The Most Wonderful Place in the World

Or the most humanizing--the laundromat. Our Quietline, shall it ever live in infamy, is now technically dead. While it passes quietly into some special place reserved for front-loader dual washer dryers with zippo capacity, I recently found myself at the local Laundromat with denizens of the tri-city area.

It's a nice one that I used to visit in my college days and conveniently close to the university. Not many college kids there though. Surprisingly a lot of people who instead of washing clothes in their house elected to head out to the laundromat once a month and do them all there. Including a super nice guy, Adam, that I met who also works in the White House kitchen as a chef. Also an amazing amount of immigrants that used to be heavily African in my college days but now reflect the geographic trends in this area and were pretty much all Latino. Give me your poor, your tired, and your dirty sheets...

It took a little bit of finesse and equal parts bravado to position yourself for elusive open dryer space. I used several dryers until I found out they didn't work (and, much to my chagrin, wasted about 7 quarters on them) and then doggedly camped out in front of a fully functional one until it was free.

Two essential truths that I learned from this experience: It is hard not be friendly to someone folding underwear and I really, really need to learn Spanish.

Beg, Borrow, Barter

This quick post suggests ways to get more out of what you have by thinking about your possessions less as yours and more as community objects to be shared. Some of these I've tried, some I haven't. Please post and let me know if you've ever used such a thing...

Beg:
Begging done correctly is not pathetic, it's an artform. My best begging is done online via Freecycle, a national web-based program with local affiliates that allows you to release, recycle and find loving homes for your things that would normally go to the landfill. You could, of course, just post "wanted" posts but frequent posters favor giving their things to those that give equally. The power of karma in action. Simply post a quick note of what you'd like to have/unload and pretty instanteously you are rewarded. It's not publicly admitted, but I think clever posts receive the best responses. Here's a short list of what I have acquired: about 25 canning masonry jars, canning equipment, a vintage sideboard/buffet, a small wooden chest of drawers, a bike.

Barter:
Just found this great service called Peerflix, a riff of Netflix (the latter of which I do participate in). Like Netlflix, Peerflix is an online-service for movies. Unlike Netflix, on Peerflix you are allowed to trade DVDs that you own for others in the network. You can trade as much as you want and only pay for the DVDs (99 cents a pop) that you trade as well as the postage paid mailer envelopes to send them to the central deposit station. Most of our DVDs are not ones I want to trade so I don't really anticipate the need for such a service (we also, do not own many DVDs), but for people like my BIL (hint, hint) this might be a really good thing to explore.

Also recently signed up for Trashbank another online system similar to eBay but with more focus on trading items within a network. Will provide feedback with my experiences.

A long time ago, I used to eat out very often cruising off of the barter points acquired by an old ex-boyfriend's father courtesy of the Barter System International. This very structured barter system allows you to trade professional services. You received a barter credit card or script, literally hard copy versions of gift certificates to apply toward pretty much any service you could imagine. There is a one-time set up fee of $495 but the network is endless (lawyers, plumbers, restaurants, skiing stores, etc) and if you have a business you can probably write it off (but don't quote me on that). Pending cash flow, I might consider joining since outside this blog I am a self-employed grant writer.

I am also beginning the process of setting up a babysitting cooperative within my community. Essentially a group of parents that trades child care instead of money.

Borrow:
Is there anything better than a good neighbor? I have some really nice ones and through a good old fashioned friendships have eliminated the need to a) pay for cat sitters, b) purchase a lawnmower, and c) store our ladder. With the proliferation of listservs, we also have a local community listserve of about 300 folks in my city where you can post questions and receive answers from a nice representation of the community. Beyond that small circle of neighbors, I also participate in a larger listserve, the DC Metro Simplifiers, a nice community in the metropolitan area of like minded folks interested in living more simply. There's also a companion website with a lot of truly useful links. Consider it a local advice sharing network.

We also have a really nice local parents group, the Mamas and Papas, where frequent clothing sharing occurs.

The bottom line is don't trash it--beg, barter, or borrow it!

What Once Was Lost...

Has now been found. Great God Almighty--it pleases me terribly to report that I have located the missing set of drill bits and can now in earnest complete many tasks I began several weeks ago.

Also--for anyone who still doubts the humidity in my home, after it rained three days in a row, the humidity in my house was 80%. Or, as my BIL said when I asked him to check the gauge, "Yeah, it's raining in here."

Meat and You: Partners in Freedom

I don't know why it's taken me so long to talk about food--the raison d'etre in our household. I am not properly qualified as a "foodie"--I'm more like a food nazi. I love food, with a solid emphasis on good food. My blog title this edition comes courtesy of the Simpson's episode where Lisa becomes a vegetarian and is surrounded by the overwhelming pressure of her peers, the beef association, and Homer's herculean love of pork chops, and the ubiquitious power of meat in our society. It also features an epic Ralph line during the classroom worm dissection: My worm went in my mouth and then I ate it...can I have another one?

Over the course of my life I've been a vegetarian two times, once lured back by an innocently positioned steak and cheese sub on the coffee table. And later seduced by Chicken Korma. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, pass the pepper cause I'm clearly an omnivore.

I've been told point blank by activist aquaintances that people who call themselves environmentalists and eat meat are environmentalists in sheep's clothing. A statement which I now emphatically reject. Meat is the focus on many cultural traditions, and while I know that buying something wrapped in cellophane or even butcher's paper does not connect me to the bison hunts of yore on the American Plains, I cannot resist a perfectly cooked Peruvian chicken. Sorry.

Saying that, I will state that I eat red meat about twice a month, if that, and meat about once a week. I strive for locally raised, hormone and anti-biotic free meats. (I used to pass up meat offered to me if it didn't meet these exacting standards but then I realized that was just plain bitchy and rude and I stopped.) I will allow myself one crab feast a year given the overfished status of our blue crab fishery (an amazing level of self restraint that is difficult given my Maryland roots and affection for these beautiful swimmers). I regularly refer to handy overfished guides when purchasing fish and shellfish, and am proud to tout that my supportive husband carries his in his wallet.

Unlike Lisa Simpson, I must admit that humanitarian forces do not come into play here. I limit my consumption of meat for health reasons (saturated fat) and for environmental reasons (the amount of energy, water, and resources used to raise cattle and poultry is simply ridiculous). These are pretty established concepts but if you require more basis for these opinons please check out the website of the American Heart Association, the USDA's revamped food pyramid, and the Vegetarian Society. A lot of people tell me that they can't afford to eat organic, hormone-free meat products to which I respond, "Sure you can, just eat a lot less of it!"

When my son exhibited milk allergies, I went into a full freak out. How was I ever going to cook anything delicious again? I camped out in grocery store aisles studiously skimming labels looking for nefarious ingredients and nutrition information when one day I had an epiphany: Why am I looking at the side of a box to decide what's good to put in my son's body?

Thus began my obsession with nutrition and my awareness that much of our culture's nutrition education comes from the people, the marketers, and the industries trying to sell us food NOT nutrition experts. How many of us can readily quote what foods are nutrient rich in calcium aside from milk and cheese? Not many would know that the reason why cow's milk is high in calcium is because cows eat a diet high in whole grains and vegetative matter teeming with calcium.

Central to this effort has been my re-education of how to eat. There is nothing more important in our lives than making clear, informed decisions about how to nurture our bodies and those of our children. To anyone on the planet who wants to think more fully about the food they eat I heartily endorse and INSIST that you read The Whole Foods Encyclopedia and her companion James Beard award winning cookbook The Splendid Grain. Those two books have opened up so many gastronmic doors to me that I can not tell you.

To any parent with children, I recommend that you devour Cynthia Lair's Feeding The Whole Family: Whole Foods Recipes For Babies, Young Children And Their Parents from cover to cover and start them off on the right foot. Better yet, give it as a baby shower gift to any budding parent. Every new parent should at least be armed with the knowledge that nutrition does not have to come out of a can, a box, or a jar of squished up banana with a Gerber logo on it.

Bottleneck Blues

It's been a long time since I've posted. Mostly because I've not been in a terribly positive place: very busy, very frustrated at alternate avenues, and crunched to illuminate the merrier, lighter side of life. So haven't been posting because honestly, who wants to hear me bitch, right??

But I have been thinking about you (all three of my readers: my husband, my brother-in-law, and my mother) and this blog. Since I last blogged I've slammed up several plastic insulating sheets around my house only to have them unceremoniously ripped off by the underaged resident or occasional toddler visitor. Clearly not a great system.

I bought door sweeps but then managed to completely lose our drill bit sets which have eluded capture for the last three weeks.

I received my blue all-paper recycling box which I've been using with glee.

We've begun buying refillable milk. The latter which, quite frankly, I had no idea still existed in the city, and had gone the way of the hand plow (to Amish country). Come to find out that refillable bottles, which used to be the rage pre-1950s are virtually extinct. All glass beverage containers used 1947 were refillable and used up to 50 times a pop. Post-war, however, one-way glass began to be circulated into use and ever since then the key word is disposable--today less than 1% of glass bottles are refillable. Big deal, you might say, we recycle them today anyway. But you'd be wrong.

Presently most of our recyclables are still thrown away:

73% of glass containers
77% of magazines
75 % of plastic containers,
and 45% of newspapers

America is Number 1--at throwing away trash. We throw away more trash per person than any other countryman (or woman) on this planet (roughly 4 lbs a day and a little over 1600 lbs a year). Our trash winds up in landfills but also on the shores of places, piling up as litter on beaches so remote you wouldn't believe it--like the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands pictured above. Every year, the International Coastal Cleanup organizes hundreds of thousands of volunteers to pick up all this accumulated crap, and it just keeps on coming.

Maybe education will get us to change, but in my very limited experience financial incentives are the best bets (this came from my experience living in Massachusetts where bottle deposits facilitate the highest refillable bottle use program in the country--18% of beer bottles were refillable). This is also echoed in various muncipality-based programs where cities striving for a zero-waste goal are instituting very successful pay-as-you-throw programs linked to the volume of garbage you throw out each week. As much as this fervent optimist hates to say it, money talks. Several refillable beverage bottle bills are currently being proposed to reverse the trend of one-use glass use. So don your pinko commie hats and insist on subsidization and regulation!

My next project is to start weighing our garbage can to see what we are actually dumping into the landfill every week and whether or not my attempts to reduce trash are actually working. I hope to incorporate a counter on this site so you can follow along with my progress. The ultimate goal is to see how close to zero waste I can get us. Back in the last 1990s I had heard about a Seattle couple that reduced their waste to a one and a half trash bags per YEAR profiled on the landmark Escape from Affluenza.

Looking for tips about how to reduce waste? There are some very nice ones on the National Waste Prevention Coalition site. Please share any you might have.

Return of the Christmas Ficus

It is definitely a tree, I thought, that only a mother would love.

For the third year in a row, the Christmas Ficus graced our living room--plucky, irregular, and honestly--a little homely.

This spirited little tree more resembles a shrub these days, but it has been with me for going on ten years now. My mother gave it to me as my first house plant when I moved into a questionable apartment complex, my first solo pad, the summer before my junior year in college. Somehow it has lasted despite near neglect at my youthful hands, eleven moves, and a blistering overnight in my brother's car last January. The latter incident, we thought, had doomed it for good. My brother, however, hacked off all of the dead branches (a lot), and miraculously the three stumps that were left flourished in the summer sun. Gotta love our Maryland summers...

Last night I finally brought down all the Christmas ornaments and Ben and I decorated the tree while waiting for Jeremy to come home. I have never before experienced such an emotion as watching my son kneeling before the Christmas Ficus asking me in hushed tones, "Mama, is this our christmas tree?"

"Yes, Wiggle," I replied, "This is our special tree, this is the Christmas Ficus."

Ben helped me pick out all the ornaments--many we could not hang because they were simply too heavy for the young branches to bear-- and such joy that went up when the single strand of white lights went on...well, it is enough to make you remember that Christmas, really good Christmases, are just about that: very simple pleasures.

This Christmas Ficus means something more to me than just a tree though, it is our family's tree--a tree that has only ever risen to the heights of Christmas Ficus in the warmth of a home habited by my brilliant husband, my exuberant son (even in utero), and our somewhat faithful cat, Jezebel.

So my special holiday wish goes out to everyone who reads this message to remember the simple pleasures, indulge in whatever wonder graces you, and to embrace your family that makes it a season to remember.

And, of course, a special thank you to my brother who resurrected the most wonderful tree in the world!

The Necessary Accesory

This post comes courtesy of my recent reuseable bag addition from MOM's (my nearby organic market). Cheers to MOM's for starting a free bag giveaway and incentive program that rewards customers with ten cents bag everytime they reuse their bags. It's a pretty sturdy one and will go hand-in-hand with my cloth string eco-bags. I love MOM's for their produce, but still shop pretty regularly at my local co-op a mere 5 minutes walk from my house.

According to the helpful information supplied on the side of the bag, by reusing my bags I will be helping to reduce the nearly 100 billion plastic shopping bags out of the landfill. It also solves the sticky question of whether to use paper or plastic bags at the grocery store. I always thought that paper bags were the better choice, but come to learn some startling things: Paper bags used in the U.S. require the deforestation of tens of millions of trees, to say nothing of the toxic pollution created by paper and pulp mills (some of the dirtiest polluters in our country according to the EPA's U.S. Toxic Release Inventory report). So goodbye toluene, methanol, chlorine dioxide, hydrochloric acid, and formaldehyde and hello fresh clean air. I've also requested a recycling bin specifically for paper products from my local department of public works, so no more paper bags used for paper products and junk mail. They provide free bin and special "mixed paper" stickers.

I am trying to remember to take my reusable bags to "regular" stores like Target and the like where I get raised eyebrows but thankfully no plastic bags. My husband is also, for his part, doing his best to try too.

Speaking of junk mail, I highly recommend this excellent site set up by the Center for the New American Dream that provides step-by-step instructions to de-junk your mail box. I did this years ago, but now that we have moved back I need to repeat the process. I have also done this for my husband, my sister and brother-in-law, and my parents, and plan to put this forms into addressed envelopes with the stamps already affixed in their Christmas stockings.

More fun trivia for the holiday season--a nifty little footprint calculator that summarizes your impact on the earth's footprint on the basis of shelter, transit, food, and goods consumed. Good news, bad news on this front...I get high marks for using public transit, rarely eating meat, and buying unprocessed foods. My small home also figures into the equation, but I am still depressed to learn that my lifestyle requires 9 acres per person to support my needs. Worldwide, there are only 4.5 biologically productive acres per person. I suppose this is not bad compared to the average 24 acres consumed by the typical American, but we would still need 1.9 earths if everyone would live exactly like me.