New fridge delivered, 2 lap sized quilts quilted, thoughts on over consumption of goods
- dreamsoaps
- 55 minutes ago
- 6 min read
What a loser.......8647!!!!
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Friday morning (11/28), Michael headed out for a workout and I headed to the studio to load up a couple of quilts. I really can’t do anymore candy until I buy more bags…and today being BLACK FRIDAY, I don’t want to attempt to go out, but maybe after dinner everyone will be shopped out and I’ll go then. Plus…..2 of my remaining candies need a working fridge…..so I decided a day in the studio is JUST what the doctor ordered! I worked for a couple of hours before joining Michael upstairs to get everything out of our fridge and freezer in preparation for the new one coming. It was installed in the afternoon without a hitch:
and eventually we also got everything out of our neighbor's fridge and into our new one.
We were absolutely exhausted after that!!! I couldn’t believe it, but I felt like I could barely pick up my arms and legs, and Michael felt the same. We just sat and vegged and watched TV for the rest of the afternoon!!!
We had turkey leftovers for dinner before vegging once again for the rest of the evening….hopefully we’ll both have a bit more energy on Saturday!
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It was 29 degrees when I got up on Saturday morning (11/29)….brrr_r_r!!! I headed to the studio to get a move on some of the quilt tops in my closet:
I worked on this all day:
and by dinnertime, it was done (I scrolled it way up to make room for the second quilt):
Michael and I decided we deserved a celebration for surviving the week and everything that went wrong (mostly the fridge dying and still managing not to give food poisoning to all of our Thanksgiving guests (just kidding!))….so it was champagne and puffy things for dinner along with the beginning of our Christmas movie watching with THE HOLIDAY.
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Why don’t I remember to embroider a label on the front of my quilts BEFORE I quilt them????? I realized in bed last night that I didn’t do that on my first quilt, so I hopped up Sunday morning (11/30) and got the embroidery done:
before loading the quilt:
and setting up the pattern. I can’t really work on anything else while this is stitching out as I have to manipulate the top to prevent getting pleats in the back with this fleece, but by mid-afternoon, it was done:
Michael was out running errands and having fun in his Mustang, so I settled in front of the TV upstairs and got to knit for a couple of hours….heaven!!!
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PSA - We had a discussion over Thanksgiving about gift giving when I realized that of the 5 guests we had for Thanksgiving dinner, not one felt compelled to bring me a hostess gift.....AND HOW GLAD THAT FACT MADE ME!!!! I totally stress out when people bring me gifts during my ''teas'' and although I was totally excited about having a 70th birthday party a couple of years ago, in part to thank people who come and bring food to my tea every year....I DREADED the thought of gifts that people might bring. It truly raises my level of anxiety, although I couldn't express why nearly as well as this writer:
There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map.
They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill.
For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations.
Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale. Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolescence (becoming unfashionable). But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent.
The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away. The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts.
Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production. We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.
People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility. Forests are felled to make “personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us. In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot. No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich people in Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food or snorting it like cocaine to display their wealth.
It’s grotesque, but it scarcely differs from what almost everyone in industrialized nations is doing: trashing the living world through pointless consumption. This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage it.
World trade rules force countries to participate in the festival of junk.
Governments cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask “spending on what?”. When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless.
The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our doors.
Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. “I always knit my gifts”, says a woman in a television ad for an electronics outlet. “Well you shouldn’t,” replies the narrator.
An advertisement for Google’s latest tablet shows a father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7’s special features. The best things in life are free, but we’ve found a way of selling them to you.
The growth of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom ensures that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. In the US in 2010 a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to the top 1% of the population. The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor, simply does not wash.
For a few decades of extra enrichment for those who already possess more money than they know how to spend, the prospects of everyone else who will live on this earth are diminished. So effectively have governments, the media and advertisers associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule.
Witness last week’s Moral Maze programme (in the UK), in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea of consuming less, and to associate it, somehow, with authoritarianism. When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics.
Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don’t.
And 10 years ago....
*** Gordon Ramsy (chef) says ‘’where there’s fat, there’s flavor’’….so guess what? I’m delicious!!! ***
*** They say sugar can't fix your problems....well guess what? Neither can broccoli! At least chocolate puts in the effort! ***
*** My winter clothes have missed me so much....I put them on and they hugged me so tight I could barely breathe. ***
You are delicious to me!!!