SECONDHAND NATION

37 Green Things To Do In Spring

 

1.  Pee into your compost bin.

2.  Walk around neighborhood and pick up all the recyclable trash revealed by melting snow.

3.  Start bean plants in half cartons of milk.

4.  Hang laundry on the line.

5.  Fill the air in the tires of your bicycle.

6.  Cruise college campus dumpsters for furniture and other cast-offs ditched by whimsical collegiates.

7.  Make home-made iced tea.

8.  Eat asparagus.

9.  Have kids wash the cars with hot water and soap in buckets.

10. Host a cook-out in the backyard (easier than cooking and great before the mosquitoes get really thick!)

11.  Pull out all your winter clothes you haven't worn all season and donate them.

12.  Wash all the rugs in your house and hang them out on the line.

13.  Plan a butterfly garden.

14.  Pick up dog poo and see if you and your dog-loving neighbors would want to make a doggie composter.

15.  Turn off the television and sit outside after dinner.

16.  Change your winter bedding to lighter blankets.

17.  Dust off the ceiling fans

18.  Clean out your coffee pot with vinegar.

19.  Make a bat house.

20.  Make home-made blowing bubbles.

21.  Wash and donate all winter gear your children have outgrown (boots, jackets, caps, mittens)

22.  Buy some sunblock and a sun-hat.

23.  Clean out and install (or buy!) a rainbarrel.

24.  Ask your city or community to improve recycling services.

25.  Find a park near you and acquaint yourself with its hours, amenities and programs.

26.  Get out your hammock.

27.  Bring your yard waste to a compost site.

28.  Collect dryer lint and leave it in the yard for nesting birds to use.

29.  Use the e-File option when you file your taxes.

30.  Join a CSA (find one in your area here).

31.  Look up farmers' markets near you to see their opening dates.

32.  Replace one car trip with a walk or a bike ride and see how you like it.

33.  Wash all your sheets with borax and line-dry them for that lovely sun-dried scent.

34.  Plan one energy free meal per week:  sandwiches, wraps, salads, anything that tastes great and doesn't need heating, grilling, baking, or frying.

35.  Make your own exfoliating scrub to scour off all that dry winter skin.  This can be as easy as using regular sugar or as complicated as some of these recipes at Craft Gossip

36.  Download and make this cool egg design felt book for an Easter gift for kids in your life.  

37.  Sit outside for 30 minutes a day doing nothing but soaking up the Vitamin D and thinking about how long you've waited for winter to end.  

Image via Library of Congress.  

The Green Year: Voicemail

 

One of the last posts I made before I went on my long, unintentioned hiatus was a review of Jodi Helmer's The Year Green:  365 small things you can do to make a big difference.

It was a good way to go out, had I decided not to return.  The Green Year is a great practical guide for people who want to make small changes that help the planet.

It's like a daily almanac or devotional - each day has a small idea or tactic to try out and includes facts about the various environmental concern addressed.  A truly simple, genius concept.  One I plan to use in guiding me as I plunge ahead into this blog.

Which brings me to March 11th's tip:  Upgrade your phone service to include voicemail.

In other words, shit-can your answering machine, Luddites.

Now, I'm biased because I absolutely loathe talking on the phone.  I have bad hearing in the first place, so it's just not a technology I am drawn to naturally.  I also hate how it interrupts me constantly.  It rings and I have to find the damn thing, then put on my happy voice and interact or deal with some issue I'm not interested in tackling at the moment.  

Whereas emails or texts do not interrupt me.  Both allow me to respond - eloquently, I feel - in my own time, with the particulars right there in print.  No message to transcribe, no blathering to suffer through, no waiting for the damn beep.  

So I will expand on this, and propose that not only should you upgrade to voicemail, you should get the best data plan you can afford and stop leaving people voicemails.  I HATE voicemail.  Everyone hates voicemail - getting it or leaving it.  

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away, where people didn't believe in evolution and considered the universe 6000 years old, I had a job with an old-fashioned push button phone with an evil blinking light that indicated I had voice mail.  Needless to say, this was a job that gave me a damn ulcer and the people responsible for the blinking light were but one voice in a mighty, incoherent choir of idiocy.  

SO.  To sum up. 

Recycle your answering machine (info here and here.)

Read The Green Year. 

Don't leave me messages.  

Reset Button: My Favorite Green Reads

 

Obviously I needed to hit the reset button on my commitment to my blog.  When my constant thrifting dwindled to levels that don't realistically warrant online discussion, I felt like I had no reason to post.  

But that's silly.  Maybe I'm not the baddest rummage sale fiend on the block, but I've maintained that living green isn't about purchasing before, anyway.

So, toss in a little re-design and the realization that the secondhand economy and its implications for one's life is still interesting to me and here I am, blogging.  No ads, no widgets.  Just ideas.  

I'm kicking things off with the method that always soothes me in times of indecision:  a book list.  While some of these don't call to mind the current imagining of ecology (hello, Dwell magazine), all of them have been influential in some way about decisions I make in my daily life.  

And I think that's about all we can do at this point - we can call Congress and we can make daily decisions with our wallets.  So, I would whole-heartedly recommend any on this list as a good way to get a toe-hold into the whole green movement.

My Top Ten Green Books

1.  The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

2.  Not Buying It:  My year without shopping by Judith Levine

3.  The Omnivore's Dilemma: A natural history of four meals by Micheal Pollan

4.  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A year of food life  by Barbara Kingsolver

5.  Food Not Lawns:  How to turn your yard into a garden and your neighborhood into a community by Heather Coburn Flores

6.  Fast Food Nation:  The dark side of the all-American meal by  Eric Schlosser

7.  Cradle to Cradle:  Remaking the way we make things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart

8:  Having Faith:  An ecologist's journey to motherhood by Sandra Steingraber

9.  Inside the Third World:  An anatomy of poverty by Paul Harrison

10.  Confessions of an Eco-Warrior by Dave Foreman

Consumption and Time

 

Hello!

Long time, never see!

Usually when you see a post from a moribund blog, you assume the writer has moved on. 

Got a job. Lost a job.  Can't afford internet service. Got married.  Had a child.  Had a death or illness in the family.  Decided to watch seasons 1-6 of Lost on Netflix.  Got someone to have sex with them on the regular.  Whatever.

I'm guessing many dead blogs are the result of losing the exciting fizz that accompanies any new enterprise. Though full of links and photos and lists, blogging is still writing;  I imagine many bloggers are more interested in their topic than writing as a practice.  So once the toes stop curling, it becomes a job like any other.  

None of these apply to Secondhand Nation.  There haven't been any tumultuous life passages for me or my kin.  I haven't experienced an uptick income that might allow me to buy retail.  I am still interested in food politics and recycling.  And I'm still a writer, in various forms and fashions.

But I don't thrift very much anymore.  And that seemed to be the purpose of this blog:  to talk about the joys of thrift stores and scores, to celebrate what is beautiful about cast-off culture. But I just don't do it much anymore and it's not about money.

It's about time.  

I don't have the time to wander through thrift stores looking for possible deals.  

I don't have time to keep track of which store has what on sale on which day.  

I don't have time to meander around following home-made signs to rummage sales that feature a bunch of junk I don't have room for in my home.

I don't have time to waste three hours digging in racks of various stores for a pair of jeans that are petite length and in my size and that are 5 bucks... when I can just get them immediately, brand-new, at the store in 15 minutes and be done with it.

Thrift shopping is still shopping.  It's still about stuff.  To get deals, you must think about stuff...CONSTANTLY.  A great deal of energy and memory is used up contemplating retail v. Savers pricing vs. eBay pricing vs. Target clearance markdowns.  

I simply don't want to spend my time this way anymore.  And if I'm honest with myself, I can say that I probably spend much less now, because the more you shop, the more you are around objects that appeal to you.  If you simply stay home, away from such objects, you don't tend to buy them. Rocket science, huh?

So I don't know what to do with this blog anymore.  If I hit a thrift store once every 6 weeks looking for pieces of Mexican tourist pottery for my collection, does that make me Citizen One of Secondhand Nation?  If I have a kitchen compost and reusable grocery bags and a backyard garden and go to Turn-Style occasionally to find cool pairs of shoes, does that make me green?  If I hit a library book sale and come home with some funny home ec manuals from the 50's and upload the pictures from them, does that interest anyone?

Of course, from time to time, I still need things but not in a rapacious, constant way.  Three years ago, we bought a new house and needed to fill it and I've pretty much done that.  My child is the age that is hard to find used clothing for anymore - when you are 6 and 7, you really start to wear the hell out of clothes and you don't need a lot of baby gear.  You eat with spoons and forks like adults, you get cheap books from class book orders, you are surpassing lifetime limits on stuffed animal accumulation.  

Buying cheap stuff might appear to save money.  But what I really need to save is TIME.

I can't think of much to say about it anymore, except that I don't know how to pretend I'm captivated if I'm not, you know?  

Anyway, I've got to think a bit about this.  If you've hit this wall, whether in your blogging or thrifting life, feel free to chime in with advice.

Photo:  war alarm clocks from Library of Congress.  Details here.