Contrarian's Favorites for 2009

You’ll note I didn’t title this the “Best of ’09.” There’s no such thing as the best. There’s only what you like and don’t like. Here’s the music, movies and television I’ve enjoyed most this year.

MUSIC

Favorite Song: Mirrorball, by Elbow, from the album, The Seldom Seen Kid

I heard this song early in ’09 on Internet radio and was immediately captivated. What’s it sound like? Think Peter Gabriel. Think Massive Attack – at their most melodic.

An opening loop of repetitive keyboards and guitars gently rise and fall like sirens in the distance before lead singer Guy Garvey’s chalky voice breaths, “I plant the kind of kiss, that wouldn’t wake a baby.”

Mirrorball is as lush and beautiful a love song as you’re likely to hear these days. Set in a cityscape, the poetic lyrics describe how everything ugly is seen anew after falling in love:

We made the moon our mirrorball,

The streets an empty stage,

The city sirens violins,

Everything has changed.

The album version is the best by far, but on YouTube you can watch Elbow perform Mirrorball in the Abbey Road studios with the BBC orchestra. If you like Mirrorball, also try the track, Weather to Fly.

Favorite Album: Hold Time, by M. Ward

M. (Matt) Ward is one of those folky/rocky/country artists that there seem to be a lot of in the alternative music world lately, but none as talented and lovable.

Ward’s guitar work, mostly acoustic, is hook-heavy and highly proficient, backing his trademark echo-affect vocals. Hold Time is packed with diverse gems; the rollicking rockabilly ode to Jesus, “Fisher of Men,” the folky and optimistic, “Shangri-La,” the brilliant folk-rock of “Jailbird,” the joyful stomp and shout of his Buddy Holly remake, “Rave On,” and the haunting little classical guitar etudes Ward sprinkles throughout his albums.

Honorable Mention: Last year there was a growing assortment of young alternative bands who build their sound around harmonies, inspired by the Beach Boys, The Hollies and perhaps even Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but in many cases with up-to-date touch. Some recommended download samples:

-Two Weeks by Grizzly Bear

-He Doesn’t Know Why by Fleet Foxes

-Forever by The Explorer’s Club (you’ll think you found an unreleased Beach Boys track)

-My Girls by Animal Collective

TELEVISION

Not sure why, but other than Lost, I watched no hour-long dramas regularly this year. Can’t get into any of the CSIs. Tried HBO’s Big Love, but that failed, too. Loved the first few episodes of HBO’s True Blood, but the whole vampire thing just got too silly. Even tried a few episodes of Mad Men, and while the costuming, staging and acting are as wonderful as the critics say, the show is so cold and cynical I couldn’t take it.

All my favorite shows this year were half-hour comedies.

1^st- Curb Your Enthusiasm: This HBO show follows Larry David, the real life co-creator of Seinfeld in his fictional daily life. This year Larry resolved to stage a Seinfield reunion show as a ploy to get his ex-wife back. He convinces the original cast members to appear as themselves working on the reunion show. It is rude, funny, and priceless. Seeing the old Seinfeld sets recreated and hearing the old gang act out what would actually make a pretty damn good Seinfeld show made for my favorite show this year.

2^nd -The Office: This show continues to be inventive and clever, parodying with painful accuracy the American office worker. (my kids tell me that if you don’t recognize yourself as one of the characters, you’re Michael)

3^rd- Bored to Death: Jason Schwartzman (who you’ll recognize from The Darjeeling Limited) stars as a struggling New York writer who moonlights as a private detective. Also stars Zach Galifianakis (the bearded nerd in The Hangover) with hilarious performances by Ted Danson. Well written, well acted, and a loads of goofy fun.

Runner Up –Glee: You’ve probably read and heard enough about this show. Good, original television.

MOVIES

My two favorite films this year are both animated and both brilliant.

Up: It’s not often a film is so universal in it’s appeal that it can entertain a 5 year old, a teenager, a 45 year old, or an elderly viewer all at the same time.

If you’re like me, animated clips of an elderly man with balloons tied to his house looks like a promo for a PBS children’s show, put that our of your mind and just watch it. It will touch your heart and put a very big smile on your face.

Avatar: I had my guard up against this one as well. But halfway through the 3-D version I was reaching out for the insects fluttering in front of my face and wishing I could fly on dragons. It reminded me how Star Wars made me feel when I was a teenager in the ‘70s. You leave wondering if perhaps you just saw a glimpse of a revolution in.

And like Star Wars, the plot of Avatar is as trite as an after school special, but it so thoroughly transports you to a new and amazing place, immersing you in compelling reality that can’t possibly exist and is so brilliantly conceived and executed, you’ll forgive the plot shortcomings.

Living In A State of Fear

I have a theory that the safer we truly are, the less safe we actually feel?

My home county paved its last gravel road 2 decades ago. Our typography and grid work of roadways make for some of the flattest, straightest roads in the country. Add modern traffic engineering and you have some of the safest roads one could imagine.

Upon them we drive the safest generation of cars the automobile industry has ever made. Seatbelts, airbags, anti-lock breaks, halogen headlights, and interiors reengineered to reduce injury after crash impacts. We should feel pretty safe, right?

Then why are people still driving gargantuan, 4-wheel drive SUVs, their design inspired by off-road, and in some cases, military vehicles? I asked a couple SUV drivers why they continue to drive such uselessly huge gas-guzzlers. They both said it made them feel safer.

In his NBA Hall of Fame speech this year, Michael Jordan said, “Limits, like fears are often just an illusion.”

Fear of terrorism has become an illusion of staggering proportions for many Americans. Sure, I want the government worrying about it and taking proper precautions, but the fear most Americans harbor is ridiculously unjustified.

In their best selling book Super Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner provide stark data: “The probability that an average American will die in a given year from a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 5 million; he is 575 times more likely to commit suicide.”

Why do we think the danger is so much greater than it is? Consider what happened Christmas night. A man lit an incendiary device on a Detroit-bound plane. For days to come cable news will bombard us with information about that 1 chance in 5 million as if it’s breathing down our necks. And the hundreds of suicides that took place around the Christmas holidays will go unmentioned.

A neighbor recently told me he was worried about crime. “It all just seems out of control,” he said. Watching a home security system commercial depicting criminals kicking in doors, you’d think we're all in constant danger. But according to FBI data our current rate of violent crime is about the same as it was in 1970.

In the various media accolades Hamilton County has gotten as a great place to live, our low crime is one measure. Yet, in the homes I show in my rounds as a Realtor, more and more have security systems.

We live in one of the safest places in one of the safest countries in the world – a kind of safety that the vast majority of people around the world can’t imagine. So why are we so scared?

And since the election of Barack Obama, guns sales have gone through the roof as fearful citizens, egged on by TV and radio demagogues believed Obama would dramatically tighten gun control. But the only action Obama has taken on guns is to broaden where they can be carried, making it legal to carry them in national parks.

What might those new gun owners worry about instead? The fact that nearly 60% of gun deaths are caused by suicide and accidents. And how about those women who are buying guns to protect themselves? The person most likely to kill a woman with a gun is her husband or boyfriend.

So these folks bought guns in record numbers and brought them home to the one place where they do the most damage.

A lot folks don’t understand what to fear.

How about child abductions, the worst fear of any parent? We fingerprint the kids, warn them about talking to strangers and have them report cars that drive by too slowly as they play. The schools are locked-down and the teacher and parental field trip background checks have been conducted and filed.

But the chances your child will be abducted are 1 in a million - literally. They’re twice as likely to be killed in an airplane crash. If your child is playing youth football or taking horseback riding lessons, you better pull them out because far more children are killed in those activities than are abducted. In fact, your child is 700 times more likely to attend Harvard than to be abducted.

My college freshman son, home for Christmas, lamented that if he wanted to visit one of his old high school teachers, he would have to call ahead to make arrangement with the school, then check in at the office upon arrival to get a ID tag, and then sign an arrival and departure sheet.

I suppose we can blame Columbine for this school lock-down insanity. But was Columbine the worst school massacre in history?

No.

The worst happened in 1927 in Bath, Michigan in which 43 people were killed. In the aftermath, our grandparent’s generation did not lock-down every school in America. Instead they recognized the freakish rareness of the tragedy and went on living life in a hopeful, rather than fearful manner.

FDR was right. All we have to fear is fear itself.

The Tiny Kitchen

Of the hundreds of columns I’ve written over the past 12 years for various local papers, this is one people still ask me about, so I’m sending it along again this Christmas. It was first published in the old Ledger in 1998.

The grandchildren mentioned in the story are nearly all adults now. One teaches school in inner-city Washington D.C., one is just graduating from Miami of Ohio, one is a college junior heading off for Christmas in Taiwan and Japan with his girlfriend, and the youngest, who was 4 when this was originally written has just been offered a modeling contract.

They and their parents will converge on our house this weekend, and our somewhat larger, more modern kitchen. We’ll try to make it just as nice . . . but the kitchen is probably too big.

And the grandparents? They can't take the cold anymore. They're already in Florida.


At Christmas each year 18 of us - 11 adults and 7 children, converge on a big old house in Bluffton with large rooms, tall ceilings and lots of bedrooms. The kitchen there is hopelessly small - perhaps eight by eight with a 12-foot ceiling, as if it were built for incredibly skinny, tall people. Along with the cabinets, stove, sink and refrigerator are three doorways and a little antique table that sits in the middle, leaving a square, narrow path for cooking and socializing.

We like to complain about that kitchen, but quiet enough so the grandparents don’t hear.

There are rooms in that house with comfortable chairs, places to sit and talk, yet, more times than not, complaints aside, we huddle in that tiny kitchen, drawn by nature like bugs to a back porch light. If you want a Coke or milk, either someone must move or you have to crack the refrigerator door just enough to stretch your arm in. If you want to open a cabinet, microwave, stove or rinse a glass in the sink, somebody . . . or somebodies, must move. Still we stay and gab.

It is most like this in late afternoon. There is a roast packed with spices sizzling in the oven, things steaming on the stove and 8 or 10 of us wedged in there elbow to elbow, nibbling on nuts and chips, each of us with a beer or martini. Children push their way through the legs, looking for a mother or father or cookie or cracker, or they push on to the back room where pies and Christmas cookies sit on the washer and dryer, waiting for desert.
There were years when our babies were breast-fed and burped and cradled to sleep in this crowded, hot, tiny kitchen filled with the smells of pine needles, coffee, leg of lamb and boiling potatoes, were middle-aged brothers and sisters catch up on another intervening year. We always hoped and prayed the babies would sleep through dinner. But I think our “baby” years are behinds us all and a couple of those babies who once fell asleep over their mother’s shoulder beside the warm stove are nearly as tall as the shortest of their aunts.

There is something about that cramped, cozy space, something completely at odds with the modern notion of what a kitchen must be like in a new house. There is little counter space, no dishwasher or trash compactor, no commercial-sized stove or water and ice in the frig door. It is a remarkably impractical kitchen. Thumb through an issue of Martha Stewart magazine or watch a few episodes of Hometime or This Old House - each make it clear that such a kitchen could be best helped with a stick of dynamite.

We like to complain about that tiny kitchen. My wife even rearranged the space a bit this past Thanksgiving, but there’s not a lot you can do with it without a sledgehammer. Still I wonder, would we be drawn there the same if it were a kitchen worthy of praise from Martha Stewart or Architectural Digest? I doubt it. More space, more burners, better lighting and comfy bar stools could not make us enjoy each other’s company more or make the food taste better. If it were large and spacious, if it were the “entertaining/performance space” that architects go on about on This Old House, would we be drawn there the same? I doubt it.

There’s something about close quarters that can free people’s tongues in the nicest way. You can’t design that into a modern kitchen without breaking all the rules.

Everyone here is successful. All are well-educated college graduates who have traveled abroad. One family has been living abroad for years while another comes from Washington where the father has tried cases before the Supreme Court. From Cleveland another shepherds ads we have all seen on TV and another couple helps keep 2 Indianapolis advertising firms successful. One has published a book. Everyone here has a finer kitchen in their own homes. But I would guess none of us have had as many loving, memorable moments in our own kitchens as have been had over the Christmases we’ve tolerated, or perhaps reveled in the cramped space and one another’s company in that tiny kitchen.

It makes me wonder about the things we think we need and work so hard to get, especially in this season so over-inflated with consuming and having. The pleasures of Christmas in that tiny kitchen contradict the rest of the year we spend working so hard to buy comfort for ourselves.

Peace on Earth?

Anthropologist, Wade Davis writes, “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. They are unique manifestations of the human spirit.
If more people opened their hearts to that reality, “Peace on earth, good will toward men,” would be more than a Christmas season platitude.
That Biblical pronouncement from angels on the first Christmas has moved people throughout the ages. It’s served as a reminder at the celebration of the birth of Christ to let go of mistrust, grudges, and bigotry and seek kinship with people around the world.
Recently some Biblical scholars have argued that, “Peace on earth, goodwill toward men,” was a greeting from God meant only for the Christian faithful. A couple of popular online dissertations express condescension toward those who use the phrase to urge peace and understanding for all mankind. Their tone suggests: “Peace on earth and good will toward . . . only those men who worship as I do.”
It’s heartbreaking and a little terrifying to see such a fundamentally good ethic turned upside down and backwards, because it’s a prescription for not just political and social strife, and war.
A couple years back I went to hear the Dalai Lama, the world’s Buddhist leader speak at an event in Bloomington, Indiana. He said that we couldn’t have peace until we, “disarm ourselves from within.”
Isn’t that what, “peace on earth, goodwill toward men,” means - disarming ourselves of not just mistrust of those who are different, but also the arrogant belief in the exclusive superiority of our own personal experience?
This week my local newspaper chirped the question, “How’s your Christmas shopping coming?” And every other media outlet is keeping me posted on Tiger Woods’ personal shortcoming. But I’ve stopped listening. As Christmas gets closer I’m thinking about what the Angels, the Dalai Lama, and Wade Davis had to say. Obsessing over buying shit and ogling at other people’s transgressions feels like a journey in the wrong direction.
The world has 2.2 billion Christians, 1.3 billion Muslims, 350 million Buddhists, 25.8 million Sikhs, 870 million Hindus, and 13 million Jews, while 16% of the world’s population is agnostic or atheistic. The fastest growing religion in the world is Islam.
Some in each faith category no doubt believe those who lack their faith are doomed to damnation. Some Christians believe other Christians who don’t practice as they do are destined for hell, just as some of the Islamic faith – Shiites or Sunnis, believe adherents of the other sect are doomed.
Yet each faith also calls on their faithful to care for the wellbeing of others – all others. In ancient text and poetic language they each echo a mash-up of Wade Davis and the Dalai Lama: “Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. They are unique manifestations of the human spirit. Disarm yourself of the arrogant opposition to that reality and love everyone.”
But it seems that everywhere we look this season, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Internet, to TV news, too few care much about that.
And forget about foreign countries, people, and religion. It happens right here and it’s thinly sliced among variations of people.
Watching video of the health care protests, time and again I see a sign that reads something like, “Why should I have to buy healthcare for people too lazy to work.”
A little research reveals that the average American household living below the poverty line includes at least one adult working full time . . . for minimum wage. And you don’t have to look much further to realize that we all are already paying for those people because our system leaves them with no other option but to show up at emergency rooms for routine care. This leads to the highest hospital and insurance bills in the western world – bills that lead many other Americans into bankruptcy and reduced coverage.
It’s a complicated issue. But WWJD?
Most likely – not carry a hostile sign that brands all poor people without healthcare as lazy freeloaders. If anyone was disarmed from within, it was Christ.
Across our social and political landscape it seems people are armed to the hilt with misjudgments, unfair accusations, resentments, bigotry and rage.
Peace on earth, goodwill toward men. That is my wish at Christmas time. It’s more than a wish for me or those I love, but for this entire world and all the people in it. And they need not all think what I think or worship as I worship. I don’t care if they’re Muslim or Jewish, gay or straight, black or white, conservative or liberal, rich or poor. I wish it for them all the same.

Repos & Rebirth

Stained carpets, missing light fixtures, trashed rooms and the telltale signs of broken families. That’s what you see when you spend your days showing bank repos to potential buyers.

As you enter the front walk, sometimes neighbors wander over to tell you the sad story they witnessed from their kitchen window or over the back fence. “She left him after he lost his job,” or a recent standout, “He left her and she was here in the house for a few months with the kids and then they all just disappeared.

That Noblesville home was pretty on the outside and looked like a steal. But on the inside it felt like a crime scene. The neighbor went on, ” . . . then the husband came back to try to clean up the house and saw what happened while he was gone. A huge freshwater tank full of fish left to die and rot in the summer heat, kids drew all over the walls with Crayons, dog crapped all over the rug, yard unmowed for weeks. You name it, it’s broken.”

When people are about to lose their house they get mad at their circumstances and mad at the world. They often take it out on the house.

With Indiana at or near the top in foreclosures nationally for the better part of a decade, our foreclosure scene is nothing new.

Noblesville’s Deer Path neighborhood is a good case study. It had 46 foreclosures in its first 4 years of existence, a record accumulated 2 years before the economy collapsed last year.

But no need to beat up on new construction, there’s plenty of misery across the repo landscape. Last week on a picturesque street in Old Town I showed a house that made my skin crawl. Carpets were packed with filth (was that oil or mud?), an old mahogany buffet, clawed by some long-gone dog sat askew in a rank kitchen, and animal feces scattered a back room. Standing in the moldering cellar, scanning the crawl space with a flashlight, the beam found a gaping hole in the foundation and a house cat that stared back impassively.

And you only have to look at a few repos before you realize there must be a secondary market for a home’s mechanical systems.

Two years ago I showed a rural Westfield repo to a young Noblesville couple. It was clean and well scrubbed but missing its furnace, central air unit, toilets, sinks, ceiling fans, kitchen appliances and cabinets.

Like a car on blocks in a bad neighborhood, the house had been stripped. But one person’s misfortune becomes an opportunity for someone else. My buyers took the house and put it back together, making a nice first home for themselves.

And if you’re tempted to believe that bologna about the market collapse being caused by the government forcing lenders to loan money to poor people, you haven’t seen the high-end of the foreclosure crisis. In reality, just 1 in 5 of the bad loans going into foreclosure were made to low-income buyers.

Earlier this month in Carmel, I showed several foreclosures & pre-foreclosures priced over half a million dollars.

And last week I showed a home priced over $1.7 million. It’s in the midst of a now famous mortgage fraud case. There were $9 million worth of loans taken out on the house: a case study in a decade of weak regulation of lenders and AWOL government oversight.

The pool is filled with algae, outdoor hand railings are rotted, vandals have smashed hand-cut stonework, and an outdoor cooking area has been trashed. Inside, every refrigerator, wine cooler, dishwasher, oven, cook-top and a fireplace mantel were gone. In one of the two garages, old signage from The Levee restaurant is scattered about. In the basement theater room, wires hang uselessly from wall ports where the speakers and components were ripped from the walls.

Like much of the rest of the country, foreclosures have raced across our county like a wildfire. But wildfires have a way of setting the stage for rebirth

The homes that have been a drag on my Old Town neighborhood for years have fallen into foreclosure and been bought for a song by investors and young folks with a dream. Drive up and down the streets and alleys now and you’ll see scaffolding, ladders, dumpsters and stacks of lumber and siding – signs of rebirth amid the debris.

It keeps reminding me of those documentaries about Yellowstone a few years after the big fire where you see these strong, young shoots of growth springing out of the ash.


Another Noblesville Blogger You Must Read:
There’s a Noblesville writer whose blog is getting noticed on a nationally well-known web site called Timothy McSweeney. The writer is Charlie Hopper and he lives in a picturesque Colonial Revival home on Maple Avenue with his wife and 3 kids.

Charlie is one the brightest and funniest people I know. He won a competition for a regular blog spot on the McSweeney site by writing about his true-life attempts to write and sell a hit country song in Nashville. His “beleaguered, but hopeful” journey will put a smile on your faced.

Anyone who has ever chased a long-shot dream while trying to hold down the fort and walk the straight and narrow will connect with Charlie’s stories.

Give him a read at: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/nashville/nashville1.html

3 Local Mysteries

1) Mysterious Subscriptions Numbers
In the August 19th issue of Hamilton County’s The Times, the paper’s publisher, Tim Timmons wrote in his weekly column:

“When we purchased The Times back just about a year ago (boy, time flies!), we had a paid circulation of less than 4,500. Today, I'm more than a little pleased to share that our paid circulation is up to more than 8,100.”

Timmons went on to say: “During today's economic ups and downs, it's more gratifying than I can possibly express that we have grown 80 percent in less than a year.”
Link to actual column: http://www.thetimes24-7.com/main.asp?SectionID=13&SubSectionID=43&ArticleID=4203&TM=31008.53

Numbers like that encouraged my local real estate office to switch our weekly showcase of homes advertising from the Star to the Times. I checked with our Tucker corporate office and they were pitched this 8,100 figure.

But those circulation numbers are mysterious for 2 reasons.

-In October, less than 2 months later, as required by the United State Postal Service, The Times published its official circulation numbers in a grainy, hard to read legal ad.* It showed the paper’s owner signed his name to a document that pegged its average daily circulation for the previous 12 months at 4,308, a number less than it was when the current owners took over, almost half the number cited by Mr. Timmons just 2 months earlier.

-Earlier this week I spoke with a representative of the Times and ask about the number discrepancy. He said that both numbers were wrong and that it’s really more like 6,000, but that he publicly uses the 8,100 figure.

2) Mysterious Messages Embedded in Asphalt
Noblesville is home to an increasing number of “Toynbee Tiles;” mysterious messages embedded in the asphalt of a city street. The Contrarian first wrote about these in 2007 when the first one appear at Logan and 9th Streets.

Such messages have been found in major cities around the U.S. and in several South American cities. Who’s placing the messages, why, and how they manage to do it without being seen remains a mystery.

Several can be found around the courthouse square. The first to appear locally can be found in North 9th Street just feet from its intersection with Logan Street, touching the northern-most crosswalk. It reads:

“Toynbee idea
in movie 2001
resurrect dead
planet Jupiter”

If you want to understand what it means, Goggle it. It’s way too weird and complicated for me to explain.

In the past year others have appeared at the corner of 9th and Conner and one appears to have disintegrated at Logan and 10th, leaving it random letters embedded, but scattered around the intersection.

They are apparently made by cutting out the design, mosaic-style from colored pieces of linoleum and then sandwiching the resulting panel between two pieces of sticky roofing felt. The sandwiched message is dropped on a smooth road on a hot summer day and car tires compress it into the asphalt, initially looking like a rectangular patch in the road. After weeks or months the top layer of roofing felt wears away and reveals the linoleum mosaic message, now fully embedded into the street surface.

3) Mysteriously Inept Writer: He can write (sorta), but can he dress himself?
I was invited by local writer Dan Logan to help judge a writing competition that was part of his writer’s workshop last Saturday at Forest Park Lodge.

I dressed myself all by myself, because I’m a big boy now, and I went off to the writer’s workshop and while there was treated like a reasonably intelligent person who knows a thing or two. I was honored to sit for a few hours with Noblesville’s well-known and successful novelist Susie Crandall and judge short stories written by the workshop attendees.

During a down hour before naming the winners, I left the workshop and went out about the community and ran some errands, then came back to Forest Park to see the awards handed out.

Everybody shook hands and complemented the winners and went home.

When I got home I sat on the edge of bed and unlaced my shoes, only to discover, to my horror, that I had spent the entire day walking around with two different shoes on.

Perhaps I need to do what my kids had to do when they were in elementary school: present themselves before my wife for inspection each day before leaving to make sure nothing was inside out, backwards, or on the wrong feet.


*To see an original, readable copy of the postal form The Times filled out to better understand what the numbers mean, email the Contrarian and I’ll send you a clean pdf.

Environmentalist, or Just Cheap?

You could call me an environmentalist, and that’s fine, but my obsession with becoming more energy efficient and resourceful has as much to do with the prospect of saving money as it does with environmentalism.

It started over ten years ago when I began converting our light bulbs to compact fluorescents. And when the furnace died last year, we had new high efficiency furnace and central air units installed. But like the compact fluorescents, those are automatic no-brainers.

Last spring when it became clear that our old gas powered lawn mower was on its last leg, I went a little further. I bought an electric mower with a built-in battery.

It’s no heavier than a regular mower, has a bag, and a nifty single-touch height-control lever. I plugged it into an outlet in the garage right where I once kept its gas powered predecessor, charged it overnight, and in the morning had enough stored power to mow an acre.

No more hauling gas cans to the station and storing them in the garage. No annual tune-ups. No more stubborn pull cords. Just lift a lever and it runs.

Granted, the electricity has to come from somewhere and often that’s a coal-powered plant. But not always. The power plant north of Noblesville in Riverwood has been converted to natural gas, scrubbers can be put on coal-fired plants and wind generation is on the rise. And I’m reducing ground level ozone - that stuff that leads to summer no-zone alert days when you’re asked not to mow lawns.

This fall I used that electric mower to turn my yard leaves into fertilizer and mulch for the vegetable garden. I mow the leaves instead of raking, gathering them in the bagger. I dump some of the chopped leaves in the garden and turn them into the soil to recharge it for next year. The bulk of the chopped leaves are piled behind the garage to decompose over the winter. Once I’ve got the garden going in the spring, I use this leaf-mulch to mulch around plants. This returns yet more nutrients to the soil and holds in more moisture, requiring less watering.

That makes fewer leaves for city pick up, less money spent on chemicals and fertilizers during the growing season, and less water used to grow the plants. And the pulverized leaves left behind among the blades of grass on the lawn will be fertilizing it next spring and summer (I also cancelled my lawn service last spring).

Last spring I bought two rain barrels from Hamilton County’s Soil and Water Management offices. They came with hardware that connects the enclosed barrels to downspouts to gather water. I found a 3rd, identical barrel for free and built a platform from scrap lumber behind the garage for all three to sit on. I plumbed the barrels together so that the water from one flowed to the others. I hooked them up to the garage downspouts and dropped a little pump that had been gathering dust in the garage into one of the tanks. A hose from the pump ran to the yard-side of the garage. After the first heavy rain I was able to water the lawn and garden with rainwater. Those 3 tanks together hold 165 gallons of water, which could be gathered from one long day of rain.

I did the rough math, and it will take about 3 years for this rain barrel investment to break even and start saving me money, which I’m willing to wait for, but I’ve also got water for the plants during the next drought, which has value in itself.

And that garden did pretty well this past summer. There was romaine lettuce, spinach, and broccoli in the spring, and tomatoes, peppers, basil, and carrots in the summer. Mid-summer I planted more lettuce, spinach and broccoli for fall. The lettuce is done, the 2nd go-round of spinach failed (not sure why) and the broccoli is coming on. I also put in an asparagus bed this summer, which is another long-term investment. I can’t harvest any until the spring of 2011, but again, I’m willing to wait. The little wispy, fern-like starts are promise enough.

Environmentalists will say I’m helping the environment because I’m growing my own food at home and buying less stuff shipped across the country. That’s great. But I like doing it, regardless.

Last month our water heater died. So I made the leap. I had a tankless water heater installed5. Out with the old 50-gallon behemoth that wastefully maintained hot water all night while we slept and all day while we were at work. The new model only heats the water we need, and better yet, it never runs out. Should take about 3 years to break even on the extra expense, but it comes with a 25 year warranty, so for 22 years I’ll be saving money every month.

I also get $150 rebate from the gas company and a $780 federal tax credit for installing it.

Some of this stuff – the high efficiency furnace, the tankless water heater, even the compact fluorescent bulbs cost more initially than their less efficient counterparts. But I’m a firm believer in the old saying, “Penny pinchers pay twice.” The larger investment today means less expense in the long run.

And if it makes the environment cleaner, well that’s pretty cool, too.