• goodbadi

    One Way to Be Rich

    June 13, 2010

    Alas, the many summer projects bouncing around in my brain’s possibilities department require money. So, as I said to a coworker at our end-of-the-year picnic Friday, “I’m trying to learn contentment.”
    “Yes,” he said. “There are two ways to be rich. One way is to have a lot of money, and the other is to be happy with what you have.”

    “If I’m ever rich,” I replied, “it will most likely be the latter kind.”

    I’m sure my bemoaning our financial status would strike most people in the world as completely ridiculous: I’m already rich, with a wonderful house to live in, met needs, and many met wants, not to mention the things I have that money can’t buy, like family and good health. Just look at our gardens:

    Are we wealthy? No doubt. These pictures don’t even show the berries patches or orchard.

    However, that global perspective gets clouded by more immediate Things I Want to Do: move the electric pole from the middle of our front yard ($1,500); replace our car with a minivan ($15,000); relocate our wood stove ($2,000), move our kitchen ($10,000); and the list goes on and on and on. And on. I doubt $100,000 would even take care of it–just for starters.

    I’ve always been this way. My favorite adolescent reading was Gander Mountain catalogs, and my parents had to maintain tight control over my paper route earnings. Their general rule of thumb was, “Think about it for a week, and then we’ll talk about it.”

    That took care of many of my ideas then, but now my desires lack neither longevity nor practicality. Maybe a week would have been enough time for me to forget about that little plastic audio mixer with a built-in mic and two tape decks for disc jockeying parties (which I never had, anyway), but now that our band is becoming established, my want for a sound system feels more grounded.

    All that said, the limiting factor of our cash flow means that our spending glacier is not threatened by global warming, and so moderation and contentment are more than ever necessary for the learning.

    Fortunately, as my dad told me my uncle says, there are always free projects to work on. So I’d better get busy.

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  • goodbadi

    Ice Cream Social

    May 23, 2010

    For a while, we weren’t sure anyone would come to the neighborhood ice cream “meet and greet.” We’d invited a few of the closest neighbors along our road, bought 15 quarts of ice cream, picked strawberries, and cleaned the house.

    So we sat on our front porch and looked at our creek side garden that I had only begun to weed and hoe earlier in the day, and waited.

    At 7:15, with only fifteen minutes left in the invitation times window, we were getting excited about having all that ice cream and a quiet evening to ourselves when in our driveway drove neighbors J and S’s car.

    During our visit, another couple came and went, but J and S seemed very glad for neighborly interaction. They’ve lived here for two decades and even went to the next-door church for 10 years, with nary an invite to anything personal. It’s not that they–or the locals–aren’t nice people. “They’re all very friendly, and they’d give the shirt off their back for you,” they said. “But you can’t break in.”

    “And they’re all related,” they said. “So you have to be careful about who you talk about.”

    They told us lots about the people around us, including this about our western neighbor who used to own our house and theirs and to whose spring we have rights (which we are considering exercising, against her will):

    They bought their farm from a bank; the previous purchaser had gone bankrupt. The farm was where she had raised her family; she had sold it to the now-bankrupt purchaser.

    When our neighbors were scoping things out while their purchase of the place from the bank who had received it back from the bankrupt purchaser was underway, our western landowner showed up offering to sell them the curtains in the house ($150 a set) and a few other things around the place. They didn’t pay her, of course, but said she could have the curtains, which are still bagged in their attic (it’s been 21 years). 

    For a while, too, after they moved in, she would stop by twice a week to get drinking (well) water; she said she could only drink that water (“It’s the best water anywhere,” she told them). The man across the street, noticing that she was coming by frequently, inquired, and said, “What? She never drank that water when she lived there. I’ll take care of that.” Soon she stopped coming by, and they haven’t seen her since.

    (These were reassuring stories to hear, in that it was good to know that our frustrations with her denial of reality, persistent infallibility, and confident ownership of the community aren’t our fault.)

    So we ate ice cream and strawberries and drank the lemon-mint tea M had made and had a neighborly chat until 10:30.

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  • goodbadi

    City Weekend

    May 17, 2010

    With my tiny little bro:

    Dr. Perfection came, too:

    On our bike ride to see the sights, Z:

    The city by day:

    And by night, from Z’s bedroom:

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  • goodbadi

    Birthday Card

    April 29, 2010

    My grandpa’s birthday is this week. It comes this year flanked on front and back with a sibling’s and a sibling-in-law’s funerals. I made him a celebratory card nonetheless:

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  • goodbadi

    I Love the IRS

    March 16, 2010

    I sent off my tax return gleefully, salivating over the credit-enhanced refund I had figured out were headed our way.

    It may be the last time I do my own taxes, considering I made a huge error.

    Thankfully it was an error in our favor.

    So we got more back than we’d expected.

    Like 73% more than we’d expected.

    In the letter notifying us of the change to our return, under the heading “What You Should Do If You Agree With The Change,” the IRS stated…well, I don’t really know what it says, since I am not in a disagreeing spirit at the moment.

    I love the IRS!

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  • goodbadi

    Revelation

    January 28, 2010

    Tuesday night I decided that our water pressure was just too powerful. The shower even felt spiky at times. Our outdoor faucet dripped constantly. The evening dishwater was extra foamy.

    “Something’s wrong,” I told M. “I think the pump’s running all the time.” Sure enough, when I investigated, the pump was stuck on–and the pressure gauge showed numbers twice as high as normal.

    We resorted to using the electrical panel breaker as a water valve, turning the power to our neighbor’s barn–yes, we supply the neighbor’s barn with power, which then powers our water pump, which is also his cattle’s water pump–on for a few minutes to fill the pressure tank, then off until our faucets gurgled dry.

    Figuring this all out required tramping up and down our driveway in the dark, crisp night with my big 4-D cell LED Maglite and in my pajama pants and work boots, so it wasn’t until late that I fell into a fitful sleep just dreading the inevitable maintenance call bill, bemoaning our electrical interconnectedness with the farmer whose cattle I’d just looked out for by closing the rickety poor man’s gate at the end of the driveway, since not providing power to the barn meant the electric fences along our driveway were just useless strands of metal string, and wondering how this pump situation–and the larger problem of our inseparability from providing current to the barn, for free–could be resolved most efficiently and inoffensively.

    After all, no longer providing him free power might remove the farmer’s willingness to mow our pasture (he’s done it twice) or plow our driveway (once) or might make him park ungainly and trashed vehicles right by our property line or be a less nice person to us. Or maybe he’d make sure his cows got right up to the spring house, causing it to deteriorate even more rapidly than it already is.

    And the solution to installing a new water and power line to a pump of our own didn’t seem that simple–too many complicating factors–until….

    Before I woke up Wednesday morning, I had a dream, of course about my preoccupation matter at hand. In my dream I came up with the perfect solution for when we put in our own pump and water line: run a gravity-flow water line from the current pump house down hill to our property to a new pump house and pump of our own, which would then send the water up the hill to our house. Simple? You bet. But I hadn’t thought of it before.

    I rolled out of bed, made sure the pump still wasn’t shutting off, called the farmer to let him know the situation and that I’d closed his gate, and headed off to school armed with the phone number to call the fix-it-up-chappies, who came out later and remedied the situation.

    As I pulled through our barnyard driveway after school, there was the farmer.

    “This is soppy,” he said. “I ought to bring a load of gravel down here. And thanks for calling to let me know about the pump and gate. When you get the bill, just give it to me–it’ll help pay for the power I use.”

    Well.

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  • goodbadi

    The Day I Joined the Military: A Fictional Account of Something That Never Happened

    January 25, 2010

    It finally got to me, so today I took the first step for making a positive contribution to the world.

    It actually started way back in 1998 when my sister and brother-in-law were in Nicaragua during Hurricane Mitch. They weren’t coastal residents, but their normally fragile communication links were wiped out by the storm, so no one in my family knew for several days how they’d been affected. When we finally heard from them, and that they were fine, they told us that we’d not been the only ones concerned–a U.S. military helicopter had flown over their house, just checking in.

    A military helicopter? I turned to my communal housemates there on our pacifist campus, tears streaming down my face. “It makes me want to enlist,” I said. “After all, the military does have the equipment to help out in these situations.”

    And now the earthquake in Haiti has happened, and again the U.S. military has rushed to the rescue. According to Time last Wednesday, “Some 800 Marines moved ashore Tuesday in Haiti, ferrying supplies on helicopters and Humvees as the U.S. military force there swelled to as many as 11,000. Military officials said troops and supplies were arriving as fast as possible despite daunting logistical hurdles. Army Maj. Gen. Daniel Allyn, the deputy commander for military operations in Haiti, said the military has delivered more than 400,000 bottles of water and 300,000 food rations since last Tuesday’s earthquake.”

    Sign me up! I thought when I read this. Let me be the compassionate arm of the U.S. government! Give me a machine gun or even just a water bottle!

    After a sleepless night during which I told M none of my intentions, today I called up a local recruiter I know. He actually comes to my school and speaks at our pep rallies about valor, courage, and cool weaponry, so he was eager to talk to me.

    “Say, Randy,” I said. “I want to sign up for the Marines. I want to go to Haiti right now.”

    “Sure,” he said. “Let me get your info.” I obligingly answered his questions: I’m straight, I’ve never been convicted of murder, I’m pro-life, winning a Nobel Peace Prize sounds good to me, and yes, Diet Coke heated in the desert probably wouldn’t be too bad for me to stomach, although why would I ever be deployed to a desert somewhere when Haiti’s just around the corner?

    “Do you speak Pashtun?” he asked. “No? Arabic? Korean? No? OK, uh, how about, do you read any of those languages?”

    “Nope,” I said. “But why does that matter? Bottled water and goodwill gestures need no spoken words. Love is the International Language.”

    “Right,” he said. “Now, how much experience do you have with guns?”

    By this time, so in a hurry was I to begin dispensing relief to our needy neighbors, I’d just begun to tell him the answers I thought he wanted to hear. “Lots, since I used to be a rabid hunter. And I shot a tin can on my first try with a .22 revolver.”

    “Good, good,” he said. “You’ll make an excellent Marine. We’ll sign you up for boot camp starting next week.”

    “Next week? Boot camp?” I asked, rather incredulously. “But the Haitians need help now!  I don’t have time to train. I’m a good driver–can’t I drive a big truck without boot camp? Can’t I learn on the job how to operate a walkie-talkie? And handing out supplies doesn’t require that much expertise–just access to the goods and transportation capabilities, which the U.S. military in all its potential radiant glory has!”

    “Uh, right,” Randy said. “But you really do need to know how to shoot straight so you don’t hit one of your 68,000 fellow soldiers on accident. You know, friendly fire never looks good.”

    “68,000? There are already that many soldiers there? That’s, like, a heck of a lot! We must be doing lots of short-term, high-impact, shock-and-awe emergency relief sort of good! But I read in Time this week that they’re expecting ranks to swell to only 11,000 on the ground.”

    “Only 11,000? In Afghanistan?”

    “In Haiti. You know, strictly humanitarian. I want to go to Haiti and other places and use your equipment to reach people who need help fast. Just think of the military’s capabilities! Swoop in, give food, water, help, access to medical attention, and start rebuilding! No other relief agency anywhere can match it!”

    “Oh. Um. Can you call back later?”

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