Sorry for the radio silence - my computer's on the blink, which has made me realise what a sad internet junkie I've become. So am using the hubby's, and it doesn't work as well with Blogger so some things will be a bit different today.

Anyway, don't think we haven't been busy. In fact, we've spent a large part of the last few days engaged in one of our favorite activities - pestering Dot's Dad about his lack of eco-friendliness. Now, to be fair, since we started this blog, he has (as discussed earlier) become a bit of a diesel advocate, got really good at recycling, closed the storm windows for us, usually turns the thermostat right back before we go to bed and has brought me a cup of tea in bed every morning (alright so that last bit has nothing to do with the environment, but it's very nice of him, no?). He's also very good at setting aside vegetable matter and teabags for composting and although it's usually me that treks down the garden to brave bears and deer to empty the bag onto the heap, he has also done that too a couple of times.

But there are two major sticking points: first he seems to have a genetic predisposition to leaving lights on. Actually he's a complete light fiend is always turning lights on to 'make it more cheerful'. I'll be sitting there, happily typing away in the gloaming, when in he strides, on goes the light and bam! Ambience and environment ruined. Many of these lights are in rooms he isn't even using and are being lit for purely aesthetic reasons. Not good enough! So Dot and I have taken to following him round and switching them off again with a snide remark. I'm sure it's really annoying so I hope to be able to report that he's changed his ways soon. (By the way, we haven't switched them all to the low whatsit bulbs yet because I can't work out if it's more wasteful to change them and throw away not-dead bulbs, seeing as they can't be recycled, or to keep using the not-dead ones and keep wasting the extra power. So many of these rock-and-a-hard place decisions. If you know the answer let me know - and I'll keep investigating too).

The other thing he seems not to be able to get the hang of is unplugging his computer and switching off peripherals, like the printer, at night. What I didn't realise until quite recently (thanks to Ideal Bite) is that any plug that has an AC adapter, like a computer plug, as well as cell phone chargers, keep drawing power at almost the full rate even when you're not using them. (factoid: Only 5% of the power drawn by a cell phone charger is used to charge the phone. The other 95% is wasted when it is left plugged into the wall - Ideal Bite - they're not paying me, by the way, they just have a lot of good tips).

So I guess I'll just keep nagging him until he's beaten into submission. At least it gives me something to do out here in the country. Hm, but then he might leave which would be rather counterproductive, and would mean I had to make my own tea in the morning. And actually I've just found out that peripherals draw power even if you do switch them off. So I better buy him one of these plugs http://www.smarthomeusa.com/Shop/Hardware-Cable/Item/LCG1/ which apparently stop this terrible waste. That way we save power and our marriage.

Don't worry, the fun isn't over, we'll find something else to bait him about, I assure you.

Our muse in the top 100 eco heroes of all time

UK newspaper the Guardian has published a list of the world's top 100 eco-heroes of all time today, per the British government's Environment Agency. And there, at number 91, are Tom and Barbara from The Good Life! For those of you not familiar, The Good Life was a show we grew up on in the 70s about an earnest young middle class couple in the suburbs who sack in their jobs to live a sustainable life growing their own vegetables, rearing chickens, goats and pigs and generating electricity from the methane produced by their manure.

We rather fancy ourselves as Tom and Barbara, but with bears. Except on the days I fancy wearing a Kaftan. Then we're Margot and Jerry.

Just call me sir

So, further to yesterday's post about the general store, the hubby just told me that store's owner, Rocky, killed a 300 pound bear with a bow and arrow from a distance of 30 feet up the road last week. A bow and arrow!!! (Apparently the bear was just strolling along the road, but let's try not to think about that bit, eh?). So I think my plans to approach Rocky about the idling motors may have to go on the back burner for a bit. Not least because I'll be busy avoiding eye contact and calling him 'sir'.

Keep my nose out of it?

Here's another thing that's bothering me. In our tiny village, we have this great little general store which stocks all kinds of random things and is dead handy in a pinch. In the morning the flatbed trucks line up outside as locals grab a coffee and an egg and bacon sandwich on the way to work, and round about now (6 o'clock) they stop off for pizza and other homemade Italian specials on their way home. But here's the thing: they all leave their engines running while they're in the store. I think this is partly a display of trust - most people up here don't lock their front doors, either - and it probably also serves a practical purpose - they like to leave the AC or heat on. But what a total waste of petrol. So how do I handle this?

I could a) keep my nose out of it (after all, in the grand scale how much damage is this really doing?) but per my previous post, this is a bit lame; b) go and ask people nicely to to turn their engines off; the catches here being that I don't know how many of them have guns and I can't imagine these rugged outdoorsy folk would be best pleased to have a prim English girl telling them how to run their lives or c) speak to the store owner about possibly putting a sign up saying 'please, no idling', the problem here being that I don't want to alienate them (the previous owner of our house did and as a result became a pariah in the village - not to mention what will happen when teatime next rolls round and I realize I'm out of milk?). Well, for now I'll just sit here and kvetch about it but please leave comments, below, as to what you reckon I should do. Yours, Busybody Williams.

Phew, it's tiring work, all this crusading for a greener world

I'd just like to point out for the record that that is not my neck to the top right of the picture.

Does the supermarket sell humble pie?

I never thought I'd say this, but Dot and I actually had a very satisfying morning at the local supermarket, Pecks. We entered disconsolately, certain to find nothing to fit our principles, and the total lack of any organic items in the fresh produce section did little to lift our spirits (we did at least find a bag of locally grown apples, but not until we'd put back a butternut squash because it seemed ludicrous to us that it was imported from Mexico when we know they're in season down the road at River Brook Farm. This checking the origin of everything we buy is new to us but we're thrilled to have discovered another way to be geeky and self-righteous).

But then we stumbled on a small organic foods section, enough to equip us with organic black beans and pasta. And in the frozen foods aisle - usually the last place we'd shop - we came across a pocket of organic breads and organic frozen fruit and vegetables - so we grabbed some. Pecks also stocks delicious yoghurt and cheese from the local Tonjes Farm (they look rather incongruous amidst the plastic cheese and nuclear chicken breasts, and we couldn't help noticing that the cheese as a little mouldy, suggesting we might be the only ones who actually buy the stuff), so we stocked up on those too.

Feeling emboldened by these happy finds, I asked the lady at the checkout whether they stocked eco-friendly loo roll or cleaning products. She looked at me blankly but offered to call the manager. This friendly lady immediately agreed to look into stocking the paper and told me she might have it as soon as Thursday, all being well. She then took me to the cleaning aisle where she proudly showed off their one brand of eco-friendly washing-up liquid as well as a multi-purpose cleaner and Dr. Bronner's Sal Suds. Apparently other customers had requested these and so Pecks had introduced them.

So it's humble pie for dinner for us tonight - there we were dismissing this as a lost cause when all we had to do was actually bother to look instead of acting on assumptions and ask, rather than sitting there moaning and being all superior (typical bloody New Yorkers, us). I'm normally a bit shy about these sorts of things but if making a change is really this easy, we're going to have to get over ourselves and become ecopests.

We'll be checking back next week to see if the loo roll arrives. Then we'll tackle our next crusade: the fruit and veg, and after that, lightbulbs. Of course, once they've turned up in-store, the next step is encouraging people to buy them. Now that might be a little bit trickier...

Dreaming of a light Xmas part 2

No Dot, you can't have one of these.

Dreaming of a light Christmas

So we went to the tree lighting and carols in Narrowsburg last night. A smallish group huddled round a smaller tree looking slightly unsure as to who was meant to be leading, and as one contingent launched into 'Frosty the Snowman', another called for 'Jingle Bells', even as a lone soprano warbled the opening bars of 'Hark the Herald'. Dot and I have never been much for American Christmas music anyway, and were more impressed with the mulled wine and grilled cheese sandwiches provided by our friend Michael of the Main Street Cafe and wine shop.

Anyway it was all a bit early for me to really be getting into the Christmas spirit. Not so our neighbours. Overnight, pumpkins and blow-up turkeys have been ousted from front lawns by illuminated inflatable snowmen, nodding fairy-light deer and veritable avalanches of those flashing icicle lights. Restraint is not a much admired virtue and I'm noticing that taste is often in inverse proportion to the size of the front lawn. But I have to admit that, with the long, cold nights and the lonely, dark, wooded roads out here, there's something strangely comforting about coming upon an isolated house ablaze with (even pretty naff) festive cheer.

Which brings me to my own Xmas dilemma. You see, I love Christmas. I'm a real sucker for the carols, the trees and especially the pretty lights. And it being Dot's first Christmas and all, I have this picture in my head of the three of us battoning down the hatches against the bears, coyotes and sub-zero temperatures and snuggling up in front of our wood stove and our twinkly Christmas tree. But on the other hand I know I should be thoroughly diapproving of it all and boycott the lights in a bid to save the planet. I mean, how much bad must all those extra lights being left on all the time do - especially the ridiculously OTT displays described above and summed up by this pic I nicked off it's the environment, stupid (and yes, I know this is Thanksgiving cheer, which somehow makes it even more ridiculous, don't you think?)


But what to do? I have spotted a lovely bit of fir tree abandoned down the road after a neighbour pruned her garden. I think tomorrow I'll pop over with the secateurs and a hacksaw and see what I can contrive from salvaged branches. Hm, a simple fir wreath and a few boughs draped in tinsel recycled from last year could actually be quite stylish in a rustic sort of a way, even without lights. I'll keep you posted, as always.

Don't shop shopping...

So yesterday, the busiest shopping day of the year in the US, Dottie and I had a brilliant idea - we would buy nothing all day (we didn't have the idea till we had in fact bought a cup of frothy coffee, our first this month, from Roasters in Narrowsburg, but at least that was only $2.25.). Our reasoning is that some people believe that western consumer culture is what's at the root of global warming, and also we wanted to thoroughly disassociate ourselves from people like the really annoying ones on the radio who were shrieking about having been camped outside their local mall since 3am to get in early on the day-after-Thanksgiving bargains (they said their fellow campers were now 'like family'. Bonding over the promise of cut-price tumble driers - I think they need to get a life).

Then we got home and found out (on a tipoff from the hubby's cousin Mopsy) that we were as usual either behind the curve or bang on trend, depending on how you look at it, because it was in fact Buy Nothing day yesterday in the US and today in the rest of the world (see Adbusters.org for more info). So we bought nothing for the rest of the day and have also bought nothing so far today, either (not hard as we haven't actually left the house yet. But at least we were both up and dressed by 10. Well, alright, 10.30).

We hadn't really thought about not shopping at all, as opposed to only shopping for certain things, as a way to be green until our friend Circe (check out her brilliant photos at circephoto.com) put us on to the Freegans, a group who found it nigh-on impossible to shop ethically so they've completely boycotted the economic system. Best know for dumpster raiding, they exist entirely on found items or through barter and almost never buy anything at all (Circe followed them on a Dumpster raid round New York one night for a story and said it was a right laugh). The Freegan philosophy is a bit extreme for us to take up wholesale - eating food out of a dumpster is a bit different from the old 5-second rule, and while we don't exactly have a shopping problem on the scale of some of our friends (you know who you are...) the idea of NEVER again experiencing the thrill of the new APC tunic or boxfresh Marc by Marc Jacobs flats is a bit more than we can swallow just at the moment - but it has made us feel better about being too skint to buy very much at all for now (penury as a political statement - brilliant!) and think harder about what we throw in the bin (do you know I once put a pair of Marc Jacobs shoes in the rubbish? Sooo wantonly wasteful and I regret it to this day. That'll teach me).

Luckily there's still Christmas to put things right (adbusters is recommending a buy nothing Xmas too). Our friends and family can look forward to a Christmas morning filled with fairy liquid bottles, empty loo rolls and sticky-backed plastic - lucky old them. (Oh my god, I just checked and not only is Blue Peter still on, but they actually still do all the crafty things. There are even some fairly eco-friendly options, like the compost bin cannily disguised as a dalek or the furry animal hanger, a canny way to revamp an ordinary household item.)

Speaking of Christmas, we're off to the tree lighting and Christmas carols in our local town Narrowsburg. If we were being really good we'd perhaps even boycott this, but it is Dot's first Christmas and hey, we never claimed to be Freegans...

Happy Belated Thanksgiving

Here's Dot taking the air before tucking in to her turkey

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Hey, what do you mean this blog is little more than a thinly veiled excuse to post pictures of my daughter looking cute?!

We're probably going to be a bit quiet for the rest of today - even a littlegreendot needs a day off now and then. Cheers, xx

Oh dear, a rant just crept up on me...

So I'm afraid I have to admit that we've fallen off the wagon again, but this time I'm blaming the supermarkets.

It was the nappies, of course. Yesterday I drove a half hour to our nearest health food store in Honesdale to stock up on all my fave green goodies (nappies and cleaning products, organic fruit and muesli, etc.). We got back and I'd just put Dot down for a nap in one of the eco-friendly nappies when she started protesting loudly. I thought I'd better check that the nappy wasn't the problem and what I found in her pants (and her tights, onesies, knickerbockers, hat, etc. Well, alright, not her hat) was not pretty. Apparently Dot and her bowel movements have suddenly outgrown the size small Seventh Generation numbers (don't worry, we'll pass them on to a new baby we know. The unused ones, natch).

Now, in the UK this would be no big problem - you'd simply nip to the local supermarket and pick up size medium eco-friendly nappies aplenty, along with all the non-toxic cleaning products, fair trade shade grown coffee and organic or locally grown fruit and veg and your earnest little heart could desire. But we're in America, pretty red-state America at that, and so there's not an organic apple, let alone a compostable nappy, to be found in any supermarket this side of New York (or LA).

I know Wholefoods and co are bucking the trend - and in fact our friend Jamie arrived for Thanksgiving from the city today with a lovely care package of Wholefoods organic honey, tea, chocolate, pie and milk (hm, trying to pre-emptively atone for anticipated bad behaviour, JB?!), but it'll be a long while before WFs makes it to Honesdale. And I know Wal Mart is, to much fanfare, meant to be going organic, but in their Honesdale branch there's not an organic scrap to be found, and even on their website all I could find in the organic section was organic milk, organic Ragu pasta sauce and organic Kelloggs Raisin Bran. Hardly changing the world there, are we?

Hold on, I'm not quite done with this rant yet. Since I was a kid, you've been able to buy eco-friendly washing up liquid and cleaning products in every supermarket in the UK. The leading UK retailers are currently falling over each other to be the greenest on the block (for example, you can now buy a windmill to generate your own power in B&Q, the UK's equivalent of Home Depot) and whatever their motives, this has to be a good thing for everyone. So how come the US is so far behind? No wonder it now ranks #53 in the list of eco-friendly countries (only China, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia do worse - not exactly stiff competition, is it? The UK on the other hand is #2. But this wasn't meant to turn into a US/UK pissing contest).

Phew, sorry about that, so anyway, my point is, we ended up - and it really pains me to tell you this - buying a small pack of Pampers to tide us over until the compostable Nature Boy and Girl nappies arrive in the mail.

I tell you, it wasn't easy being green in New York but it's really an uphill struggle sometimes out here.

If anyone knows, by the way, how to convince a supermarket to change its stocking policies (and I know convincing the locals to buy is probably the answer) please let me know! And I promise to try and be less serious tomorrow.

It's shopping tip time again

So I mentioned before that we were on the eBay hunt for blankets to act as draft excluders/curtains for the kitchen doors. Well, instead of the Welsh blanket I showed you initially, we went for these Swiss army numbers, also off eBay. What a double whammy - recycling and helping conserve energy, all for only $20 apiece. Eco-chic at its finest I'm sure you'll agree. Plus, note the organic curtain rod freshly hewn from the garden.


And let me tell you they arrived not a day too soon - this morning there was the sort of thick rost Laurie Lee would do a good job of describing and it's barely got above freezing all day. But we're cozy on the inside.

It's cold in dem dar hills

At least it was today and is supposed to go down to 20F tonight - brrrr. Luckily we're all prepared with a fetching snowsuit for Dot we got in Patagonia. Was feeling a bit bad about it, being synthetic and all, till I found out they're actually pretty good at helping the environment. Hurrah, more shopping you don't need to feel too bad about from Freya and Dot. More tomorrow when we show you our fabulous new draught-excluding but second hand woolly curtains. Oh, here's Dot. God she's cute (even if she does look like a Smurf, Anna).

Go Laurie

So I've been meaning to mention for a while now that Laurie David is our hero du jour. She's done a massive amount to get global warming on the national agenda (did you know she was instrumental in getting the must-see An Inconvenient Truth made? Of course you did!) spurred on by Bush wonning a 2nd term. I will know we've started to achieve success when my hubby is channelling Larry David in this speech about her (as opposed to just channelling his Curb Your Enthusiasm character all the time).

Acutally in this speech Larry touches on a topic I've been wondering (and feeling slightly guilty) about ever since my friend Lucy, who used to live in eco-friendly California, told me a little mantra she learned there: 'if it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down' (ick). This would be another great reader poll opp: would you consider not flushing the loo if it was only number one to save the environment? I can't quite bring myself to do it, though it wouldn't really matter out here in the country. So instead I tried to take the alternate approach today of putting a blown-up plastic bag in the cistern so that you use much less water each time you flush (I have read you could also use a common or garden brick but didn't have any to hand). But I didn't quite manage it because - and I know this sounds really ridiculous - I have this irrational fear of pipes, plumbing, urinals (especially urinals), anything like that (for example I get pretty freaked out if I'm on my own in a public toilet, especially if it's a really old one like you'd get in an old British hospital or like the loos in Bromley cinema where they have the overhead cistern - aargh, getting the shivers just thinking about it....) ANYWAY so I couldn't put the bag in the loo because I got too freaked out. I know it's pathetic. But I will ask the hubby to do it tomorrow instead. And maybe if you readers are less crap than me, you could do it too, unless you have one of those snazzy modern loos where you can do the half flush if you like, elegantly negating the need for the bag or brick.

But Dot and I did manage to join Laurie's Stop Global Warming virtual march which you can do too here. It only has half a million signatories which seems a bit crap considering the population of the US just passed 300 million (was hoping Dot might be the 300 millionth American but she missed it by a few weeks) so go join up! We hope to meet Laurie some day - after all, gotta think big.

Dot in a Pot (or, Dottie for dinner)

Oh dear, how could this have happenned? After I was so careful with the orange hat and all, too!

Just kidding, unfortunately this is the kind of thing her father does for kicks these days. Well, it's not as if there's much else to do of a frigid Pennsylvania evening and I suppose t beats drinking 72 pints of lager down the pub.

An uphill struggle...

So I promised you adventures in diesel. The first thing you need to know is, while those Euros all nip around their cities in diesel Renaults and Fiats, no one in America drives a diesel car. When we were looking to buy one ourselves (the lovely vintage Jeep Wagoneer was costing us $40 for a one-way trip from NYC to Milanville and had a habit of breaking down on deserted roads in -20F snowstorms), we discovered that's because no one - besides VW - sells them.

[Now you might think this is no big deal - after all, diesel is nasty dirty stuff, right? Well, acutally, on the highway (where we mostly drive), diesel cars are as fuel-efficient as Hybrids, and these days diesel has been cleaned up so it has far fewer emissions than of old. (When I tell my husband's friends this, they raise their eyebrows and say 'really?!' in a tone of voice which means "yes dear, I don't want to contradict you in front of your husband but clearly you have no idea what you're talking about (and anyway, they don't make diesel Porsches so la la la I can't hear you)". So for them - and you know who you are - here's a link to prove it). You might also ask yourself why no one sells diesel cars, and I'm pretty sure all gas-guzzling roads would lead back to GWB and friends.]

Anyway, because of this, lots of garages don't sell diesel and when they do, it's usually from a clapped out old pump somewhere out the back with grass growing through the tarmac, a lever you have to swing from 'off' to 'on' and those numbers that flip round like a really old digital clock. But we don't care, because we now get upwards of 45 miles to the gallon and given that gas prices just went up again today, we can feel double smug - our new car (a diesel VW Golf) might not draw admiring glances from East Village hipsters but we're saving the planet and pennies at the same time - hurrah!

So we were driving back from collecting Emily on Thursday and we were running late (my fault) which meant Dot was hungry and screaming and we got caught in a rainstorm of monsoon-like proportions. We pulled up to the one diesel pump on the whole of the Palisades Parkway and while the hubby waited for the 4Runner (huge ugly SUV) parked at the pump to move along, I ran through the rain into the store to pay.

Dripping, I asked the girl behind the counter for $30 of diesel. "Diesel?" she said looking at me like I was a moron. Me: "Yes, please." Her "You do know what diesel is, right?". Me: "Er yes, thank you." (She'd clearly never sold diesel to anyone before. This reminded me of the labour nurse who, as I was having a baby without drugs, kept looking at me saying, 'wow, I've never seen this before', which as you can imagine was not very reassuring, but anyway, I digress). So I paid up and ran back through the rain to find the hubby still waiting for the 4Runner driver to return. He didn't look happy.

So I ran back through the rain to the store and said to the girl, "There's someone still on the diesel pump." She said "Oh" and went back to her magazine. I shouted to to the store in general, "Anyone got a 4Runner on the diesel pump?" No one answered. Eventually the girl looked up, shrugged slowly as if to say 'silly old me' and mumbled "Oh, that's mine." Gah. I ran back to the car. Five minutes later she turned up and moved it. By this point, my marriage was hanging by a thread. We filled up and turned back into the rainy night (though not before we discovered she'd put $13 on the pump instead of $30 - I mean who buys $13 of gas?).

The good news is, I think this episode helped turn my husband from a resistor into a militant diesel driver. As we drove off he muttered that we should have known the 4Runner was an unneccessarily large, gas-guzzling SUV and as such could only have been driven by a woman dumb enough to use the diesel pump as a parking spot and not to remember that fact when her customer wanted to pay her to buy diesel fuel.

Just goes to show you the uphill battle we've got to turn the good ole US of A from red, white and blue (especially Red) to green.

PS in case you're about to suggest I try biodiesel, I did look into it and it would have meant adding a heater into the engine and driving 200 miles in the wrong direction to fuel up and I'm not up to converting fat from the local chippie. But I love the idea and it's on the back burner.

Dot dodges a bullet


Dottie's new hunting hat. This baby ain't nobody's supper.

Lucky escapes…

You’re lucky Dot and I are still here to tell our planet-saving tale. Unbeknownst to us, hunting season began two days ago. In retrospect, the fifteen year-old boys toting three-foot shotguns we passed as we headed out for our walk yesterday should have tipped us off, but it wasn’t until a sharp crack to our left made us jump out of our skin that we decided walking in the woods might not be such a good idea. So tomorrow it’s off to the farm shop to find some luminous orange garb for little Dot – she may be edible but I don’t really want her being turned into venison.

Our uninvited house guest problem was also put into perspective by reports of a bear-sighting in our local friends Kelly and Anna’s yard. Think I'll take mice over bears. Mind you, there was that curious incident of the four-pound weight…

Anyway, we took another small step in the right direction today. This one's REALLY embarassing because it is kind of 'going green 101'. I've been meaning for ages to start using a washing up bowl whenever I wash up (which the hubby would contend is rarely) but instead have been wantonly running the tap. Today I was finally spurred into action by the need to eke out the last of the eco-friendly washing up liquid. So I dug out the washing-up bowl we used as Dot's bath when she was first born and got to work. I was really shocked at how little water I needed. I haven't been able to find a definitive figure on how much I'll now be saving every time I wash up, but estimates I found range from 5 to 9 litres. However, since taps apparently spout 2 to 3 gallons a minute this seems conservative.

Blimey, am so crap - that bowl's been sitting there and all I needed to do was go upstairs to the bathroom and get it. No wonder the planet's in peril. It's because people like me keep putting things off till tomorrow. Speaking of which, I know I promised you adventures in diesel but I'm just soooo tired. Can we do it tomorrow?

Dot in the washing up bowl

Meeses

Oh dear, another apology because I know you've all been dying for news of the mouse. It's just that Emily's been my best mate since we were nine and we couldn't quite squeeze a blog entry into her super-quick visit. But that doesn't mean we haven't been indefatigable in our quest for green-ness.

So, rodent update time. On Wednesday night, I set the Steve Smith Homemade Humane Moustrap (SSHHM) and went to bed. I was awakened around four by a crash which at first I took for the ghost we suspect is haunting the spare room, but then realized was actually the SSHHM tripping. Success!

So in the morning we set off to collect Em from the city with the SSHHM carefully arranged on my lap, weighted down with the River Cafe Cookbook to prevent in-vehicle escapes. We counted five miles on the odometer then selected a grassy field with a view of rolling hills. I got out of the car, set the trap down, lifted the lid, leapt backwards, and there, in the middle of the tray was....absolutely nothing! Aargh! I couldn't believe it. The SSHHM had malfunctioned.

Well, we had an extremely long day and by the time we finally got home I was in no mood for wrestling with the baking tray which refused to balance on the bamboo skewer, so in the end I gave up. That gave the mouse his chance and overnight, he nibbled his way through half a bag of flour (discovered spilled all over the floor) and the entire plastic lid of a tub of posh pancake mix in addition to most of it contents.

So last night, after trying to wrangle the tray onto the the skewer for half an hour, I made a minor modification to the design (a bit of tape round the skewer to provide traction), and went to bed.

This morning, the trap remained intact but a loaf of bread, which had been perched atop a set of old-fashioned scales on top of the 5.5ft fridge, did not. Somehow the mouse had waltzed right by the trap, scaled the sheer fridge wall, pulled the loaf and a 4lb weight off the scale and eaten almost the entire thing before disappearing.

At this point I think we may have to face facts: the mouse who got away must have taken his experience as a declaration of war and brought in reinforcements. Either that or he is in fact a squirrel.

Anyway, the husband says that's it, bollocks to humane traps, he's off to buy some old-school poison. I reminded him who it was that had let the mouse go in the first place, and begged him not to, but suspect he may have gone behind my back while Emily, Dot and I were out for a walk. So now I'm afraid it's a policy of don't ask, don't tell. I will continue with the SSHHM as long as evidence of mousey mates persists. But I'm afraid somebody in the house isn't 100% on board with the eco policy and I can tell you it isn't me...

Tomorrow: adventures in Diesel. It;s a good one, promise. xx

Hi all, sorry no posting today, nipped to NYC to pick up my best mate Emily over from England for a few days. Very long day so will have to catch you up tomorrow. There is mouse news...

Purple carrots

So here we are back in the country, and that means that when you get hungry at about 1 o'clock, you have to magic up some lunch from what's in the fridge. No nipping out to Hale and Hearty for a scrummy thing of soup and a fancy cake.

The cupboard was looking pretty bare, but I found some purple organic heirloom carrots in the fridge from Willy Nelson over at River Brook farm (our friend Paul said everything at River Brook is funny colours - pink potatoes, purple carrots, white tomatoes...), and decided to make curried carrot soup with them. Felt very resourceful and Nigella-esque - until my 6-year old blender decided to deposit most of it on the floor. Salvaged it somehow (alright, with a potato masher) and it ended up being edible, if a little redolent of mashed-up watery carrots.

But the flavour was hardly the point. This soup had a) saved me at least $7 (soup for two from chi-chi lunch joint: <$10; bag of hippy carrots: $3), b) saved the planet from pesticide contamination and c) contributed two less plastic (or cardboard) take-out containers to landfill. In fact, if we lived here for a year and I made soup instead of buying it every weekday lunch, that'd be 261 fewer plastic containers. Double that for the hubby and we're up to 522 - not to mention the paper baggies and the 522 annoying plastic utensil packets - aargh, and now I'm imagining all that multiplied by the six years I worked in Manhattan; or what about multiplied by all the readers of this blog (of course there are....several); not to even contemplate what you get to once you've added all those Thai and Sushi evening deliveries, and I'm looking at...well, the whole of Milanville would be shoulder-deep in waste. Oh, I have been so naughty, if I could take back all those plastic containers I would, but now they're all filling up a landfill site already and it's too late! I thought the only reason to look like a saddo and bring your own lunch was to save cash but I promise that if I do end up going back to work in January I shall bring my lunch with me as often as possible and positively flaunt it in my colleagues' faces as a badge of my eco-friendliness.

Ahem, anyway, so my point is, this was carrot soup for the soul.

And later, checking out a link sent to me by the lovely Courtney, I became even happier about the organic carrots. This site has a chart of the relative toxicity of different non-organic fruits and veg so that if you're a bit skint, or you're faced with a supermarket like the ones up here where there's no choice, you can at least pick the lesser of the evils. Carrots, it seems, are #13 on the list of the most toxic fruits and vegetables you can eat if not organic, so in fact I'd done me and Dot another favour. Hurrah!

Of course the bad news is that clocking in at numbers 1, 5, 6, 7 and 8 respectively are peaches, nectarines, strawberries, cherries and pears. Guess what yours truly literally gorged on the non-organic-but-highly-appealing Citeralla versions of while pregnant with Dot this summer....

This happy little tome then goes on to say:

There is growing consensus in the scientific community that small doses of pesticides and other chemicals can adversely affect people, especially during vulnerable periods of fetal development and childhood when exposures can have long lasting effects.

Oh Dottie, Mummy is very, very sorry.

This is all too depressing. I'm off to reset the mousetrap (what, you didn't think I'd forget, did you?)(and actually, make that 'rebuild' - guess who dismantled the previous incarnation and of course hasn't stuffed up the hole behind the cooker?) and then to bed to toss and turn with angst. Oh my god, I just heard a mouse skittering across the floor overhead. Really. Right, this time I mean business...

I should send the jiffy bag idea to this site - recyclethis.co.uk. Invites tips on how to recycle everything from used Colgate toothpaste pumps to out of date condoms. Suggestions range from the sublime to the ridiculous. (Found the link on the UK Times' Eco Worrier column).

The husband finally seems to be getting the hang of this recycling thing...

Last night the hubby found a great way to recycle a quilted jiffy bag he was sent:

It finds new life as a handy sleeping bag for Dot, perfect for keeping out the Pennsylvania chill.

Look, before you report us, I just want you to know we didn't really make Dot sleep in a jiffy bag. I made him take her out of it immediately. Well, as soon as I stopped laughing, anyway. Poor littlegreendot...

Well, what would you have done?

Had planned to post a picture of the naughty Zara tights and do a reader poll: if you were me, would you have been bad and bought them or not? But I can't work out how to do a proper poll (and anyway the tights would have won by a landslide) so here's your chance to try out the comments function, below. Here Dot is in her tights. Ooh, isn't she good enough to eat?

This picture has nothing to do with anything, just though you hadn't seen Dot for a while and she looks nice and bonkers in this picture. Now onto the serious stuff...

Is somebody trying to tell me something?

So New York’s been a bit of a struggle. Firstly my computer refused to connect to the internet from Lucy’s apartment, hence the radio silence – well, that, and the fact that Dot’s decided she’d rather protest for four hours than go to sleep at bedtime. Last night the wily little bugger had four of us taking it in turns to rock her off, and every time we relaxed, thinking she’d gone down, snap, the little eyes would open, quickly followed by the little mouth, and back to the griping, grizzling and caterwauling routine. Think it was her drunken Daddy who finally got her off around ten (knocked out by the alcohol fumes, perhaps?). But obviously the baby had to take precedence over the blog (the baby takes precedence over everything, little darling).

On top of that, I have to confess we’ve strayed from the righteous path. Yesterday afternoon we somehow found ourselves in Zara Baby where we were hoodwinked into buying some distinctly non-organic and almost certainly non fair trade (but extremely cute) stripy cotton tights. Zara makes exactly the kind of disposable fashions we’d promised ourselves we’d eschew in favour of second hand, vintage, long-lasting and organic garments. Bad bad Freya and Dot! At least we asked for no plastic bag with our purchase (by the way, let’s all start doing this as often as possible. We were in Club Monaco yesterday too (looking, not touching, promise) and I noticed they wrap everything in tissue before it goes in the bag, as do most shops. Of course it feels rather wonderful when you get home and unwrap your shiny new item from its gorgeous parcel, but think how much even better it would feel to be able to be all smug about saving a tree instead (especially around ‘the holidays’ when I dread to think how much damage all those pressies cause to the environment as most are wrapped once by the shop, then again by us in wrapping paper). Might even assuage some of the guilt of the shopping spree (hey, we’re getting good at these conscience-easing shopping tips). OK, rant over).

And then to cap it all off, I just committed the cardinal household cleaning product sin – I used…BLEACH! In Lucy’s shower I realized I’d forgotten my shampoo so helped myself to her rather lovely Clove Aveda shampoo and conditioner – you know, the stuff that dyes your hair (of course I only picked that bottle because it was the more environmentally conscious choice than the Pantene). Well, I would have told you anyway Lou, but now I’ve been totally caught red – or make that sort of reddish-brown – handed because the conditioner somehow splattered off my hair and dyed the tub and tiles instead and WOULDN’T COME OFF no matter how hard I scrubbed. So I dripped my way to the kitchen to look for white vinegar, the eco-friend’s alternative to bleach, but all I could find was Clorox. So I did it. I used as little as possible but bleach is bleach is bleach. And goddamn the stuff, of course it worked. Anyway, as penance I have since spent ages scrubbing my hands a la Howard Hughes to get rid of all traces before Dot wakes up from her nap. Don’t want to be corroding her precious baby skin with horrid bleach and fumes now, do I?

So do you think somebody’s trying to tell us something? We’ve had a lovely time really, but maybe it’s time to go home. We’re slipping back into bad habits here in Vice City.

Bottoms

So we’re back in the city for a few days. Dot’s Dad phoned from the pub last night to say he was in culture shock. Dot’s been a bit off her normally very mellow stride today too, so you have to wonder if she’s discombobulated by the change. Or maybe it’s because she’s sleeping in my friend Lucy’s wardrobe (the best place we could find to hang her hammock). I think I’d be a bit thrown by that. Hey, no need to phone social services – we haven’t shut the door….!

So, on to the rather lovely topic of bottoms and the fact that, over the past twenty-four hours, two people’s bottoms have rejected my attempts to make them greener.

First was Dot's. As we mentioned on day one, since she was born, Dot’s been trying to find a greener alternative to disposable nappies but had fallen on back on them as, being upstate, we didn’t think we could manage the cloth diaper thing without a washing machine. Well, they might be chlorine-free, but even so I just couldn’t believe how many Seventh Generation disposables we’ve already contributed to landfill.

So on Saturday I thought, we’ll be staying round the corner from Whole Foods this week, I could buy more of those G-Diaper liners so let’s just give them one last try. (For those of you who aren’t familiar, G-diapers are these natty, colourful numbers; the outers are cotton and the liners are fully flushable and/or compostable. Lovely idea, but in practice, we’d found they leaked. All the time. So I spent half my life with hands immersed in scalding water washing poop off the outers. (Just the thing when you’re trying to get the hang of a week-old baby.)

All morning, Dot’s nappies had been suspiciously clean. I put the G-diaper on for the retrial around noon. I fed her. She scrunched up her face. She went red. She clenched her little fists. And boom! A pant explosion on an epic scale. She’d obviously been saving it all up for a real torture test. Anyway, the next part of this story has been deleted to protect the innocent, but let’s just say the G-Diaper failed the retrial quite spectacularly.

So for now, it’s back to the disposables. I’m actually going to try these Nature Girl nappies recommended by Amanda from my yoga mummies group – apparently less materials used and biodegradable (ooh, actually just visited the site and they're compostable, so will def do more research when not so totally knackered, as well as into composting and wormeries...there's hope on the horizon!). And if I’m feeling really good, might even try my friend Evie’s suggestion to use cloth diapers in the few days in the run-up to laundry day. As she said, even one a day is 365 less in landfill a year (she’s a cloth diapering pro – enough respect Evie!).

Bottom number two was my friend Kim’s. Over tea and sticky toffee pudding today at 220 on 9th Ave she said she’d been so shocked by our loo roll blog entry that she’d rushed out and bought some Seventh Generation paper to try (hurrah!). But she had not been impressed. “It’s like that awful cheap stuff,” she said. “And the roll goes on forever. I just want my Charmin back.” I guess I’ve been using it for so long I hardly notice.

So, Kim, two top tips for you and your tender-bottied fellow Charminites. If you do use the Seventh Generation stuff, the 2-ply is better than the 1-ply. But you might like to try this quilted Green Forest paper. You go through the stuff in no time, but it is more luxurious-feeling and might sugar the pill a little. They usually have it at Lifethyme on 6th (between 8th and Waverly).

Right, bottom’s up gang, I’m shattered and off to bed.

Bloody husbands

Bloody husbands. They're completely useless sometimes. Not only do they burp, fart and spend hours sitting on the loo, they also RELEASE THE MOUSE YOU'VE PAINSTAKINGLY CAUGHT WITH THE PATENTED HOMEMADE STEVE SMITH HUMANE MOUSETRAP BACK INTO THE KITCHEN!!!!!!!!!

Yes, it's true. To high excitement I went downstairs this morning to find the mousetrap sprung, the baking tin collapsed on the bottom tray and a small pile of telltale droppings just outside it.

The hubby eyed it suspiciously. "No, there's nothing in there, it's just collapsed or it would be making a noise," he sniffed. True, the mousetrap was eerily quiet, even when I gave the tin a little tap. But what of the droppings, then? Unless he'd looked at the cheese, pooed and nicked off again in an unlikely display of self-restraint, there had to be a mouse inside.

"He might have been there, but he's obviously escaped," was the hubby's response. "Face it, your trap is crap."

Obviously I couldn't check it inside the house because if there was a mouse, he'd escape (you know?). No, we'd have to wait till I was ready to go out.

I told Mum on the phone. "What will you do with him if there is a mouse?" "Drive five miles down the road to release him, as instructed." "Not very eco-friendly to drive five miles to release a mouse, is it?" Smarty pants (apparently she'd been discussing the trap in the pub last night with her mates). So I resolved to combine the mouse liberation outing with my planned trip to the organic farm shop (River Brook Farm, amazing place), but that doesn't open till 10, so I came upstairs to put Dot down for a nap in the meantime.

Unfortunately not everyone on the house has as much patience. My husband is borderline OCD when it comes to clearing things away and clearly couldn't resist the mousetrap. He just came upstairs looking sheepish. "I took the top off and there he was," he said. "He looked at me, I looked at him, and before I could do anything, he shot off behind the gas oven." Oh ye of little faith! Vindicated, but foiled!

So we're back to square one. At least we now know the trap works. But the next question is, will the mouse fall for the same trick twice, or has the hubby ruined everything? It'll depend if he (mouse, not hubby) can resist the clarion call of the New York State Helluva Good Cheddar. Well, we're off to the big smoke tonight for a few days so I guess we'll try the trap again when we get back and see what happens (and no, we can't leave it out while we're gone. Apparently he's a very cute little mouse and if he gets in there tonight, he'd have snuffed it by the time we get back. Not ideal).

Anyway, guess who's going to be spending the rest of the morning on their hands and knees behind the gas oven plugging up the hole where the pipe comes in? (Clue: not moi.)

My Mum

Just wanted to send a big shout out to Dot's Granny who, since Dot's birth, has switched to all eco-friendly household products - recycled loo roll and Ecover cleaning and laundry products. She thinks her sister might do the same too - thanks Auntie D!

Now, you might not think it matters how my parents choose to wipe their botties, but you'd be wrong. This is from the Seventh Generation website:

You Are Making a Difference™ If every household in the U.S. replaced just one roll of 500 sheet virgin fiber bathroom tissue with 100% recycled ones, we could save:* 423,900 trees* 1 million cubic feet of landfill space, equal to 1,600 full garbage trucks* and 153 million gallons of water, a year’s supply for 1,200 families of four!

You see? This is what we're all about, me and Dot - we don't care if you read our blog (well, we do a bit) but we do care a lot if, because of us, you're inspired to do something green.

So, cheers Mum!

It's the little things...

First things first, no mice this morning. Although this means I'll have to spend another 30 minutes trying to get the bloody tray to balance on the skewer before I can haul my sleep-deprived bum to bed tonight, am secretly quite relieved - the hubby refused point blank to do any rodent relocation and I wasn't looking forward to doing it myself.

The good news: it's only 9.30 but already Dot and I have been hard at work saving the planet (Dot does her bit by napping so I can get on with things). We've closed the doors on the log-burning stove (according to this top tip page, Jesse's Journal, keeping them open is like having a window wide open). We've turned the fridge temperature up a couple of notches after Tomo noticed the porridge he had in there was practically frozen. It immediately stopped its furious whirring (the fridge, not the porridge); could this be the culprit in the mystery of why our eleccy bills have been so enormous despite previously being here only at weekends? I've closed all the storm windows (for those in the UK these are the equivalent of double glazing; according to my mate Jesse, storm windows can reduce heat loss through by 25% to 50%). If we add to our mental tally not living in that NYC apartment with six huge draughty non-insulated windows any more, we're doing well on the window front.

In fact, the more I read of Jesse's page, the better I felt. "Decorate with lighter colors that reflect daylight" - check, we're almost all white. "Use task lighting; instead of brightly lighting an entire room, focus the light where you need it" - check too (ah, the joys of an old house that never had overhead lights fitted). And I've started looking for a couple of gorgeous vintage charcoal grey welsh blankets (like this one - hey, no counter-bids!) on eBay to draught-proof the kitchen doors. Nothing like a spot of guilt-free shopping to cheer a girl up.

And I needed cheering because I'd been growing increasingly despondent about my eco-naughtiness as I followed Ideal Bite's home improvement week tips this week. (In case you don't know Ideal Bite, it's like Daily Candy but all the tips are eco-friendly. Sign up now!) We've just done some lovely renovations on our bathroom and kitchen and have singularly failed to do the right thing, i.e. we didn't use wood from renewable sources or low VOC (volatile organic compound) paint (there's one that's made from 99% edible ingredients, would you believe, and another from powdered curdled milk. Hm, maybe not...) Still, we have plenty more renovations still to do, so once we find the cash, we can do the right thing. See, as my Dad likes to say, everything happens for a reason. By this logic the reason we're skint is so I could find all this out and do a greener job. Brilliant!

Anyway, we might disapprove of the renovations but they are starting to look rather lovely. Take the kitchen:

Our great carpenter John made this kitchen unit - not eco-friendly but beautiful. The sink is vintage - gold star. If you could see the 'before' pics you'd be even more impressed. Might post them tomorrow just for a laugh.

This bathroom used to be half a bedroom. Note pale colors and reclaimed bath and basin; ignore non-eco-friendly paint and tongue and groove...

Spare room expertly papered by my dad with Eley Kishimoto for Habitat wallpaper (ungreen but gorgeous Xmas pressie from the hub). John uncovered the original beams for us. Er, do we get points for 'task lighting' at least?

Outside. Clearly no renovations done here yet but thought you might like to get a feel for where we are. Don't look at this as a knackered old house with a pile of very un-eco-friendly wood out the front; see a porch ready to be renovated with renewable wood, walls to be filled with energy-saving insulation and siding crying out to be painted with edible sour milk paint...

Instead of 6th Avenue...


Some pics of Dot's new hood. No wonder she's been inspired to save the planet.

Oh, by the way, I know our posts for the last two days have studiously avoided mentioning it, but of course something fairly major has happened in US politics. Apparently it's particularly fab news for green issues - 8 of the so-called 'dirty dozen' (Republicans with particularly bad voting records on environmental issues ) are gone. It's taken me till today to find this out because in between feeding Dot, entertaining her, changing her nappy, taking her for walks, getting the odd bit of food into myself and writing this, I don't manage much in the way of current affairs...Get more info here. OK, off to set the mousetrap and get an early night. xx

Boob-oo

Apologies if you got to your computer this morning breathless with anticipation for news of the contents of the Steve Smith mousetrap. I was too scared to brave the dark, rain and latent threat of confrontation with axe-murderers to forage for bamboo skewers in the barn, so was hoping I'd get away with using the sonic deterrent devices.

Unfortunately there was one tiny but telltale dropping on the kitchen table this morning and our house guest Nathan reported further seed sightings under the pillow in the spare room. So I’ve constructed the mousetrap and will activate it tonight. As you might have guessed from the diagram, getting the baking tray to balance on the skewer is no mean feat, and I’m sure if we do catch anything, the noise of it falling will give the poor bugger a lethal heart attack, thereby somewhat defeating its purpose, but we'll try. Still better than releasing noxious substances into the fragile Milanville ecosystem.

To make up for the disappointment I’ve scoured the web to bring you this exciting green innovation just in from Japan.




Yes, it’s No!, a bra made entirely from recycled materials that in just a few simple steps can be converted into a handy….shopping bag! All you need to do is remove the bra in the middle of the supermarket, undo the bag components from beneath the underwires and hey presto, you can carry your dinner home with a clear conscience! Emmeline Pankhurst would be proud. I'm so getting one (or at least I would if I wasn't going to be wearing super-sexy nursing bras for the foreseeable future...). If only every company in the world thought like this there’d be no need for the likes of me…

There's a mouse in the house...

So we’re starting small today - very small - with the matter of how to deal with some tiny guests trying to hibernate with us for the winter. When we moved in in January, there was what I’ll call ‘copious evidence’ of furry friends in the kitchen and over the summer we’ve had the occasional missing cookie but thought we’d nixed the problem by keeping everything in sealed jars or the fridge. Until, that is, my mother-in-law awoke to a small cache of seeds under her pillow in the spare room a few weeks back. Since then, similar bounty has turned up inside the hubby’s golf shoes and my knicker drawer (how?) and the final straw was when I found droppings by the kitchen sink. Ugh. We’re not sure if we’re dealing with mice, chipmunks or both, but with Dot in the house, we’re not keen on rodent co-habitation.

Clearly under our new littlegreendot regime, poison and inhumane traps are out of the question (thank god – I‘ve seen one of the mice and he was cute. Don’t want to discover him or his kin squealing with one foot stuck to glue trap, or worse). So I’ve been looking into alternatives.

At first I found this industrial-looking humane trap. But since it can catch ‘up to 30 mice’ and the site also features traps for minks, pigeons and ferrets, seems a little out of our league (I hope). Then I found this cutesy ‘smart mousetrap’ (site features tales of kids’ delight at freeing their new-found friends into the wild; cut to scene of me and Dot gamboling along the Delaware….) and was about to enter my credit card details when I thought, hm, made of plastic and will inevitably come delivered in copious packaging, both of which are strictly verboten. But no worries: Steve Smith and his Blue Peter stylee homemade humane mousetrap design to the rescue! (Equipment needed 1 tray, 1 baking dish, one bamboo skewer, one toothpick and a piece of cheese (I kid you not.)) Here it is:

So I’m just going to dig the bamboo skewers out of the moving boxes in the barn now. Will let you know how it goes. In the meantime, am experimenting with some plug-in sonic deterrent boxes kindly donated by my lovely friend Lucy. Maybe they’ll do the job so Steve Smith doesn’t have to….

Welcome

This is our new blog - mine and Dot's. I'm Freya and Dot is my fantastic 9 week old daughter. Together with Dot's dad, who’s a photographer, we've just left Manhattan and moved to our half-renovated 1880 cottage in a tiny village called Milanville, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware river. We did this partly because we wanted to try out rural life, partly to save some money and mainly because our landlord kicked us out of our lovely apartment in the city with three weeks’ notice. Nice.

We might be here till January, when I'm due to go back to my job in advertising, or longer, depending on how things go.

So Dot and I have made a pact to spend the next two months trying to save the planet. We decided this after our first trip to the local supermarket. It was very scary and made us realize how much the American lifestyle trashes the planet. Dot said she since she would really prefer to have somewhere to live when she’s a bit older, it was time to make some serious changes.

We aren’t terrible now. Here’s a list of things we already do to try and be green:
Me:
- Recycle paper and plastic (though NYC recycling is crap – e.g. New Yorkers live on take-out but you can’t recycle take-out cartons)
- Use eco-friendly cleaning products (the cleaning lady insisted on Ajax with bleach, but she stayed in the city) and loo roll
- Traded in gas-guzzling vintage Jeep Wagoneer for diesel Golf off Ebay (couldn’t afford a hybrid and diesel’s more eco-friendly than petrol, plus second-hand is kind of recycling)
- Buy food at local organic farm and farmers’ market as much as possible (well, alright, when I can be bothered)
- Have several pairs of organic cotton socks
- Buy loads of vintage stuff on eBay (what? That counts)
- Have seriously cut down on purchases of celeb weeklies to save trees (and marriage)

Dot:
- Was using a cloth diaper service in the city (found out the service used bleach though – bad). Can’t do cloth here as we don’t have a washing machine and am sure trips to laundry every other day in car would cancel out benefit. Not to mention sanity. So currently using Seventh Generation disposables and feeling guilty although secretly find them much easier. Considering retrying G-diapers – of which more later
- Only buys clothing made from organic fibers (though isn’t above wearing all the beautiful pressies she’s received which aren’t)
- Insists on organic bath and body products
- Sleeps in an organic wool-and-cotton hammock – a lot
- Eats food from 100% renewable resource

And here are some of the things we know we should do but don’t (yet):
- Compost (no excuse now we have a yard)
- Stop working in advertising where job is to sell millions of extra plastic bottles and far-from-organic products to the masses
- Stop flying in planes
- Buy organic fibers in adult sizes too (but the styles are so geeky…)
- Find new husband who doesn’t keep scuppering attempts to be eco-friendly. Well, maybe I’ll work around this one

This blog will chart our progress as we try to green up our act. Hopefully by Christmas we'll be ready to lobby Congress. If you know me and Dot and are now a long way away from us, the blog'll keep you abreast of what the hell we do out here all day. If you’re already a really green person, you’ll probably think we’re a bit crap. And if, like us, you’re someone who knows you should really be doing a bit more to help, you might find it interesting. Hell, you might even pick up a few tips along the way.

Please check back soon for more from Little Green Dot.