Baking is so much fun. There’s always something new to try, plus you get to eat the results (well, unless they’re too burnt–we’ve all been there). On top of that, there are lots of different cool tools. I’ve talked about some of these before, but there are two additional ones that happily are in our kitchen: a pizza stone and a baking steel.
A Lifetime of Pizza
Why are those two tools in our kitchen? It’s all in a name: Pizza.
Like most other kids, I loved pizza growing up. Back then, it was simple: Your Mom buys the Chef Boyardee pizza box from the store and you follow the instructions. The big tools you need are really just a bowl to mix up the ingredients, some oil, and a round baking pan to put the pizza on. Some minutes later, the pizza comes out.
I’ve heard of it happening to other parents and particularly grandparents. Great social thinkers have considered it. But, for me, it was the first time to think, “What kind of world am I leaving to my kids?”
Funny How this Came Up
You’d think this concept would have come up during some deep, meditative moment when thinking of my family and the greater good. This is reality, though, and stuff comes up at the weirdest moments. In this case, it was when I was gathering the trash to take it out to the bins.
We’re a family of four right now. Four people’s not really a lot, especially when two of them are under five. Looking at how much trash I was pulling out of our trash cans, and in turn filling up the bin, made me realize that we generate a lot of trash, though.
To Give Perspective
Well, I was going to rule this world, but now that it’s such a pigsty, forget about it.
Now, we don’t have the biggest bin you can get from the trash company, but it’s not the “I just have enough to fill a grocery bag” size either. So, overall, we’re not generating the most or the least trash on our street.
The whole “legacy for my kids” thing, though–that came up because I looked at our trash bin, then looked up and down our street at all the other homes putting out (big and small) trash bins. If you multiply how much we’re putting out by all those homes, let alone a city, and then think “Where the @!$# does all this go? Are my kids going to end up living on these garbage heaps later?”–well, that’s a bit of a wake-up call.
Sanity Check First
OK, before I could get too wound around the axle, how much trash do people generate per year? In Oregon, per this report (in PDF), we generated 1,549 pounds of trash per capita in 2017. Yes, that’s 1,549 pounds per person. The total of amount of waste was 5.5 million tons, with 2.3 million tons of that being recovered (e.g., for recycling, etc.).
How about the U.S. in total? From the EPA’s 2015 numbers here, we Americans generate 262.4 million tons of waste–which, as they so kindly point out, means each person is throwing out 4.48 pounds of stuff per day. The total of that recycled or composted was 67.8 million tons.
The interesting thing is that, if you read through those links, these numbers are comparatively good. That is, they aren’t even our peak trash generation. Well, at least that’s some positive news. But still . . . that’s a lot of waste, and it all does pile up somewhere (in landfills in the U.S. or another country). And do I want my kids to have to live on or around that? Would you want to live in the midst of it?
Let’s go with, “No”.
Starting at Home
Even though this really is a nationwide problem (just focusing on the U.S. here), the idea came up at home, and that’s the best place to start fixing it. After all, this whole article is because I realized how much trash we make.
Our Bins
The Usual Suspects, Waste Bin version.
We get three bins where we live: A recycling bin (with a side tote for glass), a trash bin, and a yard waste bin. The yard waste bin we fill up and sometimes overfill will all the things that grow here in Oregon (and grow, and grow). That one doesn’t really count as a waste problem as it should be able to be reused for compost, mulch, etc.
The Recycling Bin
Recycling generally shouldn’t count as waste, either. I mean, it’s recycled, not thrown away. But here’s the ugly truth: Not all that goes into recycling will end up getting recycled because sometimes it gets contaminated with other things. You have 100 houses putting out recycling and sure, some trash can slip in and not be caught at the recycling center; that could ruin the whole load.
The bigger point is: It would be better if you had less to put in the recycling bin anyways. That’s the old “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” concept. Buy economy size bottles instead of several little ones if you actually need that much. Say “no” to extra containers when they’re not needed. It’s less to carry home, less to clean out, and less in the bin.
I feel we do fairly well at recycling correctly, which is partly because I’m like an anal-retentive bin policeman. There’s a sharp eye on what is making its way in there versus what should be in the trash, and vice versa. We could do better at the “Reduce” part, but most of the recycling is from food staples. As not eating isn’t a viable option, I’m not sure how much we actually could reduce the recycling.
The Trash Bin
Our biggest problem area is the trash bin. There are several things we generate as a result of being parents of little ones. Disposable diapers are the biggest thing; they take about 1/4 of our bin up. We’d greatly prefer cloth diapers, but had to give up on them due to skin sensitivity issues. We can, however, work on potty training as quickly as possible to cut down on that waste.
Paper towels are also another big part of our trash right now–and yes, we know it’d be far better to use real towels. But once you realize that kids under five are incredible mess-makers, and you’d end up doing a whole load of real towels everyday anyways, paper towels are AMAZING. And worth the extra trash load.
Another big trash item, and a sensitive one for those of us in the rainy Pacific Northwest, is disposable coffee/cocoa/drink cups. A warm drink is good comfort, but I do hate having to get a stupid disposable cup every time. Something we can work on, then, is seeing if our favorite places will let us bring our own cups.
What We Keep Out Already
Just so it doesn’t sound like we’re throwing everything away, we are doing really good at a couple things. Take-out food containers have been one item we’re now putting in the trash less. The point where we went to a nationwide chain restaurant to get takeout and they gave us containers that would have fit our meals two or three times over–that was our line in the sand, because what a frigging waste. Now we make eating out special and eat at the restaurant (usually), and act like people who know how to use real plates and silverware.
We also aren’t buying things that we don’t need. In turn, we then (usually) don’t throw away things until they are no longer capable of serving their purpose. This has greatly reduced the amount of things that go in the trash. Which then lets us keep the medium-sized (cheaper) trash bin for pickup instead of the large (more expensive) one. Score one for savings!
Is This Enough?
With those few things that we could improve on, is that really enough to make a change in our nationwide trash problem? Of course not, if it’s just us doing it. But if everybody takes a step, not to be perfect but to be a little bit better, we’re going to make a huge dent in our trash production.
Which might help leave our kids a decent world after all.
Been dealing with your own attempts to reduce your trash load? Share your successes and failures in the comments. Suggestions are welcome too–we’re all in this together.
About every other week, I’m posting about a project I recently completed. Usually this involves baking, as that’s my favorite project, but it could involve books, home projects, etc. Dads have lots of roles, after all. This week’s project was completing Ursula K. Le Guin’s book The Dispossessed.
And that’s right, there are no pictures for this post. I’m sure Pinterest will survive.
I read a lot of fantasy books, along with horror books. Mix in a little bit of science fiction, a little bit of mystery–yup, that’s good for me. But I will admit I tend to get stuck on the same authors, the same narrow topics sometimes. That’s really not helpful for exploring new concepts, whether from old or new writers.
Into the (Somewhat) Unknown
With that in mind, way back in 2011, I found a list on Amazon of their Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books. There are plenty of “Top 10” or “Top 100” lists to choose from, but this one seemed pretty interesting, so I grabbed a copy and said, I’m going to read these books.
Quite a few of the books on the list I’d already read–things like Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and some of the Xanth series by Piers Anthony. There were books and authors I’d never heard of though–Larry Niven, Brandon Sanderon’s The Mistborn Series, Timothy Zahn, Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, etc., etc. Enough to push me out of my comfort zone and explore.
Oh No, Not This Author
One author that I’d read before and had not enjoyed was Ursula K. Le Guin. There, I said it–I don’t like her writing. I’d read A Wizard of Earthsea and was very hopeful, but it just didn’t do it for me. Then, I found that there were not one but two other books by her on my list.
Now, here I am trying to expand my horizons, and I did the exact wrong thing–avoided reading those two books. Finally, I forced myself to read the first one, The Left Hand of Darkness. It was alright, and definitely led to some thinking afterward (particularly in regards to the conversations at the very end), but I still wasn’t a fan.
The Dispossessed: Third Time’s a Charm?
Finally, after completing The Left Hand of Darkness, reading several other books, and practicing avoidance of the final Le Guin book, I decided to tackle it. This one, The Dispossessed, talks about a man traveling from his home world to an Urrastas, which is the moon for his planet and vice versa.
There’s a lot of culture shock with the travel: Anarres, the home planet of Shevek, the main character, has aspects of socialism and communism that make for a world where everyone is provided. Everyone has to work, though, in order to survive in their minimalist, non-ownership culture. Urrastas, on the other hand, is like a utopia, a paradise, where so much is available so easily if you are willing to pay. Or, as is the case with Shevek’s hosts, have people pay for you.
Going through Shevek’s early time on Urrastas, and his history on Anarres, takes up the first half of the book. Here is where my complaint comes in–it is a long slog through that first half. Yes, yes, the plot and backstories and intrigues build through it, but it’s not riveting reading.
Fortunately, the second part of the book really does pick up speed and breadth (a tiny bit of a spoiler here). Shevek begins to see the bad that goes along with the good. He learns that his knowledge of temporal physics is what really drove his hosts to bring him to the planet. As expected, it guides him into looking at what is good and bad between Anarres and Urastas. There’s even more, including eventual introduction of other alien species, but I won’t spoil the good parts.
Finishing the Book
I did, of course, finish The Dispossessed–I have a hard time stopping a book once I start. As I mentioned already the overall second half wasn’t bad, and the ending was quite well done.
So was this third book the charm that will drive me to like Le Guin’s books? No. I just don’t enjoy her writing style. She seems to want to drive to a point and sometimes, as with this book, it takes her a very long time to get there. I do appreciate that her books give you something to think about, in this book as with The Left Hand of Darkness. That’s not enough to draw me in for more, though.
Final Thoughts
Ursula K. Le Guin’s book The Dispossessed has previously won the Hugo and Nebula awards. The Left Hand of Darkness, published earlier? The same. Each of those books also won several other awards, and Le Guin won a myriad of awards during her career. So, while I might not like her books, plenty of people did. She passed away in 2018 after writing an extensive number of series, standalone novels, collections, and poetry.
For more information about Ms. Le Guin, you can check out this web page.
I’ve briefly mentioned before about living in a hotel when I was an engineering contractor. Between those stays, which might last up to months, and stays for personal travel, I’ve seen a lot of hotel rooms.
There are lots of nice things about hotels–someone cleans up after you, there’s usually a pool and exercise room, and the “social hour” snacks are alright too. One of the things I liked best, though, was all the little items in your own room that just made it, well, comfortable. When you leave to go home, you’d expect to feel even more comfortable. Home is your own place, after all. But there’s something that never feels quite so open, quite so “getting away” as when you’re in a hotel room. Is there a way you can bring some of that feeling, that hotel living, home? Well, you don’t have to wait–just keep reading to find out how to make the answer yes! 😀
A Focus on Two Rooms
There are two major areas of focus: The bathroom and the bedroom. Why? Those are the two spaces that all hotel rooms are made up of. If you get a nicer hotel room, or a larger one, then sure you’ll have other spaces and items to consider. Let’s keep this simple, though.
You’ll want to focus mostly on the bathroom and bedroom that you use the most in your home. If you’re fortunate enough to have a master bathroom attached to your bedroom, that’s what you’ll want to look at. If there are multiple bathrooms in your home, choose the one that has the best facilities (e.g., a bath instead of a shower, dual sinks, or wherever the kids are least likely to intrude).
Let’s Start with the Bathroom
What do you see when you first walk into the bathroom at a hotel? Apart from the toilet. You see a clean, organized space; the little things on the sink are neatly laid out, the trash can is tucked away, and the towels are all folded up.
Shower time
The shower is likely the epitome of all that cleanliness: There are few things, if any, on the shower’s shelves. If you want to bring hotel living home, start there by getting rid of all the things you don’t need in your shower. Those things that are crucial? Sure, keep them. The bulk size bottle of shampoo and the multiple soap bars? Move the shampoo to a smaller bottle and just have one bar of soap. Give yourself some space to enjoy moving around in the shower!
And, to truly enjoy that space, make sure you invest in a good showerhead. Most hotels have multi-setting showerheads so you can do anything from blast yourself to just have a little mist. You don’t have to spend a lot to get one of these, although you can get some very fancy ones if you truly want to make the investment.
Beyond the shower
To keep the area around the shower clean, get a towel that’s different from all the others to serve as your bath mat. This is one thing that hotels do that has a lot of wisdom: They just use one nice, unique towel for you to step on without slipping. They (and you) could use a fabric bath mat, but those are really difficult to keep clean and a pain to run through the laundry.
Finally, apart from keeping your floors and toilet clean (and your trash from overflowing), the other thing to do is have minimal clutter around your sink. Put all the often-viewed-seldom-used things away, find a drawer for your toothbrush and toothpaste, and minimize the decorations. In alignment with my wife’s post on hospitality, keep an extra basket or stand with some small, extra bottles of shampoo and soap on hand in case you or your guests need them.
Did your hotel ever have a sink this messy?
Much better, eh? You could just walk up and use this.
That’s it for the bathroom. Streamlined, improved, and ready to move on to the bedroom.
The Bigger Space: The Bedroom
Do you really want to know why it feels so good to walk into a hotel room? Yes, sometimes it’s that you finally completed the end of a long, dreary drive. Yup, you can watch TV channels that you might not get at home. But with both of those, and other reasons, there’s one big point: The bedroom has enough space to drop your things, and is clean so that you can go anywhere and sit anywhere without dealing with “stuff”.
The biggest, best thing you can do for your bedroom, then, is similar to what you did in your bathroom: Remove all the clutter. Dirty laundry: into the clothes basket. Coats: They go in the closet. Kids’ toys: Back to the kids’ rooms. Anything on the dresser: Find a place for it. That feeling of openness, of peace you just got there? Already so worth it. Now for the more fun stuff.
Start with the bed
The big focus point in your bedroom is, of course, the bed. In a hotel, the staff makes the bed up for you. Get off your butt and do it yourself every morning to have that experience. Again, it keeps things looking clean and brings hotel living home. While you’re dealing with the bed, get a set of nice sheets and a decent comforter to put on there. Hotels are good at putting nice bedding (though not expensive) on. They’ve also become very good at providing pillows of different firmness and size to help everyone sleep better. If you have a hard time sleeping (like I do), indulge here so that you can find the option that fits you best every night.
Finish with the nightstand
In both the hotel and in most peoples’ homes, there’s a nightstand. Keep it simple: Limit what’s on there to a light, a book, and an alarm clock, just like a hotel room. And turn your darned phone off or to Do Not Disturb, because there’s very little you’re going to be needed for or can solve overnight anyways.
Very much not hotel-level cleanliness there.
No clutter or anything else to stress about here. The little pink monster my oldest gave me is quite happy.
Hopefully, with this, you’ve got a bedroom with very little clutter and a very big sense of space. Since it’s the current fad, you can call this following Marie Kondo’s methods. If you’re like me, you call it minimalism (which came way before Ms. Kondo, by the way). Either way, it’s a step towards having the hotel experience in your own bedroom.
You Can Do This, and More
There you have it: If you want to bring hotel living home to your bathroom and bedroom spaces, it’s primarily about minimizing what’s out on the multitude of surfaces, and keeping organized those few items that are out. With that, and a very few purchases, you can experience hotel comfort in your personal spaces.
There are many other things you can do to try and achieve the hotel living experience. You can prepare snacks for you and your family for your own “social hour” in the afternoon. Putting away the rest of the clutter in your house is great, too (and helps prevent bare feet from meeting hard LEGOs). Even some small purchase like a new entry mat for your front door can be a step in the right direction.
We can’t duplicate the entirety of the hotel experience in our homes. I hope that this post has given you some insight into what you can do, though, to make your bathroom, bedroom, and the rest of your home feel like a great place to be.
About every other week, I’m posting about a project I recently completed. Usually this involves baking, as that’s my favorite project, but it could involve books, home projects, etc. Dads have lots of roles, after all. This week’s project, Boston Cream Pie, is from the The Cook’s Illustrated baking book.
Boston cream pie is, when done well, truly incredible. The interesting thing is that, at least in the restaurants we go to, it’s not served much anymore. Similar to the previous project, Baltimore Berger Cookies, I last had one while traveling; in this case, on the east coast. Go figure–Boston cream pie is more common around Boston.
If you’ve never had a Boston cream pie, you can see the pictures in this post, but the general idea is this: Cake layer on the bottom. A cream layer in the middle. Another cake layer on top of that. All of this is capped off with a chocolate layer that surrounds the top cake layer and drips down the sides. So, yes, with all those layers you don’t need a large piece to get a lot of dessert.
Money can be a great thing to have, and a terrible thing to be without. I’ve known people who are great at managing it even when barely making ends meet, and people who struggle financially even though they’re making six figures. Today’s post about having an austerity month is definitely more for the latter group–so if you’re struggling just to pay the bills, take a breath, and just take whatever you can out of this.
There have been multiple articles on how money doesn’t really buy happiness, at least once you get past a certain point. A 2010 article from Time indicated that your day-to-day happiness doesn’t increase once you make more than $75,000. A more recent article from Money magazine (which references the previous one) looked internationally, and found that it took up to $95,000 for those of us in North America to be happy, or $105,000 if you include long-term goals and other metrics.
Getting Personal
For us, the idea that we’re able to go out and buy a superyacht or a mansion to live in is ridiculous. Our bank accounts are far below that threshold. We are at a place, however, where we can fulfill our needs and quite a few of our wants. The trick is in those “wants”, though–it’s very easy to spend a lot of money on new toys (my weak spot), caffeine-based drinks (the wife’s), or myriad other things that you believe will bring more happiness into your life but really don’t.
About every other week, I’m posting about a project I recently completed. Usually this involves baking, as that’s my favorite project, but it could involve books, home projects, etc. Dads have lots of roles, after all. This week’s project, Baltimore Berger Cookies, is from King Arthur Flour. You can find the recipe here.
I’ve had to travel sometimes as part of my job. When I was a contractor for a systems integrator, this meant traveling to different places in the U.S. Moving into the non-contractor world, the rare travel situations have been to other countries.
No matter how good or bad a trip to another country is, the food experiences are always interesting. Lots of people rave about incredible dinners, but on a trip to Finland a couple of years ago I enjoyed breakfast far more. The overall amount, variety, and quality of food was excellent, but one little item became a favorite morning treat. It was a crisp cookie which had a fairly basic dough flavor, but was half dipped in chocolate. The crunch of it, the smooth chocolate taste, were a nice little sugar rush to wake my jetlagged behind up.
I felt weird doing it, but I took a picture of one of those cookies. I was unable to find anything about it online once I got back, and I couldn’t find any recipe that really looked like it. That is, until King Arthur Flour published in their magazine Sift about favorite foods in different states. And lo and behold–Baltimore had something called a Berger cookie that looked darned close to what I ate in Finland. Of course, that meant I had to make it to see if it actually was similar.
While driving home from work the other day, I marveled for the umpteenth time about how nice of a drive it is from work to home. Why is it nice? Oh, sure, it’s not a super-busy stretch of road I’m driving, and the views of open fields next to suburban neighborhoods are great. Those aren’t it, though. The real reason the commute is so nice is because, both time- and distance-wise, it’s short.
Traffic is the Real Problem
I entered the working world at the same time I was learning to drive. This led to commuting from school to work and from work to home. The great thing was that we lived in a rural area. Those less populated country roads allowed you to just get in your car and go. Cruising down the road at the speed limit (or a little higher)? Not a problem.
I’ve mentioned Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast before, which is for making breads. A companion book to it is Forkish’s The Elements of Pizza: Unlocking the Secrets to World-Class Pies at Home. It has lots of great recipes for dough, sauce, and the overall pizza. Making the New York Cheese Pizza was my personal project for this week.
Preparation
We prepare our normal pizzas within the span of about 15 minutes: dough, sauce, toppings, the whole shebang. With the New York Cheese Pizza recipe, you prepare the dough two to three days ahead of time. The dough yields three dough balls, so you can make three different pizzas (or get three chances to do one right 🙂 ).
Here’s what the dough balls look like fresh from their second fermentation in the refrigerator:
Doughballs, Fresh from the Fridge!
The sauce can also be made ahead of time. You can get most of it done in the blender with prepared ingredients, and then there’s a bit of cooking with some sugar. Here’s what it looks like in the blender:
Somedays, it feels like “responsibility” is treated as a dirty word. In our current sensationalized-news and media-centric environment, the idea of ensuring that we serve, and love, those around us seems, well, outdated. Tell someone they’re responsible for something and you’re just as likely to get a finger pointing at someone else as an acknowledgement.
From a real-life conversation . . .
This all came to mind the other day when walking with some friends. The one said, “I get the feeling Keith goes home and sits down and reads with his kids and spends time with them”. Then, jokingly, they pointed to another friend who’s a dad and said you expect he just goes home and drops all his efforts at the door.
Yes, they were joking about that other dad. I have known dads, though, who fit that mold. These are the ones who invest more time in their work than their family, who feel like video games are more important than quality time with their kids (see this previous post about that), or who feel they have the same responsibility level as their kids.
