Recycling Memories

As you may have heard, my last grandparent died on Monday. Grandma Rae was 98 years old and perfectly healthy right up until her slight stroke two weeks ago. Her only health issues in the last few years were a deteriorating hip from a previous break, leading to some falls. We decided after the last fall in June that she could no longer safely live on her own, and she was moved into a nursing home.

Nursing home rooms are small. She was lucky enough to have a private room, but still, it’s small. One piece of her furniture fit, my grandpa’s bureau. So what do we do with an apartment full of stuff? My parents have their home fully furnished the way they wanted, I didn’t really have room for any more in my apartment and my sister isn’t really in a position to take any furniture since she lives in a closet in San Francisco. But we can’t just get rid of it. Her furniture is all very nice and most of the pieces are antiques from her family. So I am taking the breakfront and the matching buffet, as well as a small delicate chair and some ginger-jar lamps. I will make them fit.

She also has a lot of art and important pieces from her and my grandpa’s and their families’ travels and vacations and there are many things in her apartment that bring up fond memories. The small yellow jade snuffbox with the bright green stopper was my favorite-favorite thing to look at among the many Asian treasures they collected over the years.

The delicate Dresden ballerinas remind me of the very rare occasions we were allowed in the formal living room at their farmhouse in Door County. She got very angry if you picked them up the wrong way! (You pick them up by the heads, so the china lace doesn’t break) These figurines were made in the 1800s and the factory was destroyed in the war. They are very precious to me and I am so happy my dad allowed me to have them.

The small china cat and kitten curled up by the fireplace. We always went in and petted them when we arrived.

The octagon-shaped glass plates remind me of the yummy ham sandwiches she would make for lunch. She would toast the bread, slather on butter and cut them into four squares.

We always had fruit at her house too. My grandpa grew up on a fruit ranch in Washington and brought his love of fruit trees to the farmhouse in Northern Wisconsin. She taught me to pit cherries with a paperclip. We would pick wild strawberries by the side of the road when we took the dogs for a walk. She called me the Cool Whip Kid because I loved it so much on strawberries.

The green plastic juice glass with the drawings of citrus on them remind me of breakfast in the farmhouse kitchen: butter in the rooster-shaped butter dish, milk in the cow-shaped creamer, grandma’s fifty vitamins lined up next to her glass of OJ and red-breasted grosbeaks mobbing the birdfeeder outside the window.

So I will try to remember these good memories when I think of my grandma from now on. I know many of you have heard stories about the not-so-nice aspects of her personality. (Perhaps SMP should get the bureau with the drawers where she was forced to sleep as a baby) But as Heidi and I drive together every day, I will endeavor to remember the generousness and forget the rest.

E-mazing

I want an e-reader. Bad. And, so, ok, fine. I am not going to lie to you. I probably only want one because they are cool and new and shiny and fun. I don’t know if I would even like reading books on an e-reader. I love to read and I love reading actual books. I love buying books too. I have too many, but I like having them in my house. I blame my mother. You should see her office. But this, I have discovered, makes me a bad consumer. I should just go to the library. But I want to HAVE them. I’m such a capitalist. I will say, however, that the books I keep I read over and over. And over.  I'm looking at you, Harry Potter.

Since they are expensive, I probably won’t be getting an e-reader anytime soon. But here is an interesting article on Slate asking this important question: which is better for the environment, books/newspapers/ magazines or a Kindle? It’s a valid question. But, you have to decide which you are more interested in, saving carbon in the form of emissions from electricity (powering the e-reader) or saving carbon in the form of trees (books and newspapers) or saving pollution from the electronics manufacturing process (heavy metals and e-waste) or saving pollution from the books transportation process (petroleum and tailpipe emissions) and etc. (Also? Ninety-five percent of US magazines are printed on virgin paper. That’s fewer than 200 out of 17,000. FAIL)

If I win the lottery and buy a Kindle or a Nook or an iPad or a whatever, I might read books on them. I certainly can’t deny that they are handy. It’s much easier to stick one of them in my purse than that giant An Echo in the Bone I am about to read (again). Barnes and Noble started giving away their electronic classics books for free a few weeks ago and I’m downloading them all to their desktop application. What? I like to plan ahead, ok?  But I also like to read a book in my bed before I fall asleep, so I am not sure I will ever give up a real book.  And Penguin (a division of Pearson!) will probably be really happy to hear that.

Critical Mass

The cordless mouse I use at home has been silently shouting at me for a few days that my batteries are at a CRITICALLY LOW LEVEL. Alright already. I don’t feel like I use a lot of batteries, but I probably use more than a few. I have two in my mouse, four in my keyboard, two in my TV remote, two in my other remote, two in my kitchen clock, one in my clock radio, one in my bureau clock and probably five or six in the various stereo remotes. That’s almost twenty batteries. That’s a lot, I think. And since Hennepin County incinerates its garbage and I don’t want to breathe in burned-up battery acid, I always recycle them. In fact, I so don’t want to breathe burned-up battery acid I have a box at my desk at work for recycling other peoples’ batteries. I take them to Wood Lake Nature Center and dump them in their big bin. I have a bag of my grandma’s hearing aid batteries to take the next time I go to Wood Lake.


Check this cute little guy out. His name is Corky and he is a mouse made of cork and recycled plastic who is entirely powered by his own movement. Genius. Unless he is ridiculously expensive, he will definitely be joining my household and maybe my work life too. What a great idea. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I will keep you posted when he is released for sale.

Scotchy, scotch scotch

Thanks to my mom's almost relentless activity on Ancestry.com, we know that her family is almost all from the Isles, and mostly Scotland at that.  (This may explain the freckles and allergy to the sun).  Scotch, or whisky, has been produced in Scotland for hundreds of years. The Gaelic "usquebaugh", meaning "Water of Life", phonetically became "usky" and then "whisky" in English. 

My dad, the actual Scotch addict in the family, is all question-mark, so who knows where he gets his penchant for this delicious amber drink.  He prefers the Glen-'s, while I am a Jack fan myself.  We think he could be Black Irish, with the black hair and sapphire eyes, so that would fit, no?

In addition to its primary use as a drunk-maker, researchers in Scotland have discovered a possible use for the waste created in the distilling process: biofuel!  This is amazing to me.  One article I read said that Scotch-distilling is the most energy (carbon) intensive in all of beveragedom.  If they can nearly or completely offset that activity by burning and selling biofuel, well then Scotch really is a miracle liquid.

Also?  They normally just dump the waste in the sea (!), so now they will be less polluting as well.  Cheers!

So help the environment and have a Jack and water on the rocks on me!  Or with me. Wait, why haven't you bought me a drink yet??

Down to the Last Sushi

At the top of the Atlantic Ocean food chain is the bluefin tuna, a half-ton hunting machine that can accelerate faster than a Porsche.  Yet it is powerless against the appetites for wealthy Japanese diners: Industrial fishing has reduced bluefin numbers by two-thirds in the Mediterranean and 80 percent in the Atlantic.  A fishing ban could restore healthy numbers within a decade, but at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species this March in Qatar, Japan marshaled 68 nations to vote against a ban on international trade in the vanishing fish - after treating them to a bluefin sushi buffet.

What's motivating Japan and the other tuna-fishing nations is more than a taste for raw fish.  Prized bluefin sell at auction in Tokyo for as much as $175,000 apiece.  Presumable the very last bluefin will fetch an even higher price.

Source: Sierra Club magazine, July/August 2010

The Original Recyclers

The Shakopee Mdewankanton Dakota community tries very hard to be self-sufficient.  Having that giant casino helps, no doubt.  They have their own water-treatment plant, DNR department, police and fire, and an energy cooperative.  And I have to say, this energy plant is genius.  All of the materials burned in this plant would just be waste otherwise.  Barley dust from beer production?  Oat hulls from Cheerios?  Genius.

Trees

Let's face it, trees rock.  We all had a favorite tree we climbed as kids.  Mine was a pine tree in the front yard of our house in Golden Valley.  It was sticky, but easy to climb and, more importantly, sit in.  There's a tree outside Kiawah Island that is rumored to be the oldest tree east of the Mississippi.  It's called the Angel Oak.  Here's my grandma standing in front of it:

One of my green cohorts at work, Ann Olson, passed along this cool story about NASA using images of the earth to try and figure out how much carbon is stored in trees and whether these trees can continue to sequester carbon as we continue to emit it..