December 31st, 2008 by Chris Eng

So, I’m back. I know that I didn’t tell you I was leaving beforehand, but I was off jetsetting for the holidays… if hanging out and drinking with your in-laws in a suburb of Edmonton can be considered “jetsetting,” anyway. Let me check up on that and get back to you.

Still, despite the neverending parade of sugary baking and Sailor Jerry Rum dancing past my eyes (and into my stomach), there were a couple of things that added a touch of greenpunk to my Christmas-time. First, I got two different encyclopedias:

 
The one on the left—The Encyclopedia of Country Living—is pretty much indispensible reading for anyone considering going back to the land or just adopting a more greenpunk/D.I.Y. lifestyle. The one on the right—The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia—is indispensible reading for anyone who wants to know what Lando Calrissian and Admiral Daala have been doing lately. I’m sure there’s a greenpunk angle there if I look hard enough, but I’m too thrilled with it to bother.

I also, in a roundabout way (which involved a bookstore giftcard), received a copy of Nikki McClure’s Collect Raindrops, which is one of the most awesome and inspirational books I own. Every year she makes a calendar of paper cut art, with each month illustrating some aspect of simple living. Collect Raindrops assembles the best of her art from 1998 to 2007.

 
The other thing we got to do, which I haven’t done in years, is visit a farm. Carla’s grandfather owns a small farm in Whitecourt, so we drove out and spent an afternoon socializing and wandering around the property. It was nice and I was happy to have been able to spend some time there, as well as finally meet her grandpa.

As a final note, in case anyone had read my previous posts and was wondering—yes, the Star Wars Encyclopedia is both excellent and beautiful. Just thought I’d clear that up.

December 22nd, 2008 by Chris Eng

It’s days like today, when I’m only about a 20 minute walk from a supermarket in a major metropolitan area, but it’s down a steep hill and there’s a foot of snow on the ground, that I really wish I had a pantry full of preserves. I don’t really have a type or flavour preference in mind, but I certainly appreciate the logic of jams, jellies and various preserved vegetables at the moment. In remote areas (depending on the weather) they will potentially keep you from starving; in Vancouver they save you from going outside, slipping all over the place and needlessly freezing your ass off.

Yes, preserving is something else I’ll be looking at learning in the new year.

December 19th, 2008 by Chris Eng

Should you conduct your own purge, you’ll hit the point (or perhaps points) where you can’t wrap your head around getting rid of some beloved and useless collection. It becomes an immense blindspot, rendering you unable to even consider getting rid of it, even if on some basic level you know it does you no good. I just dealt with one of those. It took a lot of thinking and reasoning to acknowledge the problem and move past it. And it hurt. A lot. I made the decision to part with a huge portion of my roleplaying books.

Gaming is a life-long passion of mine. I got my first set of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Why start with Basic? Doesn’t that imply it’s dumbed-down? Gimme the good stuff!) for either Christmas or my birthday when I was nine—I can’t recall which. And though I didn’t have enough similarly-minded friends to get a game going at the time, it was D&D’s singular emphasis on imagination which kept me hooked. I made character after character, designed dungeon after dungeon, created world after world. By my teens I usually had at least one group together at any given time, culled from a variety of social groups.

And bought game books. I wasn’t particularly picky—if a system had a cool premise or neat set of gaming mechanics, I’d pick up the core rules. If it showed promise beyond that, I’d buy the supplements, too. It probably hasn’t helped that I’ve worked in gaming shops off and on pretty much since I got out of high school, but it’s helped me accumulate some pretty amazing RPGs: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the game they came out with before Games Workshop decided to switch completely to miniature-based tabletop gaming; Amber Diceless, a system based on one of my favourite series of novels, and the only one I own which proudly eschews any use of polyhedral dice; In Nomine, concerning the machiavellian interplay between the various castes of angels and devils; and Exalted, the greatest single game I’ve never gotten to play.

It’s a little difficult to describe Exalted in a nutshell—you might as well try to distill the essence of our world down to a short paragraph. The incredibly wide scope of the game is part of its inherent appeal. Still, a not too unfair description of it would probably be to take high fantasy on an epic level and add an equal portion of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style wuxia with a small dollop of the Holy Roman Empire. I’m forgetting some important influences, but that gives you a very basic idea. I fell in love with Exalted the first time I had it shown to me… and I started buying the books.

I don’t know how many I’ve ended up with over the past five years or so, but I have a stack of them standing over two feet high. Well sure, there are some doubles in there—if I ever got a game going, each of the players would need a copy of at least one or two of them—but most of them are singles, each of them covering an aspect of the game world at large. Sadly I never got that game going, so the books have just sat there.

On the other hand, I’ve somehow recently managed to convince (or trick, I’m not sure which) Carla to play in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’m running. It’s 4th Edition, which I was sure I’d hate (based on the fact that I’d been there since 1st Edition and a couple of them seemed like blatant cash grabs), but turns out I am a complete convert for. The changes made to the new edition are sensible and logical and it’s the perfect game to get new roleplayers involved with—hence, Carla. I’ve been buying the new supplements and have enough material and ideas to last for years. In fact, it’s one of the only games I can envision myself getting a campaign running for during the rest of my life. Sure, I may feel the need to branch out and break out the Paranoia for one or two sessions, or dust off the Warhammer FRP books again, but those would be the exceptions to the rule. I don’t see teaching Carla to play Exalted at any point in the future and she’ll likely be in most of the games I run from this point on (since she seems to be quite taken by gaming in general).

So, what to do with the mountain of gaming books that have accumulated over the course of my life? Get rid of them. It’s the only sane answer. I love gaming, but what I love about it is the interaction—the roleplayng. The imaginative part of the process (i.e. adventure creation and world building) is still fun and captivating, but I left the part of me that was content to sit there and world-build by myself back in my childhood. If I really want to build a fantasy world, I don’t need a set of rules to do it; I can just sit down with a pen ad some paper and make some notes. If I’m going to incur the expense of buying gaming books these days, it’s because I’m going to play them, and that means any games I won’t likely use will have to be gotten rid of.

It took way more effort to come to that realization than with any of my other collections, and I think it’s probably because of the extra investment of self which comes with gaming books. Whether or not you ever use them to run a game, when you read through them you can’t help but imagine yourself (or your group of characters) in the setting to some degree or another. There’s a piece of you in every gaming book you read. Still, they’re small parts of me, and they’re parts I can get back by participating in other games. Any ideas inspired by leafing through piles of rule books can be salvaged and used again somewhere else. Nothing is lost. So, it is with just a small amount of regret that I say good bye to most of my Exalted collection.

I say most because I’m keeping a few of the core books. Not many—five or six. A fraction of what I started with and only a few inches of the two foot pile, but enough to keep the ideas flowing. And I’m also getting rid of In Nomine and most of my 1st, 2nd and 3rd Edition D&D books. I’m never going back to play with the 2nd Edition rules again (I’m not a masochist; I hold no nostalgia for THAC0), so why keep them?

When all is said and done, the books I’m getting rid of will probably fill about four or five medium-sized boxes. But it’s not the amount of space I’m freeing up that is the payoff—it’s the fact that I know that over the course of years I may just end up with a streamlined and optimised gaming book collection I can use to give my wife a fraction of the joy and fun tabletop RPGs have given me over the years. Well, that and getting the rest of my friends eaten by dragons.

Save vs. Awesome.

December 13th, 2008 by Chris Eng

“Not only am I not learning, I’m forgetting stuff I used to know. ”
- Milhouse

I was thinking about The Joy of Cooking the other day and how baffling parts of it were to me growing up. “Why,” I thought to myself in dumbfounded bemusement, “do they tell you how to skin and gut animals in here? Do people still do that?” The short answer being yes, just not in as great numbers as they used to.

And that’s the thing of it: the contents of The Joy of Cooking were a standard repository of kitchen practice and advice from 50 or 60 years ago. In half a century, the collective knowledge and wisdom related to food preparation in Western culture has degraded immensely. Catastrophically, really. Witness the CitiGroup ad from earlier this year, featuring a woman standing in a kitchen where every available bit of cupboard space is filled with clothes, about which she proudly boasts: “I don’t cook. So I made my eat-in kitchen a fabulous walk-in closet.” Which isn’t to say it’s a woman’s place to be in the kitchen skinning possums and baking pies and men should be out shooting said possums with their 12 gauge. Not at all. But it is to say that we generally have no idea where our food comes from or the steps it takes to bring it to the table anymore, and even the act of cooking a simple meal is arduous and confusing to the better part of a generation.

If most of our food is already prepared and comes from a box, bag, bottle or can, what will that mean if the cost of shipping the food to the cities from its origin points around the globe becomes so expensive it’s untenable to continue buying it on a daily basis? It means people will have to resort to buying their food locally—fresh food, untouched by preservatives and still in its component parts. And the generation that’s going to have to put it together is the one demanding Kraft Cheese & Macaroni in already assembled microwaveable packages because the original kind takes too much effort and/or skill to prepare.

This loss of knowledge and wisdom is touched upon in a recent essay by Dorothy Woodend. In it, Woodend specifically adresses the concept of what might happen to coming generations if there’s some kind of large-scale emergency spurred on by a global oil crisis. All the skills useful in such a situation (which our grandparents might have known and practiced) are being forgotten and abandoned at such a rapid pace that in a few generations there will be very little first-hand knowledge left to be passed down.

“Still,” as one of my co-workers argued, while we discussed this the other day, “we’ve never been in a situation like we are now, where almost limitless information is available on every conceivable subject at the touch of our fingertips.” Which is true as far as it goes, but Woodend has a convenient and succinct rejoinder for that: “Information is not knowledge, nor even close to wisdom.” And that drives to the heart of the matter. If you want to build a house, you can find blueprints for any one you want, but they won’t teach you the proper way to use your tools. Even if you find good books on foundation-laying, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, tiling, shingling and all of the other trades that go into house-building, you still won’t have the accumulated tips and advice accumulated by doing the same job over the course of your life—the wisdom gained by being an expert in one’s field. That’s what will take the most time to regain, should we find ourself at a point where our culture needs this wisdom again.

And those are my plans for the short term: read up on the various subjects I’m interested in as much as possible, then seek out someone able to impart first-hand knowledge of them. In the case of farming, there’s a number of places around the Lower Mainland that accept volunteers (though not for a few months, at the moment—December/January isn’t really the ideal crop-growing season), and in the case of cooking, there’s Carla. I’m not an awful cook, but she knows tricks and shortcuts around the kitchen that would help me out immeasurably over the course of my life, and conveniently enough lives in the same house as me. In point of fact, there are experts out there willing to give you practical, hands-on training in almost any almost any field you could want—some for money (in places like community colleges), some not—but we have to get our D.I.Y. drives back up and running and quit handing all our problems off to the next person in line. Yes, there’s too much out there to be an expert or even a jack-of-all-trades in every field, but we can learn enough to feel like accomplished, capable and responsible people in our own lives, and maybe the reclamation of that responsibility—and the decision not to fill our kitchen with Manolos—is one of the most responsible acts we can currently strive for.

December 9th, 2008 by Chris Eng

One of the most critical moments for sending me down the path toward self-subsistance was getting my hands on a copy of The Long Emergency by James Kunstler. I plan to review it at length some point soon, but the general thrust of the book is that mankind is headed for a really, really crappy time and it’s going to come within our lifetimes. Kunstler gives a number of reasons for this, but the first one discussed (and the one discussed at the greatest length) is that we’re going to run out of oil.

The phrase used most commonly to describe this problem is ‘peak oil’, and it refers to the point when 50% of the Earth’s supply is used up. The other 50% is the half that’s harder to get out of the ground—in smaller deposits that we’ll have to keep searching for, trapped in hard to extract mediums like the oil sands, etc. Experts figure we’ll hit peak oil somewhere between now and the next 15 years (it will likely be one of those points we won’t know we’ve hit until it’s happened). Meanwhile, the worldwide demand for oil has been climbing ever higher. Both China and India have growing middle classes that want the privilege of driving cars, and the global population continues to skyrocket.

So, what does this mean for the everyman (aside from it being more expensive to drive)? Well, just about everything is reliant on oil. Our food is brought in on trucks; our consumer goods are brought in on tankers; most people commute to work in their own cars. Essentially, the cost of everything will rise. Eventually, when the oil shortage reaches a critical point, the entire system will fail. I’m not going to be some kind of doomsaying prognosticator who lays down an exact date and time when the end of the civilization comes crashing down, but even though I think it’s a ways down the road, that doesn’t mean getting there will be any easier. Society may remain standing in the short term, but if the cost of everything goes through the roof, it’ll be harder and harder to make ends meet.

The tone of The Long Emergency gets a little hysterical from time to time, but its basic arguments about peak oil are pretty sound. In fact, if you distill them to their most basic level, it’s hard to refute them: there is a finite amount of oil in the world and someday we will run out. There’s no Magic Oil Machine to make more when we’re done exhausting our supplies of compressed dinosaurs and algae. Moreover, there’s no eco-friendly substitute to replace oil with. Even if we could make biodiesel a workable option for our cars, we can’t produce it on a large enough scale to power the autofleets of the world. And while hydrogen cells may someday (though not, by the looks of it, any time soon) become viable fuel sources, we can’t retrofit our current cars in order to run off them; we would have to replace all of the cars on the road. On top of that, many of the power plants in North America are run off oil or other fossil fuels like natural gas—which is, itself, running out—or coal. Environmentally-friendly power options like wind, solar and tidal are certainly things that we should be looking to, but we aren’t currently implementing them at a rate that would cover a fraction of our energy needs, and by the time we hit the crisis point it will be much too late. Nuclear energy is a viable option for covering some of the gap, but the concept has essentially become a dirty word and the public doesn’t want it.

So, where will that leave us as supplies dwindle? It will leave us in a world that grows forever smaller. It will become increasingly costly to leave the region we’re currently living in (plane fuel costs grow more expensive all the time, and it’s possible that ultimately none but the richest of us will fly). Prepared food will become more and more expensive, prompting us to grow our own as much as possible. Metropolises will find it harder and harder to support their infrastructure, and small town-life (based on community and local trade) will enjoy a resurgence.

Is there a solution? Not as far as I can see. I don’t think there’s some solution just waiting around the corner that will allow us to keep consuing energy as we have been. Consequently, Carla and I feel its in our best interests to scale back on our consumption (of everything) and plan an exit from Vancouver to our own acreage—growing and raising crops and livestock and taking advantage of small-scale, eco-friendly power generation. Doing so will hopefully allow us to better weather whatever is coming down the road

You don’t have to agree with me on this. I’m not putting this here to enter some kind of protracted argument about whether or not peak oil is a real phenomenon. I know there are plenty of people out there who think it’s a load of crap. That’s fine. They’re welcome to their opinion. I think it’s kind of crazy, but that’s why we live in a society like ours—so we can have differing opinions. Ultimately, peak oil could all turn out to be some horrible dystopian fantasy, but even if it does, the life I have in Vancouver at the moment isn’t the life I want to be leading. Even if it never comes to pass, the race to consume going on every day isn’t what I want to be concerned with. And, ultimately, as long as I manage to get the acreage up and running, I’ll be living the way I want to in a setting I’m happy in.

(Photo courtesy of Michael Foley Photography)

December 6th, 2008 by Chris Eng

You weren’t around for The Purge I, I know. That was a few months ago when I roped my friends into driving me and nine boxes of books down to Pulp Fiction to lighten my collection of Stuff. And in the short term it did. My bookshelves were blessed with noticeable gaps here and there, and there was breathing room… for a couple of weeks, anyway.

And then the books came back, because that’s what I collect, by and large. Yes, I collect comics, but let’s be honest—those are just really skinny books. And I have other collections, but they don’t take up much room. (For instance, I have all the Buffy DVDs, but Buffy’s done and that collection’s not gonna get any bigger… well, except for the new comics, which I’m buying.) No, I collect books primarily, and books are a collection that takes up an assload of room. So much room, in point of fact, that at least half my books are in storage—about 20 boxes at my house and another 15–20 in my home town.

It’s pretty hard to read books in storage and even harder to read those a ferry ride away. And when you can’t access them to any degree, it really makes you consider why you have them. “Well, someday we’ll have the room to display them,” my inner collector pipes up shrilly. “Someday we’ll be in a bigger house with plenty of shelf space and all our books will be on display!” That’s a nice fantasy, but I’m not sure it’s not completely delusional. Even assuming that the next place Carla and I move into will be larger (which is not necessarily assured), I’d have to assemble my collection of books in one place (which will require effort, a truck and ferry fare) and buy more shelves to house them. Well, shelves aren’t cheap (though there are inexpensive ones to be had) and books are friggin’ heavy.

There is wisdom to be gleaned from that line in Fight Club when Brad Pitt sagely intoned that the things you own end up owning you, and that’s something that anyone that’s had to move upward of 100 boxes of boxes could tell you. You start to consider places to live based on the amount of boxes you’ll have to move (and the amount of stairs you’ll have to carry them up), and eventually you just never want to move at all, no matter how bad your home situation is. “I don’t care if I live with an abusive grizzly bear—how could that be worse than packing, moving, and unpacking my crap?!”

So over the past year or so, in the interests of not having my stuff own me, I’ve been paring down my life. Getting rid of Stuff, which is mostly books. A few months ago was The Purge I, which was certainly a success, but I’ve been driven to further reevaluate the rest of the Stuff I own. So I pared down and I made some hard and brutal cuts and I pared down some more and I boxed everything up and took a count after the dust had cleared. End result: thirteen boxes of books and two short boxes of comics to be sold and/or gotten rid of. The storage area in my house is now half emptier than it was a week ago.

The funny thing was, at the end I felt like I had to keep going—find just a few more books to get rid of, clean up my life just that little bit more. Then I looked over at the thirteen boxes I’d already culled and thought, “Hm… I think we’re good for now.”

I feel particularly proud of being able to let go of a couple of collections I was assembling for the sake of collecting—most notably, my Harlan Ellison books and my Vancouver Film Fest Guides. The Ellison books were particularly hard to give up. Almost all of his books are out of print now and they’re continually sought by collectors, so you generally don’t just find stacks of them kicking around—one in a used book store here, one a year-or-so later over there, etc. I’ve been collecting him since I was fifteen or sixteen and over the years have come to amass a respectable collection of 35 or so books (out of the 70+ he’s written). But thinking about it recently, I came to realize that almost all of his stories that I come back to and re-read time after time are contained in his best-of omnibus The Essential Ellison, which I not only have but which is signed—why would I need more than that?! (Okay, there’s a few others I need to keep, but probably not more than, say, six, which leaves about 28 unspoken for.)

The Film Fest Guides I’ve been collecting basically since I moved to Vancouver in the mid-’90s and have been an annual tradition with me. An annual tradition that’s lost a lot of its magic since I stopped being a habitual cinemaphile who went to movies every other day. But I kept buying the guides and sticking them next to the others on the shelf. This past year I barely gave it more than a cursory glance before consigning it to its dusty fate. And really, what’s the point in that? I never go back to the old guides and sift through them for movies to see. I never use them as the reference guides they should be. They’re just something to look at—a collection notable for being a collection. And I don’t have space in my house or life for that anymore.

There’s a part in the Sterling article I quoted a couple of entries back where he asks, in essence, why we allow the things that surround us to be anything less than excellent or beautiful. If there’s a piece of art in your house that’s, y’know, kind of nice, why do you have it? If you own a series of books or DVDs that are only okay, why do you allow them to take up space? If the things you own don’t elevate your soul or inspire you or make you come back to them again and again from their sheer awesomeness, why give them any of yourself at all?

It’s exactly that argument that’s been guiding my buying over the last month or so: “If I buy X, a year from now will I thank myself for doing so? Will my life be better for having bought it? Or will it be something I give scant attention to and then never really look at again?” And let me tell you—even just this far, it’s stopped me from buying a few things that have no lasting value to me.

And that’s the criteria I used in evaluating the Stuff I already own: “If this disappeared from my collection, would I even notice a year from now?” And for the Stuff in storage: “Did I even notice this was packed away?”

Having less Stuff is freeing. It’s satisfying, and it makes the stuff you’ve decided to keep worth so much more because of the purging. And, seriously—take a look around you and think about how good it would feel if you could say that everything on those shelves—every single thing you own—was something of amazing quality and made your life better. That would be a place to come home to. That would be a collection worth owning.

December 4th, 2008 by Chris Eng

It’s true that I think that Tolkien is awesome, yeah, and having your very own Hobbit hole is amazing, but having a Hobbit hole that’s also low-impact and environmentally sound?! That’s better than a Smaug-sized parcel of eleventy-first birthdays. This is now officially one of my favourite houses. (Thanks for the link, Kelly!)

December 3rd, 2008 by Chris Eng

I’m not sure if Bruce Sterling coined the term ‘greenpunk’, but he was the first one I saw use it. It was here (courtesy of Boing-Boing), used in conjunction with a furthering of the concepts inherent in steampunk (a genre of science fiction that speculates what would have happened if steam power and pneumatics powered our technology). What if, instead of using coal to power Victorian technology, they had instead used alternative and renewable sources of energy? What if we were doing that now? What if, instead of having a dystopian and universally grungy version of cyberpunk where everyone is wired neurally into the ‘Net because no one wants to live in the real world, we had a world run off of solar panels, wind and tidal energy? Technology and green living aren’t (or, at least, don’t have to be) mutually exclusive.

Still, there is the division that appears in most people’s minds, which is you either have computers/technology/whatever trappings and conveniences you take for granted, or you’re living in the sticks with your tallow candles, poorly-sewn hempen smocks and Luddite mentality. Which is stupid. This is not a black and white decision that needs to be made, nor should it be. In the above article, Sterling uses another term that’s appropriate here: ‘hairshirt green’—in essence, those people who martyr themselves for the environmental cause by moving out in the middle of nowhere and living completely off the grid with an anti-technological philosophy. There is nothing to be gained, in a larger sense, by doing this. While martyring yourself for the green cause and removing yourself from the ‘Net ensures your emissions and personal living will impact the environment to a minimal degree, dropping out at this point simply makes certain you’re removed from any further discussions on how to lead our lives in the best possible way. You’re making life unnecessarily harder for yourself when you could have the support and wisdom of thousands of other like-minded individuals, and any contributions you might have made will be felt only by those you have immediate contact with.

I view Greenpunk as a concept in two ways:

1) It’s the continuation of a series of ‘-punk’ genres, blending science, science-fiction, technology and culture together in a melange that might ultimately impact with the real world and produce something more than the sum of its parts. Then again, in the end it may only give us philosophical fodder, but it’s not like that’s valueless either.
2) As a collision of the words ‘green’ and ‘punk’. Punk at its heart has always embodied a spirit of community. At its most idealistic, it’s a vehicle for revolution and no one is (or can be) a revolution on their own. It takes a movement, generally with an anti-authoritarian flair, to change society. Considering that the Internet is the greatest communications tool mankind has ever come up with, it’s not unreasonable to think we could form a community (or, more likely, multiple communities) to help us cooperate, collaborate and reach our goals, both individually and as a group—a group of environmentally-grounded people with a D.I.Y., homegrown, punk attitude.

Together, I see the concepts dovetailing in technologically-minded enviro-punks who have every desire to use technology to make the world (and their lives) better but simultaneously want to reduce their footprint on it and impact in it, preferably by returning to some of the concepts we’ve forgotten over the past 100 years (as well as making the remembrance of those concepts easier through the use of technology we’ve pioneered in the last 30 years or so).

Such a lifestyle is not without its own inherent costs—you can’t have a society that still uses microchip and silicon-based technology and not have environmental damage. If you’re producing anything technological on an industrial level there’s going to be waste and toxic byproducts. Still, there’s a balance we can strike (or at least work toward), and by living as sustainably as we can while exchanging knowledge and building community through global networking it’s something we can possibly achive.

I don’t think that greenpunk is the answer to the world’s problems, but I do think it’s a step in the right direction, and if we’re there to help each other out there’s no telling how many steps we’ll be able to take—locally, nationally and globally. Forty years ago, activists encouraged everyone to turn on, tune in, drop out; currently, I think everyone should log on, pare down, act up.

December 1st, 2008 by Chris Eng

I went with Carla to the Home Despot today, partially for something fun to look at (even though we aren’t really in the market to do any kind of home repair/upgrades) and partially because one of the only two Harvey’s in town is inside it (the other is at the Vancouver Airport). We got our burgers with extra pickles and hot peppers and then wandered around to see what interesting things we could glean. Here are some of them:

1) Electric heaters designed to look like fireplaces are, by and large, pretty ludicrous.
2) I do want a chainsaw at some point (probably when I have more reason to use one), though I don’t want one that’s on sale at HD.
3) I can never have too many Formica chip samples. Their Classic line blows my mind every time. It’s like a ’50s diner exploding all over your kitchen counters.
4) HD is a great pace to spend an hour or so, because I have no real desire to spend any money, but it gets me all excited about house stuff in general.

Now for an excitingly domestic afternoon. I’m going to write and purge a bunch of books from my collection (though not simultaneously). I think Carla is bakin’ cookies. Mmmmm… cookies.