Being Green isn't easy, 9 years as a one car family

For the past nine years my husband and I have been a one car family. When people hear this they say "Oh well you two work together so it's easy" and then we move on to something else. Our situation minimizes in their eyes because we work similar schedules and work in the same building. As we gear up to become a two car family I'd like to say a few words.

We have never rented a vehicle for convenience.The only times we have rented a vehicle have been when we needed a truck for hauling stuff that wouldn't fit in our car, when we moved, or when we went somewhere that we didn't think the crappy car we owned could handle. Yes, we rented a vehicle for our two trips to Black Rock City, Nevada. We rented a pickup truck for one weekend when we redid our bathroom. We rented something when we moved.

During the nine years that we have been together I have had four different jobs. One of those was across the bridge. Also my husband is on-call 1/3 of the time. He and two co-workers rotate a beeper. This means that my daughter and I have been to work with him at some very odd times. Before our daughter was born I was there on even odder times, usually in the parking lot waiting. You never know when that beeper goes off whether it's going to be a ten minute problem or a ten hour problem. If we are out somewhere and he gets called in, we all go initially. Once he settles it out how long it's going to take we figure out what to do with our daughter and myself, whether we should wait somewhere or go home. Our schedules are similar right now but they do not match exactly, and there are a lot of times when we need to be in two different places.

During the nine years that we have been together we have lived in three different places. Well four to be exact because when we first got together he still had a separate place, but we have had three shared places.

During the nine years that we have been together we have been through three cars. He sold his truck in the beginning of our relationship since it wasn't running anyway. We had my old red Ford Escort Wagon. I forget what year it was but it was known for electrical problems. When we finally traded it in (if you could call it that) that car had no heat and no back window. It was a work of art. In the winter my husband rigged up a converter to the battery and set up a space heater to defrost the windshield. When someone hit our parked car and took out the back window they didn't bother to stop. He took one of those plastic floor mats that you put under office chairs and cut it to size and taped or glued it in place. It held. What was left of back lights were held in place with spray foam. I remember that.

During the last nine years that we have been together 6 1/2 years have not been on a bus route. So if you are thinking "yeah, they just used public transportation..." then think again. We live out in the sticks folks. There is no cell phone service here and until a year ago we didn't have high speed internet. As it is now we have satellite internet that goes out whenever we get a storm. We are about 7 miles from the nearest state road.

I have been known to strand him places, leaving him to find a ride home from a friend or a co-worker. I love him dearly but it has happened.

When our car died two years ago and I had pneumonia it was a rough week of car shopping and doctor's appointments because we had to combine things.

I spent most of the 14 weeks of maternity leave without a car, in the middle of the woods, with a newborn, and dial-up internet. I thought I was going to go crazy. I probably did.

I think in the nine years that we have lived as a one car family we have paid our dues to the environment. We traded in that junky Ford Escort for a fuel efficient Honda Accord and when the transmission went on that we bought an Element because it slides on the snow and ice a lot less. We have made compromises in our jobs, in our social lives, in our education, and in our family life because of the dedication we have had to being a one car family.

Now our daughter is entering Kindergarten. Now the era of being a one-car family is coming to an end. Of all the obstacles we have been able to overcome, the public school system is not one of them. With Kindergarten on the horizon, and the end of paying for full time daycare in sight, we will soon be buying a second car. Our lives will change a lot.

It's been a good ride for the last nine years but it hasn't been an easy one. Time will tell if we miss it or not.

Identity Crisis and ACOA/Al-Anon, part two

Well I think I am pretty much stuck with my Icepacklady name on Twitter. I'm starting to pick up some followers, and a few folks are even retweeting what I write. Yahoo! I retweet quite a bit too of course so it's all fair. For better or for worse I have my real name on there too.

My next Identity Crisis to handle has to do with ACOA and Al-Anon. I think I have this solved but I'm going to put this out there anyway. Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I am an Adult Child of an Alcoholic. I went to my first Al-Anon meeting when I was a college student and in a crisis. If my memory serves me right the meeting was on campus, at lunchtime, and the subject was balance. I probably cried. After that I went to some meetings there but not always. It wasn't a convenient time etc. Years passed by. Another crisis in my life. I actually shopped around for meetings this time. Showing up at a couple here, and a couple there, before adopting a "home group". I also went to meetings online. My boyfriend at the time was studying abroad and I was working two jobs. I managed to find time to go to a lot of meetings between the online ones and the face to face ones. When the boyfriend came back to town it got harder to go to meetings. Then the relationship ended and I rebuilt my life. That's another story. Time passes. Things change. Now my life is different and I cannot go to meetings, and I'm not sure I really need to but I picked up the books, actually went out and bought new ones since I'd donated my old ones long ago when I was cleaning things out. I also found a lot of blogs out there. So I started blogging about my life and what was going on, and I did it in Al-Anon terms. However there is something in most 12 step programs that talks about anonymity so I took that to be that I needed to be anonymous on my blog. I chose a different name and created a separate blog and I posted it all there. Sometimes I was pretty sure people would connect me to the blog, and once or twice I even told people point blank that I was the writer of that blog but for the most part I kept it separate.

You know what? That blog got more followers than this one has. People could connect to it. Maybe because it was specific. It wasn't scattered like this one is.

So now that blog is out there but I told my readers that I was dropping out. I started it when my mother came back to Massachusetts after my grandmother's stroke and I ended it pretty  much when she moved back to Florida. Now that she isn't in my life every day I don't feel like writing the blog.

What I would like to do is to add an Al-Anon/ACOA page here to this blog. I know that's not very anonymous of me, but at this point I don't really care. I'm more interested in unifying myself. In pulling all these different pieces of me together and putting them under one roof.

The family, the writing, the weight loss, the politics, good books, and ACOA/Al-Anon all under one blog. I'd like to do it all under different pages to make it easier to read. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that though. Although I've figured out how to create different pages I haven't figured out how to add posts to them. Still working that out.