Now that the holidays are over, here's a wrap-up of how we made our Christmas fun a bit more environmentally friendly.

For the second year in the row, we got a living tree as our Christmas tree. Last year, we got a more traditional fir, and planted it in a corner of the back yard in January. This year, we picked up a kumquat tree. It's really great-looking, covered in tiny orange fruit and will nicely replace the old kumquat tree that didn't make it in our back yard. (I think I've learned enough about taking care of trees in the last year to make sure this one survives.) Here is our kumquat decorated for Christmas in a sunny corner of living room.



For additional decoration, I took some fallen branches, spray painted them gold and strung them with some tiny lights I got at Ikea a few years ago.



That was about the extent of our decoration, except for a wreath on the front door, which I made last year out of spray-painted zip ties, and some colored LED lights on the front porch. We kept it simple, but our house still felt festive.

Gift-wise, Dakota and I received several excellent items that will make 2008 our greenest year yet. These included some gardening and green roofing books, a log with which we can grow our own shiitake mushrooms and, most exciting, a chicken coop! I should say, a custom-made chicken coop, hand-crafted by Dakota from left-over cedar pulled from his workshop. Check out its lovely design.



Before Christmas, we had been talking about getting chickens, but hadn't really officially decided whether to get them or not. So, the coop was a complete surprise. But, a great one.

You'll be hearing a lot more about backyard chicken prep on this blog in the coming months.

In terms of gifts for friends and family, I tried to make as many as possible. I went on a knitting frenzy--mostly hats--and sent those off to various cousins and friends in colder climates. I also got a wood-burning tool, which I used to decorate wood picture frames and a cutting board. Wood burning is hard, but some of them came out okay. And then we gave donations to relatives who have all the "stuff" they could ever want. Dakota gave my mom a gift certificate to the micro-lending site Kiva.org, which has been getting tons of press coverage lately. It was actually started by some guys I know from Stanford, and it's great that they're doing so well. (I think Kiva was even on Oprah!)

Christmas is getting really close now, so I thought I'd do some holiday-related posting. First up, office gift giving.

For my coworkers, I love to give donations and other do-gooder-style gifts. I find this is a good call because:
1) I don't know everyone I work with well enough to get them the perfect personalized gift. And I don't want them to be stuck with some piece of junk they don't want.
2) It allows my co-workers to gently mock me about my tree-hugging, do-gooding ways. Good times.
3) I always get a really positive response from these types of gifts.

In the past, I have given my coworkers "animals" from Heifer International. It's kind of fun because you can give everyone a different animal, and, you know, try to pick an animal to fit their personality.

This year, I did the following:

For the assistants in my department, I got SIGG bottles. These are snazzy metal-lined reuseable water bottles with cool design. I have one that I use every day at work. I highly recommend a SIGG bottle as a gift for an office mate or for a friend who does a lot of outdoor activity. It's are a nice accessory of sorts that also elimintes the need to use disposable plastic water bottles. And, as we all know, plastic bottles are evil!

For the other executives I work with, I gave a two-part gift. First, I made a donation in their names to America's Second Harvest. Then, I extended the grocery theme by taking some cotton shopping bags and personalizing them with paint and letter stamps. I think they came out pretty cool, and people seem to like them.

Both these gifts were simple and fairly inexpensive, and both will hopefully make a long-term impact by getting my coworkers to use fewer plastic bottles and fewer plastic shopping bags. At least, that's the hope.

A week after I made the hot pepper vinegar, I tried drying as a second way to preserve all the hot Red Thai Peppers from my garden. Basically, I cut off the stems, strung them together with a regular needle and thread and hung them up in the kitchen.



It was pretty easy, although I think I should have worn gloves. That pepper juice can burn! And it stays on your hands for a while even after you wash them.

The peppers have been drying for several weeks. They look good, still red, and aren't molding or anything. So, I think I have succeeded.

I am not sure if I'll eventually put them in a bag or jar and use them whole. The other option would be to grind them into a powder and use them as chili powder. That might be cool. We'll see. Maybe I can do both. There are still two plants outside that haven't ripened yet.

I love spicy food, but not really enough to eat all the peppers I've been growing as soon as they are ripe. So, I looked into ways to preserve my peppers and came up with a few good methods. The first one I tried was preserving them in vinegar. It was relatively easy.

First, I boiled some jars to sterilize them. (There are jars in there, I promise.)


Then, I put some nice, spicy peppers in each jar. (Those are Red Thai Peppers. Very hot!)


Next I warmed up some vinegar to just below boiling...


...poured the vinegar in the jars, capped them and that was it!


It really was very easy, although I would have liked to have some better jars. The ones I am currently using are mini Martinelli's apple juice jars. They are cute, but not good for sprinkling spicy vinegar. I will probably have to transfer to other containers before I use it.

I tasted some the other day and it was hot and sour, as intended. I think it could be very tasty on potatoes or other starchy foods. Maybe seafood, too. It's basically like home-made Tabasco sauce, or that's the intention.

Next up: drying peppers.

My peppers have all decided to ripen at once.

Right now, I'm picking Thai Peppers, Mini Red Bell Peppers, Santa Fe Grande Peppers and Aurora Peppers every day. I am trying to figure out ways to use all these pretty red peppers, and today I will try: stringing some to dry, adding some to vinegar and making salsa with others.

That should take care of much of my crop. And possibly make some nice gifts for the holidays.

For the last month or two, I've been harvesting tomatoes and peppers from my (late) summer garden. The best producers have turned out to be the Mini Red Bell Peppers and the Yellow Pear Tomatoes, although the Thai peppers and Tommy Toe Tomatoes are happy as well. I didn't get as many of the larger tomatoes as I would have liked, but there are still some out there on the vine, so maybe they're just running late.

Overall, reviews on taste have been positive. Family and friends have enjoyed popping the smaller tomatoes in their mouths, and we've added the peppers to quesadillas and vegetarian chili with good results.

I've also really enjoyed adding lemon basil to sandwiches, especially sardine sandwiches. And I even made a lemon basil aioli a few weeks ago which was delicious.

Here's a shot of some Tommy Toe Tomatoes still on the vine.



Here's a still-green Hungarian Heart Tomato.



An Aurora Pepper Plant with fruit in various stages. They start out deep purple, fade to yellow and then go from orange to red. Soooo pretty!



And here's a recent harvest of tomatoes and peppers.



Overall it's been a pretty successful summer of gardening. My only disappointments were that the okra did not grow at all, and that my garden plot was a dud in general--only producing a few tomatoes and some early Cyclon peppers. Before I put my Fall seedlings in the ground, I need to do a massive overhaul of the garden soil. It's time to get serious.

And speaking of Fall gardening, I already have some tiny eggplant seedlings coming up in small pots on the deck. This weekend I plan to plant some squash and hopefully next weekend I can get my root vegetables in the ground. I'm already late, I think.

Good news. The check from Los Angeles DWP arrived yesterday. We got a $200 rebate on our new washer/drier and a $50 rebate on the air conditioning unit. It really pays to be resource conscious, especially this year when it's barely rained a drop.

Hopefully, by the time we start home renovations, we can take advantage of other incentives to build sustainably, like solar energy grants and energy efficient mortgages.

I've been really into summer gardening this year, having decided to try out a few of the heirloom tomato varieties offered by the Seed Savers catalog. So far, things have been going pretty well.

In June, I planted a variety of tomato and pepper seeds in small pots and kept a close eye on them on the upper deck.


By July, they'd gotten big enough to transplant to large containers, and also into the garden plot.


Now that it's August, many of the plants have begun making small fruit, and I'm getting very excited to harvest it in the next few weeks.

Here's a still-green Mini Red Bell Pepper.


And here are some nice heirloom Tommy Toe Tomatoes.


The main enemies facing my tomato gardening efforts have been the evil, squishy green caterpillars known as tomato hornworms. They grow very large very quickly and gobble up tomato leaves like crazy. They also take bites out of the fruit I have been waiting for months to enjoy. I hate these caterpillars, and I plan to get rid of them all. Here's a particularly nasty one I pulled off a plant last night. This guy was about 3 inches long!


Tomato hornworms are really good at hiding, so it's pretty difficult to find them, even when you know they are there. And they are really gross to the touch. But, I have to find and pick them off in order to save my beloved tomatoes from destruction. Then, according to the experts, I must drown them in a bucket of soapy water! I kind of think they deserve it.

So, that's the current summer garden status. I hope to harvest some ripe fruit in the next couple of weeks.

Currently growing:

• Italian tomatoes
• Hungarian Heart tomatoes
• Tommy Toe tomatoes
• Yellow Pear tomatoes
• Red Thai Peppers
• Aurora Peppers
• Mini Red Bell Peppers
• Cyclon Peppers
• Santa Fe Grande Peppers

Plus, lemon basil and Thai basil.
All from seed from the Seed Savers catalog.

In June, we finally got a new washer/drier to replace our old, energy-inefficient one. We purchased a front-loading Whirlpool Duet Sport washer, which uses significantly less water and power. It's great.

It's Energy Star rated and uses 168 kWh/year, which is very much on the low side of the clothes washer range. It has a water-level sensor and uses less soap than a regular washer. It also spins our clothes quite dry, so the drier we got runs for WAY less time than our old drier did. I'd say it's about 30 mins compared to 60 mins. Of course, I still want to set up a clothesline in the back yard. That uses 0 energy, after all.

Plus, we applied for a rebate from the city of Los Angeles. Hopefully, any day now, we'll get a check from the Department of Water and Power for $250. LA has really great rebate programs, actually, although I guess I should wait to get my check before I say that. We should get a $50 rebate on the small window air conditioner we bought this summer as well. It has a pretty high EER (Energy Efficiency Rating) of 10.8. The most efficient window a/c until would have an EER of 12. Anything over 10 is considered good.

This new washer/drier purchase was phase 1 of the kitchen remodel, which we will hopefully begin in October. We've been sourcing materials and settling on the design, so we've done most of the prep work. Now we just have to find the money and the time. I'll be sure to take lots of pictures of the whole process, so look for posts on that this fall.

The first week of June is packed with opportunities for community service and activism. This Saturday, June 2, is LA Works Day here in Los Angeles. And Tuesday, June 5, is National Hunger Awareness Day.

To find local events marking Hunger Awareness Day in your area, go here. There's something called "Wine.Dine.Donate" happening in Los Angeles on June 7 (and in 4 other cities next week). It sounds pretty cool. For only $100/person you get to eat at Table 8, a very snazzy restaurant, and the donation goes to America's Second Harvest. The event is sponsored by Epicurious, one of my favorite places to find recipes. Or, for no money at all, you can help out at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank on June 2.

There are also individual ways to mark Hunger Awareness Day, laid out here. One way I might participate is to write letters to my senators and congresspeople about important hunger-fighting legislation. And, I suppose I am sort of "raising awareness" through this blog (for those two people who read it anyway). Many people also fast on Hunger Awareness Day, which is something I'm looking into. It might be a good way to raise my own awareness and also collect some donations. I'll think about that.

Here's part two of my post on little things we did to make our wedding a bit more environmentally friendly.

The drinks


I actually did a fair amount of research about what wine to serve at the reception. Dakota and I are not particularly wine-savvy, but I needed to choose something, so I decided to go with an organic wine from California (local and pesticide-free, was my hope). That actually ended up being a bit more difficult than I expected. What I learned is that there are actually different levels of organic-ness when it comes to wine. There's 100% organic wine (made entirely of organic ingredients), organic wine (must be made with 95% organic ingredients) and wine "made with organic grapes" (with 70% organic ingredients). The 100% organic and organic wines are also sulfate-free, while the "made with organic grapes" wine may contain sulfates. Oh, and then there's biodynamic wine, which is similar, but somehow different than 100% organic. Anyway, for a wine-novice, it was a bit overwhelming.

What I ended up doing is looking at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods for wines with organic on the labels, and then trying to taste as many as possible and find ones that people would probably like. We ended up going with Bonterra for the reception. Bonterra is the organic label of the Fetzer wine company. Their wines were fairly decent, easy to source (sold at both Trader Joe's and Ralph's in California) and inexpensive (around $10/bottle). So, that worked out pretty well. We also had a small wine reception the night before, where we served a variety of organic wines, including Green Bridge Syrah, which I'd recommend.

For the beer, we got two kegs from Craftsman Brewing Company in Pasadena. They're a very small microbrewery based in an industrial park fairly near our house, and they make delicious beer. They are also extremely nice and helpful. We had a keg of theirs at our inaugural patio party last Fall, and it was a huge hit. So, we definitely wanted to use their beer at the wedding. The Craftsman beer was a big success once again, and, after visiting their brewery, I felt happy to use such a great local business at our wedding.

Little stuff

• Our gift bags to those who helped at our wedding were actually re-useable recycled-cotton tote bags, great for bringing home groceries, from reusablebags.com


• Our invites were printed on Neenah Paper's Classic Crest FSC and PCF (chlorine-free) recycled paper


• I wore a cute, blue cocktail dress to get married, and I plan to wear it again at other nice events. Same goes for Dakota's suit, which he's already worn again


• We used our website to encourage our guests to rent hybrid cars from EV Rental and to carbon-offset their trip with Terra Pass


• We registered with Heath Ceramics, a California pottery studio, and VivaTerra, an "environmentally-friendly" online store. Of course, a real green choice would have been to not register at all

Yes, the most environmentally-friendly thing we could have done would have been to not have a wedding at all, or to have a really small one that required no one to travel on a plane, no one to buy us gifts and no fancy clothes or jewelry. But, I guess we weren't willing to go that far. We tried to keep the wedding down to just the things we really care about--seeing friends and family, good food and drink, and lots of dancing--and we did succeed in that. I feel like we avoided overspending and over-consuming on things that didn't make a big difference to us. But, we certainly could have had a smaller, simpler wedding.

I guess I'm always going to be a battle between my consumer impulses and aesthetic desires and my convictions to live moral, environmentally-friendly life. I'm still working on and thinking about that, and this year, as we start real work on the kitchen remodel, that conflict will come up again. I plan to be thoughtful about all my choices, though, and hopefully I'll make the "right" ones--whatever that ends up meaning.

Today Oprah had a whole episode on going green. I checked it out for a little bit at work, and it reminded me of this great thing I did a while back to get less junk mail.

You can actually put yourself of a "delete" list for junk mail senders through the Direct Marketing Association. It's worked pretty well for me since I signed up a couple of years ago. I don't get unsolicited credit card offers anymore, and, while I still get some random junk mail, I definitely don't get as much as I used to. Anyway, I'd recommend it.

You can go to the Mail Preference Service website and follow their directions to get yourself on the "delete" list.

For other junk mail that keeps on coming after your register with this service, you have to call the individual companies and ask them to remove you from their mailing list. You can also cut down on junk mail by carefully reading the privacy policies that various financial institutions send you. There are usually instructions in those policies on how to ask the company not to sell your name and address to other companies. It can be a bit of a pain in the butt, but so is getting junk mail.

I guess there's also a pay service, which Matt Damon was talking about on Oprah today, called Green Dimes. I'm not sure if they're better than just doing it yourself, but it's good that there are several options for stopping the flow of junk in your mailbox.

I wonder how much of an impact today's green Oprah will have on her viewers' daily lives. Of course, the main way to be truly green is to reduce how much you're consuming, and Oprah pretty much embodies the opposite of that. She appears to mean well, but she's the queen on conspicuous consumption. Overall, being green definitely appears to be going mainstream. I wonder if it's just a trend, or if people will really adopt their new green habits permanently.

I've been gone from blogging for a while, mainly because I was working on planning a wedding (mine). But now that's all over with and I want to do some posts on all kind of fun topics. I have updates from as far back as Christmas, in fact.

But first I'll give a little rundown on the "green" stuff we tried to incorporate in the wedding.

The rings

Dakota and I both got our rings from greenKarat. It's an Earth-friendly jewelry company that uses recycled materials and lab-created stones to mostly make wedding and engagement rings, although other jewelry is available. We actually had them make us custom rings, although they weren't very elaborate. Dakota has a flat, shiny band made of recycled platinum and I have a similar, thinner band also made of recycled platinum, except that mine has a tiny flush-set lab created diamond in it. It came out really pretty, I think. Overall, our experience with greenKarat was excellent, and I'd recommend them to anyone.

The decorations & favors

The place where we got married didn't really need much decoration because the landscaping was so pretty, but we did need something to put on the tables. What we decided on was minimal flowers and tiny potted succulents. It took us quite a while, but eventually we collected around 100 mismatched Japanese cups in various shapes and colors. We bought assorted tiny succulents from California Cactus Center, and then we planted the succulents (and a few cacti) in the cups. It took us about three hours one Saturday morning to do all the planting. Then, we encouraged our guests to take the plants home with them. Overall, I think the little potted succulents looked great, and I know lots of people took them home. We brought the leftovers home, and I have some plans to place them in various locations, inside and out.



The candles

While it ended up being a bit too windy for candles on the tables, we did order some. We decided to go with soy candles, because they're not made from petroleum products and they burn cleaner than regular candles. I found some really nice, unscented soy pillar candles from Way Out Wax. Since soy candles also burn longer than regular candles, I saved money by ordering 3" pillars. If we had lit them, they would have lasted all night. I also ordered some scented soy travel candles from Way Out Wax to include in the gift bags I gave to the people who helped with the wedding. I got various scents from the Vermont Naturals aromatherapy collection, which has a nice modern design and natural scents like rosemary and orange.

Okay, I'm going to wrap up the wedding post for now. I'll call this Part 1, and write the rest in a Part 2 post tomorrow perhaps.

Today is both the 34th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision and Blog for Choice day. So, here's my entry on this year's subject: Why I'm pro-choice.

I don't think there's actually one particular reason why I believe in a woman's right to choose, so I'll list all of them:

1) People should be allowed to control their own bodies, and their bodies should not be subject to the beliefs of whoever is in power at the moment.

2) I don't think teenagers should have kids unless they really want to. People are flawed. Not everyone is going to use birth control every time they have sex. And teenagers are particularly likely to make that mistake. One can argue that teenagers should be told not to sex in the first place, but clearly many of them are still going to. Just because a 15-year-old makes a bad decision--or accidentally uses a condom incorrectly--doesn't mean she should be forced to have a baby. I know that if I had gotten pregnant as a teenager, I would not have been able to handle a pregnancy or the responsibilities of motherhood. That's despite the fact that I had (and have) incredibly supportive parents with the ability to help me financially. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a pregnant teenage girl in an abusive or cash-strapped household.

3) Illegal abortions are dangerous and can be deadly. Even if abortion was illegal, women would still get them--especially desperate women who see no other option. And desperation equals vulnerability. By keeping abortion legal, we keep women who need abortions safe. They can have the procedure done by licensed doctors at regular medical facilities, and they can get any and all follow-up treatment they need.

4) No woman should have to carry a child she doesn't want, and no child should be unwanted at birth. I think "every child a wanted child" is an incredibly powerful slogan, and I fully endorse that idea.

Those are my reasons for being pro-choice. I've never had an abortion myself, but I know women who have, and, honestly, they all believe they made the right decision. I'm just happy that it was their decision to make.

Last Saturday, the Good Girls took a trip down to the EarthWorks Enterprises farm in the Whittier Narrows* for their Make a Difference Day. EarthWorks is an urban farm with a number of goals. Here's their mission statement from their website:

EarthWorks Enterprises is a nonprofit grassroots organization that strives to enhance the health and economic security of youth, low-income families and other residents of South El Monte and Whittier through organic sustainable agriculture.

We employ youth to help grow and sell organic produce to the community. In addition, youth develop communication, leadership and job skills, and learn about nutrition and the environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture. The community benefits from having a local source of affordable, nutritious organic produce.

The farm itself is large, especially for one worked by volunteers, and there were crops growing on about 3/4 of the land. Farmer Bob, who is the farm manager and a third-generation farmer, said he has big plans to improve the farm and grow more crops. He seemed to think the farm was unimpressive, but, having been to a number of nonprofit urban farms in the past, I thought this one looked pretty darn good.

Merete, Rachel and I were put to work transplanting leeks, kale, lettuce and onions into raised rows. It was fun and fairly simple, so we were able to chat while we worked. Of course, I was deeply jealous of all the happy, healthy plants growing all around me, considering my own pathetic home garden. But, Farmer Bob is a professional, after all. Perhaps someday I'll grow okra and eggplants as nice as the ones at EarthWorks.

When lunchtime arrived, a group of chefs provided all the volunteers with a cooking demonstration that was supposed to show us how easy it was to make a tasty, healthy meal using fresh veggies from the farm. Unfortunately, most of the people in the crowd of volunteers were not interested in the demo, and when lunch meat sandwiches and bags of chips appeared, they all flocked to eat those instead of the salad and stir-fry the chefs were cooking. It was a little depressing, and a good reminder that you can't change people's habits overnight. If these teenagers were unfamiliar with kale and okra and fresh ginger, they probably weren't going to try it without some persuading. It seemed like the kids who actually worked at the farm every week were more into the veggies, though, so EarthWorks does seem to be succeeding in helping those kids learn about healthy eating. Perhaps they'll persuade their friends.

On the bright side, EarthWorks also provides free boxes of produce to 30 local low-income families every week. So, the kids in those families will get used to eating fresh, healthy vegetables and hopefully develop a taste for them. And, the EarthWorks produce stand,open every Saturday from 10am-12pm, provides people in the area with inexpensive fresh produce that they probably can't find in stores. I bought some kale, okra and lettuce from the stand, and it was all very tasty.

To wrap up, the Good Girls had a good time helping out on the farm last weekend, and I think we'll go back. They welcome outside volunteers every Saturday morning, and there's no need to pre-register. So, if you live in LA and you're looking for a nice way to spend your morning helping a good cause, you should check it out.



* The farm is due South of Pasadena. It actually wasn't a very long drive from my house, especially on Saturday morning when the freeways were clear.

Election day is one week from today, so I thought I'd do a little post about California's Proposition 85, and why all two of the people from California who read this blog should vote "NO" on this particular prop.

Prop 85 is basically a resubmission, with minor changes, of the already rejected Prop 73 from the last California election. It would require women under 18 seeking an abortion to notify their parents of their intent and then wait 48 hours before they could receive the abortion. While most people wouldn't claim that it's a bad thing for parents to be involved in their teenagers' lives, I do believe that it's wrong for the government to mandate parental notification.

Some teenagers may not feel safe telling their parents about their choice to have an abortion, for fear that they would be kicked out of the house or ever physically harmed. This may cause a teenage girl to seek dangerous means to end her unwanted pregnancy, or she may delay necessary medical care to avoid her parents finding out that she's pregnant.

While the proposition does provide for a judicial waiver if a teenager doesn't want to inform her parents, it seems rather unlikely that a girl who is afraid to tell her parents about her choice will have the courage to go before a judge.

Weirdly, one of the arguments that proponents of Prop 85 put forth is that a parental notification law will scare teenage girls into not having sex. Apparently, they think that the idea that they'll have to tell their parents if they want an abortion will make girls stay abstinent. This "logic" seems absurd to me. First, this proposition is supposedly about opening the lines of communication between parent and child, but the prop's backers are saying that kids will not have sex in order to avoid talking to their parents about their sex lives. Huh? Also, I have a feeling that a teenager beset by hormones, emotions and peer pressure is not going to stop and think, "If I get pregnant from the sex I am about to have, I'll have to tell my parents in order to get an abortion. Best to stay abstinent." I don't think most people in their 20s or 30s think that far ahead, let alone teenagers.

If the people backing Prop 85 really cared about preventing unwanted teen pregnancies, they would write a law that mandated comprehensive sex education and encouraged teenagers to educate themselves about the consequences of unprotected sex. Perhaps there could even be a required unit in California's sex education class called "How to talk to your parents about sex." I'd vote for that proposition.

On close inspection, Prop 85 feels like a sneaky way to intimidate teenagers who want to have a safe and legal abortion. Hopefully, Californians will vote "NO" next Tuesday.

The website for the No on 85 campaign can be found here.

Here's an article from the Los Angeles Times laying out arguments from both sides: Abortion Initiative Puts Focus on Girls' Welfare

For a while now, Dakota and I have been working on converting the back yard into a more usable space. Our most recent and biggest project, was demolishing the old, rotting deck and installing a patio. It took several months, and we did it all ourselves. Dakota did the bulk of the work, since he's got the skills and the endurance for these things, but I certainly worked hard as well. We're pretty proud of the final product, completed the first week of October. Here's a short photo time line:

Here's what the old deck looked like on Day 1 of the patio project.

Here I am pulling rotting deck boards up with a crowbar. It's hard. I give Dakota credit for ripping the majority of the boards out on his own. But hey, I did my best.

This is the completely demolished deck/pile of rubble. Dakota cut down some of the bigger, unrotted boards that were supporting the deck for reuse.

After it was all ripped up, we hauled all the old wood that wasn't reusable up to the front of the house and loaded into a truck. Then, it was off to the landfill.

I actually had no idea there was a landfill so close to our house. This was my first landfill experience, and it wasn't nearly as smelly as I expected it to be. I definitely saw a lot of toxic-looking construction material and plastic being dumped all around us, but, overall, they seemed to be doing a decent job of replanting over the piles of trash with native plants and separating out yard waste materials and old appliances from other trash.

This nice pretty pile made up of the bricks that we found underneath the deck once we ripped everything out. Apparently, there was a patio in the backyard before. So, it's not so much that we were making a new patio as we were "restoring" the old one. Sort of. Dakota salvaged as many of the bricks as he could by carefully chipping away at the crumbling mortar between them. Then he took a sledgehammer to the cinder block and concrete blocks that were holding up the deck. I decided to let him handle that part on his own. I'm not much of a sledgehammer person.

Here are the molded cement planters Dakota made using the cement mixer he acquired off craigslist. These are for the special cactus section of the patio.

Unfortunately, we didn't end up having enough of the salvaged bricks to cover the entire patio surface area. We laid down all the old bricks we could (they're the gray ones towards the bottom of the photo) and then bought some inexpensive concrete brick from Home Depot to cover the rest of the patio. To fill the spaces between the bricks, we swept sand across the top of the patio and let it sink into the cracks. We'll probably have to add more sand after the first big rain, but, over time, it should get pretty tightly packed and stay put.

The new brown deck was made by Dakota from the boards he salvaged from the old deck. (I painted it.) The new deck is a long, low "bench" on the downhill edge of the patio and a wider section surrounding the planters.

Here are the completed planters and their cacti.

Believe it or not, I don't have one big, pretty beauty shot of the completed patio. We were racing to finish it before a party we had on October 7, and I guess I never managed to document the final product. I'll take one soon and post it.

So, that's the saga of the deck to patio transformation. It was a lot of hard work, but completely worth it. I'm happy we were able to use salvaged materials for the deck and half of the paving--especially since I felt pretty bad dumping all that old, crappy lumber in the landfill.

So, I finally watched Hotel Rwanda last night. It's one of those movies I've been wanting to see/dreading because I know how sad it is. And man, is it sad. Beyond the fact that it's about the brutal murder of a million innocent civilians, it's also about how people in the West--and around the world--turned a blind eye to the genocide in Rwanda, just as we did in Kosovo and just as we're doing now in Darfur. It's heartbreaking that people in Africa called out, begging the U.S. and other nations for help, and we did not help them. How could we have been so callous?

And, you probably all know, we're doing it again. The conflict in Darfur has been going on since 2003, and we still haven't sent a U.N. or U.S. force in to stop it.

Today, I made a small attempt to speak out by writing my U.S. senators, representative and the U.S. Secretary of State, asking them to turn their attention and resources towards stopping the killing in Darfur. I feel like it probably won't help, but, it's better than doing nothing.

There are more people I can contact (and you can too). Here's a list:

Secretary Rice
http://www.state.gov/

Head of African affairs at the State Department, Jendayi Frazer
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2004/06/24/”mailto:

U.N. Secretary General
inquiries@un.org

U.S. mission to the United Nations
usa@un.int

President Bush
president@whitehouse.gov

You can also write letters to the editor and/or simply contact your local paper and ask them to give the crisis in Darfur comprehensive and constant coverage.

Maybe this won't do anything, but I think it's better than ignoring the problem. For a while now, I have read articles about or thought about the crisis on Darfur, done a little Internet research and then kind of given up without doing much. Maybe it's silly that a movie has energized me to pay closer attention to what's happening in Darfur, but who cares. Silly or not, it's not a bad thing to start putting more effort into trying to end a genocide.

It's so easy to pretend that terrible things aren't happening all over the world--or get bogged down by how many terrible things are happening all over the world. But, I have come to the conclusion that I should always try to help rather than give up. I hope some of you agree.

I'll let you know if I find any other ways to speak up about Darfur.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting editorial about the conflict in Darfur from the LA Times. It's a bit old though, and their coverage since this piece has been fairly minimal. I think I'll send them an email.