And when she was bad, she was horrid.

With the recent passage of Earth Day 2010 and Earth Month drawing to a close, I was rereading some past posts from a blog that must now rest in peace.  However, a handful are almost worth sharing:

From My Life in Green, 2009


I assess my efforts to live a little greener like an excerpt from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem: "...when she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid." Here's the poem in its entirety, in case it doesn't ring a bell: http://tinyurl.com/ykyegu6.

Ever since dragging home a four foot tall recycling bin soon after we moved to the Pacific Northwest (which my parents gamely embraced after reminding me that my Dad, an employee of Alcoa, produced aluminum for a living), I've known that I could do a bit better. Throughout junior high and high school, we dutifully hauled our recycling spoils down to the Wenatchee (WA) recycling center, where we would sometimes receive up to seven whole dollars for our efforts!

Newspapers were stacked by the door and bundled with twine to take to the center, and magazines were begrudgingly (more on magazines as the ultimate vice of our family's females later) sent once in a while as well. Not bad in the grand scheme of things, given that our home's location half way up a mountain did not exactly make curbside or mainstream options available.

These days, my husband, five year old and I do a pretty bang up job recycling every single item in the city's curbside program, and we generate very little trash each week. We need to revisit our composting efforts, but for now my focus has been on making improvements in various other areas a little bit at a time.