Category Archives: My Life

Our big blue bin

On Monday or Tuesday night, Matthew informed me that St. Nick had brought us something extra this year.

For the last two years, we had curbside recycling pickup, and our landlord paid the low rate that the city subsidized. With the start of the city’s new recycling dumpsters in the alleys, they dropped the subsidized curbside service.

Problem was, the city is rolling out their program slowly, and while some relatively nearby alleys had their bins in November, the only info I had said that they all should be in place by March 2011. I was preparing for the reality of having to drop our recycling off somewhere for up to 4 months (and the idea of driving somewhere to recycle really rubs me the wrong way), so I was super excited to hear the news about the bin in our alley.

The only thing that kept me from running out to see it right when Matthew told me was the fact that I was comfortably curled up on the couch and the temps outside were under 20 degrees.

Despite my excitement, I would be remiss if I did not point out, as I’ve mentioned before, that recycling is only a stop-gap measure, and not an ultimate solution to our problem of over-consumption and too much waste.

Environmental sustainability really depends on us practicing the other R’s: Reduce and Reuse. I’ve also heard mention of a fourth R, Refuse (as in refuse disposable packaging, containers, etc.), which I see as being part of Reduce.

A fashionista, I am not

Sometime between when high school ended (many, many moons ago) and now, I became anti-clothes shopping.  The majority of my wardrobe dates back to college or earlier.  I’m sure that owning and wearing many of the clothes I wore in high school will not earn high marks on the fashion scale, but fashion’s never really been my thing.

I bought my two main pairs of gym shorts in 7th and 8th grade, and am just now thinking about retiring them.  The elastic waist band seems to be giving out, as evidenced by the blue pair nearly falling down on my last run.

In general, I prefer clothes that are NOT trendy, so it won’t matter if I’m still wearing them in 10 or 20 years.  In order to insure that my clothes last 10+ years, I have a couple of tricks.

First, if it’s not dirty (i.e., stained or distinctly sweaty/smelly), don’t wash it!  Excess washing is hard on clothes, not to mention the environmental impact in terms of water use and energy if you’re washing on warm or hot (if you’re doing this, switch to cold water washes).  I may have a bit of an advantage here — I seem to sweat somewhat less than the average bear, but you may be surprised at how long you can stretch things.  Also, the infrequent washing works best if your clothes don’t spend time in a heap on the floor — this makes them look wrinkly and dirty, even if they aren’t, plus it’s hard to tell what’s dirty or not.

Second, when you do wash your clothes, line dry them.  The dryer may be even harder on clothing than the washing machine.  You can extend the life of your clothes and save energy at the same time — double green bonus!  If you’re tight on space for clotheslines, either inside or out, there are many options now for collapsible drying space that takes up minimal space when not in use (check out the links in this Tiny Choices post for some options).  Due to limited yard space, we just use the clotheslines in our basement year-round.

Third, invest in good quality clothing.  A $75 top that lasts 10+ years is a better investment than a $20 top that lasts less than two years.

That said, almost all clothing does eventually wear out, or cease to fit in one way or another, and taste in clothing does change.  So what’s a greenie to do when she does want to buy some new clothes?  Come back later this week to read about my recent attempts to purchase clothes.

My hot rod

Leading up to our recent trip to Texas, which involved a rental car, I couldn’t help but flash back to our rental car experience from a few years ago.  We “reserved” some kind of a compact car, only to have them “upgrade” us to a boat of a Buick.  In addition to the terrible gas mileage, we had quite a time maneuvering that behemoth around the narrow streets of Carmel-by-the-Sea.  That said, we managed without incident.

For our most recent excursion, we again reserved a compact car, and I was ready to put up a fight if they gave us an “upgrade.”  We arrived at the counter and presented our reservation.  After going over a few things (like declining their extra insurance and signing away our first born child — why does renting a car stress me out so much?), the customer service rep offered us the keys to a Dodge Caliber.

Now, I could not picture this particular car in my head, but I don’t exactly equate “Dodge” with “good gas mileage.”  Since I wasn’t familiar with the car (which is in fact a compact), I responded somewhat dubiously.

Me: We want to get something small with good gas mileage.

Service rep: This is one of our smaller cars.  [Looks through a couple of sets of car keys in his box.]  [Then, in a voice that sounds like he doubts we would really want what he’s about to offer . .  .]  The only other thing I have here is a Toyota Corolla.

Me: [Very excited, but trying to stay calm] And we could have that for the same price?

Service rep: Yes.

Me: Score!

Okay, I didn’t really say that, but I was doing a major happy dance inside, which only increased when we found our super cute, late model, bright red ‘Rolla waiting for us in the lot.  We suppressed our enthusiasm, guessing that a preference for small foreign cars might be less than popular in the land of gigantic American brand trucks.

Our little car performed nicely, though we didn’t realize until the return trip that there were actually two main drive settings on the automatic transmission (D3 and D).  We accidentally discovered “D” on the way back, which apparently equates to overdrive, and wished we’d discovered it sooner due to better gas mileage.  Either way, we did better on the MPG front in the Corolla than we would have done in the Caliber.

Perhaps this positive experience will leave me a bit more relaxed the next time I face a car rental.  In this case, one little question netted a better car with no extra cost — now that’s my kind of upgrade!

Bread & tomatoes, illness on the side

Sick + Writer’s block + Entertaining + Tiring week at work (last week) = not much blogging around this place.

While I have a relatively high pain tolerance, I don’t do sick well.  This has been the kind of mildly sick where I’m still able to function, albeit at a slightly reduced level.

Saturday night I passed out on the couch at some early hour, abandoning Matthew to start the bread making on his own.  This resulted in a new note on our whole wheat bread recipe: “Do not start at 9 o’clock at night.”  Even though he was only getting the dough together so it could have a long first rise on our cool back porch overnight, he didn’t make it to bed until after midnight.  (I moved from the couch to the bed sometime before then, pausing only to brush my teeth, no energy for flossing or neti-ing.)

Sadly, the bread did not turn out as well as it has in the past.  Still good, just not the “We should open a bakery and sell this for $5 a loaf” quality that we were expecting.  The bread served as the base for some very-late-season Caprese Salad Sandwiches last night.

We’re slowly working our way through the last of the garden tomatoes.  We (and by we, I pretty much mean Matthew’s mom) harvested a boatload of tomatoes a few weeks back and they’ve been slowly ripening (as well as slowly rotting, in a few unfortunate cases) in boxes in our living room ever since.

A few of the things that we’ve done with the tomatoes:

  • Roasted tomatoes
  • Tomato sauce (we need to make more)
  • Tomato tart (the crust has some serious butter)
  • Pizzas
  • And, of course, the Caprese Salad Sandwiches

My usual recourse for ripening tomatoes (and other unripe fruit) is a paper bag, but we had way too many tomatoes for that.  Instead, we set the tomatoes in single layers in cardboard boxes and covered them with newspaper — fast to arrange and easy to keep an eye on them.

How green is that movie rental?

My M.O. with movies, as with books, is borrow rather than buy.  My reading far outpaces my movie watching, in part because I also watch very little TV, so I’m rarely exposed to movie previews.  My one-movie-theatre-visit-a-year also limits my preview exposure.

Anyway, we’ve had decent luck getting some movies from the public library, but their collection is limited and, when they do have a movie, the DVD is often in such bad shape that it’s unwatchable.

After slowly working our way through Matthew’s sci-fi television show collection over the past four years, we’ve recently found ourselves wanting to rent a movie or two.

We quickly discovered that actual movie rental places are becoming obsolete.  All of the within-easy-biking-distance video stores were out of business, and I was not about to hop in the car.  Enter Netflix.Continue reading “How green is that movie rental?”