unbelieveable!

i’ve been earning some extra money indexing files for this woman and i just came across her water bill…

in 93 days her modest house used 700 cubic feet of water with an average daily consumption of 7 cubic feet. total use in gallons in 93 days is 5,000 with an average usage of 56 gallons per day!!

guess how much the bill was for?

only $12.60!!

can you imagine going into a store and buying 56 gallons of water each day? (and then transporting it to your house, no less) you might be able to find a gallon of water for $2 so we’re talking about $112 a day to buy water from a store. that’s $10,416 in 93 days!

i know we both live near the chesapeake watershed area which is the largest (?) in the U.S. but i was just listening to Peter Singer on the radio today talk about his new book/campaign. here’s a quote from the website:

For the first time in history, it is now within our reach to eradicate world poverty and the suffering it brings. Yet around the world, a billion people struggle to live each day on less than many of us pay for bottled water. And though the number of deaths attributable to poverty worldwide has fallen dramatically in the past half-century, nearly ten million children still die unnecessarily each year.

Singer was explaining to Diane Rhem (LOVE her!) how a large part of what all these kids (age 5 and under) are suffering dying from is diarrhea from unsafe drinking water.

america’s water usage (and over-consumption in general) affects everyone in the world. people are dying because they can’t access the water we use to hose out our assholes or whatever. water is NOT FREE. it is NOT CHEAP! maybe if gas & electric bills were made lower (so, you know, people don’t freeze in the winter time) and we made water bills higher (FUCK LAWNS!) then some of these water-consumption issues would be drastically reduced and people would think twice about taking a half-an-hour shower or fixing a leaky toilet.

have you heard what’s going on in california? by the time winter rolls around you might be hard-pressed to find an out-of-season fruit or vegetable. (buy local and can your shit!)

my high school environment science teacher theorized that the next world war will be over water and food. i don’t doubt it.

ha-aretz

ha-aretz means “the land” in hebrew, and also the name of an israeli daily newspaper. i feel like i’m going through a “fat” period. like, doing my storing up for winter now that we’ve got some real cold. storing up like eating, and also storing up on ideas.

i’ve been hibernating to some extent, dreaming of the spring instead of focusing on now. the cat’s got the same idea. now that his thyroid isn’t freaking out, he doesn’t pee on my stuff anymore. we’ve been keeping each other warm at night.

child care is hard work, but rewarding. i’m trying to influence their little brains about reading, using one’s imagination, and trying non-chemically foods.

i just read in defense of food: an eater’s manifesto by michael pollan. he spends a lot of time defining just what the hell food is not (factory-produced chemical garbage that makes “healthful” claims according to the current nutrition fad, for example) and gives a seemingly-simple strategy for making good food choices:

eat food. not too much. mostly plants.

i will include a few choice quotes from his book. note his oh-so-dry wit:

[A]s a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound “whole-grain goodness” to the rafters. (Pollan 39-40)

quoting Weston Price (b. 1870), a dentist concerned with the rise of tooth decay:

“The dinner we have eaten tonight,” [Price] told his audience in a 1928 lecture, “was a part of the sun but a few months ago.” (99)

think about it! eating real food is like eating the sun! but it’s more than that–it’s connecting what one eats (which, when put through the mostly-perfect machine that is the human body, gives life) to the people who grow the food, to the sun and the water and the soil that produced the food, to the process of evolution…i mean, it gets really big.

in the chapter “eat food: food defined” one of pollan’s food-choice rules to follow is “don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” he elaborates:

Is a product like Go-Gurt Portable Yogurt still a whole food?…There are in fact hundreds of foodish products in the supermarket that your ancestors simply wouldn’t recognize as food: breakfast cereal bars transected by bright white veins representing, but in reality having nothing to do with, milk; “protein waters” and” nondairy creamer”; cheeselike foodstuffs equally innocent of any bovine contribution; cakelike cylinders (with creamlike fillings) called Twinkies that never grow stale. Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting is another personal policy you might consider adopting.

now–i enjoy a moon pie as much as the next junk-eating american but the man has a point.

[side-bar: in searching for a link about moon pies, i discovered the official website with a "moon pie memory" contest. this piece won "most unusual":

My favorite Moon Pie memory is one of the most bizzare experiences I've ever had. I was driving my squad car one Summer night, eating a Moon Pie, I received a call of a man walking down the highway, in the nude. I arrived to find one of our local eccentrics (actually bi-polar) named Jack *Smith* walking down the side of the road without any clothes, carrying a box of Moon Pies in his left hand & eating one with his right. As I approached him, he said to me "Here, ya' want one?", and I haven't been able to eat one since. As a joke, some of my co-workers will put a Moon Pie on my desk. I probably need counseling.

W.D.

enough said.]

aren’t there foods that “bring you back?”

hunting and trapping

yesterday, an exterminator came to check out our rodent problem. yes, it’s a problem. we have squirrels in the attic and mice in the kitchen. no bats in the belfry. (actually, mick the exterminator told me a story about how when he was new with the company a man made a joke about having bats in his belfry. mick didn’t know what he meant so he just said something like, “well, i’m not sure if you do. uhh…i’m gonna have to ask someone about that.”)

i’m glad we don’t have bats. but–i did sweep up about 5 thousand mouse turds from under the washing machine today. like someone dropped a sack of black rice. for some months now, i’ve walked into the kitchen and seen a brown or gray mouse scoot from the counter to the stove top, where they have some highway up through the burners.

since they’ve been hanging out in the stove, sometimes when we turn on the burners it smells like nasty mouse piss. once, i left some sliced cheese on the counter for about three minutes. when i came back, one slice of cheese had moved about a foot and another had nibbles taken out of it.

the squirrels, however, live in the attic. the entrance to which is very close to my head when i sleep. i occasionally hear them skittering through the inaccessible parts of the roof. or, when, say, one is reading the paper in the living room, sounds of little bodies throwing themselves around can be heard from somewhere in the ceiling. they are clearly having a blast.

so–according to the exterminator, mice have to be poisoned (cause they can produce like 700 of themselves in a year) by tracking through poison powder placed in their travel tunnels. when they lick it off of themselves and each other, they ingest it and it kills them. this poison does not affect the cat because the cat doesn’t actually eat the mice and even if it did, the dose would be too small for his big cat body. squirrels, on the other hand, must be trapped. the curious squirrel, lured into a have-a-heart trap by a snickers bar (the official bait, apparently) then must be driven to a location over 5 miles away so it can’t find its way back. usually, though, the animals are euthanized.

squirrel trapping plus mouse poisoning costs about $550 and that’s not even a long-term solution. the old house just has so many little rodent highways in and out that what we really have to do is get a roofer and a foundation specialist to plug up all these holes in the basement and attic. (another story about the exterminator–he was explaining to me that the squirrels really have to be removed, otherwise, if they get trapped in the attic it’s much worse than mice when they die. i offered this reasoning: because squirrels have more meat. he seemed to enjoy that a lot.)

so–i proposed a low-cost trial solution: “victor” mouse traps: 8 for $4 at your local Rite-Aid. as in–i am the human with the trap and i am victorious over this mouse which has been driving me bonkers.

so far, i have caught 5 mice in about 24 hours. the cat is jealous, i just know it. or else, relieved that i am picking up his slack. he used to be an excellent hunter and caught many chipmunks, mice and the occasional bird or squirrel.

now it is up to me and the victor traps. the poor little mice don’t stand a chance against those things. but it’s so much more humane than poison, or those awful glue traps. and they actually work. even without bait, the traps work.

so, then i have the kind of sad/kind of primal task of prying the trap open, dropping the dear little mouse bodies into a paper bag and then–leaving them far in the backyard for the vultures or coyotes or owls. ultimate recycling.  i’ve left them at night so i don’t know if they’ve been snatched up or what, but i don’t really want to get too close to them after i set them out there. i know what a decomposing little rodent body looks like.

it seems kind of gruesome but really, we can’t have mice in the kitchen leaving turds in dishpans, frying pans, drawers, etc. or chewing through oven mitts to make little nests. the mice have got to go.

tomorrow i will buy a have-a-heart trap and a snickers bar and see what i can do about the squirrels. did i mention they are poking holes in the ceiling over the litter box in the “mud room”? i keep finding more plaster on the floor everyday from those industrious little buggers.

(also–these traps are eager to catch some mice. just placing it down carefully in a cabinet corner will set it off and that sound puts all my nerves on high alert. i’ve had some near misses with my fingers.)