Category: Sustainable living

2017 Fiat 500: A 7-year re-review ★★★★★


Click here for high-resolution version.

I well remember how guilty and splurgy I felt when I bought this car seven years ago. Yet it turned out to be one of the best financial decisions I ever made, because it has kept my cost of transportation very low.

The base price was $14,995. The total sticker price plus a destination charge and $250 extra for the ivory seats came to $16,240. But I didn’t pay that much. The dealer gave me a too-good-to-turn-down discount because Americans won’t buy Fiats, and this one had been on the lot for a while. In fact, Fiat stopped selling the Fiat 500 in North America after the 2019 model year.

Americans prove over and over again that they clueless and foolish in pretty much every way. Most people want enormous SUVs. The average price for vehicles sold at present in the U.S. is just under $50,000. The average amount that Americans spend on gasoline each year is more than $2,700. In some states, such as Wyoming, the average is considerably higher — $3,300 a year. Many households have two cars, and 22 percent of American households have three or more cars. Americans don’t like to ask themselves how much they can afford to pay for transportation. Consequently they don’t have much money left over for buying eggs.

I can’t tell you how many times someone sees the Fiat and says, “Fix it again, Tony.” Probably once upon a time Fiats deserved their reputation for not being reliable. But automobile manufacturing is much, much better these days, largely thanks to robotics and much better machining. Most Americans don’t know that the Italians are superb automotive engineers. The Italians also have a flair for style — and fun — in automobile design that seems to have vanished in many places.

In seven years, my Fiat 500 has had to go in for repairs twice. In year four, a speed sensor failed in the front left wheel. Fiat fixed that under warranty. Last year, the service engine light came on with a complaint about the electronic throttle. That turned out to be a known software issue for which Fiat had issued a service bulletin. The dealership reflashed the PCM, which cost me $100. I don’t mind that, because I assume it means that my Fiat now has the latest version of the Fiat software. Other than that, at 42,000 miles, I’ve never had any trouble.

The engine and transmission are silky smooth. In fact the Fiat 500 handles like a sports car. People ask me if I feel safe in such a small car. I feel as safe in the Fiat as I do in any car. I also believe, because I’m a good and careful driver, and because the Fiat is far more maneuverable that heavy vehicles, that I can evade accidents that heavy vehicles would not be able to evade. I have done many quick stops for squirrels, including a few quick stops in which I had to both brake and swerve. The Fiat goes where I point it, stops quickly, and doesn’t threaten to roll over — though a swerving quick stop is always, in any vehicle, a dangerous maneuver.

My average is about 48 miles per gallon. The photo below shows pretty much the maximum mileage the Fiat can achieve. The 70.5 mpg figure is from a 12-mile trip on a flat highway, mostly in fifth gear, at about 50 mph. The mileage rating on its window sticker was 31 city and 38 highway. One would have to be a terrible, terrible driver to get gas mileage that low.

Before the Fiat, I had Mercedes Smart Cars. Trump types were incredibly rude to such a small car. Once, in rural Tennessee, a pickup truck ran me off the road in the Smart Car. Trump types are not as aggressive toward the Fiat as they were to the Smart Car. But when I have a heavy truck or SUV right on my bumper when I’m driving exactly on the speed limit, I pull over as soon as possible and let the idiots pass.

My car looks like a mouse. That does not embarrass me.

Three generations of white deer?


A neighbor shot this photo of the youngest white deer, now two years old. She is muscular and remarkably healthy.

It was more than ten years ago that I first saw a white deer in the woods here. Sometimes I was able to get a photo, and comparison of the photos from year to year led to a strong suspicion that there were two white deer, almost certainly of two generations. Then, in the spring of 2023, a baby white deer appeared. That would make three, all part of the local deer herd, whose range includes my woods, the opposite ridge to the south, a lot of creek bottom, and a field or two along the ridge north of the creek.

Fortunately their range is not crossed by a paved road, and as far as I know the local herd has not had any car fatalities. The deer are often in my yard. They’re hard on my day lilies, but they’re welcome to the clover. After I stopped keeping chickens, I opened the gates to the orchard. The deer now do a fine job of keeping the undergrowth (mostly honeysuckle) out of the orchard.

My nearest neighbor keeps a close watch on the local deer herd. He puts out corn for them as well as mineral salt. He is a longtime hunter, but as far as I know he has never shot a deer from our local herd. Rather, he sees his job as keeping poachers out and letting it be known that anyone who shoots a white deer — or for that matter any deer from the local herd — just might get shot, if caught. There are plenty of hunters who would like to have a white deer as a trophy.

I asked my neighbor, in a text message, if the youngest white deer has a white mother. He replied:

“Not sure which doe it was. There are genes in this area to produce the white deer. I’ve heard that there are several between here and the river.”

There is a lot of wild bottom land between here and the Dan River, which is less than two miles away. Bears are seen in that area pretty often. There is a pack of coyotes, though I rarely hear them. They must have a pretty large range.

There are places in North Carolina with white squirrels. The commonly heard explanation, probably false, is that they escaped from a P.T. Barnum circus truck after a truck wreck. If Brevard is still having its white squirrel festivals, I wonder if there are any for sale on the black market. Woods with white deer ought to have some white squirrels.

Ken is in the New York Times today


In September 2018, Ken and I hiked across the eight-mile width of the island of Ulva to get to the island of Gometra. This photo of Ken was shot on the Mull side of Ulva. Click here for high-resolution version.

Ken’s article in the New York Times today is “What a Small Island Off the Coast of Scotland Could Teach America.” He writes:

“As an American who lived for years in North Carolina, I saw firsthand the decline of rural communities. The boarded-up shops, political disengagement and ‘No Trespassing’ signs of rural America may be less picturesque, but in important ways they’re not so different from the stone ruins and abandoned fields of Scotland’s Highlands and islands. Could community ownership let people reclaim control over their land and their futures in rural America?

“Some think it might. In the United States, federal and state governments can claim land using eminent domain, but we rarely see communities take control to provide affordable housing, let alone empower local residents to make it happen themselves. ‘It is impressive,’ said John Lovett, a law professor at Louisiana State University, who studies Scotland’s land reform laws. Scotland is ‘trying to achieve something that we just don’t even think about in the U.S. It’s creating a way for the government to enable or facilitate the disassembly or the decentralization of landownership. We’ve never tried that in the U.S.'”


Ken picking blackberries on Ulva, September 2018.

Thrifted dress shirts


Bought on eBay for $13. I’m pretty sure this shirt was new old stock, never worn.

I’m retired and live in the sticks, so I haven’t fretted over dress shirts for a long time. But, in Scotland later this month, there will be several occasions for which I need to look like a decent American and even one occasion for which I must meet the dress code for the oldest social club in Edinburgh. Yikes.

Casual shirts in size medium usually fit me pretty well. Dress shirts are a different story. The size with agreeable shoulders and sleeve length are grossly full in the chest and waist. The fabric billows into a bagel above my waist.

I’m an old hand now at understanding how to get tweed jackets to fit. Shirts, not so much. The wonderful Chinese tailor lady in Winston-Salem who worked on my tweed jackets has retired. Shirts, I figured, could be handled by someone here in the country. Some time back I had noticed a sign in a yard on the way to Madison advertising sewing and alterations. I took two Ralph Lauren dress shirts there.

I had no idea what was involved. I had assumed that it meant pinning the shirt to fit, then removing some seams, cutting out some fabric, and making new flat felled seams. When I picked up the shirts, they fit just fine. But she had done the job with what amounted to a single long seam, with appropriate curves, from the cuff through the armpit and down to the shirttail. The original flat felled seams in the sides and down the sleeves were now gone.

OK. Fine. It’s just a shirt and doesn’t have to be perfect, unlike tweed jackets, which last a lifetime. Plus these shirts will be worn under jackets and sweaters.

I realized: Heck fire. I can sew well enough to do that. So I bought a third Ralph Lauren dress shirt in the same size and did the job myself.

What little skill I have at the sewing machine I learned from my mother, when I was probably 11 or 12 years old. That’s a strange thing for a boy to learn from his mother, but partly it was because the machine itself fascinated me, and I love machines. From how-to videos on YouTube, though, I can see that there are many men who alter their own clothing. Two or three times in my life I’ve tried to actually make something, but I’m just not good enough at it. But anybody can sew a simple seam. It was bean bags, as I recall, that my mother started us on, because my younger sister was learning to sew around the same time.

I was amused by the photos on the Ralph Lauren web site. All those shirts have been adjusted to fit the models. The standard sizes just don’t fit lean people. I could have taken in my shirts a little more, but I don’t think that overly tight shirts would be very becoming on someone my age. I’m satisfied just with getting rid of the billows and bagels.

By the way, there is far greater variety of men’s dress shirts on eBay than you’ll find online. Most of the shirts on the Ralph Lauren web site were in cool pastels that I don’t think would look good with winter clothing. I didn’t much like the prices, either.


⬆︎ My rarely used sewing machine was happy to get some daylight and exercise.


⬆︎ This photo is from the Ralph Lauren web site. New shirts similar to my $13 eBay shirt are $148.

Pumpkins are a superfood


A baked pumpkin. I’ll scrape the goody out with a spoon. This pumpkin became soup. See below.

It’s pumpkin season, after all, so I hope you can put up with my pumpkin evangelism a little longer.

Once upon a time in America, a time that I can remember, everyone in rural America acquired fresh apples in the fall. Lots of people had their own apple tree. Those who didn’t have their own apple tree probably had neighbors who did. And many people lived near orchards where you could buy apples by the bushel or the peck. A family of four to six people could easily use a bushel of apples by Thanksgiving. If you bought enough, they’d last until Christmas, because apples keep well.

Pumpkin pie is as American as apple pie. Maybe pumpkins weren’t as much of an autumn must-have as apples, but plenty of people also acquired “eating pumpkins” for fall. Pumpkins keep just as well as apples, so there was your pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, and maybe Christmas, too.

These days, you can buy fresh apples all year. I have no idea how that works, because, traditionally, any apples that lasted through the winter would be pretty shriveled by spring. In C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, set in Tudor England, the London womenfolk sometimes sent the menfolk to market to get apples, even shriveled ones, because apples were an important food. As for pumpkins these days, you’d better get them before Halloween, because after that there won’t be any. That is a shame. Because pumpkins, properly stored, will easily keep all winter.

I came across an article at BBC News about pumpkins as an international superfood. They will grow in poor soil, they’re drought tolerant, they’re very nutritious — including the seeds and even the leaves — and they keep well without needing any refrigeration.

Pumpkins also are a good “prepper” crop. A few years ago I supplied some of my neighbors with seeds for what we call “little pumpkins.” The proper name of the little pumpkins is Long Island cheese squash. Several of my neighbors grow little pumpkins now, and each year they keep the seed for next year’s crop. A good stash of homegrown little pumpkins could help make winter a lot more bearable if something happened to our usual supply lines.

Pumpkin soup is a challenge. A savory stock is essential. I like to add just a touch of nutmeg and a teaspoon or two of sugar.


A neighbor gave me the little pumpkin for the soup. The local farmers from whom I buy vegetables grew the lettuce. I baked the bread for the grilled cheese.

The future of ancient places


On the island of Gometra, looking toward the island of Ulva. Photo from my visit to the islands in 2019. Click here for high resolution version.

The Scottish islands have been on my mind lately for a couple of reasons. The first is that Ken is working on an article for the New York Times on the community buyout of the island of Ulva, which he and I visited in 2019. The second reason is that I broke my vow not to buy any more Harris tweed jackets.

As part of his research for the article, Ken was reading a history of the community buyout of the island of Eigg, which was completed in 1997. The book is Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power, by Alastair McIntosh, published in 2004. McIntosh was born in 1955, and the book starts with his reflections on growing up on the island of Lewis and Harris. The book gives a complete history of the Eigg buyout. But it also describes how the island of Harris narrowly evaded the construction of an enormous and incredibly destructive “super quarry” in the 1990s.

Land reform in Scotland has a long and depressing history. Vast amounts of land in Scotland’s highlands and islands is still owned by rich absentee landlords, who continue to do everything they can to keep as much land as possible in the hands of as few (very rich) people as possible. See Absentee owners buying up Scottish estates in secret sales, in the Guardian, April 2022. The secret sales are intended to keep local people from bidding on the land.

McIntosh’s book has a good deal to say about Harris tweed, but much has changed since the book was published in 2004. Probably the best source on the economics of Harris tweed is the Stornaway Gazette. If you search the Gazette for the word “tweed” you’ll find that the island’s tweed industry was in a deep crisis in 2007, when a foolish Yorkshire entrepreneur bought a major mill in Stornaway and immediately set out to wreck the industry. See The tweed crisis that became an opportunity. A man named Ian Angus Mackenzie is credited with almost single-handedly stepping in to save the Harris tweed industry. According to Wikipedia, production of Harris tweed more than doubled between 2009 and 2012.

As for my new jacket, I violated my oath not to buy any more Harris tweed jackets because this one was a color I had never seen before — burgundy. There also is no pattern in the tweed. It’s a uniform burgundy. I ordered this jacket on eBay from the U.K. (as usual) and when it arrived was surprised to see that it’s almost certainly new old stock. The pockets were still stitched closed, and there was a packet of spare buttons in an inside pocket. Based on what appears to be a date on a hidden label (I’m not certain), I strongly suspect that the jacket was made in 2015, when tweed production was increasing. The jacket was made in Egypt for Marks & Spencer, a British retailer. The tailoring is excellent. In the U.K. — at least once upon a time — one could buy something off the rack and still have a tailored look. I have found, though, that any Harris tweed jacket is likely to be well made. To afford the handmade fabric is also to afford some good cutting and sewing.

I’m eager to see what Ken will have to say about the Ulva buyout. My impression is that things have not gone as well on Ulva as on Eigg. It’s always the economics, and in Scotland’s highlands and islands I think I can imagine how difficult it is to balance a remote and sustainable lifestyle with the necessity of tourism. The islands’ situation is a microcosm of the global conflict that is the story of our era: Is the world a playground for the super-rich who want to be lords of the earth? Or is the world for the rest of us?

If I only had a field…


From my morning walk. Click here for high-resolution version.

There are many beautiful hayfields in this area. I covet them. I have only woods. I’ve often talked about how much I’d like to have a pasture, or a field. Then again, maybe not. A hayfield is not a hayfield unless there also is a tractor with a mower and a baling machine. I don’t have such things, nor do I have the farmerly skill to use them.

Hay is a major crop in this area. Sadly, though, most of the hay goes to feed beef cattle. This is not horse country, though there are some. Country people love their beef. I can say this for their local beef, though. It’s all grass fed. The beef cattle all live in excellent pastures, and they winter over with local hay.

The political situation

I haven’t posted lately about the political situation. The changes have been dramatic, but everything is going well, and I have little to add. I would like to mention a piece in The New Republic today that detests the political punditry as much as I do. It’s “Beware the Pundit-Brained Version of the Democratic Convention.”

When a political event is on live television — for example, a president’s state of the union speech before a joint session of Congress — the brainlessness of the punditry is on full display. C-SPAN, if you can get it, may televise such events with no pundit “analysis.” But if you watch it anywhere else, you’ll have to listen to the inane and endless yipyap from witless talking heads that passes as analysis. I have not been watching the Democratic convention live. I do watch some of the speeches the day after, and, if there is yipyap, I skip over it.


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ The road past my house. The house is hidden behind the trees on the lower right. Click here for high-resolution version.


This hayfield plant has remarkably beautiful powers, but I well remember it from my rural Southern childhood and what its briars can do to children’s bare feet. I believe this is Carolina horsenettle, Solanum carolinense. Click here for high-resolution version.

Low tech to the rescue

My heat pump (which also is a cooling system) had been working perfectly for fifteen years. It chose to stop running on a hot Saturday afternoon when the outdoor temperature was 88F. The temperature inside the house slowly rose to a miserable 89F.

When critical systems in a house fail, the perversity principle requires that they fail on a weekend, when the kind of businesses you need are closed (though they might make an emergency call for a hefty additional fee). Lucky for me, my nearest neighbor is retired from the heating and cooling business, and he came to take a look.

His diagnosis, in which he says he is 90 percent confident, is that an electrical relay on the air handler has failed. That’s a relatively minor thing, and if we can acquire a new relay on Monday then the fix won’t take long.

Two rooms in the house have ceiling fans, which help. But my upstairs office does not. I went up into the attic and fetched an oscillating fan that had been used in the downstairs bedroom before I had a ceiling fan installed in that room. I had forgotten how amazing fans can be!

I well remember what it was like growing up in the South in the 1950s, when some businesses had air conditioning but pretty much nobody had it in their homes or cars. It was fans that made life in the South bearable before the age of air conditioning. Architecture and landscaping were important, too. It’s why houses of that era had big front porches and shade trees.

Here in the American South, heat pumps have been common for decades. Almost everyone has a heat pump and has some understanding of how they work. In a climate that doesn’t get too cold, heat pumps are an efficient source of heat. The heat pump’s true magic, though, is that it’s reversible. It can pump heat into the house from outdoors, or it can pump heat out of the house. There is a limit to a heat pump’s efficiency, though. When heating, a heat pump can raise the temperature of the outside air only about 50 degrees F. So, if it’s 20F outdoors, a heat pump will have to rely on assistance from electrical heating coils, which are not efficient.

I have seen a good many stories lately about how efforts to introduce heat pumps in the U.K. aren’t going very well. A friend recently returned from a visit to a Scottish island, where a local had complained about the cost of operating a newly installed heat pump — £2,000 for one winter’s worth of heat. My guess would be that the problem is not so much the heat pump as a drafty and poorly insulated house. Here in American South, people who live in older houses often use heat pumps for cooling but still use gas or oil for heating.

The sound of the fan, and the start of the Democratic National Convention tomorrow, have stirred up clear memories of the summer of 1960, sitting in my grandmother’s living room with the sound of her large floor-model oscillating fan and watching the party conventions on television. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was running against Richard Nixon.

Correction: Upon reflection, I realized that my summer memory had to have been from 1960 rather than 1956, and I have edited the paragraph above accordingly.

I’m also remembering the importance of ice for living in the South before the days of air conditioning. My grandmother was fond of Pepsi. Pepsi over ice was regular thing with my grandmother, especially in summer. At home we drank far less Pepsi and far more iced tea. There was always iced tea in the refrigerator, and there was always ice in the freezer.

Normally, now, I don’t use much ice, even in the summer. But one of the first things I did after the air conditioning stopped yesterday was to turn on the icemaker.

No. 1 pencils, now and always


Click for high-resolution version.

One of the finest writing instruments ever made is the No. 1 pencil. Whenever I have bought No. 2’s, because No. 1’s are often hard to find, I have regretted it. Pencils with harder lead don’t produce good contrast. And one has to bear down harder.

The first twelve or so years of my career were as a newspaper copy editor. (In the mid-1980s, when newspapers started using publishing systems built on computers, I became a systems guy, because I was good with computers, and it paid better.) In those pre-computer days, the type was set in the composing room with hot-lead Linotype machines. The newsroom was full of typewriters, always heavy office machines, usually Royals made between 1945 and 1958. The copy paper actually was cut from the same huge rolls of newsprint that went onto the presses. A big hydraulic knife in the pressroom was used to cut the copy paper 8.5 inches wide by about 20 inches long. When you loaded a typewriter with paper, you always used two sheets of copy paper, with carbon paper in the middle. The top sheet, of course, went into the production process. The carbon copies from the entire newsroom were collected each evening (by a copy boy) and filed away, in case there were ever any questions about whether errors originated with reporters or whether the errors were made during the editing and production process.

Copy editors made their marks with, and only with, No. 1 pencils. This was not so much because the marks ever needed to be erased. It was because No. 1 pencils make clear and readable marks, and the need for less pressure meant much less fatique for the copy editors’ hands. To have edited with hard-lead pencils would have been miserable work.

So, when a copy editor’s evening started (usually around 4 p.m. for morning papers), he or she would sharpen a handful of pencils. During the evening, there would be multiple returns to the pencil trimmer. We wore out a lot of pencils.

In those days, everyone recognized everyone else’s handwriting. By the time a piece of copy was ready to go to the composing room through the pneumatic tube, there would be many pencil marks on it. Every editor would know quite well who had done all the edits, all the way back to the reporter.

Years before I entered the newspaper business, one of the jobs of copy boys would have been to carry copy from the newsroom to the composing room. By the 1930s, pneumatic tubes were the rule, larger versions of the pneumatic systems that large department stores used to use for making change from a single room somewhere where all the cash was kept.

While I’m on the subject, one of the nicest things that ever happened to me was getting a weekend job as a newspaper copy boy when I was in high school. There was no job in the world that I would have been better suited for. One of my favorite parts was looking after a room full of Teletype machines — loading paper, changing their ribbons, tearing off copy, sorting it, and distributing the copy to the right editors in the newsroom. I also typed stories going out to the Associated Press onto a Teletype system that had a keyboard and a tape punch. Punching paper tape before sending the stories allowed typing errors to be corrected, and sending stories out with punched tape meant that the Teletype machine could operate at full speed (about 60 words a minute), reducing the time used on the Teletype’s telephone circuit. Typing directly onto the wire was possible, but it was frowned upon.

Maybe someday I’ll write about the machines that were used to transfer photos over telephone lines, from coast to coast as well as transatlantic. One of those machines (in Nuremberg) actually appears briefly in the Netflix series on the Third Reich (now streaming on Netflix). The machine involved a rotating cylinder to which the photo is attached. Anyone who noticed it in the documentary is unlikely to have figured out what it was. A few of them must still exist in museums.

A few years ago, Ken saw the copy tube (below) in my attic and said, “What is that.” Oh how things have changed, that someone as deeply immersed in writing and publishing as Ken didn’t recognize it.


⬆︎ This copy tube used to belong to the San Francisco Examiner. The typewriter is a Royal HH from around 1952. I have about a dozen typewriters in my collection. Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ This recipe for quiche was typed on a Royal KMM typewriter on newsroom copy paper. You can see some of the pencil marks over pâte brisée and the scratched-out typos. As for pâte brisée, you can be very sure that copy editors were as careful with French punctuation as with English. Whereas the uncaught typo “parpare” embarrasses me now, 45 years later. I have used this recipe for 45 years. Click here for high-resolution version.

(The Royal KMM typewriters were made from the late 1930s into the 1940s. It’s one of the models of typewriter that helped fight World War II. It has been said that World War II could not have been won without typewriters. The logistics of war are formidable. But consider also how the Nazis managed logistics and kept records, and what the evidence at the Nuremberg trial might have looked like had it not been neatly typed.)