The Small House Movement

Having grown up in a small home, I spent most of my childhood dreaming of living in a huge, luxurious home. As I've grown older, however, I've learned to appreciate the benefits of a small home (or condo!). I live in a part of the country that is practically frozen all winter long. Heating costs are high, and you can't really enjoy your yard half of the year. Why buy a multi-million dollar home if you can't even enjoy it?

According to the New York Times, many other people are also realizing that bigger is not always better when it comes to their living space. Yesterday the New York Times interviewed Gregory Paul Johnson, founder of the Small House Society in Iowa City, who lives in a 140-square-foot-home. Johnson explains the appeal of smaller homes:

“there are so many powerful forces at work right now...like rising energy costs and the mortgage crisis. I think people want small homes because they cost less to purchase, maintain, heat.”

Not everyone is dying to move into an 100-square-foot-house, but compromising on, say, living in a house that is 1000-square-feet or smaller is starting to make more and more sense to home buyers.

To find out more about the movement, and for pictures of these lovely small homes, check out The Next Little Thing? On the NY Times website.

PETA Buys Sea World?

Apparently, PETA is considering an option to purchase Sea World. It is still not clear whether Anheuser-Busch, the company that owns Sea World, will take the proposal seriously, but it's an interesting offer nonetheless. PETA is not planning to shut the park down (or even to release all the animals--which seems rather hypocritical to me), but they will be setting some of the animals free and "virtualizing" portions of the park (which seems like a good idea to me--after all, how many tanks of fish do people need to look at anyway?).

One wonders how PETA's purchase of the park might affect the local economy--I'm afraid I don't see the park raking in nearly as many dollars with PETA at the helm, but maybe that's just me.

Air Drying Clothes

Air drying or line drying clothes is an excellent way to save on energy costs, saving the average family at least $100 a year. Dryers are one of the most inefficient appliances in any household, and believe it or not, 10-25 percent of most family's electricity bills are due to running the dryer (dryers are also a leading source of home and apartment fires). Furthermore, the energy savings are just the tip of the iceberg, since line drying also makes your clothing last MUCH longer (ever wonder where lint comes from? That's little bits of your clothing!).

Sadly, in the US, clotheslines are seen by homeowners associations as a sign of poverty (since when did being environmentally friendly equal poverty?), as this article on line drying bans in the Boston Globe attests. Still, there are a myriad of options for line drying, even if you live in a place where air-drying is forbidden (or impossible, like in an apartment building). I live in a condo, so we use clothing lines.

For information on the various ways of air drying your clothes (and evaluation of different drying racks, etc., check out this air dry washing article on the website Tip the Planet.

The Kennedy-Obama Connection

I've been watching the opening of the Democratic Convention today with some interest.

I also thought this would be an opportunity to try out my pet theory about Obama's candidacy. For some time I've been telling my husband that I felt Obama represented an opportunity for the Kennedy clan to regain control of the Democratic Party. My reasoning is primarily geographic: since JFK, we've only had Southern Democrats in the White House (LBJ, Carter, Clinton). This means Obama would be the first non-southern Democrat in the White House since JFK. I first started to suspect something along these lines when Ted Kennedy came out in support of Obama early on. Now, in spite of being extremely ill with brain cancer, Kennedy is expected to speak at the convention (along with his niece, Caroline Kennedy).

It turns out that I'm not alone in my suspicions.

Conservative commentator William Bennett commented on CNN today that "this is not your older brother's Democratic party, it's your father's Democratic party" and went on to note that the Clintons are gone and today marks a decided shift to the left in the Democratic party's platform.

I hope news agencies and bloggers will pay a bit more attention to this issue. I've been trying to find more information on the Kennedy-Obama connection, but I haven't found much yet. If anyone runs across a good article on this, pass it on, because I'd love to read it.

Power through the air?

My husband sent me this video, and I had to share it. The concept is cool, but it also freaks me out. If living next to power lines is dangerous, just think what this stuff could do!

Wireless Electricity

Source: BBC

More and more career women choosing to stay at home

I ran across a couple of interesting articles this week about changing attitudes towards women who choose to stay at home.

The first was an article on the BBC website 'Support for working mums falls' about how more women are choosing to stay at home with their children as a result of the pressures in the work place. Most offices aren't particularly friendly towards working moms, so a lot more moms are choosing to quit work once their children are born.

Interestingly, although the article puts most of its emphasis on how unfriendly the office environment is to working moms, the author also confesses that it's not JUST the fact that it's hard to work once you have kids--social attitudes towards working mothers are changing. In the past, women who chose to stay at home with their kids tended to be viewed negatively, as if they were somehow less productive than women who managed to juggle career and family. Today, more and more couples believe that family life suffers when women work (62% vs. 49% in 1994). Professor Jacqueline Scott of Cambridge University, who was interviewed for the article, is quoted as saying that the notion that support is steadily growing for women to abandon their more traditional role in the home is "clearly a myth".

The other article I read deals with a similar subject matter. CNN reports on the changing attitude towards housewives in an article entitled "No kids, no jobs for growing number of wives." Whereas the BBC's focus was more on women with kids, CNN has chosen to focus on women who choose to stay at home even though they don't have kids. While the author focuses on the fact that having a wife at home is viewed as a "luxury" by some, I think they are sort of missing the point. By learning to live with less, single income families can help lighten the load we put on the planet and significantly reduce a family's carbon footprint.

And as this Second Income Calculator available from MSN money reveals, depending on the income of the second wage earner, once the the costs associated with working outside the home (such as a second car, clothing, etc.) are taken into account, it often costs MORE to have that second income!

Image: Tyranov, Young Housewife--courtesy of wikimedia commons

Colombians March for the Freedom of Those Kidnapped by FARC

Independence Day in Colombia is usually characterised by military parades, so I was touched to read today that this year Colombia is celebrating its independence with a march in support of those who have been kidnapped by Colombia's armed rebel groups. Today in Bogota, more than a million protesters gathered to raise their voices against FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Luis Alberto Gutierrez expressed the feeling of many Colombians, stating "first we got independence from the Spanish, now we want independence from those who oppress us with violence and kidnapping" ,the BBC reports.

Although Ingrid Betancourt was freed several weeks ago, the FARC continues to hold over 700 people in captivity. The climate of fear and violence in Colombia has been a real barrier to the country's growth, and the FARC is to blame for a great deal of this. Hopefully FARC will get the message from this protest: Colombians are tired of their morally bankrupt despicable tactics. It is impossible to call your movement "revolutionary" when you are in the business of stealing and selling human beings.