Ecofrugal gifting games, 2023 edition

One of our most successful holiday gift ideas this year was a model of ecofrugality. It provided not one, but eight secondhand gifts for family and friends, with a little extra entertainment thrown in—all for just a few dollars.

Last year's round robin gift exchange with our niblings was so successful that we decided we'd try to repeat it this year. Our original plan was to do it with books again, picking up secondhand ones throughout the year and supplementing as needed with new ones. But last summer, as Brian and I were weeding out our collection of board games, it occurred to me that maybe we could make some of these discarded games the basis of this year's gift exchange. This would kill two birds with one stone: finding new homes for the games we no longer played while crossing eight people off our holiday gift list.

After clearing out our game shelves, we had more than eight possible candidates for the gift exchange. As Christmas drew nearer, we supplemented this selection with others that we picked up at the local thrift shop (some of them still in their original shrink wrap) and at yard sales. We picked and chose among these to get the best variety of different games to fit differing tastes. The finalists were:

• Bali, a word game for one or two players
• Rook, a trick-taking card game
• The Sherlock Holmes puzzle case, a collection of mini-mysteries
• Tantrix Match, a pattern-matching game
• A nice wooden version of the classic peg solitaire game
• How to Rob a Bank, in which a team of robbers takes on a team of security guards
• Anomia, a hectic group game with a lot of shouting
• The Resistance, a social deduction game in which you have to find the traitors in your midst
  

But the gifts themselves were just the start. The thing our niblings (and one nibling-in-not-quite-law) seemed to enjoy most about last year's gift exchange was a puzzle that we threw in kind of as an afterthought: a hidden message spelled out by the first letters of the pages where we'd stashed $5 bills. So for this year, we decided to craft a more elaborate treasure hunt based on clues hidden in all the game boxes. Brian's first thought was to put one clue in each box, so the kids could either collaborate or compete to find the hidden treasure first. But eventually he decided it would be better to make them all work together, so he decided the first step in the hunt would be to put together a puzzle. On the back would be either some sort of treasure map or the first in a series of clues leading them to the treasure.

On a video call with his folks, Brian scoped out the house to find good hiding places for clues. These had to be spots that were within reach, but enough out of the way that the clues wouldn't be found by accident before the game had started. Possibilities included a spider plant hanging in the dining room, a curio cabinet in the living room, an old dollhouse in the basement, and the tops of various tall pieces of furniture, such as the grandfather clock. We thought it would be nice to have all the clues joined by a common theme, and after considering several ideas (names of games? Literary quotations? Cards and suspects from the game Clue?) we came up with one suggested by the plant: species names.

On the back of the puzzle, Brian wrote a winding trail of letters spelling out Clorophytum comosum, the Latin name of the spider plant. We knew they could easily find that out with a Google search, leading them to the plant. In the plant pot, we placed a slip of paper with the second clue: Strix occidentalis. Although this is a real species (the spotted owl), there wasn't a real one in the house, but there was a stuffed animal version of it in the family room wearing a baseball cap. Under this cap, we hid the third clue: Brunus edwardii (magnus). This is not a real species, but a search on the name would lead them to a joke article that appeared in a 1972 issue of The Veterinary Record on common diseases of the teddy bear, and the magnus would tell them the specific specimen they wanted was the one known as Big Teddy up in the sewing room. Big Teddy was holding a piece of paper bearing an entirely made-up species name: Erinaceus horologium. The first half of this refers to a genus of hedgehogs, and the second half is Latin for "clock," directing them to the toy hedgehog sitting on top of the grandfather clock in the hall. Under that was the final clue, Chrysochus cobaltinus. This is a real species name referring to a type of blue beetle; there were no such beetles in the house, but there was a model of a blue Volkswagen beetle in the curio cabinet, and behind this we stashed our treasure chest (a cigar box filled with chocolate coins, jewel-like polyhedral dice, and some other odds and ends).

This gift exchange was a big hit. Once we had all eight youths in the room, we laid out the gifts for them to take turns choosing and swapping, and before they'd even finished opening up all the packages, some of them had peeked inside and discovered the puzzle pieces stashed there. This so piqued their interest that they immediately started putting the puzzle together, not even waiting to look at the rest of their presents, so the adults in the room exchanged their gifts to each other while the youngsters set about solving the puzzle and hunting down the clues. The only part we had to help them with was finding the treasure chest hidden behind the blue Beetle; we'd marked it with a slip of paper bearing the traditional X, but they thought that was just the next clue in the series and had to be directed to the box it was sitting on. We did see at least one of them later playing with the game she received in the gift exchange itself, but I think that the hunt-the-treasure game was more exciting for them than the actual presents.

This has led us to two conclusions for next year: First, we should definitely keep this tradition going. Since we seldom see our niblings, it's much easier to get them something they like by having them swap gifts among themselves than just trying to guess who would like what. And second, since the treasure hunt seems to be their favorite part, maybe next year we should start with the puzzle rather than the gifts. That is, rather than choosing presents and designing a puzzle to go with them, maybe we should start by thinking about what would make the best puzzle and selecting gifts (ideally ones we can find secondhand) to fit it. Because with this crowd, apparently, it's the fun that counts.

Gardeners' Holidays 2023: The Changing of the Garden

Most years, Brian and I celebrate this Gardeners' Holiday by picking out new seed varieties from a catalog during our drive to Indiana to visit his folks. However, this year, there were a couple of complications. First of all, the new seed company we used this year, Botanical Interests, didn't send us a catalog—and by the time I realized they hadn't, it was too late to order one in time for the trip. But even if we had received one, we might not have chosen to use it, since Botanical Interests doesn't carry our favorite Carmen pepper seeds. That didn't matter so much this year, since we had a few left over from our last Fedco order. But for next year, we'll definitely need some more.

So we decided to give a different seed supplier a try in 2024. I checked the website of True Leaf Market, which was also on our short list last year, and found that they carry the Carmen peppers and everything else we're currently out of. However, trying to browse True Leaf's website on my phone in the car would have been a bit awkward—especially while trying to take notes of our selections on paper at the same time. So, since we had a little free time today, we opted to do our seed selecting at home instead. 

The seeds we plan to either renew or replace are:

• Arugula. True Leaf sells several varieties, most of which were unfamiliar to us. Our first instinct was to go with Rocket, since we've successfully grown it before and know it works in our garden. But the Rocket arugula has one problem: it always bolts as soon as the weather turns hot, leaving us with leggy, bitter plants that aren't really worth harvesting. So when we saw a variety called Slow Bolt, which was actually slightly cheaper than the Rocket and had a 5-star rating from growers, we decided it was worth a try.
• Thai basil. The company touts its Siam Queen variety as an AAS winner, but it's extremely expensive: a minimum of $12.24 per packet, more than three times as much as its other varieties that have better user ratings. We decided to go with the more modestly priced Red Leaf Holy Basil, choosing it over the equally well-reviewed Thai Sweet Large Leaf because its red color will make it easier to distinguish from the regular Italian basil.
• Dill. This is another plant that has a tendency to bolt. Usually, by the time our cucumbers ripen in the summer, there's no dill left in the garden to make dill pickles with. In hopes of mitigating that problem, we chose a variety called Dukat, which allegedly "holds longer at the leaf stage than other dills." One user says it "didn't even bud until July despite unusual heat," which sounds promising.
• Lettuce. The Marvel of Four Seasons variety we bought this year from Botanical Interest performed very well in our garden. It was so bolt-resistant that we were able to keep harvesting it all summer and well into the fall. Initially, we thought True Leaf didn't stock this variety, but it turns out it was just listed under its French name, Merveille de Quatre Saisons. However, the packet it comes in is only 500 milligrams, which might not be enough for six squares' worth of lettuce (especially with a second planting in fall). Rather than buy two packets, we decided to hedge our bets by adding a packet of a blend called Gourmet Mix. Since it includes five different varieties of Bibb, leaf, and romaine lettuces, it maximizes the chances that at least one of them will do well.
• Peppers. The Carmen pepper seeds were the reason we came to this site in the first place, so naturally we're ordering more of those. Their performance this year was actually a bit disappointing—only a dozen peppers off two plants—but we're hoping that's just because the seeds were two years old. We plan to put in two or three of those and fill in with a Banana pepper from our last Fedco shipment, rather than take our chances on a new variety.
• Snap peas. Our trusty Cascadia snap peas did moderately well this year, yielding a total of 26 ounces. That's better than their performance in 2021 (when a deer ate most of the plants) or 2022 (when some of them never germinated), but nowhere near as good as the whopping 79 ounces we got in 2019. Still, this variety has done better overall than any other we've tried, and it gets better ratings for yield at Cornell's Vegetable Variety site than any of True Leaf's other offerings. We're going to stick with it for at least one more year, but if our yields remain lackluster we'll consider a different variety, like the well-reviewed Sugar Ann or Super Sugar Snap.
• Zucchini. The Emerald Delight zucchini seeds we bought from Botanical Interest were a resounding flop. Though described as "extremely productive," they produced only six usable squash off both plants and suffered a bit from blossom end rot. True Leaf doesn't carry the highly productive Green Machine variety that did so well for us in 2021 and 2022, so we're going back to Black Beauty, which we've grown with moderate success in the past.

One other item we'll have to replace in next year's garden is the bird tape we hung up to deter deer. As far as we can tell, it worked—that is, we've suffered no more deer invasions since hanging it (although without a control, we can't be entirely sure if they're only keeping away deer the way balled-up newspaper keeps away elephants). And contrary to our fears, the lines stayed in place pretty well and didn't blow around that much. But this week, Brian discovered that the tape was disintegrating, leaving little scraps of shiny plastic scattered around the garden. So he took them all down, and next year we'll either buy another roll of the stuff or see if we can achieve the same results with something similar, like strips of aluminum foil.

But that's a problem for next year. For now, we've taken care of all the necessary tasks to put our garden to bed for the winter. Our new rain barrel, unlike the old one, has not gone back into the shed; instead we've partially drained it and covered the opening with a trash can lid, weighed down with a brick, so no more water accumulates in it. We've also covered the entire garden with a thick layer of leaves—not just in the beds, but also on the paths. I noticed this year that the back edge of the garden, where leaves naturally tend to accumulate, didn't have weeds popping up all over the place the way the rest of the paths do, so I decided to spread leaves everywhere and see how well they did at keeping the weeds down. We piled a good couple of inches on the paths and more on the beds, and when we plant them in the spring we'll sweep that lot onto the paths as well. Fingers crossed, this may be the solution that finally provides us with a mostly weed-free surface to walk on.

And lastly, we've brought our new rosemary plant—bought to replace the one we unsuccessfully attempted to winterize last year—indoors until spring. Its predecessor didn't survive the winter even tucked inside a plastic bag and piled with leaves, so when we bought this one, we just put it in a large pot that we could carry indoors when the frost hit. And since it was going to spend this month parked in front of a sunny window downstairs, I figured I might as well give it a seasonal makeover.

Happy holidays to all, and best of luck with your gardening efforts in 2024.

Recipe of the Month: Whole Wheat Raisin Rye

OK, I realize it may be a bit of a cheat to use a bread recipe as my Recipe of the Month for December. After all, the original point of the whole exercise was to get more fruits and veggies in my diet, and each month's selection is supposed to be a recipe that features either veggies or fruit in a prominent role. This raisin bread does contain fruit, but it's hard to argue that it's fundamentally a fruit recipe. But on the other hand, my very first Recipe of the Month was also a bread—in fact, a sweet quickbread that was closer in spirit to a cake, and thus less healthful than this one—so if that was allowed, this should be too. More to the point, there are only a couple of weeks left in December, and we're spending the last week of the month celebrating Christmas with Brian's folks, which doesn't leave us much time to squeeze in a new dish that's more veggie-centric. So calling this bread my fruit-based recipe for December seemed like the safest play.

Technically, this isn't even a brand-new recipe. Brian has made a similar raisin rye bread before, which I quite enjoyed, but that one used a mixture of white and rye flour. This time he replaced the white flour with whole-wheat flour to make a heartier (and healthier) loaf. He was afraid this substitution might mess up the texture, but it came out fine; a little dense, but still agreeably chewy. The only downside was that the whole-wheat flour somewhat overpowered the rye, so it tasted more like a whole-wheat raisin bread than a raisin rye bread. But it was tasty all the same, with a hearty, wheat-forward flavor punctuated by the pops of sweet raisins. It worked quite nicely with our new homemade plant-based spread.

So how healthy is this modified recipe? Well, it depends on your priorities. If I were still on my low-carb diet, there's no way I'd be able to eat this on a regular basis; the three small slices I usually have for breakfast contain about 50 grams of carbs, including 15 grams of sugars (mostly from the raisins). But they also have 7 grams of fiber and 7 grams of protein, both of which appear to be more important for me to keep my blood sugar within a reasonable range. And with all those raisins, this fiber-packed loaf still feels like a treat.

If you'd like to give it a try, here's the complete recipe:

Whole wheat raisin rye

Ingredients:

• 1.75 cups lukewarm water
• 3 Tbsp brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp yeast
• 1.5 cups rye flour
• 2.5 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 Tbsp vital wheat gluten
• 1 Tbsp caraway seeds, coarsely ground
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 Tbsp oil (Brian used canola)
  
• 1 cup raisins

Directions:

1. Dissolve/suspend sugar and yeast in water and set aside for a few minutes. The mixture should start to foam up.
2. Combine flours, gluten, caraway, and salt in a large bowl. Add oil and yeast mixture and stir to mix. Cover bowl with a cloth and allow to rest for 5-10 minutes.
3. Knead dough for about 5 minutes, adding additional flour or water as necessary to maintain consistency. Knead the raisins into the dough, then continue to knead for an additional five minutes. Cover the bowl with a cloth and place in a warm, moist place (an unheated oven over or next to a pan of hot water works nicely) until the dough has doubled in size (about an hour).
4. Divide the dough into two equal-sized pieces. Shape the pieces into rough cylinders and place them in two bread pans. If you’re worried about the loaves sticking to the pans, you should grease and flour the pans before placing the dough in them. Return the dough to a warm, moist place and allow it to rise until once again it is doubled in size (about an hour).
5. Bake the loaves at 375 degrees F for 30 minutes. Turn out of the pans as soon as they're finished and cool them on a wire rack if you have one.

Return of the Shoe Conundrum

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the snow...

Last March, I bought myself a new pair of winter boots. I'd already limped through most of the winter with boots that leaked—two pairs of them, in fact—and all attempts to repair them had come to naught. After spending over a month searching for a replacement that met my tough criteria (comfortable, weatherproof, leather-free, not too ridiculously expensive, and not too ridiculous-looking), I finally found a pair at Woman Within that seemed acceptable. Not ideal, but acceptable. They weren't available in my exact size, but they were wearable; they weren't very warm, but with a thicker sock, they were tolerable; they didn't have much in the way of arch support, but I could add that with a suitable insert; and while they didn't look all that durable, they were cheap enough that I figured I could at least get my money's worth out of them. And they were actually kind of cool-looking—nice enough for both indoor and outdoor use and even reasonably appropriate for wearing with skirts. Of course, by the time they arrived, winter was nearly over, so they didn't get a lot of use before I put them away for spring. But it was nice to know that when colder weather came around again, I'd have suitable footwear ready to go and wouldn't have to subject myself to another frantic round of shoe shopping.

Fast forward to late October, when I decided it was cool enough outside to start wearing my new-ish boots again. All through the fall, I remained quite pleased with their looks and comfort...until the first wet day, when I discovered after about 20 minutes of walking in them that my right foot had become damp around the toes. I hadn't been stomping through puddles or anything, just walking outdoors in a light rain, and even that was enough to get my feet wet. In short, I now had not two but three pairs of leaky boots, including one that was practically brand new.

So here it is, the start of another winter, and I'm right back to where I was a year ago. Once again, I'm facing the same old dilemma: what's the most ecofrugal way to get through this winter with dry feet? Is there any reasonable hope of repairing these boots, even if I was unable to repair either of their predecessor pairs? And if that doesn't work, where, oh where, can I find a replacement pair that meets my criteria?

However, I do have a couple of advantages that I didn't have last year. First of all, I'm armed with the knowledge of what didn't work last time around. I know not to bother trying to fix these boots with Shoe Goo or hot glue, as neither will hold up. I also know where not to look for replacements, as I've already tried a bunch of different styles that weren't suitable. For instance, I'm not going to waste time or money on any more Sperry boots, given that the last pair I bought wore through at the heel and began taking on water within a matter of weeks. (If only I'd seen this YouTube video deconstructing the boots before I bought them, I could have saved myself the hassle.) Nor am I going to bother with specialty vegan retailers from overseas, like Will's Vegan store, since last time I hazarded $136 on a pair of their boots I ended up having to ship them all the way back to Britain.

Also, I've found some better sources of information this year about both boot repair and boot shopping. For starters, I found an article on how to fix boots that leak at the seams with a product called Aquaseal SR. A little research showed that this product has different ingredients from Shoe Goo, and it appears to do a better job with waterproofing, so there's hope that it may succeed where Shoe Goo failed. It's not available in any local stores, but I found a tube for $13 or so on eBay (shipping included). So I'll start by trying to repair my existing boots with that. If it works, I should be able to make it through the winter with them.

If that doesn't work, I also have more possible places to look for replacement boots than I had last year. Thanks to my uncle's Hanukkah gift, a full-access subscription to the New York Times that includes their product-review site, Wirecutter, I was able to consult this roundup of the best winter boots for recommendations. Most of their picks didn't fit my criteria in one way or another—either they contained leather or they were pull-on styles that would never fit onto my feet—but there was one "also consider" pair from Bogs that looked like it might do. (The pair they recommended is a pull-on boot, but there's a similar style available that laces up and is leather-free.) It's rather pricey (around $150), but it has solid reviews and a one-year warranty, so I know it will at least get me through one winter, which is more than I can say for the $100 Sperry boots. Wirecutter also recommended a Columbia boot that's no longer available, but there are a couple of similar styles priced at $100 to $120 that get good reviews for warmth and waterproofing.

The YouTube video I linked to above—part of a series in which a guy cuts up four pairs of duck boots to assess their construction—also yielded some useful information. The best performers of the lot were the pricey L.L. Bean boots, which don't meet my criteria because they have leather uppers. But the review also found that a truly crappy pair of $30 boots from Walmart performed almost as well as the the $100 Sperry boots. Both were terrible, but one was terrible for a much lower price. So if I just need a stopgap pair of boots to get me through the winter, a cheap pair from Walmart might not be such a terrible idea. Even if they fall apart after a few months like the Sperry boots, I won't have to feel as bad about it.

Are consumers really responsible for consumerism?

I recently read a hand-wringing story in The Guardian about the problems of consumer culture. It starts by describing a visit the author, Chip Colwell, made to a huge landfill in Denver and his horror at seeing the literal mountains of trash created by "mass consumption." Feeling the need to do something about the problem, Colwell sat down with his family and worked out a plan for a "slow-buy year." During that year, each of them would purchase no more than five items beyond basic necessities (food, medicine, school and work supplies, and any parts needed for car repairs). They'd be allowed to accept gifts of material objects, though they were supposed to "discourage" others from giving them, but any gifts they bought for others would count toward their five-item limit.

Now, I'm all for being mindful about consumption, but this struck me as unreasonably extreme. I've seen, and even taken, challenges along similar lines, but they were much more limited. For instance, the Dress Retro challenge I'm taking this year requires me to purchase no more than three new garments—but that's only for clothing, and it doesn't include shoes, socks, underwear, or anything purchased secondhand. Under the rules of the Colwell family challenge, none of those exemptions would apply. 

Moreover, it struck me as problematic that the Colwells were taking it on themselves to fix what is, fundamentally, a social problem. It's the same problem I had with the Take the Jump Challenge and its requirement to give up personal vehicles: American society is designed around car use, and giving up my own car won't solve that problem. All it will do is make my own life considerably more difficult. And it's the same problem I had with the Climate Coach's advice to switch to zero-waste personal care products: the amount it would cost me to replace my conditioner, dental floss, and toothpaste with zero-waste versions is simply not a reasonable price to pay for the tiny amount of waste it would eliminate. Car dependency and plastic waste don't exist because of individual consumers making irresponsible choices: they exist because, for all practical purposes, we don't have any better choices. It's big business and big government that have shaped our society to look the way it does, and they're the ones who have the power and the responsibility to fix it.

Eventually, Colwell comes to the same conclusion. Six months into his family's yearlong experiment, when the project has been all but derailed by real life—a hole in his only pair of running shoes, a pen going through the laundry with most of his clothing, a new home—he feels a need for "bigger answers" that "don’t reframe just individual consumption, but how our larger world of consumerism operates." He speaks with scientists who point to the sheer scope of the waste problem (one estimates that there are around 250,000 tons of plastic) and say that addressing it is going to require fundamental changes in business and public policy. Even if Colwell's family produced no plastic waste whatsoever for an entire year, that would be a tiny drop in a very, very large bucket.

This doesn't mean that it's pointless for us as individuals to be conscious about our consumption. Even if my personal choices don't have a huge impact, every little bit helps—and more to the point, it helps keep me sane. When I've been calling Congress month after month about climate legislation with no result, it's a nice change of pace to focus on the little things that are within my control, like buying stuff secondhand. But that doesn't mean that I should beat myself up every time I give in and buy something new from the store. My small decisions aren't going to save the planet, and they aren't going to destroy it either.

Recipe of the Month: Spicy Butternut Squash Ribbons

Back in July, I thought I might have hit on the ideal vegan coffee creamer: a blend of homemade oat milk and commercial soy milk from Lidl. But, sadly, after a few weeks of fiddling with the recipe, I couldn't come up with a version found as satisfying as the Silk Protein milk I'd been using. So, reluctantly, I went back to hitting the Stop & Shop every few weeks for a new container of Silk Protein. To get a little more value out of each trip, I'd also add a grab a copy of the store's free magazine, Savory, and flip through it looking for interesting recipes. But most of the time, I wouldn't find anything useful. 

However, the latest issue of Savory yielded one recipe that looked intriguing: Spicy Butternut Squash Ribbons with Chickpea Crumbs. Mind you, we didn't exactly need a new butternut squash recipe, since our harvest this year has been pretty small (just six Waltham squash and three tiny Honeynuts). That's barely enough to do justice to all our favorite go-to squash dishes—soufflé, pizza, lasagna, and the newly veganized version of butternut squash pasta with brown butter. But this one still looked worth trying because it was so different from those other recipes. It was a lighter, healthier dish containing almost nothing but veggies and fruit: ribbons of uncooked butternut squash topped with roasted chick peas and pomegranate seeds. We already had most of the ingredients on hand, and Brian was easily able to pick up the pomegranate and some cilantro at the Shop Rite on his bike.

The dish is pretty simple to put together. The most time-consuming part (and messy) part is extracting the seeds from the pomegranate. Slicing the butternut squash into long, thin strips also takes some time; it probably would have gone faster with our veggie spiralizer, but Brian decided to use a vegetable peeler since that's what the recipe called for. One of our smaller squash ended up yielding about enough ribbons for a half-batch of the dish. These got steeped for one hour in a marinade of olive oil, lime juice, garlic, chili pepper, and cilantro (which the recipe kept referring to as a "vinaigrette" even though it contained no actual vinegar). The one part of the recipe Brian didn't follow exactly was the instructions for the chick peas. It says to pulse them to "fine crumbs" in a food processor before roasting them, but he feared that would make too much of a mess, so he just mashed them up coarsely. They still got reasonably crisp with a 20-minute roasting, and he then sprinkled them on top of the squash ribbons along with the pomegranate seeds.

The finished dish was certainly very pretty to look at, with the bright red seeds and speckles of green cilantro against the golden ribbons of squash. Taste-wise, though, it was less impressive. Although the raw squash strips were as thin as Brian could make them with the vegetable peeler, they still came out crunchy and not very sweet, not at all like cooked squash. (If the dish had been described as a salad, maybe we wouldn't have minded the crunchy texture, but on the other hand, maybe we wouldn't have chosen to make it at all.) With the garlic, lime, cilantro, and pomegranate, the dish certainly wasn't lacking in flavor, but it didn't have the flavor we expect from butternut squash.

On the whole, this recipe was interesting as an experiment, but not really worth using up any more of our few precious butternut squash on.  The one part of the dish we might be interested in making again is the crispy chickpea crumbs, which have a nice texture and could be useful for adding a protein boost to salads or pasta dishes. But unless we get a real bumper crop of butternut squash in some future year, we'll probably stick to our tried-and-tested favorites.

What is Circular Monday?

Some time ago, I visited a site called Climate Hero to check my carbon footprint. (I like to check it on a variety of sites to see how they compare and get a wider range of suggestions for lowering it.) Ever since then, I've been getting occasional mailings from the site offering tips for cutting or offsetting my emissions. Most of these are stuff I already know, but this week I got an intriguing email telling me about something I'd never heard of before: Circular Monday.

Circular Monday, which is celebrated on the Monday before Thanksgiving, was conceived as an alternative to the consumer frenzy of Black Friday. Apparently, it was originally called White Monday, but the name got changed to something that better reflects its purpose, which is to promote the circular economy. A quick primer for those not familiar with this term: A circular economy is one in which all products can be broken down into their original components for reuse or recycling. This is in contrast to our current linear economy, in which most products are created from raw natural resources, used once, and then discarded in a landfill. (You can see a simple diagram of this model on the World Economic Forum website, or a much more complex one on the EPA site.) 

Now, this idea of a circular versus a linear economy isn't a simple matter of either-or. It's a question of degree. The more stuff gets reused, repaired, and recycled, the more circular the economy is; the more stuff gets extracted and discarded, the more linear it is. There's probably no such thing as a perfectly circular economy in which absolutely everything is reused; some things, like food or medicine, are always going to be used up. But the closer you can get to a true circle, the more you improve efficiency, reduce resource use, and limit pollution and waste. Examples of ways to make the economy more circular include:

• Making and buying products built to last, such as a pair of boots that can be resoled, and then keeping them in use longer
• A car-sharing or bike-sharing service that reduces the number of new cars or bikes being produced
• Refilling containers, such as milk bottles or printer ink cartridges, instead of tossing used ones and producing new ones 
• Shopping at thrift stores and yard sales
  
• Giving away unwanted but still usable items on Freecycle
• Upgrading your computer to keep it working longer so you don't need to buy a new one
• Turning old clothes that absolutely can't be worn any longer into rags or putting them in a textile recycling bin
  

Naturally, all this stuff is right up my ecofrugal alley, but I was a bit unclear on how I was supposed to set aside a particular day for it. It seems like you have to do these things whenever they happen to come up: refill your ink cartridges when they run dry, resole your shoes when the old soles wear out, donate your old clothes when you discover they no longer fit, turn socks into rags when the holes in them get too big to repair. The only thing you might be able to schedule on a particular day is a trip to the thrift shop, since you can always hunt for treasures even if there's nothing specific you need at the moment. But surely it would be easier to do that on a weekend than on the Monday of a busy holiday week.

I consulted the Circular Monday website and found that it's primarily a database of businesses that form part of the circular economy in one way or another. The list of U.S. businesses includes Back Market (a seller of refurbished electronics), eBay, Vinted (an online vintage clothing store), Turo (a car sharing marketplace), and Too Good to Go (a marketplace for businesses to dispose of surplus food). So it's really more Circular All Year Round than Circular Monday. However, on Circular Monday itself, most of these businesses have sales and promote them on social media with the #circularmonday hashtag. In this way, they call attention to the concept to help promote circular shopping all year round.

And this, apparently, is what Climate Hero was encouraging me to do next Monday: not necessarily to buy from these businesses right now, but to promote them by posting. "For instance," the email helpfully suggests, "you can inspire by sharing something you chose to buy circularly in the past year instead of new." Then add the appropriate tags for Climate Hero (@climatehero, #climatehero) and Circular Monday (@circularmonday, #circularmonday), and presto, you're part of the event.

Well, I've bought a lot of things secondhand in the past year, but I typically posted about them at the time. So rather than sharing new information, I'll just provide a quick recap of the posts I've done in the past year related to circular shopping:

• Ecofrugal gifting games (December 25)
• The Dress Retro challenge (April 4)
• Why I don't buy everything used (June 5)
• Good hunting at Goodwill (August 20)
• An ecofrugal fashion makeover (September 10)
• Why we're not a zero-waste household (October 8)
  
• Yard-sale haul 2023 (October 15)
• Ecofrugal episodes (November 12)

Here's hoping something on this list can provide a bit of ecofrugal inspiration for you.

Ecofrugal episodes

The ecofrugal life, as I've observed before, is a series of little ups and downs. This past week or so, we've had a series of small wins—including some that started out as losses—and one small win that turned into a loss, but can probably be reversed. Here's a play-by-play:

Ecofrugal Episode 1: The Stealth Vampire

Remember how we got a free home energy checkup back in August that included a bunch of free LED light bulbs? Well, this ended up having an odd secondary effect—one that we didn't notice until the nights started getting longer.

Early one morning, while it was still dark, Brian got up to use the bathroom. On his way back to bed, he passed the spare bedroom and noticed something odd: the lamp in there, which was turned off at the wall switch, was ever so faintly glowing in the darkened room. When he went up to it and turned off the lamp's switch, the light went out. But when he turned it back on, the hint of light came back. (I couldn't get a picture of this phenomenon because the light was so faint, but imagine it as a vague, dim aura, just barely bright enough for the eye to detect.)

We couldn't remember this lamp, or any other lamp ever plugged into that same outlet, ever doing this before. But up until recently, the light in that room has always been a fluorescent bulb, not an LED. So Brian's theory is that the wall switch is faulty, allowing just the faintest trickle of current through even when it's turned off—but in the past, that tiny bit of current wasn't enough to activate the bulb. Only now, with our new ultra-efficient LEDs, is it detectable. He tried plugging the lamp into our Kill-a-Watt meter to see how much current it was actually drawing, but once he did that, the faint light went out completely. Apparently that tiny bit of extra resistance was enough to block the current.

So, this ecofrugal win (free LEDs) turned out to be a bit of a loss (a stealthy energy vampire). But it's not much of a loss, since these LEDs use only a tiny bit of electricity even when fully powered, and presumably an even tinier bit when they're only barely lit. And it should be easy enough to eliminate completely by replacing the light switch, a fix that will only cost a few bucks.

Ecofrugal Episode 2: Vegan brown butter

Back in 2018, Brian and I discovered a really delicious recipe for pasta with butternut squash and brown butter. However, we have mostly gone off dairy at this point, and most plant butters (including our new homemade plant butter) don't brown. And it's the brown butter that really makes this dish special. Without it, it's just pasta with squash—reasonably tasty, but nothing to write home about.

But recently, I found a hack online for making vegan brown butter. The trick is to add a spoonful of nut butter, which provides the proteins and sugars needed for the browning reaction. It sounded worth a try, so we picked up a jar of almond butter at Costco, which we knew we could use up even if the recipe didn't work. 

Integrating this vegan brown butter into the pasta recipe was a little tricky. The protocol is designed to make the brown butter by itself, but the pasta recipe browns the butter in the pan with the squash. Brian compromised by making the brown butter first, then adding it to the pan with the squash as it cooked. And it worked! The vegan version of the recipe had the same rich, complex flavor as the original. Take that, dairy industry!

Ecofrugal Episode 3: Board-game bonanza

This ecofrugal win started out with a loss: Brian's year-old boots, which he was expecting to last him through several winters, have developed a leak that Shoe Goo has proved unable to repair. (The Wolverine name is no guarantee of quality, apparently.) Initially, we thought the ecofrugal solution to this problem would be to buy him a really good pair of boots with Goodyear welt construction, which would allow them to be resoled. I did a little bit of research on Reddit and learned that for this kind of boot, you should expect to pay a minimum of $250. (There's one well-reviewed brand, Thursday Boots, that starts at $200, but it's not available in stores; you can only order it online, which makes finding your perfect fit a real hassle.)

Now, for a pair of boots that will last ten years, this isn't such an unreasonable price. But after his experience with the Wolverines, Brian was feeling a bit distrustful of high-end brands. He thought that before shelling out for an expensive pair of new boots, we should at least make the rounds of local thrift stores and see what they had to offer.

What does this have to do with board games, you ask? Well, the first thrift store we visited was the one at our local Reformed Church, only a mile from our house. Their selection is quite small, but their prices are outstanding, so if we happened on a suitable pair here, we knew it would be a bargain. Unfortunately, we had no such luck; there were very few pairs of men's shoes on the rack, and none in Brian's size. But while we were there, we decided to check out the rack of board games in the back room, and there we hit the mother lode. 

Someone had obviously just cleaned out their board game collection and donated the lot to the thrift store, because in amongst the usual motley assortment of old Scrabble and Monopoly sets, we found several like-new games. Three of them, in fact, were still in their original shrink wrap; two others were open but obviously hadn't been played much. I don't want to disclose exactly what we got for fear of holiday spoilers, but we scored five new, interesting-looking games (two that we'd played before and three that were new to us), for only five bucks. So even though we didn't find what we were looking for, it was well worth the trip.

Ecofrugal Episode 4: Boots made for walking

Exciting as this thrift-store adventure was, it still left Brian without footwear. So, in the afternoon, we set out in the car to check out the Goodwill store in Bound Brook (the same one we visited for our anniversary). And there, Brian found not one but two pairs of boots that fit him reasonably well: a pair of Timberland hiking boots and a dressier leather pair originally from Banana Republic. Both were in excellent condition, and each was priced at a mere $20.

Each of these pairs had its own pros and cons. Brian slightly preferred the look of the Banana boots, but the way they were constructed made them a bit of a hassle to get on and off. The Timberlands were more convenient, but definitely casual in appareance, which meant he probably couldn't wear them for any kind of slightly formal occasion. When I asked him which pair felt more like the boots he'd want to reach for every day, he said the Timberlands were probably better, but he didn't seem happy about it. 

At that point, I proposed the solution he'd secretly been hoping for: just buy them both. That way, he could use the hiking boots as a casual, everyday shoe, and the Banana ones could be his dress boots. And at only $20 a pop, the two pairs together would cost less than half what he'd paid for his current pair of Wolverines that had let him down so dreadfully.

When we got these home, I did a little searching online to figure out just how good a deal we'd gotten. I found that a comparable pair of Timberlands would cost around $120 at full price, while similar boots from Banana Republic would run around $250. In short, we just acquired $370 worth of footwear for a mere $40—about 11% of retail.

Sadly, with my weird feet, I'd never be able to pull off this kind of ecofrugal shoe coup myself. But I can at least bask in the reflected glory of Brian's success. And if we end up having to blow a couple of hundred bucks on my next pair of winter boots, the $200 or so we didn't spend on boots for Brian will balance it out.

Ten climate tidbits for 2023

This weekend was the annual (virtual) fall conference for Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL), a climate group I've been involved with since 2020. Like last year's conference, this one didn't really give me any broad new insights about climate problems and solutions, but it supplied several interesting nuggets of information worth sharing. This year's ten tidbits are:

1. Language matters. The keynote speaker at Saturday's session was commentator and activist Van Jones. He's worked with people on both sides of the aisle and says that both groups often "get hung up on language." He gave the example of police reform: conservatives didn't want to listen to talk about "injustice" in the penal system, but were often open to the same policies when they were framed in terms of "liberty." He argued that similarly, they would be willing to move on climate policies if they were framed as being about "pollution" or "helping farmers" or "protecting God's creation" rather than "climate." He admitted that it's stupid for the word "climate" to be politically charged, but given that it is, it would be even stupider to insist on using it if it makes it harder to address the problem.

2. People do have their own facts. Senator Pat Moynihan famously said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." But at the time he said it, the media landscape was very different from today's. Everyone got their news from the same local papers and major TV networks. Nowadays, your social media feed and your Google search results will show you different facts depending on your political orientation. Type "gun" into Google and it will auto-fill "gun rights" if you're on the right and "gun control" if you're on the left. Consequently, each side is getting an incomplete picture of every issue and is often unaware that the other group's facts exist. So when you're talking politics with someone who seems blind to the facts, Jones says, you have to remember "They're not in the same movie as you." To communicate better with them, talk less and listen more to figure out what their starting point is.

3. Red states benefit most from IRA incentives. Last year's Inflation Reduction Act was short on sticks and heavy on carrots: subsidies to build and install clean energy infrastructure across the country. And the benefits are accruing overwhelmingly to red states. They have plenty of open land on which to place new solar and wind farms, and their lower taxes and wages make them attractive sites for new battery plants. Jones thinks this is good news, as voters will look more favorably on the clean energy transition if it puts money in their pockets.

4. Politicians respond to RAP. That's Jones's shorthand for "reward and punishment," which he says carry a lot more weight with legislators than logical argument. You're much less likely to convince them by talking about the perils of climate change or the benefits of clean energy than by showing them polling numbers on how popular climate policies are or how many voters are swayed by climate issues. Therefore, Jones suggests, if you have an extra hour to spend preparing for a lobby meeting, spend it learning more about the politics of an issue, rather than the policy. As he points out, "We already know the policy."

5. Van Jones reads graphic novels. As interesting as I found Jones's speech, at once point I found myself distracted by the background on his Zoom screen. I enlarged the picture to get a closer look at his bookshelf and, sure enough, there was a copy of Watchmen and several volumes of The Sandman that I recognized from their distinctive covers. He's not just a policy nerd; he's a nerd nerd!

6. Renewable energy is growing amazingly fast. Following the keynote address, there was a "good news" session with a CCL policy maven who had some mind-blowing stats to share on clean energy. Did you know that nearly half of all solar capacity ever installed in the U.S., since the dawn of time, was added in the last three years? Or that 75% of all electric vehicles ever sold in the country were sold in the past three years? In 2010, less than 1% of all new cars sold in the U.S. were electric; now it's 10%, and if we manage to get permitting reform passed to improve the electrical grid, by 2030 it could be anywhere from 40% to 60%. Likewise, with permitting reform, we could install twice as much new wind and solar capacity in the next three years as we did in the last three—quadrupling the amount we had three years ago.

8. Goofing around is good for your health. The next panel I attended was on "resilient climateering" (a portmanteau word the presenter made from "climate" and "Mouseketeers"). According to her, playfulness has a wide array of mental health benefits. She had sources (which I unfortunately didn't manage to get the links for) to show that it releases endorphins and endogenous (self-made) opioids, which I didn't even know were a thing; stimulates nerve growth in areas of emotion and decision making; and even reduces dementia. I don't know how much of that is true, but it certainly couldn't hoit!

9. Stress can shut you down. One source from the "climateering" presentation that I did find a copy of was this polyvagal chart showing how stress affects the body. Most of the time, when we talk about feeling stressed, we're talking about the effects in the yellow zone: increasing levels of anger and fear, increases in heart rate and blood pressure, dry mouth, heavy breathing. All these are signs of hyperarousal: the familiar fight-or-flight reaction. But when stress is intense or prolonged enough, it can cause just the opposite effect: hypoarousal. At this stage, we stop trying to fight or flee and just give up. This red zone is associated with feelings of despair, numbness, or shame; physically, most of the body's processes slow down as it pumps out extra endorphins to block out pain and, basically, prepare for the end. We all know about the negative effects of spending too much time in the yellow zone, but the red zone is really bad news. Probably best to keep an eye on those yellow signs and avoid getting to that point.

10. Climate deniers can change. Honestly, I didn't feel like I learned that much from the "CCL Group Leaders Tell All" session. It was basically just leaders of several different CCL chapters talking about how they got into the job and how they do it—info I don't expect to need, since I'm not interested in being one. But one of the group leaders had an origin story that interested me. His parents were—to an extent, still are—climate deniers, and he was brought up to think human-made climate change was a big lie. But his parents also taught him to stand up for what he believes in, and in high school he came to realize that he believed in the dangers of climate change. So he became involved with climate and, as a freshman at Michigan, joined the college's CCL chapter, of which he's not a co-leader. And his parents, remarkably, have not only been supportive; they've also been willing to talk with him about the issue. They may not be believers yet, but he thinks they're gradually changing their views, and they even support some of CCL's policies. And the reason for this, he thinks, was their personal connection to him. It's harder to dismiss "the other side" when it includes your kid—or your parent, your sibling, your spouse, or your good friend. When someone you care about is involved with an issue, you may disagree with their views, but you can't just reject them without consideration.

And maybe that's the most important lesson from this year's conference, one that all the speakers echoed in some way or another: build connections first. Build connections with legislators, connections with friends, connections with other climate activists, instead of just leaping into facts and arguments. Because it's much easier to tell your story in a way people will hear if you know who's listening.