Half Changed World

I spent about half of the weekend working — on a paper about work-life pressures on American workers.

It was a pretty uneventful first day of school around here.  Both boys are continuing at the same schools (preschool in N’s case) that they attended last year, so there was relatively little drama.  And the school bus even showed up on time.

It was an odd feeling for me to be standing around at the "parents’ coffee" at N’s preschool, looking at the teary-eyed parents of the younger children, and realizing that this is our last year of preschool. 

Some of my previous posts on the topic:

• 2004
• 2005
• 2006 and follow-up
• Much to my surprise, I seem not to have posted on the first day of school last year.  But I did write about the first PTA meeting of the year.

Back from vacation.  Had a good time, but could use a vacation from my vacation.  For a week, I was on my own with the kids.  The program I was at had children’s activities during the day, and evening babysitting, but that still left me with maybe 6 hours a day with the boys. 

The main issue is that there were a lot of kids who were a few years older than D, whose parents gave them a lot more freedom than I was willing to give D, so he was testing the limits every few minutes.  And whenever I let him do something, N wanted to do it as well, so if D wasn’t arguing with me, N was.  And neither of them quite got the concept that I’d want to have a conversation with other adults over meals.

D also desperately wanted to play with the older kids, especially when they broke out pokemon cards and a portable game machine, but mostly they saw him as a "little kid" and weren’t interested.  It did help a little when I borrowed Munchkin Fu from someone who was attending, and he was able to demonstrate his ability to play complicated games.

It made me realize that D has a lot more experience playing with younger kids than with older ones.  I had D when I was 29, so few of my friends have older children, and mothers groups tend to attract parents of younger children more than school-age kids.

The tomatoes I planted this year did even worse than last year.  A few of the plants just got drowned in the torrential rains shortly after I transplanted them, and the one plant that got big and healthy hasn’t produced much in the way of fruit.  I don’t really get enough sun here for tomatoes, but I can’t help myself. 

Today, we finally had a ripe tomato, and I let N pick it.  He came in with it and asked "Can we make First Tomato soup?"  This was, of course, a reference to one of the Voyage to the Bunny Planet books* by Rosemary Wells** where in the day that should have been, Claire gets to pick the first ripe tomato and her mother makes her First Tomato soup. 

I couldn’t resist a request like that, but I also didn’t want to waste one of my few homegrown tomatoes on something that could just as well be made out of store-bought tomatoes.  And I strongly suspected that neither of the boys would actually eat whatever I made.  So after a few minutes of googling, I made the simplest soup possible — tomato, olive oil, and salt, pureed together without cooking.   D refused to taste it and N had just a few bites, but T and I enjoyed it.

*In each of these books, a young bunny has a terrible day, and then the Bunny Queen takes them to the Bunny Planet, where they get to experience the day that should have been.  Each of the days gives the child what they were really missing — quiet and solitude, parental attention, warmth and affection.  The link is to a book that contains all three stories, but if you can find the out-of-print box set in a used bookstore or yard sale for less than the unreal prices being asked by Amazon sellers, I’d vote for that.  The books are larger than the classic Sendak Nutshell Library but only about half the size of a standard paperback and there’s something about the small books fitting into their own little case that is absolutely irresistible for preschoolers.

**Yes, Rosemary Wells, better known as the creator of Max and Ruby.

Last weekend, I took the boys to the big Air and Space Museum annex, out by Dulles.  Like all the Smithsonian museums, admission is free, but they charge $12 for parking.  After some agonizing, I signed up for an annual parking permit.  I’m something of a sucker for unlimited admission passes — we also got season passes for Six Flags.  I’m not sure they always make economic sense, but I’m a more relaxed and happier parent when I know that we can leave as soon as the boys start to fade, without having to endure the "death march of fun" in order to wring out the most value from our admission.  Economic logic says that once you’ve paid the admission it’s a sunk cost, and thus the price of admission shouldn’t affect how long you choose to stay, but I don’t know anyone who actually behaves that way.  (I’m also pretty sure that we’re still not mentally accounting for the price of gas when when we decide to go to the museum because it’s "free.")

The Six Flags passes are an interesting case, because they cost barely more than a single admission.  As far as I can tell, they’re a loss leader to get you to buy food and rent lockers at the park.

• We’ve been swimming a lot.  D’s now comfortable going under water (with goggles on) and N can paddle around with a swim noodle.

• Zot! is finally out.

• We’ve been having a great time playing Boom Blox.  I really like the cooperative play mode, which is a good level of difficulty for D and me — hard enough that we have to work at it, but easy enough that we can in fact solve the puzzles.  We’re clearly not the only ones who like it — it was sold out at all the stores near us, so we ordered it online.

• I loved this librarian’s letter to someone who asked that a book be pulled.

• The nice folks who make Avatar asked if I wanted a review copy of the next disk.  Boy did I, especially since we managed to miss an episode on the tivo.  The boys are just thrilled.

Back from the camping trip with my college friend.
We had a great time, even though it rained on and off almost the whole time, I got
stung by wasps, and I fell several times, earning this enormous bruise:

For scale, that’s my thigh, so the bruise is probably 5 inches across.  And I can’t blame it on particularly tricky terrain — there was just a big rock in the path that I totally didn’t see.

Given the rain, we decided that climbing Old Rag would probably be a stupid idea, so we explored some of the other trails in the area, and had a great time playing around in this swimming hole:

I suspect that the rhododendrons would have been unreal a month or two earlier, but at this point, the most interesting wildlife was the various and colorful fungi:

For anyone considering a trip to Shenandoah National Park, I highly recommend the trip planning database on the NPS website.  You enter the experience level of your group and how many nights you want to camp, and it spits back a list of suggested trips.

In the final week, we wound up doing three grocery trips, to Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Giant, for a total of $173.75 for the week, and $460.78 for the month.  Some of the high spending this week is because we stocked up on stuff that will last until the next month, but we also bought more packaged goods — a big thing of nutrigrain bars for D to take as snacks at camp, string cheese, ice cream — and D even convinced T to buy "orange chicken" at Costco.  So, it’s easy to see that it would be easy to blow past the $501 thrifty food plan budget if you weren’t really watching.  The bars are a lot cheaper at Costco than at the regular grocery store, but they’re still far more expensive than baking.

As it happens, this week we’re going to get our first delivery from South Mountain Creamery.  Since I read The Way We Eat, I’ve been wanting to move away from industrially produced meat and dairy, and this looks like a way to do so without adding yet another set of shopping trips to our lives.  It’s not cheap, but it’s a better price than the comparable foods from Whole Paycheck.  I’m interested in seeing whether we can taste the difference.

I’ve spent much of the last couple of hours digging into our storage closet and the boxes stuffed in the garage trying to locate all my camping gear.  My closest friend from college is visiting over the 4th of July weekend, and we’re going to go backpacking for a couple of days.  I’m hoping that she’ll be able to help me figure out my big frame backpack, which I’ve never used.

I bought that pack sometime in the fall of 1999, around the time I ran my last marathon.  T and I were going to hike the Grand Canyon in the early summer, and I had even written away for the backcountry permits.  But by the time spring came around, I was pregnant with D. and doing a strenuous hike in 100 degree weather didn’t sound like such a bright idea.

BitchPhD blogged last week about visiting with an old friend, looking for reassurance that they’re still the same people, even if they spend their days saying "eye-rolling mommy things."  K is single, she doesn’t have kids, and she has her summers off from work, so she gets to spend lots of time hiking and biking.  Our lives are pretty different.  And she lives on the west coast, so we don’t see much of each other.  I’m a little worried that we’ll find out that we’ve drifted too far apart to bridge the gap.

We’ve been in this house for a bit more than a year now, so now we’re able to do same month year-to-year comparisons of our energy use.  We’ve been steadily working on making the house more energy efficient, so I’ve been curious to see what the impacts are.  We’ve replaced the windows, one of the toilets, clothes washer, dryer, boiler, fridge, dishwasher, and stove.  Basically, the only things left to do are the hot water heater and the air conditioner…

So, the envelope please…

• Electricity — Dominion Virginia Power has a handy-dandy button on its site that generates various comparisons for you once you’ve logged in.  It shows how much you paid in a given month compared to the previous month and the same month the year before, and divides the change out among different temperatures, different number of days in the billing cycle, change in prices, and "customer-controlled use."  So, we paid $71.20 in May 2008, down from $95.02 a year previously.  And the rates went up in that period, so they claim that customer-controlled use saved us $27.28.  So, a decent percentage savings, but not that impressive in absolute dollar amounts.  Even with the forthcoming 18% rate hike, it’s going to take us a long time before the improvements pay for themselves.  (Obviously, the energy savings were not the primary reasons we made these changes, so we’re not upset by this.)

• Gas — Washington Gas doesn’t offer this kind of comparison, so I have to sort of eyeball things.  We used 13.2 therms last month, versus 63 therms a year ago.  That’s because it took us a while last year to figure out how much energy our old boiler was using keeping water hot even when it wasn’t sending any into the baseboard heaters.  Once we figured out that we needed to shut the boiler off in the summer, it dropped down to 32 therms. (The remainder is for the clothes dryer and water heater, both of which are gas-powered.  Our new stove is also gas powered, but you’d have to work really hard to spend more than a few dollars that way…)  The more impressive comparison is February to March, when our use dropped from 258 therms to 151 when we installed the new boiler.  That improvement clearly is cost-effective, since our February bill was close to $400.*

• Water — We get billed quarterly for water, and haven’t paid more than $100 per quarter.  While the washer and dishwasher use less water than the old ones, I don’t expect it to make a noticeable difference on our bills.  We put in a low-flow showerhead but I’m guessing that it impacts the gas bill more than the water bill.

Dominion is making a big deal out of their new conservation plan, but I’m pretty skeptical.  Based on my results, my guess is that just showing people how much their energy use costs won’t significantly affect usage unless they also adopt variable rate pricing, where electricity costs a lot more during peak usage times. (Dominion does not appear to be doing that, since their demo says you’d be entering the rates from your bill.)  I think this is mostly an attempt to convince politicians to give them approval for the transmission lines and coal-burning plant they want to build.

* When I see stories like this one about people with $400 monthly electric bills, I have to assume that they have electric heat, and very poor insulation.  I’m not sure I could run up a $400 electric bill in this house even if I ran the air conditioning with the windows open.

Cross-posted to my home blog.  Also, note the new "Environment" category — I’ll go back when I get a chance and add the tag to some of my older posts.