Cleaning contretemps

I went out for a drink last night. I know, a drink! It felt wildly liberating. I hadn’t realized how long it had been until I did it. Walking down the street at night on my own, meeting a friend, sitting at the bar…It all came back to me surprisingly easily. In fact before I knew it I was halfway through a bottle of vinho verde and it was 10.30.

Anyway, that’s not really my point. My point is that I got home in a fabulous mood which only got better when the hubby announced he’d booked a cleaning lady to come today (a cleaning lady – such luxury!) and we were having a lovely chat until he mentioned The Shopping List.

Ah, The Shopping List. For those non-New Yorkers among you, The Shopping List is something every cleaner here has. It almost always features Ajax, bleach and ream upon ream of kitchen roll and your cleaner is within his/her rights to refuse to clean your house unless his/her exact specifications are met (at least, that's how they make you feel). It's been so long since I've had a cleaning lady I'd forgotten about it.

“I have to go and buy her a load of cleaning products in the morning,” he said. "She needs Ajax, Fantastik with bleach, toilet cleaner, Windex and kitchen roll."

“Er, no you don’t,” I said matter-of-factly. “We have all that Seventh Generation and Babyganics stuff, and she can use white vinegar for the windows.”

What happened next was weird. “I am not going to tell her to wash the windows with vinegar,” he exploded. “It’s not fair.”

I was a bit taken aback. I mean, it’s not as if I’ve been particularly quiet about my stance on cleaning products - you'd think he'd have noticed by now. Then it got weirder.

“Freya, she can’t do her job without this stuff. It’s like if I took your computer away and told you to do your job. She barely speaks English, she’ll be trying to clean with your crappy products and worrying if she’s doing a good job. It’s not fair on her. I won’t do it.”

See how he did that? Sometimes it’s really annoying having a sweet empathetic husband - one always come off looking like the b*%$h in the house. But I’ve been playing this game too long to fall for that one.

“Do you know women who stay at home have an 80% higher rate of breast cancer than those who go to work and it’s because of those cleaning products? And you want to expose Dot to this stuff because you won’t stand up to the cleaner? Blame me, tell her your wife is crazy, I don’t care, but I'm not having it,” I said - my turn to be all righteous and indignant. “And anyway, the products aren’t crap.”

“Yes they are. I want the house to feel clean. I want my oven shiny not all full of crusty shit,” he said, and then played his trump card. “If you want to clean the oven with baking powder that's fine but you do the cleaning.”

It's so boring when he does that. He knows I'm finding it hard to keep body and soul together and am indeed doing as much cleaning as I can muster on an almost full time job, mum-stuff, making Dot's food and five hours sleep a night and have devloped acne and a spare tyre as a result. (He does the same thing about the laundry. "If you don't want all your woolens shrunk to Dot-size, you do the laundry." Well, yes darling, but WHEN? And in case you're wondering, I write this on the subway these days so that's not a solution.) He flounced off to bed. We rolled to opposite sides of the mattress and went to sleep in frosty silence.

By this morning he’d mellowed. “Give me a list of what I have to get then and I’ll go,” he said grudgingly.

At lunchtime I called home to find out how things had gone. “Oh fine,” he said insouciantly. “She said she really likes Ecover products.”

And this evening? The house looked lovely. The lovely cleaner had been completely accommodating and was Dot's NBF. And the hubby was passing the Ecover off as his idea.

Nappy nightmares

Ever tried to get a straight answer about how to compost so-called biodegradable nappies? Thought not.

Well I have, and let me tell you that after several hours of research (and not for the first time) I'm still far from clear.

It ought to be easy. You buy biodegradable nappies thinking you can either chuck 'em in the rubbish, or even better chuck 'em in the compost, and all will be well.

But by the time I came to buy biodegradable nappies, I'd already read that the conditions in landfill are wrong for decomposition to happen (not enough light or air) so buying them and putting them in your regular household rubbish is a complete and utter red herring (I'm talking strictly about reducing output here. Of course there are significant benefits to the planet, as many are produced without the use of chlorine bleach, and to the baby, because they avoid coming into contact with many of the nasty chemicals in conventional nappies, but still...).

So I figured I'd compost them, seeing as my buying them coincided with my moving up here where I've got a garden and a compost heap.

I emailed the manufacturers, Nature Baby, to check whether I needed any kind of fancy composting system. I've lost the reply now, I'm afraid, but basically it said that due to some of the nasty bacteria in human fecal matter (eeeugh), although the nappies are technically compostable, you can't compost them. Well that makes sense. Not.

So I sort of wimped out for a bit and used them, trying to forget the 'wrong conditions for decomposing' thing. But it;s been quietly eating away at me ever since, so this week I decided anough was enough and as soon as we had a car at our disposal - today - sent the hubby to get our subsidized PA compost bin (it's huge and looks like a tardis) to put them in. I figured that as long as we composted them separately and didn't use the compost on our future vegetable patch, all would be well. We'd just have the nappy corner of the garden where nobody goes but me and my bag of dirties.

While the hubby was getting the tardis set up, I thought I'd look into it one more time. Well, several hours later, I'm none the wiser. Some sites say a wormery is the answer; others that the nappies kill the worms. Some say you can compost them and they'll decompose in 6 months or less under the right conditions, but fail to explain what those conditions are. Other sites say you have to pull the nappies apart before composting but don't tell you whether you then chuck everything in, or only chuck certain bits and not others.

Frankly it's making my head spin and I promised the hubby I'd play Scrabble with him tonight instead of sitting in front of the computer till way past bedtime so I can't spend a lot onger looking into it.

I'm tempted to just start sticking the dirty nappies in the tardis and see what happens (though to be fair, I doubt much will until the temperature breaks freezing which it hasn't done for several weeks now). But on the other hand I do NOT want to find myself getting rid of non-decomposed, six-month-old dirty nappies a few months down the line. The hubby already made it clear this was strictly my preserve.

Help!

I am going to try and get this sorted because for god's sake somebody needs to. Right now there are parents everywhere doing exactly what I was doing: buying eco-friendly nappies to assuage their consciences, then conveniently sweeping under the carpet the nagging doubt that they were really making no more difference than their fellow Pampers and Huggies users, which, in fact, they weren't.

I pledge to make some enquiries tomorrow and see what gives.

In the meantime, if you know the answer, please do tell.

Apparently the average disposable takes about 500 years to break down and is the third most common item found in landfill followed by paper products and food containers. This can't go on.

Tilting at Windmills

I'm proud to announce that the Williams Delaney Lethbridge household is now powered entirely by wind. This will come as little surprise to those of you better acquainted with my husband. In fact, you may be wondering what took us so long. Ho ho!

OK, crap jokes aside, I'm feeling extremely smug because after an excellent morning's work, I've converted our house to run entirely on green energy generated by windmills. I'd like to tell you I've got my own one in the back garden, but actually it was easier and much cheaper, if more prosaic, than that.

I got the idea from an email I was sent last month encouraging me to go to www.conedsolutions.com/greenpower and sign up, but I was leaving New York and ConEd isn't our supplier up here, and me being of little faith, I was convinced Pennsylvania wouldn't be enlightened enough to offer the option. Well, there I go again with my NY snobbery. After only an hour or so of the type of research I can't normally be bothered with, I was all signed up with the exact same supplier Con Ed uses in NYC, but by going direct to the source, even more cheaply (am becoming a real little Consumer Reports shopper out here. Next thing you know I'll be clipping coupons).

So basically I went to my electricity co (PPL)'s website and learned that since the eleccy industry was deregulated , you can now choose your supplier (you can't change the grid, just the energy source, I think). From there, like a good eco-geek, I clicked through various consumer reports until I figured out that my only green option was to sign up for wind power with Community Energy.

It says on the website that they charge $2.50 per block of 100 kWh (you have to buy 2 minumum) and that you pay this direct to them on top of your usual eleccy bill. I found this a bit confusing so had to phone them for an explanation. The friendly bloke on the phone did his best. "You buy the power and we tip it into the grid you're connected to," he said. "What, so I'm paying but I don't know if the green stuff is coming to me?" I asked. "Well ma'am, we can't control the electrons, so no," he replied patiently. "Oh," I said, deflated. But then the light dawned. "It's a bit like when you buy those vouchers to offset your carbon emissions from a flight" - which I will do before I head to the UK next week- I said, deciding I quite liked the socialist feel of it all. He confirmed it was something along those lines.

The next step was to figure out how much eleccy we use a month so I'd know how much wind to purchase. I phoned PPL and apparently in the last 30 days we used 351 kWh (compared to a national household average of 500 kWh a month).

So I was going to round down to 300 and buy 3 blocks in anticipation of our reduced consumption, but then I figured that was like buying those size 8 trousers (that's a US size 4 people) before you've been on the diet, and you know damn well they'll be in the cupboard till they go to the charity shop unworn (not to mention being also terribly cheap), so I signed up for 4 blocks of wind, 400KwH, a month, at a total cost of $10. The online calculator let me know this would save 5266lbs of CO2 per month - equivalent, apparently to 4568 miles not driven or 358 trees not planted. Not bad for $10, eh? And really ridiculously easy - though I have to admit that if I was working at the moment, I would probably have given up before I got it all figured out. This being green is a full time job.

But now I've done the figuring out part for you, what's your excuse? Join me, friends! You can do the same thing in most US states (all on the same site) . If you're in NYC, you can go through ConEd and get a $25 rebate, they waive the NY sales tax and they only charge an extra 2.5 cents per kWh (though I think it's cheaper still to go direct to Community Energy and cut out ConEd). If you do this, by the way, make sure you go for the 'wind only' option because they also offer a 'green power' option which is 60% hydropower and I heard on the radio yesterday they now think hydroelectric damns somehow cause methane to be released into the atmosphere which is even worse for the greenhouse effect than CO2 - bad! Oh, and in the UK you can do the same at www.ecotricity.com.

So join me and my windy spouse - if nothing else, it'll also give you endless opportunities to make truly appalling jokes. (and by the way, if you do, please would you let us know? Would be good to keep track of any +ve changes made as a result of this blog. One day I'll figure out how to have a running tally on the site - the opposite of naming and shaming. Also please share this tip with anyone and everyone you know. Think how much CO2 we could save.)

Festive Cheer

I'm struggling to stave off a cold that's threatening to lay me low so to cheer myself up, I decided to get going on the eco-friendly Christmas decorations. First some pine branches from the garden rigged up on the front door with a piece of ribbon recycled from last year:



We also fashioned a 'tree' from those felled treetops I mentioned I'd spotted down the road. The hubby hacked a few branches off with his axe, tied them together with string and suspended them from the ceiling. Dot seems not to have noticed the difference and we're pretty chuffed with the results:



Don't worry, we're rationing ourselves to two hours a day for the lights (I'll be keeping an eye on that light-happy husband of mine; I've also replaced the most-used bulbs in the house with the eco-friendly variety (nb Damian) which should offset any incremental power and they're in place of the lamp usually in that corner of the room - ah, the debit/credit eco-reckoning we go through...). Am feeling rather smug about the whole thing: no trees cut down especially, no transport required to get the tree to us (all materials collected on foot), no new decorations to add to the plastic in the world and no Canadian person on 6th avenue charging you $60 for a tree that comes up to your kneecaps. Brilliant! Also because I live in the country, I'll be able to easily compost the tree (though if you live in the city you can take trees to lots of the parks and to the Union Square greenmarket for mulching. I know it's a pain but it'll help you feel purified after all the seasonal excesses).

Now, you'll notice the tree has little in the way of decorations (besides some origami cranes my Mum made last year). That's because when I opened up the bag of decorations, I found them all covered in sticky mouse droppings - and an empty bag where a forgotten Christmas cookie from last year had been. How the hell do they find these things? So I guess it's time to come clean on the mouse front (and please don't hate me): the hubby put down posion. Lots of it. In fact he kept putting it down, and it kept going which leads us to believe we were dealing with an army of the little blighters. Well, they've gone now. RIP Mice of Milanville. I just wonder for how long I'm going to continue to stumble upon pleasant reminders of our cohabitation...

As for the decorations, like a good eco-worrier I haven't thrown them out: I have them soaking in warm soapy water with a few drops of tea tree oil to disinfect them.

And just before I move off the topic of festive stuff, I must give a big shout out to Paul, Tara and the gang who made sure we had a totally organic Thanksgiving. The turkeys might have left you bankrupt but they were worth it. A belated thanks kids!

Wot no loo roll

The hubby just checked and there's no recycled loo roll in Pecks as yet. Hm, I'll have to stop by tomorrow and find out what's up.

Is there anybody out there?

We do love getting your comments - it makes us feel like we're not just talking to ourselves. So for today's entry, we're going to address a bit of reader feedback. Fun!

Firstly, further to my grievance with the village store customers over idling versus cutting the engine, a couple of readers responded to query and whether it wasn't in fact worse for the planet to stop and start the car. My initial reaction was to thank them for saving me from an awkward conversation with a man who kills bears with his bare hands (well, almost), mind me own business and get back to me cup of tea. But then I thought, no, that would be lazy, I really need to do my homework.

So I googled it. Luckily a blogger in Hiroshima recently dealt with exactly this conundrum. And, Alexena and Anonymous (who are you? reveal yourself!), his extremely thorough research overwhelmingly suggests idling bad, stopping and starting good. In fact, so insidious is idling thought to be that in Japan, they ran a whole public service campaign to stop idling (Canada and Oregon are doing the same). Here's their natty poster:

Do you think I should print it off and stick on the railings outside the shop? I'd be doing them a favour because apparently idling not only wastes fuel and harms the environment, it's actually bad for the engine!

While I was at it, I could also give them my Grandpa's top petrol-saving tip: coast down hills in neutral and only stick the thing in gear when it's about to give up on the upward slope (he nicknamed his Ford Capri Rollscnardly - rolls down hills, cnardly get up the other side). I'm sure I'd make their day.

Next up: eco-friendly Xmas cards for those relatives who don't understand the e-card thing. Alex, I hope this isn't too late to be of any use to you. A lot of eco-friendly cards are a bit naff but with a bit of help from Ideal Bite and Google, I came up with the following:

• Greene Sreet Greetings: cool vintage photo cards, whiter than white credentials (100% post-consumer paper, soy-based inks, carbon-free messenger delivery optional) and
• Girly Whirly: cute, 20-30% post-consumer recylced materials (if you're wondering, post-consumer is better than plain old recycled). Very Alexena, I reckon
• Kid Bean grow-a-note: not so keen on the designs but not only are they all handmade from post-consumer recycled stuff, you can also plant them in the garden when you're done and they grow onto poppies and cornflowers. Lovely!
• Speak Peace cards: recycled paper, PEACE spelled in sign language on the front, proceeds to kids who are hard of hearing.

So there we go. By the way, here's a stat for you: if the Chrissy cards sold in just one year in the UK and US were laid end to end they'd stretch round the world 54 times. Who the hell is sending all these cards? I'm so disorganised I barely get round to sending one to my Gran. Still, at least this year I can plead ideology - think of the trees!

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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!

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.