A different kind of love song

When you think of love songs, I bet lines like “Oh baby, baby, baby, baaaaaaaaby, I love you” and other word conglomerations of that ilk come to mind. These songs run the gamut of happy, sad, mournful, or even overly goopy.

Leave it to my sweetie to write a song for me that speaks to what we value, not to mention what I spend my days navigating in varying degrees while I make a living. The lyrics go like this:

Shed
by Sven Eberlein

I’ve got a closet full of things
don’t know how they made it in
there’s that sweater I don’t like
and the tapes left behind by my friend Mike

I’ve tried to clear it out before
but all that stuff keeps getting more
my house is looking like a store
and now I can’t even close the door

 

Blooming in a D.I.Y. kind of way

One of the happiest joys and honors is an invitation to witness friends unite their lives. As a natural observer and sometimes documentarian, my eyes are always drawn to the quiet details that make each event so unique. In recent years, I’ve notice a proclivity to incorporate incredibly personal handmade or D.I.Y. (a.k.a. do-it-yourself) elements, and this has been most notable in the flowers.

A wedding I attended last year featured arrangements and a bridal bouquet lovingly homegrown by the bride’s sister. I consider this to be a brave and stunning undertaking, especially when one is at the mercy of Mother Nature!

 

I thought I knew what “quilt” meant

A long ago discarded pair of pants are hanging over my desk. Well, that’s partially true. To be precise, parts of my pants and parts of two other peoples’ pants are hanging over my desk in a wall warming creation called The Traveling Elephant Quilt.

The elephants are parading through space to an unknown destination, but the “traveling” part of the piece hails from my insanely talented, creative, and silly friend, Sharon. Throughout the earlier part of this year, I received sporadic emails from her that read, “Now where? Hee hee,” and “Elephants in Orleans, CA?”

 

How to recycle the years gone by

Time was up. I could no longer defer the inevitable: I had some outdated wall calendars that I was unable to part with. Keeping them any longer was ridiculous, but recycling them meant discarding something I felt was not disposal-worthy. What was an organizer girl to do?

 

A shoe fetish for the holidays

From a distance, it looks just like any other bedecked Christmas tree. But this one, residing in the back room adjacent to my neighbor’s kitchen, is a little different from the one in the living room. (Yes, she has two.) You have to get close to see what I mean. This tree is aptly and affectionately called the shoe tree.

 

Life without single-use plastic bags? Tote-ally awesome

Here I am, caught in action with one of my favorite canvas totes!

For anyone who has yet to practice forgoing the plastic bag from the store cashier upon checkout or a restaurant waitperson when leftovers are packaged to go, learning to just say no is a simple yet powerful act.

We’ve become accustomed to the presence and regular flow of these rustling little critters in our lives. They are versatile and always at the ready when needed – until you notice that there’s a hole in one, and you know how quickly these bags tear. The reject gets tossed in the trash, and you have to dig in the cupboard to find one without a hole.

But imagine, if you will, life without this convenience, or in the case of  bags with a hole – this inconvenience. Imagining is one thing, but practicing is another.

Can you live without single-use plastic bags? Absolutely.

Where to start?

 

Reminiscing about “paper or plastic?”

“Paper or plastic?” may soon be obsolete…at least in California. On June 2, the California State Assembly passed a bill (AB 1998) to ban single-use plastic shopping bags. The bill goes to the Senate later this month, and if it passes, the golden state will become the first in the union to ban the option.

In San Francisco, there is already a ban on single-use plastic shopping bags at chain grocery stores and pharmacies, and today, an expansion of the existing legislation is being introduced that could lead to more extensive city-wide elimination of plastic bags. This prospect makes someone like me very very happy.

The SF Department of the Environment provided a startling figure at their booth at a local farmer’s market last week: 380 billion single-use plastic bags consumed in the U.S. each year, and that translates to 1,500 per person. California consumes 19 billion of those bags each year – more than any other state. These numbers are astounding. Things have to change, and thankfully they are…slowly but surely.

 

Rethinking the “junk” in the junk drawer

Photo courtesy of Paho Mann (www.pahomann.com)

The ubiquitous junk drawer. It is the centralized repository where a plethora of useful and not-so-useful, like and not-so-like items seems to congregate. Think about it. Where else might you find a yo-yo with a broken string, rolls of tape, keys to unknown locks, full and half-used matchbooks, loose buttons, an undeveloped roll of film, outdated menus, loose change, and questionable batteries in one place?

The junk drawer seems to be a socially acceptable place for disarray. My professional organizer ears have heard few people express embarrassment about the condition of theirs. The drawer offers regular opportunity for impromptu treasure hunts. It also serves as a safe haven for things that are in the process of finding their way “home,” or that have no place else to live until, perhaps, they eventually find their way to the trash. For many, this collection and dispersal system works just fine.

But what if you wanted to rethink the junk drawer and remove some of the junk to make way for the more functional?

 

She’s got the whole world in her hand

"The World," by Drew, age 6

It’s a world that brings joy, but it will cause pain if handled without care. This world is made of a crayon-marked crumpled piece of paper gingerly held together by straight pins and a rubber band-as-equator. A hand-drawn American flag impaled by a toothpick marks the location of the creator’s home.

“My brother was making a globe in science class, so I wanted to make one too,” said six-year-old Drew about the inspiration for this piece when I interviewed him via his mother via e-mail.

His mother, my friend Barb, told me about this sweet creation and how she didn’t quite know what to do with it.

 

A trashy tour

Do you ever wonder what happens to your trash?

A year ago, my curiosity led me to sign up for one of the monthly tours of San Francisco Recycling & Disposal Solid Waste Transfer and Recycle Central.

Despite the threat of rain canceling the tour, me and my equally inquisitive partner, Sven, drove to the southern end of the city to take in the sights, sounds, smells, and surprises that awaited us.

Swarms of seagulls filled the air above the transfer facility property and provided a directional indicator that let us know we were almost there.