True Cost to Own 2

I just heard a cringe podcast where they were discussing lack of street parking near our city's high school. One speaker said that, our region is hilly, and eBikes help with that. But not everyone's family can afford an eBike so many kids have no choice but to drive. 

This is a classic case of car brain where people no longer notice the high cost of car culture and car ownership. 

When our teen daughter was added to our car insurance policy, our premiums when up ~$2,000/yr even without adding another car. If your teen can delay becoming a driver by just one year, you can buy a decent eBike, lock, lights, and panniers. You will also save hundreds of hours chauffeuring your teen. 

Another year, another AAA "Your Driving Costs" report has dropped. It's time to update True Cost to Own. The cost of owning and operating a new vehicle in the US has increased to $12,182 in 2023.  New cars cost 4.7% higher than in 2022, but used cars went down in price. 

Remember, this is an average over the entire US, and Los Angeles tends to have higher insurance and fuel costs (both gasoline and electricity). This is also for the average new car sold which, at $34,876, is significantly cheaper than the typical new car I see in our school district (Tesla Y, ~$45,000-$52,500). 

The typical behavior in our area is for the parent to buy a new car and give their old car to the teen. Then they park the old car out on the street, making street parking even scarcer. It's not more people making street parking scarcer. It's more cars. 

I'm doing the calculation a bit differently this year, inspired by a LA Times article about a Culver City High School teacher that had their students run the numbers on car ownership over a lifetime. I don't get into the messiness of predicting inflation rates or marginal tax rates. 

Suppose you don't buy that new car and save that money instead in a balanced mutual fund. Using the Vanguard Benchmark Returns on Target Retirement Funds, you can expect to get ~8.25% long-term returns 

Using an online Savings Calculator, assuming 

Annual Savings: $12,182

Annual Increase in Savings: 3% (car costs have been going up faster than that)

Returns: 8.25% from balanced funds above

Taxes: 0% (if in tax-advantaged retirement account)

Then you have $1,0983,667.47 in year 24. 

Start when you turn 16, and save a million dollars by 40. 

In 50 years, age 66, the car-free saver will have $11,199,484.63. 

But, wait, you can save $18,264 pre-tax (33.3% combined CA+Fed tax rate) while $12,182 car costs are post-tax. But then you pay taxes on withdrawal from retirement accounts. So the amount will vary, but the message is the same. Living car-free or car-light (my family) is a huge money saver. 

Now I want to talk about the really pernicious part about car ownership, the externalized costs borne by others. 

This is painfully obvious to me every time I go to city council to beg for a bike lane and am turned down because "poor people need a free place to park their vehicles" on the public streets. 

I am charged the same price for my groceries whether I use the supermarket's huge and hugely expensive parking lot. I walk or bike to post of my groceries. I even bike to Costco for some of my trips. Yet, I pay for that parking lot. 

Even though road wear is proportional to axle weight to the 4th power, I am paying property taxes to maintain my city streets even though I get around on a 50# eBike instead of a 4,500# electric SUV. 

A 2020 Harvard Kennedy School study found that Driving is more expensive than you think. "Massachusetts' car economy is roughly $64.1 Billion, with more than half of that coming from public funds."

"Using publicly available data, the authors put the annual public tab at $35.7 billion, which amounts to about $14,000 for every household in the state. Those that do own vehicles pony up an additional $12,000 on average in direct costs."

You might nitpick that Massachusetts is snowy and snow plows are expensive. But, a 2021 Ulupono Initiative study in Hawaii found that "Public costs amount to roughly $15,000 per taxpayer ($24,400 per household), annually, even if they don’t own a car."

Furthermore, "Personal vehicles cost an additional $16,200 per household per year. With the public costs above, each household’s costs total $40,600 per year (or 51 percent of pre-tax income)."

Then there is the opportunity costs of the land. "Land value of public lands dedicated to road, highways, and parking is $3.9 billion, covering about 14 percent of the available urban land in our state."

Next time you see me bicycling for groceries, thank me for subsidizing your roads and parking. And drive carefully and slowly around cyclists. Dangerous road conditions are what's holding back the 60% of the public that is "interested but concerned" about riding bicycles. The more of us that are bicycling; the fewer cars in front of you, competing with you for parking, polluting your air, costing your city big bucks in road repair and climate change adaptation...

California AB 1909 states: 

“Existing law requires the driver of a motor vehicle that is passing or overtaking a bicycle to do so in a safe manner, as specified, and in no case at a distance of less than 3 feet.

This bill would additionally require a vehicle that is passing or overtaking a vehicle to move over to an adjacent lane of traffic, as specified, if one is available, before passing or overtaking the bicycle.”

Drivers are required to pass cyclists with at least 3 feet of clearance (and that is from the furthest point of my bike, including handlebars and cargo).  If there is more than one lane, drivers are required to change lanes before passing cyclists, just as they would do when passing another vehicle. This is why it makes sense for cyclists to ride 2-3 abreast in a pack instead of strung out in a single file line. Drivers can pass them in a shorter distance, making it safer and more convenient for everyone. 

This is now in California Vehicle Code 21760. 

Faux Disruption

I read Home Delivery! What Will They Think of Next? by Peter Funt with a chuckle.

When I bought my first Bernina, I went to the store by bike. The Bernina dealer delivered the machine to my home on her way home from work. Another colleague bought a framed picture and the art dealer delivered it to him at home, too.

At one time, the Boulder Public Library delivered requested books to your home in a "green bag." You return the bag and the book to the library later.

Funt rightly points out that dot coms like AmazonFresh and Instacart are inventing stuff that already exists. Home delivery of food was ubiquitous from the days when milkmen and green grocers were common sights on the street. Grocery stores delivered because most housewives didn't have cars.  They never stopped offering home delivery.

When I was in graduate school 20+ years ago, a classmate without a car told me about King Soopers' home delivery service. She would ride her bike to KS, select her weekly fresh food plus monthly nonperishable staples, and then take them to the customer service desk to arrange for home delivery. She then rode her bike home and met the KS delivery van a few minutes later. The rest of the month, she bought just what she could carry by bike.

Back then, King Soopers charged $9 to pull your groceries and deliver to your home. If you needed only one of those services; e.g. you pulled your own groceries and just needed delivery, or you needed someone to pull the groceries for you and load them up into your own car at the store, then you paid about half as much as full (pull+delivery) service.

For about $5/month, my friend solved one of the difficulties of being car-free.

The Denver Channel compared different home food delivery services and discovered that, while Instacart allows you to order groceries from King Soopers, Instacart offers a much smaller selection and charges 30% more than if you order directly from KS.

King Soopers Homeshop would cost me $96.12 for delivery and $90.12 for pick-up, followed by Instacart who cost $134.51, or 30% more than just ordering from King Soopers directly.

Home delivery was a necessary service before private cars were commonplace. For less mobile people, particularly the sick and elderly, those services are a lifeline.

Silicon Valley did not invent any of this. SV just pays their workers less, charges you more, and evades taxes.

This is an extension of my thoughts about Fauxtomation.

Gender wars of household chores

How did I miss The gender wars of household chores: a feminist comic.  It was published in the Guardian back in May!

In case you are wondering, Emma hits close to home x2.

Sweater maintenance

The weather climbed above freezing, hooray!  Today, it hit the 60s.

Kyle asked whether anyone else had hacked RTW pieces lately.  Well, I did some sweater maintenance but the only hacking was to go back and add length to the sleeves of a me-made sweater.

With the warmer temps of spring, I wash all of my wool sweaters before putting them away for the season.  I've read that wool moths are more attracted to dirty sweaters so this is my ounce of prevention.

While I was at it, I examined them for damage.  The black cashmere cardigan had developed a small hole at the shoulder.  Perhaps it was a casualty of my purse strap.  I darned it with a small amount of the black lace-weight wool I am using in my cowl before washing.  Does this count as a RTW hack?  Or just basic wardrobe maintenance?

I'm embarrassed to admit that the two black RTW sweaters are cashmere--purchased before I learned about the planetary cost of cashmere and more bad news about cashmere.  I wrote and firmly believe:

If you already have cashmere, don't sweat it. Take good care of it so it lasts. I have cashmere sweaters that are 25+ years old (one bought new, two bought at thrift shops).

The sweaters are all clean, fluffed up, delinted and fresh.

I washed them with shampoo on the delicate cycle of my washer. Well, I didn't let the sweaters agitate--I just used the spin dry feature.

 I filled the tub with a mixture of warm/cool water until it was tepid and let it agitate just to dissolve the shampoo. Then I added the sweaters and let it agitate just enough to thoroughly wet the sweaters. I turned the washer off and let them soak while I went to the gym. When I got back, I let the washer drain.

 Then I took the sweaters out, let the tub refill with warm/cool water, then put the sweaters back in for a rinse cycle (with an abbreviated agitation period). I repeated the rinse cycle and lay them on the drying rack for a day.  No visible fulling or shrinking.

What about you? How do you maintain your sweaters? DIY or outsource? Wash or dry clean?  Are you interested in a post about the planetary cost of dry-cleaning?

Thanksgiving change of heart

I was definitely in the "just say no" to shopping on Thanksgiving day camp until my MIL asked me to place an internet order for her. Something went awry and the confirmation showed it was being shipped to my house instead of hers. I called the 800 number to change the shipping instructions and a live person answered on the first ring.

After she corrected the shipping address, I wished her a happy Thanksgiving and said that I was sorry that she had to work on Thanksgiving.

She replied that she was not sorry.

Huh?

She explained that, because she was working today, she got out of cooking and cleanup. Answering the customer service line was definitely easier and better paid than staying home today.

Hmm. She's right. Until we do something about unequal division of labor at home, going to work for pay, aka market work, can be preferable to working for free, aka family work. In my perfect world, we'd be cooking and breaking bread with our loved ones today and sharing the work equitably. But, as long as workers are able to freely choose their work schedule on generally celebrated holidays, I'm fine with that.

After talking to her, I decided that Bad Dad was handling the cooking admirably on his own. I did help with the clean up though.

Andrew Sullivan posted some other opinions and links.

A friend said that his dad, a doctor, shared his practice with two Jews. His dad always got both Christmas Eve and Christmas day off. Bad Dad, a Jew, says he always volunteered to work those two days so Christians could take those days off. How about you? Do you have sacred days which you preserve for noncommercial activity?

Slowly going back to normal

Our house guests from Mexico have departed.  They barely left the guest room while they were in our house.  Their schedule was so busy, it felt more like I was running a bed and breakfast cum livery service rather than hosting cultural exchange students.

Since Bad Dad and I don't speak Spanish, and they don't speak English, we relied on Google Translate a great deal.  The mother/group chaperone didn't criticize my housekeeping to my face.  But, I noticed that the kids had a conversation on Google Translate about how come the dishes are so dirty.  (Iris replied that the glasses aren't dirty, but they do come out cloudy from the dishwasher.)

While they were here, Bad Dad was in the middle of a field experiment, working out of a local municipal airport.  He came home a few hours a day to shower and sleep, but worked every day for two weeks.

Meanwhile, Iris stayed home with a modest fever and a head cold that developed into a sinus infection. She was so sick, she missed most of the exchange week activities, including Disneyland.  You know your kid is sick when she turns down a free trip to Disneyland.

Our Aussie visitors are friends and I was a lot more relaxed about housekeeping.  Moreover, one of them asked if there was anything from Australia that I coveted.  She showed up with six Style Arc patterns in my size.  She can stay with us anytime.  (Actually, she's been coming to the US on average every six months and usually schedules an LAX layover at our house bearing gifts.)

I hope to show the Style Arc projects soon.  But, I haven't even shown the Jalie patterns I picked up at PR Weekend in April.  I've sewn one up and love it.  One day, I'll do a proper review.

On the good news front, I learned how to switch from Google Hangouts back to the old Gmail Chat interface.  I really hated the Hangout interface because it required me (at least in Safari) to click on the chat box before typing.  In Chat, I could just start typing.  Interface and U/X designers, why add that extra step to something that worked fine before?

The definition of a friend

is someone I don't feel the need to clean my house for when they come over.  I have also heard someone say on NPR that, if someone helps themselves to stuff in your fridge without asking first, and you feel fine about that, then you are friends.

I enjoy hosting friends visiting from out of town.  I like to stay with friends instead of a hotel whenever possible.

But, what if you are hosting a stranger?  A stranger from our sister city in Mexico who hosted my (not always angelic) child during Spring break?  A stranger who, according to my normally not observant child, keeps an immaculate house?  Iris' host sister's mother is also coming as a group chaperone.  They will both stay with us for one week.

I asked our (Mexican-born/US Citizen) biweekly housecleaner for advice.  She replied that our house is pretty good for an American house.  We are going to tackle the house together the morning before the guests arrive.

Bad dad thinks the house looks fine.  I pointed to holes in the ceiling from repairs made 20 months ago.  "Oh, I forgot about that and stopped noticing.  We should get someone in to repair all the plaster and repaint."

He did notice that the dining room chairs were torn and wobbly.  We are eating on the piano bench until they come back from the upholsterers.

We sent some blinds out for repair and purchased new blinds for two bedrooms.  Now the rest of the blinds look shabby and their days are numbered.  Hmm, why hasn't the blind repair place called me back yet?  It's been a week.  [Update: they are working on it.  They had to order parts.]

We started with Iris' bathroom that guests share.  Mark fixed the towel rack.  I performed an archeological dig in the medicine cabinet and under the sink cabinet.  Why do we still have baby stuff? You can see the counter now.

New guest room sheets are on the way.   UPS says they should be delivered today.  [Update: UPS handed them off to USPS for delivery in 1-2 more days.  WTF?]  The pillows will get a good wash were washed in hot water.

I am tackling piles of clutter, one area at a time.  Now that I am looking, I see we have piles (and spiders!)  everywhere.

I may call a handyman and tackle the garage after the house.  I have BIG plans!  But, everything won't be done before Friday.

Meanwhile, I see from LinkedIn that my dream job just opened up in Belgium.  They need someone to test earth observation data and software as well as write their data preservation plans.  Hey, that's my specialty.

If hired, I'll move.  The hell with housework.  I'll let the other two clutterbugs sort out their own piles.

Seriously, there are parallels with sorting through and curating data and household clutter.  It takes knowledge, insight and imagination to understand how things are used, the effort it would take to replace something, to imagine future uses for old stuff/data and weigh that against the cost of storing the stuff.

I'm really, really good at that.

And data analysis and curation pay so much better than housework.

Mommy dearest moment

Remember "No wire hangers, ever!"?

I'd taken my daughter to Lands End last week to buy her a new jacket.  But, she was so cranky and tired, she didn't want to shop for anything else.  I was doing (more thankless) volunteer work today nearby so I swung by LE again to peruse the clearance racks.  I bought her four things and showed them to her this evening.  She liked two of them and asked me to return the other two.

Anyway, one of the items fit right now and went into her bureau.  We agreed to hang the slightly large shirt in a corner of her closet until the next growth spurt, when it should fit.  (She grew from 4'11" to 5'2" in less than a year.)  I went to my room to fetch an appropriate hanger.  When I returned, she asked what was wrong with the hangers in her closet.

I replied, "They are all the wrong type."

She probably thinks I am crazy, but they really were all the wrong type.

The shirt is too large to stay on her child-sized hangers and all the wider non-slip hangers were being used by her wider-necked tops.  I really did have to walk to my closet and fetch an adult-sized plastic hanger.  Really.

Of course, we don't use wire hangers in our house.  That would mean dry-cleaning, which we seldom use.  When we do send stuff to the dry cleaners (every spring when we put away the wool clothing that can't be hand-washed), I gather the wire hangers and return them to the dry cleaners for reuse.

Just in case you have never read the book or seen the movie, here's a clip. I read the book and skipped the movie. Reviews were negative, portraying it as a campy, over-the-top movie that failed to capture the nuances of the relationship explored in the book. The book made me so uncomfortable, I wouldn't have been able to watch it, even had it been a good movie.



References to "Mommie Dearest" in pop culture tend to get the story wrong.  Yes, Joan Crawford could have been a better mom.  But, she worked damn hard in an unforgiving business--a business notorious for pumping it's talent full of drugs and booze to make them work on demand.

Her daughter had very few household responsibilities.  She had been told repeatedly that it was her responsibility to take her clothes off the wire hangers used by the dry cleaners and rehang them on padded hangers.  That was her single household responsibility, requiring mere minutes each week.   Yet she failed to do it week after week.

By her own admission, Christina had a loving grandmother, housekeeper and many maids, nannies, cooks, gardeners and drivers.  She was not neglected.  She was loved (but, perhaps, not by her mother).  But, she also came across as too narcissistic to be lovable.  Publishing the book is only one among many transgressions against her mom.

When I was eight, my mother showed me how to use the washer and dryer and put me in charge of all of the family laundry--including ironing and planning washday around the weather because we used an outdoor clothesline.  My eleven year old sister and I traded responsibilities weekly.  One person was responsible for laundry and cleaning both bathrooms.  The other was responsible for doing all dishes and cleaning the kitchen.  We swapped every weekend.  When we were the age of Christina during that scene, we were the gardeners as well, swapping care of the front and back yards on the weekly schedule.

My mom worked as a charge nurse (senior registered nurse) at a small hospital.  She had Wednesdays off, which she spent cleaning, shopping, cooking and schlepping us to music lessons.  She also had every other weekend off, and she planned outings for each of those weekends.  (Ordinary people would have spent that time sleeping.)

I don't know how my mom did it.  I would never have dreamed of treating my mother the way Christina Crawford treated Joan Crawford.  I can't believe that people got the story so wrong; did we read the same book?

There are so many ways that a mother-daughter relationship can go wrong.  Give me strength because I  need it to get through (her) puberty.

I got another call today about an interesting job in another city.  Is it wrong to dream about getting my own apartment in another city and being a mom only on weekends?  Is it wrong to dream about her lifting a finger around the house?

2012 Maker Wrap-up

This year, I kept a spreadsheet of my projects and craft purchases.  I purchased ~250 yards and used ~150 yards of fabric in 117 projects.  The fabric usage is a bit low because I did so much refashioning and and worked with used clothing and odds and ends from my 'zero-waste' bin.  Scraps yielded  linings, facings, pocket bags and bias bindings.  I also produced many a quilt top and toddler clothes for LA County foster children from them.

In numbers:

• 33 items for me (nearly all of my new clothes for the year)
• 17 for Iris (about half her new clothes this year)
• 67 for others ranging from quick baby pants to twin-sized patchwork quilts
• 10 knit projects
• 107 sewn projects

My favorite project has got to be the whale fluke quilt I made for an anonymous LA county foster child.  Someday, I would like to make one for myself.

In other news, Iris and I took singing lessons together.  We had fun.  They helped.  She scored a principal role in her school musical and I no longer feel embarrassed singing in public.

We traveled all over the western US, skiing, bicycling, hiking and visiting friends.

I'm busier than ever.  On top of my CSA coordinator role, I am also serving as a nutrition docent, 3x a week math tutor and making the sets for the play (with Pennamite) for Iris' school.  The schools are so hard up for money that parent volunteers are filling in so many roles.  

Bad dad and I are taking several MOOC (massive open online courses) and enjoying them immensely.  For some reason, he also expects me to do all of the housework and child schlepping.  I'm exercising and cooking from scratch more.

I hung out a shingle as a one-woman consulting company and STEM tutor.  I had a third interview and hope to sign the first consulting client soon.  Meanwhile, I discovered that, while there is very little work for earth scientists, there are many opportunities for someone with my data wrangling skills.  Headhunters do call, but only for full-time positions in other cities.

Aside from the money thing, life is full and good.  Our money situation is not dire so I am not complaining.  I just want to stress that family work is work, even though it doesn't pay as well as market work.  LOL.

The same goes for community volunteer work. I already made my sentiments about NCLB and high-stakes testing known.  I'm trying to make life better for the children in my community that fell victim to them.   Like family work, the pay is lousy.   But it is work and it is important.

Backstage support: traveling nannies

I decided to break up the nanny arrangements post and treat this backstage support item separately.

My last manager used to say that he could not put me on such and such (high profile) project because I cannot travel.  I repeatedly told him that I am able to travel, but I need to know in advance so I can make appropriate arrangements.  This back and forth went on for years with him making a false statement and me gently correcting him.  Anyway, all water under the bridge now.

In the last post, I wrote that the amount of backstage support that elite women can afford to purchase is out of the question for most women, even ones with PhDs like myself.  When my daughter was young and I was working nearly full-time, I did spend on a high-quality daycare center that provided coverage 7AM-6PM Monday through Friday.  A cleaning lady came biweekly.  My husband, when he was in town and not otherwise occupied, helped.  Otherwise, I was on my own.

My husband is a field scientist and travels frequently and with little notice. He told me that, if I put my travel on the calendar at least 6 months in advance, then he will hold that sacred and not book travel at the same time. That didn't work out as promised.   I have put travel on the calendar as far as 13 months in advance and he has then arranged to travel at the exact same time.  Again all water under the bridge now.

One time, when I was traveling to DC to brief a large project to the client agency, he had a trip pushed back from the prior week to the exact same week.  His client was one that could not be denied.  I couldn't back out of a big meeting arranged months in advance.  We were booked for the same flight to DC and shared a hotel room and car, saving our employer hundreds of dollars.

Our parents were in too frail health to help out with childcare overnight, so I  called the work/life balance counselor at HR for help with overnight daycare arrangements.  Blah, blah, blah.  They talked a good game, giving a work/life balance phone number.  But, when I really needed help, they offered me nothing but ridicule for even calling.   I told the counselor that the company was sending both parents out of town and that we needed help locating an overnight nanny.  She paused for a few seconds and then went into a spiel about how daycare is a private matter and not something that she can help me with. 

Anyway, I was heartened to read that U.S. Soccer provides and pays for traveling nannies as a normal part of the of cost of doing business and competing.

Wouldn't it be nice if all this talk about bringing women into STEM included more backstage support?  Or offering backstage support to anyone who needs it, regardless of profession?

Nanny arrangements

There's quite a bit of chatter about Marissa Mayer's new job as head of Yahoo.  Good for her!  And that's all I feel qualified to say as I've never worked in the dot com world.  If you want to read something, see Wandering Scientist's very thoughtful take.

I have to say that I am impressed at the difference that throwing money at a problem can make.  I was astonished to learn that the MBA CFO wife of a former scientist coworker had three full-time people facilitating her 'having it all' life.  At the office, she had a full time secretary AND a personal assistant in addition to the finance department staff.  At home, she had a full-time nanny.

Scientists don't earn that kind of money or have that much clout in the workplace.  Her personal assistant made about as much as I made working full-time as a scientist at a nonprofit.  Anyway, that kind of backstage support is not available except to elite women.  In effect, she's at the top of a pyramid scheme.

That's the thing that is getting lost in the debate.  There is a whole lot of care and attention necessary to run a home and family--what Joan Williams calls family work.  Family work, when it is not outsourced, generates no money and doesn't add to the GDP.  However, it is still work and it is still necessary to keep the family, community, state, nation and world running.  For instance, if no one signed up for the unpaid job of growing and raising children, society would eventually stop.

Elite women can afford to outsource.  But what are we doing to support all the lower-paid women propping her up?

Links:

• I have riffed on Joan Williams' excellent analysis multiple times, most thoroughly in Perfect Madness.  
• Please go back and read the Joan Williams series.  
• More than 20 years ago, sociologist Arlie Hochschild followed the lives of Silicon Valley women, the women hired to perform their family work and the women hired by those women.  She wrote a fascinating book, The Second Shift.  Follow the money trail and the pyramid scheme is evident.
• The pyramid scheme does not stop at our borders. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild contains an uneven (but worthwhile) compilation of pieces by researchers following the global movement of women to satisfy the "care deficit" with devastating effects in their home (and host) countries.
  

The agile home

First Cloud shared how she and her husband juggle the logistics of two full-time careers and two kids in Having it all: The Logistics. Then FeMOMhist proposed a blog carnival for sharing logistical solutions in celebration of International Women's Day on March 8.

I got tired just reading Cloud's description of a typical day.

I have no tips to share. Marriage to a field scientist means that he will leave at the drop of a hat and come home--or not come home--based on so many factors beyond our control. My white blood cells go AWOL at the drop of a hat. And they appear to have gone south for the winter, hence my blog silence of late.

I feel like I am constantly reacting and juggling. I never reach a comfortable equilibrium.

I lamented this fact with a coworker today.

He says that I just have to rebrand my life. I am not reactive, I am agile. Well, he wrote the book on software architecture and he said that I was doing fine.

The death march is over (sorta)

I meant to post a timely follow-up to Wandering Scientist's post, Anyway You Do It, It Is Hard, but time is something in short supply at our house.   Go read her thoughts about combining science and motherhood, particularly about the division of housework in two-scientist families.

I can attest that couples are in a competition for time.  That time can be spent pursuing activities that get us ahead at work, improve our health or overall well-being, or keep the household running smoothly.  I  bet you can guess which is the least personally and financially rewarding.

I've been on a death march (endless slog) since we got home from our NYC trip during spring break.  If you read Bad Dad's blog, you know he is a big film fanatic.  When TCM announced their first ever TCM Classic Film Festival, he bought a pass with my blessing.  At that time, he didn't have too many work travel commitments so I figured a long weekend of single motherhood was doable.

Then I watched in horror while one business trip after another was announced.  In a 35 day period, Bad Dad was scheduled to be home for 8 evenings (and ~12 mornings)!  I breathed a sigh of relief when his last field experiment was postponed, only to be broadsided by the news that he was being sent to the Gulf of Mexico to study the effects of the oil spill.  (Only weeks earlier, he had been flying over nominally operating oil rigs near Santa Barbara and they had been waiting for a non-nominal case.)  That trip took us into week 5 and 6 of the death march.

(In fairness, I should add that this was a death march for him, too.  The life of a field scientist is hard, hard, hard.  The only thing he wants to do when he gets home is to take a shower and sleep.)

After he got caught up with sleep, the Ring Cycle was playing at LA Opera.  He's also a big opera fan and some tickets were available at the last minute at cut-rate prices.  How often do you get to experience the entire Ring Cycle in your home town?  He spread that out over the next week and a half (week 7-8), so he was home some nights in between.

Some people might think this is all manageable because I work part-time (36 hours/week).  But, I work part-time because of my health.  I am officially classified as 'partially disabled but able to work' except for occasional flare-ups.  My last flare-up was in late February, following an infection, and I was put on a reduced (20-30) work schedule for the month of March to give me time to recover.  I didn't magically become well when April 1 rolled around.  In fact, I have been suffering from chronic fatigue and joint pain since then.

May and June are terrible months for working parents.  There are so many end of year school activities, especially because Iris graduated from elementary school in June.  (And why do the schools expect so much volunteer time from the mothers and so little from the fathers?)

In addition, Iris had to have a new graduation dress for the occasion, particularly because we were warned by the school ahead of time that she was up for an award.

She said that she wanted a silk dress--she was ready for something more grown-up.  I had originally shown her a yellow embroidered raw silk from my fabric collection, but she wanted a smooth silk.  We went to Joann's and bought a pattern and some cotton to make a 'wearable muslin', a mock-up of the dress that she could wear for less dressy occasions.  After we tweaked the fit, I made the final dress in a silk twill with a large-scale print.

I should save the dress journey for its own post.  Both dresses were lovely.

In the long slog, I did manage to do some creative endeavors just for myself.  I did accomplish some things at work for which I was given kudos.  I didn't get much exercise and would have liked to sleep more, but that is a constant in my life.

Given the odd 15 minutes to do something creative, or to blog about creativity, I chose to make something.  Eventually, I plan to post about them here and on Ravelry or Pattern Review.  Or maybe not. If I don't get caught up with project notes by the end of the summer, I may declare bankruptcy and just blog the new projects as I complete them.

You call that a feminist icon?

Imperfect Union, a book review about the testy relationship between Virginia Woolf and her household domestic, Nellie Boxall, highlights the imperative to find someone else to do the dirty work.

Unbelievably, Woolf expected Boxall, hired as a cook, to do all the household chores in a Victorian household without modern plumbing (think chamberpots) on her own. Reading excerpts of Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury in Mona Simpson's book review made my blood boil. I don't think I need to read Woolf's diary. The relationship between the two women ended, after 18 years, when Boxall demanded a room of one's own by asking Woolf to please leave her room. Good for her.

I am surprised that the Atlantic Monthly website didn't link Imperfect Union with that old Caitlin Flanagan classic, How Serfdom Saved the Women's Movement. It's true. You can enjoy more life if you find someone else to do your dirty work. Come to think of it, you can enjoy more life if you get someone else to pay your bills.

I can't stop thinking about how Woolf unilaterally decided to loan out Boxall to her sister's household as if she owned the right to Boxall's labors. Was Boxall an employee or a slave?

The first few chapters of Joan Williams' Unbending Gender survey the history of laws regarding women's labors. Williams is a law professor, and the book can be heavy reading, but I can't recommend the book enough. At the very least, read the history in the early chapters.

Cleaning their own chamberpot never occurred to Virginia Woolf or her husband. That theme is explored in the anthology, Global Woman. I can't remember the anthropological/sociology jargon in the book for it, but it was something like transference. That is, some people assume that their gender (male) or their class get them out of doing dirty work. It never even occurs to them that they could or should do their own dirty work.

The chapter in Global Woman about the plight of a Taiwanese family and their Filipina maid comes to mind. An invalid elderly mother moves in with her retired son against the wishes of his wife. The son/husband says that his mother cannot go to a nursing home; what would people say? What kind of son would he be if he let his mother go to one of those places? He must care for her at his home.

His retired wife, who had worked as a schoolteacher and raised their (grown) children with minimum help from him, found herself trapped in retirement in the house seven days a week with a very demanding and sadistic mother in law. Her husband sat in his chair and read the newspaper all day, even with a graduate student studying household distribution of work observing the household. He felt absolutely no guilt because it never occurred to him that caring for his mother meant doing the work himself. (I wish I could remember the book's term for that kind of myopia.)

In the end, the wife/daughter in law went back to work three days a week so that she could afford to hire a live-in Filipina maid. If she taught three days a week and took care of her mother in law on the maid's days off, that left her 2-3 days a week of freedom. She said that she would have to work until her mother in law died; her husband would not pay for the maid because it was something that they should have been able to handle on their own. That kind of obstinate blindness is very convenient. ;-)

Lost & Found points out another way in which the labor of a woman can be taken away from her against her will. Louise Teagarden's skeletal remains were found in a cave in the Santa Rosa mountains decades after her disappearance. Why did she disappear?

She intended to come back. Why else would she have drained her car's radiator as a precaution against the desert winter cold? Could it have been an attempt to use her own time on her own terms, even for a short while?

Of three sisters, Teagarden was the only one who never married and thus was expected to be her family's helper--coming home as an adult to nurse one sister through an infected cat bite and her father through prostate cancer.
...
Anyway, it was probably better being chilly in a cave than at home with her family for the holidays. Her father had died three years before, followed soon after by her sister Virginia. Her girlfriend Moore had moved away. Now her mother's health was declining, and Teagarden was again under pressure to come home and care for her. After all, as her surviving sister surely pointed out, Teagarden had no responsibilities.

As an evolutionary biologist pointed out, there are advantages to having homosexual family members. The unmarried aunts lived with their siblings and took care of their nieces and nephews. No one asked them what they wanted, but their thankless labors helped ensure the survival of their relatives.

Who does more housework?

Don't miss this morning's Marketplace Morning Report interview with Frank Stafford, an economist at the University of Michigan, Who does more housework?

Frank Stafford: Well, the new finding actually is we looked back to 1996, where we had single women, single men living on their own, had never been married before. And then as you go forward 10 years to 2005, some of the women had gotten married and their housework went up from about 9.5 hours a week to 16 hours a week. But what's different is that if you look at the young men, the bachelors had gotten married, their house work went by up about 2.5 hours.
...
Stafford: Yeah. There is a little bit of a bias. Men tend to report more housework hours than they do when you get a better measure of their housework.

Listen to the whole story, or read the transcript in the link above.

Birthrates and Housework

I have alluded before to the connection between distribution of housework and but I was not aware until recently about a small study that showed exactly that. I pulled a few quotes from a BBC News summary about the study.

The researchers from Brown University studied 265 married couples in which both partners were employed.

The husbands and wives were asked to report how much time they and their spouses spent per week on nine common household tasks, such as cooking, shopping and cleaning.

...81% of couples in which the husband does at least half the housework will have a second child.

...when the woman did between 54% and 84% of the housework, the likelihood of the couple having a second child went down to 55%.

...more traditional couples, where the woman did more than 84% of the housework, frequently went on to have a second child.

She (Christine Northam, a counsellor for Relate) said some couples may decide it is better for one half to stay at home and take on all of the household tasks. "If one of them is taking complete responsibility for the housework it means the other one doesn't have that on top of everything else. "It may well indicate that one of them had decided to stay home and look after the family, in which case maybe for that couple having a family is more of a priority than working," she said.

Reading this, it looks like women who expected an egalitarian marriage but did not get one, are the ones most likely to stop after one child. It is the expectation versus the reality that causes low birthrates.

The one child family is the norm in many countries such as Italy and Australia. No wonder health and pension ministers from those nations have been trying to get men in their countries to do more housework. I wonder when American politicians are going to "get it".

I am also surprised by people who talk about falling birthrates as if that would be the answer to the huge influx of immigrants we have experienced in recent years. The reason we need so many immigrants is partly because American parents, particularly mothers, are so overworked.

Remember the quote from Sharon Lerner from the What do I tell her? post? She said that birthrates in the US would be as low as in Europe if it weren't for high-fertility recent immigrants. It is easier to build 20 foot fences around our borders than to take a hard look at home.

The anthology, Global Woman, may be somewhat uneven, but it contains some excellent, well-researched treatments of the global effects of "the care deficit" at home. When women do not get the help that they need nearby, they look farther for solutions. That is as true for the wife in a dual-career household in the USA as the single mother in Mexico who leaves her children behind with relatives to seek paid work "El Norte". Both women are doing what they must do for the survival of themselves and their children. Why do we know Zoe Baird's name but not her husband's?

Aside:
In the preface to the second edition of The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild wrote that the narrowing of the gap between percentage of housework performed by husbands and wives in dual-career couples is not because the men do more. It is because the wives have outsourced more of it. In fact, husbands are doing less now than in her initial study.

I would like to add that people work at different efficiencies. Just because a husband expends 30% of the household work hours in a home does not mean that he performs 30% of the work. ;-)

I also encountered this article about division of labor between the sexes in Turkey in the BBC News archives. Mark wonders why Europe prefers immigrants from Turkey over east Asia.

Mommy Blogging

Today's NY Times ran two complementary articles about motherhood. Both are worth reading. The Op-Ed page printed Linda Hirshman's Off to Work She Should Go. The Books section reveals Mommy Books: More Buzz Than Buyers.

Reading Linda Hirshman's piece made my heart sink because she is so right. If you actually read LH (rather than read her detractors), you will know that she is careful to back up her assertions with data. In this case, she quotes the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics' “Trends in Labor Force Participation of Married Mothers of Infants.” (Despite my gripes about the common misapplication of statistics, I have always admired the careful handling of statistics at BLS.)

The authors also speculate that the pressure of working and running a household is great. They do not say, however, that working hours have increased as participation has declined. Educated women, they report, work 42.2 hours a week on average and those with professional degrees, 45 — hardly the “80-hour week” of legend.

Yeah, I work "part-time", but my total market and family work day is longer than that for most men who work "full-time". Joan Williams' research showed that I am far from alone in this finding. Husbands actually do less housework when their spouses move to part-time work. In fact, they decrease their family work hours by more than the the number of hours their spouses decrease their market work.

What has changed in the last decade is that the job of motherhood has ramped up. Mothers today spend more time on child care than women did in 1965, a time when mothers were much less likely to have paying jobs, family scholars report.

How did mothers do less childcare in 1965 than today, and do it without childcare centers? Social networks are one answer. Highly trained professionals are expected to move anywhere for their jobs. Not many bring their mothers or other female relatives with them to help with childcare. So, at a time when work demands more hours, the mothers are often displaced from their family support network. Even when family lives nearby, they are often unable to help. Grandmothers are often older and frailer due to delayed childbearing. Younger relatives often perform market work and are, thus, not available for family work.

Additionally, professional neighborhoods used to be full of SAHMs who looked after one another's children. Children also used to run around the neighborhoods, playing unsupervised. Mark and I both walked to school without parental supervision at Iris' current age. However, our school district specifically prohibits children under a certain age from walking to school without an adult. Older siblings or older neighborhood children used to accompany younger children to school.

That the most educated have opted out the most should raise questions about how our society allocates scarce educational resources. The next generation of girls will have a greatly reduced pool of role models.

This is LH's scariest point. I have blogged about this before. My education was costly, for both society and myself. If I don't use it, then society will be justified in denying this type of educational opportunity to future girls on the grounds that the education would be wasted upon them. Should we go back to the days in which universities either banned women, or put a cap on women's admission to reserve the vast majority of seats for "men who would actually use the educations"? The Taliban carries this argument to its logical extreme and bans the education of girls altogether.

The mommy books article makes the point that, despite the media buzz, very few people actually buy the latest crop of mommy books. Even today, Betty Friedan's classic, The Feminine Mystique, outsells all the newer books. (They imply that book buying is a valid proxy for book reading, which is not proven. No matter.)

Perhaps the article was right. Women don't want to read about such a personally painful subject. It takes a certain kind of denial to become a mother.

I, for one, am not at all surprised that those motherhood books are not selling well or being read. If you read "The Feminine Mystique", you would know that mothers do not have time to read books. We get, at most 15 minute blocks of uninterrupted reading time--just enough to read a magazine article!

Aside: In Britain, women who marry high-earning men have a huge incentive to quit their jobs right after the wedding. Read the International Herald Tribune story about divorce laws in different countries.

How 'Green' is Your T-shirt?

Can Polyester Save the World? touched on many issues dear to my heart (link to the NYT article published 1/24/07 and good for 7 days) . I had never before read a full analysis of the energy impact of a cotton t-shirt and a polyester blouse.

The pop up graphic on the left side, How 'Green' is Your T-shirt?, is particularly interesting. Before adding in the impact of laundering, the energy use for both the polyester blouse and the cotton t-shirt is nearly identical. Although I have a few quibbles with the assumptions used in the calculation, the results are close enough to the energy impact analysis for "Paper or Plastic?" that they make intuitive sense to me. (Our household receives both Chemical and Engineering News and NRDC's OnEarth magazines.)

I have personally heard some people sneer that polyester is made with petroleum and cotton is made is renewable. Well, it depends on whether one counts the petroleum used in farming (fertilizer and pesticides), transporting and processing the cotton. Cotton T-shirts, like paper grocery sacks, are heavier than polyester blouses and plastic grocery bags and, thus, require more energy to transport. (Let's not even go into the energy expended to move trucks of bottled water around to places where tap water is plentiful and safe.) Additionally, I have read in several other places that more pesticides are applied to produce cotton than any other crop in the world. I also know, from living in California, that cotton is an enormously water and energy-intensive crop. Water is heavy; pumping water around is also very energy-intensive.

Several of the assumptions in How 'Green is Your T-shirt? may not apply to you. They certainly do not apply for our household. For both energy and safety reasons, we set our water heater to 130 F. After Iris' birth, we lowered it even further to 120 F. We wash most of our laundry in warm and cold water. We also use a clothesline for our synthetics, t-shirts, towels, jeans and other items that take a long time to dry in the dryer whenever the weather is amenable.*

What can be done about this problem? We have seen the enemy and the enemy is us. I cleaned out my closet last weekend and was shocked at how my wardrobe had multiplied like bunnies in the darkness of the walk-in closet. The fashion cycle moves so fast, it is dizzying. It is also so easy and inexpensive to buy disposable fashion now. Moreover, like food, we can buy clothing in more venues than in the past.

The end of the article gives me some hope for change, but also shows how far we still need to go in terms of changing people's attitudes:

And so Marks & Spencer is thinking about whether its customers will be willing to change their buying habits, to pay more for less-fashionable but “sustainable” garments. After all, consumers have shown a willingness to pay more for clothes not made in sweatshops, and some are unwilling to buy diamonds because of forced labor in African mines.

On a recent day outside Marks & Spencer on Guildford High Street, where everyone was loaded with shopping bags, Audrey Mammana, who is 45, said she was not “a throw-away person” and would be happy to lease high-end clothing for a season. She would also be willing to repair old clothes to extend their use, although fewer shops perform this task.

But, she added: “If you cut out tumble-drying, I think you’d lose me. I couldn’t do without that.”

It is good to read that such a large retailer believes that there is a market for sweatshop-free clothing. It is not so heartening to read that the consumer cannot make her own clothing repairs. I am especially disheartened to read that she rules out line-drying her clothes.

Links:
I joined Wardrobe Refashion for a two-month period. I wrote about refashioning clothes and sweatshops previously in I want to be let alone. I wrote about how using a clothesline can save you time (and energy) in Another Way.

Read Joel Achenbach's article for the WaPost entitled Another Way, and the subsequent discussion. Joel, too, also categorically ruled out using a clothesline even though he admitted to using one in childhood.

Sigh. You don't have to give up tumble drying altogether. You need only tumble dry less. One good thing, maybe the only good thing, that came out of the electricity crisis in California is that the state legislature made it illegal for homeowners' associations to penalize residents for using a clothes line in places where it is against the Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions (CC&R's). How can it be legal to waste energy and be illegal to conserve energy?

* The weather forecasts that are pretty darn good. Use them to plan your laundering around non-rainy days. During el Nino years, we have long stretches where we use the dryer more than usual. However, we hang our jeans and towels on in indoor rack. Even cold weather can freeze-dry your clothes. ;-)

That's all folks.

When Home Baths Became Spas

Do you remember a time when the bathrooms at the Hearst Castle were considered opulent? That was the thing most people remembered about the house tour. People walked out of there exclaiming over the size and number of the bathrooms in that house. Now, middle-class homes have caught up with and perhaps even surpassed the Hearst Castle.

Even Sunset Magazine, has an article about creating your own spa bath. The bathrooms in that article put the Hearst Castle to shame. Sigh. I remember reading Sunset to learn how to make my own bath sink from a copper bowl from the housewares department.

My favorite architecture critic, Witold Rybczynski, recently wrote a slide-show essay about America's growing obsession with bathrooms. The only thing I would add to his comments is to think about how one would clean and maintain all the fancy finishes in these baths. Is there a connection between our high maintenance homes and our insatiable need for low-cost household labor?

Rybczynski also wrote about the design trend in the location of bathrooms in new construction over a decade ago. That deserves its own post another time. Right now, we need to head out the door to Descanso Gardens to see the camellia forest in bloom.

Links: I explained how Rybczynski became my favorite architecture critic in Recurring Themes.
Thanks to Dynamist for the heads up on the slide show essay.

That's all folks.

Madison Avenue Discovers Moms

I read Marketers Look Past Jelly Stains and See a Mom Who Has Needs today with some incredulity and a hint of anger. Every source of angst is another marketing opportunity!

The worst part about the article is that the quoted "experts" stereotype mothers while protesting that they are done stereotyping mothers. There is so much crapola in that article, I am not sure where to begin.

The beginning is as good a place to start as any:

Brands as disparate as Suave shampoo, Time Warner Cable, KFC fried chicken and Tide are tailoring their messages to mothers who, they are certain, are dying to spend more time on themselves, but feel too guilty to do so.

Who says that moms feel guilty about spending time on ourselves? I wish I had more time for myself, but I never ever feel guilty about the small amount of time I manage to carve out for myself. I revel in it. I blog about it ad nauseum. Do I write like a woman conflicted about time not spent doing underappreciated housework? Do they think I should feel any more guilt than a father?

A little further down:

“We used to stereotype women as sex objects, and then we stereotyped them as superwomen: career woman, homemaker, mom and mate,’’ said Gary Armstrong, professor of marketing at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina. “But now we are recognizing that anyone who has been out in the world as a smart, beautiful woman will not give that up because she’s a mom.”

I was going to dismiss this quote because it came from a man (or a woman named Gary), but Donna Charlton-Perrin, creative director on the Suave account said,

"There seems to be this feeling in the culture that moms must be martyrs, that their lives have to be all about their kids. But the beautiful woman inside that mom is still dying to get out. So we’re saying, ‘A pretty mommy is a better mommy.’ "

The ick factor runs high. Evidently, we are not done with the physical beauty stereotype. Our society is so fixated on equating beauty with goodness. Women are judged so much by our looks. I deeply resent the encroachment of the beauty myth on motherhood.

Everytime I listen to the soundtrack of "Into the Woods", my heart breaks when the witch sings, "Stay awhile", to her daughter. The daughter who would run away from the one who loved and raised her. Why? Because her mother was ugly.

The article also said Ms. Charlton-Perrin was looking for ways to

“interrupt moms when they are not thinking about themselves’’— say, by putting Suave stickers on food shelves in supermarkets, or running pop-up ads on Internet sites that sell children’s clothes.

My life has enough interruptions, thank-you. Please don't add any more. I will hold a grudge against you. I have a long and excellent memory thanks to lots of practice as chief household systems engineer.

keyword: modern motherhood