Twice now, we have had five people around our table for dinner in our tiny studio apartment. Kelly and Christian have both stayed with us over the weekend a couple of times. All of that worked out really well. This weekend, our apartment manager came around to ask us if we wanted to extend our stay so we signed up for another six months. We do not really know where we will land next. We do not even know when we will be able to make the next changes. Alzheimer’s is like that.
What we do know is that we like to live a downsized existence. The apartment, in spite of its small size, works just great for us. We are close to shopping, work, school and restaurants. We can walk just about everywhere we normally need to go during the week. In addition to that, we have a small, economical car so we do not really use too much gas. Now I have been a good (conservative) Republican as long as I can remember, so I pretty much hate the environment, clean water, clean air and all that sort of thing. It pains me that we have such a small carbon footprint.
Even worse, the plans we have for the next place we get, wherever and whenever that is, have shrunk dramatically. We want to get a small house with as open a floor plan as possible and three small bedrooms, two of which have Murphy beds. What will people think? We are not planning to do this to save the environment–we actually like to live that way. I guess we can do the small stuff by letting people know our garden is definitely not organic and we use real pesticides. And of course we will have a gas burning über-stove. We will have to quit eating granola, too.
Well, these sacrifices are probably worth it. We do not want to lose our redneck friends or hang out with angsty, environmentalist hippie types, but we really like to live small.
Betty Blonde #374 – 12/22/2009
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