Thursday, May 10, 2007

Moving

I've mentioned this before--I hate to do dishes. I know, who doesn't? This seriously gets in the way of cooking as often as I would like, though. I either need to clean before I can cook, and lack the energy, or I just don't want to go to all the trouble of getting a lot of dishes dirty that will just need to be washed later.

That is all going to change, though--I am moving to an apartment with a dishwasher! WOOHOO! My new apartment will also have an extra bedroom so that the girl and the boy don't have to share anymore (and so that all their stuff will fit in their rooms rather than my living room!), and TWO more closets. Wow. All this for only $100 more than I am paying now. And the best part? It's in my building, so I don't need to rent a truck. Of course, I will still need to carry stuff downstairs from my 3rd floor apartment and then upstairs to my new 3rd floor apartment since the only floor with a hallway that goes all the way through is the basement, but hey, no big truck. And, I don't have to move the stuff out of my storage unit.

If I don't make it here very often, imagine me packing and going up and down a lot of stairs. Maybe it will even help with some weight loss! I'm taking some stuff to Good Will, too. That will be a few trips just down to the car, which will be nice. Wish me luck!

Monday, May 07, 2007

Ah, Air-Conditioning

Ever since I started this almost vegan project, I have been thinking a lot about my impact on the environment. As I talked about just after Earth Day, I hate the idea that you would only do one thing for the good of the environment that we live in, and I have been trying to think of other ways I can live green. One of the things I have been looking at is my use of electricity. So, as the weather has started to get hotter, I have been trying to resist the siren call of air conditioning. I have ceiling fans, and I have been changing into shorts and tank tops when I get home from work. It’s been getting cool at night, so it hasn’t been too bad.

The big problem is, I live on the third floor. These methods weren’t going to work for very long. Finally, tonight, I realized that I could be fairly comfortable only if I sat perfectly still under the fans. My kitchen needed cleaning, but trying to stand at the kitchen sink doing dishes resulted in a steady drip of sweat off my nose, into the soapy water. That didn’t seem very sanitary to me, so I gave up on my battle to keep the a/c off. I really wanted to turn it on last week, so I guess I did hold out for a while, but I just couldn’t take it anymore! Oh well, I’ll keep looking for other green methods that fit into my life better.

For dinner tonight, we had pizza with For Your Heart Vegan Mozzarella. The girl shredded the cheese, and she put a LOT of cheese on the pizza. We had used this cheese before and liked it, but this time we used a lot more, and it tasted a lot more like cow milk cheese, for some reason. It tasted really good when I was eating it, but when I was done with a slice, I felt a little queasy. I know that it doesn’t have any dairy, but when it tastes so much like it does, it’s hard to convince my taste buds that everything will be all right. What a criticism, huh? Your fake cheese is too much like real cheese!