Ecofrugal exercise

It will probably come as a shock to absolutely no one that I have never had a gym membership. This is partly because I'm cheap and partly because, frankly, I'm not that into exercise. I wouldn't call myself sedentary, but I like to keep my physical activity low-key. I have my dance practice once a week, and I go for long walks—around an hour a day, weather permitting, which I combine with running any errands I need to take care of in town. And until a few years ago, that was it.

As fitness routines go, this was okay for cardio, but pretty short on strength and flexibility. And the older I got, the more I started hearing about how important it is to include some strength training in your routine so your muscles don't shrivel up and die. (The word the articles typically use is "atrophy," but that basically means "shrivel up and die.") And when COVID hit in 2020 and I found myself stuck at home with plenty of extra time on my hands, I decided to start doing the 7-Minute Workout. 

In case you've never heard of this routine, it's just a sequence of a dozen exercises that you can do at home with no equipment except a sturdy chair, such as push-ups, jumping jacks, and squats. You do each exercise for just 30 seconds before moving on to the next one, working out each part of your body in turn. Serious fitness buffs say that to get a real workout, you should go through the whole rotation multiple times, but I made up my mind at the outset that I wasn't going to listen to them. I knew I could convince myself to spend 7 minutes a day sweating and panting, but if I tried to force myself to stick with it for 14 or 21 minutes, I'd start skipping it because I was too busy, too tired, too depressed, et cetera. The way I figured it, a 7-minute workout I'd actually do was better than a 14- or 21-minute workout I'd keep meaning to do.

I must know myself pretty well, because I have indeed stuck with this routine for the past five years, only only occasionally skipping a day due to illness, injury, or lack of time. Over the years, I have made a few minor modifications to the routine. I do the exercises in a different order, building up from the ones I find a bit easier to the harder ones. I've also switched out the crunches and the forward plank, which seemed to aggravate my notalgia paresthetica, for reverse planks, which are supposed to help with it. After reading an article that lauded the one-leg rise as one of the most beneficial exercises for older adults, I subbed it in for the wall sit, which I'd always found somewhere between painful and boring. And I've tacked on a series of stretches to the end of the routine—some for my legs, some for my back. So it's now more like 15 minutes in total, but only 7 minutes of the real high-intensity stuff.

Another advantage of this workout is that I can do it at any time of the year, rain or shine. The same doesn't hold true for walking, which is still my main form of exercise. I manage to fit in a walk most days, but sometimes it's just too cold, too hot, too wet, or too windy. I didn't realize just how often I was skipping or curtailing my daily walk until I signed up last fall for CashWalk, a little app that rewards you for your daily steps with points that you can cash in for gift cards. (In order to claim your points, you also have to view ads, because that's how the app gets the money to pay you with, but you don't have to pay attention to them.) There were a surprising number of days I didn't even hit the 6,000-step mark—and while that's partly because the app only counts steps I take while carrying my phone, and partly because the phone is cranky and sometimes fails to record steps properly, I knew I couldn't blame it entirely on that.

So this year, as one of my New Year's resolutions, I vowed that I would get at least a modest 49,000 steps per week, regardless of the weather. The first day it was too cold to walk outside, I tried walking indoors instead, doing laps around our big downstairs room while carrying my phone. This got boring pretty fast, so I started amusing myself by watching YouTube videos on the phone while walking. That made it more fun, but unfortunately, holding the phone steady so I could see the videos interfered with its pedometer function. I'd watch a 5-minute video, all the while walking at a pace of at least 100 steps per minute, and then pull up the app to find that it had recorded less than 100 steps total.

Eventually, it occurred to me that I should just watch the videos on my office computer instead while walking in place in front of it. When I do it this way, either holding the phone in my hand or sticking it in my pocket, I get a pretty accurate count of my steps. I can trot in place at a rate of around 180 steps per minute, so it only takes me about 40 minutes—two longish videos or five to six short ones—to get in my daily steps. 

This "walk and watch" routine is at least as good a workout as walking on a treadmill at a gym, and a lot less hassle. I don't have to go anywhere, I don't have to wait my turn for a machine, and I get to watch whatever I want while I do it. (My favorites include SciShow, Good Mythical Morning, The Icing Artist, various scam-baiters, and clips from Taskmaster.) And best of all, I'm actually earning a few bucks a month for my efforts with my handy app instead of shelling out $10 to $100 per month to a gym. After all, if I'm the one putting in the work, why should I have to pay someone else for it?

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: First Sowing

Most years, all we do in the garden to mark the spring equinox is put our snap peas into the ground. And we did do that yesterday, but only after putting in a bit of work in an area that we don't usually mess with this early in the spring: the asparagus bed.

Over the past several years, our asparagus crop has dropped off to almost nothing. We never got more than a few pounds a year, but for the past few years we've been lucky to manage half a pound. Last year we picked up a few extra asparagus crowns as an impulse buy at Lidl and tucked them into some bare spots in the bed, but as we'd tried that before without much success, I wasn't optimistic. I was convinced that our fifteen-year-old plants had simply come to the end of their productive life, and we'd have to start fresh this year by digging up the whole bed and planting new ones. To that end, we invested $8 in a set of ten "Jersey Knight" asparagus crowns on our last trip to the Co-Op.

But by the time the weather was warm enough to put them in, it had already become apparent that our existing plants were not quite kaput after all. In a handful of spots around the bed, little purple shoots were already poking their heads up—and shoots of reasonable thickness, too, not like the skinny little spears we've been seeing for most of the past few years. Brian wasn't willing to dig up these obviously healthy plants, but he also didn't want to rely on them as our sole source of asparagus.

 

So he came up with a new plan. We dug out a U-shaped trench along the edges of the bed, leaving the healthy plants in the middle. We transferred the topsoil, including the layer of leaf compost we'd added, to a plastic trash barrel, and when we dug deep enough to hit clay, we put that into a separate bucket. He spread out the new asparagus crowns in this trench, covered them up with a layer of the saved topsoil, and watered them thoroughly. We covered the barrel of soil and left it out in the yard so that we can easily get more to cover up the new asparagus shoots as they start to emerge. We'll keep the new plants well watered over the next couple of years and see how many of them survive.

Once that was done, we were able to move into the garden proper to put down the peas. Brian reminded me that in recent years, the majority of the peas we've planted haven't come up, so he suggested planting two seeds for every plant we hoped to get. I agreed to this on the condition that he'd agree to thin the plants if the seeds did all come up, rather than trying to spare them all and ending up with too many vines to fit on the trellis. However, when I tried to space the holes I was poking in the soil closer together, I couldn't manage it; I would have had to collapse the existing holes before I'd gotten any seeds into them. So instead, I kept the holes two inches apart and dropped two peas in each one.

I then covered them up and watered them all well with a can of water I drew off from our freshly uncovered rain barrel. After that, I covered the entire row with the modified Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluder in hopes of protecting the peas from squirrels and birds long enough to give them a chance to sprout.

Meanwhile, Brian was busying himself planting another crop that doesn't usually go in this early: the parsley. For the past couple of years, we've been seeding this directly in the garden in early April, as recommended on the packet. But Brian thought it was taking too long to grow productive plants that way, so this year he went back to starting it indoors. And as it turns out, this variety of parsley (Flat Leaf) grows really fast in our seed-starting setup. The seedlings, which weren't due to go out in the garden for another few weeks, were already so big that Brian thought he'd better get them into the ground before they outgrew their tubes. So in they all went—enough to fill four square feet and, with luck, provide heaps of parsley for making falafel this summer.

This spring planting binge yielded one unexpected bonus. Although March is too early to harvest any of our actual garden crops, some of the wild plants in the yard are already coming up, including the big tufts of wild garlic. I pulled up one particularly large clump that was intruding on the slope where our honeyberries are and discovered that, instead of the tiny little bulbils it usually has on its roots, it had actually produced a few decent-sized cloves. So we may get to enjoy a meal with at least a little bit of produce from our yard even earlier in the year than usual.

The things I can change

I've always hated the Serenity Prayer. You know, the one that's printed all over on greeting cards, on T-shirts, in people's email signatures: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." It always seemed like such a ridiculous thing to say when we live in a world full of so many horrible things that I clearly can't change and that, just as clearly, are not acceptable. Just because I can't stop war, tyranny, wildfires, tuberculosis, or pointless acts of cruelty, I'm supposed to accept them all as facts of life, the same way Energy Secretary Chris Wright has apparently accepted climate change as just “a side effect of building the modern world"? I'm supposed to feel serene about them? 

But lately, I've begun to think about the lines in a different way—particularly with regard to climate change. In less than eight weeks, the Trump administration has already:

• pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords;
• ordered all references to climate change wiped from government websites;
• canceled billions of dollars' worth of climate and energy grants, even withholding funding from projects that were already under way;
• blocked approval for any new offshore wind projects and revoked authorization for some that had already been approved;
• frozen funding for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program;
• signed executive orders to increase oil and gas drilling and logging in national forests;
• cut thousands of workers from the EPA, NOAA, and the Departments of Energy and the Interior;
• and, most recently, announced plans to repeal the rule that recognizes greenhouse gases are pollutants at all.

Some of these moves are already being challenged in the courts, and many of them will probably be struck down eventually. But I personally can't change them, and sitting around wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth over them won't do any good. I'm not accepting them, not in the sense of seeing them as in any way okay; I'm merely putting them in the category of things that I, right now, cannot do anything about, and setting them aside so I can focus on the things I actually can do.

So, here are three things I'm doing:

1. Pushing for stricter regulation of methane leaks from natural gas pipelines. 

When it comes to methane, there's good news, bad news, and good news. The good news is, we can significantly slow global warming by ending methane leaks from natural gas pipelines. According to one estimate, quickly curbing methane emissions could slow the rate of near-term global warming by 30% and prevent 0.25°C of warming. This can buy us more time to get off fossil fuels and zero out the rest of our carbon emissions. The bad news is, the federal government is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Congress just repealed the Biden-era methane fee that was meant to provide an incentive for gas suppliers to plug leaks, before it even had a chance to go into effect.

But that fee was only ever going to address the biggest leaks, anyway. There are loads of smaller ones that, collectively, have a huge impact. And that's where the other good news comes in: Those small leaks can be tackled at the state level by Public Utilities Commissions (PUCs), which do not answer to the Trump administration. So Climate Changemakers is leading a big push to get people all over the U.S. to email and call their PUCs and ask for stricter regulation on gas leaks. Its website has a series of "playbooks" that can walk you step by step through the process of finding and contacting your PUC, state legislators, and other policy makers. Each playbook only takes around 20 minutes. And because utilities commissioners don't get nearly as much mail as legislators do, they're a lot more likely to pay attention when they suddenly start getting a lot of messages on the same subject. So this is one of those rare actions that's pretty easy and yet has a chance to make a real difference.

2. Donating to effective climate causes.

Some people like to do all their charitable giving once a year, often around the holidays. Others prefer to break it up into a steady stream of regular monthly donations. I like to take a middle ground: I make just one donation a year to every organization on my list, but I spread those donations out over the year so that I only have to make a few each month. And one of the scheduled recipients for March happens to be the Giving Green Fund, which researches and funds climate nonprofits whose strategies are "particularly promising, overlooked and/or underfunded." This allows me to support the most useful and cost-effective climate organizations without having to research them all myself. Also, as Vox notes, funds like Giving Green can time their donations "right when extra funding is most needed"—for instance, when a group is critically short on funds or needs them for a time-sensitive project.

3. Playing board games.

Tomorrow, Brian and I are hosting a board game party for my chapter of Citizens' Climate Lobby. His gift to me last Christmas was a copy of the board game Daybreak, in which each player takes on the role of a major world power and they all work together to find ways to bring down their carbon emissions before the planet tips over the edge into climate disaster. So when Nadine, the head of my chapter, mentioned that she was looking for ideas for the group to have more social get-togethers this year, I suggested a party to play this game together. She has a copy of the game as well, and if we have more people than those two games can handle, we'll open it up to include other cooperative games as well.

Granted, playing games together, even climate-themed games, doesn't directly tackle the problem of climate change. But it will give us a chance to learn more about all the different climate solutions out there, as well as brush up on our teamwork, communication, and problem-solving skills. All of which will help prepare us for the work we're still continuing, even in the face of an administration that openly denies climate change is a problem at all and a Congress that seems, at the moment, ready to cede its own power utterly to that administration. Because even if we know we can't make any major progress for at least two years—even if we know we're going to be losing ground in a lot of ways during that time—what exactly is the alternative?

We don't, in fact, have the wisdom to know whether our efforts will really change anything. But we know they won't if we don't try.

Tending to organic matters

Last spring, while planting seeds in the garden, I discovered that the soil in our raised beds had become quite hard and compacted. This was very frustrating and confusing, because the beds hadn't been walked on for 15 years and had received regular infusions of compost every spring. But after doing a bit of research, I found that the amount we'd been adding—maybe one bucketful per bed—was far less than the one to two inches gardening experts recommend. Since our little home compost bin couldn't produce nearly that amount, and since bagged compost is costly and requires testing to make sure it isn't tainted with herbicides, we decided our best bet was to pick up half a yard of leaf compost every year from the Belle Mead Co-Op. This stuff isn't as rich in nutrients as homemade compost or manure, but it's still useful for improving the soil texture.

Unfortunately, we never got a good opportunity to do this last fall. As this year's spring planting drew nearer, we kept a nervous eye on the calendar, looking for a weekend that was both free and tolerably warm for outdoor work. Yesterday, we finally got our opportunity. I had to make a trip out to Somerville that afternoon for my Citizens' Climate Lobby meeting, so we combined that trip with a jaunt to Hillsborough—not directly on the way, but not that far out of it—to visit the Co-Op. We brought along a carload of trash barrels and empty birdseed bags and loaded them all up as far as we could while still being able to lift them. (In some cases, in fact, we couldn't lift them and ended up having to remove some. We forgot that that leaf compost was much finer than the bulk mulch we usually buy at the Co-Op, and consequently the volumes we're used to weighed a good deal more.) While there, we also dropped $8 on a new set of asparagus crowns, as the plants we have are now over 15 years old and their productivity has dwindled to almost nothing.

After my meeting and a little hanging out in Somerville, we decided it was too late to bother unloading all the compost from the car. We waited until this morning to suit up in our grubby gardening clothes and start hauling those extremely heavy bags and barrels out to the back 40 (square yards). First, though, we had to go through all the beds and remove the detritus from last year's garden—another chore we hadn't gotten around to tackling in the fall. Brian used both tools and bare hands to dig out the roots of last year's bean and basil plants, while I went along the trellises breaking up and extricating the tangled remains of the squash and tomato vines.

Then Brian, who could manhandle the loaded barrels a lot more easily than I could, began dumping heaps of compost out into the beds. I raked each pile out into an even layer covering the whole bed, and we added extra scoops to fill in any thin areas. By the time we were done, we'd used up the contents of both large barrels and two full bags, and all the beds were filled with dark organic matter to the very brim. 

Since we still had lots of compost left, we used up another bag supplementing the soil in our new outdoor planters. These aren't looking too good after this bitterly cold winter; of all the starter plants we put into them at the end of the summer, the only ones that look like they might still be alive are the heucheras (coral bells) and English ivy, and I wouldn't give heavy odds on either of them. But those plants were more or less just place holders anyway, the odds and ends that we were able to pick up at the Co-Op's end-of-season plant sale. Soon enough, we'll have our pick of a fresh, new batch of nursery plants to choose from, and we should be able to find some that have a better chance of lasting out the year. And when we do, they'll have a nice, new layer of fluffy leaf compost to dig into.

By this time, we were pretty tired, but we found the strength to haul one more bag down into the side yard and spread it on the asparagus bed, preparing it to receive its new batch of crowns next weekend. We stowed about half the remaining bags in the shed and shoved the rest under the planters, where they'll be ready to hand for use on any plants in the front yard that need a little topping up. (In theory, there's nothing to stop an enterprising thief from grabbing one and walking away with it, but we think their sheer weight will be enough of a deterrent.) Then we put away our tools and dragged ourselves inside for a couple of well-deserved showers.

After putting in all this work, I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high about the results. I realize that just one load of organic matter probably won't be enough to make a noticeable difference in the quality of our garden soil, and it will take another few years at least before we see real results. But having the compost layer on top of the beds should make at least part of this year's planting earlier. We'll still have to dig down into the hard-packed soil for transplanting, but most seeds should be able to go directly into the soft, fluffy compost. It won't provide much nutrition for them, but their roots won't have to probe too far to get to the richer, denser soil below.

Recipe of the Month: Vegan Pasta Alla Norma

Several years back, I mentioned in a post that Brian and I had become fans of the Netflix series "Queer Eye," in which five queer powerhouses (four gay men and one "nonbinary fairy," as they call themselves) team up to help others spruce themselves up both inside and out. Along with being energetic, funny, and heartwarming to watch, this show has proved to be a good way to discover new dishes. One of the earliest episodes introduced us to mujadara with fried eggplant, which has since become one of our staple recipes. And in a more recent one, we watched chef Antoni teach a deli owner how to prepare his girlfriend's favorite dish, pasta alla Norma: pasta in a light sauce made from tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, and fresh herbs, topped with crumbled ricotta salata cheese. It looked so tasty that right after watching the episode, I went to my computer and hunted for a recipe.

The one I found at Serious Eats looked pretty simple, but it had one problem: the cheese. According to the description, this particular cheese is a pretty major component of the dish's flavor; the notes on the recipe describe it as "funky as all get out with a punchy barnyard flavor, an intense saltiness, and a savory aroma somewhere in between a good aged pecorino and a feta." So simply swapping it out for some of our vegan mozzarella wouldn't work. 

My first idea for a substitute was to crumble up some firm tofu and spike it with nutritional yeast, lemon juice, and salt, as suggested at Voyo Eats. But when it occurred to me to just look up a vegan pasta alla Norma recipe and see what it used, I found that most of them didn't bother with any of that. The one at Holy Cow Vegan, simply left out the cheese altogether, and at Lazy Cat Kitchen replaced it with two tablespoons of toasted pine nuts. These nuts taste nothing like Kenji Lopez-Alt's description of ricotta salata, but they do have a pleasant taste of their own and would add a nice bit of crunch to the texture. 

So Brian made this simple substitution in the Serious Eats recipe, along with a couple of other minor changes. Kenji Lopez-Alt said to use whole peeled tomatoes and crush them by hand into 1/2-inch chunks; however, since the Lazy Cat Kitchen recipe called for four fresh tomatoes, peeled and diced, Brian figured he could get away with subbing in a can of diced tomatoes instead. He increased the amount of eggplant from 3/4 pound to a full pound and reduced the amount of pasta from a whole pound to half a pound, thereby boosting the veggie-to-pasta ratio. He replaced the fresh basil in the recipe, which we didn't have on hand in early March, with a roughly equivalent volume of our frozen basil. And he dialed back the quarter-teaspoon of red pepper flakes in the recipe to half that amount to accommodate my low heat tolerance.

I don't know if these modifications made a big difference in the flavor, but I found the result something short of extraordinary. There was certainly nothing wrong with it—with a sauce that was essentially just eggplant, tomato, garlic, basil, and oregano, it's hard to see how there could have been—but there was nothing all that exciting about it either. It certainly wasn't the best dish we've made with eggplant; it wasn't even the best pasta dish. I prefer the similar one we call pasta melanzane, which includes fresh mozzarella (regular or vegan) in the mix. 

Thus, this new vegan pasta is unlikely to make the cut to be included in our regular rotation. We'll save our eggplants for dishes we truly love, like our favorite eggplant and pepper sandwiches.

Two clothing repair challenges

It turns out my clever plan to reinforce the thighs of my corduroy pants with a honeycomb stitch really wasn't all that clever. It took me at least two hours to stitch both sides of the pants, and within three months, they were falling apart again. Not only had the threadbare area expanded well beyond the borders of the original darn, but the threads in the darned area itself had worn through and broken off in several places. This left nothing to protect the fabric underneath, which had started to develop actual holes. They were still small, but clearly re-darning the area wasn't going to do much to keep them from growing. If I wanted to save the pants, I was going to need a new fix.

Since darning hadn't worked, I decided to move on to an entirely different technique: patching. I didn't have any fabric remotely similar to the original grey corduroy, so I decided to go for a complete contrast instead. Down in my scrap bin, I had a fairly good-sized bolt of colorful striped fabric in good condition that we'd picked up at a yard sale or somewhere. I cut two pieces of this large enough to cover the threadbare areas on both thighs, right over top of the honeycomb stitching. That saved me the bother of picking it all out (and possibly weakening the fabric in the process). 

I left a little extra space around the edges of each patch so that I could hem them. I folded over the raw edge and sewed it down using a back stitch. They came out a little bit lumpy, but more structurally sound than just a chopped-off piece of fabric. 

Then, using my usual whip-stitch technique, I sewed the two patches in place. My first attempt was a little messy, as I didn't pin the fabric down first; I just followed the line of the seam in the pants. That worked fine along that one edge, but it didn't secure the entire patch well enough to keep it smooth and flat, so the fabric underneath ended up a little puckered. I couldn't bring myself to pick out the seams and do it over, but I did make a point of carefully pinning the second patch before stitching it so that it would come out neater.

All told, this repair took me a couple of hours, about the same as the first one. But I'm hoping it will hold up longer and maybe justify the amount of effort I put into it.

Sadly, I don't think there's any equally simple fix for the wardrobe item that most recently fell apart on me: my two-year-old black ankle boots. They already had cracks in the sole that Shoe Goo had proved unable to fix, making them too leaky to wear in the rain. But when I wore them out on a walk today, one corner of the heel simply disintegrated, leading me to suspect that I won't be able to wear them even in dry weather for much longer. 

You can't replace the heels on a cheap pair of boots like this, and at this point, there's so little left of the sole that there wouldn't really be anything to attach it to anyhow. The only question is whether I can come up with some sort of hack that will allow me to get another couple of months of use out of the boots—long enough to get me through the multiple rounds of trial and error it will no doubt take me to find a replacement.

Recipe of the Month: Kung Pao Tofu (with bonus dessert)

I've had other things to post about the past couple of weeks, so this is my first opportunity to tell you about our new Recipe of the Month: Kung Pao Tofu with Roasted Cauliflower. Brian found this recipe on a site called Eating Bird Food while hunting for new ways to use a cheap cauliflower we'd scored toward the end of January. As usual, he made a few small changes to the recipe:

• Scaling it down from four servings to three
• Substituting canola oil for avocado oil
• Leaving out the fresh cilantro, which we didn't have (and I don't care for anyway)
• Replacing the hot chili sauce, which we also didn't have, by adding a dried hot chili to the marinade instead—and then, for fear that change would make it too fiery, dialing back the crushed red pepper to just a pinch for the two-thirds recipe

As it turned out, he needn't have worried about the heat level; the dish was mild enough that even my delicate taste buds could easily have handled more. In fact, I'd say it was bordering on bland, despite the ample amounts of onion, garlic, and ginger in it. It just seemed like it could have used a little bit more of pretty much everything. Texture-wise, the cauliflower worked better than the tofu, which seemed a little too soft and squishy for the dish. It might have worked better with some Soy Curls, which have a firmer texture closer to chicken. But given how unmemorable we both found it, it's probably not worth making a second attempt.

But that wasn't the only new vegan recipe we tried this month. Last night, as a special Valentine's Day treat, he prepared the Salted Dark Chocolate Tart from Gimme Some Oven. This rich little dessert has a gluten-free chocolate-almond meal crust filled with a dairy-free chocolate ganache made with coconut milk. It's supposed to be served with flaked sea salt on top, but Brian decided to make that part optional. Since the recipe says it makes 8 to 12 servings, Brian cut it down to one-quarter of its size for the two of us.

This dish was much more successful than the tofu. The crust was a bit crumbly and didn't come out of the pan neatly, but the ganache was creamy and delicious. Brian had his with a sprinkling of salt and found that enhanced it still more, but I chose to top mine with a generous portion of coconut whipped cream instead. This actually made it a bit less decadent, tempering the richness of the filling by stretching it out over a larger volume. We ate about half of it up while watching the last bits of Campaign Three of Critical Role, leaving us with two more small portions to enjoy tonight.

So, unlike the kung pao tofu, this dessert looks like a keeper. We might fiddle with the recipe a bit to see if we can keep the crust from sticking, but we can be sure the results will be good enough to justify the effort.