A Sad Stat

Our little local paper recently reported that six percent of the people in Lee's Summit, MO, recycle. Six percent. That means that 94% of the people in this town find it prohibitively difficult to throw their pop cans and water bottles into a recycling bin instead of the trash can.

Now, I'll admit that I'm not a great environmentalist. My house is too big, and from the looks of my utility bills, not terribly efficient. I get plastic bags at the grocery store (although I do reuse them as trash bags) and when we need or want something, we tend to buy new instead of used. But I find this statistic a bit horrifying. I mean, it's not like we have to actually turn our garbage into new products. We just have to place them in a different container. Is it really that hard?

This pathetic number is particularly disturbing to me because our town has curbside recycling. It costs an extra five bucks a month--a Starbucks. Big deal. I place a bin full of my aluminum, plastic, newspapers and cardboard--I don't even have to separate it--out with the regular trash. Once a month or so I haul my glass and magazines to the local Resource Recovery Center, about five miles away. Not difficult. (And as a side note, I have to say that beer drinkers are excellent recyclers. The brown glass container is always full.)

The most challenging part for me has been training the people I live with to follow my lead. But I know that if I nag, rag and bitch long enough, they'll do what I want just to shut me up. Actually, I've found this to be an excellent strategy for getting just about anything done in my household.

Keeping Up With The Neighbors

In the suburbs, we care very much about the appearance of our homes. We obsess over it. The street on which I live is no exception.

I live in a cul-de-sac with seven homes...all of them (including mine) are in a perpetual state of updating. All the homes are about 15-20 years old, so maybe it's just time for the first wave, but it's really quite amazing to watch.

And I do watch. Since I work at home, I am the Mrs. Kravitz of the 21st Century, peeking out my front window several times a day to keep track of what's going on with the neighbors. It's obvious that we are all doing our part to keep the economy--or at least in the construction and home improvement industries--alive and well. Here are just a few things that have happened in just a last year or so:

All seven of our homes have gotten either new or extensively repaired roofs. Four have been painted. One had a complete landscaping overhaul, complete with full-grown plants and a koi pond. Another ripped out and replaced what I know was pristine carpeting. And the appliance and furniture delivery trucks are in and out of here with staggering regularity. You can bet that when that happens, I am looking for a reason to visit and see what they got.

This is the house three doors down from mine. In the past year they've replaced all the windows, installed an underground sprinkler system, replaced the cedar shingle roof with a tile one, and just a few weeks ago they replaced the driveway with this fancy colored one. (I hope they are planning to repaint their plum-colored front door because it now clashes with the roof.)

And this house, which sits behind mine but is obviously in a different neighborhood, is truly the home that we're all watching. The proverbial Joneses that we're all trying to keep up with. The owners purchased the home three years ago for just under $1 million. For the first year after they bought it, they lived somewhere else while the interior was completely gutted and renovated. They moved in and started on the exterior, including a new two-story, two-car garage--apparently the existing four-car garage was not quite enough. (The garage doors have been brown for quite a while. I hope they aren't leaving them like that.) Now, three years later, there is still a steady stream of construction vehicles and heavy equipment driving through the circular driveway. I can't see the backyard, but I suspect they are putting in a pool.

It's fun to live in the suburbs! I'd love to go on, but I have kitchen cabinets to paint.

Crisis Management

Although I worry about it every day, my family has not yet been personally impacted by the economic crisis. We both still have our jobs (for which we are grateful every single day), having made it through several rounds of layoffs. Our 401(k)s look pretty ugly, but since we won't need those for 20 years we've just stopped opening the statements.

But being financially stable is still a big concern. We have become more thoughtful about our day-to-day spending: we don't go out to eat nearly as often as we used to, I'm clipping coupons, and we are trying to pay more attention to the difference between what we need and what we want. Yes, we are making some major home improvements, but we believe (or hope) that we are investing in the value of our home.

So this weekend we ran over to the shopping area of our town. We have a fairly large mall, surrounded by all the big-box department stores. We hadn't been over there since before Christmas, but Chris needed a pair of dress shoes.

As we exited of the highway, the exit ramp was backed up with traffic. We inched down the ramp, thinking there was an accident; but no, there was just a lot of traffic in and around the mall. Everyone was shopping!

Believing the news that consumer spending was down, I thought maybe people were just window shopping, wanting to get out of the house on a sunny Saturday--because shopping has become a form of entertainment, right? But in the store a voice came over the loudspeaker, asking for all available associates to open a cash register because the lines were very long. People were buying stuff.

What does this all mean? Has the crisis not hit our area yet? Were these people, like us, just out to buy something they really needed? Are we all in complete denial about what's happening? Or do we all feel so helpless and out of control that we don't know what else to do except to engage in some "retail therapy"?

I think we (and when I say "we" I mean anyone under the age of 50) just don't know how to stop shopping. The line between need and want has virtually disappeared. We've never been asked (or forced) to sacrifice, to tighten the belt, to save money. I think we simply don't know what to do.

I'd love to know what you think...

The Worst Drivers on the Planet

Before I dive into the kitchen remodel, I thought I'd take just a moment to rant about something I'm reminded of every time I leave the house--the suburbs are teeming with soccer moms in SUVs, or who I like to call The Worst Drivers on the Planet.

You've seen them: They're usually blond with expert highlights, they wear expensive sunglasses, and they have a cell phone that's perpetually attached to their ear. For some reason, they've never gotten around to buying a Bluetooth, so they're always driving with one hand. They weave in and out of traffic, cut me off (because they realize they're in the wrong lane at the last minute), or my favorite, tailgate me because I am not observing their inalienable right to be in a hurry.

If I ever kill anyone, it will be a blond in an SUV who is tailgating me. I suspect I will beat her to death with her cell phone. And steal her sunglasses.

Size Matters

When you live in the suburbs, your self-esteem is intimately tied to your home. More specifically, it is tied to the size of your home. And bigger is better, right, Ladies?

So when we were transferred from (a suburb of) Denver to (a suburb of) Kansas City four years ago, we got pretty darn excited when we saw how much house we could get for our money. The homes we were looking at to buy were twice the size of the basic little tract home we were selling. Yippee!

And since we weren't terribly happy about leaving Denver (but you have to follow the job, right?) it was easy for us to justify buying the biggest house we could afford: we're moving away from our family; we work hard and deserve it; if we have to live here we'll live however we want.

But did we stop to think that there were only four of us? Or that our kids were older, had friends and girlfriends in Denver, and would want to escape Missouri (which my oldest son pronounced "Misery") at the earliest opportunity? Not for a second.

We also didn't think about how much maintenance a large house requires. Or how much it costs to heat and cool. Or the time and energy it takes to care for a pool (yeah, we got one of those, too, thinking it might help convince faraway family and friends that Kansas City is a great vacation destination).

So we went for it and bought a lovely home in a lovely neighborhood. It has four bedrooms and five baths (which sounds cool until you spend a Saturday morning cleaning five toilets). It includes a formal living room, a formal dining room, and a designated guest room--three spaces for which we didn't have any furniture.

And so began what has become a real love/hate relationship with my big suburban home...

"Dinner Moments"

So, I was cooking dinner last night, and by cooking I mean I was heating up a Stouffer's frozen lasagna, and on the back of the box was part of their latest media campaign, called Dinner Moments. The message: Families should eat dinner together and parents should talk to their kids. And on the box are "conversation starters," questions you should ask your kids, while you're all sitting around the dinner table, to get them talking.


Well, yes...of course. As parents, we already know this, right? It's a lovely sentiment, in a very Ozzie and Harriet way (although Harriet would NEVER make a Stouffer's dinner).

So why does it bug me that a corporation feels the need to dole out parenting advice? Perhaps because the questions are so dorky:

• If you could star in a movie with a famous actor, who would it be?
• What singer or actor would you want as a babysitter?
• If you could be a foreign exchange student anywhere in the world, where would it be?
• What is your favorite Saturday morning TV show?

These are obviously for younger children. Now I don't know how things are in your house, but when my kids were young I couldn't shut them up...all I had to do look at them and smile and they'd babble on for hours. It wasn't until they were about 14 or 15 that my interest in their lives was met with a series of grunts.

I got online to see what kind of questions they came up with for older kids (yes, they have a website dedicated to getting families talking, which apparently will sell more frozen dinners: dinnermoments.com) but they were all for little kids, too. So I thought I'd suggest some questions to get teenagers talking:

• What's it like to play video games for 12 hours straight?
• When are you going to get a job?
• When are you going to stop asking me for money?
• When are you moving out?

Now these, my friends, are Conversation Starters.