Cost-Benefit Analysis

Joan & I are about ready to leave in a few hours for the Portsmouth Transportation Center and then to Logan for our 7:10 departure on BA # 212 for London Heathrow and thence by train to Paddington Station, Moreston-in-Marsh and finally arriving at Chipping Camden tomorrow early afternoon. I used to do this transatlantic travel stuff a few decades ago at the drop of a business meeting in London or Madrid but it’s been a while and the human body gets less tolerant of being jerked around as we get older. I also occurs to me how much clutter and stuff we’re put aside as “don’t need that” as we pack out backpacks for our walk in the Cotswolds over the next 14 or so days. 

At one point in my life – pre-Joan, footloose divorced Dad days – I had a 250 things rule in my life. Everything that I owned was a thing; my car was a thing, a suit was a thing, a pair of skis was a thing. The total of all my stuff that surrounded me and weighed me down was limited to 250 things; why that number you might ask. It was because I’d found that that was about the limit of things I could stuff into my VW 412 wagon!  Anyway, as I look around me now, our big house, garage, cellar and artic are stuffed with things, accumulated over the past 30 years and all essential, needed or wanted at the time but too some not used for many years. Going on a long walking trip, carrying everything you’ll use in your backpack and feeling the weight step after step has  a wonderful way of clarifying what you really need and what you don’t in a very dramatic manner. We have a precise scale that we use to weigh everything – in ounces! – that goes into the backpack and our goal is to carry no more than 10% of our body weight. For me, that’s a limit of 17 pounds but anything over 15 pounds feels like too much on my 80 year old legs.

That damn scale causes all sort of financial cost/benefit decisions to be faced. For instance, is the new Patagonia Nano Puff jacket that weighs only 8.3 ounces and costs $350 worth the 11 ounces it saves over the $100 EMS Ascent nano jacket that I now have? That 11 oz. difference represents a 5% savings in my total weight at a cost of $22 per ounce. The Patagonia also packs down to a fraction of the size of my old one. I did all the calcs, decided “yes, it was worth it”, and drove 70 miles to the REI store only to find out they didn’t have any more large size jackets in stock. So much for analysis!