Food From Trays

Full disclosure upfront:  I am going to be both unfair and hypocritical today...

Kroger has "Free Friday Downloads" which are online coupons that can be downloaded to get one specific free item.  The free items cover the range of groceries available at Kroger, being anything from candy bars on up.  I used to think these were designed to get shoppers to hunt for them, thereby forcing shoppers to walk through and look in more aisles of the store, but the Free Friday items are now always located near the front of the store, so the intent must be to drive web traffic towards Kroger.
One of my Rules for Life is:  Just because something is free, doesn't mean you want it.  Following this, some Free Friday items (gum), I don't bother with, while others are a risk free way to try something I wouldn't otherwise buy.

A few weeks ago, Stouffer's FitKitchen was the free item.  It promised, "Hearty Satisfying Meals."  Sadly, it wasn't, but at least the cost to me was about commensurate with the product.

The beans were rubbery.  The chicken was even more rubbery, and the sauce can best be described as odd.  The sweat potatoes were tolerably good.  Here is the part where I'm being hypocritical.  Some of my other weekday meals could be considered on par with Stouffer's FitKitchen.  I actually like frozen chicken wings.  Frozen pizza (with toppings added) are nearly a staple.  But the FitKitchen, frankly, reminded me of the 1970's TV dinners we occasionally ate as a child.
I would hope that either my memory of TV dinners is clouded and that 1970's culinary adventure was actually worse than I remember it, or by 2016 ready to eat meals could have advanced.  I suppose the one thing that the 1970's TV dinners had going from them was the lack of microwave ovens.  Coming in a plastic tray, Stouffer's FitKitchen has only the microwave as a cooking option.  Thinking back, I can't imagine how bad the 1970's TV dinners would have been if microwaves had been nearly universally available then.  To this day, I think I dislike peas just due to the memory of TV dinners.

There must exist a world, somewhere, between Chris Kimball's fantasy land and the TV dinner where most of us live.  Yes, some of America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country foods are touted as simple.  But having both time and energy to go the Kimball route on a daily basis is a delusion.  Staying in the PBS world, I once saw Caprial admit going to McDon... on occasion with the kids - this was refreshing, but that show has become unwatchable now that they have some truly bizarre onscreen husband-and-wife dynamics.
America's Test Kitchen plays its watchers disingenuously.  When not wearing a costume, Chris Kimball likes to start the show with the absolute worst example of a dish, and then improve on it - thus setting the bar impossibly low for success.  He also claims to have a "very small kitchen," and yet Cook's Country is reportedly filmed at his farm in Vermont.  By that standard, my kitchen is a thimble.  

Walking through Kroger yesterday, I paused by the frozen dinner section.  "TV Dinners" designed for oven cooking still exist.  Many of these are now in paper or plastic trays which is a little frightening, but I guess it works OK.  So maybe the unhappiness with the Stouffer's FitKitchen should be against the cooking method, not the cuisine?  Either way, the frozen meals were left in the freezer - available for the next shopper who wants to eat over 1 pound of food.

I actually think much of the food I grew up on would be pretty unpalatable by today's standards, or by my standards today.  But TV dinners, something special when I was young, don't seem to have improved much since then.  Perhaps the real issue lies in the fact I've been eating them wrong all along.  After all, TV dinners were created to be eaten off of steel TV trays, sitting on the sofa, while in front of the TV, with shag carpeting underfoot.  Shudder.

Office Detritus: The Things We Leave Behind

This can be a brutal time of the year accompanied by major funk brought on by cold winter days, the monotonous cycle of work-eat-sleep-repeat and little good to look forward to.
This funk may grow again this year, but I am hopeful it won't as I have three things going for me.
First, winter hasn't been too heinously bad.  This weekend is cold on a nearly intolerable level, but we've had a couple really nice weekends recently allowing bicycle riding and even some grilling.
Second, I have a trip coming up.  Not only does this give me something to look forward to, but the thinking and planning (an integrally fun part of the trip) allows for something to break up the monotony.
Third, I am in transition to a new job at work.  While I won't get too jazzed up about work, the change allows for some corporate repletion, even if it ends up being bleakly short.
This transition just sort of happened.  At first I wasn't too sure about it, but now that I'm two weeks into a five month transition, I'm realizing that I'm quite ready for new problems.

My work transition has me working out of two offices, or rather, my old office and new cubicle (damn, it feels good to be a gangsta).  As I sat in my new cubicle on one of my first days in the new job, I opened all my desk drawers.  As usual, the previous denizen had done a reasonably good job of cleaning it out, but there was still some flotsam and jetsam.
The previous occupant must have been very paper oriented as there was no shortage of folders and folder tabs.  These will end up in the shred barrel soon enough, but there were much more interesting things:

• Five pairs of scissors.  Why did "Rod" have a need for not one, two or even four pairs of scissors, but five?  I can only hope that they are remnants of past employment civilizations.  I'll keep one of these and the rest will be discarded.
• Two telephone headsets.  Why did "Rod" need not one, but two telephone headsets?  This is a standard office cubicle where talking on the phone with any degree of decorum is difficult, so one phone is a stretch.  Two headsets looks like a problem.  Reusing these feels almost as gross as rewearing someone else's pants, and they'll likely end up in the landfill (sorry future generations).
• Six opened boxes of staples.  I'm quite sure all the staples that the world will ever need have already been manufactured.  Every work location I've every moved into has at least a partial box or two of staples.  But six?  I guess I'll keep these, future archaeologists will assume these are some type of office idolatry and I must be in a very sacred place.  Oddly, there was no stapler.
• A vast assortment of pens and highlighters.  I kept a couple felt tip pens and sharpies.  I have no affection for highlighters and am partial to gel ink pens.  "Off with their heads!" says the Red Queen to the rest of the writing paraphernalia.
• A powered USB port.  I've never needed one of these at work, but I guess I could someday.  I'll stick it in the drawer likely to be discarded later in office life.
• Various other sundries:  pennies (keep), paper clips (in the stables camp), toothpicks (um, really gross), rubber bands (keep, but discard when they start to deteriorate), screws taped together (cubicle must be missing some critical hardware somewhere), and other things that I, frankly, have no idea what they are...
• The most curious thing though has to be this Plantronics device.  I'm really not sure what it is, but I strongly suspect it has been supplanted by cell phones long, long ago.  My suspicion is that since this was probably really expensive initially, "Rod" must have been unable to appropriately discard it when he left the cubicle even though it now has negative residual value.  Curiously, I have not thrown this away either, yet...

I shouldn't and won't beat up "Rod" too much.  I've never met the guy and probably never will.  But I also know that once my job transition is complete and it comes time to vacate my old office, I will probably leave a few parting gifts to a future generation of subterranean office dwellers.  

I guess the only question will be:  What do I do with my partial boxes of staples; do I begin breaking the generational cycle of office detritus?

The Unabomber and Punky Brewster

Two historic events have been in the news recently.  These feel incongruously tied...

The 20th anniversary of the arrest of Ted Kaczynski (AKA The Unabomber) is coming on April 3.  Yahoo! News has published a number of stories about Ted, mostly about his life and writings in prison.  Much of this reporting has been well worth reading.  Ted Kaczynski's life's work in writing is being preserved at the University of Michigan, where Ted earned his PhD in Mathematics.  As far as serial killers go, Ted has to be one of the more fascinating and enigmatic characters.  It is much harder seeing the writing of Jeffry Dahmer being preserved in perpetuity by an academic institution.
I was in college when The Unabomber's Manifesto was published in 1995.  The internet was in its infancy at the time, but it was available online and I downloaded and read it in entirety.  I've tried more recently to read it and its repetitiveness made it hard to complete.  Or perhaps my attention span is now shorter than it once was.
I had graduated by the time Ted was arrested in 1996, but was still fascinated by the story of the Unabomber.  What I found most compelling about him was that, while his methods were madness, his message was hard to argue against.  I've met a few PhD's who I struggled to understand how they got their degrees, but good schools like UofM don't typically just hand them out and, it was easy to see Ted's intelligence.  Still, one must ignore the bombings to think truly think this.
And that makes his message harder to take seriously.  How a few random bombings, often against bit players in technology, will affect any real change is, frankly, a really dumb idea.  It did get his Manifesto published, but the New York Times likely did that to sell more newspapers over any other reason.
One other fascinating aspect of Ted's life was that not only did he believe and espouse the dangers of modern technological society, but he lived what he believed in a small cabin without electricity or running water in Montana.  It is much easier to write about the destruction of the world, Al Gore style, finger-wagging and living a very comfortable existence.
A few years after his arrest and conviction, OFF! Magazine published Ship of Fools by Ted Kaczynski.  I heard a blurb about this on NPR and wrote the magazine editor for a copy, which I still have.  This led to a short correspondence with the magazine's editor, Tim Lapietra.  I continued to get OFF! for a few years, giving me insight into the fringe left of American society - a scary place indeed.  I wish I could find Tim's final editorial from the magazine as he made some personal observations of the fringe left and what it was really preaching.

And 10 years before Ted was arrested, while the Unabomber was bombing computer store owners, the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up over coastal Florida - the other historic event in the news this week.

I can vividly recall the first space shuttle launch in 1981.  I was riveted to the idea of, not a rocket, but of a spaceship blasting off and returning to earth to be reused.  The space shuttle was infinitely more cool than a rocket.  I even had an Estes model rocket designed to look like the space shuttle - painted flat white (with house paint), just like the real thing.
By 1986, space shuttle launches were become routine, at best, and maybe even boring.  In order to bring public attention back to the space program, NASA held a contest, American Idol style (long before reality TV invaded), to transform a commoner into an astronaut.  A school teacher, truly "one of us" was chosen.
Our school classroom was not one of the many which watched the doomed space shuttle Challenger launch on January 28, 1986, but it was all the talk at recess.  Being of a certain age when things blowing up is cool, the initial reaction of many of us was, "Gosh, it is a spaceship, don't they blow up all the time?"
Being probably too old for  the TV show Punky Brewster, I'm slightly embarrassed to still remember the episode post-Challenger that dealt with the Challenger destruction.  Why this memory is stuck in my mind almost as vividly as the actual destruction of the space shuttle is yet another mystery of the feeble mind.  We are not in complete control of our memories!

Space shuttle launches continued after a hiatus, with new o-rings.  Despite Punky Brewster, the astronauts still must have been reminded of that old joke during prelaunch readiness that, "this thing was built by the lowest bid!"
Manned space missions are even more boring now than they were in 1986.  After the 2003 Columbia destruction on reentry into the Earth's atmosphere (Don't make spaceships out of Nerf!), the majority of time in space was spent making sure the shuttles survived launch with a few minutes to look at an ant farm sent into space by a grade school in Topeka, Kansas.
Unmanned missions continue to provide much more data, and excitement, at a fraction of the cost and risk.  Mars Curiosity and Rover provided real data and vivid images long after they were expected to die a quiet death on the surface of an alien planet - something impossible with a manned mission.
Meanwhile, manned missions are now using Soviet Soyuz technology derived from the 1960's to put humans in the International Space Station.

And maybe that is where the connection between Ted Kaczynski and the Challenger destruction actually do come together.  The Unabomber was railing against the technological destruction of humanity and society, while the Challenger brought this to life with horribly tragic and visible consequences.  And now we're reduced to using cold war (ancient, but still probably unacceptable to the Unabomber) technology to put humans into space, to accomplish things of questionable value relative to what modern automation and robotics can do.
So while Ted's message against nearly all technology is impossible to live - not many of us want to live in shacks in the woods, perhaps a Luddite can help us think about what technology can, and should be used for.  And more importantly, an Atavist can help us think about what it should not.

Stories I Tell Myself

A short time ago, I was complaining about the lack of winter having the effect of prolonging 2015.  The 10th day of the year came with winter in full force.  Temperature dropping all day.  Wind howling all day.  So brutal that only a short dog walk was tolerable.  With a planned plumbing project apparently not needed, I sat down to read Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F Thompson.

I've read much of what Hunter S Thompson has written in book form, so when I saw on a website somewhere a reference to the book written by Juan, his son, I immediately requested it from the library.  It was listed as "In Cataloging" which often means a long wait, but it was available within a day.  I originally planned to read this on an upcoming trip, and I rarely sit down and read an entire book in one sitting.  But I did so with Stories I Tell Myself on that frozen windy day.

The book tells the story of Juan growing up in the shadow of his father.  I was sort of expecting something along the line of  Agusten Burrough's Running with Scissors, but Juan's growing up was substantially more normal than that.  If I were to compare it to another Burrough's book, it is almost closer to A Wolf at the Table, but not with the same level of overt brutality.  Largely, it sounded as if Juan's youth was grounded much more in his mother, with his father a figure to be feared.  After his parent's divorce, I read between the lines that there were several years with minimal contact between Hunter and Juan.  Juan alludes to this, but doesn't come right out and say it.
Juan also goes out of his was several times in the book to point out that he is describing things from his memory and that his memory may be incomplete or possibly erroneous.  This is part of the narrative that runs through the book, and I found it interesting as also something I've become increasingly aware of.

The most prominent theme in the book is one of the relationship between fathers and sons.  This almost seems to be more important at some points than the fact that Juan's father is the famous and eccentric Hunter S Thompson.  Still, after reading books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Screwjack, growing up with Hunter does have aspects and events that might be expected.
It was somewhat shocking some of the other figures who appear in the book:  Jimmy Buffet, Kieth Richards, John Kerry - if more than eccentric, Hunter certainly had a diverse A-List crowd he moved in.
Sometimes the right book comes along at the right time and Stories I Tell Myself was one of those.  As my dad's recent death has had me pondering my relationship with him over the years, Juan's book allowed for a different perspective and some introspection.  Not that my dad, although he did work in the book publishing industry, should be compared to Hunter as this would be like trying to compare peacocks and robins, or maybe peacocks and suspension bridges.

The other thread running through the book is the overall theme of growing up.  All of the painful moments of awkwardness, confusion, alienation, childhood difficulties are laid bare.  This is more poignant as Juan appears to be somewhat clingy to his mother and quite an introvert.
Like most of us, Juan eventually finds his own life and ends up surprisingly normal, even somewhat boring at the end of the book.

There was one detail of the book I found somewhat maddening.  Juan first goes to college at Tufts and writes about being lonely and quite unhappy there.  Transferring to Colorado University and spending a year in England suites him better before returning to the US to finish college.  He writes, "Upon my return to Boulder for the first of my two senior years, I declared English literature my major."  And on the next page he graduates.  This implies graduation from CU in Boulder, but his bio states he graduated from Tufts.  So either he transferred back to where he was previously miserable, or his bio is wrong.  Either way, something is missing either in the story here, or in the editing.  While a minor detail, I find this hard not to perseverate on.

There are a few revelations about Hunter I found surprising as I read the 272 pages.
First, I was surprised at the level of money issues he faced.  It reads like this was mostly self-induced, as it often is.  But I would have thought that a famous writer who had sold millions of books could endure poor money habits without as much effect as was eluded to in the book.  More than anything, this probably supports the notion that no matter how successful a person is, living at the end of means is dangerous.
The other revelation was Hunter's relationship with drugs and alcohol.  I had always assumed that his consumption of drugs and alcohol was somewhat exaggerated as part of the persona that sold his wares.  Peter Whitmer's unauthorized biography When the Going Gets Weird makes mention of health issues early in his life from overindulgence, and I inferred from this that as he aged, he was more careful - or possibly he needed to be more careful.  Apparently, overindulgence in both alcohol and cocaine was a daily occurrence and it is somewhat surprising that Hunter lived as long as he did.  Still, the effects of this debaucherous lifestyle become clear through the end of the book and the end of Hunter's life.

The book ends with a narrative around Hunter's ultimate suicide and final, spectacular sendoff.

The book was a good read and a different take on an interesting man.  As with much of HST's writing, it wasn't always clear if the main thrust of the book was about Juan, or Hunter.  I'll end, not with a something about Juan Thompson or Hunter Thompson, both of which would be easy, but I'll end with a quote from Peter Hamill's A Drinking Life.  Because while Juan's story is distinctive as the only son of an eccentric, gonzo father, the larger story isn't unique - but is the same story experienced through history of growing up and becoming an individual separate from where anyone came from.

I was myself now, for better or worse.  I was forever Billy Hamill's son, but I did not want to be the next edition of Billy Hamill.  He had his life and I had mine.  And if there were patterns, endless repetitions, cycles of family history, if my father was the result of his father and his father's father, on back through the generations into the Irish fogs, I could no longer accept any notion of predestination.

2015: Saudade

Somewhere around late August, too early, I started looking for the end of 2015.  Not that 2015 was a bad year ... overall.  I didn't use my vacation time too well, but that which was used appropriately, I enjoyed.  Planned trips worked out and the impromptu ones were a brief hoot.  Some longer term issues at work have (largely) improved, and my work hours allow me to leave when I want more often.
I may have even been pushing for the end of the year, but it was like pushing on a rope; time will pass at its own rate.  Never faster, never slower.

"Certainly a measure of this reactionary navel-noodling can be attributed to the standard metaphorical casting of autumn as the season when winter's deathly breath first fogs your rose-colored glasses, but on a more fundamental level I think it has to do with the reaping of gardens and good intentions, both of which tend to come in well below spring's predictions." 

Michael Perry (Truck - A Love Story)

Christmas came with the winter solstice behind it and the new calendar waiting to be hung on the wall, but Christmas morning woke up to 50 degrees after a Christmas Eve bike ride warm enough to wear shorts.  

On a rational level, I enjoyed the uncharacteristically warm December; my heating bill certainly has.  The warm weather made for more bike riding and some of the most comfortable deer hunting I've had.  Yet, the lack of winter was bringing with it a sense of prolonging a year that needed to end, the warm weather behaving as a nagging sense that something is unfinished, the epoch won't advance until some beastie somewhere is set free.

For the fourth year, I've time lapsed daily pictures of my back yard.  I very likely have the most photographed back yard in the township.  Proof that the year started and is over.

Bronnie Ware's Top Five Regrets of the Dying is repeated all over, so it isn't included here.  But it is worth rereading occasionally.  The last regret is one that seems to request attention after 2015.  Happiness is a choice.  It sounds so easy, and it probably can be.

There are already things to look forward to early in 2016.  An annual trip south is actually quite close.  A trip west, very far west, to scrawl a few difficult check marks on of the bucket list is being planned.

Since Christmas, winter does seem like it may have arrived.  With winter winds and daily highs nearer freezing, the calendar can be changed.  I'm not sure if the beastie has been slain or set free; only time will tell.

Looking back over the four years of time lapsed video brings with it a sense of hope.  Winter, in some form, will always come.  Winter will relent to spring, bringing green and good intentions.  Summer will bring the deliciousness of muggy mornings and evening walks watching the Queen Anne's lace and chicory grow.  Fall will bring the hopefulness of the treestands.  And winter will come, yet again, with the right mindset, accompanied by happy reflection since happiness is a choice.

Thanks for everything.

Confessions of a Climate Agnostic

There were a lot of pomportant people in Paris and they seemed very self-congratulatory after signing a climate treaty.  Other than the smiles, hand-holding and comments like, "this is historic," it should be noted how little coverage the final agreement actually received.  The day after signing, it wasn't even mentioned on the evening news.  Even NPR had only a tacit story on it.
After learning more about the agreement, the lack of coverage probably makes more sense than should be admitted.  The final agreement has a lot of "shoulds" in place of "shalls" and there are basically no ramifications, other than global shaming, for non-compliance.  No country other than Luxembourg seems to really care about public shaming - there is always someone else to blame.  There is also very little in the way of objective measurements across the globe, making compliance with the suggestion even more doubtful.
The should versus shall should not be downplayed.  I should eat healthier and exercise more.  The law says I shall not walk out of Walmart with Twinkies without paying for them.  The former is a suggestion, the latter has consequences.  While the scale of a global environmental agreement is much bigger, the binding of the language is the same.
Reportedly, some of these "shoulds" were put in place at the urging of the US since the Obama administration was fearful that "shall" would then require Senate approval of the agreement, and this would not be a requirement if the agreement is merely a suggestion.  So rather than face the difficult political work at home, John Kerry pushed for a, largely, vapid agreement.

What the Paris agreement will allow, is for a lot more finger wagging.  Al Gore has been finger wagging for quite some time now.  And, frankly, something does need to be done.  However, even Mr. Gore does not agree that anything drastic needs to be done.  He is quite content living a lavish 1%er lifestyle while earning his living as a professional finger wagger.  He has attempted to address his oppulence, but his response is actually more dangerous than the problem his lifestyle creates.
I could almost admire his honesty if he said some form of, "I'm imperfect, and like everyone else, would like to do better.  But alas, I'm human so do as I say, not as I do."  What his response is really saying is, "I'm very wealthy, so I can live an extravagant lifestyle with only some guilt and an insignificantly small additional expense.  Those of you who are not rich must make real sacrifices."  (and he says this with condescension).  Elsewhere, the referenced "10 geothermal wells" are noted as being under Al Gore's driveway.  Just How friggin' long is his driveway?
I shouldn't pick on Al Gore too much.  It is just too easy to do and if the environmental movement ever does take off for the non-Birkenstock crowd, he would have to find something else to prognosticate on.

Expanding in a minute, I do see climate change as a real and growing threat.  What is almost unbelievable is how little population is discussed as part of the issue and solution.  As soon as procreation is mentioned, eyes get wide and hands are thrown up - having seven children, even if you can't afford three, is a basic human right!  Sadly, in the first world through the third, the people having seven children are too often the ones that can't raise them in a more sustainable manner.  The lack of including population changes as part of any solution, or even any discussion, of the environment in the future is further evidence of the (lack of) real importance of the issue.  As Al Gore has taught us, real sacrifices must always be made by someone else.

The question most of asked around the issue is, "Do you believe in global warming?"  This question itself is wrong and unfortunate.  The branding of the phenomenon as "global warming" was a huge mistake made decades ago.  Branding it as "climate change" allows for more honest discussions without including anecdotal observations of a frigid winter in Dallas.  There should actually be three questions:
So, is the climate changing?
Yes.  This is fact, and there is data to support this.  Denying this is, frankly, wearing blinders.
Is the climate change caused by human activity?
Somewhere between probably and almost for sure.  Scientific fact is hard to come by, but the vast majority of climate scientists are not dumb and while modeling the atmosphere is notoriously difficult, most models together point in generally the same direction.  Even the most conspiracy-minded skeptic must admit that, at best, human activity is not helping since, as above, the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is fact.
What should be done about it?
AAAHHHHHHHHHH, here is the real question.  The difficult one.  The question even Al Gore doesn't want to live by if he really believes what his prophet persona says.
The question of what to do about it must not be based exclusively on hard climate science, since any changes shall take into account economic theory, social changes, etc.

As much as I've spent much of my adult scientific life poopooing the "social sciences," they play a bigger role here than what anybody wants to admit.  Until the Joe and Jane six-pack crowd sees a short term benefit to changes that might improve the climate situation, it will never take hold.
Witness how when gas was $4/gallon a few years ago, the sale of small cars began to noticeably creep up, while in our current oil-glut environment, larger vehicles are again making a strong comeback.

Great, so the answer is to make not being a granola really, really expensive, right?
Wrong, economic theory must also play a role.  As resilient as the atmosphere may or may not be, the global economy is a fragile glass figurine in comparison.  Any attempt to affect a large change quickly will result in catastrophic consequences, even if the long term result is good (and modeling the economy long term is harder than the environment).  Negative changes in the economy moves people, business, and government into preservation mode and the climate will quickly become an even lower priority.
Similarly, it is ludicrous to expect advanced economies to digress - the economy must grow or die and any politician who suggests a decrease in lifestyle for the next generation will be railroaded out on a log.
We also should not expect developing economies to do anything other than pursue the lifestyle that the developed world has.  Suggesting otherwise is borderline evil.  I do sometimes wonder if the developing world is not in a better position to move ahead of the developed world - without the entrenched infrastructure in places like the United States, France and Germany, is it easier to put a different, more sustainable infrastructure in Subsaharan Africa? If environmentally friendly solutions are such a no-brainer and so much better for the long term economy and technologically advanced to the point everyone should have them, how come they are not becoming the norm in places like China, India or Brazil?  Maybe not quite as much of a no-brainer as the solar crowd would hope.

The difficulty of individuals making changes can be illustrated by what I do to help and hurt the globe.  I do this not to flog myself, or to be self-congratulatory, but to illustrate that almost everyone does things that help and hurt.
I recycle nearly everything I can, but I also realize that much of what is recycled does end up in a landfill.
I have a longer-than-average commute, but I chose my truck as the highest mpg open-bedded 4wd vehicle available at the time.
I drive very little on the average weekend, but pursuing mass transportation is not something I have much interest in.
I could buy a more efficient 4-wheeled vehicle, but then I would have yet another vehicle which is not really helping.
In the summer I do most of my commuting on a motorcycle which uses much less fuel than most cars, but my bikes are not really built for fuel efficiency and, frankly, I ride motorcycles because I like motorcycles, with any environmental benefit a tertiary thought at best - do motives matter?
I heat and cool my house with geothermal and keep it at a cool 64F in the winter, but if the house wouldn't have had geothermal when I bought it, I probably wouldn't have put it in myself.
I've looked into solar panels, and even ran full electric to my pole bard with that in the back of my mind, but any payout for solar panels, using realistic estimates, would be at about the anticipated lifetime of them, so I don't think I'll do it anytime soon.  To be clear, it is getting closer to being cost effective if subsidies are maintained, but looking at the actual cost, it is not.  And I can think of better uses environmental or otherwise for that money.
I see water scarcity as a potentially much larger problem in the future, but water use minimization is almost silly living in the Midwest.
I have planted many trees on my property, but they keep dying.

Everyone of these things has a "but" in it.  Nobody wants to destroy the environment or return to the days of burning rivers.  Everyone could be doing more and probably should (even Al Gore), but...
And that is the real answer, there are no easy answers to this.

Dad's Christmas Cookies

For at least the last decade, Dad always sent Christmas Cookies.  These were large cookies decorated with copious amounts of frosting to look like Santa Claus, at least mostly like Santa Claus.  While the gesture was nice, most were never eaten - something I always felt a little guilty about.

Dad was diagnosed early in 2015 with pancreatic cancer.  He had some unusual issues, and after a few misdiagnoses, late stage four pancreatic cancer was confirmed.  I knew pancreatic cancer wasn't "a good one" to get, but until doing some reading, I didn't understand the degree of badness to this, especially at the stage he was at.

Dad was always a rock.  He was never flashy, never flamboyant or loud, or boisterous.  There were prayers for the miracle-cure which wasn't to come; my Dad and his wife said those prayers were answered in thousands of small miracles after his diagnosis, which was yet another lesson I needed to learn from that man.

In the classic sense, I guess we weren't close.  Our interests were very different.  I usually (only) saw him once or twice a year.  I communicated with him 10-20 times a year in addition to our visits - yet his diagnosis and the realization that his life would likely end, and soon, from pancreatic cancer hit me like a boulder.
All of my Dad's kids got together about a month after his diagnosis for a rally-around-Dad weekend.  On one evening, Dad showed a slide show of 35mm slides from our youth on his father's very antique slide projector.  Dad assumed this would be, at best, tolerated.  It was probably one of the highlights of my year.  We all really enjoyed watching the pictures and reliving childhood memories - creating new memories in the process.
We all had a great time that entire weekend - and it wasn't until the drive home that I realized why his diagnosis hit so hard.
Time spent thinking and putting thoughts to paper helped me put into words how with a strong foundation, Dad was able to help raise five interesting kids that were able to develop freely into their own very unique and independent selves.  I ultimately sent this to him for Father's Day - almost too late - and read it at his funeral.

I saw Dad a few more times over the spring and summer, watched the ever-healthy man deteriorate.  He never complained, never lost faith.  Just like his whole life, he was accepting and enjoyed every single positive second.  Early on, there was a lot of communication, but that waned as his condition worsened.  Updates, both good and bad, came mostly from his wife - a woman who showed the strength of Samson and compassion of Mother Teresa.

Dad died on Father's Day.  Maybe because I saw him the day before, I see his death on a day to honor dads as inexplicably non-negative.  His funeral really was a celebration of his life, as well as a roller-coaster of emotions since there were many people there who I hadn't seen in years.

Since Dad's death, I miss him in ways I never could have imagined.
I miss how he would read something I would post on Facebook, and then email me about it.  I'm not sure if his lack of Facebook comments was that he didn't totally get it, or his deference to my being a somewhat private person.
I miss how he would always have some reason to email me after I saw him, and asked if I made it home OK.
I miss how he would always send me a really cheesy online birthday card.
I miss realizing that my habits and mannerisms had grown to match his more than I was comfortable with.
I miss just knowing ... he is there.

And I miss those Christmas Cookies I didn't eat.
To be honest, I have a hard time seeing Dad make and decorate cookies; there is a lot I learned about him in his last few months that is difficult to picture.  But the cookies would come every year, very near, sometimes shortly after, Christmas, when my taste for sweets of any kind was diminishing.  There would always be an email preceding the cookies that "something was coming" for me.  A rumpled box would then show up, with cookies wrapped in cellophane and bubble wrap.
It hurts a little knowing that that box will never show up again, and I will still feel guilty about not eating those cookies.  Maybe this year, I will make some cookies, and I will frost them to look like Santa.  But I will not eat them - because whether it is Christmas, or Father's Day or any time in between, when I think about my Dad, I don't ever want it to be without a little bit of ache.