Surviving the Workday

I have read a number of posts in the blogosphere that hint at the seasonal changes in our lives that happen in the late fall. For those of us north of the equator, it’s colder this time of year, there is less light, and our moods often seem depressed. I know that several years ago, when I left on my commute at 5:20 a.m. and returned hom3 around 6:30 p.m., I could scarcely function this time of year, and it wasn’t just the commute (though that was part of it). At least part of the problem at this time of year was that I spent most of the day inside and not in natural light.

So if you are having seasonal issues with your mood, as a remedy*, I suggest trying to spend at least 20 minutes (an hour is much better) outside each day, hopefully in the sun. For those of us with office jobs, that might mean:

Being in the light is a mood elevator, and you will gradually start to feel better. Being outside gives you an opportunity to find a source of wildness in your workday (and there is plenty of wildness in cities), a sense that there is life and death apart from what goes on between cube walls under fluorescent lights.

While we experience our indoor-ness most acutely this time of year, it’s not just an issue for adults in the workplace.

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Finding community seems to be one of those issues that comes up again and again in the workplace, particularly for people who work at home. Where is the community? Is it with coworkers online? with others in online communities? With their immediate families at home?

Shannon at Apartment Therapy describes how she found community in her day by going door to door in her neighborhood to gather signatures.

But walking around over the past few days, no, not just walking around but walking up onto people’s porches and in to conversation with them, my relationship with my neighborhood has changed. I feel more free to smile and say hello to people I see on the street, the way we did growing up down South, not just while petitioning but just out doing my regular activities. I feel more curious about my neighbor’s lives, not just their paint jobs and property values.

I’ve said “I am your neighbor” so many times that I’m starting to believe it.

I’ve gone door to door for water issues in our neighborhood, and it totally changed my outlook too. Not only did perfect strangers invite me into their homes and lives, but my notion of what it means to survive and struggle was broadened hearing about the lives of others.

Since I learned of World Shutdown Day, I like the idea of limiting my technology use so that I have time to recharge and do things other than reply to an endless stream of emails. Stephen Elliot even spent a month offline. Now for a writer, that’s pretty impressive. I’m not particularly good at it, but I like the notion.

GhostGirl found a new trend in limiting technology (new to me, anyway): Email Free Fridays catch on in the U.S.  During Fridays at certain business places, email is limited while person-to-person communication and phone calls are encouraged. You are allowed to send attachments, and external emails, but not internal emails. It’s not a bad idea, though I could see having a half dozen drafts started in email.

GhostGirl notes that they can pry her email from her cold dead hands. Other thoughts?

Ghostgirl sent me a link to hikaru dorodango or spheres made from mud. I’m not sure why I find looking at them so soothing. If you’re in New Mexico, you can see the artist’s work on Canyon Road in Santa Fe (of course!) and he also wrote instructions for creating a sphere of your own.

 If you’d like to paste a soothing link to your favorite art in comments, please feel free.

Biking to work is a tip that comes up often in green circles. And in theory, I think it’s a great idea. I don’t particularly like cars or the fumes they produce or their use as status symbols (at least in Southern California), and I like the idea of making the commute real exercise. So in theory? Good tip.

In practice, I will never ever ever bike to work. Not only do I live rurally and off a scary highway (and work at home), but I’m not a great bicyclist and I know it. My brother is a great bicyclist and has been injured multiple times, not only by cars, but by other people on bikes. And we went to the funeral for his brother-in-law, who was killed while on a bike by a drunk driver. I just read Collecting the Door Prize, which details the bike accident of a freelance writer and subsequent major problems, which just quadruples my resistance to biking.

Biking may be part of the solution, but you’re going to need a whole lot of education to improve car-bike safety, and a whole lot of bike paths.

In For First-Time Job Hunters, Pay Shouldn’t Be Top Priority, Lisa Patten, director in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ human resources group, advises recent graduates to look beyond the question, “How much does it pay?” when evaluating a potential position. These suggestions arose in the article:

1. Make a connection between your passion and your profession.

2. Focus on the “right” type of company for you.

3. Evaluate the location and cost of living.

4. Know your own worth (financially speaking).

5. Understand all the benefits, including medical, dental, and retirement.

I might add that there is substantial research that indicates that mentorship is important to job satisfaction and longevity, so recent graduates should look for those opportunities as well. And, lest you neglect the salary entirely, it also helps for recent graduates to get help with the number crunching in terms of making a budget to know whether a job will pay a living wage for you.

Co-op America has a list of 21 things that you may not have known you can recycle, including Tyvek envelopes. Most of the items are found (or used) in the workplace.

Speaking of recycling, has anyone joined bookmooch? I read about it last night in Vegetarian Times. Basically, you join, type in your books to give away to others, accumulate points with each book mailed, and then can request books that you want with your points.

What’s the primary workspace for the college students? Why it’s the dorm room. And why not have a clean green room that inspires you rather than a gray slovenly pit of despair that many of us lived in (Wesleyan’s Butt B, I’m thinking of you).

Here are some top tips for greening the dorm room:

Old Paradigm: regular coffee
Easy Greening: organic, fair trade coffee

Old Paradigm: no plants
Easy Greening: Top 10 house (dorm room) plants for cleaner air

Old Paradigm: plugs everywhere, no easy way to turn off electronics
Easy Greening: Take a power strip to attach all the sundry electronics *and* easily turn them all off to reduce phantom loads (electronic devices that keep running clocks, etc., even when the power switch is turned off).

Via Treehugger

We’re taking home tours of different sustainable homes at the Crestone energy fair. We began with a wooden 24-sided yurt of about 750 square feet. It was constructed over a year while living in a second more temporary yurt on the same property. The wooden yurt is passive solar, and has some of the same challenges we had when living in a passive solar home with heat regulation. Our passive solar rental was in New Mexico, and lovely and warm in the summer, but you definitely had to regulate and monitor the blinds in the summer or the house became oven-like. Still this wooden yurt was breathtakingly beautiful inside, had wool carpets and lovely plant beds in front of the south-facing windows for growing food.

We then walked to a strawbale home that has been in construction for several years and built as money and time were available. The home was around 650 square feet on the inside (strawbale square foot figures are often for both the inside and outside since the walls are so thick), and had a gorgeous brick floor and composting toilet! The owner and builder didn’t seal the outside walls soon enough (straw bale walls are sealed with linseed oil once the mud has been applied) and had a small amount of rain damage in the winter. She did most of the labor herself with locally available materials. Her home had a really nice shape and feel to it.

The third home and studio was that of Annie Pace. It was really a mini-ashram, demonstrating how the yogic lifestyle is essentially about living sustainably. It’s is on the grid, but with solar energy from adjustable solar panels (and the option to use the grid for emergencies). The facilities of the structures are strawbale, coated with adobe mud, linseed oil, two additional coats of lime plaster and something called “crack master.” There was a wild hail/snow storm yesterday afternoon and her exterior walls looked absolutely fine, while other strawbale walls in town are reportedly damaged.

It was a full morning, and it’s hard not to be immensely thankful that there are people who are willing to let us into their homes with our questions about building options.

Why build with straw bale? It’s a sustainable resource, and often goes to waste and is burned. Straw bales create thick walls, which are energy efficient. Straw bale homes use untrained labor, like me. They also have a thick rough look to them, which I rather like.

The walls are covered with mud or mud/lime or mud/cement. Most of what I learned at the Earthen Plaster Demo was about how flexible you could be with your mixture both in terms of the components and the application.

I just went to a talk by Shay Solomon, author of Little House on a Small Planet (which I’m about to buy). She is the co-founder of the Small House Society, and extremely well versed in the history of homes as spaces in the United States. And although Jim and I do live small in 600 square feet, I learned a lot of historical and political background on housing. I learned, for example, that there is no housing shortgage despite what it seems like from the number of new developments. The economy is measured in terms of home unit growth, and so we build homes even when we have plenty.

Here are some of her tips for living small:

1. Stop Jonesing. Stop yearning for what other people have. Stop comparing yourself and your possessions to others.

2. Choose what you need in your home, not what you want.

3. Live in a space that fits you like a glove, not a space that fits your stuff. (Shay says that the storage industry is larger than the music industry in the United States!)

4. Pay off your debts. (Many people who live small have little or no mortgage.)

5. Go outdoors. Reclaim the common spaces.

6. Give up loneliness. Bring others into your space. And go out more.

(That’s an Ezra Pound quote in the sign).

This is what you do at the Four Corners: You pay $3 to the Navajo Nation and then wait in line to stand on the supposed borders of all Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. I’m not really sure what the draw is…yet I ‘m pretty sure it was my idea. Today it was also about 100 degrees, which makes border straddling and fry bread a bit less interesting.

And this is Ute Mountain, my favorite photograph of the day. It was also very hot, which may explain the beer bottles.

From the Four Corners area, we drove east into Colorado through Pagosa Springs, where we saw this double rainbow (perhaps visible if you squint). We’re attending the Crestone Energy Fair in Colorado the rest of the weekend learning about small community energy systems, building with straw bale, and little homes.

We’re in Flagstaff for the night on our way to a conference on sustainable energy. This photo was taken on “Fatman’s Loop,” a trail in the Coconino National Forest so long we couldn’t finish it. Not sure where that name came from. Love how I’ve taken the time to put on a slicker but choose to hike in Tevas.

Flagstaff is a funny place. It’s at 7000 feet with tons of hiking in the surrounding mountains. Demographically it seems like if you took all the white folks in Santa Fe (where we used to live) and just hauled them down I-40 to Arizona, you would have Flagstaff. I’m sure there is more to it than white Santa Feans….I see that there are Sedona Hummer Tours advertised in our hotel room. And they’re biodiesel powered. I shouldn’t find that as funny as I do. But, in all seriousness, Flagstaff and Santa Fe seem examples of convergent evolution—despite wildly different histories, they are places that look and feel remarkably similar to me.

By the way, you only have a few hours left to take my readership poll in the side column….

On one of the nature walks last week, David Lukas and his wife mentioned an article in Orion Magazine called Polymers are Forever.

The general gist of it is that there are enormous areas in the ocean that are covered in plastic trash, which seems to last just about forever. And eventually when plastics break down into their individual components, they are more toxic than their original components. Here’s the stunning description of these areas of ocean trash, which Charles Moore, a captain, came across first in 1999 in the so-called Horse Latitudes:

By 2005, Moore was referring to the gyrating Pacific dump as 10 million square miles—nearly the size of Africa. It wasn’t the only one: the planet has six other major tropical oceanic gyres, all of them swirling with ugly debris. It was as if plastic exploded upon the world from a tiny seed after World War II and, like the Big Bang, was still expanding. Even if all production suddenly ceased, an astounding amount of the astoundingly durable stuff was already out there.

What would a sustainable food supply look like for a family? Scott McGuire, a renter in Ashland, Oregon, embarked on an experiment in growing his family’s food supply.

You-Tube clip includes moments of great humor halfway through when host begins to cluck like a chicken.

This New Green Home is a 10 minute video on building straw bale homes in Crestone, Colorado. I’m pretty sure the fact that it’s in my in box this morning means Jim would like to move to Crestone and build one or possibly go to the sustainable energy fair in Crestone over Labor Day weekend.

I really like alternative living and working spaces, particularly if they are small and made of recycled materials. Here’s a video on homes/work spaces made from shipping containers that I found pretty interesting.

Staples will now recycle your computer equipment for $10.

We run a tight environmental ship here, possibly because I’m a bit of a what the neighbors call an “eco-freak.” I’m married to someone who refuses to buy anything made in China, so we buy nothing new at all. And we live and work in 600 square feet. I’ll stop there because that’s enough for people to start throwing things at my glass house (I will admit that we installed heat and air conditioning). In any case, I’ve written a few tips for reducing and reducing paper. (And Boy in the Bands has more tips for greening your office, Ms. Kitty has tips for greening your lifestyle, and Mom to the Left has other green lifestyle tips.)

Home Depot will label its 2500 eco-friendly options with this label, beginning on Earth Day. What’s an eco-friendly option? Well, I like to use diatomaceous earth to keep ants out of my house rather than poison. But I would usually have a hard time finding it at the HD. I also like to sow with organic seeds (not genetically modified). And use non-volatile organic compound paint. This sort of product will now be labeled at Home Depot.

I’m pleased by this development. You’ll recall that less than a decade ago, Home Depot had all sorts of boycotts against it for unsustainable practices. So whether this is some greenwashing or a turnaround on their part, I’ll feel okay about spending my Home Depot gift cards from Christmas on some CFL bulbs. Except they’re giving those away (on Earth Day, April 22).

Via Earth Times and Sustainable is Good