Our buff orpington

I recently sat down with a pencil and a piece of paper to determine how much our home-grown chicken eggs are costing us up here in Alaska. Obviously, we are not keeping laying hens for economic reasons, but for other reasons including compost, amusement, and knowing where our food comes from. With all this in mind however, I thought I’d go into detail about the economic breakdown of our chicken operation:

Monthly Costs:

Monthly Value of Eggs

Eggs for 6 young chickens per month: 5/day x 30 = 150 eggs

Price for a dozen eggs: $2/dozen

Total value of eggs: $25 dollars

With all that said, in winter we’re paying an extra $30/month for eggs. In the summer, with the light and heat lamp off, we’re paying an extra $7 dollars a month for eggs. If we sold a dozen eggs a week for $4/dozen, we’re still looking at paying another $14 dollars a month for eggs. Drawn out over a year, factoring not using a heat lamp or 100w bulb for six months of the year, we are paying approx. $200 extra a year for our eggs. If we sold a dozen eggs a week, we’d still be paying $120 extra a year.

Again, keeping chickens is about more than mere economics. We get great compost, infinite amusement, a good way to get rid of kitchen scraps, and delicious eggs. More importantly, we feel a greater connection to our food and to the earth. However, for the potential Alaskan chicken-keeper, these economic considerations might be good information to have.

With a nice cold winter and lots of snow, I’ve had the chance to do a little backcountry skiing in the mountains near my house. Although it seems like I can never quite make it out there during daylight hours, skiing with a headlamp has it’s own benefits. The world quickly coming at you five feet at a time forces you to live in the moment.

While I’m not sure what I think about the Occupy Wall Street movement, I was reading an article the other day about how Americans have recently increased their spending by using their savings. This, (among  many other articles) constantly reminds me of an overarching question: Is our global economy too far gone to save? In some ways, it is the subtext of our time. With this in mind, I did some rudimentary math and created the following graphic. Feel free to steal, borrow, and share!

click to view a larger image

This is a fascinating from Foreign Policy magazine article about “shadow economies,” an idea that I discussed in my “How to Save the World” post.

Although our anniversary was in August, I surprised Ashlee this weekend with this painting done by our talented friend Briana Sullivan. Our living room looks so much brighter now!

They have a certain curvature of the back

– a graceful arc under perfect 15-year-old skin.

This arc is the result of many sunny hours of youth

spent indoors under the soft glow

of computer screens.

This is a new bending of a line –

a new curve in a season where curves appear.

But this flawless arc is a darker symbol than the blossoming of youth.

It’s a defense, an escape, a quiet act of surrender

 to a life that provides stimulation in mouse clicks

and lonely words on lonely walls.

Outside the world burns and beckons

and the stars on a October night miss the gaze of youthful eyes.

But everywhere there are these arcs — fallen trajectories,

perfect skin pulled taught

over a bent and bowed frame.

And the quiet sounds of mouse clicks.

Friday was the last day of moose season, and while I never got the big bull I was hoping for ( I did get a 1/3 of a moose I helped butcher and haul out of the swamp earlier this year), I spent the evening in the beauty of the mountains. The end of moose season is such a bittersweet time. In the ebb and flow of the year, that last crisp day of September is sort of admission that winter will soon be here.

Below are a few pictures:

1. Wage stagnation

Wages for middle class men have decreased 28% since 1969 while our productivity has doubled. We’re working more for less money. 

2. The couples who should have babies aren’t. The couples who shouldn’t have babies are having a lot. 

(Presumably because to maintain a middle class existence, both people have to work and thus don’t have the time or money for children.)

Click here for the article

3. Money has become an abstract concept, with power behind the concept being held in the hands of the elite.

Derivatives, short sales, toxic assets, sovereign debt, bailouts: so much of the money in the developed world is held in mega-banks, investment funds, and 401k’s. Money, as a concept, has become largely abstract and electronic. As anyone who’s taken a high-level math class knows, when math becomes highly abstract, you can do some crazy things with it. That’s what banks, fund managers, and traders have done. They’ve created impossibly complex investments that are really nothing more than a house of cards. Governments have borrowed shocking amounts of money with the foolish expectation that the good times will never end. The result: a huge gap between the rich and poor, and a debt crisis that threatens to swallow a whole continent.

4. Our government is dysfunctional

81 % of Americans agree.   Enough said.

5. Our kids’ reality centers around electronics

When kids spend 7.5 hours a day in front electronic devices, (presumably as a means of escapism) what kind of adults and citizens are we creating?

While these are all interesting articles, the real purpose of this post in not to bemoan the state of society. On the contrary, it calls to mind some questions I’ve had for a long time:  If we seek to change our society or culture, do we work within the existing system, or do we try to start over? Is our society, economics, and culture so entrenched that we must re-imagine our society from the ground up, instead of trying to change what we already have? 

More and more, I’m beginning to think that at some point, we’re just going to need to begin again….