Deep Value

[catsittingstill]

There's an interesting post over at Making Light about "Deep Value" --stuff that remains useful over a long period of time and many changes in circumstances.  Stuff like bicycles, treadle or hand cranked sewing machines, reusable shopping bags, stuff like that.

My "deep value" articles are

1) My bicycle.  I have a recumbent bicycle that I ride regularly to the library and to the store.  Today I paid the water bill, took the paper and cardboard recycling in, and am presently in the Carson-Newman library courtesy of my bicycle.  The best "value added" items on the bicyle are the great big bag behind the seat, and the foldable wire baskets attached to the frame. 

2) My leatherman tool.   A couple of chisels.  My C clamps.

3) My camping stove.  Okay, it sounds silly, but I have a Trangia alcohol stove for camping.  It has no moving parts (unless you count the simmer ring that can be dropped over the business end to lower the flame). It can boil a quart of water in ten minutes, and  I confidently expect it will be functional (barring catastrophic accidents) long after I am dead.

4) My musical instruments.

5) I have got some shopping bags; whether they're deep value items will depend on how long they take to wear out and whether I lose them.

6) My racks for drying laundry.  A number of years ago I broke one, and before buying a new one, sat down and worked out that the old one had paid for itself eight times over (figuring drying laundry at a laundromat).

Have you got deep value items that you would recommend?

Comments

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I'm conflicted here. I absolutely appreciate the value of simple, reliable tools. But when I think about the things that I use constantly, that have the biggest practical effect on my life, they're all hightech. My laptop, my ipod, my cellphone/PDA. I really hate not having my Leatherman on me, but take those other things away and my entire lifestyle changes. (That said, I do put a lot of effort into maintaining my hightech items as much as possible. My previous laptop was at least 60% non-original by the time I returned it to work, and it still had a year or two of life in it easy.)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I also use my electronics constantly. My mp3 recorder is something I use nearly every day (to listen to the radio, mostly, but still.) But I've only had it for four years, and one of these days the battery will go pearshaped, or I'll drop it on some unforgiving surface, and that will be the end of it. I'll have gotten good value for the money (I think, anyway) but it's not the sort of thing one might pass to one's children.

A lot of the deep value items I listed are not really things that changed my life in a massive way. A lot of the things that have changed my life a great deal are not things I can expect to last a decade, much less a lifetime.

It's kind of odd, really.

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

My "deep value" items are:

1) My hard copy reading books, which don't require batteries to read, enjoyable again and again. (Thus speaks the English major and teacher.)

2) Like Cat, my musical instruments: piano, guitar, drum and even the boys' harmonicas.

3) Also like Cat, a clothesline. So many hand washables, and then, so much energy saved by not having to run jeans through three times through the dryer, just hang overnight in the basement laundry area.

4) I use my shopping bags for so many things: trips to the library, toting things to friends, back and forth with teaching things to school. For my normal shopping runs to the grocery, not so much, (Kroger wants to fill and put the plastic bags of food in my bags.) For special trips to Trader Joes or World Market, my source for peanut free and eco-friendly, I take them, because I get a wooden nickel for every bag I bring, and the store donates five cents to the charity whose box I put my wooden nickel in: Humane Society, or Big Brothers and Sisters, Green Project X, Y or Z or books for somewhere, etc.

5) High quality shoes, like Birkenstocks or Dansko. More expensive, but last me longer (years) even with daily wear with a job that is on my feet all day. Added bonus: my feet don't hurt.

[mdlbear]

I'll second the shoes, though I don't really get more than a year's use out of a pair. I've pretty much switched to Keen hiking boots these days; good support, and cost about the same per year as resoling a pair of Mephistos. Maybe less -- I get about a year out of the Keens, and I only ever got 9 months out of the soles on my Mephistos.

The thing with deep value is a brand with stable styles, so that a couple of years down the line I can find a replacement without having to find out, usually the hard way, what the new version is called.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I also like good quality shoes. When Mom died, I inherited her old hiking boots and several pairs of good walking sneakers--they take longer to wear out than cheapie sneakers, I notice.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I understand about the books, and get a lot of enjoyment and information out of them. Speaking purely for myself I didn't count them among my deep value items because there's no one book that provides all these things, it's the aggregate. But I definitely value books in general and my books in particular.

Regarding the clothesline; I dry pretty much all my laundry that way, saving the drier for drying emergencies--I'm all out of clean clothes and it's going to rain for a week, that kind of thing.

Regarding the shopping bags at Kroger--I find I get good results by putting the bag on top of all my other stuff at the checkout and saying cheerfully "I brought my own bag, so you don't have to use the plastic ones." But it does require that I be on the ball about speaking up at exactly the right moment--when the checker focuses on me, but before the first item goes into a plastic bag. Now I have most of the checkers at the stores I use properly trained, and I don't have to be quite so vigilant.

[mdlbear]

My musical instruments, of course. But the linked article goes on to mention things like Linux -- an operating system that you can count on to be stable and free to upgrade for a long time.

I'd like to add my files: my configuration files and all the stuff I've written. My files are almost all text in various formats; mostly HTML and plain text these days. I know that no matter what software comes along, my files will continue to be usable; no matter what storage medium they're on now, I'll always be able to copy them to a newer, bigger device.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) I like to gloat over my hoard of con mp3s. I'm definitely hoping the mp3 format will be readable for a long time.

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

Stainless steel cutlery.
Corelle
Swiss army knife.
Merck Index
Dictionary
Handbook of Chemistry and Physics
Polarizing sunglasses
Binoculars

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I like stainless steel in general, and I'm with you on the Corelle--that's good stuff, and the plain white seems to be a stable pattern over the years, so if you break some, you can get replacements.
The Swiss Army Knife is cool, and has been around for longer, but I favor the Leatherman Wave over it because of the pliers. But I grant you the Swiss Army Knife is probably more comfortable for long term carving.
The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is good--I have an edition from before I was born that is still a useful reference work.

[ozarque.livejournal.com]

It's a very hard list to put together -- which is in many ways a surprise; you'd think it would be right on the tip of the tongue! Off the top of my head, these would be high on my list...

My crochet hooks
My embroidery needle
My musical instruments
My Swiss Army knife
My drawing paper and colored pencils

And if I could have a high-tech item, it would be my Zire 71 PDA; I love that PDA.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

You can have a high tech item if you want; I'm not being a purist here, and plenty of people have lauded high tech items or even file formats :-) As I said in a response above, a lot of the items that have changed my life the most are items I don't expect to continue to work for a decade.

My PDA is cranky and temperamental, (mostly about handwriting input) but I would really miss it if I gave it up.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Now me, it's soft pencils and my Pentax 67. On other hand, I'd hate to do color printing without a computer. My sense, btw, is that virtually all of our computer technology these days is drowning in over-complexity (yes, I include Linux); just because we can put all this complexity in a small space is not a good reason to do it. Hmmmm...maybe the Python language counts.