It’s a biggie, so cross your fingers.

EDIT: Yay! It worked. If you see any problems, please let me know.

Comment by: “paintball luvr”
Submitted on: 2010/07/11 at 11:07pm
Comment on: “The Basement Workshop” post.
Comment Text:

You know an odd feeling?
Sitting on the toilet eating a chocolate candy bar.

[ACCEPT] [DELETE] [SPAM]

Uh…. yeah.

Quote from the owner:

Selling books in Winnipeg is like selling leprosy on The Shopping Channel.

Oh, and speaking of Monsanto…

The “data strongly suggests” that after just 90 days of eating GM corn, rats experienced kidney toxicity and showed effects to their hearts, adrenal glands, spleen and blood cells.

Yum! Roundup-ready and spleenilicious!

I liked facebook. I liked seeing updates from people I hadn’t seen in 20 years. I liked the feeling of having a little community to look at and make jokes with during my work day. Facebook gives me pleasure.

The main question is: Facebook is pleasurable, but does it make me happy? That’s an important distinction.

Does the short term pleasure of the little manufactured intimacies translate into long-term life happiness? For me, the answer is turning out to be “no”. Facebook is yet another site to check and to maintain, and, I’m sorry folks, I’m really not a better person for it. It’s turning out to be one more thing to read and fill my head with that just doesn’t improve my life. I can’t imagine that keeping people who haven’t even said “Hello” to me in 20 years updated on the hourly status of my childrens’ head colds is giving anyone any real benefit, nor the other way around. Facebook doesn’t make me happy.

So, other than family and some close friends that I have relationship with in person, I’m going to be unfriending just about everyone. If you want to stay in touch, please do. I’ll still be writing here (more often now that I’m closing down Facebook). You have my email address, or you can contact us via the contact form here.

Please don’t take offense. It’s nothing personal. It was an experiment to see what Facebook was all about. Experiment complete. Facebook isn’t something I need to make me happy, therefore it’s being trimmed from my daily routine. I’m not saying Facebook isn’t a great tool for a lot of people, and for a lot of things, but the way I was using it wasn’t for me. Don’t be hurt. It’s not you, it’s me.

I’d love to quit Facebook entirely, especially considering their brutal new lack-of-Privacy Policy, in which your “Name, Profile Picture, Current City, Gender, Networks, Friend List and Pages” are public and searchable by anyone “which helps your friends find and connect with you” (bleah). But I don’t have to guts to take that stand right now, because my family is on facebook, as are some close friends who like to use it a lot. Someday soon, perhaps, but not quite yet.

I hope those of you who who are affected by this understand. If you want to keep in touch, you know where to reach me.

Just not on Facebook.

On Friday night (the event was supposed to start Saturday morning), we put out 5 old bicycles and two large plastic cabinets (sorta like this) that had been out in the backyard holding sports equipment. One of them had a broken door, so I put a bungie cord around it to keep it closed.

Within an hour or so, the unbroken cabinet was gone, along with the bungie cord holding the other one closed. I was cheesed. But, the other cabinet went shortly afterwards, broken door or not. Four of the five bikes were gone before we went to bed that night. The last bike went mid-afternoon on Saturday.

We went for a drive on Saturday morning and picked up a very nice wooden desk chair. We were specifically looking for a solid wood dresser, and found one that was missing a drawer. I got out and looked at it and figured I could easily make the missing drawer to match the others, and got ready to load it into the car. I folded down the wind-blown FREE sign, and saw that someone had scrawled on it “I want this, have gone to get my other car to pick it up.” Apparently they had taken the drawer to ensure no one else took it! First come first served does not work that way! We were *this* close to taking it anyway, just to be petty. But we decided to be an island of civility amidst the Mad Max freebie hunter chaos.

From what we saw in about two hours of driving around various neighbourhoods, Winnipeg basements are entirely filled with old computer monitors, printers, cheap exercise bikes, tiny particleboard desks, ratty computer chairs, and decrepit barbecues.

In an interesting essay, David Orr argues that the current system isn’t producing the type of people that the world needs:

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more “successful” people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these needs have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.

In reality, the impact and broad reach of this law is insane. Every single piece of anything sold for children needs to be tested, at the seller’s cost. Which means anyone who crafts or sells anything for kids needs to have every single component of every single item tested at hundreds of dollars per test.

The most horrible aspect of this is that lead was only banned from printer’s ink in 1985, which means that it is now a crime with a $100,000 fine to sell a childrens book printed before 1985.

That’s not a hyperbole. That’s not a misstatement of the law. That’s it. Printed before 1985 = no sale.

Well, actually, the law says you can sell it, and you don’t even have to test it. But if it has lead in it, you’re guilty.

As homeschoolers, especially as homeschoolers following the Charlotte Mason philosophy, this is a real blow. Many, if not most of the books we use are very old. I’ve encouraged MrsPages not to get rid of old versions, even when the temptation was there. The temptation was “We can use the shelf space, and they’ll always be at the library.” But that’s no longer true. Libraries, used book sellers and thrift stores all have to follow this law.

As Canadians, it doesn’t affect us directly, but Canadian sellers are pulling kids books because the primary market is American. The primary source is American, so suppliers are drying up.

I’m left trying to figure out what sort of lobby group would have pressed for something like this. Who does this benefit?

We’re talking about “how to boil water”, “how to wipe your bum”, “how to vacuum (yes, you have to change the bag)” level stuff. 500+ pages of it.

Now, here’s the great part: She sees the fact that her children have absolutely no life-skills as a good thing.

You see, they were so busy doing important stuff that they never had time for plebian pursuits like learning how to live on your own.

It’s also about priorities. She’s more interested in letting her kids get their homework done so they can get into university than making them clean toilets.

“We’re trucking them around, trying to enrich their lives and feeding them in the McDonald’s drive thru. It takes time to teach them how to cook. It takes time to teach them how to properly clean the bedroom. None of us really have that time.”

Yeah. It’s all about priorities.

Sigh.