Zero Waste Summer Treat

I Pledge Allegiance

It isn't just the new house that has been filling me with promise; its the start of a New School Year.  The start of the school year rivals January 1 in terms of its promise-filling abilities--if you're the student, there's no missed assignments, no lunchroom embarrassments, no trips to the office, no sleeping past the alarm clock yet.  And if you're the teacher, there's no flopped lessons, no misplaced stack of graded work, no crushing heap of extra duties, no misguided top-down initiatives yet.  Gosh, just thinking about all of that took some of the New School Year wind out of my sails.

This year is special.  This year, Amanda starts kindergarten.  Half of my heart is soaring--the pride! the excitement! the good times ahead! and the other half is trying not to hyperventilate: welcome to THE MACHINE.

And so, with all of this in mind, I pledge allegiance anew to my waste free goals within the context of school lunches.  Now, it isn't just Amanda who is going to school.  We are a three-person Palo Alto Unified team at this point.  We ALL need school lunches.

We already have all of the little boxes and containers and pouches and bags we need to be waste free for lunch.  The issue is twofold: time and energy.

The morning is fast Fast FAST! on school days, and getting the lunches ready to go is tough.  Yes, I know that conventional wisdom suggests preparing the lunches the night before, but here's where I insert my formal complaint:

First, I don't like the not-fresh way the lunch seems by lunchtime when it was constructed the day before.  Second, CAN I PLEASE HAVE SOME TIME TO RELAX IN THE EVENING? Honestly, I punch out about thirty minutes after the last kid falls asleep.  That's just enough time to do damage control on the current day, let alone prep for the one to come. I'm done on my sad violin now.

I'm going to spend some time in the next couple of weeks focusing on making sure the lunches are 100% waste free.  It's all about the habits.  If I can get off to the right foot, I'll dance all the way to June.

Happy Day

One of our many, modest dreams has come true: we have an awesome new house.

Our awesome new house is in a great neighborhood, close to work and school and daycare, close to good friends and stores with good food. Our neighbors are friendly, our mortgage is affordable.  So much promise in our new little house!  And so, so much to do.  And do it soon we must!  Without systems, the waste creeps back.  We have  been generating about one can of trash every ten days or so since we moved because there is just too much to organize, rethink, and figure out. And honestly, a fair number of things to buy, too.

But, I can see the future, and the future is good.  

Already, we have whittled our commute from twenty miles to five.  Now, Sergio bikes to work whenever he can. I drive, but always with at least two or three passengers in my vehicle (ok, ok, nothing new there). We do use our bikes as much as possible on the weekends, and we also tried a couple of different bakfiets.  Big investment, but huge return.  Right now we are debating between a two- or three-wheeled model.  Sergio likes the two-wheeled Work Cycles bike because it handles like a regular bike and is fast, and I like the three-wheeled Babboe model, primarly because it seems safer for the baby, and frankly, I'm a slow and steady kind of rider. Seeing as we are not in the market to spend 7K on bikes any time soon, we'd better decide between them.  And, we still need to test more bakfiets out before we buy anything at all. 

Now that we have a house, we have a little yard for planting vegetables and hanging laundry out to dry.  Have we done these things yet? No! We still have 101 boxes to unpack.  But, the goal exists.

What we have that we value more than anything else in the world is more time.  More time to spend together as a family, and more time to do the things that will help us achieve our waste free goals, like get back to making our own bread and yogurt.  Time, it seems, is one of the only things that can be well wasted.