GreenGranny

GreenGranny's "What Were They Thinking" Observations

Last year I noted  how two major "big box" discount stores were built side by side in my town,  with parking lots connected to each other by a street.  Cars can go from one store to the other without exiting onto the busy thoroughfare.  Very thoughtful.   However, if you are on foot or on a bicycle, you are out of luck.  The street is too narrow for both cars and bikes, and there is no sidewalk at all.  Walk or ride through the grass. 

The accommodation of pedestrians arriving from bus stops and bicyclists arriving from  adjacent  low traffic volume streets are little better.

What were they thinking?

Perhaps "they" simply didn't think about people who can't carry away a  lot of merchandise.   They are poor, aren't they--little purchasing power?  Well, maybe once upon a time that was so.   But what about approval of the plan by a city that prides itself on being bicycle friendly and increasingly "green"?

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Today I rode my bike to the mall and left it locked in the conveniently located bike rack that's been there for decades.   After shopping a little while, I decided to walk through and out the other side of the mall to shop at the drug store built in front.  Now, a good bit of the parking lot was redesigned and repaved when the drug store was built a couple of years ago.   And they chose to put the bicycle rack for their store about as far from the entrance as you can get.   That's why I decided to walk there from the mall.

Walking from the mall main entrance across the traffic way to the drug store parking area, I notice that there is no sidewalk  nor painted walkway to guide me on what should be an important pedestrian route.    To get out of the busy street, I hop onto a small grassy island where a path is already being worn by previous pedestrians trying to get from the mall to the drug store right next to it, just as I am doing.  Next  I have to cross through the main parking entrance for the drug store and across the drive-up window lane before making it to a sidewalk alongside the building.

What were they thinking?

Wouldn't ALL the stakeholders--Mall, Drug Store, and City, desire a bit of connectivity there?

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A couple of years ago, a new supermarket went up in a new subdivision to the west of mine, making it the closest grocery to my house.  They have a lovely store but never bothered with a bike rack at all.  This week two grandchildren bicycled over from their house to mine  shortly before lunch, and suddenly we needed more food.  They had never been to that store by bicycle before, so we three rode together.  We chained all three bikes together for greater security, not having a fixture to use.   It did cut down on sidewalk space, but where were we to place the bikes instead?

What were they thinking?

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I had an errand at the local high school's main office.  I arrived on bicycle and discovered the bike racks were clear over at the end of the sprawling building.  Auto parking for staff and students alike was adjacent to the main entrances, however.   The city bus has a line that runs to the high school, but there is no bench or shelter for shade and rain protection, and it is a long way across the parking lot to the school building itself. 

What were they thinking?

I don't blame students for preferring to drive a car to this school, given our harsh climate.  But in far worse climates one can find accommodation for pedestrian and bicycle travel.

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One hot summer day I came out of the drug store to my bicycle, parked at the inconvenient bike rack, and lo, there was a package in my bicycle basket.   I gingerly peeked into the bag and discovered two bars of cheap soap.  The receipt was still in the bag.  Was this some sort of joke or just a good deed?  I gave the soap to the community food pantry.  

What were they thinking?

The soap giver might like to know that in addition to being good for the environment and great fun for me,  my biking--along with avoidance of salty food--has blessed me with a blood pressure of 112 over 70.  And I'm 66 years old.  I wonder what their blood pressure is, and if  it's worth not needing as much soap as they think I need.

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When it comes to designing shopping areas, schools, and other public buildings, all I can say is, I hope those charged with designing the infrastructure of America start doing some thinking.  Design seemed consistently better a few decades ago.   Who is signing off on these cookie-cutter buildings that come off the corporate drawing board and get plopped exactly as-is into each community?

A lot of construction money has been spent in recent years on flawed plans, and these days there is just no excuse for it.  The blunders literally have been cast in stone.

Greening one's lifestyle: discard old habits to release your creative mind

A large part of greening one's home is a matter of questioning old habits of daily living and replacing the energy hog habits with better ideas.  In the process, we come to realize how many of our daily or weekly chores we perform on autopilot.  That's not a bad thing in itself.  But when we need to adapt to different circumstances and new conditions, we see that periodic practice in re-thinking habitual tasks is a good thing.  It gives a resilience we can call upon when dealing with more serious changes.  

I recall one activist blogger who was focused on eliminating the plastic shopping bag.  From her I learned one doesn't need a special reusable bag kept only for shopping.   Many items you already have on hand can work as a shopping bag.   She even suggested if you HAVE a plastic shopping bag, turn it inside out to hide the store logo and keep on using it to carry groceries home.  I felt very sheepish because I never would have thought of that.  My mind was only making a tiny change in my bag habit instead of engaging in flexible problem-solving.

Many of our modern household habits have engendered an undue amount of squeamishness.  For instance, are you capable of carrying out a batch of old newspapers and tossing them in your big trash can (the one your garbage service empties), or do you stuff them in a plastic bag first?  If you can do that, how about empty cereal and cracker boxes?  Keep going on categories of trash--eventually you will come to a point where you've just got to plastic-bag it up first.  When I force myself to eliminate the bag, I don't find any garbage blowing down the street after the trash truck comes by.  Empirical results show I've been wasting both time and plastic.

The same thing works in other ways.  How about the weeds you pulled up from the flower bed?  Assuming they are not ripe with weed seeds, can you just lay them down on the soil as mulch, or do they HAVE TO leave your lot bagged in plastic? 

Our modern disconnect with nature and the outdoors brings on another kind of squeamishness that gets in the way of green living.  When Japanese beetles (the iridescent brown ones) first showed up on our raspberry bushes last year, eating the tops of the canes to shreds, I know my husband felt the urge to nuke 'em.  Get out the pesticide spray.  Instead, we found we could take an empty peanut butter jar and sweep them off the leaves with the lid and into the jar.   Those beetles are about the easiest insects to catch that I ever did see, and since we both grew up playing in prairies, we had some old experience to draw upon.

The first time I went out with my jar, I put on garden gloves.  Soon I used my bare hands to hold the jar and lid.  Later I found out if I catch them in my hand, their legs tickle but they don't emit smelly goo or anything disgusting like that.  Bare hands work best at nabbing them and dropping them into the jar. 

We are so accustomed to eating perfect looking fruits and vegetables with pesticide residue that we recoil at any sign of insect damage on food grown without pesticides.   When my granddaughter, age three, picked a raspberry with a tiny bit missing, I said, "Oh, the ants have  taken a few bites, but that doesn't really matter."    And she ate it with the same relish as the other berries.  Ant nibbles don't ruin food. 

Moving on to the mundane task of laundry:  I realized I had to approach the task of greening my work habits with more flexibility. 

I have a dryer next to the washer in my basement.  If I had no dryer, I'd figure out pretty fast how to do without one, though perhaps not willingly or happily.  But it's there, and I am simply trying to minimize my use of it, adding the element of will power. 

The result is that the task becomes all about will power rather than creative problem-solving.  It is raining out, I am late for an appointment, I feel exhausted, it is time for bed.  And I throw the load of wash into the dryer like always.  Of course, I regret not having sunshine, time, and energy to carry it up the stairs out to the yard and drape it over the lawn furniture, the swing, and the patio table, as I have enjoyed doing in drier and more leisurely springtimes.

I had merely substituted one habit, the dryer, with another that was green, that I enjoyed, but that too often was not workable (the draping over outdoor furniture to air dry).   I decided to be more creative.  I have a house with lots of possibilities if only I see them. 

The very light items like shirts and very heavy items like bluejeans I have down pat.  The light things get put on hangars right from the washer, and I hang them on a rod by the washer and carry them upstairs (two flights to the bedrooms) to finish drying on an over-door rack.  I carry them up when I feel like doing it.  Slacks and shorts get hung on hangars with clips and get treated the same way.

 The jeans get draped over the top of the dryer to air dry.  One day when I had lots of denims in the wash and it was raining, I took them to the garage, unfolded a couple of mesh lawn chairs, and draped them there to spend the night.  The garage was hot and dry and fairly clean. There was plenty of space because we have one car in our two-car garage. The next morning I opened the overhead garage door and pulled the chairs out into the sun to finish up. 

I've also used an old folding lawn chair kept in the basement for extra drying space next to the washer/dryer.  Why don't I buy a regular wooden drying rack?  Why should I?  The lawn chairs work.   Why do we keep a couple of folding lawn chairs down there?  To sit in while waiting out tornado warnings, of course.   That hasn't happened the last couple of years, but it's a fairly common occurrence.   For the same reason, we keep the area under the basement stairs empty and ready for taking shelter.

 Back to my drying examples:  I am reducing extra steps, time and energy by air drying the clothes inside instead of the preferred fresh air and sunshine method with the wonderful smell.  I can do without my shirts and jeans having that extra perk.  And air drying inside removes the dreaded threat of bird poop.  I should add, I do this mostly on days when we are not running the air conditioning and not worried about adding humidity to the house.  But that is another story.

For the remainder of the laundry I use a tip I found on a green website.  It suggested using the dryer to fluff the clothes for a few minutes FIRST, and then hang them to dry the rest of the way.  It really works!  Family members who formerly complained about wrinkled, stiff underwear can't tell the difference from a full dryer cycle.

So, after I have removed the really light or really heavy items, I toss the rest into the dryer.  After the shirts are hung and jeans are laid out nearby, I open the dryer and grab another bunch of things, the most lightweight first, and let the rest continue in the dryer.  I hang or lay those flat.  I keep going for one or two more batches until the dryer is empty.  Usually it has only run about 5-7 minutes, and the clothes are much easier to deal with afterward.

During the heating season, air drying inside is an even better deal because adding moisture to the air is desirable. 

I remember as a child, my mother hanging clothes in the basement during winter.  She'd bring them up and lay them out on the bed to dry the last little bit, or else she'd sprinkle them with water and roll them up for ironing later.  Clothes of today are so much easier to care for.  

 I also remember living on the Gulf Coast, which we did for a total of seven years, well before global warming became a household phrase.   My first wash load in Galveston I eagerly hung up to dry on our private, fenced little patio.  The sun shown brightly, the breeze was brisk.  But we were an eighth of a mile from the ocean.  Three days later, I took down the still-wet washing and dried it in the dryer.  If you live in a place like that, put your cottons away and invest in a few duds made for the tropics--the quick dry kind.

Some day when our electric power is converted to sustainable sources, I can use the dryer as much as I need to.  Till then, I'm going to use brain power instead of will power to use less fossil fuel energy.