Mail bag

Well, we're all caught up on errands, and finally caught up on rest, so I have some time today to catch up with our readers.

First, by way of update: we are still at McKinney Falls State Park, driving around in the nerd-mobile, and expecting to be working at the DSMC for a few more days. Of course, we now have two tropical storms on the map, and, while we are a bit out of the box for Christobal, Dolly is aiming for south Texas, and I will not be surprised if we get diverted to San Antonio, Brownsville, or Corpus.

The other big news at the moment is that George has been under the weather. She threw up Thursday evening, and has been lethargic ever since. When our normal arsenal of remedies did not clear things up by yesterday morning, we took her to the vet, to discover that she has a kidney infection of unknown origin. We now have an IV bag of electrolyte solution and have been giving her subcutaneous fluids, along with antibiotics. If we don't see an improvement by tomorrow, we may have to hospitalize her, which would certainly limit our availability for deployment to the gulf. We have both been very worried, and sometimes teary-eyed, about her.

As for reader mail: First, let me apologize to anyone that has been waiting for a response; we tend to get very focussed en route to Red Cross work, and there is just not time to get to everything. What little writing time I do have, I use to update the blog, as that keeps as many people informed as possible.

I'd like to acknowledge the many people (too numerous to list) who have either posted in the comments or sent us direct email thanking us for our involvement in the Red Cross. Let me just say that we find the work fun and rewarding, as well as fulfilling, so it is really a win-win (to borrow a trite phrase) arrangement for all. And I can recommend it as an excellent volunteer opportunity for everyone -- the Red Cross is always looking for more help.

As we were en route here, reader Cedar commented that we seem to eat out often, especially for dinner, and noted that it would be more cost-effective to cook aboard, given that we have the facilities. This is absolutely true, and I have a two-part answer to this question.

The first part has to do with that part of our lives when we are working for the Red Cross (since that is when the question arrived). While we usually stick with our custom of eating breakfast and lunch at home (although we sometimes will go to lunch with coworkers to be social), we almost never eat dinner at home while en route to, or working on, a job. In part, that's because we are too wiped out at the end of the day to cook, and in part it's because the dirty dishes, which I often wash the next morning when we do eat in, will simply accumulate in the sink until the following day's dinner time (and, if I'm too tired to cook, I'm certainly too tired to wash all the dishes first, and then cook). And the bus is just too small a place to have dirty dishes lingering for even a whole day.

We have an expense account when we are on duty with the Red Cross. So it's not as if we would be pocketing any savings by eating at home -- we only claim actual costs. We do save the Red Cross some money by eating in as much as we do (most volunteers are eating three meals a day in restaurants, because they are staying in hotel rooms -- yet another expense the Red Cross does not underwrite for those of us in RVs).

As for the rest of the time, when we are not volunteering, well, we just like to eat out. In fact, next to diesel fuel, it's our only real expense. We have all but completely checked out of modern American consumer culture, which, frankly, is the way many people reward themselves on a daily basis. So we get our little pleasures from sampling the local cuisine when possible, or returning to old favorites on a regular basis.

Don't get me wrong -- I love to cook, and we do eat dinner at home quite a bit. I don't ever blog about meals that I prepare myself, whereas I often blog about restaurants, since we figure some of our readers who will pass the same way might want to know about them. But we do spend a good deal of time in the middle of nowhere, where it's cook or go hungry. In fact, we can go two full weeks on our water tanks, and, not coincidentally, we can fit two weeks of food in our little 7.5 cubic foot fridge. Since there are so many nights when we have little choice but to cook in, we take advantage of nice restaurants whenever they are in convenient walking, transit, or scooter distance.

Moving on, this morning we received an anonymous comment taking us to task for the amount of fuel we burned coming here to Austin to volunteer. (Don't bother looking for it -- it was rude and abusive, so we deleted it. This is, after all, our blog.) The implication being that, somehow, the work would just get done without any expenditure of fossil fuels. That's a bit naive, and I'm going to guess that the poster has never spent any time working with any type of humanitarian or other volunteer organization.

For the record, I asked our handlers in Washington why it was that they decided to send us some 1,300 miles just to help turn equipment around here in Austin, and their answer was that we were the most cost-effective solution. (For anyone who has not noticed, donations are down, and the American Red Cross is in the grips of a budget crisis, having to borrow money for the first time in years, and laying off hordes of regular employees.) The reason for that is simple: "normal" volunteers have to be flown in from around the country (and, no, there is not a magic pool of trained and qualified volunteers just hanging around Austin, unfortunately).

Not only is that more expensive than asking us to drive down here (more on that in a moment), it, too, uses a direct quantity of fossil fuels. A round-trip air passenger will consume an average of 40 gallons of Jet-A (which is practically the same stuff as diesel fuel), and they would have had to send at least two and possibly three other volunteers here to get the same work done as the two of us. (Our output is higher because of our extensive training and experience level, the fact that we already work well together as a team, and being here in our own home allows us to work longer hours with fewer distractions.)

So that's already 80-120 gallons of fuel, as compared with our ~200 gallons to get here. Then on top of that, you'll have one or two extra rental cars for those other volunteers, and the fuel to run them. Also, those folks will be eating three squares a day in restaurants, and using up three hotel rooms, all of which have carbon loads associated with them as well as donor dollars. So while I can't unequivocally state that the carbon footprint of sending us from Wyoming to Austin is lower than, say, flying three people in from the east coast, what I can say is that the difference is not as big as you might think. From a donated dollar standpoint, it's much more clear-cut: we're saving the donors $200-$300 a day for each day we are here. (And we include ourselves in the donor category: we donate far more in cash to the Red Cross each year than we are reimbursed for expenses.)