on up

In regards to the current conversation about the recent rise in price at the pump and what we can do about it James Howard Kunstler says,

In any case, all this wishing and lying is about to collide with price volatility to make the American voting public absolutely batshit crazy with dread and anger. That, of course, will only prompt more lying, whopper-spinning, and grievance-flogging in the political arena. It will be nearly impossible for the public to evaluate reality.

I was going to start with a bit about oil and gasoline but, Stuart Staniford has done a great job over at Early Warning so I’m just going to let you go and have a look.  I will reproduce a couple of his excellent images here and quote him as saying, “You can see that there's a very strong relationship over time. Technically, 97% of the variance of the price of gas is explained by the price of oil.”

 

More...

Speaking of oil, the noise about Iran continues to ramp up.  In response to the new economic sanctions,

Iran has stopped selling crude to British and French companies, the oil ministry said on Sunday, in a retaliatory measure against fresh EU sanctions on the Islamic state’s lifeblood, oil.

“Exporting crude to British and French companies has been stopped … we will sell our oil to new customers,” spokesman Alireza Nikzad was quoted as saying by the ministry of petroleum website.    More… 

And then there’s the less reported planned Iranian action surrounding oil trades in something other than the US dollar.


"Last week, the Tehran Times noted that the Iranian oil bourse will start trading oil in currencies other than the dollar from March 20. This long-planned move is part of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vision of economic war with the west."  - source  Will that really happen?  Will it be allowed to happen? 

Not surprising to see the cost of oil up at above $108/barrel in late February 2012.  Which means higher gas prices if you read above.  Of course if we’ll just elect Newt then he’ll bring the cost of gas down to $2.50/gallon.  ;-)


And with the price of oil/gas going up and fear of economic catastrophe pulsing through the American psyche the price of gold has also jumped.  Warren B has this to say,

"Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B? 

Admittedly, when people a century from now are fearful, it’s likely many will still rush to gold. I’m confident, however, that the $9.6 trillion current valuation of pile A will compound over the century at a rate far inferior to that achieved by pile B."

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf (pdf warning)

On a not complete unrelated note my boss just walked into my office and asked me where to buy a cow; not beef but a live cow for her to raise and later process for food.  Which leads us into funnier territory with this excellent video.

Lastly something a little personal.  Two weeks ago I crashed my bike, my first real cycling accident.

Fortunately that image makes the whole thing look way worse than it really was.  After the crashI walked 100 yards home with only a few bruises.  My 1979 steel frame Trek is quite beat up however and so it was with great anticipation that I ordered my first ever brand new road bike!  I have a great commuter and a mountain bike slash long haul set up but this will be my first new road bike ever.  It's being built this week by my LBS.

I’m competing in a race in May and between the crash and the race now seems like the time to invest in this Giant Defy 2.  It’s an entry level road bike but quite fancy by my standards.  Report forthcoming.   

Aaron

household energy update

It's been a few months since I updated our household energy use.  The first chart if natural gas which we use for domestic hot water, cooking and sometimes heating our home.  We're entering into our forth calender year of tracking this data.  You'll see January is down considerably from last year which was down remarkable from the year before.  In Jan 2012 we had 4 extra days in our billing cycle compared to the previous year but the average local temperature was 9 degrees warmer.  Still I was impressed because we are primarily heating our home with wood so the outdoor temperature shouldn't have had that big of an effect in terms of reduced NG use. 

Here's our electricity use.  After using slightly more in October 2011 than in October of 2010 we saw decreases in November, December and January.  December reduction was probably primarily due to my wife's more judicious use of Christmas tree lights.  Hopefully by June, July and August- our three high use months- we'll have our new HVAC system in place.  Also we will likely have a new clothes dryer by then.  We dried clothes much more out on the line last year than in the past and that will continue but we will continue to sometimes dry inside and we have quite an old machine. 

 

success!?!

An recent incident involving the closed circuit television security system in Britain provides an example of how more complexity won't necessarily lead to safer streets or even tighter control by the authorities.  The law of diminishing returns is in effect here as are more and greater problems facing people trying to work with more complex systems. 

The operator [of a British security camera] directed the officer, who was on foot patrol, as he followed the "suspect" on camera last month, telling his colleague on the ground that he was "hot on his heels"... But he failed to realise that it was actually the plain-clothed officer he was watching on the screen.

In other words the camera operator had the officer on the ground chasing himself.  more.

Breaking news: Rick Santorum wins in 3 states GOP primary contests last night, trouncing Romney!  Of course it's all just more media hype because,

Officially, a total of zero delegates will be awarded after Tuesday's contests. The Minnesota caucuses are the first step in a long process to assign delegates; the same is true in Colorado. Missouri's primary has been described as simply a "beauty contest," since the state's delegates will only be awarded after the March 17 caucuses.

A man was discovered in his home fours years after killing himself.  His house had been foreclosed upon. 

"David Carter reportedly used a 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun to shoot himself in the head some four years ago, shortly after quitting his job and telling neighbors that he was moving to New Mexico. That was in 2007."  more.

The article says his neighbors had taken to mowing his lawn.  One item in the article that caught my attention was the fact that his body wasn't discovered until a local government real estate worker was checking on the property because the county was taking ownership in light of unpaid taxes. 

I know my county is dealing with the issue of owning more properties because of similar circumstances, minus the 4 year old dead body.  My county doesn't want the added tax-payer expense of maintaining these properties.  Here's a problem that could be an excellent opportunity for someone or some group that could figure out a constructive way to address the issue of unwanted properties like these. 

Lastly an article about natural gas availability in Europe.  Many parts of the continent are dealing with extremely cold weather.  Russian gas supplier Gazprom has reduced NG exports because as Russian Prime Minister Vladimír Putin explains, "it is more important for the company to first supply the Russian market."  more

We saw plenty of this when food prices spiked in 2008, countries limiting or banning the export of resources, in that case food in this case natural gas.  My guess is we'll see more of this as resource constraints tighten in the future.

backstream

backstream jan 2012

First an update on the Baltic Dry Index, the measure of international shipping demand I mentioned in the last post.  It hit a 25 year low last week, breaking down past a mark reached in the wake of the 2008 economic debacle.

There are varies reasons given to explain this but one I found particularly interesting is that, "shipping companies have also been deliberately slowing down their journeys to save fuel, with trips from China to the US going now taking around 50% longer than they were early in 2011"  source.

There has been plenty of talk in the past about peak oil meaning "the end" of globalization and international shipping.  Of course some goods were shipped around the world even before petroleum was harnessed as a transportation fuel and will likely continue to be shipped well into the future.  My point here is that the way this plays out in the short term is scenarios like this, slower transport to save fuel, not complete and sudden collapse of the international shipping system. 

This article is just one of several recently published that point towards the increased likelihood of an Israeli/Iranian war that could drag the US into another armed conflict in the Middle East.  But wait, aren't we already at war with Iran?  Stuart Staniford puts it this way.

And the series of explosions and assassinations in Iran has been getting longer and more blatant.  At some point, the pretense that this is not a war becomes unsustainable, and once people stop feeling the need to pretend, things could worsen quickly.  more

And the fact that this is a US presidential election year complicates the matter.

Speaking of which is anyone else thinking of voting for Mitt just so we can continue to be treated to high level gaffs like his recent comment that he doesn't care about the poor?  The US could suffer under his leadership but think about the entertainment value of Saturday Night Live under a Romney regime.  And no moon colonies as the 51st state!

I've decide to make fun of a few groups of people in 2012 partly as a way of testing whether or not shame still works as a motivator in the US.  And partly because it helps me to continue to feel sane.

The first group I'm targeting is people that park cars on sidewalks.  No longer content with domination of the asphalt, recently people in my community have take to mounting (more on that term as it relates to this issue coming soon) the curb and parking their vehicles on that 4 foot strip of concrete formerly used only by pedestrians to try and avoid getting run over.  I think this phenomenon says a lot about the current mental state of people in my community and maybe throughout our nation.

What I need from you good and loyal readers are name suggestions for my new blog featuring pictures I take of sidewalk parking.  Please leave suggestions in the comments section below.  Winner gets a T Shirt of course.

Here's a teaser.  I took this last week. It is a code enforcement officer working for my local police department who stopped to investigate a  food truck set up in a vacant lot.  No doubt the officer thought the truck was operating without proper papers.  He is seen here on his cell phone, gun on hip.  Hours later however the food truck was still serving hotdogs and so I assume it was in fact a legal operation and the officer went away discouraged.

Notice that it wasn't enough for the cop to merely pull over to the side of the road and investigate. He had to get all CHiPs and drive up onto the sidewalk, completely blocking it.  Turns out he was the only person violating the law at this particular time and place.

More once I get a snazzy name for the new blog.

Aaron

throwers

 

throwers 1 5 2012

It looks like India is set to start buying Iranian oil with gold instead of US dollars.  Apparently China is likely to do the same. 

http://www.debka.com/article/21673/

What does that mean?  Time will tell but my guess is that the price of gold and other precious metals will rise in response and the pressure to go to war with Iran will increase. 


ribbonfarm has an interesting post on 'Acting Dead, Trading Up and Leaving the Middle Class'.

 I thought this chart was interesting.  It looks like the bottom for the price of gasoline in my area corresponded remarkably well with the Christmas holiday.  Santa brings it!

Also take a look at the Baltic Dry Index which measures international shipping demand.  It's approaching a 5 year low not seen since after the 2008 economic crash. 

12 27 2011

ng update

I haven't felt much like writing (and haven't had the time) so just more dorky updates on our energy use. I'm going to start posting our natural gas usage along with the amount of electricity we use.

kWh update

Dorky household electrical usage update below. 

aspo 2011 annual conference

I just got back from the ASPO US annual conference in Washington D.C. I had a great time and met some wonderful people.  Here's my presentation.  

#occupy the media

At this point I do not know what to expect from the #Occupy Wall Street movement, but I do admit to being greatly amused at the way tit is making the conventional media squirm, now that that group has decided to cover them at all.  Part of the reason I haven't been writing as much lately is that other people have been doing a damn good job of saying something similar to what I want to express about all sorts of stuff.  On this topic Matt Taibbi has two great posts that address media coverage of OWS.

Why Occupy Wall Street is Bigger than Left vs. Right

and

Why Rush Limbaugh is freaking out about Occupy Wall Street

Essentially Matt says the OWS message and sometimes their lack of message doesn't fit the conventional media formula.  He's right and even before I read his take on the issue I was almost more interested in watching the media response than watching the protestors themselves.

Conventional Media in the US, and I'm including here Fox, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, etc., has done this country a great disservice by selling out or perhaps just capitulating to the idea that the way to frame a media story is to polarize it, to line up two and only two arguments on the so called left and the so called right (I love their "so called" short hand disclaimer that these terms aren't perpetuated by them but by others) and let two representatives of each end of the political spectrum go at it.  Then at the end of story they offer up a sort of "You Decide!" question to the audience.  It is as if some stories have no right or wrong answer- as if banks receiving 10 trillion dollars in taxpayers dollars should or perhaps should not be able to give more than a hundred billion dollars out in bonuses the following year.  You decide!

Or perhaps some stories can't have more than two perspectives.  I fault all the major media outlets for this but I come down hardest on NPR which pretends not to have biases while the growth mantra of economics is built into everything money story they cover.  There are never any stories about economics that aren't based on the idea that not only is it grow or no-grow but that grow is the best case economic scenario.   I'm not permoting any particaulr alternative here in this post, just pointing out that such a perspective would get no air time on theirs or any other conventional media program.  Ask Diane Rehm about staedy state economics and she'd look at you like you'd just grown another head. 

And that leads me to another way in which it is fun to watch the media fail to figure out what to do with OWS- the group has of yet no clear demands or agenda.  It is as if the media is annoyed that OWS won't get on with it and publish a hard and fast set of wants and a list of leaders who will lobby for those wants.  So that the media can give the right and the left a chance to fight about the OWS set of wants and demonize the OWS list of leaders (You decide!) and then move on to the next media story.

Like I said I don't know what if anything the OWS movement might accomplish.  Personally I'm happy to let them do what they say they plan on doing for a while OCCUPY.  It's interesting enough to watch the media squirm at this point.  I'll leave you with a question though.  What if a group of largely young, largely disaffect youth learn how to organize through consent and were ready to respond to the next big revelation of corporate and governmental corruption, mismanagement or out right theft?  This is what has the 1% concerned.   

bloggin' again?

Note to readers: I parked this blog a few months back.  That had a lot to do with me having lots of (read too many) projects going on in the physical world.  I am going to have to scale some of them back and give up on others.  I am going back to the original intent of this blog, my way of making sense of the world- my therapy of choice.   You might get pictures of narwhals my daughter likes on one day and observations on the #Occupy movement like above on the next.  No promises.

electric reduction

Another UPDATE:

This is the start of the second year of an effort to more greatly reduce our energy use.  I'm even spelling the months correctly in the most recent chart. 

NEW UPDATE:

August rounded out one year with the TED device and the new wood stove.   We saved 3423 kWh.  It also became clear to us that despite living in a home designed to keep rather cool and being pretty conscientiousness about the thermostat (usually between 78-82 degrees F) air conditioning is a huge part of our footprint.

Also this program, Plot Watt, is suppose to interface with the TED and give us a much more thorough breakdown of our usage but I can't get it to work- software issues.

After A/C the big hog is the electric clothes dryer.  We upgraded to a sweet new line and Jennifer, who does most of our laundry, redoubled her efforts to use it.

We're about to get a new washing machine to better address the issue.  Yes you read that correctly.  We're getting a new washer to reduce the amount of energy we spend drying clothes.  Both our washer and dryer are 10 years old.  In addition to a new washer being more efficient in the energy and water it uses, the new one will spit the clothes out almost already dry.  We'll hold off on a new dryer for now. 

END NEW UPDATE

OLD UPDATE:

It's been a hot, hot summer but still...END OLD UPDATE:

This is a graph that represents the amount of electricity my family used from September 20o9 until March 2010 vs the amount used one year later after installing the TED smart meter.

It represents an average reduction of 44% over a 6 month period totaling 2112 kWh saved. At an average cost of $0.10/kWh that is $211 dollars. The smart meter costs $240.


It also gets us down to about 40% of what the average American household uses and there are four of us.

Read an old post of mine about the TED smart meter by clicking here.

Aaron

new dietary guidelines

If you eat this way I promise you will lose unwanted weight and have more energy- guaranteed.

The people who design government dietary guidelines are gagged by the fact that politics and business are so tightly intertwined in this country. Their advice will never directly target the primary source of obesity and metabolic dysfunction-- industrially processed food-- because that would hurt corporate profits in one of the country's biggest economic sectors.

More interesting is the take over of imaging and marketing to support a more truthful message. We're likely to see more of this as the ship sinks.

More here...

carolina farm stewardship association

Carolina Farm Stewardship Association - Join the Food Revolution from GeoCore Films on Vimeo.

japanese farmer suicide

Tokyo (CNN) -- A farmer's farewell, etched in white chalk, is echoing menacingly through Japan's agricultural sector.

"Wish there was no nuclear power plant. My endurance has come to an end," the note says.

The farmer, in his 50s, then killed himself on the land he struggled to maintain since Japan's tsunami and nuclear crisis began.

The dairy farmer's suicide message was left on the wall of one of the man's barns, members of a local farming bureau said. The man also apologized to his family and friends in the note.

Hiroyuki Ebihara, a member of a local chapter of Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, said he knew the farmer personally and tried to check in with him after the March 11 disaster.

On June 11, Ebihara says, members of his group found the farmer's body.

"The situation here is depressing for everyone," says Ebihara. "We are all in the same situation. Our future with daily farming is unclear, especially since we don't know what the compensation will be. We want TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) or the government to come out with a clear plan for compensation."

The man had fled Japan with his family to the Philippines after the earthquake and tsunami. He returned to the farm after 10 days to care for his cows. The farmer's family remained in the Philippines until this week when they returned for the man's funeral.

He leaves behind a wife and two children, Ebihara says.

The agricultural sector of Soma -- the farmer's region -- has been deeply impacted by the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

entire article here

evaluating adaptation projects

(sample project list)

My family, like most others, has a limited amount of time and resources. We also have differing opinions about what constitutes appropriate adaptations to a changing world. Put differently, my wife thinks I’m crazy to consider adding meat rabbits to our yard this year and just how to decide if she’s right?

Last year I read a post by John Michael Greer, entitled The Cybernetics of Black Knights (hat tip Jack) which inspired the following system. His system which I have modified, was aimed at more narrowly deciding on which projects might be more important and timely. My adjustments are aimed at coming up with a system for making decisions about adapting strategies to undertake in the context of a family with differing opinions on what should be done when and how.

So when facing this question of what to do next how might a family more forward? Here’s what we did.

First on a separate sheets of paper my wife and I wrote down all of the projects we both wanted to undertake – for example putting up a new clothes line and adding meat rabbits. Some projects were known to both of us, projects we had previously discussed. Others fell into the category of secret longings, the refinished kitchen complete with new counter tops for example.

To say that all of the projects were directly related to adapting in place with regards to peak oil, climate change and financial upheaval would be misleading but most had a solid component of reducing our energy and resource use. While a deck on the back of our house would seem like more of an amenity than a need, it will also provide a place to live outdoors (something appropriate in my climate much of the year) and would give us a place to cook and can food in the hot of the summer without heating the interior of our house. In this way many projects were lobbied for as both lifestyle improvements and adaptive strategies. How to know then which one to start with?

We took both our lists and combined them. Then we printed two copies of the combined list. We both took a copy of the list and labeled it with a number and letter.

The numbers corresponded with the following:

1 – This is a project we could do easily with the resources readily available to us.
2 – This is a project we could do, though it would take some effort to get the resources.
3 – This is a project we could do, but it would be a serious challenge.
4 – This is a project that, for one reason or another, is out of reach for us at the moment.

A – This is a project that is immediately and obviously useful for our lives right now.
B – This is a project that could be useful to for us given certain changes we expect in the near term.
C – This is a project that might be useful if our lives if circumstances were to change significantly.
D – This is a project that, for one reason for another, is useless or irrelevant to us at this moment.

Then we recombined the list. Each project got coded with both letters and numbers with 11AA projects at the top of the list and 44DD projects at the bottom. Each item got a cost estimate and schedule time of completion. When we reevaluate the list in the future we will add an estimate of the number of hours a given item is expected to take.

This exercise will produce a rough guide regarding how to prioritize your adaptation strategies. You can refine it. Once you decide, let’s say, that weatherstripping the leaky windows of your apartment before winter arrives is a 1-A project – easy as well as immediately useful – you’ve set up an intentionality that allows you to winnow through a great deal of data and find the information you need: for example, what kind of weatherstripping is available at the local hardware store, and which one can you install without spending a lot of money or annoying your landlord.

Once you decide that building a brand new ecovillage in the middle of nowhere is a 4-D project, you can set aside data relevant to that project and pay attention to things that matter, not just to you but also to the other people in your family, which is key to making real progress.

carolina ground: farmer + miller + baker = NC grown bread

Update:

They made it. Thanks to all who help.


I have never run advertising on this site. I do have a donate button in the sidebar but I have never actively asked for money; in part so I will seem more genuine when asking for money for people like those working on Carolina Ground. ;-)

Less than 3 days left in the campaign and they are within $3000 of their goal. Check out the video below. If you have enjoyed checking this blog enough over the years to consider supporting it financially don't send me money. Give instead to this project. Minimum donation is $10 so you don't have to give much.

Donate here.

Thanks.

Aaron

reducing your resource use... and staying married

Just a little warning: This post is going to be less about the actual ways you can reduce the amount of resources you use and more about how you can do it and still stay married. And it’s probably going to ramble on a bit.

I started thinking about this when I found out about Kathy Harrison’s new book, “’I Can’t Believe You Think That!’ Relationship Struggles around Peak Oil, Climate Change and Economic Hard Times”. You can read a teaser blog post here:

How to ruin a perfectly good argument about peak oil, climate change or economic troubles.

When I read the post I immediately forward it to my wife. Yes we are still married despite our share arguments about how to adapt to the coming changes but there have been plenty of times when the actual adaptation she or I was contemplating turned out to be much easier than the conversations about what to do. It wasn’t so much reducing our electrical usage as it was deciding to do it, how to do it and making all the other minor decisions that go along with major change. I’m not going to list out strategies for handling loved ones during the process of adaptation. Rather I am just going to share some of what my family has experienced.

A little background: My wife and I have been married almost 10 years. We’ve know each other for more than 20. We are in our mid-30s and have 3 and 5 year old daughters.

When I first started talking about "resource depletion" I didn’t use such swell sounding phrase. Back then it was all about “peak oil” and all the changes that would come as a consequence. Not the more nuanced discussion that takes place on many websites today but the more alarmist rhetoric that ruled the Internet back when Matt Savinar’s now retired website was about the only information on peak oil. My friend Todd used to call it “the black page of death”. To my wife’s horror I went through the classic 5 stages of grief as I mourned the end of civilization on account of peak oil and wallowed in stage 4 – Depression.

It was no surprise then that when I finally broke out into stage 5 – Acceptance- my wife looked with skepticism on all the plans I was beginning to make. She didn’t want to get sucked into the same sort of depressing vortex that had befallen me. She wanted nothing to do with anything that was related to peak oil. I can say I blame her. I had a tough time and it took quite a while but eventually she and I were able to talk more openly about all the changes that might be prudent now that we were facing, together, a world where fewer resources, energy and otherwise, would likely be available to us.

One strategy I stumbled upon was to make it tangible for her; to make the changes something she could track. In December of 2007 we had our house sealed and insulated. You can read about that here. It was an important step towards reducing the amount of energy our household consumes. On the list of errors in judgment I would attribute to myself, I scheduled this construction project for late in my wife’s second pregnancy. It also took place over the course of 3 consecutive Fridays instead of 3 straight days in a row. That had to do with the contractor’s schedule but it also meant cleaning up the dust and the mess three separate times. Another misstep of mine. However in the end our house was tighter and cozier and quieter and I was happy. We were happy. But Jennifer’s happiness was most obvious on the first day of the following month. That was the day she received the first natural gas bill after a month of having the home improvements in place. Our energy use had dropped dramatically- down more than 50% compared to the previous January’s bill.

Now you may be thinking that she was excited about all the money we were saving and she was. But that was not the main reason behind her giddiness as she read me the numbers out over the phone. (She had called me at work with the news, unable to wait until I got home.) For her, seeing the reduction made it real. It also made it into a game. How much less can we use in February vs. last February became the goal of our energy reducing exercise. Turning down the thermostat or putting on a sweater or wrapping the hot water heater with insulation was not longer just another pain-in-the-ass request by her husband. Now it was a move in the game aimed at even further reducing our next month’s natural gas bill. Who knew my wife would ever utter phrases like, “therms used per month?”

In fact our NG provider’s website allows you to compare any two months from the last several years of your usage. And they don’t just track therms. They track the average monthly temperature, nights with temps below 40 degrees, days in the billing cycle, cost and other stuff. Our most recent bill arrived today and was pretty impressive.


We’re down from 57 therms used in March 2012 to 24 therms used this year. Unfortunately our NG provider doesn’t keep records online going back to the time before we sealed and insulated our home. The first year after doing so we saw on average a reduction of about 50%. That means it is likely we went from more than 100 therms in previous months of March to now using on 24 therms. That is a pretty significant reduction.

So you might be wondering how we further reduced our NG useage in the winter of 2011-12. The answer,


A Vermont Castings Encore woodstove. Now I don’t plant to get into the pros and cons of different heating systems in this post. What I do want to talk about is the theme of cooperation and compromise among family members while adapting to change. The stove pictured above is beautiful and it came with a handsome tax rebate (although not as big a rebate as was described to us by its salesman) and we have greatly enjoyed having it but… it was more expensive than the stove I would have purchased. In fact I would have been happy with a used stove, one that wasn’t really attractive at all. My wife however fell for the VC Encore. She liked the way it looked. I like its efficiency rating and quality reputation and so I agreed to spend more than I would have spent on the stove of my choice in part to satisfy her desire to have this particular stove.

Some of you might think this is silly -that in our time of change the last thing we should be worried about is compromising with a spouse for the sake of aesthetics. But I would argue against that sort of thinking. True if the extra money hadn’t been there or was strongly needed for another project then it would have been foolish to spend it on the upgraded stove. But the decision was made as a team and was therefore possible and carried out rather smoothly.

Incidentally she didn’t grow up with a woodstove in regular operation so she was unprepared for the twigs and the ash and such that seem to mess up the area around the stove. She dealt with that though, her borderline obsession with a clean floor, and I did my best to clean up after reloading the stove beyond what I would have done if I lived on my own. More compromise.

Another added benefit was the house was much warmer than the 58/62 degrees we were used to the previous few winters. My wife really liked that. It’s not that we tried to keep it a lot hotter but when you’re trying to get a stove to the temperature at which it combusts gases instead of releasing them into the atmosphere you tend to end up with at least a few rooms warmer than 62 degree. But I digress.

So just how did we decide which projects to take on, how much to budget and some sort of order for getting them done? How did we do it together? That will be the subject of my next post.