Keep It Simple Sisters

In today's society, most of us believe technology holds the answers to our desires and the solutions to our problems. To some degree, I believe this is true. Technology allows me to have hot and cold running water at the turn of a tap, to light my home by a flick of a switch, to write this article on my laptop sitting in a lawn chair on a sunny day and to instantly connect to my friends and family by punching a few buttons on a phone or by sending an email.

But, sometimes the things that are supposed to enhance our lives or give us ease do the exact opposite. Do you remember the promise of a shorter workweek and a paperless society when personal computers were invented? The incessant need to talk on a cell phone or text message while in public venues has created a whole society of rude people and a strange disconnect with what is happening around us. The internet has opened a Pandora's Box of ills, giving people easy access to cyber porn, online affairs and gambling with the click of a mouse.

Yes, technology has made certain aspects of our existence easier but I wonder if indiscriminately adding more of it into our lives really enriches our experience or deprives us of what we were seeking in the first place?

Cari and I relocated to a small acreage in an isolated part of British Columbia by choice. There is no cell service on the farm and we can only get dial-up internet, and basic phone service. The closest village has one main street with not a McDonalds, Wal-mart or Superstore in sight.

But even here, where we are limited in our access to the newest gadgets, when challenges arose Cari and I often found ourselves reaching for technology to solve our problems. The two examples that immediately come to mind involve two very unlikely things; bread and cat litter.

Soon after we had settled into our new home, Cari declared that she wanted to bake her own bread. Without even considering that we could bake bread from scratch, we toodled off to the village hardware store and bought the most expensive bread maker we could find. It was stainless steel and fully loaded. It gave you the choice of three loaf sizes, different crusts colors and eight different dough settings. After reading the instructions and following them to the letter, I produced three pans of inedible glue. I gave up in frustration. Cari didn't have much luck either. Her bread came out hard as a rock and only a few inches high.

Disappointed, we gave up on the idea of eating our own freshly baked bread and consigned the behemoth of bread making wizardry to the cupboard to collect dust.

Months later, we attended the Fall Fair held at the village community centre. There we met a local woman who was selling her own baked goods. Her name was Grandma Fay and she was known in the village for her irresistible bread. As we stood admiring her table laden with golden brown loaves, she pulled out a bowl, a measuring cup and three glass jars containing pre-measured amounts of yeast, flour and salt. She placed the ingredients on the corner of her table and commenced to make bread.

We watched in amazement as she swiftly mixed the ingredients and expertly kneaded the dough. She shaped the dough into dinner buns and when the dough had risen and was ready to be baked, she headed into the community centre’s kitchen. Minutes later, she handed out the most delicious melt-in-your-mouth dinner buns I had ever tasted.

The following day, Cari, using Grandma Fay's recipe and her own two hands, made her first of many loaves of bread. The whole house filled with the warm yeasty smell as the bread rose to perfection. It came out of the oven with a golden brown crust and perfectly baked on the inside. It was the best bread I had ever eaten and it didn't require an expensive machine to do it, just a few simple ingredients, a couple of loaf pans and an oven. We eventually gave our bread maker to a friend that had always wanted one.

Now, onto the issue of cat litter. We have four cats and back when Cari and I lived in the big city we had two cat litter boxes discretely tucked away in the basement for their bathroom needs. In our mobile home on the farm, we didn’t have the luxury of a basement and the only place the cat litter could go was in the bathroom tucked into the laundry closet next to the washing machine. We could only fit in one litter box so that would have to do.

Even though we cleaned it daily, the smell of used litter permeated the house. Every month the smell seemed to intensify. It was unbearable. Cari and I decided the only solution was to get an electronic, self-cleaning litter box.

Procuring one turned out to a complicated process. No store in the village carried anything like that so we tried to order it on-line from a pet supply place only to find out that they did not deliver that item to Canada. Friends of ours who had recently moved to the Burton area were heading back to Calgary for a visit. They offered to pick up one from the city and bring it back home. Four hundred dollars later, we installed the electric self-cleaning gizmo.

Three of the four cats adapted to their new bathroom facilities with out a problem but the fourth cat was having nothing to do with it. Flea is his name but I think his previous owner should have called him Flee. He is a very skitterish cat, afraid of his own shadow.

The first time he used our epitome of cutting-edge feline toilet technology he did his business and then stood just outside the box shaking off the litter from his feet. When the automatic rake began to move, whirring and grinding as it scooped up Flea's deposit, the movement and noise freaked Flea out. He scrambled out of the bathroom as if his tail was on fire.

For days, Flea wandered the house yowling miserably. I tried to coax him back into the bathroom to show him that the whirring, moving cat box was nothing to be afraid of but he wasn't convinced. I figured he would get over his fear when the call of nature became more urgent than his dislike of our whiz-bang fully loaded cat litter box.

A few days later, I was sitting on the couch talking on the phone, absently watching as Flea paced around the house, moaning and looking completely unhappy. Suddenly, he hopped up on the couch and perched himself on the cushion next to me. Flea gave out one last terrific yowl and then proceeded to evacuate his bowels and bladder. I watched in shocked amazement as an avalanche of cat turds hit the pillow. I screamed out Flea's name more in horror than in admonition. Of course, true to his flee-like-nature, my screaming frightened him and he leapt off couch sending his deposits flying up into the air. For a brief instant, my living room was raining cat poo.

After reassuring Flea that I was not mad at him for redecorating the living room, I went about the unpleasant task of cleaning up the mess. Then, I promptly pulled out the incredibly expensive, electric self-cleaning, motion-sensing piece of technology, threw it up in the hayloft and replaced it with one of our old fifteen-dollar plastic litter trays. Within days, Flea was back to using the litter box and Cari and I noticed that the horrible smell that had prompted the expensive purchase to begin with had disappeared. We were baffled.

Weeks later, when we were house cleaning, Cari moved the washing machine to scrub behind it and discovered the desiccated remains of a mouse. The horrible smell that had originally started this whole saga wasn't the foul odour of used cat litter but the putrid smell of decaying mouse. The holy grail of cat litter boxes is still consigned to the hayloft where it has become a home to the many spiders that live up there.

When a problem arises or a desire felt maybe instead of reaching for the latest and greatest, we need to take a moment to see if buying another thing is really the solution or a complication. Cari and I spent over seven hundred dollars on the bread maker and the automatic litter box. Seven hundred dollars, that if we had brainstormed other simpler solutions to our needs, we could have used to buy things that really do enhance our lives, like books, or groceries, or more plants for our gardens. Two very expensive lessons that could have been averted if only we had remembered to 'Keep It Simple, Sisters'.