Redneck Sustainability: Paint Glove Philosophy

Pipe corrals suppliesSome of my uninitiated readers may yet be ignorant of such things as paint gloves or paint mitts. But they’re essentially paint brushes you wear on your hands, used mostly for painting pipe and such. As a young redneck I spent much of one glorious summer gently caressing the underbellies of mile after mile of pipe while wearing said paint glove.

The job at hand was to freshen up the pipe corrals on the family ranch which consisted of enough lots, runs, gates, chutes and ladders to create a dozen life-sized redneck versions of the child’s board game. Lest you think I exaggerate, I’ve included a photograph of a stockpile of metal pipe of which I’m sure would be insufficient to represent the amount of pipe constituted by our corrals.

The six-pipe-high corral, (redneck maze of pipe) equalled a butt-load of rustoleum red paint and a couple dozen lambs wool paint gloves. If it hadn’t of been for the tinny, ranch truck radio set to 94.9 the EDGE and basking me in Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, and Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, I would have truly gone mad.

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My Superhero for Climate Change

The last thing the world needs now is another Batman zipping around saving the world with his high-tech gizmos while driving a gas-guzzling batmobile. Sure he can come up with some expensive project to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere that his playboy lifestyle contributes, but how does this help joe-schmucks like the rest of us?
If you follow the sustainability buzz (which I know you don’t, because let’s face it, you’re not pathetic like me), then you would already be familiar with terms like “bright green,” “light green,” and “dark green” beyond their use as descriptors of hue.

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Appraisals, Home Sales and Green Lies

McMansion under construction by merfam

Remember when people where trending on such topics as “downsizing” and “simple living?”  It seems like just yesterday.  With untold McMansions listing in their weed-infested suburbs across the U.S. it would seem that the time was indeed ripe for reason to reenter our housing market and smaller footprints and more practical usage of square footage to be valued and rewarded.  The only problem is that downsizing is easy to talk about and hard to do.

American’s love things big.  As my wife and I have listed our 4 bed 3 bath, 1990 sq. ft. home in SLC for sale we have discovered that it is too small to demand top dollar (in our current crappy homes market).  I thought such a home would be ideal for all the people who have been talking about downsizing from their 3,000 sq. ft. 3 bed and 3 bath houses.  But, apparently there aren’t any such people.  What there are, are people who are looking for their first home and finding that 2,000 sq. ft. just isn’t big enough.

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