Graphic Blogging

The other day I stumbled upon a website whose author makes cartoons out of peoples dreams. Which made me want to immediately try making a cartoon of one of my own dreams, though all I had was the tiny paint program that comes free on the PC. It was pretty fun, anyway.

So here's my first entry into the realm of graphic expression (you can see it bigger here):

Slow stretching...

I've been meaning to write awhile now, of course. Thanks Fiddler for asking what's up...I know in blog land it can be unnerving or worrisome if somebody just stops blogging.

Our excuse: we have had such a busy spring! We unintentionally took a blogging hiatus because MaGreen is working on a novel so she can get her PhD, GreenDaddy is finishing his last semester of PhD coursework and working his day job, and Grasshopper is long past the age of gurgling patiently whilst we invent.

I keep beginning posts and then stopping them because it seems there's so much to say. I suppose I don't need to try. I'll just start slowly, and pledge to not worry so much about writing posts that I don't write...

1)
MaGreen has started taking yoga again at Yourbodycenter.
Highlights: Her teacher is pretty funny, and her biceps are back.
Lowpoint: Her sticky mat was stolen from her car.
Highlight on the lowpoint: "if you're not into yoga, and have half a brain" seems pretty dated in the days when yoga mats are unsafe items to leave in a car. I'm hoping some homeless person stole it to sleep on, and not some style concious yogi (because it was a cool looking mat).
Second highlight on the lowpoint: Her new mat is not made of plastic.

2)
We've renewed ties to the Central City Vegetable Co-Op, and GreenDaddy's garden is also full of yummy greens.

Highpoint: MaGreen is cooking more, though she's afraid all her food tastes the same.
Highpoint deux: We're paying less for vegetables than we did going to Whole Foods.
Highpoint tran: Grasshopper knows you can eat things that grow.
Numero cuatro : GreenDaddy found a potato growing in the compst, replanted it, and made six of his own new potatoes!
The fifth good thing: MaGreen built Koski compost bins in the last yard after many months of saying she would.

Lowpoint: Grasshopper has lost her taste for vegetables
Another lowpoint: GreenDaddy's lettuce bolted (see in picture above!) and he was really excited, thinking he'd discovered a new way to grow lettuce before our friend JP told us bolting is a bad thing for lettuce to do.

3) We hired a nonprofit tree planting service called Trees For Houston to plant, stake, and mulch two new trees out front

a black gum

and an oak...I can't remember what kind!

and a tree out back started falling onto the cars


so MaGreen sawed off all the branches. It is possible she didn't kill it.


4) Grasshopper is all highpoint...Here she is with her friend Tom Sawyer, who was supposed to be taking her on a walk around the block:

No, no: that's C. Uncle. She is chatty, funny, sneaky, and likes to sing and tell jokes. I'll devote an entire post to her in the near future.

Now the door's cracked back open, we, or at least I, hope to reenter the world of Green Parenting in the blogosphere.

Since We Last Communicated

I wondered why it is that people always put things like blueberries or bananas or raisins in oatmeal, and rice with beans. Never one to have a thought without a recipricol action, when Grasshopper requested a bowl of cereal for dinner, I added some turtle beans to her oatmeal and molasses. I felt smarter than her the first few bites, when she, as usual, dived after the dark chunks that are usually blueberries in her oatmeal. It took her seven or eight bites before she determined she'd been hoodwinked. GreenDaddy and I tasted the oatmeal and were surprised it took her so long: the reason people don't but beans in oatmeal, we immediately surmised, is because it brings out the grossest sides of two foods that we generally like. The thick innards of the beans, particularly, doesn't go with the mushiness of oatmeal like it goes with grains of rice. This isn't to say I won't try adding lentils to the rice, one day, if Grashooper continues demanding to eat cereal 24/7.

Sometimes It's the Huge and Vicious Things That Count

We have worked hard here in Megalopoland to teach Grasshopper how to be a smart, green little baby. She shares, so long as she gets something she wants at the same time somebody else does. Her drinks have never been tained by the taste of old plastic. Her butt has rarely been covered in poo, her hair has never been covered in sodium laurel sulfates. She has eaten cherry tomatoes from our own organic garden, she has learned to love molasses (thanks Amit) and is a pretty good little green baby. We thought we were teaching her to make intelligent, thoughtful choices that would guide her through life. But as we exited the plane in Missoula, and headed towards the stairs we passed this seven or eight foot tall Grizzly:



Grasshopper saw it, ran towards it full tilt, squealing, "Doggy, doggy, doggy!" and then hugged the bear's giant glass cage.



Thus proving that sometimes it isn't the little things that count. Sometimes it's the very, very, big, and vicious things.



Sadly, or perhaps luckily with Grasshopper's track record, we didn't see a live bear or moose, though we saw tracks. We saw Rock Creek freezing over, and deer, and this crazy bird that only comes to Rock Creek in the winter. It dives into the freezing water and digs for crazy, cold-loving insects. In the photo above Grasshopper is proving that so long as you have a daddy's chest nearby, it is possible to take a snooze sub-zero land.

The Month in Pictures

So we're heading to Montana, tomorrow, to spend time with my aunt and uncle in their cabin just outside Missoula.  (I know, I know: if we bought carbon offsets, this year, somebody would be very rich and we would be very poor.) I thought before I get a store of a whole new set of photos, I'd do a little photoblogging to make up for the long lapse of no posting:

After Greendaddy's parents left...and we didn't get any photos when they were here...we had a few regular days.  Greendaddy and Grasshopper tooled around in the cool bike seat my friend Jbrd gave us.



And Greendaddy experimented with taking over my old job (or my boob's old job) of putting Grasshopper to sleep...



...then he perfected it.



After a couple weeks of moseying and snoozing, we hopped on the plane with our irate toddler and went to Virginia, where Grasshopper got to bond with her cousins Katydid (who is five) and Cricket (a little older than one).  This was taken right before we went to a Pumpkin Patch:



This is the picture that shows how Grasshopper was the one little cousin who really needed a nap, but refused to take one:



At the farm with the Pumpkin Patch we spent about twenty minutes lounging in this pile of corn. Greendaddy wanted to make his own pile of corn, right in the back yard, because it was so comfortable and refreshing.  Really, on both accounts.  This is Grasshopper:



And Cricket:



And the whole bunch of us:



When we got back home, my mom came to visit, and it was Halloween.  Grasshopper appears here as a Lion.  She's wearing her friend Willy's costume, homemade by his grandmother the year before.  She won $10 at WholeFoods later on, in the costume contest my mother quickly discovered and entered her into:



And she was also either a Boohbah or Rodney Dangerfield:



I didn't think she knew how to open up candy by herself 
since we never give her any candybars.   But my baby is no fool.



Here's my mom, Greendaddy, and Grasshopper -- the only proof mom was here, as I keep aiming the camera at the baby and my husband, and nobody else.  Got to get better at that:



Mom took us to the Renaissance festival.



Grasshopper was sitting on a giant, fabulous cement pig that my mother didn't think was nearly as intersting as we are:



We went to Galveston with my mom, but we went too late to get in the water.  The weekend after she left, though, we went to Surfside and it was still warm enough to get in the water.  Two weekends ago.



Montana, where I'm going at five a.m. tomorrow, will be tough medicine for this subtropical family, but I hear we get to go cross country skiing...

Toddler Talking Trash

I know I've been heavy on mommy posts, lately. But I'm thinking Grasshopper's interst in this blog, if she ever reads it, will be these sorts of posts.  Don't worry, though: I'm in the midst of a post on feeding a vegetarian baby. Okay. That's a lie. In order to justify another post about my wee one I hustled some synapses, which reminded me of the Quorn taste in my mouth, and how I once considered writing a post on the topic of raising a healthy vegetarian child. I am still at the dawn of thinking about writing that post however.

This post, by the way, is unabashedly about my adorable toddler whose requisite pronounciation mistakes have a distinctly crass bent.

For instance, although she has always referred to her breastfeeding as, "NiiighNigh!" she ran up to me and started demanding boobies last week. Boobies?? Grasshopper is all but weaned and neither of us could remember the last time we'd uttered the "b-o-o" word. The next morning, though, she asked again. I said no, outright, which sent her into tears, but she quieted down and gazed at me intently as I started making her morning seven grain cereal. When I opened the freezer, as usual, and dumped a handful of frozen blueberries into the pot she let out a victorious gurgle of sorts and started laughing/chanting like an insane baby: boobies! boobies! boobies!

And just tonight she crassified another of her favorite foods. I was teaching her that all liquids aren't, actually, called agua or water. On the table in front of us: bilburry juice (jugo), milk, water, and ketchup. After a protracted conversation in which I had to assure her that my name was still "mommy" even if all the liquids were not "agua," she decided I wasn't pulling her leg. Then she pointed and named everything on the table: aqua, jugo, milk, cow poop.

And last but not least: after she sits on her potty GreenDaddy chirps: "Good job, Grasshopper! Let's go put the pee pee in the toilet." Grasshopper falls into a full tilt run towards the bathroom yelling, "Twat! Twat! Twat!"

We're trying not to encourage her in these mispronunciations, since I don't want to be one of the YouTube parents who thinks it's funny to teach their children to swear worse than sailors and put it on the web for the world to see. But, like my father always swore he was doing for me, I am saving these stories to tell her first dates (though by the time she's thirty-five, she'll probably just think they're funny too...heh heh).

Of course, my favorite of her words is not an uncouth mispronunciation at all: it's an extraordinary invention. A mix between the spanish and english words for shoe -- "zapato," and, well, "shoe." A shoepato.

Notes On BabyG

Who is, by the way, no longer a baby. She is a full blown, prancing, squawking, bluffing, bossing bundle of toddlerhood. And toddlerhood is an incredible thing – I realize now that the old doctors and aunties who write books about how to be parents were not even slightly exaggerating when they talked about the extraordinary smarty-pantsedness of these little tykes. In fact, I swear to moss and emeralds and all things pretty and green that if you put your ear to my baby girl’s ear the same way you’d put your ear to a seashell, you will actually hear the gurgling and bubbling of rapidly developing human brain. (Unfortunately you won’t be able to test this fact since my baby would bite, claw, climb, stuff an elbow inside of, yank the hair above, or kiss your ear long before it reached her ear for verification.)

Proof? In just the last few days I taught her to kick! Kick! Kick! in the pool. She's mastered the difference between her arm and her elbow. We’ve taught her to sleep without breastfeeding, to carry her potty to the toilet after she’s gone (she’s not ready to dump…) A chasing game I improvised the other day has been transformed, by her, into this: she: pulling a little ball toy behind her; Mommy or Daddy: follows her while pushing the ‘popper’ toy. Sounds harmless but it means hours of minutes ‘chasing’ the baby from room to room, in a circular fashion. The whole time we have to shout: Weeeee! Weeeee! Weeeee! And if we stop, she drops her toys and shrieks! (The twos are coming on strong)

More charmingly, I taught her to open her eyes and to close her eyes last night, in hopes it’d help when it was bedtime. Only it backfired, because she makes this hilarious effort at closing the eyes. Instead of just letting her eyelids fall normally, she expends all this effort and ends up in this fluttering eyelid state. (It reminds me of that exercise where you sit in a pretend chair, and your muscles shake and buckle, and your body’s saying: don’t tell me you’ve gone and forgotten how to sit down on the floor, because if this is the best you can do, we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble…)

Living the Three Quarters Life

Yesterday, I switched to a three quarters full-time schedule for my job. I negotiated this arrangement eight months ago, but the switch depended on a new person joining the office staff and training that person to take over some of my responsibilities.

At first when I wrote out my new schedule to share with my co-workers, I felt disappointed. After all the patience and bureaucratic legwork it took to make the part-time switch, I realized that thirty hours is not dramatically different than forty hours. I will still go to work five days per week and during most of the daylight hours I will be sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen. Instead of starting work at eight, I am to start at ten the first three days of the week. Thursdays, I will leave at one so I can take a course towards my doctoral degree. Fridays, I will work a full day.

But those two hours yesterday morning were precious and wonderful. I left the house when I normally would in the morning, but instead of going to my office I wrote in the library. The whole day I felt more cheerful and energetic. My work and family life felt more balanced. It is not that I spent more time with MaGreen and BabyG, but when I got home, instead of crashing on the couch and slogging through the evening, we all went to the university outdoor swimming pool. BabyG seemed to enjoy the pool. She climbed up the small slide and slid down it about twenty times in a row. Even though the absolute quantity of time I spent with my family did not change, I think the quality of the time was better.

In order to arrange this three-quarter schedule, I had to give up a quarter of my pay, which was used to cover part of the new staff person’s salary. We could not be able to pull this off oeconomically if MaGreen did not manage our finances as carefully as she does. She keeps track of our expenses using a computer program Quicken. She spent several days earlier this summer switching us to an internet bank, turning off our landline, setting up a good Skype account, and doing various other things to save us money. Also, even though my total income will decrease, our taxes will be lower so the cut in my take home pay is less than the total cut in my gross pay.

I hope I continue to feel good about the three quarters life and that it also helps MaGreen and BabyG feel a good balance in their lives too.

Seven Greenish Things About Magreen

Like GreenDaddy's post below, I'm responding to cake's tag: we were both supposed to write seven things about ourselves people don't know. Because I am stickler for the title of our website, mine are loosely based on ideas I associate with being (or not being) green.

1. I drank a glass of shelack, as a child, and had my stomach pumped. I don't remember the pumping, but I remember eying the shelack and thinking it looked tasty.

2. My friend Shelly and I used to clean my dad's bar every Saturday and Sunday morning, while playing barmaid. We stole a sixpack when I was six, drank it, and threw up all night long.

3. Throughout my pregnancy and even the delivery of BabyG I never actually envisioned having a baby at the end. I was thinking: I'm pregnant, or I'm in delivery, but never: I'm creating a child that will one day actually exist. I was determined to come through the 'phases' of pregnancy and delivery, but was totally shocked when suddenly there was this tiny other being, my baby, in the delivery room.

4. I learned to swim in an irrigation ditch full of leeches. Every summer I stepped on at least one rusty 'pop top'.

5. When I am depressed, I imagine myself curling up and resting in some coral cave deep in the ocean. When I'm happy, I look forward to passing lots of time swimming and canoeing in cold, cold clear rivers.

6. I once hitchiked out of Zion's park, during a Spring Break backpacking trip I took there with college classmates, because I missed my father so much and couldn't stand being so close to him without visiting(I went to school in Minnesota and he lived in Salt Lake City).

7. Whenever I am very angry at somebody I fantasize about supergluing their car's tires to their driveway.

Okay. I tag anthromama, fiddlehedz & pirate papa...none of whom I've met face to face, but whose blogs I've read awhile. I also tag top secret blogger juju, and anybody else out there yankering to yammer in meme form.

The Secret Seven

I got tagged by cake to do a post that lists 7 things about me that you might not know. I've never done a meme, but here it goes:

1) The first album I ever bought was Aerosmith’s Permanent Vacation, back in 1987. That’s the one with the song “Dude Looks Like a Lady.”

2) I won a gold medal at the 1989 National Unicycle Meet for my age group in the Walk the Wheel race, which requires taking your feet off the pedal and putting them directly on the tire. Only one other kid finished the race. Mobile, Alabama – the city I grew up in – had a very active unicycle group. I got interested when I saw them performing at a pumpkin festival.

3) When I was about fourteen, I read and reread Ursala Le Guin’s Very Far Away from Anywhere Else at least three times.

4) I started a South Asian radio show at a college radio station that’s still going after nearly ten years. It’s on WNUR in Chicago and is called The Lotus Beat. I feel really proud of that even though the name embarrasses me.

5) I never had any wisdom teeth.

6) I enjoy checking everyday how many minutes are left on our cell phone plan.

7) One of my favorite tasks I have been assigned as part of a job was when I worked as an intern for a children’s magazine called Muse. I was asked to find pictures of monkeys that didn’t show any of their genitalia. So I spent half the day at the Chicago Public Library thumbing through books about monkeys and, among other things, learned about Jane Goodall.

Now I'd like to tag Laura.

Green Inventions That Aren't

The frugal traveler, in the New York Times, is driving across the states. Since I've been having snark attacks lately, I began my sincere suggestion about where he should go in Houston (Menil, Artcar Museum, Cali sandwiches, folk houses, Clayburn cafeteria if he's a veggie...) with the observation that it is neither environmentally (the whole greenhouse thing) nor economically (with the rising gas prices) frugal for one man to drive an old car across the country. (Don't you think it'd be more interesting for him to take the Greyhound or one of the posh Mexican bus lines? He could have packed a portable scooter or bike to toot around on.)

Anyway, I know precisely how expensive gas is right now because my snarkish comment is a hypocritical one: GreenDaddy, BabyG and I have been guilty of a lot of car travel ourselves these past couple weekends. Which means we saw lots of new sights, but we also saw a lot of the same old sight: concrete & asphalt.

Gruesome, hot concrete. Unfriendly, scalding asphalt.

The whole starting off complaining about the frugal traveller's gas may have thrown you off track because, god knows, we need something that isn't gas to use in our cars...but corn, soy, oil, battery, electricity, fuel cell focused people seem to be on that one.

Which brings me to the green invention that isn't: more porous roads. I declare it high time for highways to be made of pastel colored clays. For city streets to be made of pressurized moss and tree leaves. Some sort of compacted organic 'waste' product. The roads would cool cities down by degrees. They would allow the water to fall back into the earth. They would be eco-modern.

Because hot asphalt isn't. It's 1978...as is the very idea we have to live in concrete jungles. It's 2007, ladies and gentleman, I am ready for some roads that feel good to walk down barefooted in August.

Do you have an idea for a green invention that isn't? Send it along to our gmail address which is greenparenting at said service.

Tale of a Fateful Trip

I am yankering to begin this story about our camping trip to Bastrop State Park by assuring you readers that it really taught the Green family a lot about what we should do better on our next trip. Which you know means one thing: everything went wrong.

It did. Wrongness was the most confident and reliable member of the camping party GreenDaddy, BabyG and I set off on with our friends Gemini, Araf and their five year old daughter, Maha. I’m fairly certain none of us would deny it.

But just in case somebody would, I’ll make my case, which begins by explaining how the site we had planned to visit, Huntsville State Park, just an hour away from Houston, was filled. Garner State Park and the clear and cool Frio River, where I really, really want to go was too far: four hours away. So we drove to Bastrop State Park, which we knew little else about except that it had a swimming pool and pine trees. I could not dismiss a forboding feeling when I heard the park (was so lame) that even though it had two lakes, it also had to have a pool.  Something seemed amiss.  

But Bastrop is two hours from Houston and had a spot open: who cares about amiss? GreenDaddy and I spent hours Friday night amassing gear...so long we skipped breakfast and were two hours late meeting up the next morning. Then, though she didn’t scream the whole two hours, our child refused a nap and earned high high-maintenance marks.

Bastrop Park was hot. Our site was hilly, BabyG tripped, and this made her cry until daddy took her for a walk. We forgot ice. When Gemini and I went to buy some, I asked the cranky old lady in the park store where we could swim, and she told us nowhere: the pool was closed and no wading or swimming was permitted in the lakes or creeks. Since we were planning to paddle, I asked if water-contact was prohibited because the water was somehow dangerous, or if it was just a protected ecosystem. She said it was an ecosystem, and wouldn't say more. When an old volunteer guy carried our ice to the car, I asked him how to cool off. He said drive five miles to the lake in the neighboring park. We eventually did: it was a crowded, swimming-pool-sized, fairly shallow area in a lake otherwise meant for water skiers and that, Maha said (dismissivley) smelled like ketchup: otherwise it was perfect.

That night, BabyG peed the bed. Twice. It was blistering cold outside, for Texas, and we were serenaded by the continuous humming, honking and buzzing of cars passing on the nearby highway. Half the pan of oatmeal fell into the fire, that next morning. BabyG started saying bye-bye to everybody, which meant: okay, I’m ready to have been back in Houston three hours ago.  

Instead, we headed to the lake you couldn’t swim in, to kayak and fish. It turned out we were missing GreenDaddy’s kayak oars, so he and Araf rented a canoe and then Araf went fishing. It took forty mintutes to put the Klepper kayak together, after which, Gemini, Maha, BabyG and I climbed into the canoe. I took one oar as Gemini had never paddled before, and GreenDaddy took the other in his kayak.

Maha, almost immediately, wanted to go fish with her dad, and BabyG was unabashedly unimpressed with her life-jacket. She performed her best shrieking raptor imitation, non-stop, until I stopped paddling and breastfed her. Gemini didn't want to take the helm as the canoe thing was new to her. She thought she'd kill us. She didn't though: she caught on to paddling nicely.

When we reached Araf, he said he’d like a ride. GreenDaddy jumped waist deep in the water to help moor us as we transferred vessels. When Gemini’s family came back, we all decided to picnic on what ended up being waterlogged veggie burgers. Yum. After eating, we packed up and headed to our respective homes.

Fast forward twelve hours and note how GreenDaddy’s body is a minefield of flatworm infestation. It looks like countless mosquito bites. Initially, I felt sorry for him, but didn't pay much attention. When the bites seemed to multiply, I searched the internet and discovered he has swimmer's itch: bites made from a parasitic worm that cycles through snails and ducks until humans stupidly offer up their, apparently, duck-like skin. Its itch is severe (like poison ivy) as opposed to mild (like insect bites) according to the Center for Disease Control. He has over 74 bites.

So, it’s like I said, we learned a lot about what to do better, next time.

But it's also like what I didn’t say, but what GreenDaddy and I talked about half the way home. As BabyG slept peacefully in her Aloha carseat, and we were following the wildflower drenched highway back to Houston (and there were dozens of varieties of wildflowers out this weekend: in purples and reds and yellows and golds and whites and lavenders...) we talked about how we both felt toatlly relaxed. Stress-free for the first time in months.

And it occurred to us, as it has occurred to all campers at one point or another, that the swim in the grass-filled and pondy bottomed lake, the making due with imperfections, the passing of intensely intimate time with another family, the learning to wash two pounds of spinach in a plastic bag, the witnessing of somebody learning to steer a canoe, the blossoming friendship between BabyG and Maha, even the little part of beauty evident in the presence of motorhomes with their sewage systems, Christmas light pollution, and satellite televisions: the power of camping is that all of these tiny things come together and trump the obvious wrongs. And no matter how annoying the wrongs were at the time, by the ride home they seem to be integral parts of camping fun (except for those worm bites.)

I mean, I wrote all this just to say: we had fun. More fun than we've had in ages and ages. It was nice to spend that time with our friends and each other. And though next time we’ll be sure not to wade in shallow lake water we’ve been told not to swim in, and we’ll remember toys for the baby, and we’ll make simpler meals, and we’ll get up earlier and swim in cooler water…something else unexpected will happen. And we’re looking forward to finding out what it will be.

I Love You Sleeping Worker

Today, for lunch, I ate two sandwiches garnished with dill and chard from the garden. Then I walked back to the office from home. I usually ride my bicycle back, but I had a flat tire and I didn't want to switch out the tube right then. It's about a two mile walk. Probably the most walkable two miles in all of Houston. Nearly the whole way the sidewalk is shaded by oaks and magnolias. I walk down Woodhead street through the lower Montrose over I-59 and into the elite neighborhood near Rice University. The trees over there don't just shade the street, they form perfect canopies. Most of the people outside in that neighborhood are brown like me. They're landscaping or taking white babies out for a stroll. Of course, I don't pass among them. My spectacles and at least a dozen other markers give me away as someone walking to the campus.

After I crossed Rice boulevard and entered the campus, I noticed a facilities worker sitting on the grass by the side of the road. He had his back resting against a tree and his legs stretched out in front of him. I thought he might be sleeping, but I couldn't tell because of his sunglasses. From about ten feet away, I heard him snoring. As I passed him, I saw a line of saliva hanging from his lip, gleaming brightly because the sun was hitting it at just the right angle. I thought about taking a picture of him with my cell phone camera, but was afraid that even allowing my camera to record the light bouncing of his body would ruin the perfection of his sleep. So I just kept walking and smiled for five minutes straight.

Home Projects

It's been awhile since I posted on home projects. But this morning my mom sent me a link to this U-Tube video in which this man named Wally Wallington lifts and manipulates Stonehenge-sized stones in his back yard, using just wood, himself, and levers.



I've been having fun reading people's summations of this video: A college commenter suggested the main point is that you shouldn't go off to Florida and play shuffleboard for retirement. Not a few others have concluded that aliens, alas, may not have created the pyramids. Mood-killers have agreed, enmasse, that Wally's "rediscovery" of ancient building techniques is a reminder of the numerous amounts of information and abilities humans have lost in the shuffle of more modern "progress". I like how it smashes common expectations/stereotypes about hard laborers -- he's a retired construction worker who is clearly ingeniuous, thoughful, resourceful, and not only interested in the way things work, but motivated and curious enough to follow his own observations to their incredible ends. And of course, I don't think it prudent to leave unspoken the obvious possiblity that Wally is, in fact, an alien.

Any summations I missed? Or, what I really want to know: what home projects do YOU have going on?

Digression for my Thawing Brain

Obviously everybody in the world is dying to know what I did with my first free moments after having taken my PhD comprehensive exams…which I won’t know if I passed until my graders tell the English department. IT COULD BE YEARS. But probably will only be days…

Because of Netflix, GreenDaddy and I watched The Bicycle Thief. It had a cute little boy in it. (But if my wife sold our linens to buy me a bike, and if the bike was stolen, and if without the bike my family would starve, I would not drag my son through the streets of Rome, looking for a bike that looks like all the others. I might try to get a loan or get help, and if after a few hours of that nothing gave, I would, first thing, enlist my cute son to help me steal some well-off-looking person’s bike and not even feel bad. Not because I want to teach him not to like rich people, but because I want to teach him how I like my family not to die of hunger. If I felt a little bad about it, after I started earning the big bucks as a bike messenger, I would take him to donate a bike to somebody else who might starve without it...because, dear me, I am a dirty hippy...so, if you ever find out the grizzlybirds at Greenparenting are starving and need something you have, better look out...)

I Talk Too Much We're Rude, Deal With It

Friday, our blog was reviewed by I Talk Too Much, We're Rude, Deal With It, a group of people whose schtik is, for the most part, to say nasty things about other peoples' blogs. Not surprisingly, they were very angry about our site.

The reviewer was so put off he couldn't muster more than three sentences about why he hates it. Usually they devote at least five or six paragraphs. So we stunned him with horror, bascially. The best part to read in the reviews, really, is the comments, though.

Things that put people off:
1) GreenDaddy taking BabyG to the Pro-choice rally
2) The site design
3) Our "enviro-fascism"
4) Dirty hippiness of the site
5) They think their lives are not political, and by extension, that our attempts at Green Parenting are somehow more political than their blissfully ignoring the environment, society, etc.

A couple people on their site liked ours, which was nice; one woman defended Raj's taking BabyG to the rally.

I'm the one who put the site up for review because I just wondered what people in other facets of life think of a blog lik ours.

I'm actually very satisfied with the review, for some reason. Most of our friends, and commenting readers, think the way we do. I start thinking everybody believes the same as we do. It's a good reality check to remember a lot of people are afraid and/or annoyed by people consciously making choices.

Hating Green

Everybody else is doing this. Writing about 20 things they hate. So I will, too. I'll tag Robin at the Other Mother, and Fiddler. Who may respectfully decline if they're in too good of moods to think of what they hate. (You all, of course, don't need to write about hating "green." Just whatever comes to your mind. Izzy Mom's is pretty funny.)

Anyway, here's the list of things that particularly annoy me about being green, or because I'm being green.

1. The revolution is costing us whole paychecks, man. I mean anything organic/healthy/not-going-to-kill-me-with chemicals costs exactly the same as the normal product, Squared. And anybody offering "green" services -- like checking my house for mold, or helping me build a green porch, etc, costs the same price as other handy people, Cubed. l

2. Being called a hippie. I grew up in Utah and can't think of the term as anything but derogatory, and I don't have the chutzpah to decide to "reclaim" the word. I hate it, too, because I think of the hippie kids I knew grewing up, whose parents didn't really look after them in the name of "freedom". I was enough one of those kids that the idea of hippie momming just pisses me off. But, I've said this before.
3. That I am judgemental about hippies.

4. Saying, "We don't hava TV," because it embarasses me. It sounds too much like saying "I'm a vegetarian" sounded about ten years ago. People always wince and get ready for me to start pounding into them about the evils of their tv watching, beef eating lifestyles. For the record, I like TV so much I have to hide it from myself.

5. I hate apologising for not having a television.

6. The hellhoundish squeals of delight squirrels make for days after having destroyed our little garden makes me want to give up my vegetarian ways and make a batch of squirrel stew.

7. My sort of moldy, blackish green thumb that makes my garden in verdant Houston look like its growing in a barren patch of the Sahara.

8. The smell of vinegar which, alas, is my primary cleaning product these days.

9. Co-sleeping when my baby wakes up, slap-happy, at 2 am, in the mood to play with me.

10. When her decision to let me know she's woken up all giddy isn't by the sweet sound of her gurging voice, but by the agonizing digging of her fingernails that have grown three inches longer since she went to bed, into my unsuspecting cheeks, eyes, and/or nostrils.

11. Elimination Communication, when I drop the potty on the bed in the middle of the night, which, thank God, I haven't done in awhile. Knock on wood panelling. Or when I don't position the potty right and my young lady pees on my leg. GROSS.

12. When I think I know she has to poo or pee and I'm wrong, and she looks at me like I' absolutely, completely insane or screams at me like I'm the most insensitive creep she's run into in her six months of life.

13. I hate how things that aren't green are portrayed of as "fun" things, and how greens are portrayed as boring, and how greens fall into the trap by getting the "world-is-ending" tone in their voice that scares the shit out of people and makes them want to drink Margaritas and jump into their Hummers to go on spending sprees at Walmarts.

14. That I have to think of an alternate way to do about 800 normal things that should be done the alternate way in the first place. Like figuring out how to get rid of my cat's fleas without poisioning anybody with the Advantage that has been one of our most beloved friends for the last five years.

15. Water that comes in plastic bottles. I've posted about this fairly recently, already, and plan to write more about it soon, so I won't go into too much detail. THERE IS NO BENEFIT TO BUYING WATER IN A PLASTIC BOTTLE. Except to the Coca Cola company, maybe, and other corporations that have figured out how to sell us something that we KNOW is supposed to be free, it is one of the unmentioned, self-evident rights Tommy J. wrote about when they were planning the first revolution. Buy water filters for your tap. Eighty bucks for a fabulous one with a separate spout, so you don't have to wait for any filtering.

16. Bikram Yoga and Power Yogas. I have done both, will probably do both again because I like yog itself. But I hate how yoga is billed as something green and good when it can be as vapid as any aerobics class. Bikram classes destroy the planet by having their heaters on high all day long, Ashtanga classes are full of competitive yogi vibes that gross me out. Sigh. Probably I'll go to one of the two by the end of the week, though.

17. I hate how mosquitoes don't seem to be aware that my natural mosquito repellent is meant to repel them away from me and my succulent, tasty little baby girl. Yo Skeeters! If it smells like Eucalyptis, YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO LIKE IT. Can I make this any clearer?

18. Shampoos and toothpastes (like Tom's of Maine's, last time I checked) from the healthfood store that still have the icky petro byproducts, or the laurel sulfates.

19. I hate how much plastic comes with parenthood, no matter how much we try to avoid it. And that I'd rather give up chocolate than ZipLocs.

20. Will they ever make a healthy deoderant that works?

Wow. It's over so soon! I must be a real asshole because a few of the other people writing about 20 things they hate wrote about how coming up with 20 things to hate was hard and I feel like I could keep going into the next millenium. Which isn't to say they're bad bloggers, but that I must have a really darkened psyche.

non sequitoria, utah, blather

for the record, i have always been a big fan of the lesser germs, even before the article greendaddy mentioned was published. my old friend julie c. and i used to go so far as to say we didn't believe in them. since that time a number of germs have made themselves terribly apparent to me and i have decided not to be so much in their favor as to disbelieve their existence entirely.

i should clarify that by germs i mean anything smaller than a pore and endowed with the ability to make me throw up, sneeze, get hives, cancer, die, what have you. um. sorry, doctors and lexographers.

anyway, more recently than the article about the healthy sewer lab rats, i think i read somewhere about kids growing up on farms having less alergies or something than city kids?

on another note, every day i am growing more annoyed by bottled water. why do people buy it? i acknowledge that in youth getting water in cone shaped cups, from the culligan man was neat. but what's neat about a plastic bottle? that isn't rhetorical. answer: NOTHING! people! go get filters! they're cheaper and you're more likely to get clean water if you get one! gosh, water is FREE. ish. take it free!

utah is a desert state. lotta water bottles.

(strained transition:)

also lots of alcoholics i know live in utah. and i am more annoyed by cihrossis and alcoholic induced hepatitis, or really, hepatitis in general (my other mom has hep c), than i am at bottled water and its drinkers.

but i'm not really annoyed by germs in general. even when i got the stomach flu last week, i didn't mind. gave me an excuse to rest (that's how fabulous utah has been.) babyg didn't get sick, which seems miraculous. her immune system fired up in response to my flu germs and her white cells kicked my flu cells' asses.

i think this post ended awhile back and i ignored it, which is why i can't think of how to end.

Six Weird, Green Things (Zombie Limbs In the Compost & Organic Gothic)

Over at Busy Mom she wrote about 6 weird things because Wacky Mama and Motherhood Uncensored tagged her. I'm a fairly new blogger and think it might be not WRONG to live out another person's tag, but sort of UNCOOL. About anybody whose ever gone to Elementary, Jr. High, and High School with me will know what the blogging community might only be suspecting at this point: I am VERY uncool. Luckily, because I've decided to write about the 6 weirdest green things I’ve noticed since beginning this blog. To add to my potential blogging inetiquetteness, I've rearranged the order of the last three posts for clarity's sake:

1) Zombie Limbs In the Compost: Those beetle larvae beneath GreenDaddy’s composts may be saving the earth by chomping on all our leftover sludge but they look like a corpse’s translucent, swollen fingers, they move like accordions, their little legs look sharper and more evil than regular bugs’, and I don’t believe they are harmless. They sleep just fifty feet away from my bedroom window.

2) Organic Gothic: One Sunday afternoon -- when Westheimer, Houston’s hip/liberal/gay/tattoo/antique/coffee house strip is most busy -- I caught myself sauntering through all the hullabaloo dressed in the raggedy post-baby outfit I live in these days: black former-running pants with a hole in the crotch that I’ve closed with a safety pin, and a nursing top I’d love if it hadn’t inexplicably developed a fuzz ball colony on the the little panels covering my boobs, and nowhere else (a construction flaw, I’ll point out, not a byproduct of the boobs!). This is the outfit I live in. On this particular Sunday, my ensemble was completed by my three month old daughter hanging over my right shoulder in a purple and gold striped sling and flamingo pink sunglasses, and a brand new pitch fork slung:
a) Menacingly
b) Ridiculously
c) Provokingly
d) Unfashionably
e) All of the above
over my left shoulder. On the way TO the hardware store I noticed lots of people pointing and laughing at BabyG, because she was very cute in her sling and her hot pink sunglasses [picture forthcoming]; on the way home FROM the hardware store I noticed lots of people pointing and whispering at me.

...And now, it appears that aside from being uncool, I'm also too obsessive a writer to create a short list. MO LATER.

3rd Weird Thing: Got To Beet It To Love It

3) I wet vacuumed our old couch (and by the way, although Rug Doctor cleaners are called steam cleaners, they aren’t. I mentioned this to my father and he said, “Right. You pour boiling water in them.” Am I alone in figuring that because all the machines have the word “steam cleaner” written on them, I should expect them to steam clean?....) Anyway, I 'wet-vac'ed the couch using the organic laundry detergent instead of the bottled Rug Doctor mix. It procured a nasty black liquid that sure made me happy I'd taken the trouble. However. After an hour or so of cleansing, my couch still looked like its usual dull, faded-minty green self.

Not to worry. I liquefied 5 beets and 1 giant purple cabbage** in my juicer; I added two bottles of black cherry juice concentrate to that; and finally, I added about half a gallon of water. Then I smeared it all over the couch with a kitchen sponge. Application took about half an hour. To set the juice stain, I started ironing it. (Note to Self: Even though setting the iron’s temperature at the hottest temperature dries the couch, it also scorches it. Use a low temperature.)

I only had enough mixture to cover half the couch. I need to make another batch for touch ups, and to finish the seat cushions and arm rests. However, the couch is a MUCH better color than the Zombie-skin green it used to be. It is more like the color of an embarrassed zombie. A light pinkish purple for those of you not in-the-know.

The most obvious downsides are that the couch stunk a little for a couple weeks, and that it isn't particularly better looking than it used to be.

But the perks! There are no end to the perks...for instance, before, I had an ugly couch that I had been saddled with, unexpectedly; now I have an ugly couch that I created. I had a hand in creating its ugliness. I saddled myself.

Also, BabyG will be allowed to spill anything she feels like on that couch, forever. And I can always know I have stained a couch with beets, a bit of knowledge that I think will make me feel pretty content, on and off, for years to come.

** I read an article about vegetable dyes on the internet. Turns out beets make a dark stain, initially, but that purple cabbage stains last longest. So my recipe was a sort of covering all my bases type thing.

Last Three Weird Green Things (Mystery, The Obvious Boob Thing, & The Most Obvious(ly Cheesey?) Weirdly Green Thing of All))

4) Mystery: I'm still thinking about number 4.

5) The Obvious Boob Thing: My breasts make milk. After living so many years with my breasts fulfilling certain functions (like attracting...bees and... bouncing around during softball games) they have suddenly become utile in a much less abstract way. I have this very, very fat babe wholly due to the boob milk.

Related, very weird question (I actually have a lot of questions, but this sort of encapsulates all of them.): If I was on a desert island with scanty food sources, with a handful of people, would I be able to feed them all if I ate all the food and breastfed them? Or at least, would they live a little longer than they would if there was no breastfeeder?

6) The Most Obvious(ly Cheesey?) Weirdly Green Thing of All:

Something Like This:
Turned Into This:

Found Poem

here is a list of the keywords people have used to find the green parenting website this month. it gave us quite a chuckle.

grizzlybird
garten verein galveston
yoga coffee compost green ideas
organic cotton blissed out mama s milk
cheap organizing ideas
latex nuris
hippy fabric
harilal gandhi
ethanol made of banana peelings
statistical graphs for sweatshop workers
pressed wood musty smell
how to eliminate mildew odors from old dolls
yellowing tupperware
photos of hindu wedding
copper stains on shower stalls
fruit wine stains
pride of houston yaupon tree
eucalyptus for deodorizer inside shoes
background composting science fair
atoning for sin
removing decomposing bodily fluids from wood floor
breast cancer keychain called boob a thing
seven mangal fera meaning
tilak hindu ceremony
picture of a ilex vomitoria stores plant
drain uncloggers
hasta melap
fabric softener dishwasher cleaner
non-acidic lime dissolver
grizzly eats human
toxiclove.mp3
free lactating stories of men that enjoy suckling from women
mahabhumi
pictures for rot proof finish in textiles
deoderize washing machine
images of pride of houston yaupon
removing bird poo stain
parenting a 3 month old what is the objective
natural toilet uncloggers