Cool Product: Bamboo Clothespins

One thing my son inherited from me is a distaste for the feel of unfinished wood. I don't know how to explain it, other than that feeling unfinished wood gives me that fingernails-on-chalkboard feeling. I remember as a kid that one thing I hated about cooking was touching the wooden spoons or the cutting boards. Fortunately, they know make plastic stirring spoons and cutting boards. However, when it comes to clothespins, plastic is vastly inferior as we discovered.

I've been looking for a clothespin that isn't rough wood but the plastic ones just don't seem to grip well, plus after one season of being out in the sun they are cracking and falling apart. Bamboo clothespins to the rescue! Whitney Designs makes a nice bamboo clothespin that's exactly the same size and gripping strength as our regular wood clothespins. Better yet, they're environmentally friendly and smooth to the touch.

Words of Wisdom

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
- John W. Gardner

I thought of this quote as I biked to work last night. My bike count reached a new all-time high of 64. Basically, in any direction that I looked, I saw cyclists. Some of them parents toting kids on tag-a-longs or trailers, some of them workers returning home with messenger bags and ties, some college students, some kids on BMX bikes, but everywhere bicycles going this way and that.

To my left and right, new front and side-lawn gardens were popping up right and left. I'll try and add some photos soon of all the new creative food-growing landscaping I'm seeing. Clotheslines (or "solar clothes dryers" as right-to-dry activists are now creatively calling them) are flapping in the breeze, and neighbors sit on newly constructed front porches or stand by their garden fence talking. All of these people in ways small and large are taking the insoluble problems we now face and turning them into challenges to be met. Sure, it's a challenge to hang out your clothes when you could just throw them into the dryer in 1/8 of the time (though I would argue that the smell of line-dried laundry more than makes up for that one!) or to get out your helmet and rain jacket and bike off to work. The great thing is that almost everything that benefits the planet really benefits us even more. We get more exercise, more fresh air, we eat better, we know more of our neighbors when we engage in sustainable living. We're not saving the earth, we're saving ourselves.

Join the Laundry Revolution

Line-drying your laundry has hit the LA Times, with this article today about "right-to-dry activists and blogging eco-moms... forming an alliance" to make line-drying acceptable and legal everywhere. You can join the fray yourself at Laundrylist.org

I love that there is a catch-phrase for both "right-to-dry activists" and "eco-blogging moms". That means there's enough of us out there to generate some change in this world. And really change, at least in the realm of laundry, is fairly easy to come by. We could cut energy consumption in our country by 6% or more, simply with a string and a few wooden clothespins, or a drying rack or two. It's astonishing in its simplicity.

So go on, be subversive today: Hang your laundry!!!

The Out-Of-Time Laundry Approach

We're crazy-busy right now with our robotics team going to the State Championships this weekend in Hillsboro. I'm probably the crazy-busiest of all, given that I'm
A) The Mom
and
B) The Coach.

Poor Wayne just had hernia surgery, so he's not really able to be helpful in any meaningful sense, except for offering suggestions about things that I could be doing. And...um...that's not really helpful. So everything falls on me right now - dishes, food, sweeping, laundry, yadda yadda yadda. The nice thing about having kids this age is that they can pitch in a lot and really help out. There's nothing like being able to say "Could you please go clean the bathroom" and actually having it look clean afterwards (even the toilet!)

Laundry is perhaps the biggest time-killer, especially if you're trying to hang it all out to dry, especially in this damp and cold season when it can take a couple of days to do so. These are the times I'm especially tempted to just fall back on technology and fossil fuels and throw it all in the dryer for an hour or two of spinning heat. But I hit upon a solution that's a good compromise between this and laundry martyrdom. I run a load of laundry, then I take the heaviest slowest-to-dry items and put them in the dryer, but I don't run it yet. I get another load started in the washer and hang the quickest-to-dry items (like my polypro running gear) in the bathroom over the heater vent. The rest goes on the drying racks in the garage. I repeat this with load two and perhaps even a load three. By the time the last load is done, I have a full dryer and I run it with the heavy stuff. So I do use the dryer, but for one load out of three. My laundry work-time is cut at least by 30%, and that lands it in the "manageable" category. That's my out-of-time tip for the day.

Bringing Back the Aesthetic of the Useful

Ordinary Days: Clothesline

One of the most common objections I hear to implementing more energy-efficient solutions in our everyday lives is that people don't like the way they look. Standing at a solar panel display at a home and garden show, you could hear people talking with one another about how solar hot water would be nice, but who wants such an ugly thing on their roof? Neighborhoods in many parts of the USA have CC&Rs prohibiting hanging out one's laundry, and vegetable gardens in the front yard are equally forbidden. Right now, our country is caught in the last thralls of the Aesthetic of the Useless.

This aesthetic can be seen everywhere from the starving fashion models on the cover of magazines (in countries where food is scarce, thinness is hardly to be valued - only in a culture of plenty can we exalt in emaciation) to the sterility of the bark mulched and shrubbed subdivision landscapes, devoid of any biological diversity let alone food-growing potential. I think a sea change is blowing in, but people will hold tightly to their last public displays of uselessness.

Myself, I'm finding that the more I live around people who value utility, the more aesthetic I see in this kind of lifestyle. After all, how many fabulous photographs of clothes dryers do you see? Meanwhile, Flickr has entire groups dedicated to beautiful pictures of nothing more than drying laundry.

Benvinguts a Sant Andreu
Originally uploaded by TalkingTree

In the caption for this stunning image, the photographer tells us that "Nearly everyone in Barcelona, if not all of Spain, hangs their clothes to dry from balconies and roof tops."

Meanwhile, photographer g. s. george shows us an image of well-utilized urban space in Venice:

Clothesline City II
Originally uploaded by g. s. george

And homeowners Stan and Priti Cox in Salina, Kansas have transformed their suburban front lawn into an edible paradise, paving the way for other homeowners to embrace the aesthetic of the practical in this Edible Estates project. In returning to more sustainable lifestyles, we might shy away from making such bold moves, worrying about "what the neighbors will think". I've had people ask me whether my neighbors mind my chickens roaming the front yard, or my wintertime laundry solution of hanging clothes in the open doors of our south-facing garage. But often, it just takes a few "early adopters" to turn the tide in the other direction from where things are currently headed. So go ahead, hang that laundry, grow those tomatoes!

The Clutter of Doing the Right Thing

I went over to my friend's house the other day and her entire living room was filled with laundry, literally! They moved their laundry umbrella in from outside when it started raining, and the living room is the only place big enough to put it. She laughed and said "don't mind the laundry" while her teenage daughter looked for any mortifying underwear in evidence. And the thing is, I don't mind the laundry, I'm there to see my friend.

We're lucky enough to be in a friendship and circle of friends and community and even a town that supports sustainability, even if that means socks in your living room. I also have re-used glass jars and washed ziplock baggies drying on my kitchen counters, bowls of drying seeds and pods from the garden on top of the microwave, and the laundry rack in our bedroom. I know that in other cities or communities, other suburban cultures, this sort of general untidyness of life would be something to be avoided at all costs. I think of my friends from other times and places with their lovely parquet floors and matching throw pillows and exquisitely framed artwork and I do experience a twinge of something - envy maybe? - at the lovely magazine-cover neatness of it all. But also relief that my house can be more utilitarian than decorative (though it still cleans up real nice for a party, when the laundry is very much not in evidence!)

The bottom line is that when you have a three-tiered compost system on your counter (there's the vegetable scraps for the guinea pigs, other food scraps except citrus for the chickens, and the main compost bin for everything else), your kitchen probably won't win any Martha Stewart awards for decor. And when your dryer only gets turned on once a month, you end up with more than a few socks hanging around. But you also end up with10 kg less of Co2 into the atmosphere from the clothes dryer alone, and that can only be a good thing, even factoring in childhood trauma induced by someone seeing underwear in your living room.