Ashen Wings, Clockwork Heart Comments (0)
Although, like many professors, I rail against the use of Wikipedia as a source in my students’ research papers, I have to admit that it’s an extremely useful reference — as a writer, I often use it to quickly glean some little fact for a story. Moreover, inclusion in Wikipedia has become a sort of measure of importance for the web generation, although the fact that anyone can edit it raises interesting sociological questions about gatekeepers, legitimation, and the like. Regardless, I was excited when someone added Clockwork Heart to Wikipedia’s list of steampunk fantasy works, and I’m just as pleased now that others have added my name as an entry. Thank you! I feel legitimated now. 
drupagliassotti @ June 16, 2008
Simplicity, Ashen Wings Comments (0)
The drawback to being a writer, editor, and professor is that sometimes I live too much in my head. Getting out hiking or traveling is fun because it forces me out of my head and into my body. Right now I have a new project to work my body and relax my brain — cleaning these two old trunks I bought via Craigslist.
One’s a large flat-top trunk and the other is a smaller steamer trunk, circa 1870s-1920. They’re in reasonable condition, but I’m told they were stored in a shed in Massachusetts until being carted here to California, so there’s a lot of rust and corrosion on the iron and brass hardware, and dirt everywhere. My current project is to get these cleaned up so I can bring them inside.
But wait — isn’t this clutter? Bite your tongue! This is storage masquerading as furniture! I’ll be using the big trunk as a coffee table, most likely, and the smaller one will go in a picturesque stack of old-fashioned boxes and antique luggage that I use to store office supplies, my DVD player, etc. I plan to move a variety of tools and crafts supplies that are currently living in plastic containers in my closet into these trunks, thus ridding my apartment of more icky plastic, creating space in the closets, and making it that much faster for me to pack up and move.
I’ve been reading a variety of trunk restoration sites to learn how to clean these up. I don’t want to do a complete restoration, but I don’t want them leaving funny stains on the rug or strange smells in the air, either. At the moment I’m tackling the very, very rusted iron with Naval Jelly, wire brush, and steel wool, and the tarnished brass with Noxon. Once the hardware is relatively clean, I’ll tackle washing the old painted canvas and stripping and oiling the wood. It’s good mindless physical labor, although breathing in the various toxic fumes and clouds of rust can get pretty intense, even out on my balcony. On the other hand, killing off brain cells is one way to resolve the “living too much in my head” problem….
drupagliassotti @ June 12, 2008
Simplicity, Ashen Wings Comments (0)
After yesterday’s blog post about gas prices, friend Dan Berger suggested working at a local library or coffee shop or starting to commute by scooter or motorbike. Since I’d been casually thinking about scooters since reading an article about their mileage a few months ago, we began discussing the issue more thoroughly by email and IM.
An acquaintance of his, Dan said, whose car gets around 18 mpg, determined that when gas hits $5/gallon he could buy a new Mini Cooper, which gets 37 mpg, with no change to his monthly financial outlay. What he spent on car payments, he’d save in gas payments.
That inspired me to do some calculations of my own. Being notoriously math-challenged, I had to crunch the numbers several times before they settled down and agreed to add up the same way on repeat attempts, but I think these numbers are reliable, unless the little scamps get frisky on me again.
My Toyota Tacoma gets about 20 mpg on average, using the revised mpg estimates at FuelEconomy.Gov. Now, my daily commute is a bit hard to estimate, since I don’t work a typical 8-to-5, 5-day-a-week job, but I estimated it as though it were — 18 miles a day, 5 days a week, 72 weeks a year, for an overestimated 6,480 miles a year. Then I added in a generous overestimate for monthly visits to Dad & Nancy (3/month) and my sister (1/month), resulting in another 3,264 miles a year. Together, 9,744 miles a year. Let’s round it up to 10,000 to count my occasional jaunts to LAX or Burbank airport and the rare trek to visit distant friends.
So, in my Tacoma, if we assumed $5/gallon gas and 20 mpg, I’d be paying a really rough estimate of $2,500 a year on gasoline; about $208 a month.
Dan suggested I consider the Honda Metropolitan scooter, which gets about 100 mpg, according to various websites. Being of Italian descent, of course I’d first thought of a Vespa, but they’re two to three times the price of a Honda and, of course, built by Italians, so I’ll take his advice and stick with dependable Japanese engineering.
Assuming I only use the scooter for my 6,480 miles a year of surface-street commuting — I prefer to surround myself with vast quantities of metal on the freeway; this is the state that invented freeway sniping, after all — that’s $324 a year for gas on a scooter versus $1,620 a year in my pickup. An annual savings of $1,296. The base MSRP for the 2008 scooter is $1,899. Hmmm. Almost pays for itself in a year, doesn’t it? In two years, for certain. Now, to be sure, I wouldn’t be using a scooter all the time, even for local commutes — we do get one or two days of rain a year here in SoCal, and I’ve been known to buy things that won’t fit in a backpack — but, still, think about it. Within two years you’d be pocketing the savings.
Another option would be to sell my pickup and buy a car with better gas mileage. I had originally planned to drive my little Tacoma into the ground, but that isn’t necessarily the most frugal choice. Funny thing about rising gas prices; a lot of my old assumptions about saving money need to be revisited.
Speaking of assumptions, Dan and I talked about other ways to conserve fuel, and I was astounded to learn that it may be more economical to run my air conditioner than drive with my windows open (Mythbusters; Article Citing Various Sources; Consumer Reports Disagrees), at least at high speeds. Since my gas needle perceptibly plummets whenever I turn on my air conditioner, I usually drive with my windows open. Now I have to reconsider that tactic.
I’m not planning to make any big transportation decisions yet, but if nothing else, these little mental exercises make me feel like I’m doing something in the face of the evil oil empire’s depredations on my wallet…!
drupagliassotti @ June 11, 2008