No Impact Experiment: Day Four

Today is food day in the No Impact Experiment. We’re trying to “reduce our foodprint”. This means eating locally, in season, and trying to eat things that are not packaged in trash.

Tony made dinner: locally raised ground lamb, with cinnamon, onion, zucchini, and tomato over organic (but non-local) rice. It was good, and even Claire ate it.

The lamb was quite expensive and I would have been fine with (another) meatless dinner but I think Tony was really starting to wither away, ha ha.

He was able to find the local meat at Earth Harvest in the shopping center near Gold’s Gym on Church St near the bowling alley.

(For breakfast I had cottage cheese with frozen berries and Tony had Cheerios. For lunch we had organic peanut butter and all-fruit jelly on whole wheat buns. He also had a cheese stick and some homemade oatmeal cookies. Isn’t this a fascinating blog? Aren’t you glad you came here to read this drivel?)

Claire’s lunch tomorrow will be apple sauce, banana, nuts, granola bar, and cheese stick. She buys milk at school, and has an afterschool snack at her program.

Up tomorrow: energy day. I am REALLY terrible at saving energy. I love to leave my laptop on all the time, I love leaving outside lights on, etc etc. Hence, I asked Tony to be in charge of tomorrow. Let’s see how I will suffer.

No Impact Experiment: Day Three

Today is transportation day. This is going to be our first huge FAIL day I think. We’re supposed to minimize our driving, use human power, etc. The irony is we’re normally really good at this (we carpool, I bike, I even run to work or to errands sometimes), but I think it’s not going to be an easy day. Here’s why:

I drove Claire to school this morning. Don’t get me started on how hard it would be to get her to school by alternate (non-carbon) means. I’ve investigated every option and it’s not pretty. There are ZERO routes to her school that do not involve at least 10 blocks on busy streets with no bike lanes, no sidewalks, and heavy construction. It’s a very depressing fact of life here. I’m really familiar with all the routes and various streets, cut-throughs, etc. Not going to happen.

Tony has to drive to NCSU to meet a friend. This means 120 miles round trip of SUV carbon.

My bike is at work and it has a flat tire. This means somehow getting to work (car? run?) and fixing the tire, then biking home.

On top of that, in order to get better at fixing my bike I was going to go to REI’s bike maintenance class tonight. It’s in Greensboro. Sigh.

UPDATE: did not go to bike maint class. Instead, pumped tires at work, rode bike to do errands, then home, then bike to eat out (ack) meet Tony for dinner after his trip back. He drove us home. Tried to find least objectionable thing on the menu. Reminds me why I hate to eat out. Tomorrow? Food day and Tony is cooking!

No Impact Experiment, Day Two

The goal of the No Impact Experiment was to reduce trash. We kept two bags of our trash collected from Sunday and Monday, including from home and from everywhere else we went during the day. Tony kept one bag and Claire and I kept another bag.

Tony kept his recyclables in his trash (he was going to separate them out later) and Claire and I put our recyclables in the bin as we went. We all kept our compostables out of the trash bags and in the compost bin.

Ways we cut down on trash:
1. We went to Starbucks and had them make our coffees in ceramic mugs (downside: the barista mixed them first in paper cups and then poured it into the ceramic! Argh.)
2. We recycled all our paper, not just things that were convenient to recycle. (I am really bad about throwing away mail instead of recycling it.)
3. We composted everything we could, including tissues. (We usually do this, I’m just pointing it out here.)
4. I got stuck with 6 of Tony’s holey socks in my trash bag because I am the one who drew the line at their holyness and insisted that they be thrown out. Since they have spandex in them, they can’t be composted. Since they’re holey, they can’t be sent to Goodwill. Since they’re dirty, they also can’t be darned. And there are only so many sock puppets one needs in one’s life…

Here is our trash (Claire’s and mine) for 2 days. We’ll post about Tony’s later.

(click for bigger version)

One bag from Wacky Mac pasta
One dixie cup
2 straws
6 holey socks
one pink feather
one lid to ketchup bottle
2 clorox wipes
One teabag cover
2 gum wrappers, one tootsie roll wrapper
one purple deflated balloon
one snack baggie
one bandaid
random bits of paper and string, dental floss, etc.

No, we did not eat out (except for that Starbucks coffee). We did eat a lot of leftovers. We did eat a lot of fresh food, and we compost and recycle everything we can.

No Impact Experiment, Day One

Day one of the No Impact Experiment is to reduce consumption. Here’s what we’ll be doing today towards this end:
1. Buy nothing. Our goal for today is to spend $0.
2. Tony listed more books on amazon. We’re trying to divest of some of our material goods. We’ll also be donating the books that don’t sell (or are too low of a price to sell) to somewhere that takes books.
3. In preparation for tomorrow, we need to each bag our own trash so we can see how much trash we produce. This should not be too bad since we are composting, recycling, and since we didn’t buy anything today. Ha. It will be mostly food packaging, I imagine.

UPDATE: I took 6 holey socks out of Tony’s laundry so I guess those have to go in my trash. Can not compost because they have some spandex in them. Can not give away because they are holey. Can not darn because they are also disgusting and I really just want to throw them out. What else can you do with ripped up socks? Ugh.

Some activities…

Wow, I haven’t updated this in a while. Totally unintentional, I promise. Life intervenes. Here are some of the happenings, no particular order:

1. Claire is doing gymnastics. Here is a video of her climbing the rope at Kidsport.

2. We’ve been baking our own bread, and I might be entering a contest soon. More details to come.

3. Alamance Outdoors is going strong. We’ve got several adventures planned for the next few weeks as well.

4. We got a cat, called Suzie.

5. Claire got her first “real” salon haircut (my haircut is no longer so flat, it’s more wiggly like normal)

6. Here are some pictures of the new house.

7. I ran in Mebane on the Move

8. See comments

9. Wedding pics: here and here

What we’re reading lately

Here are some of the books we’ve been working on lately.

–Mysterious Benedict Society (we’ve been reading this together)
–Star Wars, the Complete Visual Dictionary
–The Penderwicks on Gardam Street (the second book)
–The Amber Brown series
–Ruby Lu Brave and True
–Wesley the Owl (with mom! on the Kindle!)

Rock Climbing

She climbs! Rock Climbing indoors was great fun, we really enjoyed it.

Claire rock climbing at Ultimate Climbing Gym in Greensboro

More ice skating, math, and groundhogs

(1) Claire and I went ice skating again on Saturday. This is getting to be a regular routine. Her daisy girl scout troop went too this time, and Claire had fun seeing her friends skate. Since Claire had a little more experience than some of the other girls, she was able to skate alone (not holding my hand), and a lot faster.

About an hour into it, we decided we wanted to try some tricks. We worked on skating by moving our legs in and out in a serpentine sort of pattern. She also learned to turn a tighter circle by leaning one way or the other and letting the other foot pivot around, and how to wiggle-dance to the songs she liked.

By the end of the day, she was skating so fast around the oval, I literally could not keep up with her and I had to cut across the center ice at one point to even get on the same side of the rink.

When I was telling her how impressed I was, I also asked her how in the world she was able to skate that fast. She said she was following a boy that was skating really fast and was wearing red skates. Heh.

The unfortunate thing about this trip was that she really did not want me to get my camera at any point, so I have no pictures of her new skating skills. She’s really quite confident on the ice for her age, and I know she likes it a lot. I wish we had an ice rink closer to Burlington. It’s such a hike to go to Greensboro all the time.

(2) While working on homework today, she declared that she did not like doing math. It was subtraction problems. I said, “That’s weird, because I thought you told me before that you liked math.” And she said, “Yeah, I only like multiplication tables.” What a little show-off!

(3) Her writing sample today is about groundhogs. It’s really cute. I’ll scan it later. I taught her a couple of tongue twisters, one of which was “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck…” and she wrote this for her groundhog assignment. I hope the teacher is amused.

a race, a trim, a day off

I trimmed Claire’s hair this weekend. It was looking a bit scraggly in the back. I took about 3 inches off the ends, and it looks much nicer. The curls are cuter now, and it still goes into a ponytail.

Last weekend I had a trail race. Not my best showing, but I had some issues with my hip and just some general fatigue. Minute/mile wise I didn’t too much worse than last month at Run at the Rock, but mentally it felt much worse. A couple of reasons for this, and things I would improve for next time: (1) at this race there were fewer runners, and those who were there were more “serious” so there were fewer people behind me. (2) The race was shorter than the last one (10 miles versus 14 miles), so I felt like I should have done better. (3) I had only run this trail once, and not very thoroughly, so I was not familiar with the terrain. This is not good for me. I don’t do as well when I can’t talk myself through the hard parts. (4) Nutrition – I had water but no electrolyte drinks. For some reason I thought they’d have them on the trail, but they didn’t. (5) Miles 6-8 were largely bike trails, which I do not like.

Speaking of biking, Claire has been riding without training wheels. She’s still quite wobbly, but she is excited about it, so this is a good thing.

We also went ice skating yesterday (this is claire’s 3rd time ice skating). Mimi got Claire her very own skates for Christmas, so we went to break those in. She did quite well. I think when she goes with the Daisies on Jan 31, she’s going to be a superstar.

daisies

Claire is in Daisy Girl Scouts this year. So far she likes it. It is held on Monday nights at 6pm at Gibsonville UM Church. The meetings are supposed to be around an hour, but sometimes they run a little long. The last meeting was a princess tea party. The girls made 4 crafts for the party: a napkin ring, a placemat, a party hat, and a fan. That was a lot of craftiness going on there!

Soon the girls will start to work on “petals” which are like patches, but for their Daisy level. They wear a little blue tunic and the petals get sewn onto the front in the shape of a flower. I’ll update with more pictures as Claire gets her petals.