Category Archives: Green Ideas

Weekend update

Once again, we made it from Sunday through Friday without the car, but it made an appearance again on Saturday.  I think that habit will be hard to break as long as we are commuter gardeners, but it does make me think crazy thoughts like, “Do we need to own a car at all?  For as seldom as we use it, couldn’t we just rent a car once a week?”  Perhaps . . . .

Saturday was full of gardening and food preservation.  I canned pear preserves (to be discussed in a future post) and prepped more fresh basil for freezing.  We will be enjoying lots of pesto in the coming months — no complaints here!

Sunday dawned rainy, great for all the little seeds we planted yesterday, not so great for biking to church.  I resolved to bike in spite of the rain and ended up staying relatively dry, due to convenient breaks in the rain that corresponded with my travels (and due to my fenders).  In the afternoon, we needed to run an errand that involved exchanging a long handle of a tool with interchangeable heads.  When I say “run” an errand, I do mean literally.  The store is 1.25 miles from our apartment, but we weren’t sure how to safely and securely attach a seven foot pole to a bike.  I was highly opposed to driving, so I suggested walking, which became running (well, jogging actually) to save time.  No doubt we looked highly ridiculous, running through residential neighborhoods carrying a seven foot long red pole.

Mission complete, we returned to begin a cooking/baking extravaganza, including roasted beets*, vegetable pot pie, and apple pie**.  This was our first time making the vegetable pot pie with all local vegetables: potatoes*, butternut squash*, carrots*, green beans*, sunchokes**, and onions**.  We love this pot pie recipe, but before you are fooled into thinking that this is a super healthy dish, in the interest of full disclosure, this recipe has 3 sticks of butter in the crust and filling.  Three sticks in a recipe that’s meant to serve four people!  We stretched it into six servings — this means I consumed a half stick of butter in one meal.  Oops!  Maybe we’ll go with even smaller serving sizes in the future.

Who needs a car?

We’ve now gone over a week with one car, and except for our rainy Saturday morning errands last week, we may as well have had no car.

Over the past six days, we’ve been to church, Home Eco (green general store), the Japanese Festival, the park, the Greek festival, the grocery store, the dentist, choir practice in the suburbs, and a community meeting about street design, all sans motor vehicle.  We also engaged in the normal biking to work during that time.  From Sunday morning to Thursday night, we covered 117 miles on our bikes.  That’s 117 miles not driven.

You built this . . . for me?

We spent the morning of Labor Day completing our own little personal biathlon — bike, run, bike. In the middle of the last biking event, we refueled at the Greek festival. Eating spanikopita and baklava is normally part of athletic events, right? I guess if you count the eating, it was a triathlon.

Anyway. On the way home, we noticed that the construction workers also had the day off, leaving the completely closed for construction interstate along part of our bike route wide open. A beautiful expanse of smooth new pavement with no cars to be found. And, oh, would you look at that? A gap in the fence — perfect for walking a bike through.

We tried to resist, really we did. But in the end, it was just too tempting. In a few short months, the interstate will reopen, serving only the all important motor vehicle, encouraging and enabling our car culture. But on this day, it was all ours, and it was beautiful. We only rode a short stretch, since we were at the end of our biathlon and ready to get home, but it was enough to make me want more. Just think of the possibilities, if there were interstate systems for bicycles, a way for us to safely and easily travel longer distances. A world where our transportation infrastructure not only supported but truly prioritized biking and other forms of alternate transportation. More green dreams . . . .

Mission accomplished

We are now a one car couple!  We accepted an offer on Saturday, but the buyer was not able to make it official until last night, so I was holding my breath for four days, hoping it would go through.

Last night, after biking home from work, I put my bike on the car for the last time and drove out to my mother-in-law’s house (in the suburbs) to meet the buyer.  Title signed over, cashier’s check in hand, and carless, I celebrated the sale by biking the 10.5 miles back home.  (Full disclosure: My mother-in-law offered to give me a ride, but I declined.)  It was a nice night for biking, and I arrived home tired but happy that I had made it under my own power and avoided a car trip.

We looked the cashier’s check over last night, trying to make sure it had all of the security features it was supposed to have and was not a fraud.  We were a bit nervous because neither of us could see the darned watermark, but I called the issuing bank this morning and verified that it is, in fact, legit.

Now begins the one car experiment . . .

White out

Replacing your roof sometime soon?  Depending on where you live, you might want to consider a cool roof.  You can read about them here.

Our landlord will be replacing the roof on our building soon, and we hope he will consider a white roof.  The fact that it will cost a bit more than a “traditional” roof is not in our favor as renters, but maybe (pretty please with sugar on top) he will step up and do the green thing.