Having the Sex Talk in the Car

"We are what we repeatedly do," Aristotle said.

I like that. So, the fact that I consistently bring my motley assortment of reusable grocery bags into the store and insist that the cashiers don't give me any new bags means that I'm a new-plastic avoider.

I'm also a paper-towel avoider and a food-waste eliminator.

Enough about what I repeatedly do already. I'm just bragging. What I want to talk about is what it takes to start that new habit so that I become a better climate-change resister instead of a climate-change-inertia-butthead.

I have a friend who had a minivan when her children were young. That van served its purpose, but now it's dead and she has to buy a new car.

What does she want to buy?

Another minivan, just exactly like her old one. She mourns the death of her old minivan. I get that. I do. A lot of life is lived with young children in a vehicle. Dinners are quickly consumed, drinks are slotted into cup holders or spilled, music blares, and conversations about sex and other deep issues occur.

I found that the car was the best place for those awkward conversations because your child cannot get irritated and walk away from you. Plus, you only make eye contact sporadically while you keep your eyes on the road, thus reducing the awkwardness for both of you. The only drawback is that there is a temptation to keep that conversation running until you arrive. Don't do it. I know. I made that mistake. Just get in and out of those necessary words and shut the hell up. Turn the radio onto heavy metal when you're tempted to go over it again, close your mouth, and rock out while your teenager mulls over the awful realization that his parents actually had sex at least once.

My friend. Right.

My friend was stuck in the thought of getting another minivan just like her old one despite the fact that she only needed two seats most of the time and four would do all of the time except when she was trying to haul a crew of kids to a paintball party.  I can tell you that she and I have discussed climate change and know that she is not in any way a climate-change denier. She just had not made the connection between mass extinction and her minivan habit. She did not want to get out of her comfort zone.

Habit was ingrained. I get that.

I'm waiting for an interesting book to come into my holds at the library, Making Habits, Breaking Habits by Jeremy Dean. I read about it in Brain Pickings. I love Brain Pickings - so much good information. I should develop the habit of reading it every week.

And now I have one more book on my figurative pile of books that I intend to read. I can't wait. I hate having to wait when I need a book now, but do I really need that book this very day? Can't I aid the environment by getting most of my books, music, and movies at the library?

Yes I can!

But those are already my habits even though I love shopping at bookstores. The bookstore owners near me know that I'll come in and talk too long when they see my face at their doors. But I really do use the library. Every few days, I stop by the library as a matter of course after I pick up groceries with my reusable grocery bags.

Sorry. I'm not here to lecture you about all the great things that I do that you could do too.

In his book, Jeremy Dean followed a study carried out at University College London about how long it really takes to form a habit. It turns out that the twenty-one days that is generally quoted to you is only for the really easy stuff. He said that the hard changes can take almost a year.

A whole damned year!

That's why I'm having so much trouble changing my carbon footprint. It's going to take me a whole year of dedication to change my habits if I can even stay focused on a few practical things I want to do.

Oh shit. We're all going to die of climate change disaster. We're just going to up and fricking die because I don't know how to focus on the next thing I need to do to fight climate change let alone institute it into habit. How the hell is everyone in the whole world going to shift if I have this much trouble on my own?

We need to science the shit out of this problem, but even there, we're going to have to evolve out of our current paradigm. We're going to have to learn to think about everything with sustainability in mind. And that's a habit that's hard to create.

Thank you for listening, jules

Making It to the Rockies

Did you ever get into the car and just drive?

I have to admit that I did that yesterday. I blew my carbon footprint out of the water. I hate when that happens.

The problem is that I have to consciously live small to control my carbon footprint. A small life is one that stays home most of the time. One of my grandpas lived in the same county his whole life and never traveled out of state. I can't do that.

Even when I'm upset about something and have nowhere in particular to go, I apparently can't do that.

A small life never gets on a plane. A small life never takes a long shower or splurges on strawberries in January or drives the dog to the luxury dog park by the water just because it would be a beautiful day to see the lake.

I can't walk the dog out my front door. I always have to drive somewhere because we live by a highway. For a while, I took Teddy to every dog park within twenty miles at least once. These days, I try to combine his dog park stops with whatever errand I need to run. I try to make a small single loop.

Summer sucks for that. Teddy stays home for all of the errands and then I loop back out to take him somewhere to see his friends. Yes, he has friends. His friends' people ask me how the book is coming along and what happened with that job I was supposed to have gotten. Even Teddy needs to see his friends once in a while. So do I.

It helps my footprint that I 'work' from home. (I'm having a crisis of faith, that writing six pages a day and editing sporadically in between is a 'real' job. Please tell me this is a real job. I need to hear that it's a real job and I'll actually earn decent money some day.)

At least the three dog parks we visit most often are within a fifteen minute drive. The closest one is seven minutes away. The bonus is that the grocery store is on the way home.

Imagine you're an environmentally-minded person who loves to travel the world. How do you manage your carbon footprint then? I know a guy who's traveling the country with his girlfriend in a small RV. They have no other home except their parents' homes. If they don't drive their RV more than I drive in a day, will they ever get across Kansas?

Every time I drove across Kansas, it seemed so incredibly long. You began to look at the Rocky mountains in the middle somewhere and it took forever for them to grow into full-sized mountains. In fact, they're so tall they look like they should arrive much sooner than they do. Kansas seems so flat it feels like you should be able to see the curvature of the earth when you're on the road there. It seems like those mountains should never appear until they are close, almost there. But with the Rockies in Kansas, you're almost there for about eight hundred miles.

So, if my friends adjust that RV to the same amount of gas I consume with my Prius - then how far could they go without blowing up their carbon footprint? It sucks to be an environmentalist traveler, doesn't it?

And what about traveling by plane? What about the classic European tour? How many five minute showers do you have to take to make up for that?

Does anyone have a chart that compares the carbon released for different activities?

Well, the Nature Conservancy has a free carbon footprint calculator, but it doesn't get down to the level of five minute showers versus the flight to Europe. I was excited to know that our lives are small enough that our carbon footprint is 30% smaller than average assuming I did it right. I might not have done it right.

Thirty percent is a start.

But what I want to know is how to keep from exhaling so much, how to keep cows from farting, how to keep our cars from blowing CO2, how to get trees to breathe in and out around me more than I do.

The Nature Conservancy calculator didn't have any questions about how many trees we host on our property. If that were on the questionnaire, we'd be cruising in our attempt to shrink our carbon footprint. We host a lot of trees, big trees, tall trees, trees that breathe out clean oxygen into our air. Douglas fir, Western Red cedar, Japanese maple, Western hemlock, big leaf maple, alder, Alberta spruce. I love our trees. I love how the air smells in our yard, sweet and clean.

Maybe those of us who like to travel should have to host a small forest to make up for our miles. Or plan a bike ride or walkabout instead of a flight. I could just see my mother's face when I tell her we're going to bike out there instead of flying. Ha!

I'd never make it to the Rockies.

Thank you for listening, jules

Luxuriate in Time

The shrinking carbon footprint I would most love to accomplish today is the one in which I stay home all day and don't drive anywhere, not even in my hybrid.

Wouldn't that be nice?

I would further benefit the planet by staying in my pajamas, thus decreasing the volume of laundry for the week. Eating leftovers instead of cooking would allow us to throw out less food. If I could keep from having to run a load of dishes, that would be nice, right? And finally, if I sat under a single lamp reading my book all day, my energy consumption would remain low.

Doesn't that sound nice?

Do I have to think about the production of the book? Was it locally sources? Did it's production occur under sustainable practices? They are good questions, right?

In the meantime, I have the book. I have the compact fluorescent bulb in my reading lamp, and I want to snuggle under a blanket while keeping the room temperature low. All of that is climate-friendly. Right?

I vote that, in an attempt to reduce our carbon footprints, we designate at least one day a month to staying home and lying around.

What would I call it?

Shrinking Footprint Day? Climate-Centered Day?

No, even better. It would feel like a Green Valentine's Day, the day I give a gift to someone I love. You know who I mean, like the 'I'm with her' signs at the protests that show an arrow pointing to a picture of the Earth. And it would be a little gift to me at the same time, to stop the rush- rush of life and luxuriate in time for a change.

Alas, I have to drive somewhere today because we're out of milk, there are no leftovers left in the fridge, and Teddy needs time at the dog park with his friends because yesterday it was blustery and there were no dogs to play with. Yesterday was a sad day for Teddy.

Ultimately, decreasing my carbon footprint means not moving and not moving means either that the book is really good and I can't put it down or that I'm dead.

Nobody ever talks about the ultimate solution to climate change - population control. Does a person have the right to have as many children as they want? It failed in China. It failed miserably. I remember thinking how barbarian it was for a government to take control of reproduction. And yet the trees, the ones who put oxygen into the atmosphere, can't compete with the growth of us carbon dioxide exhalers.

I'm like everyone else. I don't want to be dead, so the solution to climate change is, like Matt Damon said in the movie The Martian, "We need to science the shit out of this problem."

Every move we make should be toward a sustainable solution to everything that is produced and consumed.

And in the meantime, Trump has added a tax to imported solar panels. Remember, he's going to bring back coal. Right? Well, fuck that shit.

Thank you for listening, jules

Shifting the Comfort Zone from My Car

I was going to tell you about the afternoon I intended to take the bus into Seattle again. It was an event at the Seattle Public Library. I was on a roll. No inertia here. I could really rock this resolution to have a smaller carbon footprint.

Cool!

I knew how to get to the Seattle Public Library on the bus. Simple, right? I printed out my itinerary and the fare, gathered my change, and double-checked my calendar for the time.

The place!

It wasn't at the downtown library. It was at the Greenlake branch instead.

Crap!

I still had plenty of time to get the new bus schedule.

Crap! I would have to either take two buses to ride two hours to get there and another two to get back, or I'd have to take three buses at an hour and three-quarters each way. The fare almost doubled.

I clicked the address into my navigator map on my phone. Thirty-four minutes with a toll and forty-one without.

What is my time worth?

These days, my time is my most precious commodity. Yeah, and I'm a frickin' housewife. How the hell do working people have time to ride the bus?

I've always complained about the buses in the Seattle area. They're great if you want to get from Seattle somewhere and back. The airport? No problem. The University of Washington? Piece of cake and you can study on the bus. Bellevue or Issaquah? I know that works great! I used it for jury duty and for the Seattle Art Museum. I was excited to use it for the events at the Seattle Public Library.

Going north and south through Seattle, King County Metro is a pretty good choice. Plus, there's the light rail, north and south only. Is it just my perception that going east to west took a whole lot longer to develop and hasn't reached a pinnacle yet?

There used to be a bus stop near my house, but during one of the recessions, it disappeared. Do you remember when Tim Eyman sounded smart by reducing the amount of money we spent in Washington state? It seemed like that man bankrupted the state. After his first initiatives passed, public transit seemed to shrink, we had to pay five dollars to walk our dogs at a state park, and the state looked like it stopped fully funding public schools and haven't yet figured out how to fund them yet. Is all that Tim Eyman's fault? I could be wrong, but it all happened right after he passed his initiatives. It seems like we're still trying to recover from that. Just ask a teacher how much he spends on school supplies for his students. It took a few years but eventually, a couple of park and rides opened up.

The Issaquah Highlands park and ride is minutes from my house and looks very pretty in a breeze.

I'll tell you about that a little later.

But I never did get proficient with the east/west buses even when they began to develop.

Blame it on needing comfort as a mom. No mom wants to be stuck on a bus with a screaming sweaty baby in a wet diaper..

Nick is seventeen. You can see how long I've been thinking about this.

If I were in a car and Nick was fussy, I'd just drive straight home no matter where I was. One time when he goobered his last diaper and the shorts he was wearing, I drove to a grocery store, wrapped his naked butt in a baby blanket, and bought an oversized T-shirt and a box of disposable diapers. Then, we went right back to the park where we'd been playing. Piece of cake. I didn't have to figure out schedules. I didn't have to balance a stinky baby, a diaper bag, and a phone to figure out how to get where I was going.

I'm a little claustrophobic, just a little. I like to be able to leave a place if I need to. If I can't just walk, ride, or drive away, it bothers me.

Especially with a young child.

It got harder to imagine when he learned to walk. Who wanted to walk across all that traffic in Seattle even if we weren't jaywalking? I took him to parks, lakes, and rivers. Where are the buses to those parks, lakes, and rivers? The Discover pass was an integral part of my itinerary.

The Metro had barely network enough to get me from one town to another, let alone to get me from one lake to another.

We drove everywhere. I forgot about the bus, even when we went to the Pacific Science Center. I totally could have managed that. But it's a mindset, don't you see? A groove. A way of thinking, moving, and being.

I live in a car mindset.

It's hard to change that.

I'll be honest. I have little experience with buses and trains. Before I got my license, I learned how to ride the bus into my small hometown. It was great! I could stop at the library, the grocery store, have a piano lesson, walk around the university, and  have a great time as long as I didn't borrow too many books to have to lug back home.

Later, when I lived outside New York City, I rode the subway only if I was with people who knew where they were going. I would never have gone there myself. The worst part was the smell on the landings half way down into the subway. The NYC subway smelled worse than a portapotty. And it was so confusing. One time, I was sure we were getting off when my friend grabbed me and pulled me back on at the last second. The next stop had an almost the identical name. Plus, you had the opportunity to get off in a bad neighborhood by accident. After that, my friends flanked me so I didn't get my naive ass lost in a place I didn't know how to handle.

When I was near NYC, my sister lived in DC. Any time I visited her, we totally took the train to go anywhere. It was easy to use, clean, and the stops were color-coded. I could understand color-coded. If I lived in DC, I would be a transit rider. I know it.

But not in Seattle, not yet.

Seattle has the excuse of nearly being an island. Elliot Bay and the Puget Sound flank the west side. Lake Union and the Chittenden locks cap the north. And Lake Washington and parallel with that, Lake Sammamish, block it from where I am further east.

Who the hell planned a city here?

I know the deep harbor is a big draw, but it is full of transportation bottlenecks, especially going east and west.

So, the other day, I was driving in my car - just sit back and feel the irony - and I heard David Hyde talking about whether Seattle should declare war on parking to lower its carbon footprint.

Go on. You need to listen to this. I can wait for you to come back.

See, despite our almost unanimous environmental patriotism, the Seattle area hasn't managed to shrink its carbon footprint since the phrase was coined by William Rees in 1992 and someone began the calculations for the city.

I'd be the first to argue that a city that has grown as much as Seattle has in the past twenty-six years might have some considerable trouble shrinking a carbon footprint when its population was exploding. Can anyone say Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing, and Starbucks?

But that doesn't mean we can't try, even if we have to work to manage to ride the bus more often. I don't like trying to park in Seattle anyway. Those parking spots are tight and getting expensive. Maybe when I want to go somewhere and can't, I should contact King County Metro to tell them of the need. I don't have to be mean about it, just persistent. I just have to get out of my comfort zone, at least a little.

Some time, I'm going to tell you about how I could be biking to church on Sundays. These days, my excuse is that I'm too damned tired or lazy or late. And who wants to be a big fat sweaty mess in church?

I have a lot of excuses, don't I? See what I mean about inertia? I drove to the Greenlake branch of the Seattle Public Library.

 

Thank you for listening, jules

We Should All Drink the Water We Pollute

Mike is out of town on business so I watched too much news last night, a whole cycle of news devoted to Trump's 'shithole countries.' comment. I am amazed that so many people still want him to apologize, as if he had never maligned people of color before. We established that he was a racist when he called Mexicans rapists, when he was rude to the parents of a Muslim soldier who had given his life to his country, when he said there were some very fine people among the Nazi thugs invading Charlottesville, when he limited aid to Puerto Rico, when he called Colin Kaepernick a son of a bitch for peacefully protesting for Black Lives Matter. Do I need to go on?

Trump is not going to change now. I don't know why people keep expecting him to. He won't apologize to keep peaceable relationships with the countries he insulted either.

The interesting comment I kept hearing was that 'Trump's handlers' tried to manage the aftermath. Trump's handlers, as if he's a trained bear. Let that sink in. Trump has to be handled.

Too bad he can't handle himself.

So, where am I on my resolution?

I missed a few days. The nice thing about a good New Year's resolution is that you can lose it and get back on track again. Right? The worst resolutions are all or nothing. Right?

I received one last note from NordicTrack: I will go ahead and pass on that information over to the correct department. I appreciate the feedback, thank you.

Yes, I am back to believing that NordicTrack might embrace my idea of making the energy of athletes at gyms actually accomplish something.

Should I try another exercise equipment company? It's hard to keep reaching out, hard to feel like an idiot over and over again. It's easier to stay quiet, to let the status quo, not to make waves. There it is, that feeling of inertia I keep talking about.

I'm certain that technology will either save or kill us, depending on how we use it. Inertia will most certainly kill us when it comes to the environment.

I heard something about climate change in the news yesterday. It was a blip. What was it? I was in the car listening to NPR on the way home from the library. I think it was an ad for Living On Earth, PRI's Environmental News Magazine.

But I know I didn't hear the latest podcast of  Living on Earth.  I would have remembered that one.The Boundary Waters is in jeopardy.

After Trump reversed an Obama ruling restricting mining in Minnesota, the Boundary Waters is at risk of being polluted by acid, arsenic, mercury, and lead.

What is it with Trump reversing every single thing Obama ever accomplished? What the hell is that? It's ridiculous and petty. Just what is the long-term benefit to allowing mining in the Boundary Waters?

It would ruin canoe trekking there. Can you imagine having to carry water into the boundary waters to paddle there for a week? Can you picture people having to stay out of the water to keep from being poisoned?

That would totally suck.

I've paddled in the Boundary Waters twice, once in the early nineties, and once in 2004. It's a place where you can get lost on the border between the U.S. and Canada, where you can see the Milky Way at night, where loons still call their haunting song, where you can still smell algae above the clean water as you paddle.

Just think of it: acid, arsenic, mercury, and lead.

It's too bad Trump's handlers don't serve him water from the  places that he pollutes. If we all looked at water that way, that we drink what we pollute, Flint Michigan would never have happened. This mining operation near the Boundary Waters would be required to clean up after themselves. People would stop putting chemicals on their lawns for fear of drinking it.

It may not be climate change, but it's a thought. Act as though you're going to drink or eat anything that you're tempted to pollute. We do, after all.

Thank you for listening, jules

Watching Jack Reacher

"I'm working on climate change now," I told Mike as we sat on the couch in front of the Jack Reacher movie.

I used to love Tom Cruise movies until that whole thing with Katie Holmes trying to escape Scientology with her daughter Suri and the time I watched Cruise dance on Oprah's couch shouting stuff about how much he loved her. Now, watching him perform is tainted somehow, not completely ruined, but tainted. It's hard when you realized that your revered Hollywood types are actually human.

 Climate change. Right.

I felt I needed to tell Mike along with a couple of friends that I'm trying to see how long I can keep a New Year's resolution going regarding climate change.

See, I've wanted to quit already. We're not even in double digits for the new year. It's pathetic. My answer to that is to tell people what I'm trying to do so I feel some obligation to do it. By the time I'm done, I'll be ridiculous and pathetic. But we'll see how it goes. Maybe there is hope against climate change yet.

"Yeah? Climate change? " Mike said after he typed some stuff onto his work computer. He's on a tight schedule this week. It's stressful. It would be nice if I just sat and watched the movie, but I get fidgety on the couch.

"Yeah. I picture myself as the angry housewife who fights climate change."

He laughed.

Bingo. I nailed it. That is exactly what I wanted to hear from him. I rambled on.

"I wanted to address inertia, you know."

"Inertia?" he said. His eyes were back to his work. He really needed to get his work done.

"Yeah, like what could I say to you that would get you to make one change to reduce your carbon footprint?"

"Nothing."

He looked me in the eye.

"Exactly. That's why we're fucked. I couldn't even make it five days without buying my big plastic container full of one serving of greens. I bought five servings of romaine lettuce at Costco in a lightweight plastic bag instead of the clamshell last week but then I had to throw out three of them because of this whole e coli thing. The CDC won't even say where the romaine might have come from, so I had to throw it all out without knowing if it could be tainted. I can't even make myself stick to my own New Year's resolution for a whole week, not even to save the world."

"Unless some scientist solves the problem, we're fucked," he said.

"Yeah, fucked."

And I sat back on the couch and watched Tom Cruise shoot the eye out of a target with a sniper rifle at Robert Duvall's gun range.

Thank you for listening, jules

Protect What is Vulnerable Even If It Isn't People

I'm trying really hard to ignore Trump's shenanigans, but it's hard. Do you see me trying?

I want to ignore the fact that he can't sing the National Anthem from memory, that he can't read from a teleprompter, that his vocabulary is third grade or less, repetitive, and sometimes slurred, that he tweets a hissy fit against:

Black Lives Matter athletes who kneel respectfully,
the North Korean dictator who goads him,
the mayor of San Juan in Puerto Rico who asked him for aid,
anti-racists responding to the Nazi march in Charlottesville,
anti-pedofiles responding to the Alabama Senatorial race, 
female news anchors who report his unprofessional actions,
his smart prepared African American Presidential predecessor,
his smart prepared female 2016 Presidential opponent who won the popular vote.

 Oh, I know I'm forgetting a lot of people. Here it is: if any female, African American, Muslim, Asian, liberal, Hispanic, nonwhite person catches his attention, he will denigrate them on Twitter.

I am trying to ignore all that because that is the shit-show. The show I intend to be involved in is GOP Congress's lack of response to the Russian investigation, to the damage he's doing by reducing the State Department, the damage he's doing to the free press, the damage he's doing to our sacred and fragile ecosystems.

We need to prevent drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The area, called the middle Arctic tundra is such a fragile environment that it depends on mosquitoes for pollination. It is treeless, cold, averaging 10 to 20 degrees, and gets little rain.  It's winter temperatures average negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Summer hangs around 37 degrees. So, summer seems like winter to me and winter is like those wild winter days when I was in college and the school warned that my spit would freeze before it hit the ground and my exposed eyeballs would freeze in three minutes. Stuff can grow there, but life is tenuous, at best.

It hosts lichen, wildflowers, and low shrubs. Trees can't survive there. Most wildlife can't either. The fauna of the middle Arctic tundra has also become completely dependent on its  climate. Arctic foxes, polar bears, caribou, Arctic hares, Arctic squirrels. Notice the Arctic title before most of those names. It's an incredibly fragile ecosystem. Have you looked at the photos of the starving polar bears. It's heartbreaking.

Drilling will bring in roads, people and equipment squashing tiny homes. Spillage of any kind will poison areas which may take centuries to recover after it stops.

This plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge came in the name of the '2017 Tax Reform Bill.' I put that in quotes because most people call it the 2017 Tax Scam, in which the 1% gets significant tax breaks on the backs of the poor and the middle class.

So, there is the added 'benefit' in this new tax bill that our most precious biome could be destroyed in the name of oil.

Did you notice that the GOP tacked this onto it? At the last second, without allowing more than 48 hours to review the 300+ page document?

The GOP flockers.

Are they bound and determined to ruin what is most beautiful about this country?

Thank you for listening, jules

Working to Find Awe

Today, I did the classic move on a New Year's resolution to keep me going. I told someone what my resolution was, why I thought it was an important move for me.

This morning, my nephew, his friend, and I, along with our dogs, hiked Mt. Si. The truth is that they hiked Mt. Si and I hiked three-quarters of Mt. Si. Teddy went with them all the way to the snow at  the top of the mountain. I dawdled. I stopped three times for lunch. I talked to people. I looked up into the trees.

All of you serious hikers might roll your eyes. Go ahead. I did not make it to the top. I did not intend to make it to the top. It was a plan for me to hike my own speed, which is slow, and to take the time to look around me.

I felt the joy of being surrounded by trees.  Have you ever noticed how many trees have a tiny hole at the base where an animal lives? I spent some time looking at the beautiful front porch on one of these tiny residences, a stone patio, sword fern planted on one side, Oregon grape on the other. And imagine the polished wood ceiling of the foyer. All it needed was a tiny hobbit door and I would have signed up to live in one.

One way to get through all the heaving of walking up a steep hill is to notice minuscule hobbit houses under Douglas fir trees. What a roof to have on your house, an entire tree that rises into the sky, an entire set of roots winding under your feet, polished wood flooring.

When fog rolled in and separated the near trees from the far ones, I was in heaven. I live for days like this, when the clouds wind around the mountain, when diamonds of droplets hang from branches everywhere, when it's safe enough for the yellow-bellied sap sucker to tap tap tap down at eye level with you without hiding behind the tree. I could barely breathe, I was so awed. Awe has probably saved my life. Maybe it can save the planet too.

It's really important for those of us who fight climate change to take a break sometimes and look at what it is that we are saving. I'm serious. I think that once a week might not be too often.

On the way to the trail, I was telling my nephew about photographing jelly fungus with my wide angle lens. I couldn't even see they were little bells until I looked through the view-finder. These are the ways I have of believing that saving the planet, that saving the species that live at these temperatures is worthy of my continued attention.

Not to mention the continuation of the human race.

After the joy of floating through the forest, of talking with like-minded people on the trail, of greeting every friendly dog and wondering if they had played with my Teddy, we all reconvened on the way down the mountain and talked about the environment.

What better time to reinforce what effort it's going to take to fix climate change. I admitted my inability to eliminate my dependence on the big plastic containers of the good greens. They both told me that everyone has their own problem sticking to the list of all the things we can do to reduce our carbon footprint. My nephew admitted that he loved driving. What twenty-something doesn't? And then he told me how exhausted he got protesting climate change for six years before he moved out to the Pacific Northwest.

I didn't know that about him.

He told me too that he wasn't done. He was just taking a break from it. He got burned out, seriously burned out. It sounded like he was beginning to recover.

His friend admitted that she didn't want to give up flying to grand destinations. Then, she told us about cargo travel. Holy cow! I want to go across the ocean on a cargo ship! Don't you? But you need time to travel that way. 

Then, my nephew told me about tide turbines. I had always assumed they were hard on sea life. Not so much, he told me, except if you're a barnacle.

Sometimes a conversation is the beginning of how we can save the world. Sometimes it's all about looking closely at what we want to save, imagining the hidden lives around us. Sometimes it's about admitting our failure to give up big plastic containers. Sometimes it's finding out about cargo travel and tide turbines.

And I admitted to my nephew that I thought we could hook all those gym members up to become a waterfall of energy. He laughed when I told him.

But he didn't tell me it was useless to imagine. I love him for that.

Thank you for listening, jules

Weird

This is hard for me. I have to be honest - some things that happened before Christmas made me feel as though I lost my voice, any right I had to talk in a room full of people. Resistance fell away. Who was I to say that Trump broke the law?

What happened?

I lost a job I was assured was mine. No, it wasn't an important job, only ten hours a week. I'd worked with these children for two and a half years as a volunteer. The teacher I was working with was simply trying to get me a paid position for what I was already doing and in the process of losing the job, I lost her friendship too. That was an awful hit to my self-esteem.

See, I was trying to argue a point and the HR people didn't want to hear it. I have to admit to you that I wasn't feeling well that afternoon. I didn't argue well or wisely. I didn't know when to stop.

Two nights ago, I told Mike I thought I lost the job because I was willing to argue a point. He was in the living room then. I was in the kitchen. He paused his movie.

"That's not why," he said.

"What?" I asked. I walked into the living room with hands goobered from loading dirty dishes.

"You lost the job because they think you're weird."

It was like a punch to the gut.

"I am weird. I was more weird that day because I didn't feel well, but I am weird. I'm not dangerous and I'm honest, but--"

"Nothing you say or do is going to change their minds."

"I know, but I can't even volunteer for them now."

And I wandered back into the kitchen so I could cry on my own and pretend Mike didn't know I was doing it. He knew.

Eventually, I sniffled enough, finished the load of dishes, and went into the living room and sat down next to him.

"You've got to love me, you know," I said as he patted my shoulder over the cat who sat on his pillow between us.

I had spent a whole year arguing against Trump's administration and I'd grown confidence in what I had to say. Plus, I felt great about all the hours I spent volunteering for kids and it was all stripped away in one fell swoop. I'd been righteous. I'd been righteous about so much of my life. When I encountered  something that was wrong or illegal or both, I finally stood up. I took a stand.

Except these HR people didn't want any discussion about their practices and their counterweight opinions overruled two and a half years of dedication I had shown. In fact, I'd volunteered weekly for that school district since 2006. Now I can't even volunteer, let alone get paid for my work. And even though I suspect I lost the job because I argued a point poorly and didn't know when to stop, no one there has explained exactly what they think went wrong. They left me in the dark. I hate being left in the dark when someone thinks I've done something wrong.

I feel like I've lost my voice.

I've written every single day for seven years and almost every day for twenty-two. That came to a screeching halt three weeks ago. I'm fighting it. I resolved to look at the inertia in human nature that has us so far down the track of climate change that polar bears are starving to death and swimming for days trying to find ice from which to hunt. I'm trying to overcome eco-anxiety and read about bleached coral, about extreme weather, about the Larson C ice shelf in Antarctica that is supposed to break off any day now.

But I'm still battling to speak out. It's hard.

Who am I to try to fight the status quo? I'm an ordinary woman. I don't even have a job.

I can't even earn enough from my last book, Angry Housewife Fights Tyranny, to justify writing another one. Oh, that is hard to admit. Yesterday, I had to argue with a bookstore owner that sold a few books that they should pay me the last $5.49 that they've owed me since October. Five freaking dollars.

So, if you're reading this, you should be forewarned: I am weird. I'm ordinary. I don't have any special skills except that I try to write every day, except that I care, except that I think someone needs to stand up and speak out. Who else if not me, a weird ordinary woman who didn't get the job she'd been doing for two an a half years?

What else do I have to do?

Inertia doesn't get broken down with silence. Nothing will change unless more of us speak out, act out, be willing to look weird.

Thank you for listening, jules

Experience the Bus

I figured you might want to know how my conversation with NordicTrack on Facebook ended.

Yesterday, I received this message:

I am sorry but with our machines we do not have the option to do that, thank you!

And this morning, I wrote back:

Please pass this message up to your engineering department. It would not be a difficult challenge and it would help the environment. Thank you. 

I have to tell you that the whole thing made me feel like an idiot. I would have appreciated a detailed reason why an engineer wouldn't put that kind of technology into exercise equipment, to capture the energy that is put into a spinning flywheel. The person I got when I sent this message was not that guy.

I think I understand the complications with a treadmill. Every time I'm on a treadmill, I feel as though I'm going to fall off the end of it. I can't quite keep up. That's probably the idea, to push me. Granted, the most time I spent on a treadmill was under the supervision of a cardiac technologist while doing a stress test and before that a short stint with a personal trainer. Personal trainers seem to need to keep you off balance, don't they? I fell off that thing at least twice. 

But my mind keeps going back to all that energy a person exerts while on a treadmill. Would it be possible to capture the up and down motion in the drop of each foot? 

What this climate change dilemma needs is more engineers to engineer the hell out of it.  

The other machines should have been easy. If there's already a flywheel, half the work is done for the engineering team. Add some copper windings, a couple of magnets, and you have current, right?

Or did I mess that idea up too? All in all, the whole thing made me feel like an idiot. Maybe I am. Probably I am. But at least I'm thinking about it, trying to do something to battle the great inertia of 7.442 billion people marching into climate change oblivion.

Yesterday, I took another challenge. I rode the bus into Seattle.

I've only ridden a bus five or six times since I was a teenager when I got my license and a set of car keys. Every single time I ride the bus, I get nervous.

Am I going to the right place?
What if I get sick? How will I get home?
Is this the right bus?
Will I get off at the right stop?
How far will I have to walk when I get there?
What if my phone dies?
What if I don't have the right change?
What if I have to pee?

You have to admit that those are valid questions for newbie bus riders. 

The first time I rode the Seattle Metro, I researched the hell out of it and planned my ride online before I left. I recommend this. I was scheduled for jury duty in Seattle and I made a trial run to make sure I'd get to the right place. I did.

It was fun. A stop for coffee, time to look around, and back home on the bus, right?

Well, the buses mostly run into Seattle in the morning and out of Seattle in the afternoon. They don't just keep circling around and around. How do they do that? Some nice bus driver told me which bus to get on to get back to the park-and-ride where my car was parked. I went home on Sound Transit.

Whew!

So far, I've never gotten sick, too lost, gotten off at the wrong stop, or failed to have the right money for the bus. Once, I stepped off at the wrong park-and-ride on the way home, but I realized my mistake right away and simply stepped back on before the doors closed. See, I am an idiot sometimes. I use the map on my phone to find landmarks and once it didn't work in a tunnel so I had to walk back up the stairs a couple of times to look at the map and go back down to where I needed to go. 

All in all, riding the bus is an adventure for me.

Hey, I love my car. I really do. When I lived five miles outside of New York City, I used to drive my car into that mess rather than learn the trains, the subways, or the buses. I didn't want to miss the last run for the night and be stuck wandering around the city until they started running again at 5am.  I was proud that I could drive in New York City. Those taxi drivers are tough nuts and I could manage among them.

But it wasn't at all environmentally friendly. One woman in her own car, driving into a city of eight and a half million people. Eight and a half million cars would never work. It was hard enough getting in and out with those of us who were ignorant enough to try on a Friday afternoon. Sometimes, that twenty minute drive turned into three hours.

Once I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I had the excuse that I lived in the middle of nowhere. No buses stopped anywhere near my house. I had to drive to get absolutely anywhere, even to the bus stop. 

Oh, I used to take turns with Mike biking home from work every other day when we both worked in the same town. We wanted to show up at work and not be a sweaty mess, so we figured that one would drop the other off at work and someone would bike home. It worked for a while, but it was a fucking hazard. Drivers don't see bikes. And worse, every week some asshole would roll down his window, drive by, and yell some insult at me.

"Cow!"

"Wide load!"

"Get some exercise, pig!"

That one always got to me. There I was, trying to get some exercise and some asshole sitting in a car was yelling at me to get some exercise. I was supposed to be beautiful while I biked? Just for him? The worst night was when a bunch of people in a car all rolled down their windows and barked at me. All of it got to me and eventually, I stopped biking home on my road. I also stopped working in the same town as Mike. I still dropped him off and then ran my errands so he kept it up longer than I did, but the second time he got run off the road by an inattentive driver, he stopped. He was finished.

Then, I was an unrelenting driver until very recently. Those bus rides were a challenge for me.

In my car, I feel at home. In my car, I feel safe. I can stop anywhere I want. I don't have to mingle with strangers in my car. I can make a detour. I can be spontaneous. I can go straight home. I love my car.

But that's part of our problem, isn't it? 

We love our cars.

So yesterday, I drove five minutes to the park-and-ride, waited twenty minutes because I missed the bus, and I went into the Seattle Art Museum to see the Andrew Wyeth retrospective. It was awesome!

I saw things I wouldn't have seen from my car, little brass animals on huge flower pots on Seneca Street. I saw how small Smith Tower seemed next to all the other buildings. I saw the golden afternoon light on Elliot Bay. I saw people, beautiful people, ugly people, bored people, tired people, and one sweet guy on a bike on Second Avenue who winked at me. I know I'm getting old now when guys have begun to wink at me again. There was an Indian man on the bus with the most gorgeous dimple in his chin. There was a sweet-looking woman reading a library book. I wanted to ask her if it was good. There were a bunch of people working not to make eye contact with anyone on the bus. I was an anomaly there, looking all around me and not bored by the experience. When I get old and lonely, I can ride the bus during rush hour so I can sit close to someone and feel their warmth through our layers of clothes. If I'm old enough, someone might wink at me or at least smile.

Still, when I got back into my car afterward, I let out a long breath. Had I been holding it for that long, the whole time I was exposed to the world? 

That's the challenge. I'm going to do it again soon, go somewhere else. Experience the bus in all it's humanity.

Thank you for listening, jules 

Two hundred and Forty Watts Per Athlete Per Hour

Yesterday, I reached out to NordicTrack about green energy. I figured they would be the most promising of the three exercise equipment companies. How do you define that feeling you get about a company, that sense that they are forward-thinking and still bound by values? That's a precious commodity for a corporation.

The only way they left open for contact that wasn't about complaints was through Facebook, so I sent them a message:

Have you ever considered setting up your machines to harness the power the person puts into it, charge a battery, put energy back onto the grid? It would redefine the word 'powerhouse.' 

They sent me a reply:

Thanks for reaching out. Is there something I can assist you with regarding your NordicTrack equipment?

I tried again:

I would like to know if any of your equipment is set up to provide green energy.

They wrote:

Just so I am understanding you correctly. You are wanting to know if you can charge your own unit instead of plugging it into a wall. 

I wrote:

No. I want to know if I can harness the energy I produce while I'm exercising for use elsewhere. 

There seemed to be a disconnect in our communications.

When I think about one machine and one person charging one battery, the whole thing sounds a little ridiculous, doesn't it? Phil Stewart says that a fit person cycling can generate about 240 watts per hour. That's enough to run your desktop monitor and your laptop, but not enough to run your refrigerator while you're exercising.

But put it into perspective by picturing your average gym at 6pm. If five guys spin on cycles, three run on treadmills, a couple on ellipticals, and at least one lifts at a weight machine, that's a whole lot of energy output, a lot of flywheels flying. And what about those spinning classes? Could a gym go green just by collecting all that energy output? No. Gyms run lights, a couple of computers, heaters, air and pool filters, a refrigerator, a microwave, TVs, vending machines, and a vacuum cleaner. Plus, I'm probably forgetting some of their energy needs. Your average exercise machine isn't in use twenty-four hours a day either, so it seems impossible for a gym to go completely green. Still, it could be a percentage. If you told me I could save ten percent on my energy bill, I might look into the possibilities.

The problem is getting everyone on-board, power companies, fitness equipment companies,  gyms, and even to some extent, the athletes. There's where your inertia settles in. A few people can move forward easily, but a lot of people take a lot of momentum to change directions, even if they all believe that climate change is a problem.

Maybe I haven't grasped the energy required to run the exercise equipment itself. Maybe I'm missing more than I think regarding this idea. That's entirely possible.

I'm going to become that crazy lady, aren't I? It's already bad at home, me repeatedly asking my family to turn out lights in rooms they're leaving and to shut off monitors they aren't using. Now, I have to nag gyms and corporations that make exercise equipment too.

Soon, I'm going all in to tell you my ideas about video game solutions and micro-windmills. I seriously don't know if any of it has any merit, but I'm already out on a limb. Might as well see how far out I get before it breaks.

Thank you for listening, jules

Creating Eco-Warriors at the Gym

Already, I'm thinking of ways I can get out of my shrinking-carbon-footprint resolution. One day. That's all it takes to lose it. How is your exercise program going? Do you feel yourself resisting it yet? I am.

Humanity is fucked if I can't last longer than one day. How am I supposed to expect everyone around me to keep trying?

Then, I thought of all the things I already do. That's fair, right? I want to say that I recycle. I religiously reuse my grocery bags.

Does that even help my carbon footprint?

I guess any reusing and recycling should help because manufacturing burns carbon, right? Sometimes, I have to admit, I mix up reducing plastic use with reducing my carbon footprint. I've seen it done on other lists too. Plus, I'm pretty sure that if climate change doesn't kill us, plastic will. Let's just allow it, okay?

Ha!

Not one of you complained in that half-second I paused. Good thing I'm not doing this on Twitter. I could have had three thousands arguments in that half-second. But I'm not. I'm here, in the quiet space. Sometimes, it's a little too quiet.

So, here's what I do now:

recycle
reuse
make stuff (I tried to make blank books. It's hard to get the stitches tight enough. But I'm good at quilts and pies.)
resist buying new stuff
resist buying a real tree for Christmas
drive a Prius
turn off the lights when I leave a room
stack errands according to location
wear laundry an extra day if it doesn't smell
wash my car less often

Really, how do you make yourself smaller? I can't stop breathing out CO2. I bang back and forth between swearing off big trips and wanting to see all the gorgeous places in this world so I work to preserve them. That's a tough one.

I plan to plant some seedlings in the next couple of weeks. Because it'll be wet for three more months, it's the season here in the Pacific Northwest. My local Western red cedars have offered me at least fifteen little starts in the pots I leave out on the deck all summer. All I have to do is host them for a few seasons and transplant them when they're about three years old. I love doing that. It's like some quiet form of communication between me and the mother trees in my yard. They trust me with their babies.

You know, I was going to tell you my idea about gym memberships. Yeah, it's a crazy idea, but it could actually put some energy back into the grid.

See, a year ago, I needed to see a physical therapist to work on my shoulder. The machine she put me on to warm up actually calculated the number of Watts I produced and I found it invigorating to raise that number as my shoulder improved. Why not harness all that energy from all those machines? 

Why doesn't the Y connect all of their ellipticals, treadmills, weight machines, and stationary bikes to charge batteries or put energy right back into the power grid?

Just imagine the YMCA, 24 Fitness, Gold's gym hooking up whole rooms full of equipment that could provide the energy of a waterfall, especially now when people are busy enacting their New Year's resolutions. They could run contests for the athletes that produce the highest number of wattage, eco-battles. They could become powerhouses, literally.

Think about all those sweating bodies actually producing something useful in addition to making everyone healthier?

This morning, I sat down and tried to figure out how to actually do it, but I know it's already been done. It isn't complicated technology. My brother hooked his TV up to his stationary bike back in the early 80's but he stopped because he couldn't keep up the pace required by his TV.

This morning, I thought about copper windings and magnets and software to inform the one exercising how much energy she provides per minute.

Your treadmill runners, your elliptical hoppers, your indoor cyclists could become eco-warriors. Get that flywheel spinning!

Who's game? NordicTrak? Bowflex? Sole? How hard would it be to switch up some of your machines to put energy back into the system? You could be eco-corporations.

Which one of you wants to make the leap? Please do it. Our world depends on us.

Thank you for listening, jules

Resisting Inertia

What this world needs most to save us from climate change disaster is behavioral psychologists to work on helping us to enact change.

I'm not talking about climate deniers. Well, I'm not just talking about the deniers and how to change their minds. I'm talking about those of us who believe that climate change is happening and haven't yet changed our actions accordingly.

Think about it.

Eco-anxiety gets in the way. We know it's happening but we try to avoid looking at it too closely for fear of facing the truth.

The other day, I was listening to NPR and Shankar Vedantam interviewed two behavioral psychologists about their research grant to understand more fully how New Year's Resolutions don't work. I couldn't find the interview, but he has a new podcast called The Hidden Brain. When asked how successful these scientists thought they could be ultimately, one said 21% and the other said 25%. That's not promising.

And that's talking about changing the behavior of one individual, like me, who truly believes she needs to do something different every day to help save the planet. What about all of us together I want to ask those psychologists.

Have you ever tried to get fourteen people moving when you've decided to go somewhere fun? When there are just two of you, it's fairly easy. You talk about going. You decide to go. You get ready to go. And you go.

Add a couple and you can feel the molasses of humanity slowing you down. It's harder to get out the door even after you decided what you want to do. Add another ten people and there are sub-conversations and people who get ready but get bored waiting and get started doing something else. Then, there are the people who do nothing to get ready until the moment you think you're about to go out the door.

"I still need a shower. Give me five minutes," one procrastinator will say.

"I need lunch and a water bottle," says the one who showered first because she forgot about some of the things she needed to do to really get ready.

Then, you get the ones who actively resist going anywhere. These people are like the climate deniers or the guy I have to fight every single time I buy groceries at a particular store who gives me a new plastic bag out of spite. We think these people are the worst at holding you back, but they're not. If they were, you could leave those two behind and still take twelve people out to the trail head to hike Mailbox peak.

No, it's not them. It's us, the ones who really want to go sweat under our bras until we reach a place with a view.

Think about Puerto Rico. It was a fad on Twitter to push Congress to send them more aid for a few weeks, but after a while, the news went on to different track and we got back to our normal lives. Puerto Rico still struggles as I write this. They've begun to add some suicides to the lists of the dead on account of the hurricane. Think about that. If you were one of the people leading that charge, what have you done lately? The problem still exists but the excitement of the fad of helping has passed. The only people still pushing for relief there are the ones with loved ones there.

Am I right?

So, I'm actually going to try to have a New Year's Resolution that involves some climate change changes, some extra things I can do to keep the spotlight on that problem, some actual things I can do differently to have a positive impact on the environment.

Wish me luck. I hope I do better than a 21% success rate.

Thank you for listening, jules