Category Archives: Green Ideas

Second best

My one hangup with my fabulous new carpool is the bike parking situation.  I hoped for some kind of covered, secure place to lock my bicycle, perhaps a garage, easily accessible basement, or a covered porch at my coworker’s house.  I rode the first morning, not knowing exactly what I would find (I already knew the garage option was out) but determined to make it work one way or another.

I arrived early on day one and found no covered parking options.  Instead, I locked up to one of the vertical support poles of a chain link fence in the back yard.  Baby Jake and I were not pleased.  Other than when actively being ridden, or for relatively short lock-ups when running errands, Baby Jake is an indoor bicycle.

I didn’t like the idea of my lovely bicycle sitting exposed to the elements for ten-and-a-half hours every day, not to mention some concerns about theft.

Enter Back-Up Bike (BUB).

BUB lacked some of the convenient commuting accessories I’d added to my main bike, namely a rear rack and crate.  I found a used rear rack at Bicycle Works, and planned to just switch my lone plastic milk crate back and forth between Baby Jake and BUB, but I tired of that pretty quickly.  I toyed around with the notion of carrying a back pack, but it’s so nice to ride “naked,” i.e., no back pack, especially in the heat of summer.

I could just bike to a store and buy a plastic crate, but that would be too easy, so the search for a used milk crate (or something similar) continues.  I will find one!  In the mean time, I rigged up a super classy cardboard box, as you can see in the above photo.  It fits will with some of BUB’s other swanky features:

Wine cork in handlebar end
Another cork, plus fender secured with string

Très chic, non?

Wood and wheat

Every time I look at other apartments, our wood floors lure me back.  Today, I dug in and gave them a much-needed cleaning.  We sweep them pretty regularly, but cleaning the floor is one of those things, like making the bed and showering, that give me pause, because as soon as I clean it, it’s just going to get dirty again.  (I definitely recommend that you NOT clean the floors before company comes, because large numbers of people tramping in are a surefire way to dirty the floor quickly.)

I started with a thorough sweeping, supplemented with a bit of vacuuming for the hard to reach spots.  No carpet means easy, usually electricity free, cleaning.  I even swept the stairs — no sense leaving them with dirt to track onto the clean floors.

Next came a bucket with a bit of cleaner and water.  I used Biokleen All Purpose Cleaner.  (I’m sure there are some great homemade green cleaner recipes out there — anyone want to share?)  The trick is to make a pretty dilute solution.  You don’t want it soapy, or you’ll have to go back over the floors with water.  I prefer a single pass.

While I was on my hands and knees washing the floor, my bread sat on the sidelines, rising.  Two 100% whole wheat plus* loaves that don’t look like doorstops = success.

Clean enough to eat off of, if you like that sort of thing 😉

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*I started with this basic 100% whole wheat bread recipe that makes two loaves.  I experimented by adding wheat berries, millet, steel cut oats, sunflower seeds, coarse corn meal, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds.  These additions totaled no more than a combined 3/4 of a cup for the two-loaf recipe.  The trick with the seeds and grains is using a presoak.  I soaked the millet and wheat berries overnight.  I soaked all of the other goodies for about an hour, starting with boiling water.

The coffee bean sack saga

The coffee bean sack saga started innocently enough.  Our friend Dani witnessed first hand our losing battle against the weeds in our commuter garden, and asked, “Have you ever thought about using cardboard or coffee sacks to keep weeds down in the paths?”

Why no, we had not, but it sounded like a wonderful idea.  I emailed a few local coffee roasting companies,  and received three invitations to stop by and pick up some coffee sacks.  Two of the three said to stop by anytime; the third (a much larger operation that shall remain nameless) asked me to let them know when I was coming.

Due to some weekend and evening work hours, I had last Tuesday off.  I started the day by running a bike errand in the vicinity of the coffee roasters.  I had not heard back from the third roaster with a specific time, but since I was right there, I decided to stop by anyway.  BAD IDEA.

Continue reading “The coffee bean sack saga”

Reluctant dairy queen

Shortly after I stopped eating meat five-and-a-half years ago, I also eliminated almost all animal products from my diet.  I traded in cow’s milk for soy milk, and stopped buying eggs, cheese, and other dairy products.  To make this manageable, I never set a hard and fast, “Thou shalt not eat any animal products” rule, so if you offered me a nice homemade baked good, I enjoyed it, knowing full well that it had eggs in it.

I was a bit more stringent with the dairy, especially avoiding cheese and other fatty dairy products. My dairy avoidance was due, in part, to some anti-dairy explanation of milk as, “Filtered cow’s blood.”  Scientifically, that may be true, in a sense, but stating it as such shows some definite anti-milk bias.  Though if you want to talk about bias in the dairy industry, the pro-milk studies funded by dairy associations would be a better starting point.  I digress.  (I have other issues with/questions about milk, both on the environmental and health fronts, but I’ll save those for another day.)

Time passed, and my not-so-hard-and-fast rule turned into a less-hard-and-fast rule, and next thing you know, I’m writing posts like this one.  Since writing that post, we continue to purchase raw milk, though we switched to another local dairy, Greenwood Farms, because they sell certified raw milk, meaning they test their milk regularly and comply with stringent standards.  For all I know, Lavy Dairy’s milk MAY meet those same standards, but I do kind of like having the assurance.  Greenwood Farms milk does have a couple of downsides: 1) It costs more than 3 times (!) as much as the certified organic milk from Lavy Dairy and 2) Greenwood Farms uses standard plastic (read: non-reusable) milk jugs.  On the upside, they offer pick-ups at Tower Grove Farmers’ Market, which, compared to driving to Silex, MO, is almost as good as home delivery.

Although freezing milk, which we did with our large Lavy Dairy purchase, does not ruin it, it does change it a bit, and we prefer to avoid that with our premium-price product.  However, for two people who don’t actually drink milk, consuming a gallon of the stuff before it goes bad presents a bit of a challenge (it seems to stay good for about 10 days, which is similar to the point when pasteurized milk goes bad).  We plan to experiment with cheese making, but we don’t have the cultures and vegetable rennet.  In the meantime, we’ve been making yogurt and ice cream.

After several edible but imperfect yogurt attempts (flavor not quite right, too thin, strange consistency), I remembered that we had a yogurt maker growing up.  A quick call to my mom confirmed that said yogurt maker still existed, plus two others that my parents acquired at garage sales over the years, all sitting in the basement, quite neglected.  While I certainly was not about to go out and buy a yogurt maker, I happily adopted one of my parents’ trio.

I greeted the new appliance with some suspicion, since it just barely felt warm when I plugged it in to preheat it.  After about seven hours, I very skeptically opened one of the yogurt containers to find . . .  perfect yogurt!

What with the milk, homemade yogurt and ice cream, and local cheese purchases, I somehow find myself eating dairy (often a relatively small amount that wouldn’t count as an official “serving”) at least once a day, if not more.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Looks like spam, smells like spam

But?  Not spam!  That’s a real email subject line, folks.  It’s in the running for my “best non-spam subject line ever” award.  And who wouldn’t want to have a “Party in My Pants” shipped to them?

For brevity, I will refer to Party In My Pants by their acronym for the rest of this post.

Without  further ado, I present my PIMPs.

Fortunately, the acronym is also amusing.

I read a PIMP post over at Healthy, Green & Frugal several weeks ago.  Strangely, though I’m going to use cloth diapers for my babies (cloth diapers have come a LONG way since they graced my bum), I’d never given any thought to reusable liners and pads.  Rebecca’s post provided that little nudge.

I can’t comment on the efficacy of my PIMPs yet, but I received excellent customer service from the PIMP ladies 😉