Fired Up

Do you ever make arbitrary rules for yourself?

Here’s one my wife and I have: we are not allowed to turn on the heat before November 1st.

Why?

It’s a mixture of frugality, stoicism, and (delusional) environmental consciousness.

Our home is heated with oil. Nasty, smelly, fossil fuel oil. Once or maybe twice a year, a big truck shows up at our house and ‘the men’ stick a rubber hose into a pipe that leads down to a big tank that sits in our laundry room and pump many liters of heating oil (something like diesel fuel) into the tank. The tank feeds a furnace that burns the oil and sends resulting heated air through vents to warm the house.

Once we do turn it on, we use it sparingly. We keep the house at 17 C (64 F) tops during the day and turn it down to 12 C (55 F) at night.

Until Spring of 2020, we still had the furnace that was installed when the house was built. It was over 40 years old and the first firing every year produced an awful stench that made our eyes water and the cat cry.

The guy from the oil company who inspected it, told us every year we should get a new one. We resisted his sage counsel for more than ten years but finally, we decided that it was time to replace the old system. Frankly, I was afraid that the thing was going to blow up one day or at least fill the house with carbon monoxide while we were asleep (though the furnace rarely comes on when we are asleep since we turn it down so low at night).

Yes, we could have gotten a heat pump or a geothermal system or a solar something but the easiest thing appeared to be to replace the one we had with a newer (more efficient) one.

I am even lazier than I am frugal.

The old system had one of those round, gold-colored Honeywell thermostats with a metal coil that expanded or contracted as the room temperature rose or fell. When the coil had contracted enough it tipped a glob of mercury inside a glass tube which completed a switch that turned on the furnace. It was to the modern thermostat as a rotary phone is to a smart phone. It didn’t work with the new furnace and had to be replaced with a soulless digital thing that needs batteries to operate. Ugh!

Still, that first firing each year still feels like a moment of import and maybe it is just conditioning but I still believe I can catch a whiff of oil stench.

Here is a sonnet I wrote a while back about the annual ritual of firing up the furnace for the first time in the fall.

Furnace

Early and the chill that comes through double

panes and blows about the bedroom can’t be denied.

Frost grins on the sills and chatters on the outside

where frozen November dew kisses bare stubble.

Her feet cross the cold tile of the hall.

She gives the plastic knob a twist;

weary mercury tumbles and completes the switch.

A moment of silence for summer lost -- then all

hell breaks loose. The furnace awakens with thunder

and groans and stretches as spark

ignites a greasy belch, a cough inside its head.

A foul smell as the beast burns off months of slumber.

Belly-fire drinks the ancient carbon of birds and bark,

warming our flimsy lives with bodies of the dead.

Home Here

Normal Monday

Last Monday night was the beginning of the month in the Hebrew calendar known as Heshvan. Heshvan stands alone in the Jewish year as a month with no festivals or annual observances. In other words, its abnormal feature is that it is the only normal month of the year.

Sometimes when I travel and am staying in a hotel, I will switch on Bloomberg Business News in the morning as I am preparing for my day. Last time I did this I was in New York City where Bloomberg is almost always one of the channel selections.

Bloomberg is clearly targeted to people who work in the financial industry — professional traders, brokers and the like. I consider myself more financially literate than the average person, yet frequently I have no idea what they are talking about on the channel.

On this particular morning, the host was obviously very excited about something that was going on in the market but after watching for about 40 minutes, I was unable to determine what it was. The S&P 500 had barely budged 1/2 a percent. Yields on bonds were rising, though not dramatically. Corporate earnings were unremarkable. All the usual indicators of drama seemed, at least to me, largely absent.

At one point the host said, “Good Morning on this Monday, but this is NOT a normal Monday!”

He was right about that. But maybe not for the reason he thought.

2022 — a Year of Chaos — Like the previous 10,000 Years

Last week I heard someone refer to 2022 as chaotic. It hasn’t seemed particularly chaotic to me. I thought back to 2020, which some people couldn’t wait to see end, only to find that much of what they disliked about 2020 continued unabated in 2021, and the things that did end were replaced by other things not to their liking. In a similar vein, those who have investments in the stock market feel that this has been an particularly troubling year, yet a quick glance at historical returns will show that:

• Many, many years have had negative returns and

• this year is isn’t even among the five worst of the last 100.

Still, they yearn for normalcy to return?

I have some bad news: this is as normal as it gets.

We have evolved to see patterns and to zero in on that which doesn’t seem conform to the pattern. But patterns aren’t static. They are constantly changing, and that change captures our attention, asking us to adapt. Since, generally speaking adapting requires effort, we, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, would prefer not to make any change at all at the present time.

At the same time, we long to return to a time that never existed. As jazz musician Ben Sidran puts it, “The past ain’t what it was, the future ain’t what it used to be.” (“I might be wrong” on Picture Him Happy)

We often feel like the world is spiraling toward destruction even though for most of us, most of the time, things are just fine or at least not bad. Much of our discomfort comes from a disconnect between the way things are and the way we would prefer or expect them to be. Sometimes we are able to act to move things closer to the way we’d prefer them to be but very often we can’t. It’s our expectations - not circumstances - that are out of whack.

Since returning home from our summer travels life has been a series of non-stop repairs. When we turned the water back on, the toilet started running and the sink started leaking onto the floor. The car that sat in the driveway for three months has been in for service for an emission light three times. One of the new tires we purchased in Fairbanks developed a sidewall bubble and had to be replaced. The dishwasher died. The new one is sitting in the middle of living room because of problems around installing it. Someone to whom I wrote a check in December deposited the same check a second time, resulting in my bank freezing my account without telling me and my bouncing three payments. Bike tires gone flat. Mice in the flour.

The Miracle of Irritation

None of these things qualifies as a real problem and probably shouldn’t even rise to the level of irritation (though if I am honest, they are irritating). In fact, these challenges are a gift for several reasons.

First, they are a reminder that life is a largely futile process of trying to restore normalcy, which is to say in a state where things are working. At the same time, though the task is futile, nevertheless it is unavoidable. And yes, anything that can be fixed with money is not a problem, just an expense.

Next, once we understand this situation we can choose to see these challenges as our path. More than a decade ago I read a piece in Shambhala Sun magazine (Now Lion’s Roar) titled,” “Five Questions that Help Us Wake Up.” Question Number 2 is “Can I see this as my path?” It is a question to ask yourself in any moment that feels like a struggle or a challenge. Accepting as your path wherever you find yourself is a real moment of awakening.

My Uncle Steve Kohn (of blessed memory) once created a cartoon which took the cliched highway ad, “If you lived here you’d be home now.” and turned it on its head. Sitting in traffic, a man grimacing with frustration glares at a sign which reads, “If you lived now, you’d be home here.” As Sapiens author Yuval Harari said in an interview with Steven Levitt on the People I Mostly Admire podcast, “Perhaps the greatest miracle in the cosmos is that you are a being capable of irritation.”

Finally, since there will never be a normal or perfect or even static state, your best course might be to be happy now.  I recently heard a story (perhaps apocryphal) that when the Dalai Lama was asked what was the happiest moment of his life. He thought for a moment before he replied.

“This moment, I think,” he said.

Economy

When Barbara and I flew from Dulles airport to Brussels, Belgium in February of 1986 for our year-long trip around the world, our budget was $10,000. We expected to spend about $5,000 on airfares and $5,000 or around $13 per day on everything else. In actual practice, knowing that there would be unexpected expenses, we planned to spend $7 per day and that had to cover food, accommodations, and other out of pockets. Through a combination of extreme frugality and a little work along the way, our money lasted 16 months and we flew home from San Francisco to Virginia nearly broke.

That was the last time we traveled:

1. for an extended period of time and

2. when neither of us was working and the only cash flows were negative.

Then this past June,, we were ready to roam again. A few things were the same as they were 36 years ago.

• We forwarded our mail to my mother to deal with.

• We had to bring gear for all kinds of weather.

• With both of us retired were on a strict (albeit slightly more generous) budget.

But there were also some important differences.

Although no air travel would be involved, we would be driving long distances in our own vehicle. We would need to pay for accommodations in expensive countries like the US and Canada and the price of gasoline was soaring; it was already well over $4 per gallon here at home and the stock market’s plummet added to the stress. To be honest, I was nervous about blowing through the travel budget too quickly.  My faith, however, was bolstered by the fact that worst case scenario we could sleep in Walmart parking lots for free and by our habits of frugality honed over a lifetime.

Now with all the final numbers in from our 3 months on the road and 13,000 more miles on the van, I am ready to share with you what it costs to do something like this.

Here is how it breaks down.

Camping 2,,031.45

Equipment and Supplies 125.48

Fares 815.43

Fees 3,812.48

Gasoline 2,362.85

Hotel 1,261.53

Other 320.90

Restaurants 1,615.21

Misc. Expense 25.00

Total 12,370.33

A few things of note.

• We only stayed in hotels a total of 7 nights but those 7 nights totaled more than half of all the camping expense. Camping saves a lot of money.

• Fares are things like ferry rides or taxis.

• Fees are mostly for things like day cruises, whale watching, or the bus trip to the Arctic Circle but I also stuck ATM fees and currency conversion fees in there too.

• Other is mostly the cost of forwarding our mail (to my mom) and also laundromats.

• Finally, Misc. Expense is cash expenditure that was unaccounted for. Probably the odd coffee or bag of ice, I forgot to enter into Quicken, my financial software.

So there you have it. 86 days — $143.84 per day or if you remove the fees for the special things $99.51 per day. Call it $100 per day. I will let you decide if that is a lot or a little for a three month trip.

There are a few things omitted. One is groceries. The reason I left this out is that we would have had to eat at home as well and we actually spent less for food on the road than we would have at home — simpler food, lots of pasta and salad, few exotic ingredients.

Also not included are the two oil changes and four new tires we bought on route. That was close to $1,000.

Obviously the cost of the van and its conversion is not included. Although this is a significant cost, the van serves as our second car and even with the conversion the used Sienna cost less than many people spend on a car. Even better, it gets 28 mpg and drives like a car.

Having this information now, I feel more confident in budgeting for upcoming road trips. Where next? The southwest including the Grand Canyon is currently leading for the Spring.

Hope to see you on the road!