Cleansing by camping
August 25, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 6 comments
We spent five days happily scrambling up rocks, walking on pine-needle-padded-and-scented trails, wading in crystal clear streams and generally wallowing in dirt.
Poets, writers and naturalists have so eloquently crafted passages and passages of tribute to this breath-taking valley. I would only trample and stumble on their words if I were to put forth my feeble attempt at describing Yosemite and the Sierra-Nevada mountain range.
Nonetheless, every visitor to the national park probably has his or her unique and personal experience while traveling through the valley.
John Muir’s description of the valley as a “tonic of wilderness” came to my mind as we clambered up a long stretch of Stately Pleasure Dome (can it be more appropriately named?) on a perfect evening.
We sat down on the luminous granite, uniquely Yosemite and watched Tenaya Lake stretching and glistening in the early evening sun. It may sound utterly corny to people, but I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I was being cleansed inside out. There were no noises in my head competing with each other to be heard. There were no petty thoughts that ran in and out from the sidelines.
Just the quietness and the smallness I was feeling.
I don’t meditate. But if I ever do, that will be the state I want to achieve.
Even my six year old and three year old, who were normally incapable of remaining silent for more than 30 seconds, were mesmerized by what was in front of them. Richard Louv wrote a whole book to encourage parents and children to play in natural surroundings. In Last Child in the Woods, he listed many practical reasons for staying outdoors.
But right there and then, all the reasons simply slipped away. Looking at my kids, I knew they got it. They were feeling it in their hearts.
Later, on the way home, my three-year old said, “I wish we could be camping all the time and forever.”
“Awesome idea if mom and dad didn’t have to work to eat and live,” I laughed.
When we got home, she dashed straight to her room. A few minutes later, she charged out jingling her piggy bank, “Mom, I think we have enough money!”
Taking a proud breath, she continued, “can we go camping now?”
Children, it seems, do not need to be persuaded to play in the woods.
This weekend as I tried to catch up with my regular blog reads, I saw that Greenbean, Burbs, and Ruchi were exercising their green muscles to fight against the evisceration of the Endangered Species Act.
Fresh from my overdose of nature (actually there is no such thing), I participated immediately with a sense of admiration for these green heroes but also a dose of sadness.
Why do we do these things to ourselves? It’s no different from chipping away at our beautiful home, one brick at a time, for a temporary nickel here and there. Depleted of any poetry in us, are we that different from a pack of hyenas?
I will leave with a passage John Muir wrote in 1877:
“When a man plants a tree he plants himself. Every root is an anchor, over which he rests with grateful interest, and becomes sufficiently calm to feel the joy of living.”
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Back to school camping trip
August 18, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 5 comments
Can you go anywhere without seeing “back to school sales” signs this week? Indeed school is starting for my kids next week. Before that happens, we are escaping to our back-to-school family camping trip for a few days.
Yosemite, here we come!
While Yosemite valley is breathtakingly beautiful, my personal favorite is Tuolomne Meadows in the Yosemite National Park where the sky is open, the domes are spectacular and the tourists are pleasantly fewer.
This is what we will see:
(courtesy of www.wikimedia.org)
and this:
(courtesy of www.yosemitehikes.com)
Be back in a week!
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Bragging time
August 11, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 4 comments
If you are a seasoned gardener, you will laugh at my misplaced exuberance. But hey, this is my first year and a few months ago, I could not tell the difference between a squash leaf and a melon leaf. More laughing at my expense, yeah, yeah.
But we are seeing the fruit of our labor. The corn is not quite there yet, but in a few weeks, these fragile and thin-looking ears of corn will be consumed with great enthusiasm. We are a little crazy about corn around here.
These are our baby melons. They may look like mature watermelons and cantaloupes. But remember that camera adds 10 pounds? They are only a little bigger than a decent sized egg. But aren’t they cute?
Here are our consistently flowering and fruiting strawberries. Every week, the six plants provide us a pint of strawberries. For the first year, I suppose it’s not too shabby. You natural green thumbs, humor me, for once?
Our carrots have come and gone. They were sort of deformed, stretching and bulging in all sorts odd directions. I happily ate them in a big bowl of salad nonetheless.
Tomatoes are late this year, though they are forming little green orbs. We did leave the plants alone for a whole month, leaving them to the sole care of a hastily rigged and barely working automatic sprinkler system. It was a miracle that most of them even survived.
Zucchinis and squashes are flowering; those will be on the bragging list for next week.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Sustain a sustainble life
August 4, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 4 comments
What does it mean to live a sustainable life?
Arduous clearly stole my would-be-brilliant thoughts last week. Fortunately I tucked away the rest of my random opinions that could only be surfaced and comprehended by a jetlagged mind at 3am. So here is my spin.
Coming back from our recent trip to China, I was disheartened. It may be hard to tell from my previous entries. But I would be blind if I could not see the consequences of 1.6 billion people trying to live like us. With India thrown in, that is 2.7 billion people potentially increasing their resource consumption by magnitudes. Frankly we don’t have any right or ability to stop them.
There are about 250 million registered cars in the U.S. Imagine 1 billion more cars on the road in the near future.
We consume 28 billion pounds of beef annually in the U.S. Imagine 140 billion more pounds of beef that may be produced in the horrendous factory farms every year.
On and on, you wonder why I was disturbed. I asked myself at 3am one jetlagged morning: “honestly do you really think it matters whether you bring your own bags to the stores?” I could not produce a satisfying answer.
Then a couple of days later, Crunchy Chicken asked an interesting question – would you behave differently if energy and water were free in terms of financial and environmental cost? Most people mentioned that they’d probably keep their houses a little warmer in the winter and a little cooler in the summer.
Then it clicked for me. Even if energy and water were free and even if all 2.7 billion people were striving to emulate our lifestyle, it would not change most of the things I do now.
I’d still enthusiastically
I’d still use green cleaning products, buy organic produce and meats, eat less junk food, apply non-petroleum based lotions, because I do all these things out of health concern not obligation.
I’d still recycle and compost, I’d still bring my own bags and cups to the stores, I’d still use homemade napkins, I’d still not buy crap from Target, I’d still repair our household tools and gadgets as much as possible, because I do all these things out of habit not obligation.
Sure I could use a longer shower or turn up the heat a couple of degrees in the winter. But these are hardly sacrifices.
I can’t seem to cut traveling out of my life, though I try to do it with as little impact as possible, I let my children get plastic (gasp!) lego pieces, mostly from second hand, I enjoy occasional restaurant outing, and we patronize the ones that use local and organic ingredients.
This is how I plan to sustain a sustainable life - living it with joy and leaving room for eco-sins now and then.
Thank goodness I am just into stock car racing, bi-annual home remodeling, or weekly shopping. Otherwise I might have to suffer some serious sacrificing for the common good.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Lost art of fix-it
July 29, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 9 comments
This weekend my vacuum cleaner stopped working. It was humming beautifully before our vacation. Surely someone must have broken into our house to vacuum our floor when we were away. In any case, since I did part with a handsome amount of fund for an engineering degree, albeit from long time ago, I decided to open the chassis and fix it myself.
A couple of frustrating hours later, the chassis was jammed back on with some loose nuts and bolts scattered on floor. It was still not working!
Leafing through the yellow pages for repair shops, I managed to find a few within 25 miles from our house. Unfortunately most of them are not open on weekends. It’d probably cost as much as half the vacuum cleaner.
Is repair work a lost art?
During our trip to China, we found a few out in the rural areas. Want to fix the right heel of your otherwise wearable shoes? Here is the man for you:
Are your pots and pans all dented or rusted? These nice looking men can turn them into shining new cooking vessels again:
Dulled knives or scissors? This clever man powers his sharpener with a bike:
Unfortunately in the wealthier Chinese cities, repair shops are disappearing as well.
It’s the economics - with virgin material being undervalued (thus seemingly cheap), the labor cost of repairing an item is often close to or more than its replacement cost. Throw in the inconvenience of not having the item while it is being repaired and the almost instant availability of a replacement item, the choice of junking old and buying new seems perfectly rational, at least to most people.
I am not sure if the art of fix-it will make its massive comeback next year, though I suspect in time the cost of virgin material and cost of labor will shift the balance once again. The economics will tilt back to the side of repairing.
For me though, repairing an item as much as possible rather than chucking it has its elegance. Tossing out a vacuum cleaner without at least trying to figure out the problem is simply crass. Go ahead and laugh. But there is a universal beauty in maximizing the efficiency and usage of resources.
The elegance of maximizing resource efficiency is manifested in living creatures and man-made designs. Even in building computer chips, unnecessarily utilizing silicon space and power is considered to be sloppy and poor engineering.
So yes, to me, fixing things is not about the economics; it’s about aesthetics. You can call me a kook, but I am sticking to it.
This weekend, you will find me sitting on our driveway, with the vacuum cleaner manual and parts all spread out. I may tear my hair out again, but at least I feel elegant, maybe not Birkin bag sort of elegant.
***************************************************************
Also want to also pass on some good fix-it information from a bay area simple living group. Thanks Kathryn Benedicto.
- www.RepairClinic.com is a website that gives useful tips for fixing stuff yourself, plus resources for finding repair shops in your neighborhood
- www.recyclethis.co.uk is one of my favorite sites (though more for repurposing than repairing). Can’t figure out what to do with old socks? Let me count the ways.
Locally:
- Menlo Vacuum and Fix-It, 1179 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, (650-322-9333) - repair all sorts of small appliances and electronics, also recycles batteries
- West Bay TV, 3219 Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, (650-368-3384) - repair TVs, stereos, cameras
- Rancho Grande Appliances, 2890 Bryant, San Francisco, (415-641-51390 - repair washers, dryers, refrigerators, stoves
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Happy hour addiction
June 30, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 13 comments
“Mommy, mommy, are we going to have a happy hour this Friday?” my daughters regularly ask me whenever the weather is reasonably nice. They are six and three, a tad shy of the drinking age. Apparently several of our neighbors’ toddlers ask the same question. In case you are gasping, let me assure you that these children have not developed any taste for alcohol.
It all started on a warm Friday evening three years ago. One of my neighbors M decided to set up a folding table on her driveway, with a couple of bottles of wine, a jug of freshly sqeezed and mixed lemonade, a plate of crackers and a bowl of pretzels. On the ground were a few toys and a pack of chalk.
We were on our way home from a walk, with a toddler, a new born and a puppy in tow. M flashed a friendly smile and invited us for a drink. Before that evening our interactions were limited to “hello-isn’t-the-weather-grand”. A glass of wine later we learned that her little baby was a month older than my newborn, she loved the color red, her husband had six brothers, and much more.
Then more neighbors walked by and stopped to have a drink of just a chat. Within a couple of hours, we began to know each other - our names, kids’ ages, favorite local hangouts, and naturally our beverage preferences. Turned out we had twelve children within four years of age on our short block.
Thanks to M, the Neighborhood Happy Hour (TM) was born. From then on, about six families on our block have taken turns to host the NHH most Fridays in the summer. Kids look forward to playing with each other way past their bed time on those evenings.
(courtesy of http://www.nyfolklore.org/>
And you ask, so what? You guys have drinks together now and then. Big deail.
Well the big deal is that we’ve gotten to know each other well enough to ask for favors, loads of favors. Unaccustomed to asking help from others, I began to see that being able to ask from and lend a hand to each other formed the basic frabric of a close-knit community.
Need to run a quick errand without the kids? We watch each other’s children.
Need a circular saw one or twice but don’t want to buy one? We know where to borrow.
Need a ride to the train station or airport? I have offered several times and haven’t failed to find one yet.
Too busy to go to farmers’ market? No problem. I can bring you back a few pints of strawberries and two bunches of yellow beets.
Want to read National Geographic, Economist, and People but don’t want to to subscribe to them all? We swap magazines.
Need fresh oregano, basil an dparsley for that pasta dish you are making? No need to run to the store. The herbs in the planter box in my front yard are yours to take.
Can you water my plants when we are away for a week? Take out our trash and recycling bin? Done.
It’s easy to put a dollar value on a real estate property based on its location, its size, and its improvements. How do you assign a number to the closeness, friendliness, and helpfulness of neighbors? I don’t know, but it sure feels like that my house is worth 50 percent more.
While a little alcohol kick-started our little community, there are other approaches, believe it or not. Greenbean organized a buying group and a green book club.
Here are a few other suggestions from Norhwest Earth Institute:
- Start making short and simple contacts - Borrow milk or hand tools, ask for planting advice if you see a nice garden
- Make yourself accessible - Relax on your front porch, play games in the front yard.
- Work in the garden - It is one of the best ways to meet your neighbors.
- Start a babysitting coop - It works if you have young children (I have some reservation on this one because I have seen many “formal” babysitting coops. I get a headache just to see the agreements everyone has to sign, given our litigious society).
- Start a bulk product/service buying club - Greenbean is ahead of the curve. She can probably provide more detail.
- Throw a block party a few times a year - Apparently annual events are not frequent enough to keep people in touch.
- If all fails, entice neighbors with alcohol - Okay, this one is all mine.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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A midsummer night’s dream
June 20, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 6 comments
Summer of 08 is officially here! Today (summer solstice) is the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere and is the day the Sun is standing still, neither moving north or south. Summer solstice is celebrated by many cultures, yet it still has not been commercialized. Have you seen a Hallmark card that reads - may you find light and happiness on summer solstice?
But to me, it means the official start of summer! It means fun, ice cream cones, vacation, popsicles, camping, water play, beach, and family time.
Heather at Simple Green Frugal said the best: we work to live a life. In the spirit of putting our money where our mouths are, CindyC and I collectively decided to do less blogging for a month or two in the summer. What are we going to do? Aside from our work, we plan to maximize our time with our families and go outside.
Currently in our plans are hiking, swimming, camping, traveling, combing bath and running through sprinklers (as Joyce suggested), making popsicles, tending to our gardens, rock-climbing, visiting local farms, going to outdoor plays (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, anyone?), and eating lots of lots ice cream.
But we will still get on our soap box a couple of times a week. Once you get used to thinking out loud, you just can’t stuff it back in! We will continue to read about and participate the pleasure-centered green movement and share our fun.
Happy Summer!
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Caught red-handed in the recyling bin
June 16, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 9 comments
When it comes to “artwork” created by kids, the adage “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” unquestionably applies – when I see chicken scratches, my kids see flowers and clouds; when I see random squiggles, they see dolphins and anemones.
They don’t think twice before taking my new crisp printing paper and doodle a sheet a minute –artwork by quantity obviously. Naturally it is incumbent upon me to find them less wasteful alternatives.
By day, I am a business consultant – yeah, like a client calls me and tells me that they have a new widget that requires a price. I do this and that and eventually stick a number like $1294.3 in a fancy deck of slides. In any case, over the past couple of years I have quite a few different clients with various lines of business and diverse sizes. However one thing all of the companies have in common – too many people too readily hit the PRINT button.
Oops, I didn’t mean to hit the print button for a 124 page document. Oh well. Into the garbage can the paper goes.
I may need to review the slide deck with 10 people. I better print out 15 copies just in case. Oops only 5 people showed up. Oh well, that’s too bad. At least we have a recycling bin.
I see this all the time. It is estimated that every year an average US office employee uses 10,000 sheets of paper - that’s 30 pages a day. If I actually conducted a systematic research, I’d venture to say that 90% of the print outs are necessary. Paper is too cheap, there is little incentive for companies to encourage their employees to print less.
Here I am again, going off on a tangent. The point is that I paper-dive on the weekly bases just to get my children their paper supply, sometimes in the recycling bin and sometimes in the trash.
Every so often, I get caught with hands still in the cookie jar. “We are obviously not paying you enough,” some clients would joke. Sure, I am always happy to get paid more. I do get frustrated in that as a consultant I work on very specific projects. Reducing paper printouts for a company has never been and will not likely to be in my project pipeline. I have casually suggested setting some sort of quota for printouts by person or by departments. But as long as the paper price stays at its current level, my suggestion will never be taken seriously.
Anyway I haul the paper home and cut it in half. Now my girls can churn out 20 pieces of “artwork” a day without me constantly saying, “that’s enough. No more paper!” or “Just draw on the same one you just did.”
Then I secretively recycle almost all of their “artwork”, though occasionally they do catch me red-handed in the process of putting paper in our recycling bin.
Now that I have a fairly constant source of used paper, my next goal is to convince the teachers at my kids’ school to use it and then recycle it.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Farmers market hot or not
June 10, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 7 comments
On any given Sunday you can find me buckle up the helmets for my kids, load up bags in our trailer and bike to our local farmers’ market. When we are there, I split my attention three ways – looting fresh finds, tracking down my husband (he is super task oriented – bee-lining to stands X, Y, and Z) and making sure that I don’t lose my kids in the crowd. It’s always enjoyable, satisfying and fun-filled, but never relaxing.
This weekend, we changed the gear a bit. I went with a girl friend who was visiting us from San Francisco (SFGF). We meandered along the famers’ market and sampled the insanely good peaches and the season’s first bunch of heirloom tomatoes. We chatted with various farmers about the weather, the water shortage, what produce was coming, and even politics. A few times, I reflexively turned around to look for my kids before realizing that I was sans bambino responsibility.
I digress; that really isn’t the point of my story.
After buying everything on my husband’s list (told ‘ya he was task oriented), then some, my SFGF and I scored ourselves some freshly brewed coffee. We sat at the entrance to the market and did what we both loved to do (back when we had ample amount of time) – people watching.
My SFGF, single and with a keen sense of hottiness, pointed it out that there were quite a few fine looking men going into the market. “Look at that guy,” she discretely pointed out to me as a man in his late twenties/early thirties walked by us. She was right – tall, dark, handsome, donning casual summer garb and carrying his own canvas bags. Can a guy get any sexier than that?
In between ogling gorgeous fruit and minding my children, I usually fail to notice the people who frequent farmers’ market. With my friend’s guidance, I was able to see that there were quite a few hotties at my local farmers’ market. Is it because people go there tend to be healthier? More relaxed in a Sunday outdoor surrounding? More sensual because they appreciate the scent, color and taste of fresh produce?
Neither of us could nail down the reason but we hardly cared. I know, I know, it was incredibly childish and shallow, but we had fun watch and rate hotness as guys streamed by. Lest you accuse me of being crude and reverse-chauvinistic, Crunchy Chicken started it a while ago. Yes of course, it is always her fault.
What would you rate this guy? 6? 7? With and without the BIG oranges.
Okay, he is not from my local farmer’s market, just some
My SFGF informed me a farmer’s market stroll makes for a great first date. Really? I had my doubts. “Dude, the smell, the color, touching of the fruit, scantly dressed people,” looking at the lady plucking away at her harp, she added, “the mood music.” I literally choked on my strawberry.
She almost killed me. For you people who think your farmers’ market has crappy music, don’t be all self-centered. It’s not for you, it’s for people on their first date!
“Don’t you laugh. I had a date at Ferry Plaza.” She seemed like a semi-believer of the idea. Sure enough, I did find this and this.
Farmer’s market = potential meat market? Far better than a bar, in my humble opinion.
To follow Green bean’s thread – the new environmentalism should be all about “fulfillment instead of fear” – you can’t do much better than going to your local farmer’s market. Not only is it good for your health and for the environment, it’s also good for your social life – watching people in my case and dating people in my SFGF’s case.
Whether you are a guy or a girl, there are quite a few hotties to choose from!
CindyW at Organicpicks
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Jennifer Anisten or Jessica Simpson
June 4, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Green Journal , 9 comments
While all you good people have joined Greenbean’s bookworm bin and are probably reading ecologically relevant books, I am pathetically drawn to reading…uh, trash – People, Us, and occasionally In Style. No, I am not quite at the level of In Touch or other smut rags where aliens regularly make appearances.
Not that I care a shred about whether Britney Spears has gotten herself in trouble again, but on the few days that I am exhausted, I am prone to lay on the couch and leaf through smut rags if I happen to have them in the house. They can be two years old; it doesn’t bother me. It seems that TV isn’t vacant enough for me. People and Us are at the pit of my brainless valley. Something about celebrity coupling and garb de jour completely attenuates my brain waves.
Given what Google has been tracking, I am not alone. Britney Spears kicks Global Warming’s butt in terms of popularity. Sad, I know.
So for 30 minutes every few weeks, I shut down my mind and get into the lives of Nicole Kidman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Then I promptly forget the stories about them. Five minutes after leafing through an issue of People, I can’t recall much. Perhaps this is how smut rags work – they count on people shutting down their brain functions and then repeat the same stories over and over.
The only principle I have about trash reading is that I am NOT allowed to buy one. It’s bad enough that trees are cut for intellectually scintillating books. To decimate precious resources to fill our heads with the latest boob jobs is no less than a crime against humanity.
What do I do to get a peak of worthless yet oh-so-sickly-alluring trash?
I used to “speed-read” at Safeway checkout counter. Ever since farmers’ market seduced me away from supermarkets, I did not have a “regular” source, until I discovered I could borrow from a neighbor. You see, knowing your neighbors yields benefits in so many ways. Others borrow garden tools, I get People.
In fact a few neighbors around me subscribe to various magazines, including smut rags. We decide to share our monthly subscriptions – Time, Economist, People, US, and National Geographic, last of which is from our household.
I am quite happy that our National Geographic issues get around the neighborhood. At the end of their circulation, I put them on the curb with a free sign. They always disappear after a day.
I still feel bad about reading People in many ways – it pollutes my mind, wastes my time, and squanders natural resources completely unnecessarily. Really, do we care whether Nicole Kidman’s child has 13 toes? or that Pamela Anderson is married for the 15th time?
I can’t explain the psychology behind the attraction toward celebrity trash, but I feel a little less bad when one copy of People, not five, goes through 5 households. In short, if you must read smut now and then, don’t buy or subscribe. Millions of people subscribe to this crap. One of them may be your neighbor…
Chile, I will quit some day. Really, I will.
CindyW at Organicpicks
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