I read some terrible news yesterday about the family of someone I know and admire. While mom was already in the middle of a battle with cancer (and you know how I feel about cancer), one of their children fell suddenly and extraordinarily ill.

That part’s not my story to tell, so I’ll stop there. I invite them to link to it in the comments here, though they’ve certainly got bigger fish to fry.

As a new parent, blah, blah, blah

Let’s not even humor me with that line. It’s just horrible when bad things happen, but extra insultingly, gut-wrenchingly, tear-makingly shattering when it happens to a child. I can’t even imagine what they’re going through, and they’ve been much on my mind.

An impotent, but hopefully poignant gesture

I want to do something for them. But there isn’t even a disease named yet I can throw money at to assuage myself. They’re extraordinarily well covered colleague, family and friend-wise, and I’m kind of beyond peripheral to this story in most ways anyway, and don’t want to intrude on them during this horrible time. I promised that I’d put a penny in every fountain I passed. What they don’t know is that my neighborhood has a lot of fountains.

This morning, after sending my own daughter off to daycare with extra kisses, I took a spin through the neighborhood and chucked a penny into every fountain I could think of.

Here they are. 16 fountains. 16 pennies. Thousands of good wishes being sent in your direction, folks.

I invite anyone to add fountains and locations.

You ever get that feeling on a Sunday night?

The snoring I blame on her dad. Because I am too much of a lady to snore. That’s right, I’m a delicate fucking flower.

Visiting one set of grandparents in Slower Lower Delaware this week. Baby VRZ is getting into the groove. If the weather cooperates, I’ll get some film in the hammock. Film being, of course, slang for “data.”

This Earth Day is my first as a parent, and I am naturally thinking about the legacy we’re leaving for VRose (pictured here contemplating the preparation of an interpretive dance on how much she hearts the planet). I’m thinking about this because at this point in my maternity leave I have watched all of The People’s Court I can usefully watch, and we are now in the land of reruns, which – I must say – is a condition I’m not proud to be in.

Be that as it may, this seemed like a good opportunity to think about how we’re living and how we could improve over the coming year – reducing our carbon footprint and our impact on the environment overall. Let’s call it Green Resolutions. I’m thinking of Earth Day as a good opportunity for reflection on the year just past and resolution on the year to come, like Yom Kippur.

So, here are six things I’m doing well planet-wise. Go me:

1. Recycle. No-brainer, right? The county gives us handy bins and picks up our recycling each week on trash day. When we remodeled our kitchen a couple of years ago, we built-in a separate trash can for recyclables. Easy peasy and it makes you feel like a responsible citizen every time you throw something away. My office has bins in all of the pantry areas, and my neighborhood even has recycling bins in the commercial area so that people can do the right thing with their Starbucks cups and beverage cans and bottles. Read about my neighborhood at Bethesda Green.
2. Use an aluminum water bottle. Recycling is great and everything, but why ship water all over the planet so I have something to sip when I wake up in the middle of the night? Why do I use a bottle instead of a glass? I have cats who like to explore open containers. I don’t want their face in my drinking water because I know what else they lick and… just, ew. See this cool video from The Story of Stuff about bottled water.
3. Take public transportation. I’ve been a loyal WMATA commuter for the last 10 years. When it works, it’s great. I read for 20 minutes while being whisked briskly to my destination. This is how I’ve also been a loyal New Yorker reader, which has enriched my life enormously. And anyone who commutes in the DC area can attest that skipping the traffic is a great way to maintain your cardiac health. Given, WMATA is not making it easy to keep my wheels off the road what with fare hikes, service cuts and any number of weird delays and generalized brokedy-ness going on at all times. What used to be a pleasure is now a labor. Also, people, give pregnant ladies, old people and anyone with an injury or a cane a seat. What’s wrong with you? But that’s a rant for another time, and I refer interested parties to Unsuck DC Metro for more on that topic.
4. Carry a shopping bag. By carrying a bag with me, I save at least a dozen plastic bags a week.
5. Neglecting my lawn. This is not a euphemism. We don’t water our lawn. It’s a waste of water. If it rains, great. If it doesn’t, then the lawn’s brown. Whatev.
6. Live somewhere walkable. We have a smaller place than we would if we lived farther out, but we’re walkable to groceries, pharmacies, hundreds of restaurants, public transportation, bookstores, coffee shops and more. This lets us leave the car behind pretty often. Walkscore is a cool tool for evaluating the walkability of a particular location. My house scores a respectable 82 out of 100.

And here are five things I could do better:

1. Have a smaller home. We have a single-family home. Given, a small one, but it’s four walls to heat and cool, and a lot of materials to maintain. High density housing means less to fill, heat, cool and light. It’s is really the way to go, so pat yourself on the back if you’re in a high-rise or multi-family situation.
2. Diaper responsibly. I do a magic trick several times a day – I turn a wet baby into a dry one. Every time I do this, I add a disposable diaper to the planet’s diaper load. In fact, it’s been estimated that one baby will soil between 5,000 and 8,000 diapers. That is a lot of paper and plastic in the landfill, and a lot of manufacturing impact. See National Geographic’s Green Guide for more info. I invested in gDiapers to try to mitigate our impact and am trying to get the hang of them. But I might not be a good enough person to really stick with it. They’re a little more interactive than the standard disposable. Also, the jury seems to still be out about what’s actually more responsible – since laundry chemical and water usage becomes a big issue with all reusable options. I’d be curious to see an end-to-end (heh, get it?) analysis of several diapering options so that I could make better choices.
3. No more happy motoring for pleasure. We have an 18-year-old convertible that we use for leisure. Taking it on long drives in the country when the weather is good. It’s great fun and a lovely way to spend a little time with Spouse while running errands. And we could totally do without it – keeping that much carbon to ourselves.
4. Eat less meat. No matter how you slice it, the meat industry uses up a lot of resources. A lot more than the vegetable industry. So, for the sake of my soul, my health and the future of our planet, I should really cut it out. Let the weaning begin.
5. Buy less. Whether it’s lunch, a cool sweater, my thousandth pair of black shoes, baby gear or books, everything I buy is made of resources and shipped from one place to another. Buying less would be a great way to reduce my impact on Earth while saving both money and my own personal energy keeping house and managing my stuff.

So there you have my self-assessment of my environmental performance over the past year and my goals for the future. It’s kind of like the performance reviews we get at work. I’d give me a pat on the back, while making sure that I understood my goals for the next year. As a fine first step, the convertible is currently posted on Craigslist (hey reduce, reuse, recycle, right?). Next up – budgeting for more thoughtful spending.

Happy Earth Day!

I’ve been struggling with this blog for a while – trying to figure out what I want to do with it and what I want it to do for me. And the more I think about it, the closer I get to the immortal words of Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything.

I don’t want to be a meta blogger, blogging and pontificating about blogging (present post excluded), and I don’t want to use the words “meme,” “leverage” or “blogosphere.” I don’t want to be a social media expert, and I don’t want to concentrate on the medium.

I want to tinker with topics and develop new, short-lived obsessions before being distracted by something shiny and moving on to the next new thing. I want to pick the brains of people who really seem to be getting something right, who have found something they care about, have developed an expertise and who seem to derive great joy from what they do. I want to poke at and pick apart some of the mysteries of daily life. I want to read books and talk to people about it, and I want to learn about things that are just totally awesome. And I just want to be funny and make people laugh. Is that so wrong? And I don’t want to be hemmed in by picking one topic or one community. The world is just too full of cool shit to pigeonhole myself.

And so the struggle will continue. I can only hope that you enjoy the ride as much as I do.

Navel gazing concluded.

Enormous orange cucumber

Since the Snowpocalypse, I’ve been fantasizing about hot summer days, citronella-infused evenings, and growing some more mutant produce in my yard. Every year I learn something new – like that neglected cucumbers turn all orange and terrifying, and that these Earth Boxes produce an alarming amount of… produce.

So I’m thinking about what to grow this year. Tomatoes are a given, I’m afraid. I think it’s genetic. My grandmother grew them, my mother grew them, and now I do. I think I’m the worst at it, but I just. Can’t. Stop.

Had way too many peppers of various heats last year, and the cucumbers almost took over the world the year before that. On the menu for 2010, we’ve got various herbs, two kinds of the ubiquitous tomato, some small crunchy cucumbers and… what? I’d like to try something new, and am looking for a good candidate with a long harvest period that we’ll actually utilize.

Free-form advice welcome in the comments below, also feel free to get your vote on.

Also, not that you asked, but here are a couple of gardening-related sites that I’ve really come to love. Ketzel would be proud. Or appalled.

American Meadows – their wildflower seed mixes are pretty cool, and I just love their attitude. Great prices, product and service.

Seed Savers Exchange – dedicated to saving and sharing rare and heirloom seeds.

Seeds of Change – rock on with your organic selves.

Local Harvest – don’t want to grow your own? Find a farm, a farmers market or a CSA program near where you eat.

When I was in grad school, one of my instructors assigned the class to read The New Yorker each week. Most of us subscribed, many of us got hooked. My weekly commute is – conveniently – about one New Yorker long, when Metro is behaving itself. Which has been great – the magazine fits neatly into my purse, and I get to maintain that smug sense of self satisfaction that comes with feeling reasonably well-informed.

It was a good system for several years. Then a bunch of stuff started interfering (trains running in a nauseating manner that was not conducive to reading, that damn iPhone having so much fun in it), and I fell behind.

And here we are – with two feet of snow on the ground, and five magazines to get through.

January 11, 2010

Chainsaw class? Phyllis Diller? A great start to the issue, but I’m afraid I’m just not going to get through the big economics feature. Too antsy watching the state repeatedly plow us back in after Spouse shovels us out. Stupid state. Meanwhile, there’s a really interesting article about the fountain architect who brought us the spectacle at the Bellagio, and another (and very long) about Justice Sotomayor. The review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book (Committed) is way better than I thought her first book – which was kind of solipsistic and itch-provoking.

January 18, 2010

The Sure Thing: Oh, Malcolm Gladwell. Your analysis of what makes a (wildly) successful and predatory entrepreneur is as engaging as it is useless to me. No way will I be able to just balls my way through making a multimillion dollar company into a multibillion dollar enterprise. Guess I’ll have to stick with my day job.

Udder Madness: I think only Jews from New York use the word “homunculus.”

Rodarte looks cool, Ted Olsen and David Bois are unlikely allies in the fight for marriage equality

January 25, 2010

I usually don’t get into the fiction so much, but “The Trailhead” was pretty great – and ants are totally violent, but not as violent as King Lear (what with the eye gouging and assassinating and stuff), a review of a half-assed production of which follows. Also, the tricky thing about memoirs, in addition to mortifying friends and family, is that so many of them turn out to be embellished or just not true. On the other hand, no one really seems to care if things “happened,” as long as they “feel honest.”

Didn’t make it the whole way through, but this is great progress!

Good God, I’m dull.

DeathSnow2009!

It’s blizzarding out, and snow days always feel like special occasions to me. Maybe it’s all of the training from childhood – where you got a surprise vacation that involved hot cocoa and a softly padded world. But whatever the reason, it seemed like a perfect day to launch my newest blog notion: BookGraf.

What is this BookGraf of which you speak?

Yeah, the name could use some work. But Book Nut was already taken, and I’ve not always felt like the people who searched on “nut” were getting what they were looking for when they arrived at my site.

I like books. And had the good fortune to belong to a fantastic book club for a time. We read some super fun and interesting books, and we totally failed to take anything seriously or insist that people actually read the book. We enjoyed one another’s company, cheap wine and some very lovely canapés from Trader Joe.

In that curious but casual tradition, I’m going to feature here some of the things with which I’m feeding my head. Cookbooks, Italian mystery novels, ye olde classics, how-to, and new releases. I’ve got a broad range of interests and am always looking for recommendations.

Why would I do such a thing?

I want my kids to read.

As part of my ongoing (and probably profoundly annoying) advice project, I decided that one of the most important things I can hope to impress upon my children is an insatiable appetite for reading. I want them to read online, read books, newspapers, blogs, magazines (bonus points if it’s The New Yorker or The Economist), cereal boxes, e-mails, angry screeds, loving epistles…. All of it.

I want review copies.

Also, I must admit, one of my goals in life is to be on the receiving end of review copies from publishers. I’ve come close a couple of times, and am afraid that I let other professional aspirations distract me from this most pressing matter.  Never again. It made me feel awesome when books arrived unbidden. It meant that someone wanted me to read their stuff and tell other people about it. They thought I had an opinion, an audience and a platform that suited their needs. How awesome is that?

And last but not least:

I want to learn new stuff.

Fiction, nonfiction, biography, how-to, history, mystery and science… you can learn from it all. A new and fabulous turn of a phrase, a plot device, recipe for hazelnut biscotti. There is so much out there. And a lot of it is bad, but a lot if it is also good, and some of it is totally awesome. And I don’t want to miss those parts.

Hit me.

I’ve got a bunch of books in the queue, but please do hit me up in the comments here or at thea [at] nutgraf dot net if you’ve got a suggestion or recommendation. Your comments on my comments are also welcome.

As I may have casually alluded to once or twice, I am no stranger to holiday dread. Every year we get all wound up about a couple of special days. We’ve built up a list of demands and expectations that can suck the joy out of an occasion. And honestly, I’m just kind of cantankerous in general.

That said, who couldn’t use a piece of advice or two to smooth their way through the season? There are a lot of potential sources of stress – shopping, travel, family, loneliness, overwork, workplace festivities… and any number of ways to handle them all.

Gifting

• Home-baked goods cost little and make great gifts. People love things that are homemade, and you can cultivate a valuable skill. People seem especially impressed by biscotti. Develop a signature treat or two, to be remembered fondly as someone who cares enough to craft a gift by hand.
• Keep a couple of gift cards (and just plain greeting cards) on hand. You never know, and it’s nice to have something in the wings. Who doesn’t need a couple of lattes? And if they don’t want them, they can easily regift.
• A thank-you note is never a bad idea. If it occurs to you to wonder whether you should send one – you should. E-mail is better than nothing.
• Don’t keep score. This is harder for some people than for others. The only person you’ll hurt by keeping a mental tally of dollars spent is you. It’s bad for the soul, it’s bad for the blood pressure.

At Work

• Yes, you probably have to go to the office party. Arrive a little after the start time (if it’s that kind of party), leave early, and indulge little. Unless you work for Twitter, who apparently have crazy alcohol-fueled orgies of seasonal excess, this is a work event, even if it looks like a cocktail party. Get crazy with your friends – not the people you are going to be asking for a promotion next year. That said, try to relax. A little. If you can’t be trusted to relax a little, make an ironclad plan to leave after an hour. Or have a previous engagement.
• Cookie exchanges are great things! Participate in at least one, and facilitate at least one more. The world needs more of these.
• Less is more when decorating your own human for the holidays. A tasteful holiday brooch, perhaps.

Sarcasm is, of course, welcome.

The impact we’re having on this – our very beautiful, hospitable and generous planet – is real. And it’s pretty scary. Plenty of other, more reputable sources have a lot to say about this, so I’ll leave it to them.

• EPA: Climate Change
• Dot Earth – a blog from the NYTimes.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Global Warming – from National Geographic
• Climate Connections – from NPR
  

Today, for Blog Action Day, I’m telling you about one thing I’m doing.

We use a lot. And I want to use a little less. I invite you to join me.

What are you ranting about?

As I may have mentioned once or twice or 20 times on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, my current obsession is gathering advice and words of wisdom from all of you to present here for public edification and to make into an album for my child-in-progress. And part of my motivation – quite frankly – is that impending parenthood is making me think more about the kind of person I want to be so that I can be the best possible role model and custodian for this little life. I mean, if not now – when?

Gawd – that again?

Yes. It’s long seemed obvious to me that our consumerism is out of control. Rather than dive headlong to another gifting occasion (and don’t even get me started on the culture of the “Push Present”), I want to welcome my little contribution to the next generation with something meaningful. Something that may be more valuable and lasting than a whimsically shaped piece of plastic, or hastily stitched-together tiny garment upon which some child in a far away country has stenciled fanciful creatures or ironic sayings. And don’t get me wrong, I do love an ironic saying.

But isn’t it just a tad ungrateful?

The motivation to give is warm and wonderful. And I have no interest in discouraging or disparaging a kind word, thought or deed. The world is in dire need of every ounce of kindness we can spare. Giving gives people pleasure on both sides of the equation, and there’s not enough of that in the world, I know. But I would like to offer to be moved and have my cockles warmed without activating a fleet of trucks to burn up our atmosphere or inciting the shipment of disposable goods halfway around the world so they can wind up in our landfills.

It’s just one thing I want to do, and I’m asking for your help. And here is why I think this is a great idea:

• We buy, own, have, use and discard quite enough, thank you very much. Cut Earth a break.
• It’s free. We’re all in the tank, economy-wise. Keep your money. Spend it as you see fit.
• It’s easy. We’re all busy, living our own lives, doing the best we can. No no, don’t get up.
• I want to welcome my kid into the world with stories and advice that illustrate more clearly than I can explain how wonderful and wise people can be.

Isn’t this all a little small-scale and frankly… self-serving?

Yes. It’s both. It’s small because small isn’t scary. We can all do small. And small things count. And small things add up. Think for a moment about the microcosmic impact of one rubber duckie on the world. Making the materials, shipping them to the factory, fabricating the toy, packaging it, shipping it around the world, driving it to a storage facility, unpacking it, repacking it, shipping it back out and delivering it to the end-user. Let’s just not do that a couple of times and see how it feels.

And as for it being self-serving – you got me. I’m still kind of jazzed about this asking for advice project, and think it totally aligns with what a lot of us are trying to do – waste less, save more and be thoughtful about what we need, what we do and what we have.

But while we’re here, let’s go big:

• Let’s reward good, thoughtful, responsible design.
• Let’s reevaluate things we think of as “must-have’s.”
• Let’s think about our impact and what we want our legacy to be.
• And let’s strive to live thoughtfully and to be a good example for one another.

We know too much about what we’re doing to the world to keep blithely chugging along on all cylinders in our current direction. Reduce, reuse, recycle is a mantra we can all feel good about, and it’s one that we can live with for a good, long time.