g&g

The raw apple and pear tart pictured above may be the hippiest thing to ever emerge from my kitchen. And that includes the Mission: Possible where we all made green cleaning supplies. The crust is raw and completely cribbed from this recipe. I ended up using only about 2 cups of walnuts instead of 2.5 and probable not a full 1.5 cups of dates, since my tart pan is a little on the small side. For the filling, I marinated a couple of sliced up apples and pear in brown sugar, lime juice and maple syrup, then ground it coarsely through the blender…not enough to make applesauce, just enough to make it feel like pie filling to me. The whole thing is topped with the remaining 1/2c walnuts mixed with a couple of tablespoons of maple syrup. Oh, and of course blueberries. Because pretty much everything I make ought to involve blueberries for the foreseeable future. I’m thinking I’ll serve this on Wednesday night when folks come over to watch MST3K!

Lately, I can’t stop cutting out trees that look like lollipops! You’ll probably see these little fellas popping up all over before too long. Right now, they’re on a Lunch Kit and two skirts. Maybe a collage is in order? Who knows!

In other treehugging news, Project: Dump the Shower Water on the Front Garden is going strong. I’ve never been so good about watering my plants before! The collards are getting big…it might be time transplant them to bigger pots this very weekend! I’ll post some pictures if we do that!

I’m not sure if I’ve bragged on my friend Robert over here. Robert is my pal who writes for How Stuff Works, where a lot of his articles are on environmental topics. Earlier this year he was writing up a piece on Gray Water Reclamation. This got me thinking about all the water that goes right down my drain that maybe isn’t potable but maybe isn’t too dirty for things like watering plants and whatnot.

[photo by Apes Abroad]
When Dave and I made that trip to Mississippi and scored all of those awesome vintage housewares, we also became the proud owners of a ton of metal buckets. We have buckets everywhere, and those buckets got me thinking. Finally, a few weeks ago I put one in the bathroom next to the tub. The next time I showered, I stuck it in there while waiting for the cold water to turn hot. By the time I got out of the shower the bucket was full, and I dumped it on our front lawn. It was so easy, and our Elephant Ears were totally grateful. Now, we have a whole potted garden out front that is living pretty much exclusively on shower water that would have just been wasted.

It’s such a tiny, easy thing to do, but it’s totally transformed the front of our home without using an extra drop of water! Hurrah!

<3

I don’t know what to say.

[via No Impact Man]

ETA:
This article linked in the comments to No Impact Man’s post talks about an investigtion of the officer in that video. It also talks about the NYPD’s relationship with Critical Mass that includes this little gem:

Things came to a boil in October 2004, when the city went to court to try to require Critical Mass to obtain a permit to conduct its monthly rides, arguing that the intense concentration of cyclists disrupted traffic. A federal judge denied the city’s request on technical grounds, and also barred the city from seizing bikes of people who were not charged with breaking the law.(emphasis mine)

This is something that has to be specified by law? That sounds like a judge ruling that a cop can’t take my purse if I am crossing the street but not jaywalking. Am I misunderstanding?

Jay Smooth has a Wall-E theory. Just like he does in the video, I want to preface this by saying I loved Wall-E. I maybe cried at the end a little. He brings up an interesting point about the backstory for the movie, though and it felt like it was worth sharing!

I mean….it’s a great question, right? Where is the other 99% of the world during this movie? What happened to Dubai?

Dave actually gets all the credit for the rain barrel awesomeness at our house. The barrels are sitting up high on concrete blocks, one on each side of the yard. He ran drip irrigation hose out of each one and snaked the hose through our flower beds. The bit of elevation creates enough water pressure that rainwater that the buckets collect trickles through the flowerbeds and keeps our pretty flowers happy! Our setup is pretty much perfect for our back yard’s needs.

I was out taking pictures around town today and stumbled on this awesome rain barrel on display at Donna Van Gogh’s! Maybe our perfect setup could use a little bit of color! Rain barrels seem to only come in black, white or green. Why shouldn’t reusing water be totally colorful and shiny? A plain rainbarrel from a hardware store seems to run between $80 and $100. The custom painted barrel goes for $149 - not bad for such a big piece of custom art!

So, I’ll tell you guys my dirtiest secret: I’ve never made clothes before. The idea of making clothes freaked me out for some reason…I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. Whether I had a pattern in front of me or not, I felt totally lost at the idea of sewing darts or finishing sleeves. The closest I’d come to making clothes before this week was hemming the occasional pair of pants or doing little fixes to thifted skirts before embellishing them. So! That makes me extra super-duper proud of the smock I made on Tuesday!

It’s got 4 pockets in the front, which is awesome for work where I’m always putting things down and forgetting where they are. The fabric is a vintage sheet, and it closes at the back with 2 bright red vintage buttons. The back of it hangs free. On the dressform, it hangs a little differently. Since I have actual hips, it’s a little more open in the back when it’s on. I wore it yesterday and loved it, tho I think it needs a little work in the yoke region.

I definitely learned a lot this time around and have an idea for another top! A tank top!

Hey, so remember my post a while back about No Impact Man’s email campaign? Well! He met with the Congressman yesterday about climate change and setting a goal of 350 PPM atmospheric carbon dioxide, and it sounds like it was basically amazing. You can read all about it right over here.

Talk about hope!