LaurenandLloyd.com
where our wasted time becomes your wasted time
This really isn’t so much a post as it is, “I need to go to bed and these are the photos I have on hand”.
For snack the other day we were given graham crackers, marshmallow creme, and chocolate chips. We could have just eaten them separately, or had crunchy bits in a s’more-type sandwich, but I chose to show the children (booming voice) The Power Of The Sun and left the chocolate on the windowsill to melt it. This lesson can also be learned by (booming voice) Leaving A Snickers In A Hot Car.
I love Icees. They are the best thing to drink in the whole world. Lauren would like to put a soda fountain in the kitchen, but I say an Icee machine. She can always let the Icee melt. Lauren has come up with all sorts of reasons for me to have some number fewer than 4.4 Icees a month, and I have had to adapt. My first line of defense is to get them when she doesn’t know about it. So I always have an Icee on Bad Movie Night and when I fill up with gas. But when I fill up with gas I have to get one in a 32 once plastic cup, and Lauren can smell those a mile away (she thinks they end up in the Pacific Ocean, I point out that they are recyclable).
However, we have reached a detente of sorts. I can get Icees if I have a cup with me. So I always travel prepared. The cups are in the back seat. The straws are under the visor (in case you ever need one). I’m the only person who brings Wal*Mart cups into the Wal*Marts.
I’ve been thinking a lot about composting lately. Sustainable Dave has worms doing his composting right in his basement, but that’s a little too creepy for me. I’ve thought about having a worm composter right outside our back door, because then I could just toss the scraps right after I’ve scooped them from the cutting board.
The whole reason for this worm pondering is that Lloyd doesn’t want me collecting scraps in a container on the counter until I get around to taking them on the long walk across the yard to the ‘compost pile‘. That’s a problem because I am NOT walking a single banana peel across the yard when it’s dark outside. There are jibblie things out there, like vampires. So, this morning I came up with a multi-tasker solution. I have a gravy separator that gets used once in a never, so now it lives in the trash can, like Oscar, and I can walk the scraps out to the pile at my leisure. In full, safe daylight.
Move along, Sam. This post won’t interest you at all – it’s part of my memory archives.
It’s been nagging at me for quite a while how many bottles and tubes of junk I have in my bathroom cupboard. I think it was the hairspray post that made me think that maybe it was time to do something about it. For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to whittle away at all those extra things and use them up, and I thought about taking a picture of them all before I started. I really wish I had, because here is a mid-way picture, and it’s so embarrassing. Tiny half-empty bottles of shampoo that I can’t bear to leave at hotels because they’ll just throw them away; little samples of lotion and conditioner, ‘miracle’ lotions that I tried a few times and stopped using; many, many kinds of hairspray; and TWO kinds of nail polish remover. I don’t even paint my nails! The truly awful part is this isn’t even all of it. I have a stash of large-bottle shampoos and I didn’t show all the stuff that I use on a daily basis, or the stuff in my travel bag. Or the teacher-gift lotions/bath stuff in the downstairs bathroom! (I clean the toilets with the shower gel, though, so at least that gets used up.) Arrrgh!!!
Some eco-freak I turned out to be. This is ridiculous.
Happy Birthday to Mark, who is my brother!
We ran into a snafu with the recycling company. They forgot to pick up our tub that first Monday, which was understandable. (I was a new account, no problem.) I called and talked to an extremely nice lady on the phone who said that they’d take care of it. I got all eco-glowy and smug again, and loaded up our stuff in another box for the next Monday.
Hmmm. They forgot again. I called again and spoke to another nice lady who said that they’d get it straightened out and that they’d even credit my account to apologize for the inconvenience. Smugly glowing, but a little hurt, I went on collecting stuff around the house to have made into new stuff.
Guess what? They forgot AGAIN. Now, this past Monday was NOT a day to mess with me because that was the day of our Christmas Program and I was already amped up on stress like nobody’s business. So when I finally drug my sore feet home at 8:45 p.m. Monday night and saw those $%#@$ bins by the curb full of junk again, I got mad!!! “Don’t they know that I’m their biggest fan?? Don’t they know that I’m a crazy eco-freak? Don’t they know that I’ve been telling everybody to sign up for this program?” “Why are you out there yelling on the lawn?” asked Lloyd.
The next day I called the nice people back and they were most apologetic. Blah blah blah, long story short – big goof up with the paperwork, it should be better, my account is credited even more, yeah yeah yeah. We’ll see. We’ll just see……
The recycling bin came today! It’s much nicer than I thought it would be – larger than expected, and it comes with a lid! Hopefully we won’t have to request an extra one (even though getting one more would be free). I’m going to take it to school tomorrow to advertise it’s coolness to families, and also to perhaps sound out having families sponsor a month of recycling for the center. This company will take plastics 1 – 7, so our milk cups (of which we use a-plenty) could be recycled!
I read an interesting article about how they sort this stuff. Apparently we’re not using trained monkeys for this like Lloyd said.