the 65 mpg Ford the US can't have

Ford's Fiesta ECOnetic gets an astonishing 65 mpg, but the carmaker can't afford to sell it in the U.S.

petty larceny

i work in one of those old art deco buildings in downtown. a lot of the office spaces are vacant in the building. entire floors are unoccupied.

every monday morning, a flower company delivers a big fresh floral arrangement to the front lobby to sit on a table between the elevators. it sits there all week until it gets replaced the following monday.

every sunday night, i walk past the flower arrangement on my way home and think about what happens to the flowers when they get replaced the next morning. then a few monday mornings ago i saw the flower guy dumping all the flowers into the dumpster, putting the vase into his van to reuse.

so last night on my way out of the building, i swiped the flowers, left the vase. they're now sitting on my kitchen table in my own vase, and the new flowers have already been delivered downstairs so no one's the wiser, except for the flower guy, who's probably wondering what happened to his old arrangement. they'll be good for at least 4 or 5 more days, and then i'll compost them.

i feel sort of bad about it. but yet so good.

eco footprint

earth day is approaching!  it's this tuesday, april 22.

in honor, i found this website that has a quick, interesting quiz to calculate your eco footprint.

i'm not telling you what mine was, because even though i try to live as green as possible, it was embarrassingly high.

the weekend update

gatsby is really getting into baby planning mode. he's all for it. here he has found a cozy resting place inside a shopping bag full of new maternity clothes.

it seems like most of my posts about gatsby involve him finding a cozy resting place. for that matter, it seems like i probably post about gatsby too much. but for now, he's my bay-bee!

i'm STILL SICK. i can not get over this head cold, and it's giving me terrible migraines. wednesday i thought i was getting better, but in the last 48 hours it's moved from my head to my chest, which now aches with every deep cough. i'm sure the nurse at my o.b.'s office is fed up with me. "are you SURE there is nothing else i can take for this headache??" *hint hint PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND MERCIFUL IN THE WORLD TELL ME I CAN TAKE AN IMITREX* but no. she finally called me in a z-pack when the gunk in my chest turned green. TMI.  whatev.

i mean, the headcold-with-no-nyquil is one thing, but i'm totally emotionally and physically drained from having what essentially amounts to a five day migraine. my doctor allowed me to take some lortab for the migraine, which makes me loopy and helps me sleep at night (albeit fitfully), but i can only take one every six hours and it wears off in about two, and i'm trying to minimize taking them during the day anyway because even though they're safe, i just. don't. like. taking. medicine. while. i'm. pregnant.

so all of this means i've been getting zero quality sleep. i missed work on monday, and i didn't go back to work after lunch today, which contributes to the stress exponentially. it's so frustrating that i can take painkillers to (attempt to) mask the pain, but i am not allowed to take the one medication (imitrex) that is a non-painkiller and will actually treat the migraine and make it go away. ARGH! i can't even express my frustration after an entire week of bare-minimum functionality and constant pain.

in a desperate attempt for more homeopathic solutions, i have scheduled a prenatal massage for tomorrow morning, and i then am going to try to track down menthol crystals at the Peace of Mind bookstore (for my sinuses) and some rosemary tea at Wild Oats (per my Grandma's suggestion, for the migraines).

anyway, onto happier things.

today while i cooked dinner (glazed pork chops with hot chunky homemade apple sauce, green beans, and twice-baked potatoes - being sick makes me even more obsessive about preservative/chemical/hormone-free home-cooked meals), J took Princess to the recycling center to drop off our recycling for the month. he really wants to teach her about what we're doing and why.

i never thought i'd find another person who shares my passions about environmentally sustainable living, but i have. J's like the recycling police in the house, and i don't mind it a bit. he takes out the trash and he'll see pieces of junk mail that i mindlessly threw in there, or a plastic milk jug, and waves it around. "why did you throw this away! this is recyclable!" it's good to have a reminder, because it's so easy to just junk everything into the kitchen trash like you've been accustomed to doing your whole life. :) it takes practice.

as a visual aid, here is what one month's worth of recyclable materials looks like for our two-and-a-half person household:

these are the recycling bins that we keep in the garage. what you see is sorted into categories (cardboard/office paper, magazines/glossy paper, bags of shredded mail, aluminum/glass, and plastics), ready to be dumped into the recycling bins down the road. also, it occurs to me that there's a color shift in that photo that makes our walls looks like they're painted baby blue. they're not. they're a really unobtrusive pale grey color. i swear.

can you imagine if we had just dumped all of this into the trash this month? it's unbelievable how much perfectly good recyclable material gets sent worthlessly to the landfill. what's even more unbelievable is that recycling is free and people still don't do it.

before we started recycling and composting, our household trash output was one full (sometimes overflowing) industrial-sized city-issued trash bin per week. this amounted to about five-six large trash bags. a week. now we are taking out the trash bin once per MONTH. that's right. about one trash bag a week. four trash bags a month. for the entire house.

for those of you readers who don't recycle, here is your official guilt trip. do it. you have no excuse. as the biggest consumer society in the world, we have a global obligation to mitigate the damage we're doing. just buy a couple of $2 bins at wal-mart and start. it is so easy.

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.