Eyeteeth

We were getting ready to go to dance class. "I don't think I can go," she said. She sat down and cried. "My tooth is going to fall out and I might lose it." It stuck out at a strange angle from her mouth.

I sat down next to her on the hall steps. "Then we won't go," I said. "It's wise sometimes to do only one thing at once, and today you are working on letting go of that tooth."

"I just want to be with my family."

"I know what you mean."

Losing a tooth is a big life change. Sometimes it makes her sad. You can't go back, you get these giant teeth, you can never have your little ones again. All the tragic things about growing up surface with tooth-shedding.



For me the day was about eyes.

I went to a vision therapist to see what he'd say about my glasses prescription.

"You don't really need them," he said. "You could do exercises and improve your vision to a point where you'd hardly wear glasses. Trouble is, you'd lose some of your near vision after a point."

We discussed my options: keep the glasses I have, do exercises and improve my vision, get progressively weaker glasses, lay off the exercises if something near and dear to me loses focus.

"If you told me you were going to spend the next year sailing around the world, I'd say do the exercises and get your distance vision back."

Not hardly. I read. I write. I use a computer. I look at my family members' faces a lot, and they're usually nearby.

"There's a reason why so many accountants are near-sighted," he said. "And farmers are far-sighted."

Huh.

I had a strong momentary urge never to sit before a computer again. To a friend on the phone I said, "Maybe someone would hire me to scan the horizon." I don't see myself sailing or farming, but good distance vision sounds important in some primal or metaphoric sense.

Maybe I need to spend more time trying to see what is far away.

My eyes changed some time when I was in my early twenties. A friend and I were at a student film festival at NYU. When the titles started rolling, in the bellicose New York way I was working hard at, I shouted, "FOCUS! Hey, yo, FOCUS!"

My friend said "Shhhh! That IS in focus. Quit shouting like that!"

I still want my eyesight back. Could I really get better? Yes, the doctor said. How much? Like, without my glasses, could I maybe, watch a movie?

Bags and Baglets

I applaud San Francisco for pushing biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable plastic bags.

But really, can't we learn to bring our own canvas bags when we go shopping or baskets woven from the native grasses of our front yards? I'm no model of alertness, and I've made it a habit.

Forgot your bag? Here, we'll sell you a canvas one, at cost. And more discounts for people who bring them, as some places do now.

I can't believe I'm talking about plastic bags while bigger fish like the Iraq supplemental are swimming through Congress, but there are better essayists out there on that one.

"I can't do it!" I blurted today while driving with my husband. "I cannot go on buying bread in plastic bags. Let's buy all our bread loaves at Bread Alone from now on, and bring 'em home in our own bags."

Talking of plastic bags, recycling and so forth, I was at the playground with my children yesterday and my foot fell upon some pale film protruding from the mulch. "What's this, a baggie?" I thought, toeing it. A condom. "Gross. But really, who has sex at the playground next to a busy thoroughfare?" (People who aren't allowed to have sex at home? I won't pursue that line of thinking just now.) Later, I got to thinking about condoms as garbage. All the strange places I have seen them. On asphalt, on grass, hanging from chain link fences...do Canada geese choke on them?

"Why am I obsessing about condoms as litter?" I had to ask myself. Condoms contribute to safer sex and zero population growth. As the biggest polluters on the planet, Americans in particular should use lots and lots of condoms, that's a good thing, even if they don't biodegrade (the condoms I mean, not the people. At least people still biodegrade!)

The guy who dropped his baggie full of fertilizer in the mulch is, at least, working to reduce. But what about composting and condoms? Seems there's some disagreement about whether latex ones, best for preventing STDs, help grow seeds after spilling some. More good reading on this from EcoChick.

Green Power & the Low Carbon Diet

The whole buying green power thing confuses me, so I did some calling today and here's what I found out.

We pay Sterling Planet $15/month for wind energy. They told me that pays for 12,000 kwh per year to go onto the national grid. While that doesn't actually power our house, it powers somebody somewhere. (We still get all our power from Central Hudson, and probably most of that is coal and other yucky stuff, but still, this is big progress.)

Over a period of 14 months last year (our bill figures three-month increments, so it's hard for me to get an annual total), we used 17,340 KWH. That's a lot, but it's going to go down a lot this year, because we started using compact fluorescents throughout the house in October 2006 and we switched our fridge and washer to Energy Star appliances in February 2007. So this year we will be completely offsetting our electric usage for $15 per month, which shows both how easy and how important it is to buy green power.

I hope this is all accurate so far.

In the Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds (here's my first post about it back in October 2006"), David Gershon credits a household with 100 lbs of carbon dioxide reduction for each 100 kwh of green power purchased. Which means by buying 12,000 kwh of wind power this year, we have made it most of the way to our goal of reducing our household C02 usage by 40,000.

Now the not-so-great news. If we meet our reduction goal we'll be at 34,790 which Gershon puts at Level 6, Level 1 being the best. That will still be 7,090 lbs above the average German household and 34,390 lbs above the average Kenyan household.

But I've made a lot more progress than I realized, and I still have hopes that an historic home built in 1850 can be preserved and be an asset to our community in more ways than one.

What I Didn't Know About Amazon

I totally support my local bookstores. These are my favorites:

Inspired, Kingston, NY
Alternative Books, Kingston, NY
The Golden Notebook, Woodstock, NY

But sometimes I order from Amazon for convenience, speed, rarity, and the 'used' prices.

This week I wanted to order whatever DVDs I could find by genius early silhouette animator, Lotte Reiniger that weren't available in the U.S. Here she is at work:



And I discovered, thanks to a film curator in Dusseldorf, that I can order from Amazon.de just by logging in with my U.S. password!
Great, just klicken, sticken in der Einkaufswagen, and you're gut to go.

I'm going to have to work hard not to go nuts buying international stuff now!

Die Ägyptische Helena

You may have read in these pages somewhere that my brother Scott is a full-time supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera. This means that he acts on stage in non-singing roles. He's played soldiers, servants, and now...Poseidon?!

Yes, Poseidon is the silent absent-presence lurking behind the story of Die Ägyptische Helena—The Egyptian Helen, the story of Helen of Troy and Menelaus and their attempts to mend a relationship troubled by war, separation and infidelity.

Scott called the other day and asked if AJ & I would like to come see the dress rehearsal. We might even get to meet Poseidon's wife Aithra, played by Diana Damrau. We were excited. We had looked up YouTube bits of Diana Damrau singing the Queen of the Night, and we were very impressed.

So we did it! We arranged to meet Scott at the stage door during intermission and went up to the lobby to get our seats. At the gift shop we saw that the window had been decorated with a positive-negative image of a man running away with a briefcase. "That must be Poseidon!" I said to AJ. "That's Scott!" We took a picture of that and the set model displayed in glass in the theater foyer, which is dominated by another silhouette of a man with briefcase that could be any of a number of men in the production who run around with briefcases and swords but which AJ decided to interpret as SCOTT.

The opera opened with Poseidon grabbing a sword and his briefcase and leaving Aithra. He wouldn't appear again until the end, when he returns from battle with the daughter of Helena and Menelaus, banishes some pesky soldiers, and kisses Aithra. In the meantime, Aithra (in my opinion) ruled the stage with her dynamic movement as the sorceress, and her phenomenal voice.

Backstage at intermission Ms. Damrau very kindly welcomed the taking of the above picture and asked AJ what operas she knows (Magic Flute is about it at this point). I hope we can see her in The Barber of Seville—maybe via one of the theater broadcasts the Met is doing—and next year, when she will be singing both the Queen of the Night and Pamina in The Magic Flute.

As for Die Ägyptische Helena, although I didn't know the music I was moved by the production, especially when Aithra turns Helena back into her innocent self in Act I, when the Omniscient Mussel (what a character concept) puts Aithra to sleep after all her exertions on Helena and Menelaus's behalf at the end of Act I, and when Hermione, their daughter, appears at the end and half of the set turns into a ship to take the restored family away. I prefer love stories about marriage and this one has a healing message about facing the past in order to deepen love. The set, a De Chirico-like pair of movable walls awash with changing colors and alive with shadows of performers—the Act II version a negative/reverse of what we see in Act I, was stunning to me, though AJ thought it too static. Still, to sit through a 2 hour and 20 minute opera you don't know at the age of 7 and-a-half is a pretty good feat.

I got a snapshot of my brother taking his first bow on the Met stage, playing a god, no less.

SHV Green Living Pages: a wiki

I've gone and started a Wiki!

The Sustainable Hudson Valley Green Living Pages wiki is for anybody living in the Hudson Valley looking to find local resources for more energy-efficient, earth-easy living. If you live around here I hope you'll visit and contribute!

Southpaw Fridge

"So what?" my husband said. "My mother's refrigerator is like that."

"So what what?" was my clever rejoinder. "That doesn't change the fact that this is a left-handed fridge. You open it with your left hand."

It wasn't the only reason I bought it. The other reason was that at 432 kwh/year, our new Frigidaire was the most energy-efficient model in the showroom we visited for a weekend sale guaranteeing the lowest prices in town. (We snagged a low-water Fisher & Paykel clothes washer, too.)

So far I'm happy with the new fridge. It's technically smaller than our old one, but I still have trouble filling it, and because it's new, and no one has spilled raspberry jam or soymilk in it, or covered it with magnets and flyers for things that have already happened or lists of fish we can't eat or Jewish holidays we fail to observe, it's neat and shiny.

And it's a leftie fridge! I am the only leftie in a family of righties, and I like the head game they must have to play ha ha every time they go toward it with their right arm held out and have to switch! I'm going to get me some more energy-efficient left-handed stuff!