Riot for Austerity: Month 1 – Chippin’ Away!

We have one month of Rioting for Austerity under our belts.  Let’s see how we did. 1. Gasoline: down but still a long way to go: 19% We’ve been extra careful with our driving. DH has gone into work a little more often than usual, but for the rest we’ve managed to consolidate our driving …

Home Made Christmas

I’m not going to give too much away. I’m going to try. If you know us, please look away, or not too closely, or don’t look at the pictures (okay, I won’t put any pictures). Sigh… We are making all our Christmas gifts this year ourselves and out of materials we already have (most of …

Pumpkin Compost

Yesterday our first pumpkin orphan was brought to us! Amie and I were just coming up the street froma beautiful Fall walk/bike (can you believe this weather: it’s 9 November and 60F!) and we saw an elderly man cradling a big pumpkin approach our mailbox. He put it down so gently near the sign we …

Requesting Pumpkins for Composting

Tomorrow we’re  dropping these leaflets in every neighbor’s mailbox. I should have handed them out as we went trick or treating – ah well, next year. We’re sure to snag a couple of pumpkins and leaves this time around, tomorrow we’ll also get a nice Fall Walk out of it, and Amie and I had …

Riot Update on Trash, and Compost

Trash Trying to establish our trash baseline for the Riot was pretty easy. I weiged the garbage as it was being transferred from the small pail under the sink to our boxes outside (handy for taking to the landfill once a month). In one week – and it was a pretty typical week – we …

Off the Market: Freecycle

My DH can be a funny one. This morning when happening to pass by this here blog (he was so nice to install the new WordPress for me, and that gimicky category cloud to the right), he caught a glimpse of the post on the War on Consumption. And he said: – What? You passing …

The War of Consumption and What to Say to Friends about “the Good Life”

Yesterday one of the headlines in Google was “Economy Contracts as Consumers Retreat“. There is a nice rhythm to that phrase, don’t you think? And, also like a good line of poetry, it says a lot in the most subtle of ways. The bellicosity of this phrase reveals what we all really know about consumption …

Riot updates on Water and Heating Oil

Update on WATER I found the water meter reading from when we bought the place at the beginning of May. We only moved in at the end of June, but we’ve had house guests – sometimes 1, mostly 2, and sometimes 3 – for most of the time since then, so I will let those …

We Riot 4 Austerity

We have decided, DH and I, to try the Riot 4 Austerity. It was that whole business with Sharon’s run-in with the New York Times that finally did it: we got really upset about it and this seems the best way to address that kind of inanity. We’re now trying to establish our baseline (starting …

Pollan’s Letter to the President-Elect

Sorry I’m a bit late posting this, but this article by one of my heroes Michael Pollan appeared in the New York Times a couple of days ago and it put a chunk in my throat that is still stuck there. It’s a good thing… balance, especially when you’re a pessimist like I am. I …