Skip to main content

Living Light

We practice minimalism in a different way. We’ve applied it to our out-and-about living.  We travel light, and I love it!
Minimalism, and thoughts of living mindfully are in the air this week.  On Racheous, Rachel talked about her family’s recent move, and how switched to a more mindful set of possessions on the way.  At Jitterberry, Jessica discussed her family’s transition to a minimalism lifestyle.

We practice minimalism in a different way, we’ve applied it to our out-and-about living.  We travel light, and I love it.

Before we had kids I was spooked by strollers.  They inevitably seemed to be loaded with numerous items on their bottom tray.  They also seemed to inspire the use of diaper bags, or other parent-laden luggage.  My typical outing at that point involved throwing a collapsible fishing rod, a tackle box about a quarter the size of a shoe box, a few pancakes wrapped in a paper towel, and perhaps a cup of earthworms into a small pack.  I enjoyed fishing in hard to reach places off the trail, behind brambles, and away from people.  If I carried too much, I couldn’t get there.  I wanted to share these experiences with my kids.  Consequently, the stroller/diaper-bag combo gave me the willies.  I need not have worried, a solution was close at hand.

I’d seen women in Boulder coffee shops with babies in wraps.  Their lives looked delightful.  They bounced into the shop with a small bag, and a kid strapped to their torso, and ordered their coffee.  If the baby was awake out of the wrap they’d come for some lap-time.  If the kid was asleep, they’d let them continue to snooze.  These moms had skills that even I would never develop.  They’d take the wrap all the way off.  When they were ready to go, they’d inevitably tie it back on with the baby in a different comfy potion.  Baby on the chest on the way in, on the back or perhaps tucked onto the side on the way out.  Showboats!

So, before we had kids, my partner and I talked things through.  We decided we could have a wrap if the kids were wrapped to me.  We don’t do diaper bags.  We just throw the minimum equipment we need for an outing into one of our packs.  We take snacks, (the kids and I travel on our stomachs), a few diapers, a package of wipes, and a few plastic bags to hold the old diapers in.  Of late, it’s all gone into our 6-year-old’s bag.  I’ll give you that as the kids grow, we need to bring more food, but this is balanced out by the smaller kids getting backpacks to carry their own things in as they get larger.

Our experience at outwards-bound minimalism has been incredible!  We can leave to go on adventures at a moments notice.  We can change routes and plans easily.  And, it’s a piece of cake to take public transit, and maneuver around town—dividing up to scamper through crowds, and having a great time!

How do you lighten your load? 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments on this topic:

Popular posts from this blog

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...
10 comments
Read more

The Alcubierre Warp Drive Tophat Function and Open Science with Sage

I transferred yesterday's Mathematica file with the Alcubierre warp drive[2] line element and space curvature calculations to the  +Sage Mathematical Software System  today, (the files been  added to the public repository [3]).  If you haven't used Sage before, it's a Python based software package that's similar in functionality to Mathematica.  Oh, and it' free.  I also worked a little more on understanding the theory, but frankly, I made far more progress with the software than the theory.  What follows will be a little more of the Alcubierre theory, plus, a cool Sage interactive demo of one of the Alcubierre functions[1], as well as a bit about my first experience with using Sage. Theory The theory is fun, but it's moving slowly.  Here's the chalk board from this morning's discussion Alcubierre setup the derivation using something called the 3+1 formalism which means we consider space to be flat, (in this case), slices that are labelled ...
3 comments
Read more

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in...
1 comment
Read more