We live here now.

There was a great post on Treehugger recently that I’ve bookmarked for more serious contemplation.

Although they may be neither popular, nor well known, there are alternatives to the two major housing options of “buy” vs. “rent.”  It seems like every day I personally vacillate between wanting to live in a Parisian apartment overlooking local markets and wanting to live on a lakefront, almost cottage-y property.  In the first case, we’d walk everywhere we needed to go and in the second case we’d generate our own electricity and grow some of our own food.  I just can’t decide whether I want to live with people or get the heck away from them.

We’ll likely be where we are for some time to come, but Dauphin was always a calculated, strategic move.  So far it has pretty much worked according to plan.  We’re closing on houses #8 and #9 on August 1, and our rental income will provide more than we need to live comfortably there.  And for the total cost of all 9 houses we’ve purchased, we still would have been only able to buy the most entry-level of entry-level homes in Toronto. (And, that would be with us paying for the privilege of ownership, not being paid enough that we don’t have to work!)

As I said to Joe last night, although yes, we can consider ourselves “retired” from traditional careers, our “job” right now is to figure out where we really want to live next and how we will be able to afford it.  It’s not as easy as you might think, and you really do need to be semi-retired before you can tackle that task; you can’t know what you really want out of living when don’t yet have the freedom to just “live.”

If I were still tutoring, I would be too busy and preoccupied to really think about what I wanted out of a house, community or local environment.  How was I to know, for example, that I really don’t mind “cooking*” when my previous life was arranged in such a way that preparing food was nothing but a huge inconvenience?  When I had taken probably less than a dozen baths in my whole adult life (and had never seen Joe take a single one!), how was I to know that we would treasure our jacuzzi tub?  There is a lot you discover about yourself when you stop “working” and start doing what might be work for some, but is really just an activity for you.

That’s why I don’t think of it as a “failure” that Dauphin won’t be the place we live for the next 30 years.  Rather, moving somewhere that is decidedly not our retirement paradise was the smartest thing we ever did:

• We had no illusions or unrealistic expectations of the perfect life.  (It was a stop along the way - another phase of the plan.)
• We chose to move solely based on finances (including of course our required amenities and necessities) so there is less of an emotional attachment to where we live.  (Leaving Toronto was emotionally so much tougher than leaving Dauphin will ever be.)
• We put ourselves in the best position to figure out what we really wanted, and didn’t assume we already knew what that was. (How could “Rat Race Rainsbergers” even pretend to know what “Retired Rainsbergers” want or need out of life?)
• Although it wasn’t part of the original plan, travel is such a huge part of our lives that we can somewhat experience and compare locations.  Two weeks ago we were in Ireland and I’m writing this now from Malvern, PA. In August and September alone we’re projected to be in Dauphin, Winnipeg, Toronto, Oshawa, “the cottage,” Brampton, Niagara Falls (ON and NY), Chicago, Turkey, the Netherlands and Costa Rica. If we can’t find something we like, it sure isn’t from a lack of trying!

And, if home ownership in Dauphin means we get to travel like this, then maybe there’s even something to be said for not doing too much of your “living” where you live!

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* - I still hate “cooking” and will refuse to prepare anything that involves the actual cooking of meat. And, much fewer of our meals are actually “cooked” now since we’ve been eating a lot raw. So, I use the word cooking to mean “making meals.” But, what I have discovered is that I like the act of chopping vegetables, I don’t mind boiling things into a soup and as long as Joe’s not sick of honey-mustard, I’m quite happy to make our own salad dressing.

No, no… this does not fall in the tax/accounting category of post! “Double Dipping” is a reference to the alumni show on the second Barenaked Ladies “Ships and Dip” cruise.

I don’t listen to many live recordings of artists, but for the last 3 weeks or so I’ve been listening almost exclusively to the “Double Dippers” show from the first night of the cruise. It was far and away the best part of the cruise for me, and several cruisers agree that this particular show was the best performance of the entire cruise.

Leave it to me to relate everything back to education, but that amazing concert was the musical equivalent of a rockin’ tutoring session. Here’s why the show was the ultimate concert going experience, and why tutoring is the ultimate educational experience:

The audience planned the show

Before the concert started, slips of paper were distributed so people could request the songs they wanted to hear. During the show, band members took turns drawing random songs out of a bucket.

That’s often how I describe tutoring. Substitute “open a textbook to any page” for “drawing a song out of a bucket” and that’s how tutors work. Unlike traditional classroom teaching, a tutoring session is student-led: the hour is driven by the student’s specific needs and goals. The result is an extremely personalized experience where no question is off-limits.

The Double Dippers concert allowed devoted fans to choose some of the more obscure songs that aren’t guaranteed to be played at a standard concert. Although our row wasn’t given request slips, others in the audience had the good sense to request Blame it on Me, Jane, Break Your Heart and yes, even Another Postcard. (I swear, it wasn’t me but I can’t say I’m disappointed!) The result was a concert lineup that I don’t think anyone could have planned in their wildest dreams. Most importantly, it was highly relevant to the audience.

The performers relied on their experience and musicianship rather than a plan or agenda

When you don’t know which songs to expect and have to be prepared to “go with the flow,” the truly talented shine. It could be a song that hasn’t been played live in years, or a song written once to go straight to recording (*cough* Big Bang Theory *cough*) or a song that predates some of the band members . . . spontaneity reveals character, and as someone once wrote about … let’s say event planning, “It’s not what you’re sure of / It’s what you don’t know.”

This concert format revealed the band’s human side and brought a certain lightness to the event. No one cared whether we had to wait a few extra minutes for Ed to tune yet another guitar. It gave the audience a chance to revel in the afterglow of the song they’d just heard and also time to get sufficiently excited for the next song.

Similarly, tutoring is a highly human (and humane) form of interaction. I would often get comments from my staff about the raucous laughter that always seemed to be clearly audible, even through my closed door, while I was tutoring. There’s a certain intimacy and casualness to sitting down, one-on-one that can make you forget that you’re screwed for tomorrow’s calculus test and allow you to calmly focus on the task at hand.

Your students also tend to be pretty forgiving if you have to take a couple of stabs at a question before you find a clean, elegant way to work it out. If we haven’t seen something in a while and you spring it on us out of the blue, sometimes we just need to gather our thoughts for a few minutes. Not only are students forgiving, but many times they are quite relieved to learn that their tutor isn’t some calculating machine, or that it really is a hard question. They generally don’t mind if the productivity seems to slow for a bit. If they’re not the type to thoroughly enjoy working through a problem with you, then they’re probably the type who are more than happy to “zone out” for a few minutes and completely don’t mind the downtime!

The musicians knew they were respected and appreciated, even admired and loved

I can’t imagine a “safer” environment for BNL to play than to a roomful of people on their second cruise with them. If ever the band felt comfortable trying new things, or just being themselves, that would have been the time for it! Short of walking out there and being complete jerks, BNL could have done no wrong that night.

And, I have to admit that being a tutor is pretty darn cool when parents and students think the world of you. You can’t get cocky about it (at least you shouldn’t) but as much as confidence is important for students, it’s important for instructors, too. One thing that can completely suck the joy out of teaching is looking into the face of a student (or worse, sea of students) who just don’t care — about you, about the math, about anything at that moment. It can really put you off your game.

Having the respect of your students (even if it’s not adoration and worship!) allows you to focus on the task at hand and put all your energy into your teaching and communication skills. You know that your audience is receptive and willing and you don’t have anything to “prove” to your student first and you don’t have any barriers to break through before your message can be heard.

I used to say I had the sweetest job in the world. All I had to do was hang out with teens and do math! I did a little more than that, but essentially I had the pleasure and honour of being the person that kids went to for help. All I had to do was respond.

It may not sound like much when you distill it down to its core element, and really, all I did was give them my time to be used however they saw fit. That’s exactly what the Double Dippers show was: BNL simply gave us their time and allowed us to control the puppet strings for a few hours.

One could argue, “They didn’t even put the time or effort into planning something for you. They just showed up and thought that would be enough.” But, isn’t that what all of us really want: for people we respect and admire to simply make time for us?

We didn’t get a canned performance, I like to think, because they respected us more than that. They had confidence in their ability to provide something of quality just by being there because they’re just that good. They also had confidence in the fans to direct the course of the evening, and the result was a set list from heaven.

This is what happens when mutual respect is assumed and assured. I don’t think all my students were “adoring fans,” though very many of them were, I have to say. But, they all knew that I was passionate about creating time personalized exclusively for them, that they called the shots and that no matter what might happen, at least I was “serving up quality.”

I couldn’t think of any better way to treat my students, and it was such an overwhelmingly emotional experience to be on the receiving end for once, and treated like that by BNL. I think now I have a better idea of why the kids kept coming back, and I can’t wait for Ships and Dip V, the re-dippening!

(It’s not too late to join us, either! Hint, hint!)

…it’s not the reason you might think. Certainly, if I could avoid paying taxes, I would do so; however, this is not the primary reason I would rather live someplace tax-free. My primary reason has to do with the unnecessary and stunning complexity of the tax rules. Today I encountered a particularly delightful example.

Consider an ordinary-looking receipt. I have to process this for my corporate income taxes. I use QuickBooks Pro to do my books, although I imagine this problem exists in all major book-keeping software. I have to enter a tax code for this transaction in order to get the input tax credit (ITC) related to the GST I paid which, I should mention, comes to $2.49. Look at how hard I have to work for my $2.49.

First, I happily choose tax code “S” for standard tax rate (6% GST at the time, 8% GST in Ontario, where this meal was purchased), then happily enter the net amount of $46.30 into QuickBooks. I see that the total is not the $52.10 I expect, but rather $52.78. Whence the extra 68 cents? Not too bad yet, since this pretty common: some items are only taxed at GST, others not at all, and usually it’s clear what’s what. I fiddle for 10 minutes or so before recalling algebra and solving the following system of equations. (Yep!)

Let x be the amount of the bill attracting only GST, and let y be the amount attracting GST and PST.

x + y = 46.30; 0.06x + 0.14y = 5.80

I solve this, but get the ugly y = $37.775, and that can’t be. Perhaps part of the bill attracts no tax at all. Well, 5.80 / 0.14 = $41.43, roughly speaking. That means $4.87 is not subject to tax at all. But what the hell comes to $4.87 on the cheque?!

Oh wait, there’s a .29, another .29 and a third .29, which I know add to .87. Aha! I can’t believe it: the tomato, jalapeño and asparagus do not attract tax because they are fresh produce!

I’m sorry folks, but this is insane. There is no way Eggspectation is doing this correctly. If that were the case, Pizza receipts would require a mathematics degree to figure out, since they use fresh produce (one hopes) in their food, too. Could you imagine if a restaurant itemized your salad and charged you taxes only on the (processed) dressing?!

Whether Eggspectation is computing their taxes correctly or not, shame on Canada for having sales tax rules with the potential to create this situation at all. It’s ridiculous. It wastes time for vendors, book-keepers, tax collectors… sure, it fuels the bureaucracy and gives civil servants jobs, but that’s not why I pay taxes, and I certainly didn’t want to pay for an absurd system like this!

So that’s why I long to live in Andorra, where at least there is almost no income tax. I don’t know about their sales taxes, though… that bears another look. To the point, though, it’s the complexity of the tax system I want to avoid. If we paid a flat sales tax on everything and a flat income tax, then I would be much happier. Happy enough perhaps not to need to leave Canada.

Sarah forwarded me an instant classic diagram, which I tried to reproduce here, but couldn’t, for Wordpress-related reasons I don’t understand. Look at the diagram if you want to understand any of the foregoing. I have experienced both in horrid detail and all its glory, respectively.

Our last dwelling in Toronto was, we believe, the last house in Toronto proper to have a septic tank. Being a nearly 100-year-old farmhouse, that might not come as a surprise, but being in Toronto, it shocked us. Sadly, we discovered a, let’s say, flow problem with the tank the hard way. It took too much time and too many of someone else’s dollars (another reason to rent in an expensive city) to fix that problem, but it was fixed long enough for us to push the image out of our minds of a sewage marsh at our front door. Of course, the septic tank connection was replaced with what we understand is an entirely illegal hookup to the city’s storm drain, but frankly, that was never our problem.

Backing up computer systems, though, is a pleasure. It is the primary reason I recommend Mac computers to my friends and family. (Really!) Mac OS X makes disaster recovery routine by minimizing down time when disaster strikes. I have yet to see a backup/restore utility on the Windows platform that allows me to resume working within 5 minutes after a serious hard disk failure. Yes: 5 minutes. At the risk of boring you with geeky details, the key point is that when I back up my computer to an external hard disk (USB or Firewire, it works the same), I make the backup “bootable”. This means that my computer can’t tell the difference between booting from its internal hard disk and an external one. What this really means is that since I have nightly backups, when my internal hard disk fails, I simply boot to the external disk, losing on average half a day’s work, then continue what I was doing. When I can take a suitable break, I survey the damage, either reformat or replace my internal hard disk, then (and this is my favourite part) back up the external hard disk to my shiny new internal hard disk. There is no “restore” in this scenario, only backup, and it’s just a question of which direction. I can even add a second external hard disk while my internal one is out of service and backup external disk 1 to external disk 2 so that I always have a backup to work from. It works beautifully for a few reasons: even a disaster means I can resume working in 5 minutes, I can keep working while I’m waiting to replace my failed disk, and it’s easy to move data onto the new disk when it’s ready. I can even just wait until the next nightly backup at around 1.00 AM. Let me emphasize that I have never seen a Windows backup/restore platform allow me such peace of mind. I used to lose on average two full days restoring from a backup on Windows, including buying the replacement hard disk, reinstalling the operating system and figuring out which files to restore and not to restore. Disaster recovery is routine with a Mac as long as you’re willing to pay about $250+ extra for an external hard disk and a copy of SuperDuper!

On my education blog, I wrote about the Rainsberger-brand of political activism: supporting causes that aren’t necessarily personal, but which are in keeping with personal goals or philosophies.

That post was prompted by the attempted railroading of our beloved Zenn car by various levels of government.

Unlike the contradiction in my volunteer work for the “Ontario Federation of Teaching Parents” (being neither a parent nor currently residing in Ontario), the contradiction in our support for ZennMotors (as a car-less and license-less couple) is a little more complicated.

I’ve always, ultimately, enjoyed the fact that we couldn’t own a car even if we wanted to. (You know, the whole pesky not being legally allowed to drive, and all.) I do think that some of the hype around alternative fuels, alternative transportation and alternative energy hides the root problem that too many of us just plain use too much.

Being car-free is a statement in and of itself. So, how do I reconcile that with the fact that it looks like we’re finally going to buy a car?

On an individual level, there’s little doubt that NOT owning a car is better for the environment than owning a car — any car, even the kick ass cityZENN that we’ll buy in Fall 2009 (or whenever it finally does roll off the line).

Looking at the bigger picture, though, I can’t help but think that owning this car might be the best thing to do.

It would be unrealistic of me to think that large sections of the population are going to go completely car-less, as we have always been. Our car-less lifestyle in which we

• (a) use fewer resources
• (b) plan every shopping trip very carefully and never just “run out for one thing” and come home with a dozen things we didn’t really need
• (c) generally never buy more than we can carry
• (d) use public transportation guilt-free knowing that we can BOTH sleep, read or just generally tune out
• (e) never worry about insurance or the rising costs of gas
• etc. etc. etc.

. . . is almost always met with a cute “oh that’s quaint” pat on the head. “But we could never do that.”
But, when we tell people about the cityZENN, everyone’s excited! (Yes, we’ve discovered that the company is not (yet) publicly traded because several people have even wondered about buying up stock in the car, in addition to the car itself.)

And, although we live a car-less lifestyle (in that we deprive ourselves of ownership) it’s not entirely accurate to say we live a car-free lifestyle. We do use cabs and take rides from others when the situation arises.

While we have long since determined that a taxi lifestyle beats car ownership in the personal finance arena, the truth is that most of the taxis we take are gas guzzlers. (Props to the ‘peg for having hybrid taxi fleets — more often than not our Winnipeg taxis are hybrids, but we’ve yet to take one anywhere else.)

Our friends and family haven’t crossed the chasm into hybrid ownership. (Unless they’re just saving the “good” car for special occasions!) So, our car experiences aren’t particularly environmentally-friendly; they’re just minimized in frequency.

I have to think that owning a cityZENN for those situations might just tip the scales environmentally. I think, come 2010, our goal should no longer be, “I never want to pay for gas,” but instead, “I never want to ride in a car that uses gas.”

We’re past the stage where we finances have to be the primary concern. Although, we can never forget that it was a lack of car ownership (and similar financial thinking) that helped us achieve our current financial position.

I think it’s our responsibility to support this revolutionary product, this Canadian company and champion the cityZENN. Although it might seem like a step backwards for us personally, I think the effect is negated by the huge step forward this car would be for others.

So, tax-time permitting, next week we write the Manitoba equivalent of the G1 driver’s license!

And Dad can take Joe on driving lessons in Oshawa at the end of the month.

Fasten your seatbelts . . .

I’ve been in one of those “if I were to label myself politically/philosophically, which label would I choose?” moods this morning.

I’ve gotta say, this does hit very close to home (emphasis mine):

“. . . conservatives are likely to support a ban on same-sex marriage in the interests of preserving traditional order, while liberals are likely to favor allowing same-sex marriage in the interest of guaranteeing equality under the law. Libertarians are likely to disagree with the notion of government-sanctioned marriage itself. Specifically, they would deny that the government deserves any role in marriage other than enforcing whatever legal contract people choose to enter, and to oppose the various additional rights currently granted to married people (married couples could make the property pool in their own contract).”

And they say romance is dead!

I know Mom has a bunch of pictures to upload to her site, but really, isn’t this all you need to know?

Yup, that’s Jenny’s kid.

OK, so IE had been whole-heartedly rejecting the themes I’d chosen that looked so good in Firefox and other browsers. We were offline for a bit yesterday with the server migration (and let me tell you, those 11 little words can’t even begin to describe what I went through!) and when I finally got back up and running, sure enough IE didn’t like us any more than it used to.

So, IE appears to like this theme, as does Firefox and Omni Web. The only browser I’m worried about rejecting the theme is JOE! (He doesn’t have to know that one of the descriptive tags on this theme template is “flowers” right?)

But, it’s simple, it worked, it’s beautiful (maybe too beautiful for Joe?) and it’s staying here until changing the appearance of our sorely neglected personal blog tops our priority list!

We went back to Toronto in December for the first time since our move. Strangely, our first visit wasn’t for family, but for business: we spent two days in Toronto almost as tourists, staying at the Sheraton Centre where I was attending a meeting of the board of the Agile Alliance. Now we’ve stayed in Toronto hotels before, and even quite nice ones, like the Westin Prince, but this was the first time I felt like a visitor to Toronto since I grew up in Brampton. It was a little odd. The following week we came back “for real”, and it felt more like home, even though we mostly stayed outside the city in, of all places, Oshawa. (Ew.)

We visited friends and family for pre-Christmas, a happy accident, since it gave us time to meet up with friends before they got sucked in to visiting only family. I got to see friends from high school, university, and even rode the TTC, even though I had to buy a Day Pass for the first time in over a decade. If it weren’t a business expense, I’d frame it. In the large, of course, Toronto hadn’t changed much in six months, so I don’t quite know what I was expecting. It felt quite familiar, although I truly did sense myself a visitor. Most notably, none of the keys in my pocket opened a lock anywhere in the city. I had nowhere to stay in the city that I could call my own. I wouldn’t be returning up the Yonge line to Sheppard, then getting on the Sheppard line to Bayview, then walking a few hundred meters to the door. I didn’t see Bayview Village on the way out nor on the way home. I did, however, go back to Spadina/Bloor, a neighborhood I hadn’t frequented since my aborted graduate studies at University of Toronto. It was an odd mix.

So what did I get from the First Visit Back? People miss us. It’s a little ironic that we’ll probably see them more now than we did when we lived up to an hour away. Also, we’ve bought a bunch of tickets to Blue Jays games. We’ll probably see 11 or more in 2008, compared to the two or three we got to when we lived there. I suppose I have to admit it: Toronto is now a tourist destination for me, just like New York or Stockholm. Winnipeg is now “the city” for me. I really do live here now.

OK, so our pretty green theme looked awesome in Firefox, but in IE it completely fell apart.  To compromise, I picked a theme that has a glitch in both.  So yes, the titles of the posts are a little cut off, but at least the rest of the site is more or less intact and functioning.  I’ll explore this more over the next couple of weeks.  In the meantime, to see the full title, simply hover over it for a few seconds and the text should appear.