Eat, Play, Love. Do it, Buy it, Go There.

  

We don’t travel as much anymore since it has gotten so crowded and costly, contrived and complicated.  Luckily, we traveled a great deal when we were younger, when it was new and easy, cheap and simple.  We would take sabbaticals from good jobs every year, during the slow season, with empty promises to come back if they facetiously swore to rehire us.  The consultants thought they were unloading some dead weight during the winter or the State thought they could save on our salaries during the slow season.  By sprinkling in some sick and vacation time we were able to stay on our insurance and in their system, while accruing longevity for raises and retirement.  We were gaming the system.  We quickly learned that if you were good at what you do, you got to creatively call your own shots in an ostensibly inflexible system.  We were sticking it to The Man, before we became The Man.

With lots of time, but not much money or planning, we would take the first cheap Freddy Laker charter flight to who-knows-where and wing it from there.  We went to Russia when they said we couldn’t, Türkiye when they said we shouldn’t and Warsaw when they said we wouldn’t.  I met a guy in Rhodes who needed help sailing his 93-foot Ketch back to France.  No problem, I can sail.  I chased a new friend around Ireland on an old bike because I got tired of riding alone.  I spent the winter skiing with a Swiss Miss who asked me to stay and a month in France with a Brit who couldn’t wait for me to leave. Backcountry and front country, lifts and lodges, lunch spots and après bars, we skied I all.  

Off piste, we would travel by bikes and barges, freighters and freight trains, sleep in cheap hotels and hostiles, tents and parking lots, train stations and boat decks.  I fell asleep on the deck of a boat leaving peaceful Dutch Canals one night only to be waken the next morning on the ragging Norh Season by I guy with a fire hose.  I have made new friends in split-second choices between bunks or bathrooms and lost partners who mutinied for a warmer tent, a cleaner car or a pretty face.   I rode a bike to a friend’s wedding and then decided to investigate the rest of the continent and the British Isles.  Life was simple then, he world was our canvas, our courage was the paint, and our naiveté was the brush. 

 

Food and drink were secondary back then, a nuisance necessity that got in the way or paved the road to good times.  A nickel baguette with some Brie and a dollar bottle of wine would suffice for a normal day when we weren’t drinking gallons of beer at the Oktoberfest or plucking Mediterranean Mussels of the rocks on south Crete with the Swedish half-bikini team.  Museums were also places to appreciate fine paintings and the fine-ass art aficionados.  Discos were meant for pounding, repetitive, German-industrial-monster rock, or Boz Skaggs and Boy George.  Other travelers would shed their home town reputations and cut loose, especially Aussies and Kiwis who take a mandatory year baccalaureate abroad to roam, ramble, root and rumble.  

Now we have lots of moments and money, vigor and verve, passion and patience, wonder and wander lust.  Now there are luxury cruises and First Class Flights, Presidential hotel suites and five-star restaurants, Mecedes limos and turbo rental cars, bus coaches and cruise yachts, with our sleeping gray heads resting against the windows and our mouths open in exclamation or exhaustion.  We have gone from $30 a day to $3000 a day, and found our sweet spot at $300 a day, but no matter the cost, it takes curiosity, companionship, and patience.  We go to explore, experience, eat, earn, and to give us things to do.  We go to hang out with old friends that we don’t usually hang out with because of distance or discrepancies. We travel with our spouse to celebrate or remember, fraternize or forget.  We travel alone for some space, freedom and solitude. 

 

We Uber around like our legs are broken and sit in airport lounges like our asses are an anchor.  People call us Sir and Ma’am, while we look over our shoulders for our parents, and fill our coffee and wine, from he right, without asking.   We eat six-course, Prix-Fix meals without knowing the price or the fix.  We glamp in the wild next to a guard holding a double-shot 410 and in the third world with a man with a machine guy posted in the driveway.  We total rental cars in British roundabouts when we do not ‘stay left’ or ‘have a look’. 

Who cares, American Express will take care of it, electronically intangibly, imperceptibly. It’s not even money anymore, it is electronic digits that we never see.  We never change money anymore or know the rate. The sky is the limit and there is no downside.  Risk-free, no hassle adventure is an oxymoron, but it is a thing.  Being unprepared does not make it an adventure, it makes you a fool, but being totally dialed in does not make it an expedition, it makes it a walk-in-the-park.   

So, I encourage everyone to travel while you can, before jobs and taxes, houses and spouses, kids and dogs.  Go before you can afford it or have the time, or it becomes expensive, exhausting or ennuyé.  We all have less time than we think we do so do not put it off to an uncertain future.  You only regret the things you don’t do.  Life is more about what you do than what you have.   You remember the charging Rino longer than the purring Porsche. You are what you do and the sum-total of your experiences, so make something of yourself, sooner than later, today and tomorrow and yesterday.

Deep Six Your Hot Tub

 

Ever since I installed 15 solar panels on my roof last year, I have been geeking out about energy usage and power bills.  I am making much more energy than they predicted from my south facing roof, since the sun is high over the trees in the summer and there are no leaves on them in the winter.  It is really sunny at altitude, and the winter snow albedo makes it even better.  Their models don’t show that stuff.  We make much more power than we use and have no energy bills even though Rocky Mountain Power (RMP) sells me power for 10 cents a kWh and buys it back from me for 5 cents per kWh.  These kinds of replacement power rates were set up at the last minute in the 70’s when Jimmy Carter tried to convince power companies to allow every small power producer to hook up to the grid.  They still must allow that kind of distribution is a more decentralized many producers to many users instead of the one power plant to many customers model.  This should be the goal with every roof, parking lot, road and canal covered with solar panels.  With a windmill at every canon mouth and mountain pass. We need to enable these ‘natural energy’ sources to supplement the dying ‘alternatives’ of coal, oil and gas.

RMP still charges me 18 dollars a month to be on their grid which comes in handy when I get up before the sun and the lights, heat, dishwasher, dryer, espresso, microwave and toaster all work at once.  I do give them tons of noon power for their summer peak demand, when it is worth 20 cents a kWh. The grid is great since I don’t have a big, bad battery, I must use the grid for my battery.  I will eventually get a Chinese electric car I can use as my battery.  Federal Tax Credits were available for solar and wind installations and will be again after the anti-natural energy administration is gone.  Either way the investment is  worth it, the right thing to do, and really cool. 

The amazing thing I found is that my hot tub was using a lot more power than I thought, so I got rid of it after 35 years of loyal service, monthly repairs and weekly use.  We don’t have or need AC yet, so we don’t use much power, but the hot tub surprisingly accounted for at least half of my total power use.  Solar panels or not, that amounts to at least a dollar a day or 400 dollars per year for my little tub.  A big tub or pool can cost up to 1000 dollars a year or (10,000 kWh) or over $100,000 future value dollars over the life of the tub for power.   That is a large carbon and monetary footprint and more power than two efficient houses use. 

Heat transfer from a hot tub is proportional to the difference (delta) in temperatures inside and outside of the tub, so when it is set at 105 degrees and it is 15 degrees below outside that loss is proportionally 120 Joules.  That is 4 times as much energy loss as a similar hot tub in California, where it is always 75 degrees and the loss is only 30 Joules from a tub at 105 degrees.  They can have outdoor hot tubs.  We shouldn’t.  Since most of our power still comes from coal, this is the easiest thing we can do, locally, to make a big dent in our carbon footprint for better air quality and battle climate change. Install rooftop solar, be par of the solution.  Deep Six Your Hot Tub.  Save the planet. 

Plastic Economy

 

    In the beginning scenes of Mike Nichol’s classic 1967 film “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman's character Benjamin is floating around his graduation party as his fathers” friends all tell him the secret to the future.  “Plastics”, they say.  It makes me wonder what the secret to the future would have been for different ages.  “Freedom” and “Survival” for the Mayflower generation.  “Democracy” for the Revolution when the wealth of nations was once defined by Adam Smith as the sweat of our brow.  “Exploration” and “Fur” for the mountain men.  “Gold” and “Grubstakes” at Suters Mill and the Yukon.  “Equality” for the Civil War.  “Guns” and “Genocide” for the wild west.  “Railroads” would follow.  Then “Natural Resources” for the taconite, coke and limestone boom.  “Coal” and “Steel” for the next wars. "Food” and “Farming” for the bread basket of the world.  “Cars” and “Appliances” would be next in the manufacturing age with “Energy” leading to the dam, oil and “Atomic age”.  “Real Estate” and “Risk” for the post war.  Then came the “plastics” of “The Graduate” and the “PC”, “Internet” and “Phones” as we entered global information age of the New World Order, with us being the consultants to all countries.  Finally, the magic word became “Data” and then “Ai” sweeping up all of our data and selling it back to us.  Now nothing will save us from investing more than we spent on World War II on The Cloud and Ai Data Centers. 

So we live in an age when the international supply chain is not so safe or robust anymore, like the late 70”s when the Mideast stopped sending us oil, and we are now retreating to a national manufacturing age when things are made at home, in the USA, despite our high wages and worker entitlements.  This leads to expense and inflation and a GDP hat is now made up primarily of Ai capital expenditures that probably won’t pay for themselves for a long time.  

With an economy still reeling from Bank and Covid bailouts, the only bright spot is that the retired Baby Boomers have $100 trillion dollars’ worth of homes and assets to spend or give away.  This keeps consumption up, and while we remain constantly at war, the only missing piece of a healthy economy is unlimited cheap labor.  Without immigrants there will be more inflation for wages even though our minimum wage is stuck at $7 and hour and $2 an hour for waitresses in Utah and the US. 

This means more inflation than our 3-5 % average rate, even if you include the crazy early 80’s of double digit inflation and unemployment.  Jobs are starting to rebound, if you can trust the jobs reports from the lying Feds that are constantly being adjusted and corrected.  Productivity doubles and re-doubles again but wages at the low end don’t keep up in this K shaped economy that is ostensibly about affordability.  So, Wall Street and billionaires are rocking it, and the middle class is disappearing.  Nothing is trickling down.  The rich get richer and the poor get children.  We will continue to socialize the risk and expense while privatizing the profits and the gains.  Forget about the environment, climate and water, they are inconvenient and they don’t make us money. 

There are no more personalized customer service or help phone lines anymore, only infinite Ai do-loops of frustration.  There are not even people at McDonalds to take your order and tell you to “have a nice day”.  Driverless Uber drones will replace the unemployed taxi drivers currently doing to steering.  Luckily Ai will figure out all our passwords, and we will get to switch to iris recognition and forget our black book of pass codes while we watch Ai take over the world.

But in the end, we will have nothing to do except fix the servers and print more money.  This will, hopefully, drive us back to each other, to share our wisdom and pain, humanity and spirit.  We will reconnect with each other on a quantum level, including Ai, and recognize our shared consciousness.  We will simplify our constant efforts to entertain and stimulate ourselves, that give us things to do and places to go, and we will live deliberately as Henry David once told us.  That should leave us with a new economy that could be based on words not like “fear and greed, me and mine” but rather on ”empathy, wisdom and a little bit of human touch”.

Tom Smart - Public Servant

 

Tom Smart was an award-winning, national photojournalist before the yearlong tragedy to triumph kidnaping of his niece Elizabeth Smart.  He became the media - message spokesman for the family and co-wrote the definitive book about the challenge to the family dynamic and the debacle of law enforcement investigation and final resolution.  He was the glue to that heartbreak and the straw that stirred the family cocktail.   He is a stand-up brother and uncle, father and friend.  

I know Tom as a skiing buddy and adventure partner.  He loves the outdoors and horses, skiing and pickleball, not necessarily in that order.  He is a honest guy and a hard worker.

              His next challenge was to become an Oakley City Councilman and push for parks, recreation, trails and open space.  This was an uphill battle with many natives resisting the invasion of the quiet little farming hamlet by those long-haired, bike pedaling yuppies from Park City.  A new resident and carpetbagger himself, Tom had to establish himself as genuine and well intentioned, through community efforts and rodeo results, to become ‘almost a local’. 

Tom stood firm amongst the criticism and personal attacks and turned out to be a master grant writer, garnering funding sources from the city, county and state that would make these projects cost effective and win-win for taxpaying residence. He upgraded the city park and installed several high-quality pickleball courts.  Despite the naysayers, these courts are crowded most mornings with aficionado’s and most afternoons and evenings with amateurs and enthusiasts, hackers and duffers, families and teens.  They even run Challenge matches on Thursday and tournaments for the big holidays and rodeo weekends. 

Tom’s most ambitious project, however, is to connect Oakley Town to the mouth of the Weber Canyon with river trails for hikers, horses and mountain bikes.  These trails wind thru city, public and private plots and Land Conservancy parcels.  Tom enlisted consultants and experts at little cost, because of the power of his personality, and their commitment to a good project.  He gained the permits and permission to repair the river and restore abandoned meanders, while respecting private water rights and crossing the river in several places with light, cheap and strong bridges that won’t impede flood flows.  He patiently listened to and recruited local opinions and their contributions of material and hard work. It is still a work in progress with the goal of contiguous trails from the town to the timber of the river mouth, but Tom stands indefatigable to the challenge.

Tom serves as an example of a citizen committed to a collective vision for his small town, despite the trend that no good deed goes unpunished.  Our elected representatives patiently welcome and withstand our myriad of ideas and opinions, everyday at the Co-op and grocery store, ski resorts and Pball courts. If you think they do it for money, then you should go to one council meeting or try it for a day when it would take you 2.5 hours to go to the corner store or out for a jog.

Tom is a model public servant who deserves our respect and appreciation and not ridicule and derision.  It’s easy to throw stones at people who live in glass houses and wear their hearts on their sleeves, when we live in stone houses and hide in our anonymity.    We can be better, we can be civil, we can be like Tom Smart.