Where Will Tiff and Chris be for Winter 2021?

Hello Everyone!

How are you all out there? We have been having a roller coaster of weather here this late fall. Gloves and hat one day and shorts and tshirts the next.

We are still in Vermont! And loving it! We are up in the Waterbury area, which is a good bit more north than we have been for a while. It’s so nice to take a relatively short drive to be able to pop over and see some of our friends we don’t get to see that often.

Oh we just had the best fall wrapping up this season. We worked at Coolidge State Park and just loved it. It is such a beautiful park. Lots of history of the CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps. If you are not familiar, in a super quick nut shell, the CCC was created by Franklin D Roosevelt in 1933 to create jobs for people to get us out of the Great Depression. The CCC built many parks, structures, planted trees, among other projects. In Vermont, much of their amazing craftsmanship can still be seen and is appreciated today.

We have some exciting news to share with you…we were offered our jobs back in Maine! We can’t believe it. The lodge we worked at last year has been sadly closed all summer as part of their covid plan. As it will be reopened this winter we were able to be in position to go back. We are so grateful. If the lodges ever peak your interest, you can check out Medawisla Lodge (the only lodge you can drive to in winter), Gorman Chairback Lodge (a beautiful lodge with a lake view) or Little Lyford Lodge (our precious little spot and the dog friendly location).

Travel. Yeah. Going to the grocery store feels like enough of a trip these days. Our wildlife keeps traveling and migrating – this dragonfly would have made a whole trip south. We are still unwinding from a completely exhaustive summer. We have so much to be grateful for that are have this transition time. There is, and has been, so much going on with the weight of the world right now. Part of my own struggles in putting anything out into the universe this summer (these newsletters, even just posting pictures online) has been I try to keep this space as neutral and positive as it can be. As an American, our collective behavior has been so disturbing and it infiltrates my thoughts so much and I still don’t know quite how to interact with that.

I’ve mentioned before, for the sake of my own mental space, I’ve had to change some of my habits in what I watch and allow into my life on YouTube. Currently my favorite youtube channels are anything gardening, reducing plastic use, tiny houses and financial videos.

As a creative person and writer, one of my main hopes in developing these skills is to produce a reaction that causes someone engaging with that work to either have more questions than when they started or be inspired. For instance, one reason watching these plastic reducing videos has really rattled me is I consider myself to be someone who cares deeply for the environment. After watching the videos, I questioned so much more of my daily actions. Am I really doing the best I can to reduce waste? Am I using recycling as a crutch for not making more effort to reduce? Could I do better? I am one of the masses that thought I kinda understood recycling and waste reduction only to realize I had little idea about what I thought I knew.

I have always had a deep drive to want to do my best. It doesn’t matter what the task is. It can be super unglamorous (spoiler alert: the reality of being a park ranger is we clean a lot of toilets) or I could be dressed up and giving a presentation. I want to my best and inspire others to do the same. Is it enough right now? Is what we are doing as world, as a country and as communities our best?

Regardless of where one is on the matters, that in my lifetime businesses across the country felt it necessary to board up their windows in recent times says to me we are not doing our best.

So here we are together. You reading my jumbled thoughts and me pondering their meaning and purpose.

I wrote this article back in 2013 about how, after my experience in the jungle (this green crested lizard picture was from  the jungles of Borneo and the article was based from Indonesian jungles, this was just a good picture) my perspective changed and I could imagine running up to every foreigner I saw and yelling ‘hello mister!’ One of the greatest gifts of travel that I am eternally grateful for is it provides windows into empathy and different points of view I don’t think I ever would have acquired otherwise. I just reread the article and even all these years later, I look at each picture in the article and I can remember those people or the interactions with the group of people.

Empathy.

To me this is a reminder that we cannot use our personal belief system as a block-aid to different ways of thinking.

Our actions impact each other. Even all those years later from strangers we meet on the street, the memory of the interaction can elicit emotions. We have a lot of emotions running wild right now. We have forgotten how to talk to each other in effective ways. Maybe one good place to start is by saying “Hello Mister!”

If you wish, you can read the short article here.

Until next time,
Tiff and Chris

A few things I found.
If you are mostly in Steuben or Yates counties in NY:
ServU Credit Union is offering a $50-$50 reward if you use a referral link and become a member. You get $50 and I get $50. I only mention this because with all the various deal shopping we do, hands down, ServU is one of the best credit unions we have ever had. Specifically, they offer free over draft checking. This means you can keep all your money in your savings account, which these days only earns .10% dividend rate – but still, and if you need to pull anything out of your checking it will take from your savings without penalty. I know this might seem like a small deal, but overall wealth accumulation comes from taking note of many small differences. Just look at the lifetime accumulation difference between a mutual fund with an expense ratio of 0.08% vs 0.04%. Small differences add up. Here’s $50.

Life is so weird – it’s like shop local, no wait, shop online there is pandemic, no wait, you get more packing if you shop online, shop local, no wait >> mind blown (!) Ahhhhh!
Deep breath.
Just try to do your best.
If you want to check out a few different products that might peak your interest on reducing plastic, here are a few I am looking into as well:
Shampoo and conditioner bars
Plastic free sponges
These really cool laundry washing sheets

The photo of this trash could be anywhere in the world. Whether we see it so blatantly or it’s more subtle and out of sight, we produce enormous amounts of trash. I have been intently looking at more ways to reduce.

The house I live in we have been watching David Attenborough’s Planet Earth. It is so beautiful. After each episode, I am so compelled to *do something*. Whether I go and look at the ingredients better for palm oil free shampoo, use my drying rack for clothes, it’s inspiring. This series inspires me to continue to try and do my best.