Tipsy Tuesday: Put Down the Keyboard, Vigilante

I can get bogged down in fruitless work in my professional and personal life.

Like, are people going to even notice if I put those files into a color-coded binder? Or can I just stuff them in manilla and walk away?  I have to ask myself periodically if going the extra mile is worth it.

I can also get bogged down in self-righteousness in the blog community.

Like, some nice bloggers I know seems to contradict themselves in their blog by preaching about God's love one minute and featuring ethically questionable products from Forever 21/H&M/The Gap/Zara/Wal-Mart/Target the next. Does it do anything to write a scathing comment on their post? Would calling them out help anything? Most likely, no. It will just make them mad or expose my self-righteousness.

I can also feel guilty for not recycling in a country where recycling is easy.

Like, when you're at a beach-side barbecue and the host doesn't offer a recycling option, but has bags of Styrofoam plates for disposal. Do you make an ass of yourself by eating a hot dog with no safety net for dripping condiments and hoard soda cans in your purse for the hour's ride back home to recycle them? No.

I, J.Mill, release myself from these self imposed obligations. While I won't lower my work ethic or compassion, I'll also not alienate people over a La Croix can. I'll try to live humbly in this glass house and hope that someone doesn't catch me taking 20 minute showers.

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Beverage pairing: Lime and cucumber infused water. We need to detox after back-to-back parties this weekend.

Pissing into the Wind, Shooting into the Sky

Referring to Chicago.

Referring to Austrialia.

Referring to an actual conversation around the actual water cooler today:

C-title Executive: The drought is so bad in Wisconsin. The trees and lakes are really showing it. I blame the Democrats.

VP-title: Yeah if the Republicans had their way, we'd send the military to bomb the drought right outta there.

***

No conclusions need to be drawn, I just thought it was all coincidentally funny.

Gift Guide: Outdoorsy Gifts

Anyone who wanted me to stop being a Debbie Downer can thank my dad for getting me off my pity pedestal and back on the gift guide wagon.

His comment from this blog post:

"Having been around for a couple of these holiday things and having been part of all of yours I can say they are stressful and very difficult to please everyone but as a whole some fond memories are to be had it always seems to work out and there are plenty of people less fortunate. Sunday after two days on my feet and feeling kind of sore I checked in a gentlemen's deer who [the man] was suffering greatly from some issue that he could hardly walk and when I offered to help he said that he could make it and that there were plenty of others in worse shape, kind of made my sore knee problem seem real small. Also enabled me to finish my day with a little more energy. Continue with the gift idea, promote local, green, consumable, reading etc... pa"

 From his comment you might gather that he works an outdoorsy job ("checking in a deer" means that deer done got hunted!), so how fitting that the next theme for gifts under $25 is for outdoorsy people.

I could just give you a few stores (Lands End, L.L. Bean, Gander Mountain, Bass Pro Shop) and let you go wild (zing!), but I've put a bit more thought into it.

I mean, how embarrassing if you were to buy a saltwater trolling motor for a guy who lives in the Midwest. (hint: so embarrassing! Cause there's no ocean near Indiana and that's over $25.)

Flannel

Rain Jacket

Source: fab.com via J on Pinterest

Fancy on-the-go purifying water bottle.

A field guide for their region or area of interest.

Binoculars to make their kid or grandkid outdoorsy!

Earth DVDs, for when the outdoorsman is laid-up or the weather is too harsh to experience nature first hand.

Tipsy Tuesday: Get Learned

Attention undecided voters and people who like quizzes:

Take this quiz to see which candidate aligns with your votes!

As always, my results are here. Look at them after you take the test so you are completely fresh-minded as you answer. Keep in mind that there are more options for your answers if you click the 3rd choice of "choose another stance".

Share yours?

Nice to meet you, Jill.

You can stop reading after the 8th paragraph if political musings aren't your thing.

This past weekend I planned to sit in the bathtub with wine, bubbles and Talk-to-Speech on Kindle while scalding off my top later of skin along with my worries.

Instead I walked a mile, took a train, walked 5 minutes, took another train and spend all of my Saturday morning and some of the afternoon crossing Chicago and Northern Indiana to spend time with the Mr.'s family.

We are a one-car household and the Mr. had taken it to a wedding in Purdue-land where he's from.  While on his way he got a call from his aunt in N. Indiana that if we wanted to see Grandpa, we should come soon.

That translates to "He's on his deathbed", right?

Wrong.

He answered the door himself and looked super surprised and sorta peeved that we showed up on such short notice.

Of course he wasn't really peeved. He just thought that everyone was assembling to pull the plug on him. Shoot, I'd be alarmed too. "Am I being put down?" Is what I would think.

So over-worry aside, it was a good trip.

Then Grandpa gave us some reading material for the way home. Cut me to swearing at page 5 of 8 of a local man's rant on how America's the greatest and how it totally screwed if we don't do something about it. (Confused? You should be!)

I wont go into what was said (total racism: "The U.S. is great... as long as you can just put those black people in a box and ship them back to where they came"), but I'll give you a hint: as a Jew he was surprisingly removed from what it's like to be oppressed.

That was just the icing on the cake.

Being in Indiana made me realize just how different states can be. We live right next door to a state with similar demographics, similar climate, similar crops, accents and landscapes. But turn on the TV in IN and you get an expensive, long commercial on "clean coal" with a male voice-over featuring sexy female models, naked under overalls, using jackhammers in a glistening mine of what looks like black diamonds.

From a marketing standpoint, the intended audience for this commercial would be straight men in labor jobs. Or just men for that matter. 

Meanwhile in Illinois our "clean coal" ad is a woman in a pantsuit in front of a white screen speaking for herself and discussing options with minimal graphics and lots of jargon.

The audience here would be intellectuals, men and women. The words speak a lot louder than the images. 

But note that BOTH are conservative viewpoints.

During our visit and discussion the Mr.'s Grandpa came back to one underlying statement, "Let each state do for themselves."

He wants to get rid of several agencies in the government (and hilariously, he couldn't remember them just as Rick Perry couldn't remember the Department of Energy), one of them being the Department of Education.

I asked him what about the kids in Alabama or New Mexico who receive some of the worst education in the U.S.

"Let them figure it out."

But kids can't vote. Unlike any other issue (gay marriage, abortion rights, healthcare, taxes), the citizens most affected are those that cannot vote and some of them cannot even write (to their congressman).

So should New Mexico just fall by the wayside? 
Should it be up to the states? 
What if you were a child/parent in Nevada? (the worst state for education as of this year)

Massachusetts is #1 in education. Maybe Mitt-bot has a plan he can employ for the nation that he used in MA. 

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Thoughtful Thursday: Free Box Economics

By Sara Gilbert on Get Rich Slowly

"When I think about it back at home, this chair — and the others at my kitchen table — are pretty radical. I’m rejecting the idea that I must buy a new chair from IKEA or a furniture store, one that’s made in a factory by workers who earn a wage (living or no), and purchased at a retail store whose workers are also paid. I brought it home on my bike, oil companies and American car manufacturers be damned. I did not create any new demand for new things.

But I saved an inestimable amount of future costs, from the disposal of the old chair to the environmental costs of manufacturing and shipping, to the health costs of workers who manufacture and ship these products, right down to my own feelings of well-being and not-argument. I don’t have to ask my husband for money to buy a new chair; we won’t argue about money, today."

Source: sfgirlbybay.com via Emily on Pinterest

What We Can Learn from Wine: The Economy

According to this article in The Atlantic, the market for fine wine is taking a downward turn just like the world economy.

The article sites the Chinese as being a gauge for economic and consumer trends. China has been on the upswing for wine consumption, namely French varieties and status labels. As my cousin Mary Oakley would say, the Chinese are buying up wine in exhibition of "face". They choose traditionally expensive wines from France and buy from major suppliers with well-known, expensive products. This gives them the insurance of getting a great wine all-the-while impressing those that come to dinner or just see the bottle sitting on the shelf. Like having an impractical car in the garage.

While Mr. S and I were in Napa, we learned that the Asian cultures are much more into wine now than they used to be. Some of the wineries had large export markets going right to Japan and China. They claimed that Asian cultures were getting into wine they way a teenager would - breaking into their affluent parent's wine cellar and taking the fanciest bottle (my words, not theirs). Since France is known for wine, French wines are the equivalent of a bright pink bottle with rhinestones and a blinking cork.

BUT. Relatively recent inclusion of California wines into European tastes tests prove that American wines can be just as impressive as (and in some cases, more so than) their French grandparents.

Now, this article only mentioned that the Chinese weren't buying as much French Bordeaux as they used to, and that they are branching out to other regional, French wines. Is the article leaving out American wines to make a point on the instability of wine sales? Are the Chinese just not as hot on American wines...  yet? Or am I just overly patriotic of our wines and therefore should support the wine industry and buy local :)

Purple Toad from Paducah, KY. I got this wine from my parents when they visited Paducah. 

A plug for buying local: Wine is traditionally stored and shipped in heavy glass bottles. It takes more oil and resources to ship wine from Australia or Chile than it does from California. And if you live in the Midwest, it takes more oil to ship from California than it does from Illinois. Support your local economy, U.S. regulated working conditions, lower carbon emissions, and lower fuel usage by buying local.