being green

saturday J and i set up our new composter in the back yard.

apparently we should have bought it last may, because i guess it takes a full year for your grass clippings and onion peels to turn from stinky trash to beautiful black fertilizer. alas. at least my circa-2009 tomatoes have something to look forward to. if we're still in this house then, that is. the vintage 2008 beefsteaks will have to settle for miracle gro. and yes i know miracle gro is not a green product, but my mom always used it and i have yet to find a tomato that rivals the tomatoes of my childhood. she would send us running out to the garden to pick a ripe one for dinner and slice it up, still warm from the sun, and serve it with chicken charcoaled by my dad, and green beans and lipton chicken rice and homegrown fried okra and a bowl of thinly sliced purple onion and cucumber marinated in iced vinegar and sugar and a biiiiig glass of whole milk.

i am totally digressing. the vegetable gardens of my childhood were not all halcyon fields. mom also used sevindust to protect her produce from critters, and that stuff is as toxic as it gets. i'm sure we never even saw the baby rabbits seizing in the bushes after munching on the squash.

so anyway J bought a compost can for the countertop. it's stainless steel with a carbon filter to keep odors from escaping, and it's nicely aesthetic - as much as a compost bin can hope to be, that is. i can throw my vegetable scraps in there as i cook and dump it out a few times a week, thus avoiding daily trips across the freezing back yard. in theory, that is. in reality, the odor-trapping lid fits on there so tightly that in order to get it off, i have to hold the can in my arms and wreeeeeeeeeench the lid off, which proceeds to come flying off with such force that the banana peels go all over the floor.

being environmentally friendly is hard work.

we've been DVR'ing this Sundance channel show called "It's Not Easy Being Green" from the BBC. we're addicted. it's a quote-un-quote reality show (more documentary, really) about a british family who is taking $10,000 and one year to make their smallish farm and not-so-smallish historic farmhouse as green as possible. ohmygod it's my favorite show ever. we dream at night of wind turbines and giant vegetable patches, cellars full of canned fruit and wood-burning furnaces to heat our superinsulated home. sigh.

by the way, i've been feeling better in the last week. enough that i did about 10 loads of laundry on saturday, which is seriously behind on housework when you consider that we usually only go through about 3 loads of laundry a week. i'm even feeling good enough that i went to the grocery store tonight, and bought meat. RAW meat.

this is real progress.

although it still didn't stop me from having a mango smoothie, a bunch of pickled okra, and a mcdonald's apple pie for dinner tonight. pregnancy is a beautiful excuse to eat exactly the way i want. i think i'll stick with it for a while longer.