We have a fairly new HE washing machine. For values of ‘new’ that are almost 5 years old. It still seems like just yesterday that the 70s vintage washer we inherited choked on a load of diapers and ground to a permanent halt, prompting us to purchase a new one.

I digress. The point is that the dryer that came with this house is getting into its teenage years and not working so well. Lately I’ve had to run a regular load of clothes on the hottest setting for the longest time twice to get ‘em dry. I’ve tried cleaning it out and making sure it’s well vented and all the parts are hooked up properly. Maybe there’s a magic dryer-saving hack you’ll tell me about in the comments.

In the meantime, I’ve been idly toying with the idea of getting a new high-efficiency dryer. Would save on utilities, etc. etc. Last week, I got this super-high-efficiency model. It uses no electricity whatsoever.

I grew up hanging all our laundry on the line. In Tucson. I always figured New England was the Wrong Climate for this activity. But if Katy Wolk-Stanley can do it in Portland, I figure I can take a shot at it here.

So far the system that seems to work is to put everything big – adult shirts and pants, towels, sheets, etc. – on the drying rack and machine dry the ten thousand baby socks that find their way into just about every load I wash. So I’m still using the electric dryer, but so, so much less.

No related posts.

Last September, when my five-year-old started kindergarten, she also went to swimming lessons twice a week, gymnastics class once  a week, music class on Saturday mornings, and a weekly play group at the community growing center.

My toddler had a lighter schedule, comprised of only swim lessons and a weekly playdate at the library. I had my own array of classes, workshops and meetings I was committed to. Oh, and then there was church.

In the past few months, we’ve quit everything.

Inspired by the wise women over at Slow Family Living, we gave up almost everything on our schedule.

The kids loved their activities, and so did I. It turns out that I love our free time even more, though. The seed of this was planted one afternoon last fall when I dragged Rio away from a friend’s house where she was having a great time jumping in piles of leaves so I could get her to her gymnastics class on time. What the hell am I doing? I thought.

Also, I really, really hate being out with the kids around dinnertime. They turn into little Gremlins, and I turn into one of those moms from an 80s movie who’s tearing her hair out in the background while the kids run amok and accidentally save the day in the midst of, say, building a tower out of expensive glassware in the middle of a store.

Speaking of expensive, all these extra-curricular activities were not cheap. Each one seemed reasonable, but put together we were paying almost $200 a month for classes and activities and memberships. That’s money that can go toward getting us out of debt faster, not to mention paying for things we really care about like travel.

So. We quit.

I talked the quitting scheme over with the kids in small doses. How did they feel about going to swimming? What did they like about gymnastics?

The two-year-old of course didn’t care at all. Her big sister had some opinions, and I was careful to listen to them. She likes swimming, for example, but doesn’t like to do it in the winter when her hair gets very cold after leaving the pool.

Sounds like a silly complaint, but her swimming class was timed exactly at our dinner hour, so two days a week she was cold and hungry while packing up her stuff to leave a busy social space. It was tantrum city, every Monday and Wednesday. Similarly, gymnastics classes are great fun, but the only one we could get her to had us driving home at rush hour, always running late to pick her sister up. The stress of that transition was no fun for anyone.

We didn’t quit absolutely everything: Rio got to pick one activity she wanted to continue, and she chose her Saturday morning music classes. They’re great: conveniently timed, close to home, and the only thing we have scheduled on Saturdays. Not at all stressful for anyone.

What we do now: Not much

Suddenly we have all these free afternoons. Rio goes to play at a neighbor’s house about half the time. Serena and I take long snuggly naps. We watch cartoons together, and bake cookies.

Along with quitting all the external stuff, I’ve put down my agenda about educating and enlightening our family. We spend more hours relaxing and playing together, and fewer hours Being Productive. That’s just fine with me.

The best part is being able to do pretty much the same thing every evening. Their dad comes home, we’re all hanging out there reading or watching a movie. We throw dinner together, eat, and then he takes the kids upstairs for a bath and bedtime. Every day. So smooth.

The other best part is being able to do whatever we feel like with our afternoons. Library? Sure. Science Museum? Fine. Playdate? Great. Suddenly cancel all existing plans in favor of getting naked and eating popcorn on the kitchen floor? Sure, kids.

This is really hard, but really good.

I have a lifetime habit of overscheduling myself. Its hard to hold empty space in my days for play. I keep noticing with surprise that all my days are booked from morning to night with new activities or playdates or commitments. All that free time is gobbled up before I have a chance to spend it.

Except it’s not really free time. There’s a cost to giving it away. It costs me the ease and simplicty the kids and I enjoy when we come across a day with nothing on the calendar. That’s a pretty high price to pay for a swimming lesson.

When I can hold the space, it’s good. It’s so good I’m still looking for more things I can throw off the boat to lighten our load. More ways I can relax into just being with these little girls, for the remaining moments they’ll be little girls content to swim in an ocean of “free” time.

Related posts:

1. More on the Wonders of Quitting
2. Kid's allowances: what's the right approach?
3. Flu Shots

Yesterday I wrote about several steps to making a life change stick. Then in the shower this morning, I thought, “Oh! I need to write more about journaling vs. simple record-keeping.”

And sure enough, the first comment on yesterday’s post was from the always thoughtful Rebecca Weger, saying, “The most important piece for me is around your bullet for writing things down. For me that translates into journaling about the issues and my feelings about them. Then I dig into noticing. Finding ways to pay attention to what is happening, what choices I’m making, and what is spurring those choices.”

Journaling about an experience you hope to transform is one of the most powerful tools you can use to change your habits, your experience, your life. There’s a substantial body of research, largely done by James Pennebaker at the University of Texas in Austin, that shows writing can have profound impacts on our health and well-being.

The Pennebaker method for journaling includes:

• Find a time and place where you won?t be disturbed. Ideally, pick a time at the end of your workday or before you go to bed.
• Promise yourself that you will write for a minimum of 15 minutes a day for at least 3 or 4 consecutive days.
• Once you begin writing, write continuously. Don?t worry about spelling or grammar. If you run out of things to write about, just repeat what you have already written.
• You can write longhand or you can type on a computer. If you are unable to write, you can also talk into a tape recorder.
• You can write about the same thing on all 3-4 days of writing or you can write about something different each day. It is entirely up to you.

Pennebaker and his research team have found that writing about trauma can help students heal. Not merely from the traumas they’ve experienced, but from the common colds and flus that affect college kids. Students who write about a traumatic event visit the health center less often and report fewer illnesses.

In separate experiments, Pennebaker found that people who have been laid off will find jobs faster if they journal about their feelings about unemployment than if they simply keep a log of their job searching activities. Both the journalers and the log-keepers found jobs faster than those who kept no records at all.

What makes journaling so powerful is that it engages us on a lot of levels. We bring our hearts and minds to the page. The act of writing helps us define and understand more deeply what we think and feel. And it aids our memory. We’re also committing, if we write about something over a period of time, to a certain energetic engagement with the topic.

I’m an inveterate journaler. I started my first diary in a little white book with a fragile gold lock on it when I was 8 years old. I, um, still have it upstairs on a shelf with the dozens of journals I’ve filled since then. These days I write about my life for a good part of my livelihood. So naturally I journal about just about everything.

I’ve found that to be really effective, I need to keep both a long, rambling, no-holds-barred journal and a clean, simple record. Writing about the unpleasant realities of grappling with debt while in financial free-fall is powerful, motivating stuff. But it’s no substitute for keeping track of every cent I earn or spend. I need to do both.

Because I’m me, and disorganized to the bone, I need to do both *separately*. If there’s not a bright line between my records and my journals, it all turns into a messy mush of long paragraphs interspersed with charts, a monthly budget with poetry in the marginalia. Not a pretty sight.

I use a lot of tiny notebooks: one for my cash tracking, one for my professional story ideas, one to write in when I get a creative flash, one for jotting down dreams. I also use a lot of computer tools, including Remember The Milk, Evernote and Quicken. (Regular readers know I actually have a whole *thing* about personal finance software, and Quicken is a band-aid at best).

For many people, journaling is key to powerful life changes – or simply to living an examined life. For others, like all magic keys, it just doesn’t work. Like most things, the key is to get started, and to play around until you find a system that works well for you.

Related posts:

1. How to Change Your Life
2. The dangers of bulk buying, and joining the Wise Bread staff

I have a post up on Get Rich Slowly today about getting the ball rolling with financial management, where I talk about “cross-training” skills from one area of your life to another.

Here, I want to just quickly lay out a recipe I use for making meaningful personal change in any area. You may recall, personal change is kind of a kink of mine.

Here’s how I do it:

• Set an intention: it’s vital to be really clear about what you want to do, in as specific and realistic a way as possible. Not simply, “I want to be a writer” but, “I want to be supporting myself making X income doing this type of writing by such-and-such a date.”
• Know where you’re starting from. Thorn Coyle talks a lot about ‘knowing yourself in all your parts’. If you want to change something in your life, whether its a small habit or a major life change, you need to know who you are and what that part of your life is like now.
• To get that knowledge, keep a record. Just write down what you do. What you spend, what you eat, what you dream, what you write. Whatever area you want to focus on, to transform, put your attention there with a journal or a log.
• Energy flows where attention goes. Once you know what you are doing now, take action to change it into what you want to be doing instead. Remember that you can’t simply break a habit; if you cut something out of your life you need to replace it. Choose what to fill those gaps with as you create them, or life will pour in and clutter them up while you’re not looking.
• Make that action small, sustainable and as much fun as possible so you can keep doing it over the long haul.
• Repeat as necessary.
• Enjoy the fruits of your labor!

I’m curious how you all do these things. How do you change your life?

Related posts:

1. The Power of Small Change
2. Choosing a Greener Life Together
3. Keeping a Journal

Fakeplasticfish has a post up about conflict between couples about green living, in which she quotes my post from last week about making green choices together.

Beth Terry, the woman behind Fake Plastic Fish, has gone to amazing lengths to cut plastic out of her life. Last year, she produced something like 4 pounds of plastic trash. It’s her cause, and she’s clear that she’s a little crazy about it.

This is not a cause I’m taking up. I simply do not have the energy to go after one environmental battle with that single-minded a focus. But I’m incredibly impressed with what Beth has done, and even more with how she’s done it.

She’s passionate about personal change. So am I.

Small, personal changes in our lives matter not because of the impact we have as individuals through those changes, but because they prepare us for the moments when individual action can effect large change. Rosa Parks is a great example of this. The popular story about Ms. Parks is that she was a tired old lady who one day got fed up with the injustice of a segregated public transit system and refused to cede her seat to a white person on the bus.

It’s true that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, and that she didn’t plan that act of protest that day before she got on the bus. She had genuinely come to the end of her rope. But she was also a lifelong labor rights activist who had spent many years learning how to stand her ground for something she believed in. When that moment arrived, she was ready and able to do what she had to do.

This, to me, is the real value of carrying a reusable water bottle, or biking to work, or being a vegetarian or whatever you do. When you change your life in the direction of something you want, you get stronger. You become better able to defend what you love, and to push back against forces that might previously have overwhelmed you. You get used to feeling powerful and free, and that makes you mighty.

This is especially true when you do something that scares you. As Starhawk, one of my early spiritual teachers, likes to say, “Where there’s fear there is power.” If you’re afraid of something, probably you have some energy tied up in it. Doing the thing you fear can free up that energy and in turn make you more powerful.

Yes, the changes we make in our personal lives have power because of their collective impact. If we all give up plastic water bottles or factory-farmed meat, we can create powerful change as a group. The Quakers did this when they spearheaded a grassroots boycott of sugar in Britain to protest slavery – and it worked.

But even more powerful for me is the way these small, daily shifts in habits are an exercise of will, strengthening our willpower like a muscle. So that we’re ready to use it when we need it.

Related posts:

1. How to Change Your Life
2. Small girls vs. The Ducks
3. Oh my power is great and terrible!

On the heels of my Monday post at Get Rich Slowly about talking to your spouse about money, here’s a reader-requested post about how couples can communicate about green lifestyle choices.

In general, my husband and I get along fine about our green living. Our values about things like making green life choices are very closely aligned. It’s something we both care deeply about, and we never have to argue about the underlying principles. For us, the decisions are about how to best use our limited resources to live into the values we share.

That’s a different problem from a couple where one spouse is deeply invested in green living and the other is not. As the New York Times reported last week, conflict about green values can be a real problem for couples.

Here are some hopefully helpful tips on smoothing those waters:

• Set a time to talk. Make a time to talk to each other about the changes you’d like to make (or not make) to green up your lifestyle. Stick to that time. That means both showing up and being present for the talk, and resisting the urge to ambush each other while brushing your teeth or cooking breakfast.
• Be specific. Don’t just start an open-ended conversation about “living green”. Have a change you’d like your partner to commit to, and be ready to make the case for why it will work in your lives and why it’s worth doing. Want to insulate the house? Agree to have one vegetarian meal a day? Swap all the lightbulbs in the house for CFLs? Fine. Know what you want and be able to make the case for it.
• Be realistic. I’d love to put solar panels on our roof, rip out our home’s 100-year-old plumbing and install a graywater system and composting toilets. My honey would veto those moves in a minute, for good reason. We can’t afford them. It’s important for both of you to be realistic about what changes you have the resources to make.
• Start small. If you’ve been a meat-and-potatoes family for twenty years, sitting your spouse down and announcing you’d like to the whole family to go vegan probably won’t go over well. Making simple sustainable changes will feel better, inspire less conflict and do more good in the long run. This connects to the realism piece: you need to be real about what you can live with, or you’ll burn out fast and bounce back to bad habits.
• Let some things go. You and your partner have to live together, but you’re not the same person. It’s appropriate to ask your partner to cooperate on household items that affect you both or require resources from both of you. It’s important for each of you to be able to make your own choices about issues that are more personal. For example, I do the Compact; like Katy, no one else in my house does. I can’t require my husband to commit to buying nothing new. I just live my own choice on that one.
• Include your kids. Even my five-year-old is very committed to “not giving the earth a fever”. It’s important to keep kids involved in green choices, both because it empowers them now and because it teaches them how to make good choices as adults. They can also be a big help; having the whole family on board is crucial to the success of any lifestyle change.

How do you communicate about green life choices with the people you live with? Are you on the same page or in constant conflict? What are your tricks for making changes stick in your household?

Related posts:

1. The Power of Small Change
2. Car-free family, for the moment
3. How to Change Your Life

I’m feeling pretty bah humbug this year. I’m tired, broke and grouchier about the weather than usual. The holiday season feels less like a joyful opportunity to reconnect and more like a train wreck of social, family and financial obligations.

But tis the season, so I’m bucking up and doing my frugal best to be festive. I’ve written quite a few gift guide articles for other people this year, not to mention letters to Santa.

Here’s my ABC guide to what I would like to get this Christmas:

Art: It’s my poorly advertised ambition to fill my house with beautiful artwork. In the past year, I’ve received gorgeous pieces from Molly Tomlinson, Nica Davidov and Rachel Silber. You who are artists, or inclined to shop for art: keep me in mind. I’m easy to please and a very appreciative audience.

Babysitting: Last year, Martin arranged a year’s worth of monthly dates for us with friends offering babysitting credits. This was THE BEST THING EVER. I would cheerfully take it again. And again. This is a great gift for me, and probably ever other parent.

Charity: I have a guest post up on Get Rich Slowly today about the value and importance of charitable giving. If you’re interested in giving on my behalf, or anyone else’s, check out Rowan’s terrific guide to charitable gift programs.

Related posts:

1. Christmas Chocolates
2. The Compact
3. All She Wants For Christmas Is Her First Grown-up Tooth

Only a few weeks into life without a car, I am throwing in the towel. Which towel, you ask? The sopping wet one in the back of the bike trailer that got the seats almost dry, but not so dry that my ass wasn’t soaked by the time we got to music class on Saturday. In addition to being cold and wet, I was in considerable pain due to some ongoing health issues.

When our van died, I did a lot of soul-searching about what I needed and wanted from a car. Should we repair it and try to limp through the winter? Let it go and be car-free? Replace it?

What I got to was: I wanted to stop worrying about my car. I wanted more peace, ease and freedom. I wanted whatever car decision would lead me in that direction.

Clearly, repairing my van was not the path to greater peace and freedom. Maybe I could have what I wanted through the simplicity of just not owning a car. That decision totally lined up with my values: gentle on the earth, frugal, independent, simple.

Maybe, I allowed, I would find it untenable. I’m not a particularly hardy flower. Once the temperature outside drops below 40 degrees, I’m inclined to stay indoors until the flowers bloom again. I also have two little kids and a teenager with unpredictable transportation needs. It might be that not having a car would bring me more misery than having one.

So I decided to go car-free for the time being, and save for a reliable car that would give me the most boring car ownership experience possible: one where the car was just there whenever I needed it, and did not cause me a lot of financial headaches. I didn’t even last a month.

I was clear that to live without a car, I would have to make some big adjustments to my lifestyle and learn some new skills. I wish I’d read this article at Car-free With Kids before we bought the car, instead of stumbling on it the day after. It’s a terrific guide to getting started as a car-free family.

I think I still would have bought a car, though. This is not the moment in my life to make the shift to being car-free. My recent chronic health issues make biking, and even walking any real distance, a challenge at times. I’ve basically lost the ability to tow my kids on my bike. The rainy day trip I mentioned above cost me two days of pain in my wrists, arms and ankles.

My kids are also still in car seats. It turns out I am not willing to carry two car seats while herding two kids along a busy street in the rain to pick up a loaner car or a Zipcar. It is a totally doable thing, and there are mamas out there who do it all the time, but I am not one of them.

One of my core values as an activist has always been to choose personally sustainable paths for being the change I want to see in the world. I don’t want to see anyone crying into their lentil soup while yearning for a steak, or grudgingly homeschooling their kids. There are, as the poet Rumi said, hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Each of us has to choose the ones that are right for us and go there with passion.

I don’t love driving, far from it. But it quickly became clear that car-free living is not sustainable for me at this moment in my life.

So we bought a car. If we had to have a car, I think we made a good choice. We got a great deal on a new-ish Mazda5. It’s incredibly cute, which was an unexpected bonus. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the most fuel-efficient six-passenger car on the market. We can take our whole family for a ride without towing around a lot of extra vehicle capacity every time we run to the store.

I’m delighted with the car, and feel like it’s the least of car-ownership evils available to us: an affordable, reliable ride that suits our needs and is as gentle on the planet as it can be.

But I have mixed feelings about having it. It’s much easier to be gentle about other people’s personal limitations than it is about my own. I’m grateful for the privilege we enjoy in having this vehicle. Even though I know that between my health issues and the ages of my kids, having a car is a better choice for us now, I’m embarrassed that I gave up on being car-free so quickly.

I still think being car-free is a great choice for families in my neighborhood. Its just one that requires more patience, fortitude and physical strength than I have available right now. One very cool family in our area writes a blog, Car-free With Kids, with great advice about diving into car free living and support for those doing it. I strongly suggest checking them out. I read them regularly for inspiration on how to drive less.

Related posts:

1. Car-free family, for the moment
2. My Big Question: Is Free Trade a Good Thing?
3. Ten Tired Tips for Frugal Family Living

Imagine having to face the climate impact of your greasy take-out as you place your order? Or seeing the carbon footprint of your cookies clearly labelled alongside the calorie count on the back of the package in the grocery aisle?

The NYT this week reports on an experiment in Sweden doing exactly that. The Swedes have adopted a new labeling system for grocery items and some restaurant foods that tells consumers how their food choices affect the planet. Swedish shoppers are in for some surprises. Apparently tomatoes come with a high carbon cost, while carrots are practically free from a sustainability perspective.

Swedens new food guidelines encourage people to think of environmental health as an integral part of a healthy diet, just like eating a balance of nutrients and keeping to a reasonable number of calories. As consumers, we’ve grown accustomed to confronting the ingredient lists and caloric content of our foods.

As research reveals that about a quarter of our carbon emissions come from the foods we eat, those of us hoping to eat our way to a smaller carbon footprint can take hope from the fact that these dietary guidelines can reduce an individual’s “footprint” by 20 to 50 percent. That’s a more exciting number than losing inches or pounds!

I’m eager to see a US version of this. This labeling program gives consumers a simple, holistic way to connect the health of their own bodies to the health of the planet. Only when we see those systems as truly interconnected will we act to preserve them both.

Related posts:

1. family footprint
2. MomsRising releases searchable database of safe products
3. Growing in the garden: making mud

Our mechanic called today to read our van its last rites. I’m not really in any kind of financial position this week to buy a new car, or even a new-to-me car. I’m just getting out of debt, and starting to put aside an emergency fund. It has an impressive $500 in it. I am impressed by this figure. The car selling people will not be.

So we are, for the moment, a car free family. In the few hours since I found out about this, we’ve been offered two long-term loaner vehicles from friends, and discovered that Zipcar parks some vehicles right down the street from our house. We live in an urban neighborhood on a bus route, a few blocks from a bike path. I work at home, and Martin commutes by bike. He drops Rio off at school on his way; her kindergarten is on his campus. It’s all very convenient for a car-free life.

I’m not as enthusiastic as I thought I’d be about this. I love the convenience of having a car. I’ve had one my whole adult life. But it’s strangely relaxing to be out of options. A bit like learning to swim by being thrown into the pool. Starting today I get to figure out how to be car free.

It’s clear to me that I don’t know how to do it well yet. In the couple of months that my van has been very unreliable, I’ve depended a lot on rides from friends or being able to borrow a neighbors car. Those aren’t long-term sustainable choices. I need to learn to use my bus routes, and build up my fitness for biking more. I probably need to invest some of the money I’m saving on car insurance and gas in better winter gear and good shoes. There will be things I just don’t do because the weather is icky and I don’t want to work that hard to go out.

But we’ll be OK. The car has been a luxury for a long  time now. It’s one I know I can live without. I’m hoping I’ll find some grace in doing the “green” thing and getting to know my neighborhood better. But I’m also planning to sock away the cash I save so that I can buy a car in a few months if this turns out to be Too Annoying To Live.

Related posts:

1. Caving in on car-free living
2. My Big Question: Is Free Trade a Good Thing?
3. family footprint