Highlights from Memorial Day Weekend

This past weekend, Amber and I went with a couple friends to see the Cubs rout the Pirates on Friday night (good thing we went that night as the Cubs lost the next two in extra innings!). It was a fun night and an active game as baseball games go as the Cubs scored in virtually every inning. As always, the view of Pittsburgh is great from PNC Park (the tickets are cheap too!), and this night's game ended with a great fireworks display.

Then, on Saturday, while Amber's car was getting some minor repairs (to the tune of over $400 - eeek!), we decided to take a road trip to Baltimore and quickly reserved hotel rooms for two nights. We found some decent hotels at a great price out by the Baltimore airport, which was only a ten minute drive from downtown (which beats paying for overnight parking downtown!). So, four hours later on Saturday night, we were walking the streets of downtown Baltimore by the harbor of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore's skyline isn't as spectacular as Pittsburgh's but the harbor sure is an added bonus - as well as the amazing crab cakes!

Overall, we didn't really do all that much while in Baltimore. We walked, shopped, checked the parking meter to ensure we didn't get a ticket, enjoyed the cable TV in the hotel room, and took pictures of the various museums from afar as opposed to actually paying the cost of going in. Baltimore has several museums around the harbor including the USS Constellation, a ship that seized 14 slave ships and freed over 400 slaves while it was in use.

In the cultural district, we viewed the first monument to George Washington, found a monument commemorating the French soldier, Marquis de Lafayette, who supported Washington during the Revolution (and happens to be the person whom my hometown is named after), walked through the Peabody Institute, and strolled by some of Baltimore's other museums.

In the evening, we walked around downtown again, struck up a long conversation with a homeless man (we noticed a lot of them actually) and gave him a couple dollars, and took a picture of the boyhood home of Babe Ruth. Other than that, I just enjoyed taking pictures.

On Living Green

So, I've been spending a lot of time working around the house this summer amidst furthering my graduate studies. Yesterday, I spent a good deal of the day planting some of our seedlings in our garden - which I tilled by hand with a hoe. It was definitely time for us to start planting them since they were starting to overtake our kitchen counter, we no longer had enough flourescent lights to help cover them all, and some of them weren't doing well in the organic soil we had them in. So the thought occurred to me that I'd take ya'll on a little tour of our attempts to live green (AND save money!):

Of course, one of the obvious things to do is to recycle. Unfortunately, Mt. Lebanon only recycles Plastics 1 & 2, glass, and aluminum, but hey at least it’s a start.
Pittsburgh's recycling program is much broader, so we actually have a little collection of other plastics, paperboard, and cardboard we hope to take to a recycling site at some point. We also try to reuse plastic water bottles and run them through the dishwasher before recycling them, but we’re rethinking this one as it’s not the safest of things to do.

Then, there's our huge collection of plastic grocery bags. Thankfully, there is a grocery store nearby that serves as a collection site to actually recycle these things, but rather than contribute to this massive waste of plastic (which take some 1000 years to decompose), we've finally bought some of those reusable grocery sacks... now if only we can consistently remember to take them with us to the store!

Next, there's the pile of recycled paper we have. At the nearby junior high school, there's a "paper retriever" we take these to periodically. There's actually another printer paper sized box in my car full of paper to recycle, that I took over there a week or so ago, but the retriever was so crammed full, that I had to wait for another day. We also try really hard to salvage all the printer paper that has printing on only one side and use it to print out things that aren't important, make grocery and to-do lists, etc.

Then, there's our wonderful compost pile Amber convinced us to start. It begins with putting our table scraps in our 5 gallon bucket... yuck. And then, combined with yard clippings, dead leaves, and so forth, we have a growing little pile outside. Its just a big pile of nastiness right now, but in a year, it will be usable compost (hopefully!). Combined with our recycling, its amazing how little we take out to the curb each week for trash day. Most weeks, we have one trash bag and that's it.

Next, we have our seedlings and garden. Two summers ago when we owned a house in Indianapolis, we had a bumper crop of cucumbers (well, until they got diseased...), yellow squash, zucchini (mmm, zucchini bread!), one lone pepper (stupid rabbits!), and more tomatoes than we knew what to do with. That time, we purchased all the seedlings from nearby greenhouses. Now, we started from the ground up with seeds in our dark basement which were then moved under flourescent lights in our kitchen when they started to sprout. Again, trying to reuse, we scrounged the house as much as we could to find containers we could utilize as temporary plots. Thus, many of our seedlings started in old plastic containers that used to contain ricotta cheese, sour cream, and shredded cheese, along with styrofoam cups from Panera Bread and Hampton Inn that I had picked up at some point and finally had a reason to use. We even used some of our rubbermaid containers that had AWOL lids.

We were totally amazed at how many plants came up. At one point we had a dozen zucchini, a 17 yellow squash, 5 cucumber, 35 peppers, and 98 tomato plants (ok, so Amber really likes fresh tomatoes!). We managed to contribute about half of them to our church which has been selling seedlings to raise money for their urban farm where they are trying to reclaim unusable land in the city of Pittsburgh and use it for something redemptive. Then, we gave some away, some died (sadness!), and others have relocated to the garden where we hope other seedlings will go once we think they're ready. It's kind of scary taking them outside. Kind of like a mother bird kicking her baby out of the nest - You're afraid the cold air might kill them or the hot sun will wilt them... so we'll see what happens!

And there’s our “wild garden” – well, actually its just wild mint growing all over our yard – yes, right next to the huge hole in our driveway wear the neighborhood squirrels, chipmunks, and even raccoons frequently visit. I’ve been able to boil some of it to make some GREAT-tasting mint water.

There are still other things we've done too in order to live more green and conserve energy. We try to unplug things that we don't regularly use, such as our computer printer, toaster, blender, DVD player, and paper shredder, as unbeknownst to a lot of people, you're often paying for a little electricity even if things are just plugged in without being on. We turn off our computer screen and try to turn off lights when they're not in use. The thought occurred to me the other day that if Amber and I stay in the same room, even while doing different things, we can use a lot less light. During the day, I try to use as much natural light as I can instead of having lights on in the house too. We keep our thermostat down lower than is typical and I just wear a sweater (Amber doesn't like that one too well). We try to wash our clothes on cold whenever we can and try to limit having water running too long or more than we need. Heck, I've even found a way to collect rainwater in order to reuse that - all our other gutters drain underground, but here there's a hole in our gutter and drips unto our sidewalk! LOL.
We've also tried to cut down on our impact on the environment in the chemicals we use. We've switched to environmentally friendly detergent for our clothes and dishes by Biokleen and Seventh Generation, which is a bit more costly, but we've managed to by them on sale and with coupons which helps. We've also tried to limit our use of draino in unclogging our bathroom sink, which seems to clog up about every week. I've managed to create a pipe cleaner out of old guitar strings which I use to essentially "floss" the drain as much as I can. Then, I use boiling salt water as a more environmentally-friendly (and cheaper) means of unclogging the drain. A mixture of baking soda and vinegar supposedly works too, but I've had difficulty being successful.

Other money saving tips we've tried to do: Aside from owning Honda Civics, this past year, I've walked and used public transportation as much as I can. Last night, we needed to take a walk, and decided to walk to Library instead of making an unneeded car trip. We've also started paying more attention to the grocery store sales and only buying what is on sale, and have decided to get the Sunday paper for the sole purpose of getting the coupons. In Pittsburgh, there are a few grocery store chains and have found that those that don't provide the gas perks on your food purchases (which is basically a scam and largely caters to those who drive big-ass SUVs) are WAY cheaper.

I think I've exhausted our list. If you have some good ideas for going green that I haven't mentioned, I'd love to hear about them!