Conservation

I am extremely tight…
and very selective about what enters my personal space.

I like warmth with a soft breeze, simplicity and a life of ease. I prefer quietude with splashes of exuberance, a neutral tone accented by color and plant life.
Predictability helps to structure my life. Friends call at special times each year, or on a particular day and time, and some come over on a certain day of the week. My daughter usually begins and ends school at the same time, and she stays at her father’s two days a week, though she vacillates on which days.

Like a menstrual cycle, lovely bills come due on their reliable, selfish, monthly schedules, and every week my generous friend shares her garbage service with me. (Together, four of us fill one small can weekly. We are avid recyclers from the Midwest. I was conserving things in Minnesota at age seven, which my parents couldn’t comprehend. My environmental efforts irritated them. Dad was poor, but not that poor, he probably thought. Mom, on the other hand, was raised with money and permitted pieces of my precocity.)

When winter comes in Colorado, which doesn’t match the snow levels nor frequent blizzards of Minnesota or Wisconsin in July, I survey my home prior to cold’s unwelcome and much-too-long visit looking for ways to keep the warmth in, the chill out.

First I assess my home’s primary occupant. I wear more clothes, layering them, so I can peel as I thaw. Being a household naturist, wearing clothing is against my religion, but I refuse to turn the heat up past 66 during the day, except Fridays when I punch it up to 72 and chip the ice clinging to my windows with a corkscrew.

Some of my ideas may seem crazy, but I’m eccentric and the characteristic will not, by choice, change. Here are three thoughts.

I slide the range hood fan screen out, toss it in the dishwasher, and cover the fan hole with cardboard, which I secure with masking tape. Only once each year do I forget and turn on the fan for a sec, gasping. For freshening, circulating, and removing particulates from the air, I use Clarity, my Honeywell Enviracaire air purifier, and mist with peppermint water (see auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2008/11/sniff-sniff.html).

Cracks and holes are discreetly plugged with old clothes or remnants if caulking doesn’t apply, so the ol’ ranch wears a tighter sweater. Guys like that. And though I’m a friendly person who welcomes a smiling face and lots of light, I keep my drapes drawn and blinds blocking the drafts drifting through my windy windows.

There may not be any more ways I can reduce expenses, as I did when I decided to work part time and be a full-time den mother in 1996, but I can be tight by conserving.

copyright © 2009 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

If you like it, link it!
http://auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2009/01/conservation.html

Nurture vs. Jail, and Rappelling the Financial Wall

Across America, I’ll bet voters approved very few tax increases. Here in Conservative Central, we decided not to approve an entire one percent increase to build yet another jail.

Some of the one percent would have gone to worthy programs, such as scraping pigeon poop off the General William Jackson Palmer statue in the middle of Platte and Nevada avenues, but for two consecutive years 50 percent of that money would have been spent on building and maintaining another jail.

Colorado Springs voters decided, perhaps two years ago, not to build another jail. Still, the county cheated on us and built one anyway, on the sly, behind our backs, using COPs. No, not police, certificates of participation.* I did not participate, nor did a lot of other constituents.

If parents would nurture, educate, and hold their children accountable for their actions, we wouldn’t need to incarcerate as many deviants.

If judges acted judiciously, which is akin to saying, “if drug addicts wouldn’t take drugs,” fewer people would live free, off our tax dollars, like judges do. [Auntie knows there are three good judges out there. The criminal in the following story isn’t one of them.]

I know a judge who sent someone to jail knowing the person was innocent. For this example, we’ll call the judge Loser Larry. Larry was fully aware that an opposing party contrived a story out of vengeance. Larry knew, because he was a party to the conspiracy and played along with the setup scheme of two attorneys, Kimmie and Lizzie.

Loser Larry conspired with them in his chambers without the pro se victim present. His action was illegal. Then, through his course of action, Larry denied due process. This is the Readers’ Digest version, but in Colorado’s Fourth Judicial District, travesty against victims is not unusual.

But if the county’s leaders really want more motel space for judges to fill, maybe our voting against the one percent tax will discipline judges a mite. Disciplining a judge in Colorado is like trying to control crazed groupies at a Stones concert, yet both parties smoke pot.

Some of us can sleep better knowing our taxes have temporarily stabilized, while others are losing their jobs.

Why do people have to lose their jobs? Were their positions superfluous? If they were, why did the positions exist?

If the people are necessary, why can’t employers simply reduce pay? Follow the airlines’ lead: “You want to keep your jobs? Take a pay cut.”

In 1996 I quit my job to more actively parent my daughter. If anything in my life was unessential to living and breathing, I eliminated it. Bare bones, babycakes.

Remaining only as a memory were massages, lunches out, subscriptions, call waiting, and my excessive gift giving. I now work from home, earn $34,000 less a year than I used to, drive less (4,000 miles per year), pollute less, waste little to no time. Plus I have time to take a daily hike.

Abundance comes through peace of mind (except during financially freaky times), continued healthy gourmet meals, more socialization, and playing music with our group.

Even in poverty, thank God for a simple life.

copyright © 2008 by Auntie Eartha. All rights reserved.

If you like it, link it!
http://auntieeartha.blogspot.com/2008/11/nurture-vs-jail-and-rappelling.html

* certificate of participation: Financing in which an individual buys a share of the lease revenues of an agreement made by a municipal or governmental entity, rather than the bond being secured by those revenues.