it's raining

and I love it!

Yesterday, it was 60 degrees, and today it's supposed to be near that again.

Lovely! (Meant with all sincerity, no sarcasm here today)

I get to wear my uber-cool new rain boots.

The kids get to use their umbrellas, which is always fun.

The tree in my backyard is covered with moss. So is the rock in the front yard.

I really want to get outside, and hook up the rain barrel and put up the clothes line and clean out the garden and order my seeds and sell the castle and clean out the sandbox and and and

The list is a mile long, but I don't care. I love being outside, and can't wait until I can leave the windows open all the time and play in the dirt and have totally dirty kids that need showers every night.

Can you tell I REALLY want spring to make it's appearance.

Is Spring on it's way?

I sure hope so.

I spent a good portion of the time this winter actually being disappointed that the huge snow storms didn't get us. Not to say that we didn't get snow, but they were always predicting feet of snow, when all we ever got were inches. I seriously wanted a foot of snow.

I wanted the world to stop, or at least slow down.
I wanted a world of white mountains and drifts, and fires in the fireplace.
I wanted days of soup and stew and chili.
I wanted to hunker down, wherever that phrase came from.

So now, we've had our usual early March warm up, just enough of a tease, to remind us that Spring is kind of around the corner. I'm sure we'll have our usual cold snap and hopefully one last snow.

But, for now, we've got blue skies, melty snow, squishy yards.

And brown. Yucky brown grass. What snow is left is grey and brown and ugly.

So, for me, spring can't get her soon enough now that it's brown. And ugly.

Yes, I know, we need the yucky brown days so we can better appreciate the beauty of spring, but I don't have to like it. It's part of our lovely weather pattern in this part of the country, the weather pattern I've been a part of for 35 years now ... and I still don't like this time of year, after the snow melts but before the green flies.

Here's hoping for a quick greening up when it happens.

can you be too green?

Okay, so my green-ness may be getting away from me. I don't even know what posessed me to do this, it just sort of popped into my head.

I have just cut up my grandma's old living room shears and turned them into five reusable produce bags for the grocery store.

The shears were in the fabric bin already, and there was no intense emotional connection to them - it was just pretty, lightweight fabric that I figured I'd use one day. Well, today was the day.

I also weighed a plastic bag with three peaches and my fabric bag with three peaches, and the weight difference was only 0.4 ounces. It's not a huge difference at all. Even if I use all five bags in one shopping trip, it will only be a two ounce difference. Not enough to notice for me.

I wonder how many goofy looks I'll get when I go to the grocery store in two weeks? Reactions from the cashiers?

The Husband ...

He may be getting a little bit green!

We were at Hobby Lobby yesterday, killing time between dinner and picking up the kids from a birthday party, and of course I headed back into the fabric department. They have their Christmas prints out already, and I saw a plaid that I already have in a pair of pajamas. They happened to be in the Christmas rack, although I don't think my pajamas are particularly Christmas-y. Any hoo ... he looked at me and said, "You know what would be cool? If we bought this fabric and made bags for our Christmas gifts with it." And he had this really sort of dreamy, don't-I-have-a-good-idea look on his face.

Then I broke it to him that I bought a bunch of fabric this past January (one yard of five different fabrics for $5) for that exact purpose - I just haven't gotten that far yet. And, since I'm on a finish what you've got before you get anything new kick, I suppose I'll be working on those things this fall too.

It's funny ... the last time I made a bunch of fabric gift bags he looked at me like I was weird. I wonder what the difference is this time, other than the idea was his?

Maybe my green goings on are having an impact.

Next, he'll probably hope his "save for retirement" goings on will do the same for me.

Green Check

Yesterday was Live Earth ... I managed to catch some of the bands, and was able to hear some great music. I will admit that Kanye West and The Police didn't mesh well in my book, but I'm not a big Kanye West fan either.

I've always been rather "earthy" but I got serious about it in high school. I don't know if it had anything to do with the big 20th Anniversary Earth Day celebration, or if I just knew enough and was more aware of it all. My family was not a big recycling family, and we didn't have recycling available to us where we lived. My step dad now recycles because he has curbside available where he lives.

There are several sites available that let you calculate your carbon emissions and also allow you to purchase carbon offsets. I calculated our carbon footprint, and not to my surprise, it's much higher than the average. The culprit: the Mom car. A 2004 Chrysler Pacifica AWD that gets 17 mpg. So not only is my car draining my wallet with the price of gas, it's killing the environment too. Lovely.

But, I do what I can to make differences in other ways. At our house we:

• change to CFL bulbs when the old bulb burns out
• I take my own bags to the store instead of using their plastic. If I forget, I request paper.
• use cloth napkins
• hang our clothes to dry, either inside on a clothes rack or outside in the sun
• cloth diaper, part time
• breastfed
• leave the AC at 77 or 78 in the summer and the heat at 65 - 68 in the winter
• turn lights off when not in the room
• compost our food scraps in our worm bins - I use the resulting compost and worm tea in the gardens
  
• recycle our pool water to use in the garden
• grow some of our own food - vegetables that are canned or frozen for year round use
• recycle almost everything we can. I am very proud of the fact that our family of four only produces one kitchen garbage bag of garbage per week! We often have two full recycle bins.
• but at the farmers markets and freeze or can for year round use
• use refillable water bottles as opposed to off the shelf, single use bottles
  
• actively recycle electronics and books. When I see computer monitors and parts on the curb I stop and pick them up and then take them to the monthly recycling event.
• give things that are no longer needed away on the Freecycle list or at the Goodwill store
• use as much of something as I can - I took a pair of old sweat pants and turned them into two door drafters, and the only garbage left over was the elastic at the waist and ankles. I turned the pockets into cloth napkins!
• use natural cleaning products - baking soda, vinegar and ammonia

I'm trying to figure out how to make a lid for a rain barrel. It's actually a 50 gallon aluminum industrial mixer waiting to be converted into a rain catcher, and if I can do that, then I'll have one of them!

I know there is more that I can do ... the biggest problem is the car. We aren't in a position right now to trade in and get something more earth friendly ... I drive the best that I can, do regular maintenance to make sure it runs well and make as few trips as possible. Luckily DH is only a twenty mile round trip to/from work, so that helps on his end. It's my fifty miles round trip twice a week that doesn't help, and I'm not in a spot to take the train, although I work on the train stop. Maybe after the kids go back to school in the fall I can look into taking the train, but my only concern is that if they need me to get the kids for some reason, I'll be stuck at work, unable to get to them because of the train. It's something to think on.

Thinking Green is a way of life for our family ... can you make it part of yours?