Waste Not, Want Not

Waste-not bread

2009-02-25T08:49:00Z

Recently I checked out the Revive-Reuse shop at the recycling centre and spotted the automatic breadmaker pictured below:

It's a bit bigger and heavier than the loads I normally carry home, but when the staff member told me the price was $5, that was sufficient motivation to give it a try. She also told me that the OK sticker they slapped on it meant only that they had tested it as far as they could, which in the case of a bread machine means that "the paddle went around when the guys plugged it in". So I decided to take a gamble on it ($5 is the price of a Lucky Dip Lotto ticket**) and lugged it home. I discovered later it weighs 7.1kg.
My mother is somewhat of a bread machine expert and when I told her I'd bought a Panasonic SD 250, she said it was a very good model. She added that I could download the original manual in PDF format from the panasonic.co.nz website. Today I tested it by making a 100% whole wheat loaf. To my relief, it worked great! I've made bread by hand in the past ... they never looked this good. Can't wait to cut into it tomorrow for breakfast, lol.

While this loaf was baking I looked at the expired listings on Trade Me for Panasonic bread machines and found one earlier this year for the same model, which sold for $222.00! I'm glad there are people in my district who--for whatever reason--would rather off-load their stuff at the recycling centre than put it up for sale on Trade Me. :-)

** Edited to add: My Lotto FREAK of a daughter informs me that Lucky Dip tickets have been $6 since August 2004 and I should know this already, being so closely related to someone who lives and breathes Lotto.

Waste-free birthday present for/from DD

2009-02-10T09:29:52Z

Rebecca's 20th birthday is on the 16th and she came up with a terrific idea for us each to give the other a present without creating any clutter, or packaging waste, or even having to pay postage costs. The big news here at the moment is the terrible bushfires raging in Victoria. The death toll is now expected to exceed 300... whole communities have been wiped out. The knowledge that at least one of the killer fires was deliberately started by someone makes it even harder to bear.

When I ask Rebecca what she wants for her birthday, she always says "nothing". It's highly annoying when you, the would-be giver, are also bereft of ideas. I would complain more about her general unhelpfulness, except I am guilty of the same thing. But tonight she came online and asked me to donate the money I'd spend on her birthday present to the Red Cross 2009 Victoria Bushfire Fund instead. Both of us are fortunate enough to be in a position where we answer "nothing" or "I don't know" when we are asked what we want. For people who have just lost everything they own in a bushfire, it will be a long time before they can say the same.

Big OOPS for Waste Not

2009-01-18T00:43:08Z

I had a hankering to try miso soup, so I headed down to Pakky where I found a packet of 12 individual packets of instant miso soup. It was only after I'd been through the self-service checkout that I thought about the waste ramifications of what I'd done.

Also, I've gone back to buying my milk powder in foil packets from the supermarket instead of in bulk from Bin Inn because the price of the 1 kilo bags has dropped twice at Pak N Save since November, from $11.25 to $10.25 to $9.25, while the price at Bin Inn remains $11.90/kg. We were told before Christmas that due to the drop in milk solid prices, we should expect lower prices at the checkout for dairy products to filter through after Christmas... so I'm a bit disappointed that Bin Inn's price has remained the same. I don't know if Bin Inn simply want to make extra profit or if their stock is genuinely pre-November; either way, Pak N Save's milk powder seems like a better choice at the moment.

More on the cutting board

2009-01-12T02:12:06Z

Googling restoring cutting boards told me I should be looking for "USP-grade mineral oil" for finishing it, and the cheapest place to buy this is the "drug store" (http://whatscookingamerica.net/CuttingBoards/AllAbout.htm). Translating this to Kiwi, I rang the mall chemist and asked them if they stocked mineral oil. "Uh, mineral oil?" came the response, in the exact same tone of voice as Manuel's in Fawlty Towers when he answers everything with "Que?". I didn't have any luck until more googling had translated "USP-grade mineral oil" into "paraffin oil" and I tried a second chemist where they stocked botttles of "liquid paraffin". The assistant wasn't at all sure that it was an oil, but I decided to risk buying it anyway.

So here's the cutting board before:

And here it is just after sanding and oiling with what I am fairly confident is USP-grade mineral oil:

There were some deep knife (cleaver? MACHETE?!) marks that weren't going to be sanded out in a hurry, but I'm not worrying about those yet.
The liquid paraffin cost $8 for 200ml, so I don't think it's exactly the cheapest option, seeing as the link above says that coconut oil is fine too, and I can get a 700ml bottle of that for $6.99. The board soaked up about 15 ml of paraffin oil on this application.

For anghed , Crown Lynn is an iconic NZ ceramics manufacturer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Lynn). In 1965 they bought out the Titian factory. There's a tiny pic here, from the book "Crown Lynn: a New Zealand Icon" by Valerie Ringer Monk:

It's (too) easy to find, I mostly pay 50c a piece at op-shops. It's not flash like Script's "flow blue". And... it's not French onion soup, but I do have the onion dip bowl! It was the onion dip bowl that got me started, actually--I was looking for a small bowl to put hummus in and saw this little honey glaze bowl for 50c in an op shop. The following week I saw a honey glaze soup mug with tall-stemmed flowers around the side and bought that to go with the big pot of vegetable barley soup I was living on that week. And that's how my collecting started. But! I am running out of designated room, so I have to be more picky now or it will just become a hoard.
Edited to add: Just wanted to note that running around searching for oil-love for the board, along with usual activities, bought my steps total to 13,673 my second highest day yet! (The highest was Christmas Eve when I topped 15K.)

Recycling centre --> Me

2009-01-11T01:25:04Z

I haven't blogged about waste in a while because after I solved the most common problems to my satisfaction, it became a case of "rinse, repeat". There's not that much new to say about my personal waste. In case anyone is wondering, I'm still using cut-up t-shirts instead of toilet paper. The 15-litre kitchen rubbish bin filled up about the 6 month mark and I transferred it to a collection bag which is sitting out in the sleepout.

The Revive-Reuse Shop, to give it its proper name, is part of the Tasman District's Resource Recovery Centre located about 2km from my home. It's a walk of about 7,000 steps there and back. I have a Yamax Digi-Walker SW700 pedometer now and aim to log 10,000 steps a day, but I'm more motivated to walk if there is a purpose to my walk beyond exercise, like poking around in the recycling centre. Today I lugged back over 10 lbs of stuff on the return journey:

First I found an end-grain cutting board that had lost one of its corners. It's still 99% intact and how often do you cut right to the edge anyway? It is about 50% larger in cutting surface than my mixed-grain board and much thicker. It accounted for most of my 10lb weight gain for the trip home. I'm going to give it a sand with my orbital sander and finish it with mineral oil.
.

The next thing I found was a Crown Lynn/Titian Ware bowl, which I nearly didn't take because my shelf for collecting honey glaze Crown Lynn is getting crowded and I should start reserving it for better pieces. It's not like I need any more small bowls. But as you can see, my resolve was weak:

Finally I saw a large wooden bowl and my mind went "salad bowl" but now that I've got it home I see it's probably a fruit bowl, because it has green felt on the bottom. I don't need another fruit bowl as I have an Ianthe plate that I love and which I use for fruit (you can see it in the background). This recycled bowl needs to be sanded and refinished too. I think I'll take the green felt off and use it as a salad bowl anyway.

These three items cost me $5.

Internet hubbies, Can't live with 'em, can't...

2008-10-24T06:00:37Z

Oh wait.. You can kill (waste) 'em.

Woman jailed after killing virtual husband

NZ Herald article

Plastic envelopes

2008-10-04T08:08:43Z

Further to my last post about the letter that came in a plastic envelope (which I chucked in the trash) from Meridian Energy; it turns out that Waveney from My Rubbish Free Year received a similar letter, but being more pro-active than me, she actually wrote Meridian a letter about it, suggesting they rethink their posting method. Meridian's reply indicated that the plastic was corn starch and thus compostable. My understanding of corn starch plastic is that it will degrade in high-temperature compost heap conditions, not in landfill conditions (where I think most of these envelopes will end up):

Bioplastics can take different length of times to totally compost, based on the material and are meant to be composted in a commercial composting facility, where higher composting temperatures can be reached (WorldCentric.org page on bioplastics)

I did what I bet a lot of other people did and put my envelope in the trash bin destined for landfill. After I read Waveney's post I retrieved Meridian's letter from my "recycle" pile and found that they did actually mention the compostable envelope in very small print at the foot of the page:

Printed with mineral oil free, soy based vegetable inks on paper from well-managed forests that comply with environmentally sustainable practice and principles. Please recycle. The plastic sleeve surrounding this pack is made from wood pulp sourced from sustainably managed plantations and is 100% biodegradable.

I'm glad I read Waveney's post, otherwise l'd assume this plastic is the same as any other plastic bag that comes through the letterbox (e.g. the one around Resene's freebie Habitat magazine) and send it to landfill. I'll be interested to see how long it takes to degrade in my compost bin.

Electrickery

2008-09-30T12:20:28Z

Today a couple of electricity-related things.... first, the mail had a letter (in a plastic envelope, grrrr) from Meridian which said they were "puzzled" by our monthly reading on Sep 24th for a total of 500kWh and they were sending their bean counter around to read our meter again. But the letter wasn't clear on whether they thought our usage had veered into "puzzling" on the high or the low side of expected usage. Puzzled by this myself (and with a dim hope we had befuddled Meridian by being spectacularly frugal with our energy use!), I accessed my old Contact energy account to look up last year's online bills. I used 535kWh in August 07. A 35kWh drop didn't seem that remarkable. Oh, well. Just then, the meter reader showed up and his reading today basically confirmed that last Wednesday's reading was correct. So he too joined the ranks of the puzzled.

Secondly, Contact Energy is in the news for putting up their prices 12% which is causing howls of protest. TV3's evening news had a sound byte from an advocate for the aged, who said that the price rises were particularly bad for the elderly, who will be forced to take to their beds earlier than usual with their electric blankets "as an alternative to keeping warm". From personal experience, I can attest that a bed with an electric blanket is a very effective method to keep warm, not an alternative to keeping warm. I tried it myself this winter and never needed to switch on the fan heater at all, I was that warm... this is why I got my hopes up that we had a meter reading so low it would actually raise a red flag in Meridian's system.

Shopping, shopping, shopping

2008-09-19T01:52:24Z

We went to see Wall*E yesterday (didn't enjoy it as much as, say, Ratatouille, in fact I piled up the z's at times) and while I was in town I checked Briscoe's spring sale for coffee plungers, to replace the one that broke. I was happy to find a stainless steel one (i.e. appears unbreakable!) marked down from $70 to $15. It wasn't overpackaged either, coming in a plastic bag (trash) inside a cardboard box (compost). The bus trip home used up the last section on my 10-trip card and I let the driver add it to his rubbish bin. DD remarked that this was cheating, so I went back up to the driver and retrieved it for my worm bin. For some reason this totally embarrassed DD.

Today we went to the new Powerstore opening sale - DD was going to look at their mobiles. I'd wandered off to look at whiteware when she came and told me she'd seen a camera that looked like a good buy to replace my broken Powershot. It is another Powershot, the A470, which is 7 MP and comes with a 1GB memory card upgrade and a free camera case (supposedly worth $70, wtf!). It cost $149. The worst thing about the camera packaging is the clamshell packaging** for the memory card, and that it came with 2 AA alkaline batteries.

** UPDATE: Requested by a reader for re-use, so no longer trash... yay!

I remember those days, myself

2008-09-14T20:40:20Z

Confessions of a Former Snob at The West Virginia Surf Report. Hat tip to 20dollarsaday .

Magical thinking fails yet again

2008-09-14T06:27:00Z

I realise now that when I posted a couple of days ago about being one appliance failure away from blowing out my trash stash, I had some kind of magical belief that if I put the possibility into words, it wouldn't actually happen.

Heh.

Last night, out of the blue, the DVD player took an early retirement. I bought a replacement Philips DVD player/recorder this morning. At least it was cheaper to replace than a washing machine! I don't know of any option for e-waste here in Nelson yet. There have been annual e-waste collection days up in Auckland, but most e-waste in NZ ends up in landfill. The dead DVD player won't actually fit into the kitchen rubbish bin, so I'll banish it to the garage until such time as I graduate to a proper rubbish bag. I've put the packaging from the new DVD recorder in the garage as well, in case I have to use the 2-year warranty. Rebecca says this is "hoarding and cheating". I say this is just being prepared and organised, as long as you are only keeping boxes from stuff that is actually still under warranty. (I only have the boxes from my laptop and the DVD recorder, IIRC). What say you?

Up every evening bout half eight or nine
I give my complete attention to a very good friend of mine
He's quadraphonic, he's a, hes got more channels
So hologramic, oh my t v c one five

Accidental rubbish

2008-09-12T12:12:10Z

OK, so I got into a groove with not creating rubbish and it's been 3 months and I still haven't filled a plastic supermarket bag with rubbish. But I figure that it's best not to set any firm targets like 1 bag a year because as soon as I do that, sure as shooting the washing machine will crap out or something. Today I had a sad moment when I was washing the second most important gadget in my kitchen, my coffee plunger, and the glass broke in my hands. So it's been added to the rubbish, along with a band-aid and wrapper from dealing with the cut.

Meanwhile, in real rubbish news, hundreds of Melbourne residents have been advised to move out of their homes for as much as a year because their properties were built next to a landfill that is leaking dangerous levels of methane gas.

Time Warp Wives

2008-08-12T07:03:18Z

This article is about three UK women who are so disillusioned with the times we live in that they've checked out and gone back to the 1930's, 40's, or 50's. Part of me wants to cheer each one on for following her heart, even if it is a little disturbed. Part of me wishes I could be so self-indulgent. But mostly I want to know (especially of Mrs. 1930's), can she share any tips for avoiding packaging and disposables?

Time Warp Wives: Meet the women who really do live in the past

Two month mark

2008-08-06T05:06:12Z

Yesterday my trash project reached the two month mark. It now weighs 250g, photo below:

I also tried a recipe for sweet chilli sauce, so I won't have to buy any more bottled sauce from the supermarket.... not that the sauce I had created that much waste (recyclable glass bottle), but the cap is not recyclable (not an issue if I want to reuse it) and it came with a piece of plastic wrapped around the top of the bottle. But why buy it when you can easily make it cheaper yourself? In the photo below, the commercial sauce is in the saucer on the left, the home made sauce is on the right.

My menu plan for this week is to have in the fridge

cooked brown rice (heat oil in heavy-bottomed pan add 2 cups of brown rice and stir for 15-30 seconds, add 2 cups water, salt, bring to the boil with lid on, then reduce temperature to low and simmer for 15 mins. Turn element off but leave pot on the element with the lid on. Will be cooked in just over an hour, with all the water absorbed.)
cooked beans (soak pinto beans over night, drain, put in pot with just enough salted water to cover (this is less than normal), bring to the boil, reduce temperature to low and simmer for 20 mins. Turn element off but leave pot on the element with the lid on. I peeked after 2 1/2 hours, IIRC, when the side of the pot was no longer warm to the touch, and the beans are cooked perfectly, with a small amount of pot liquor still remaining.)
tinned chopped tomatoes
sweet chilli sauce

... and in the freezer, frozen mixed vegetables. Then I'll mix together some rice, some beans, some chopped tomatoes, sweet chilli sauce, and frozen vegetables, and heat it all up for a one dish meal. It's filling and healthy and best of all EASY AS. Today even DD showed some interest in my meal, as she munched on her oven wedges. I've noticed she does this when I'm eating something with lots of veges in it, which says to me her body is craving vegetables.

EAT SOME COLOURED VEGES, GIRL!!!! :-)

Cold-brewing iced coffee

2008-08-02T06:18:21Z

It's not really iced coffee weather here (it's OMG-I-hope-the-roof-stays-on! weather) but I found an article on how to make cold-brewed iced coffee, so I gave it a test run overnight ( without the ice cubes, room temperature alone is cold enough!). It was so good, I didn't need sugar. It's not normally exactly electricity-free because you use ice cubes but it's another example of substituting time (free) for electricity (not free).

Another reason why it might have been such an improvement over coffee brewed with hot water is that I used filtered water. I bought a used Brita water filter jug for $1.50 from the Salvation Army shop next to Bin Inn this week. I have mixed feelings about this because the filters are disposable, not recyclable. OTOH, our tap water tastes awful, so neither DD nor I drink water straight from the tap. DD, who claims that our tap water "makes [her] brain twang!", mostly drinks Coke Zero and during past summers I drank Diet Coke. After a migraine, when I'm dehydrated and craving a nice glass of water, DD buys bottled water for me, cos she's such a loving daughter, awwww. If the Brita water filters aren't eco-friendly, neither are Coke and bottled water, so I was curious to see if the Brita filters would really make our tap water easier to drink.

The filter definitely makes a difference - DD was also impressed. If drinking filtered water displaces drinking Coke or whatever else we use to disguise the taste of tap water, the cost of the filters (2 litres a day costs around $1 per week, so $2 a week for 2 people) will be much less than the cost of Coke/coffee/tea/sugar. etc. A filter is good for 150 litres of water, so I guess the environmental comparison should be between production and recycling costs for 10 1.5 litre #2 plastic bottles vs. production and landfill costs of one Brita water filter.

I found the filters on sale at 20% off at Farmers ($19.99 for two instead of $24.99). I had a plastic Farmers gift card with a couple of dollars still left on it, so when I took the filters to the counter I said I wanted to use that up and put the rest on my credit card. Unfortunately, when the filters were scanned, they came up as $24.99 (i.e. without the 20% discount), which wasn't mentioned until after the $2.26 from the gift card had been scanned. I told them the correct price but the fact that the gift card had already been scanned complicated things. The transaction couldn't be cancelled - in fact, the checkout girl didn't even know how to process it from that point. She called her supervisor who explained we'd have to proceed at the incorrect price and then do a second transaction refunding $5 to my credit card. While we were doing that and I was concentrating on entering my PIN twice, the supervisor put my filters in a plastic bag. Slightly embarrassed that I hadn't been more alert, I asked to take the filters without the bag, which was fine. She took the "sold" tape off the bag and put it directly on the filters box, and put the bag back.

It was only when I was almost out of the store that I realised I no longer had the zero-balance plastic gift card AAARGH. I briefly thought about going back to get it, but quailed at the thought of being That Customer, lol. I wish I knew what became of that card; I suppose they threw it in the trash. Those cards are designed to be re-loaded, so maybe Farmers put it back on the display of gift cards on the counter, but that would make it a second-hand gift card, so I don't think it's likely. If I had gone back and retrieved it, I could have re-loaded it at some future point as a gift for someone else. I wouldn't have any qualms about gifting a re-loaded card... I regret that in this instance I let worries about what other people might think stop me from doing what I think is the right thing to do.

Paper cones! For Anghed

2008-07-31T05:12:50Z

Interesting information about paper cone packaging and detailed instructions on how to fold them:
http://home.swipnet.se/roland/conefold.html
Found on The Nappy Network.

Startling cooking discovery, more trash

2008-07-29T05:54:55Z

Tuesday, being my shopping day, is the most likely day to create trash here. Today I bought two small foot-pedal bins for trash - 15 litre rectangular ones, both of which came with a couple of large brand name stickers. One is for the toilet (to hold toilet coths until they are laundered), and this size fits between the toilet and the wall. The other is for the kitchen (for actual trash) and because it's smaller than the existing metal can, I've been able to move the refrigerator to the right and widen the gap between it and the stove, which should be good for the energy-efficiency of the fridge. I've moved the larger metal bin out to the back porch and emptied a ten kilo bag of potatoes into it, which meant the plastic handle from the bag was also new trash.

I made fried rice with egg and veges for lunch, using brown rice I'd cooked by the absorption method last night, and that finished off a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, so the plastic vege bag was also added to the trash. I started to cook some soaked dried black beans today at lunchtime, to use for dinner tomorrow. I brought the beans to the boil in a stainless steel pot, lowered the heat down to 1 and simmered them for 20 minutes, at which point I switched the element off, because I was leaving the house. When I got home again this evening, I set about making a hay box, thinking I'd bring the beans back to the boil again and finish them off in the new hay cooker.

I put it together from stuff I already had sitting around in the garage, so it didn't take too long. I took a 10-gallon Sterilite storage tote which stored Christmas decorations* and packed it with shredded office paper instead of hay. I don't have a Dutch oven, but I do have a billy can used in our camping days, so I packed the shredded paper in leaving a billy-can-sized gap, and stuffed an old pillowcase with the rest of the paper for covering the top of the can. Then I went to transfer the black beans into the billy can, thinking I would heat them up again, and test out my hay box. But they were already cooked! This means that beans that supposedly need to be simmered for 2 hours only needed 20 minutes of actual electricity and then you can just switch the electricity off and let the retained heat do the rest, without even using insulation. I never knew you could cook dried beans, as well as rice, this way.

Only now my hay cooker will have to wait until next week to be tested.

* I'm going to donate these to the Salvation Army or St Vincent de Paul, they are too... meh.

I'm still alive

2008-07-28T06:39:48Z

I survived Saturday's Swiss roll gamble. And yesterday I made noodles following Ready's tips and they came out perfectly. I could roll the dough to 1mm thick without too much trouble and they tasted great. Thanks, Ready! :-)

MENU

Breakfast
Porridge, made with rolled oats, sunflower seeds and ground linseed
Lunch
Noodles (wheat or buckwheat) and vegetables
Fried rice, egg and vegetables
Marmite & alfalfa sandwich, homemade yoghurt
Dinner
Tortillas with black beans and rice
Samosas with chutney/yoghurt
Lentils, spiced, with Squash and Raisins* over brown rice
Snacks
Apple
Carrot sticks
Popcorn
Dates
Drinks
Tea or coffee

*from freezer

SHOPPING LIST

Bin Inn
popping corn 415g            1.20                       400ml Less Lids container
buckwheat flour               d/k                       800ml Less Lids container
cat food 420g                2.22                       reuse snaplock bag
dates  150g                   .68                       300ml Decor container
bay leaves                    d/k
oregano                       d/k
cilantro                      d/k

Pak N Save
pasta sauce/tinned tomatoes
hot sauce
              
Freshly Picked
apples * 7                   1.40
celery

3 waste-related things

2008-07-26T06:45:19Z

One: I was in danger of wasting an Amazon gift certificate if I didn't redeem it, um, TODAY, so I spent part of the afternoon browsing for books. I chose:

two books by Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework, and Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash;
Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage by William Rathje; and
Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte.

Two: I came in to the kitchen to find DD peering intently at a packet of frozen chocolate swiss rolls. She had just noticed the small print on the box that said not to store longer than six months. "The only trouble is, I can't remember when I put them in there," she muttered. "There's no date on it". Ha ha, who amongst us doesn't know that feeling? They are Pam's brand, which is the less-cheap of Pak n Save's two house brands, and Pam's is generally trustworthy and not likely to break food regulations, so I took the package and carefully inspected it for the best-by-date. I'd just given up when I spotted it cut into a cardboard flap, i.e. no ink involved and really only visible when the light struck it exactly right. But there it was: BBD170208. OK, so it's Best By Date was 17th February this year, I told her. She looked a little sickly. "Well, don't waste it!" I told her, "I'll eat it if you're afraid to". I didn't really expect her to take me up on it, but after a pause she said, "Go for your life". So if you never hear from me again, I've fallen victim to gluttony and a packet of chocolate swiss rolls. But I think I'll survive - I may have a fragile brain but I have a cast-iron stomach!

Three: SuPerfluous Annoying Marketing award goes to Telecom for yesterday's letter offering a free Telecom Security Suite licence. It's not the unsolicited letter itself I object to, it seems like a good offer (if you're not already covered, which I am, nor do I want an AV solution that's tied to an ISP I look forward to leaving). But stuck to the bottom of the letter is a small (4cm * 2.5cm) plastic doodad that looks like an envelope. DD immediately offered to pay the postage if I would write Telecom a letter returning the seemingly pointless piece of plastic. A surprising offer, which I accepted. "Oh great! I'll bring home a pre-paid envelope home from work then." Zing!

It turns out you can pry open this envelope, and inside it says, "This is how easily an unwanted attachment can sneak in." Ha ha ha. But what's it supposed to prove, really? Curiosity kills the cat? Am I supposed to think, "oohh oohh I'm so dumb because I opened the mystery plastic doohickey, gee I better go download that Security Suite tout suite, because OBVIOUSLY that proves I open all my email attachments willy nilly too!"?

There's no digital quarantine or trash can for the physical plastic payloads your ISP spams you with... there's only the landfill. So one unrecyclable plastic marketing doohickey was added to my trash.

Useful website for women

2008-07-26T01:14:30Z

I just found (via Cinderella's Sundance blog) a beautifully simple website that tracks the dates of your menstrual cycle. You just click on the day that your period starts, and based on that data, Monthly.Info gives you an ETA for your next cycle. By default, it will send you an email reminder two days before, but you can disable this or set it to the exact day, the day before, or one week before. You can also set your time zone, in case you're nearly a full day ahead of America, like me. It has a really uncluttered, serene interface (a good thing, considering you'll be looking at it after that pre-menstrual stretch!) as you can see in the partial screenshot below.

Once you've entered enough dates, a block of statistics is generated, which includes the date of your probable next ovulation and normal day of ovulation. For me, that would be like a forewarning of my next migraine that I can plan around.

I'm going to follow the lead of Donna from Cinderella's Sundance and put Monthly.Info in my FF bookmarks toolbar for easy access come Aug 14th (or thereabouts).

My 3-day break in blogging was due to

2008-07-25T07:56:23Z

... illness, which meant almost* nothing worth blogging happened anyway - I didn't make any rubbish, or buy anything, or even do anything except lie in bed and suffer. I'd just got out of bed at last and taken a shower, when I saw the fold-out mailer that arrived Monday from Contact Energy which starts with, "Jo, we want to make things right" on the front of the mailer, and "What would it take to keep you with Contact?" on the back. Of course, it was triggered when I switched electricity suppliers. Opened out, there's a begging letter; a Customer Service Rep will be contacting me to hear my feedback. I was rehearsing in my head what I wanted that feedback to be, when the phone rang. It was the Contact rep. I explained how I'd started at Greenpeace's Clean Energy and found that Contact was the worst environmental choice and Meridian was the best, and then checked Consumer's PowerSwitch and found that Meridian was also the cheapest source, which made the decision to switch a no-brainer.

First she told me that Meridian being the greenest source was "not 100% true" because the electricity from NZ's electricity generators all goes into the National Grid, so there's no guarantee that the electricity you get comes from a renewable source. Well, duh! I told her the point was to support the companies who use renewable sources to generate the electricity they put INTO the grid. I wondered, what kind of fool would fall for that particular argument? It didn't augur very well, intellectually, for the rest of our conversation.

She started telling me about the green initiatives Contact was putting in place, e.g. that all their sites are carbon-neutral ("like, we don't even have paper cups any more!"). I'd read the 2007 Sustainability Report on Contact's website, so I know that this claim excludes their emissions from electricity generation. I commended them for their efforts, but Meridian has the CarboNZero certification from Landcare Research for both the generation and the retailing aspects, so... Game, set, and match to Meridian.

She followed this by telling me that when NZ's electricity generating sources were divvied up, Meridian unfairly got all the green sources. "So it's not like they earned it or anything". It was embarrassing and depressing to listen to her argue it's not faaaaaaiiir!, like a whiny two-year-old.

She switched to the equally hopeless task of tackling the pricing aspect, and after admitting that Contact can't meet, let alone beat, Meridian on pricing, she offered Fly Buys points. I told her I didn't participate in Fly Buys, since I avoid flying... "Oh, me too! I hate to fly!" You can just see the script: *Rule No. 1. Always agree with the customer (create empathy)*. Before I could say that I don't hate to fly at all, she started to explain all the marvellous stuff like hairdryers and whatnot I could buy with Fly Buys points. Consumerism, yay! Sigh. Then she pulled out the big gun - a $100 bribe/credit on my account. I turned that down too, since I'll save that over time with Meridian. DD told me that companies tend to maintain their price point, so that if Contact drops their prices, Meridian will likely drop theirs too, to keep their position as the lower-price option. At this point, the Contact rep. gave up.

I immediately rang Mum and told her that if her DH still refused to switch to Contact, she might be able to get $100 knocked off the bill by switching to Meridian anyway, and letting Contact bribe her back again!

* "almost nothing" because one company found a novel way to send me a small but completely useless piece of plastic, but that's tomorrow's post.

My worms must be happy

2008-07-20T22:56:22Z

They've been making babies! :-) I saw them this morning when I was adding tea leaves to the worm bin. I saw the baby worms, that is, not the mating... They look just like miniature worms, except white.

I hadn't actually given the worms' sex life a great deal of thought before today, but now I've found out that worms are hermaphrodites, with both sperm and eggs. They need to swap sperm to fertilise their eggs, so two worms snuggle up facing in opposite directions, and pass sperm between each other. After they've separated, the clitellum (the wide band at the front of the worm) secretes a cocoon, which forms a ring around the worm. The worm backs out of the cocoon ring, injecting into the cocoon its own eggs and the sperm it received from the other worm. The baby worms develop in the cocoon. If conditions in the worm bin aren't favourable for hatching, the cocoon can remain dormant for years. DD tells me that I can't infer "happy worms" from the presence of baby worms, which I suppose is true, but at least I can infer conditions in my worm bin are conducive to cocoon hatching, which seems like a positive sign.

First try at making noodles

2008-07-19T04:35:50Z

Now this is what I call an experiment! Hypothesis: Noodles made at home by Jo will end up a gluggy, inedible mess after an hour and a half's labour and she'll end up dining late on toast and Marmite instead. Oh well, failed cooking experiments can always go in the worm bin or compost, and if it works out (like the tortillas), I'll have another tool in my toolbox.

I found it harder than making my own tortillas. The dough for these noodles was 1 cup of plain white flour, 1 egg, 1/4 cup of milk, and a pinch of salt. However, it took up a lot more flour during the kneading and rolling. I found the homemade noodles recipe on a site called Russian Food for Kiwis. It's hard to say how long the process took, since I sensibly started making the dough during the ad breaks of a Monk episode (the one where he gets amnesia in a small town and the opportunistic local crazy cat lady tells him he's her husband and a world-famous roofer, and could he get up the ladder and fix ~~her~~ their roof?).

Next time, I would use a parsley cutter (like a 10-bladed pizza cutter) to cut all the strips to an even width. I was eyeing up one in the St Vincent de Paul shop the last time I was there and I thought it would be good for noodles, but decided to try just using a knife first. Well, this time I used a paring knife and they turned out a bit wobbly. I'd also like to try half white/half stoneground wholemeal flour if I do it again. I cleaned one end of the clothes airer, and hung the noodles there to dry, with a clean tablecloth covering the floor underneath in case they break and start dropping off.

So far, so good, but I haven't cooked them yet, so a gluggy, inedible mess is still a possible outcome. I'm planning to eat them with canned sauce and stir-fry mix vegetables.

Wow, you can see the steam rising, lol. I cooked about half of the noodles in boiling salted water for about 4 mins. They tasted just fine and so ended up in my stomach instead of the worm bin. Hypothesis disproved. Oh, and DD sat there watching me eat and drooling. I had to keep her at bay by offering her the odd green bean as a sop. ;-)

I'll have the rest of the noodles for lunch tomorrow, maybe with a parsley "pesto".

Reply to anghed

2008-07-18T00:06:27Z

I looked for the question mark ;-) in her comment and found not one but eight, so I figured it merited its own post. Eight good questions, I might add.

Subject: I'm not quite sure I understand.
It was scary to think how easily that tiny piece of plastic could have gone into the waste water system.

Is this something that would have been awful in its own right? Or is this something that is a minor evil, but the cumulative effect of a lot of small pieces of plastic would be awful?

I don't see this as an either-or situation or understand what the definition of "minor evil" would be. The cumulative effect of plastic in our oceans is awful (see Donovan Hohn's Sea of Trash article in the NYT (NYT registration required)) but as far as I can tell, even one small piece of plastic floating around in the ocean has the potential to cause harm to at least one sea creature. Is that awful in its own right? Moreover, I don't see the point of making the distinction. Which is worse, something that's "awful in its own right" or something that's cumulatively awful? Both kinds of awful are worthy of my attention.

Also, what would have happened had your brush been made out of some biodegradable material? Would this have counted as a piece of trash? Would you still have been taken aback at how easy it would have been to wash that bristle down the drain?

If the bristle had been made out of biodegradable material (and since I caught it), I would have added it to the compost. No, a biodegradable bristle wouldn't have counted as a piece of trash; I'm not taking an inventory of everything I compost. Once seen, I wouldn't have just let it go down the drain even if it had been a biodegradable bristle. But if a biodegradable bristle had gone down the drain unseen and made it out into Tasman Bay, at least it would degrade over time, like maritime trash did before we invented plastic. Still, if I decide to retire the current brush (on the grounds that it's better to send it to landfill intact than to let it break into smaller pieces that could get into the waterways, should they get through the screening and grit removal filter at the treatment plant), I will keep durability in mind when shopping for a replacement.

And an unrelated question: How long are you planning to continue this experiment? Are you planning a year of it, with an assessment/review at the end, and a decision about what you will continue doing and what you won't? Or are you seeing it as more ongoing, dropping practices as they stop working for you, adding practices as you can?

I don't think of it as an experiment with a result and a conclusion. There's no question in my mind, or hypothesis I'm testing. In my Weltenschauung, waste and rubbish are Not Good Things, and the less we make them, the better. It's more like a project without an end in my lifetime. I'm not planning on a year of minimising my waste and making a decision at the endpoint. How could I decide not to bother any more?! It's like that Oliver Wendell Holmes quote: "The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size." There's no going back! I'm sure that after a year I will be able to look back on a body of knowledge I've acquired over the year, but finding out what I can and can't do is ongoing.

Today was not a trash-free day after all.

2008-07-17T10:55:46Z

I just washed the dishes and when I was washing a glass storage jar with my plastic dish brush, a plastic bristle got caught between the glass and the wire clip and was pulled out of the brush. It was scary to think how easily that tiny piece of plastic could have gone into the waste water system. In summer I recycle the dish water out onto the garden, in winter.... not so much.