Almost on my way to...

I am going to Israel tomorrow! I will be gone for 10 whole days. My friend Wendy and I will visit some friends in Tel Aviv for a few days then join a group of women for the Hadassah Young Women's Mission. The tour part of the trip will take us to Haifa and Jerusalem. Once in Jerusalem, we will take various day trips to the surrounding areas. This trip is unique for me for several reasons:

• I have never been on an organized tour before (more than a day trip). The tour is not just sightseeing, but educational (e.g. participating in community service projects, meeting with Hadassah and other Israeli officials, hearing people speak about current issues, etc.). It is totally weird not to have to plan anything.

• I haven't been away from my kids for more than 5 days EVER. Thankfully, Grandma Bev is coming to help Steve. It's not that Steve can't handle things solo, but my anxiety would be through the roof. I would constantly wonder what is going on and if everything is ok. Bev will be here for 7 days to help hold down the fort and deal with kid management issues. The kids love her and she will be a great distraction when they discover they miss me.

• Traveling solo is a rare treat these days. I can do what I want whenever I want. The only person to worry about is me. I am looking forward to all the things I rarely get to do uninterrupted like reading, sleeping, shopping, thinking, exercising, and relaxing. Now that is easy!

• And I have never been to Israel! Enough said...it is going to be awesome.

The planner in me usually spends several months fretting over all the details. For this trip, I have done virtually nothing except check out the itinerary, order a couple of guide books, and renew my passport. There is definitely more I could have done to prepare, but time has been very short recently as I have been trying to wrap up my final dissertation draft before I leave. (OK, so I have had no time lately. It has been all dissertation all the time. I am exhausted).

The old me would NOT have been ok with this. The current version of me is very tired, but pretty relaxed and zen about the whole thing. I say this now as the dissertation is done! Ok, I admit I am desperate for a break from work and regular life. I am even leaving my computer at home so I can really unplug. I decided that I will just deal with life when I get back, including the looming dissertation defense occurring four days after I return.

Wish me luck! I know, it is kind of hard to feel sorry for me...I am going to Israel!

The Soda Maker

We are not big soda drinkers in our family. (Well, Semira would be if we let her!) But we do have an addiction to club soda. And to make matters worse, I like it in the can. The bottles tend to go flat quicker than I can drink them. Over the last few years, we have bought A LOT of club soda. I am guessing on average at least 50 cans a week. We recycle all the cans, which is a pain when you live in a town without curbside recycling pickup. Well, the guilt of the cans finally got to us so a few months ago we bought our very own soda maker. The soda maker came with two bottles and the carbon dioxide cartridges are refilled so you simply return them for a new one.

While we recycle, many Americans do not. Roughly half of all aluminum cans end up in the trash in North America. Meanwhile recycling aluminum uses only 1/20th of the energy of creating new aluminum. Making aluminum is messy business. If you have been reading the news lately, you get the idea of how environmentally damaging aluminum production is. That gross red sludge oozing through Hungry is a toxic byproduct from aluminum manufacturing. Although recycling is good, it's still the last of the three "r's" so perhaps we need to be thinking of using less.

I dislike the plastic bottles that come with the Soda Stream, but overall am happy with other aspects of the product.

1. It literally takes just a few seconds to make a liter of club soda.
2. No more trips to the store lugging all the cans of club soda. They are heavy.
3. Entertainment for the kids... They like making their own soda.
4. We control what is in their soda. We are using different 100% juice concentrates so they can make their own fruit flavored sodas. In the end, it's regular juice diluted with carbonated water. How bad is that once a month or so?
5. It is way cheaper than buying soda or even the cheapest club soda at the store.
6. It is better for the environment...no cans to be made or recycled and savings of transport of our soda from wherever it is made to our grocery store. The carbon cylinders are reused.

A few weeks ago I was in Cheyenne for a doctors appointment so I took the opportunity to run some errands. I went to Bath, Bed, and Beyond to exchange the empty carbon cartridge for a new one. The clerk had no idea what to do with my request so she called the manager over. Twenty minutes later I am still standing there while three people figure out what to do. I was told that no one has yet to return the empty cartridge. Long story short, the manager digs through stacks of papers in her office to find the contract with Soda Stream. I then get my $15 credit for the empty cartridge and get a new one. I got the impression returning something to be reused was an alien concept for a store!

It is sad to me that everything in our society is either disposable or a piece of crap that breaks. The amount of waste produced for short term pleasure is just astonishing. The really sad part is that no one seems to care much about it. Sure some people care a little, but not enough to make any drastic changes to the system. What if we drank less soda? What if we all made our own soda? What if we reused glass bottles over and over again? The pictures below are from our trip to Ethiopia two years ago. Soda is served in glass bottles that have worn off labels or no label at all. I can't imagine that this would ever fly in the U.S. There would be a revolt!

Beer, Mirinda (orange soda), and Ambo (club soda) - Ethiopian style

Saved bottles outside the restaurant

In the end, making your own carbonated water in reusable bottles is not going to save the environment. It does, however, give one the opportunity to think about what our kids consume, the cycle of resources, and how "disposable" our culture has become. If we're this footloose with material items, at what point do we start treating people in the same way?

Celebrating Three Years w/o TV

Ok well technically we have one TV (as seen in the picture), but it hasn’t had any channels since October 2007. We have a DVD player and watch movies from Netflix, but that is it. I remember fondly that September day in 2007 when Steve said “Let’s get rid of our TV.” My first reaction was absolutely no way. After all, I have important things to DVR like The Bachelor and American Idol. The DVR was the best invention because I could fast forward through the commercials and watch what I wanted when I wanted. It was supposed to save time and I would watch less TV. In reality, however, I still stayed up late, usually finding something to watch on all those cable channels. Lily was three at the time and we didn’t yet have Semira. Lily did watch TV, but only Nick Jr. and PBS…stations without commercials (but not without commercialization!). The commercials were advertising the other shows, but not sugary cereals and worthless plastic toys. So I rationalized that things were good. But it was hard to deny that TV was a mindless activity and total waste of time for us all. My biggest issue was that Lily was turning into a beggar even with the supposed lack of commercials. I think this is what made me change my mind and agree that TV must go.

So we did it cold turkey. I canceled the cable and joined Netflix…then waited for my withdrawal symptoms to kick in. At first I watched a fair number of movies as a substitute. But I found out quickly that I needed a longer block of time and I had to actually pay attention to the movie. Then I ran out of interesting movies to watch. So I started doing other things like reading books. Not a magazine, but books and lots of them. Along this journey, I have learned quite a few things. Perhaps even better, it has had some unanticipated, positive side effects.

If you need compelling evidence of the negative effects of commercials on children and the absolutely horrible marketing techniques used to turn your kids into little consumers, please read Juliet Schor’s book Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. This book should make you scared, very scared.

• Now for some quick TV stats from online: Children ages 2-5 watch 32 hours of TV per week while 6-11 year olds watch 28 hours. Sixty-eight percent of kids have TVs in their rooms and 63% of families have the TV on during meals or eat in front of it. Kids see an average of 20,000 commercials each year. Seriously??? Now I don’t feel so bad about Lily and Semira watching 5 hours of movies per week.

• Even without TV, my kids still beg for crap at Walmart. I hate to see how bad it would be if they watched commercials all day long.

• Lily and Semira do not understand the concept of a commercial. This was evident last fall while staying at a hotel. One of us turned on the TV and found some cartoon. Soon the cartoon cut to a commercial. It was mass hysteria. What happened to their show? I had to explain.

• I can’t tell you how much more time I have. I wish I had kept a list of all the books I have read in three years. It has to number in the hundreds at this point. I don’t like fiction at all; they are all non-fiction books about things I care about.

• I get way more sleep. I am usually in bed before 9 p.m. and get 8-9 hours of sleep a night. In my 20s, I never went to bed before 11 p.m. because I always had to catch some show. Because of my long commute to work, I was up around 5:30, averaging only 6 or so hours of sleep a night. I was always tired.

• I get asked why I don’t just set some rules to limit TV time with my kids instead of getting rid of it altogether. That’s an easy one. If I am trying to lose weight, I don’t have cupboards full of crap to eat then tell myself to have willpower. By having no TV channels, we rarely have arguments on limits and I am never tempted.

• Since I pay for Internet only through our cable company, I save about $80 a month on our bill (this was what it was three years ago to have some expanded cable package, the DVR box, and HDTV channels). This has added up to some real money - $2,880 in three years. Plus I don’t spend money always buying the latest, greatest electronic device. We had wavering thoughts this summer about getting a flat screen TV to watch movies on. That ended when I did a simple cost benefit analysis about the cost per movie watched if we made such a purchase.

People can live without TV. I am living proof that regular people can reject something so mainstream and still be normal. I don’t live under a rock. I still know what is going on. I don’t feel deprived. Instead, I feel great! I don’t miss TV one bit, which is perhaps the biggest surprise of all! You should try it. You might actually like it.