Rock and a hard place

This no car thing had been going really quite well thanks to a couple of sets of friends nearby who've been kind enough to let us use their cars when they weren't. In fact, there was something about the model of shared car ownership it implied that rather appealed to my idealistic green side - I could envisage a future in which this is the way we all do things to save on resources. Sort of peace, love and communal vehicles.

Plus, it was fine when the weather was only rather chilly - I could bundle Dot up, take her for walks and get lost in reveries of simpler times before we had cars while basking in the glow of our dramatically reduced carbon footprint.

But then it got properly, bitingly cold. Taking Dot for a walk today wasn't an option. But babies, like adults, get cabin fever too and by about four o'clock I'd gone through my complete dog and pony repertoire twice, and she knew it and she was wasn't being fobbed off any longer. This is the point in the day where I usually strap her into the Bjorn and strike forth, but today all I could do was stick Madonna on the iPod and jig around the kitchen like a loony. It did the trick, but I think tomorrow I'll need to find a way to get us out of the house, car or no car - for both our sakes.

Then something happened to give me mixed feelings about getting our own car back. Someone posted a comment letting me know that diesel fumes are supposed to be particularly bad for infants' lungs; to be precise, the comment read:

"so recent studies show that desiel fumes possibly damage infants developing lungs- so what's it to be childrens lungs or the planet?"

I googled it and found any number of links to articles about school buses giving kids asthma, diesel being a carcinogen, etc. Oh no! Oh god! Why didn't these posts come up when I was looking into the relative eco merits of different vehicle options? Probably because my google criteria were too narrow, but what have I DONE?! Poor little Dot!

The hubby wasn't amused either.

"I thought you'd researched diesel cars. Did you know about this?" he said in a slightly accusing tone.

"I thought I had done my research but of course I didn't know about this," I said plaintively.

"So now you don't want the diesel car after all?" he said.

"Oh god, I don't know, we'll just have to keep her out of the way of any possible fumes," I said, wishing google would yield some contrary evidence. It didn't.

And here in a nutshell is one of the biggest problems of this being green business. I mean, talk about ignorance is bliss. Either you find out about all these problems you had no idea existed, or every time you think you've got it sorted, you realize all you've done is open a can of worms: I also received two comments today about lavender oil causing young boys to grow breasts; then there's the 'organic food has often been flown from Mexico' issue, the 'Wal Mart getting in on organic will just dilute what organic means' debate and the 'it uses so much energy to transport the recycling waste that any benefits of recycling are cancelled out' argument. It makes me wonder if I'm doing any good at all.

"Well that'll teach you to be so dogmatic," said the hubby, or words to that effect anyway.

I'm pretty sure he wanted to say 'I hate to say I told you so', but since I was clearly sufficiently depressed already, instead he said 'I think you should have an early night dear.'

For once I'm going to take his advice.

Quick one

Keeping it brief today - a long day down to the city and back in a borrowed car (petrol. I feel dirty) to get poor Dot stuck with about 73 needles. She was a trooper as ever but decided no paparazzi today.

And I'm trying to sort out my future. I'd love to sit at home blogging with Dot forever but I only earn on average $1.42 per day from it and even in the country that ain't enough to eke out a living. So I'm trying to take our greening to a bigger stage. Watch this space.

I'm also depressed because it turns out the car needs a new engine and of course a diesel engine is twice the price of a petrol one. I call that discrimination against the color of your environmentalisms. Still, think of all the carbon savings while we wait for it to be ordered and then installed. Will almost cover us for our next flight home.

By the way, someone sent me the press release for this book today.

I reckon our littlegreeendot entries would be like this only better. What do you think readers? Do you know any agents who might like us? Answers on an e-card, please...

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.