mountainFrugal Journal

[mooretrees]

I appreciate the credit you’re given me, but you are such a rock star that it feels a little silly to be given so much credit for all of your work and effort. Anyhoo, what a great year and write up! I am (as always) so impressed with your accomplishments and focus.

I remember your BC friends from your wedding, they were great!

I can’t wait to keep hearing about your DIY tenure plans and how you keep attacking your goals for 2025.

[sodatrain]

@MF - Wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing a bit more about how you structure and approach "$ Talks DW - 20 Min / Week". I'd like to start doing something like that and would appreciate your insights on how to do it well. I went back many pages to see if you had previously talked about it and did not encounter it. Sorry if I missed it.

[mountainFrugal]

@mooretrees - Thanks! You provided an outside view in my blind spot. That is extremely valuable coming from someone who has demonstrated a great social capital base in a small rural town. You get the credit for pointing out the obvious to you ... and helping me to see how apply it in my situation.

@sodatrain - We have internalized that talking about money is easy. So if you do not already do that openly, I would start discussing finances on a scheduled basis, especially if you tend to procrastinate doing so. We would have longer discussions once a month structured around spending, saving, investing, etc for the first 5+ years of our relationship. It works better for us at this point to do this more frequently to stay on the same page about things. Depending where you are coming from, 20 minutes might actually not be enough if you do not have the longer term discussions about where you want to be financially as a couple. For example, when we purchased our house we spent a lot more time discussing all the things we wanted how best to pay for it (mortgage vs. cash, we could do both). We had a large piece of paper that we worked out our personal needs/wants, sharing those with each other, then making a joint plan to meet all those and prioritize. We do this at least once a year for a longer term relationship map. This year we are doing another anti-consumer year and spending little (if at all) on non-essential items outside of food and bills. What is interesting so far, having done similar projects in the past, especially during the pandemic, is that we can focus on all the abundance we have.

[basuragomi]

Parallel thinking! I started hosting a monthly drawing session as well at the library, although membership built up from just posting about it on local social media. It's really motivational to have people working away beside you.

[sodatrain]

@sodatrain - We have internalized that talking about money is easy. So if you do not already do that openly, I would start discussing finances on a scheduled basis, especially if you tend to procrastinate doing so. We would have longer discussions once a month structured around spending, saving, investing, etc for the first 5+ years of our relationship. It works better for us at this point to do this more frequently to stay on the same page about things. Depending where you are coming from, 20 minutes might actually not be enough if you do not have the longer term discussions about where you want to be financially as a couple. For example, when we purchased our house we spent a lot more time discussing all the things we wanted how best to pay for it (mortgage vs. cash, we could do both). We had a large piece of paper that we worked out our personal needs/wants, sharing those with each other, then making a joint plan to meet all those and prioritize. We do this at least once a year for a longer term relationship map. This year we are doing another anti-consumer year and spending little (if at all) on non-essential items outside of food and bills. What is interesting so far, having done similar projects in the past, especially during the pandemic, is that we can focus on all the abundance we have.

Excellent, thank you. We are pretty good at it already - in an informal and unstructured way. My goal is to structure it a little more as part of combining our lives a little more and beginning to share expenses (and goals around savings etc) more. It's also part of what I realize now is just building systems and tools to help me stay focused and on track with/towards the goals I (we) have. I've been working on my personal goals/plans/WoG last year a bunch and now it feels like it's time to start combining it with hers. It makes lots of sense to have a larger vision and periodic check-ins. Money and relationship stuff.

Would love to hear what you two do for your once a year session, if you don't mind sharing some of it!

Anti-consumer year - sounds like a more reasonable or at least accurate way to say buy nothing year. I like it.

[mountainFrugal]

@basuragomi - The library is a much more wholesome place than a bar. haha. Unfortunately, our small library is never open during evenings when we have the greatest turnout. Let us know any good tips for hosting meetups that you learn!

Would love to hear what you two do for your once a year session, if you don't mind sharing some of it!

I will share...but you and your partner have to do one first. The meta-skill is learning to think of individual and joint visions that you work on together by creating your own framework(s). You do not have to share on the forum if you do not feel comfortable, but let me know when you do the activity and I will write up our method. Start with a 5 year map and work backwards from there.

[mountainFrugal]

# January 2024

This will be the last month that I do a paired illustration with my update for a while. I am working on a graphic novel/essay and want to reserve my digital art time for that so I do not get burned out.

Montology
I came into Darmera early on a Saturday morning to box up a piece and deliver it locally to a buyer. When I pulled up to the entrance there were a few guys peeking in the window. I opened and invited them in. One of the guys really wanted one of the sold pieces still hanging on the wall. I said it was not for sale. He said what about for cash over asking price? I said yes of course! I boxed it up for him and off he went back to SF. The original buyer was a local and we had a handshake deal. I explained the situation to him, he congratulated me, and then I agreed to make him a new one at the original price as a commission. 5 pieces total sold from my show. . Late in the month, I received a text message from one of the art buyers that the piece had arrived and a photo of my piece hanging in her living room in Philadelphia. I have sold art before, but I felt very proud of how far I have come as an artist in that moment. My art is on stranger's walls in Philly and SF. Crazy!

I finished up the layouts for the next three issues of my graphical essay series on exploring fire landscapes. The plan is to have these done and printed for an art opening in November. A non-profit reached out after hearing about this project. They have funding for these types of projects so I am going to be paid to do a series of lectures, field trips, and nature journaling classes that will proceed the gallery show.

I spent a lot of time this month on gouache value studies. I am working on originals for the Pyroscapes project and to be displayed for the November opening. These also overlap with a near future gallery show that my business partner and I will do on small format plein air paintings.

Darmera
I had 5 new students this month between the two classes I teach. We have been break even for the past 3 months and we will be profitable from February going forward after paying yearly business fees, insurance, and digital fees.

We are making some mini-painting kits out of old cigar boxes for small format plein air paintings. We have a list of sites picked out that we will start taking clients, but first we will paint at these locations and create marketing content for upcoming retreats. The paintings will make up a small format gallery show to have a pure profit summer show to shovel back into the business.

We had an art opening of student work from another art studio in town. It was fun to co-mingle the groups and make additional connections in the art community.

Movement
I completed the second 4 week training block that was co-designed by my coach (heading into the end of the rest week this weekend). I spent more days sleeping 9-10 hours a night and eating more protein (mostly supplemental pea protein shake). Going into this block I was well rested, but the last day of my rest week I went a little too hard. I paid for it immediately. I do not need coaching to go harder. I need coaching to go easier on rest and recovery days. The top of my Zone 2 is between 155-160 (nose breathing) depending how warmed up I am and accumulated fatigue. He keeps me in check because many hours of Zone 2 is too hard for me to recover from effectively. Everything clicked this training block. I skate skied 501 km and made massive deposits to the Zone1/Zone2 base bank. The block had increasingly big days at the end of the week. My last day I skied 100km in Zone1/Zone 2 in 6:45:30 with 1850 m gain/loss. I balanced this with ridiculously easy recovery days on the stationary bike (i.e. 90 bpm average). I have gotten way faster and efficient for a given heart rate. I look forward to harvesting some of these gains in early March at the end of the ski season. The game has completely changed for me because these past two blocks unlocked the mental discipline to go easier and put in the boring time for recovery days.

Community
I volunteered for a local backcountry ski-mo race (up and down on skis). A friend and I lead the food prep for the post race party. It was fun to work in a large commercial kitchen at the venue and to see how willing various food vendors were to give out donations to support the event.

[delay]

Thanks for sharing your journey. Teaching your own classes sounds awesome. It must feel great to be appreciated by your students.

[shaz]

Congrats on the art sales! And all the other progress of course. It's great to see things going so well for you.

[Stasher]

The one thing that I notice with the hardcore mountain athletes in town is they tend to have money by just being frugal and focused on what they are doing. It is a slightly different kind of dirtbagging. Work part of the year and have the winters off to get insanely fit doing skimo workouts. It is not exactly ski bumming because there are very specific mountain objectives instead of endlessly chasing powder at ski resorts. There is something with the training intensity and focus that is inspiring because it is completely self imposed and intrinsic. This makes me wonder more broadly if an alternative edit [PATH] to ERE IS something like this. The money saving, frugality, and low consumption is a side effect of being focused on a larger objective. There is some beauty in it because athleticism like this is a lifestyle in and of itself. There is very little infrastructure needed to do these backcountry pursuits. Perhaps the skis and/or bikes are the most expensive items that are owned by these individuals. What matters is the work/play of human powered adventures. For me, I come at this inspired by the specialists, but want to remain an all rounder. I think it is more holistically healthy.

This is basically how I look at it and my approach as well. I trail run, hike, fastpack, mtb and gravelbike doing one or multiples of those activities every single day. After the initial expense of the high quality equipment (because of reliability/quality spend more) those items tend to last a very long time so the only input after that is time and carbs. The last couple years were focused on gravelbike races and now this year I'm focusing on running trail races and a couple shorter ultras.

Just read your journal for the first time after a small break from ERE and now that I'm back and reading more finding your journal has allowed me to be fascinated by your artistic and visual way you do monthly recaps. Too bad you are taking a break to focus on your graphic novel but we can't fault you for that, hope it is going well.

[mountainFrugal]

Thanks @delay, @shaz and @stasher!

It is really fun to help adults learn art...to revive something that they may have thought was lost forever in childhood or adolescence when they last made something.

@stasher - good to have you back on the forum. I look forward to seeing your adventure updates.

The graphic novel is just ramping up. It integrates art skills, storytelling, science, design, color theory... it is very fun. It is much easier to make one digitally so I am going that route.

I am toying with an illustration template for the reviews and potentially moving the review illustrations to analog, but there is only so much time.

[mountainFrugal]

February 2025

Montology
I went from having 0 commissions to 5 larger ones this month. I have done 0 official advertising. Every one of them has come to me based on work that I put out there on my website, my gallery, instagram, or people asking while I was sketching IRL. Commissions are taking up all of my incidental income time and pay a lot more than bike repair. This month I declined two bike repairs.

Graphic Novel
I plan to release this serially and then collect it rather than working on all and releasing as a single event. I worked out the watercolor and ink style I will use for the final pages. I wrote a 6 page sub story to test my process and workflow.
1) Digitally lay everything out
2) Tight digital pencil sketches
3) Print reverse image on mixed media paper
4) Use light box to ink over printed pencils that show through paper
5) high resolution scan of inks
6) Digital color studies if necessary
7) watercolor on original
8) rescan and assemble
I am working on consistently drawing faces and hands from imagination. Consistency in characters is my main barrier to producing a longer form story. The graphic novel is a multi-year project.

Darmera
All of our events (outside of regular classes) are hit and miss for attendance. The default is generally put on an event that we would also like to do so that if no one shows up, we still get to do what we want. This has the added bonus of students learning from people who are personally stoked to teach. We had two new students this past month for our regular classes and now one of the classes is full! Our live model session was also full for the heated classroom space (the back studio is too large to heat). We had considered hosting two per month, but it has been hard to find consistent models. Two new models contacted us this month through word of mouth. All in all, we continue to grow slowly and organically by just consistently showing up.

Movement
Finally some Z3 intervals! I set 6 Course Records on Strava at our Nordic Center this month that ranged between 7:30-20 minute efforts. The long base phase in December/January have payed off. I also noticed an improvement in overall mood. Z3 effort has been a staple of social anxiety and stress dissipation since I was young. Despite the long easier base efforts in December and January, I had a background level of stress that I could not quite put my finger on. It was Z3/Z4 that was missing. This is something I will keep in mind for the next base phase.
XC Ski - 296 km
Bike Trainer - 18.5 hours
Weights and Core - 8x
Trail Running - 10k

The March training block is all about reintroducing running and transitioning away skate skiing and into back country spring skiing. I am very fit right now and it feels fucking great.

Social
I reconnected with Late DW's college housemates/best friends. They moved to the West Coast a few years ago, but we had a number of missed connections since. I made them (and their teenage boys) dinner. I also had 1.5 glasses of home brew made mostly from ingredients on their permaculture farm.

Most of my limited social life outside of hanging with DW revolves around Darmera and training with friends. It is an ideal balance for me.

Life
I had to patch a leak in our roof while it was storming. I used wetpatch to slow it down initially and did a better patch job when it was dry out last week. We will see how well it holds as the next storm cycle comes in. If it holds I will claim victory and post to the fixit log.

[mountainFrugal]

Musings:

The deeper and more integrated your capital stack(s) are, the better you are able to express yourself in any given moment or situation. Eventually, everyday living and actions in the world become artistic expressions. Consumption based living dulls creative expression because it is based on consuming other's creative expression rather than making your own fun and games. Nothing wrong with consumption or consuming something as a tool, just know that ONLY consuming will never fully satisfy. Full satisfaction stems from what you bring to the moment and often requires very little if any material things. If you are more integrated in your capital stacks, Art with a capital "A" and life are the same thing more often moment to moment.

[AxelHeyst]

Consumption based living dulls creative expression because it is based on consuming other's creative expression rather than making your own fun and games. Nothing wrong with consumption or consuming something as a tool, just know that ONLY consuming will never fully satisfy. Full satisfaction stems from what you bring to the moment and often requires very little if any material things.

I was working on a post this morning about the book Die With Zero, in particular working on articulating concisely what's 'wrong'/insufficient with his "spending money is how you acquire positive experiences, which is what life is all about" philosophy, and then I come over here and you've done it beautifully.

I also noticed an improvement in overall mood. Z3 effort has been a staple of social anxiety and stress dissipation since I was young. Despite the long easier base efforts in December and January, I had a background level of stress that I could not quite put my finger on. It was Z3/Z4 that was missing. This is something I will keep in mind for the next base phase.

This stuck out to me as a great example of refinement/tuning/kaizen mode that I'm in the process of figuring out. Thanks for sharing.

[jacob]

The deeper and more integrated your capital stack(s) are, the better you are able to express yourself in any given moment or situation. Eventually, everyday living and actions in the world become artistic expressions. Consumption based living dulls creative expression because it is based on consuming other's creative expression rather than making your own fun and games. Nothing wrong with consumption or consuming something as a tool, just know that ONLY consuming will never fully satisfy. Full satisfaction stems from what you bring to the moment and often requires very little if any material things. If you are more integrated in your capital stacks, Art with a capital "A" and life are the same thing more often moment to moment.

This is an exceedingly difficult message to communicate to consumers. Consumers effectively live in the line (1D) version of flatland and so all they see is what something costs. You might be making a 3D sphere, but if it barely touches the line in the money dimension, the one-dimensional consumers will judge it short. If the sphere doesn't touch at all (because it's dollar-free), it won't even register.

[mountainFrugal]

I do not really have a clear direction with these musings, but I do feel a bit of a "discovery intuition tingle" that there are some fertile ideas that can be applied more generally to ERE and beyond. Maybe writing more consistently a bit more loosely and trying to collect the ideas will unearth something. I am also tinkering with these ideas in real time as an art and nature journaling teacher.

I do see your point @jacob, but are we trying to change the mind of a median consumer? Ultimately yes, but I view this more as thinking creatively about generating more pull and motivation for those on the fence that are already aware (ERE and ERE adjacent). The idea is that there could be other paths to becoming a non-consumer by prioritizing (and balancing) other capitals. What does it look like to lead with ecological awareness AND balance the other capitals? Permaculture folks understand systems thinking better than your average ERE newbie, but they lack an understanding of economic principles (i.e. all capitalism is bad). Those leading with primarily (and only) social capital fall into similar traps of leadership when necessary (i.e. everyone has equal weight in decisions on all topics which leads to passive aggressive leadership). Should we be focusing instead on how to draw analogies across disciplines sooner? How does one learn to do that? Can it be taught? Is it already taught somewhere? Is there evidence that it can be effective?

Maybe an even harder thing than teaching the consumer is teaching people tools for thinking about open ended problems that do not fit into answers A, B, or C. I have been looking into how to teach different types of thinking as part of becoming a better art and nature journaling teacher. The fundamentals of Nature Journaling are that curiosity can be taught and cultivated. Curiosity is not just applied to nature, but all disciplines. Inquiry based learning, and project based learning are both in-line with this as are the idealized versions of the Next Generation Science Standards (https://www.nextgenscience.org/). As far as I can tell, the next gen science standards (starting in ~2013) are much more inline with how scientific discovery actually works than what I learned about science in K-12 that rigidly taught "the scientific method". An idealized cohort of teachers with all the time, energy, and resources could do a good job of teaching these increasingly complex versions of the core concepts starting in elementary school through high school. If the science curriculum also had integration with literature and social sciences, maybe there would be spill over. My guess, without evidence, is it would be easier to apply these thinking concepts to other domains/capitals like emotional, economic, social etc. if you had this type of thinking taught much earlier as part of K-12 education. There are likely some areas of the US that still want to teach biblical characters and dinosaurs coexisting or whatever, but imagine if there were a cohort of children that were taught under this idealized framework starting in 2013. They would just be finishing up K-12 and going to college or new entrants into the workforce. Are they better able to deal with complexity because of it? Where does that leave the majority of the working age population that were not taught under this framework? Can we retrain the working age population to think about things differently and perhaps more inline with the science standards? If we could what would that look like?

Anyway...some blue sky thoughts and questions without my default skepticism/cynicism creeping in.

Cross-cutting Concept Examples from NGSS:
Cause and Effect
Structure and Function
Systems and Systems Models
Stability and Change
Energy and Matter
Patterns
Scale, Proportion, Quantity

Another resource that is passed around:
https://sadlerscience.com/how-to-read-ngss/

[7Wannabe5]

An idealized cohort of teachers with all the time, energy, and resources could do a good job of teaching these increasingly complex versions of the core concepts starting in elementary school through high school. If the science curriculum also had integration with literature and social sciences, maybe there would be spill over. My guess, without evidence, is it would be easier to apply these thinking concepts to other domains/capitals like emotional, economic, social etc. if you had this type of thinking taught much earlier as part of K-12 education.

My state uses NGSS, and I've had a couple fairly long term (couple month) substitute assignments teaching science at the 7th and 8th grade level. One of the schools was so chaotic, I had to entirely invent the curriculum based on the standards, so I chose to create lesson plans and activities based on general Systems Science standards/concepts and Ecology. Unfortunately, the median student in the disadvantaged groups I was teaching didn't yet have full grip on basic skills and concepts related to mathematical measuring, so we started with the simple activity of mapping the classroom itself as a system. We also designed cards for a web of life game based on animals and plants likely to be found in local eco-system.

If you look at this page from the NGSS site, focused on the task of teaching kindergarten level students about weather forecasting and local severe weather possibilities, at the bottom of the block in black the connections and dependencies upon ELA/Literacy standards and Common Core Math standards and concepts. For example, you can see that discovering a severe weather pattern is (at least) dependent upon grasping concept of Counting and Cardinality in math. Words such as "pattern" and "strategy" are introduced very early in math education these days. For example, a bright 3 year old recently described his activity with blocks to me as "making a pattern." He could also count items to 10 and tell me which group of blocks had "more" or "less", so he might be able to just begin to comprehend a pattern of sun shapes and lightning-cloud shapes arranged on a calendar during a discussion about severe weather.

https://www.nextgenscience.org/pe/k-ess ... n-activity

For better or worse, because this approach to education is so complex, and many educational situations in the U.S. are far from ideal, teachers frequently resort to canned lesson plans based on the standards. Adherence to the standards can also be administered in a towards tyrannical manner from the teacher's perspective. For instance, I taught at a school where the standard that was being addressed in every lesson had to be clearly posted on the board. This sort of thing becomes more than a bit ridiculous in a situation where many of the students require remediation in order to gain the skills necessary to meet the standard. In theory, in situations where remediation is necessary, the teacher is supposed to also provide individualized support while juggling all the complexity found within even a kindergarten level lesson as seen in link, while also managing all the usual or unusual classroom behavior issues. In reality, this only happens in the very best settings such as designated STEM focus middle school in same neighborhood as engineering campus of major research university. In this sort of ideal setting, where I have also briefly subbed, you will observe 12 year old students conducting their own research projects and having group discussions about climate change policy related to a specific suggested problem and making use of appropriate conceptual vocabulary. In the least ideal settings located only a moderately long bike ride away, you will observe 12 year old students (maybe) learning how to use a ruler as a tool rather than a weapon. In median setting, you will observe 12 year old students being guided through a canned lesson tied to a few of the standards.

[mountainFrugal]

Thanks for the write-up @7. After looking through the documents I changed my phrasing to "idealized" before posting. Sadly, I realize that this would likely only correspond to wealthier areas of the US, if at all. I think that public school teachers already have an enormous burden on their shoulders and that reaching for "uninspired canned examples" might not be even marginally better than the older system.

[jacob]

I do see your point @jacob, but are we trying to change the mind of a median consumer? Ultimately yes, but I view this more as thinking creatively about generating more pull and motivation for those on the fence that are already aware (ERE and ERE adjacent). The idea is that there could be other paths to becoming a non-consumer by prioritizing (and balancing) other capitals. What does it look like to lead with ecological awareness AND balance the other capitals? Permaculture folks understand systems thinking better than your average ERE newbie, but they lack an understanding of economic principles (i.e. all capitalism is bad). Those leading with primarily (and only) social capital fall into similar traps of leadership when necessary (i.e. everyone has equal weight in decisions on all topics which leads to passive aggressive leadership). Should we be focusing instead on how to draw analogies across disciplines sooner? How does one learn to do that? Can it be taught? Is it already taught somewhere? Is there evidence that it can be effective?

I'm probably more focused on the median mind than anyone else here needs to be due to how I sometimes get dragged into presenting for a "mainstream audience". People surely get easier to connect with the closer they already are. There are two variables that effectively determines how close someone is. One is topic and the other one is complexity of thinking (MHC).

Of those, I think a difference in topic is easier to communicate than a difference in MHC. I believe this is why I've had a much easier time communicating ERE to permaculturists and philosophers; and probably the hardest time those who think in narratives/believe everything is a narrative.

However, I'm not sure MHC is something that can be increased pedagogically or whether it's an innate quality of the phenotype mind that perhaps just need easily installed some intellectual structure to begin working. IOW, whether scaffolding is self-increasing, self-supporting, or self-regressing.

In the Nordic books, Hanzi notes that MHC is mostly uncorrelated with intelligence or perhaps more accurately, that it's possible to have high intelligence but medium MHC. This may only indicate that a high MHC is not necessary in this highly specialized world we've constructed. Indeed, it may even be that specialization discourages MHC-development.

[mountainFrugal]

Requoting here for reader context.

According to my notes (correct me if I am wrong), @jacob made the connections between the higher ERE Wheaton Levels and the MHC levels of complexity as follows:
WL6 - Yields and Flows - MHC 11 - Formal
WL7 - Systems Theory - MHC 12 - Systematic
WL8 - Actualization - MHC 12.5 - Systematic/Meta-systematic
WL9 - Autonomous - MHC 13 - Metasystematic

In the Nordic books, Hanzi notes that MHC is mostly uncorrelated with intelligence or perhaps more accurately, that it's possible to have high intelligence but medium MHC. This may only indicate that a high MHC is not necessary in this highly specialized world we've constructed. Indeed, it may even be that specialization discourages MHC-development.

If I recall, he said that having high intelligence and a lower MHC would likely mean greater depth at that stage. Horizontal rather than vertical. As an example, I see this in biological researchers who believe that all biology can be reduced to YES/NO on electrophoresis gels (MHC 11). "You don't need statistics if you have clear gels." This view is technically true, but it is very limited and blind to that limitation. That thinking got us really far, but it is only scratching the surface of complexity. Not everything can be reduced in that way and they think that it can be because they had lots of early success with lower hanging fruit.

Add: If the scaffolding provided for Alex the Parrot allowed him to advance MHC stage well beyond his species level, I assume this would also work for humans given enough time and patience from the teacher. Looping back to other simultaneous threads, maybe AI can help provide that scaffolding in a custom tailored way. I think this already happens with math tutoring: https://www.mathacademy.com/