time to set the table. So here's the final product:

2004-03-04T13:12:00.001-05:00

Vegetable Plate
Vegetable plate preparation, Southern-style, is very easy - we make some rice in our rice cooker, boil some frozen vegetables, boil some beans, make some Kraft's macaroni and cheese. Maybe add a casserole or banana pudding. This time, we fried up some Lite Spam to add meat to the meal.

But today we'll concentrate on how to make
CORNBREAD

Here are the ingredients:

1.First you crack 2 eggs into a bowl, add 1-2 cups of milk, 1/4 cup of vegetable shortening,

2.Add 2 cups of cornmeal:

Stir well, grease a baking dish (we're making cornbread muffin-style here), ladle the
cornbread mixture into the baking pans:

3.Set the oven to bake 425F, slide the stuff in and bake 12 minutes:

Here's the cornbread out of the oven:

And here's the final Southern-style vegetable plate meal:

This takes maybe 45 minutes to prepare and will feed 4 Jethros.

2004-03-04T13:12:00.000-05:00

Vegetable Plate
Vegetable plate preparation, Southern-style, is very easy - we make some rice in our rice cooker, boil some frozen vegetables, boil some beans, make some Kraft's macaroni and cheese. Maybe add a casserole or banana pudding.

But today we'll concentrate on how to make
CORNBREAD

Here are the ingredients:

1.First you crack 2 eggs into a bowl, add 1-2 cups of milk, 1/4 cup of vegetable shortening,

2.Add 2 cups of cornmeal:

Stir well, grease a baking dish (we're making cornbread muffin-style here), ladle the
cornbread mixture into the baking pans:

3.Set the oven to bake 425F, slide the stuff in and bake 12 minutes:

Here's the cornbread out of the oven:

And here's the final Southern-style vegetable plate meal:

2004-03-03T07:03:00.000-05:00

Come Look Around Our House

I've introduced myself, but here's a look at our house in its current state, no clean-up or tidying done at all. When we expect guests to arrive, for instance, we'd tidy up the best we could to make our place look better. But I think it is more informative to see how we live and what our living spaces look like in a more typical scenario. You will find that there is a lot of clutter and garbage. I'd like to throw a lot of stuff away, especially toys, but both my wife and my son are tremendous pack-rats and trying to throw something out develops into major battles.

When you enter our house from the front door, the first thing you'd see would be our "formal dining room" to your right, which we are using as a lounge and piano practice room for Harrison and as my wife's office:

If you look to your left from the front door, you'll see our 75gallon aquarium in an oak cabinet (see about me in the link on the right sidebars and scroll down to see a shot of the tank) and our main library:

If you walk in, passing the first floor bathroom on your right,

you'll see our "family room"

and walking into the family room, then into the kitchen area, you'll see where we do most of our projects,
homework, and eat all our daily meals (our eating area):

If you look through the windows behind the dinette area you'll see our screened in balconywhich sits maybe 50 feet above ground. Our grill is on a landing at the top of the stairways coming down from this screened balcony.

Here's a look at the kitchen:

I might as well show you the insides of our refrigerator and freezer compartment::

Our garage entry is next to this refrigerator - the garage is boring to look at, just 2 Hondas and some storage gorilla racks in the back with our lawnmower, weeder, blower, camping equipment, strollers, variety of junk.

We enter our house about 80% of the time through this garage door. We've been keeping our garage door itself closed all the time due to a rash of reports in the local papers about teenage girls and boys sniffing around to steal stuff from our neighbor's garages.

Across from the garage door is our pantry. It's very cluttered with stuff, including lots of junkfood which we're trying to do better about avoiding. You won't be interested. Well, here's a look in case you are interested:

Walking back across the kitchen and family room to go upstairs, you'll note a door to the left of the stairs - this door leads down to our basement which is actually pretty impressive and large (about 1200 square feet).

We keep sports equipment, tools, ladders, large toys, old fish tanks, some books down there. I drilled and plumbed in a work sink down there.
Here's our SanteFe Dehumidifier which keeps our basement humidity at 41% or less throughout the year:

Here's our reverse osmosis - de-ionizer water filtration system which we use to make all our drinking and cooking water:

We hope to some day finish out the basement with heat/air, formal full bathroom, suspended ceiling with fluorescent lighting. We've estimated this will cost a minimum of $25k so we've put it off well into the future.

If you open up the basement door, you'll see our back porch:

And you might as well take a look out the backyard:

Get back in the basement and take a look at our old neglected bikes, not ridden for the past 6 years:

And take a look at the back of the basement where we've set-up a small makeshift tornado shelter - please note that this shelter is not likely to work well, but it at least it let's us have a place to go if a twister comes up the lane:

And across from the tornado area are some of my old fish tanks, a 75, a 55, a 30, and a 20gallon:

Let's go back up and out of the basement, then go left and up the stairs

Once upstairs, the first room to your right is my office:

You can see back down into the foyer through a little balcony area next to my office, but across from my office is the master bedroom:

Here's the closet:

Here's a glimpse of the master bath:

Here's airing our dirty laundry bin:

Leaving the master bedroom and walking left down the upstairs corridor, you'll see our little laundry room to your left down the corridor:

Here's our guest room. My parents, my wife's parents, my in-laws, my sister's family, friends of my wife, etc. have all stayed in this room. When you come over, you'll probably be staying here as well. It contains a little desk area, a closet, a couple of dressers, an old antique chair, a small rolling chair, and a 19" tv hooked up to cable and a couple of vcrs:

Here's the 2nd floor hall bath:

At the end of the corridor, here's my son's room:

Here's a look at his most recent mess of toys which he never cleans up:

Just for completeness, walk back down the corridor toward the stairs, and to your right, open up the door next to the master bedroom, walk up and take a look at our cluttered attic.

2004-03-02T03:19:00.000-05:00

S&B Golden Curry Rice

This is a vegetarian (no meat by-products) Japanese-style Indian dish we just tried making for the first time last week - bizarre as it sounds, this is one of the most popular dishes in Japan, especially among children. You can purchase a package of S&B Golden Curry sauce mix for about $2.99 in most oriental grocery stores and in all Japanese grocery stores. One package contains 2 packets of sauce mix. I packet is enough to make up a mixture to go with 3cups of uncooked rice - enough for a family of 4. Here are the ingredients for this very interesting and flavorful meal:

1.Go ahead and put 3 uncooked rice-cupfuls of rice into your rice cooker and press cook. We use Tohuko Rose prewashed rice - about $12 for 20lbs of it - cheap and excellent rice. Below is our new "10cup" rice cooker made by Zojirushi - it plays "twinkle little star" when you press cook, it plays some unrecognizable tune when the rice is all done, it has "neuro fuzzy-logic" rice cooking and warming functions. It is shaped like a little piggy bank:

2.Chop up your vegetables, your tofu, and 2-3 crisp peeled apples. We use 2-3 small Idaho potatoes, 1 small packet of baby carrots, 4 scallions, 1 package of firm tofu chopped to 1cm cubes, and 2 chopped crisp apples soaked briefly in lemon juice.

3.Put about 1/3 cup of Canola oil in a Wok-type pan and sautee your chopped potatoes, carrots for about 15 minutes, add your chopped onions and tofu and sautee an additional 10 minutes or so. Finally add the apples and let sautee just another 5 minutes or so and set all the mixed vegetables aside in a bowl.
Here are the vegetables before cooking:

Here they are after cooking and set aside:

4.Now open up 1 packet of the S&B Golden Curry sauce mix - we use "mild" flavor. I've heard the "medium-hot" ones taste better.

Pour out about 3cups of filtered water and bring to a light boil in the now emptied Wok (or another pot). Place the sauce mix pellet into the roiling water and stir and break-up to make it dissolve - this can take several minutes:

5.When the sauce is dissolved well, finally dump all your prepared vegetables including the apples into the sauce mix and allow to simmer for about 5 minutes:

6.Assuming your rice is done by now, pour out desired portion of white rice into a deep bowl, then ladle the Curry sauce vegetable mixture onto your rice.

RESULTING MEAL:

This preparation only takes about 1 hour and will be filling for 3-4 "Jethro"-type adults. You can add some Indian-style Nan bread, and maybe some pickled side-dishes for extra flavorings.