Who still uses plastic bags?

Apparently people in the Evanston Farmers Market.

I happened to pick up a copy of the Chicago Tribune this Sunday. One article about the farmer’s market caught my eye. There is a farmer who is starting to charge 25 cents for each plastic bag that the customers use.

He is an organic farmer who is using vegetable oil in his tractors. He cares about the environment and sells high quality, organic food. But every weekend he was partially responsible for adding a few more non-degradable plastic bags to the landfills. So he decided to take a stand. Every plastic bag now costs 25 cents. Each bag that you use to separate out the parsley from the carrots from the tomatoes. 75 cents right there.

His customers were up in arms. One customer threw her almost purchase back on the table when she was told about the extra charge. A lawyer emailed him complaining about the extra… dollar? that she had to pay for her all natural, organic vegetables. She claimed that she tries to avoid plastic bags when she can but doesn’t like people telling her what to do. “He doesn’t know that I recycle those bags. He has no idea what I do with those bags.”

GIVE ME A BREAK.

If you can afford to shop at the farmer’s market and pay double what you would at Meijer for parsley, you can afford 25 cents for a bag. If you don’t like the charge, bring your own bag next time. Plastic bag, cloth bag, your pockets, who cares.

Italy has “long charged” for the plastic bags that you get in the grocery store. (I can’t find a specific time, but it has been at least five months.) Granted, it’s only 5 cents, but still. I got used to carrying a few plastic bags in my purse for those random purchases. If we were heading out to the grocery store and I knew we would purchase soda or water, I took along my canvas bags.

You didn’t see plastic bags floating around on the streets. You didn’t see them littering the sides of the roads.

I still use plastic bags in the grocery stores, but only because I need bags to scoop used cat litter into. I have about a billion and four canvas bags that we’ve collected from conferences over the years. Since getting back from Italy, I’ve started taking them to the store with me for the heavy stuff. We go through about 10 liters of sparkling water every week, and about 6 liters of soda. Add to this laundry detergent and soap and anything sharp that can tear a plastic bag and I use about 4-5 of my canvas bags each week.

It’s not much, but I figure I’m saving a few drops of oil every week that would instead be used to make the bags.

So you don’t go to conferences once a year and get random canvas bags, but want to use cloth bags at the store? What can you do?

• Make your own. Easy, easy, easy! Lots of patterns out there. Here’s one pattern, and here’s another.
• Buy some. One of my favorite bloggers (www.crazyauntpurl.com) loves these. They are really cute and have little roll up straps but I have trouble paying for bags when I have so many extra around the house.
• My sister told me about someone who is giving away free cloth bags, but I deleted the email. Maybe she’ll email me with the link again…
• Sweet talk me. Sometime in about 2 months I’ll probably have free time and I KNOW I have a million yards of scrap material. Maybe I’ll make some and send them to people. But don’t count on it.

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Disclaimer: I do apologise for everyone who came looking for photos. I’m about to get boring because I’m almost out of Italy photos; only about 2 posts left. Now I get to use my blog to spit in the wind!

A Day at the Pool

I have to admit that lava was pretty much the high point of the Italy trip. But there were some other pretty cool things. And then there were the random things. One day by the pool in Sicily was a little bit of both. Cool and random.

Random first.

I spent a lot of my time in Sicily sitting by the pool. Reading, working on the blog or just sitting. One day, I was engrossed in getting a post done when some action at the pool caught my attention:

Scuba lessons in the pool. I guess they have to learn somewhere and the big scary ocean isn’t the best place for a newbie to go under for the first time. But two things really caught my eye.

One - the guy on the side of the pool, gesticulating wildly. Teacher? Cheerleader? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the teacher to be in the pool with them? I guess I don’t have a lot of confidence in an scuba instructor who doesn’t have the breathing apparatus on. Does he really know how it works?

Two - The camera crew. I agree, people scuba diving in a pool is unusual. It was salt water, but come on. Is there really anything interesting on the bottom? I can see the bottom, without actually getting in the water.

I don’t know what they were doing, but one of the pool critters (of which there seemed to be more and more every day that we were there) thought they were great fun.

Trust me here, the little girl is riding on the back of one of the scuba divers. Either that or using her arm floaties to help pull him to safety. I’m betting on the latter.

Pretty soon, the scuba divers were out of the pool and on there way to the next site. Maybe an aquarium in town?

Anyway, I stayed by the pool, because where there is one random event, there tend to be a few more to follow it up. I wasn’t disappointed. Again, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.

What is that? It kind of looks like a palm frond, but I think it is a boat. It sailed up out of no where and all of a sudden several boats from the hotel raced out to meet it. For the next 40 minutes or so, it raced back and forth in front of the hotel beach, practicing tacking I think.

It was really cool. One of the conference goers said that it looked like an old Americas’ Cup race boat. Maybe the Italy team was practicing for the upcoming race? (Disclaimer here: I don’t know jack about sailing. Is “tacking” the the right word for turning? Are there teams in the Americas’ Cup that aren’t associated with either of the Americas? I make it up as I go along.)

When they were in the middle of a turn, the crew on the boat would go mad cranking this hand crank:

You can kind of see them in a row, hand pedaling away. I think a friend called it a coffee grinder, but I don’t remember.

I took lots of pictures, because it was so very cool. This I think is the best one of the lot:

It needs a little cropping, but what picture doesn’t?

Some people would say that watching the boat out there would make them want to take up sailing, but from what I saw, it was a lot of work for the crew. I wouldn’t mind riding on the boat, but up near the front. Not at the back where they might need help turning something.

Ya know, they give Ph.D.’s away as door prizes…

About an hour ago, I was feeling sorry for myself because I wasn’t as creative as one of my friends. Now, I’m just pretty much wishing that I wasn’t so … me.

The story:

Husband is out of town - in California drinking wine… er, at a meeting. I am really tired. I got up at 5:30 this morning to go on a tour of the Pfizer plant in Kalamazoo. I was having a nice, relaxing evening at home, catching up on the usual domestic stuff: paying bills, petting the cats, cleaning the kitchen.

I made corn on the cob tonight as part of dinner. Instead of just throwing out the water, I thought I would use it to water the flowers on the front porch. Being green and all that stuff. As I I was walking out the front door, I was thinking to myself: “Don’t lock yourself out of the house. That would be really stupid.”

Do I really need to finish this story? Can you see where this ends?

Yup, I locked myself out of the house.

This is only the second time when I didn’t have any roommates/husband to bail me out. And it’s 11PM, again. And I’m only wearing my PJ’s, again. But this time, I was wearing underwear.

Long story short - I have an amazing friend and she came and let me into the house. Laughing all the time.

The upside, I met some of my neighbors and they were really nice. I’m going to deliver some flowers to their house tomorrow.

The downside, it rained this evening and the worms were out. And I didn’t have shoes on.

Is that the city?

Back to photos!!

Remember, once upon a time, so long ago we can barely remember, I went to Sicily. Husband had a conference and I sat by the pool. Well, those meanies at the conference decided to give everyone the afternoon off, so their brain didn’t turn to mush by the time it was all over.

Leif, Jim and I decided to take the afternoon and check out the town of Taormina. It is north of Catania, and according to the guidebooks, quite the tourist destination. But some friends at the conference had spent the week before there and suggested we check out (yet another) Greek Theater. Plus, the sights were supposed to be amazing.

We had to drive to the city. The drive wasn’t bad, if a little boring and uninteresting, scenery-wise. I think that’s because we decided to take the highway and not the more scenic local roads. Jim doesn’t like being honked at.

But on our way up, we see this:

Is that a city on that rock? Is that where we are going? Do you see a road leading up to that or are we going to walk? I’ll admit, I was a little concerned.

But Toarmina is definitely used to the tourist hordes. There were actual PARKING LOTS. With space to put your car. It was posted, with actual signs and everything. I almost felt like I was back in the states. But to get to the parking lot, we had to cross this terrifying bridge. I only have a very vague recollection of it because it freaked me out good. Thank goodness I wasn’t driving. We would have come to a screeching halt in the middle of the road. I vaguely remember that it was only two lanes wide, with no shoulder. There were guard rails, but come on now. I really don’t know how it was held up. Toothpicks probably.

But husband was driving and so we made it safe and sound. At the parking lot, there was a BUS that took us up to the main square of the city, so it was quite painless. No walking at all.

It was much more crowded than Syracusa. There were people everywhere, but it was a very pretty town. We made our way up to the Greek Theater and saw some of the most amazing views of the trip.

Well, of course, we’re not the amazing views, but the coast and Etna behind us are!

The ocean was SO stinking blue. I could have sat there for hours!

Above the city sits the castello. You can hike up there, but it takes about 30 minutes and it was pretty hot out that day. The views would have been amazing, but we made do with what we saw from the Greek Theater.

As usual, the “Greek” theater is now almost entirely Roman (rebuilt in 3 Before Canada) and of course obscured from our view by some stupid concert set. (We were 0 for 3 in the Theater seeing department.)

Remember, scientists can take the fun out of any occasion. They were talking about science.

I like this next photo:

I don’t know for sure, but I hope those columns are some of the original Greek columns that the Romans incorporated into the “new” theater. Plus, you can see the cheap stone on the inside of the walls with the more expensive brick on the outside.

Whew!! All that looking can make a person awfully thirsty. Plus it was getting late in the day, so we found a place to have a drink, right next to a beautiful church:

Can you imagine getting married there? Well, someone did! At some point, a bride passed us on the street. Plus we kept seeing all of these people dressed to the nines, promenading in the sunset. Very cool.

I left the boys to do some tasting of the local beverages while I did some shopping. I passed a shop and saw a rug that I really wanted:

I’m not sure if it goes into the “Dogs in Inappropriate Places” photo essay, but it made me laugh.

As we were leaving, I saw a GREAT sign:

If you don’t read Italian or English, or even if you do, does this really explain what is forbidden? Holding hands? Relationships? And what is the last one? No eating? Thank god they didn’t catch us at dinner then!

One thing I will miss about Italy:

Well, duh, the wine!! But beyond that, this is a bottle that we bought in Toarmina. Even though we were going to open it in about 3 hours, they wrapped in beautiful paper and tied a ribbon on it. Almost everything that you buy in the smaller shops is wrapped up in beautiful bags or paper. I will miss that pride.

It was, like, amazing!

We grow out of a lot of things. Milli Vanilli albums, radical make-up usage, and hair that changes color about every three months. But I wonder, is using the word “like” as an interjection or phrase linker something that people grow out of?

“It was, like, the most amazing thing!” or “And I was, like, no duh!”

Husband and I were at lunch today and we had the misfortune to sit next to a pair of college age girls complaining about their dorms. Jim timed one girl in particular; she used the word “like” 7 times in 22 seconds. And we’re not talking “I really like this sandwich.”

Once you hear a conversation like this, it is almost impossible to train your ear not to hear it. We laughed every time we heard two or three “likes” in a single sentence.

This is a conversational usage that afflicts females from the ages of 16-23 (this statistic is PFA by the way). You don’t hear professionals peppering their speech with “like”. So is this something that you grow out of, or is it something that you eventually train yourself not to do?

I was tempted to, as we were leaving, walk by their table and let them know that the word “like” came up about every 4 seconds in their conversation. Just FYI, ya know. But I didn’t really want to deal with the fall out that I know would be coming:

“That is so, like, rude!! Who do you think you are? Like, the language police?”