Homemaker

Don't ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.

Harold Whitman

I recently attended a presentation by a fairly well known city planner (ironically, I don't remember his name). After he was formally presented by the host, he came to the 'stage' and introduced himself as a homemaker. No, he did not stay at home with his family every day, but his home is the earth and his ultimate goals in life revolve around maintaining and the earth so that we can live on it.

I really liked his perspective. I want to take a step back and define what a 'homemaker' is. By traditional definition, my wife is a homemaker. She stays home and tends to the children, keeps the house and does the laundry, etc. Unfortunately, homemaking is often looked up on as "not doing anything" or "not living up to your potential". I couldn't disagree more. I think one of the most important tasks on this earth is to raise the next generation and prepare them for the world they will eventually run. Don't get me wrong, I do really important things all day, like telling people to be more active and eat better, but it when it comes right down to it, my career has little lasting power. The work my wife does at home raising our children has effects that will last many generations. My job makes money, hers doesn't, but I would say that my wife is of far greater value to our household than am I.

So what does my wife do in keeping our home? She spends a lot of time tending to children. Sure, she could put them in front of the television (if we had one) and let the programming slowly suck the knowledge right out of them while she got more housework done. She doesn't. She interacts with our children at the expense of a pristinely clean home. I would have it no other way. Don't get me wrong, our home is presentable. Our things are generally where they belong and you can easily walk from room to room. Is the floor scrubbed daily? no. Is the dusting done weekly? Lets just say the dusting is done weakly. Could we be making more money and be able to give our kids more 'stuff' if my wife were to go get a job? Absolutely. I think the focus of our efforts to live simply revolve around our effort to increase interaction in the home and demonstrate that happiness comes from relationships and not stuff.

That is what I want to do as a profession as well, just on a different level. I want to be a 'homemaker' for the earth. My niche is in city design and active modes of transportation. I want to help design cities that promote walking. While I'm certainly interested in improving the health of people, more importantly I'm interested in increasing opportunities of people to talk with one another and interact. Does it take 'stuff' to interact? No. On the contrary, as people acquire more stuff, it seems to draw them apart into little cliques that limit interaction. Do I think that the earth is suffering from the amount of 'stuff' people have? Yes I do. While I have some very strong environmental views, I think the greatest benefits that will be seen from living a more deliberate and purposeful life is that we can lose the dependence on stuff and increase or improve our relationships.

You may note that there is a lot of room for compromise and I think that some 'stuff' is OK. Here is the key to my environmental views, as well as what I think will improve social interactions and society as a whole... Our current rate of consumption is going to destroy the earth. That doesn't mean we should all be aesthetics living with nothing, but living to build relationships rather than accumulations of stuff will greatly improve the earth and the fabric of society.

Thanks to all who commented on my son's blog, he was really excited about it.

6-years

This will be a quick post because I don't like to take the time away from my family on the weekends. Today is our sixth Wedding anniversary. I think that it's interesting that there are debates in the school newspaper editorial section on marital conflict. There is one group that claims that the more arguments at the beginning of marriage the better because that way you work out the areas of conflict early in the relationship. Another group claims that arguments are bad, the idea is to get along in a relationship. And yet another group claims that more isn't necessarily better, but you also can't hold stuff in; you have to communicate.

This argument in the newspaper shows a couple of things. Number one, we have one of the lamest editorial sections ever for a student paper. Number two, there seem to be different ideas on arguments.

Here's my experience. I've got the perfect wife and we've never really had an argument. That doesn't mean that we always agree, we just don't really argue. We discuss, and I love the discussions that I have with my wife; that's why I married her, we can talk forever about anything.

I also married my wife because she is simple. I don't want that to sound bad, a simple woman is often thought of as less intelligent or less than pretty. That is most definitely not the case. I look back at dating and am EXTREMELY grateful that my wife is simple. We never had to decide the point at which we were exclusive, we always were. We never had to play the silly dating games of hard to get or whatever (she just didn't like me at the beginning which made it a challenge). We communicated, not in trying to impress, but simple, straight forward truths. It's amazing what telling the truth and being honest will do to a relationship.

Here are some other ways my wife is simple... I have only seen her in make-up once. It was the night before our wedding and her friends convinced her that she had to wear make-up for her wedding. She tried it and came down to show me. She looked ridiculous. She's beautiful without it and I think that all women are prettier without the war paint. She doesn't shave her legs, even though I do (actually neither of us have shaved in quite some time). She just doesn't care what people think and I admire that about her. I think her greatest quality is that she always tells the truth. That seems like a little thing, but I think it is often overstated. I think most people consider themselves "honest", but my wife will always tell you the truth, she will never lie. Even if it is something that is hard to say, she won't lie to you. You name it, she tells the truth. Santa, Easter Bunny, where babies come from... she tells our kids pure and simple truths. Her relationships are built on truth not trying to impress. That is what impressed me and has continued to impress me for the last 6+ years.

What to write?

First off, I have had good intentions of blogging more frequently than weekly, unfortunately 14-18 hours a day at school have made it so I neglect the blog a little. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll be back to a more frequent schedule.

I had all sorts of wonderful ideas for a blog this week, but then my wife went and gave me no choice but to blog about her. So here I was, I had a HUGE test on Tuesday that I spent a little time studying for. I had a 12-15 page paper due on Friday in my first ever Civil Engineering class and I was running a little behind in my progress. I finished the test on Tuesday morning and stayed on campus until late Tuesday night. Wednesday is my light day at school, so I knew I had to put in some solid hours on my paper so that I had time to get it done. I went to my classes in the morning and was sitting down, getting started on the paper when I got a call from my wife. She needed me to come home. Why?

Really this should be a long story of what happened, instead it's going to be short, because not much happened. My wife was coming down the stairs. She didn't fall, she didn't trip, she just stepped wrong and heard a loud POP and felt a lot of pain in her foot. Then she hopped around and screamed until she got the chance to call me.

This is a photo of my wife's foot. Notice the bruising. She really got some nice color. It was pretty. So I offered to drive her to the OR, but no, she wanted to wait and see. I did some tests prescribed by the athletic trainers at school which suggested there could be a break and an x-ray was needed. Apparently, part of the peroneal tertious tendon pulled a small piece of bone off. My wife got a boot and that's about it. Final diagnosis: Fractured foot.

I had a racquetball student this year do the same thing. She broke her ankle going down the stairs. When she told me she actually made up a bunch of stuff involving being chased by a dog to make the story sound better. We need to come up with something better.

So I came home and spent the afternoon with the family instead of writing a paper.

The paper turned out fine and I enjoyed the time with my family, but it sure made Thursday sort of rough.

On Friday my dad and step-mom came to visit. We had a great time and enjoyed their visit. Six-pence is going to turn two next month, so we decided to have an impromptu birthday party for him. He liked that. He insisted on wearing his Halloween costume to open presents, and we insisted that he remove the costume to eat dessert. Here are some photos.

How to paint a popcorn ceiling

Happy birthday to my wife! For her birthday I painted the ceiling in the bedroom... Now I have some questions. How do you paint a popcorn ceiling?

First off, does everyone know that a popcorn ceiling is one of those highly textured ceilings that I think were popular in the 70s (my wife wouldn't know about such things, she wasn't alive yet).

So I went to the hardware store and I bought white paint and a high texture roller. Then I started painting. My intention was to end up with paint on the ceiling so that it looked clean and white. That is not what happened.

I dipped my roller in the paint and I rolled it across the ceiling. The "popcorn" texture stuck to my roller and the paint dripped on my head. I continued, thinking that eventually paint would have to stick to the ceiling. It didn't. The more I rolled, the more I tried to apply pressure and get paint on the ceiling, the more that fell or stuck to my roller. Sure, I got some paint on the ceiling. It may even look better than it did before (or then again, it may not). I did some mathematical calculations to find the exact results of my efforts.

If I include the large areas of ceiling that never took to being painted and the fact that I couldn't get the paint into the deep texture (the little that remained), I calculated that I have paint coverage on 14% of the ceiling.

I then calculated the surface area of my body that was covered with paint, etc. The bottoms of my feet were covered. Head, face, and shoulders were also pretty much covered. My arms were heavily splattered, but I would not call them covered. My legs and body that was covered with clothing was not harmed in the least. I calculated that 17.4% of my body was covered in paint.

The final calculation that I did was to find the amount of popcorn left on the ceiling. Based on the fact that the roller would no longer pick up paint because it was covered in texture and the amount of texture on my head, face, shoulders and feet, as well as the texture that ended up in the paint I was trying to get onto the roller and the texture that has now dropped all over the floor in our bedroom, I calculated that 6% of the original popcorn is still on the ceiling.

The big flat parts and streaky paint job don't look especially good, but I did get some paint on the ceiling. For less of a mess and lower cost, I think today I will buy 20 gallons of paint on the way home, take the lids of and throw the paint at the ceiling. I think I will have better success that way.

Happy Birthday Dear!!

5 Years!

This is a blog. I'm a passionate person and I write about those things that are important to me. I write about bikes, the environment, simple living and my family. Today's post is about the thing most important to me of all, my wife and our marriage.
Today is our 5 year anniversary.... I can't believe that she put up with me for that long. When I was younger (I was going to say when I was in school, but I'm still in school) I didn't understand marriage. I had Jr. High crushes like the next guy and I would think, "I could marry her, she's cute, funny and I like being around her." Then it would fade and I would move onto the next crush that I never built the courage to talk to. I really don't miss Jr high or high school. That was the pattern for most of my younger years, but eventually I would actually talk to the girls and occasionally make a complete fool of myself by asking them out as my voice cracked and I stumbled over every word.
I don't know how well my family knows this, but when I first asked my wife (before she was my wife) on a date she refused me. In fact she refused me a lot... for months. You see, what I learned in college was that in order to make my voice not crack and to avoid looking like a fool i had to make the date invitation sort of informal. So I would go over to my wife's apartment and ask, "Hey, I was going to go to Tuba-fest, do you want to come?" And she would respond, " no, not tonight." That was that and we would move on.
I started hanging out at her apartment a lot and she still didn't really acknowledge my interest, but i really liked talking to her (and asking her out and getting rejected). One day I worked up tons of courage and left a rose on her bike that she would find on her way to school. She thought it was from someone else... Or maybe she hoped it was from someone else. Anyway, I eventually convinced her that I was interested and she sort of gave me the time of day... begrudgingly.
We really fell in love on long road trips when we had hours of driving and talking. My wife is brilliant, and has the potential to do anything that she wants. She's extremely talented and well organized and is really good at getting stuff done. She would be quite successful in the business world. She wants to use all of her talent to raise children and bring them up to be contributing members of society. She is also active in the community in as much as she can be while still devoting the requisite time and energy to raising our boys. And when I say raising our boys, it is more than babysitting. In her free time she reads about parenting techniques and schooling so that in 2 years the Mugwump will have the best opportunities possible. I don't think there is anything that my wife can't do. She even puts up with me!
I've read on several websites about couples who don't see eye to eye on environmental or simple living issues and they spend their lives trying to convince one another. My wife and I have similar views on almost everything. That's not to say that we never have different opinions, but in five years we have never really had an argument. It's also not because we hold it in. We talk about it and it always just works out.
After five years of marriage, I feel bad for every other guy in the world who had to settle for someone inferior to my wife... I feel for them, i don't know what I would have done if I had had to settle for another woman. I get along with my wife better than I have ever gotten along with anyone in my life and I often think that she is the only person to every really understand me and who I am. There is nothing as important in my life as my wife, my marriage and my kids. Even if I rant about the environment sometimes.