Tag Archives: Simplicity

I’m going to get today’s point across by telling you a few stories.

The Dryer Game

The laundry facility I use is small, crowded, and often quite busy.

There have been times when every single washer and dryer is in use when I’ve shown up with my dirty laundry.

Once there was even a line of people waiting to snag a washing machine the second one became available. That was one overloaded day, pun intended.

Some people do like wait around for an available machine. After trying that once and getting frustrated by the folks who like to let their clothing hang around in the machines for hours after they’re done washing or drying, I started making rules for myself.

If all of the washers and dryers are claimed, do not pass go or unload your laundry basket. This game was doomed from the start.

If a few washing machines are free but all of the dryers have just been claimed, come back in 30-60 minutes. Some of the machines will probably be free by then. If they aren’t, try again on a different day.

If there are enough washing machines right now and at least one dryer looks like it will be free by the time you’ll need one, start the laundry immediately. Not everyone uses all of the time on their dryer, so you could end up with far more dryers than you actually need.

It’s easier to take your chances on this when a few of the dryers will run out of time in the next thirty minutes or so anyway.

Rethinking Steak

Those of you who have followed this blog for a long time might remember that I’m not a big fan of meat, especially red meat.

I react to it the same way many people seem to react to vegetables: a part of a balanced diet, but definitely not the fun or enjoyable part.

(When I was a kid, I actually ate a plate full of lettuce as my after school snack every day. That’s how much I liked and still like vegetables!)

The other night I went to a friend’s birthday dinner at a restaurant that is known for its steaks. There weren’t a lot of other dairy-free options on the menu, so I ordered a steak for my meal.

Historically, I’ve asked for well done meat because I thought that the red juice you see in cooked steaks was blood. The sight of it completely grossed me out. It was only recently that I learned what it actually is, though, so this time I decided to order a steak that was cooked to medium instead of well done.

What a difference that one decision made! My steak was juicy and delicious. It’s still not something I’d want to eat more than occasionally, but it was a much better meal than the steaks I’ve had in the past.

Tying It All Together

Sometimes trying things another way makes all of the difference in the world.

What problem or situation have you approached from a different angle recently? How did that work out for you?

Comic by Grant S.

Many visitors are surprised by how little my husband and I own.

We live simply in a very small apartment. We don’t own a car, couch,  dishwasher, washer, dryer, table, chairs, or a lot of the other stuff that most people have in their homes.

I’m happy with what we do own. It’s enough to cover all of our needs (and most of our wants), but it never feels overwhelming.

There are some people in the simplicity movement who’ve pared it down to just 100 items, including stuff like clothing. It works well for a lot of them, especially if they travel a lot or don’t make many meals at home.

For me, that would be too bare-boned. I don’t particularly like washing the dishes, but with my allergy to milk it would be tricky and expensive to eat every meal out. (It would also be much less healthy).

And I like owning enough clothing that I don’t have to do laundry every week. If a pair of socks counts as 2 items, you could only own a few of them before they took up too much space in the 100 item count.

The trick to any movement, I think, is to use it only to the extent that it works for you. I don’t talk about our voluntary simplicity on this blog as often I used to because it’s so well-integrated into our daily lives.

What about you? What movements have you dabbled in without committing to everything they have to offer?

About six months ago Drew and I cancelled our cable subscription. We’ve been watching our favourite television shows on our laptop.

Losing commercial breaks and all of the stuff advertisers want us to think we need was refreshing. I wasn’t expecting it to affect me as much as it did and does because when we had cable we rarely if ever paid attention to commercials. That time was usually spent by going to the kitchen for another snack or finishing up a quick chore.

Yet when we cut commercials out of our television habits I slowly noticed that I was less and less interested in new stuff just for the sake of having it. I’m happier to wear things out or use them up now. Even though I’ve never been the type of person to, say, buy a new wardrobe every year I did grow tired of what I owned more quickly than I do now.

And then I began to notice something creeping onto the foregrounds and backgrounds of some of my favourite shows:

Product Placement

A few characters gather together for a meal. Rather than sipping a cold drink from a glass tumbler they now drink name-brand juice or fortified water whose labels just happen to be in view of the camera.

They haven’t written what they are drinking into the dialogue (so far…) but until I train my eyes to only read on command I can’t help but know their beverages of choice.

Is this the new face of advertising?

If it is there is at least one advantage: the show doesn’t have to take a break to flash a product at us.

But every time it happens I’m momentarily jarred out of the world that each television show creates. When I watch a program I buy into certain assumptions about the way TV-land works:

• Vampires were born to mope.
• Female superheroes fight better in skimpy clothing.
• Women who wander into dark alley ambushes need a man to rescue them.
• If two people despise one other the first time they meet it means they are destined to fall in love.

Sometimes these assumptions are turned on their heads (see: Buffy the Vampire Slayer). At other times they are not (see also: Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

To this list I’d also add:

• TV-land packaged food is manufactured by imaginary companies.

Part of the allure of fictional stories is the promise of escaping into another world for a little while. Product placement ruins this aspect of it for me.

The question is, in what other ways could products be marketed to us if fewer and fewer people are watching commercials?

What do you think?

Now that we’re about a month into the new TV season I thought I’d give an update on our cable-free experiment.

So far we have had little to no trouble finding most of our favourite TV shows. At times I do have to wait a day or two for certain shows to become available for download, and certain ones are not always easy to find, but once I figured out that my shows will show up eventually it quickly became part of everyday life.

The price of individual iTunes episodes turned out to be a little more expensive than we had originally thought, so we did cut back on a few shows that, while interesting, didn’t seem worth the extra two to three dollars per episode. Small amounts here and there can add up quickly by the end of the month! I’d like to see the price come down for individual episodes on iTunes in Canada, especially for the half-hour programs. Right now it costs less to rent some movies that it would to rent two episodes of a sitcom that, added together, only provide about 45 minutes of entertainment.

It doesn’t make sense and I honestly think they would make more money if the price for individual hour-long shows went down by a dollar or two and if half-hour shows were just a little less expensive than that. At this point, viewers have a real disincentive to choose shorter programs when we can watch an hour long show or a movie for the same amount of money.

Download speeds do seem to vary quite a bit depending on the time of day. We’ve learned to download our shows first thing in the morning if at all possible, as they seem to finish more quickly that way. Downloading more than one show at a time also seems to help speed up the process. (Or maybe it just seems that way because I have more than one show to look forward to? 🙂 )

If there’s one thing I haven’t missed one bit, it is commercials. I can’t stress enough how nice it is to avoid these interruptions, especially in our drama and scifi/fantasy shows where it is very common to cut away at the most inopportune scenes. Once or twice now I’ve stumbled across a traditional television program while away from home. No sooner do I begin to become interested in a program than a commercial pops up. These interruptions are becoming an excuse for me to wander away from the screen and do something else every 5 minutes. I think I’m losing my tolerance for commercial breaks as I don’t remember noticing them so often in the past!

As the weather grows colder, Drew and I are spending more and more time indoors watching our shows, reading and surfing the Internet. The temptation to follow more and more interesting shows is only going to grow for us as winter approaches and the average daily temperature drops closer to freezing. I’ve been trying to come up with alternative (and free or inexpensive) indoor activities so that we don’t spend too much time staring at computer or television screens.

Honestly, I wish we’d done this a year or two ago. The benefits far outweigh the occasional slow download time, new episodes that take a little extra time to show up, or the temptation to begin watching more and more programs over time.

One unexpected advantages so far of not  having cable TV is that I no longer need to argue with the commercials.

Candles. Dish soap. Body wash. Laundry detergent. Fabric softener. Deodorant. Hand lotion. Feminine hygiene products. Shampoo. Mouthwash. Toothpaste. Wood polishers and other cleaning products. Disposable dusting clothes. Everything is scented these days.

If I want the scent of fresh lemons in the kitchen, I will buy some fresh lemons to cut, peel or juice in there. If I want a living room to smell like flowers, I’ll….go admire the fresh bouquets at someone else’s house.  If I want to bask in the scent of  fresh laundry, I’ll head over to the laundromat and wash some of our clothing. (What does fresh smell like, anyway?)

Part of the problems is, I think, that marketers believe that clean has a scent. It doesn’t or at least not the scent of rainwater, fruit, flowers, sunshine or oxygen. Clean dishes/clothes/houses smell like nothing at all. That’s why we wash them. Clean people soon develop a faint aroma unique to their own body chemistry, but that’s nothing to be worried about. Making you smell like you is exactly what your body is supposed to be doing!

On the rare occasion now that I catch advertisements for scented things the entire scented-life-stuff industry seems even more ridiculous than it was before. Especially when one considers that scents mix. It isn’t just one scented product, after all, it’s layer upon layer of them- a noxious mixture of hairspray, cologne/perfume, body wash, mouthwash and shampoo on each person in the room, plus  the aroma of any scented candles/wall-plug-ins as well as a faint whiff of any strongly scented cleaning products that have been used in that area recently-  that were never intended to be inhaled at the same time. Because of this they clash. Sometimes horribly.

I have no love for any of it. Which is why I reserve the right to argue with the faulty logic of commercials who try to convince us that adding extra scents to products that don’t need to be scented to work properly is a good idea by any stretch of the imagination.

A few weeks ago Teresa from Thoughtful Eating recommended that I read Living More with Less by Doris Janzen Longacre, a book about the connection between social justice and simple living from a Mennonite perspective. This book illustrates a few of the many reasons why if I was ever going to go back to church it would almost certainly be a Mennonite congregation.

Most of the books, articles and blogs I’ve read about simple living are focused on the benefits of those things for us as individuals. There’s nothing wrong with choosing a more frugal lifestyle for personal gain but Longacre’s focus on the often mindless waste of resources in the west and her description of how changing these habits can benefit others as much if not more than it helps us was a breath of fresh air.

My favourite section of the book involved a list of imaginary development problems that were commented upon by people who lived outside of the United States.  Topics ranged from building energy-efficient public transportation to connect small towns across the U.S. to living without disposable goods to using fewer kitchen appliances and less energy when cooking. Their suggestions for these problems showed how difficult it can be to offer realistic solutions for systemic problems in cultures that you know little or nothing about.  Yet people in the west often give similar well-meaning but misguided advice about which seeds to buy or irrigation systems to use when the people who actually live in that society already know that those items or ideas aren’t going to work for their community. I had never thought about this before and it was a section I re-read several times.

The second half of the book contains tips on getting the most out of what we do use whether it is the clothing we wear, the food we eat, the homes we live in or the celebrations we have for weddings and baby showers among other events. These tips ranged from how to use vinegar to get rid of soap scum to how to build your own home in the side of a hill or out of recycled materials.

One of the biggest drawbacks to many the techniques described in this book, though, is that they require a lot of time and skill. Maintaining a vegetable garden, preserving food safely, cooking every meal at home from scratch, sewing your own clothes, building or retrofitting an eco-friendly home out of recycled materials…none of these things are easy to do when one is already working a full-time job elsewhere. This is something that is feasible for families who live in a rural setting and can devote at least one adult to learning and doing all of these activities. It is more difficult, though, for the 79% of Americans who live in urban areas (80% in Canada) or the 61% of  women who work outside of the home. (59% in the US).

I recognize that this is partially a matter of cultural differences between 1980 and 2010 and (to a degree) cities and rural communities. To be fair, the introduction does say:

Approach this book as if it were an invitation to a treasure hunt rather than a summons to a final exam. Doris Longacre has no interest in legalism or works-righteousness.

One of the things I respect the most about Longacrue is that she isn’t dogmatic about the application of every suggestion in this book.  I don’t know if I’m romanticizing the Mennonite community or if I have just happened to continuously  meet people from that background who approach even their most strongly held convictions with humility and grace but this is something that I deeply admire about them.

I do wish, though, that one of Longacres descendants would write a sequel to this book that addresses the societal shifts of the last generation or two and offered more examples of simple living for the sake of others for everyone outside of the breadwinner dad, stay-at-home mom and several young children model of life. I can only imagine what sort of creative solutions have been hammered out over the last three decades.