A Novice

For those of you in Los Angeles, don’t forget to recycle your Christmas trees this year.  Dial 3-1-1 to schedule a delivery!  I believe they turn your trees into mulch.

Another option for next year’s tree: if you have space to plant a tree outside, buy one with the roots tied into a ball and plant it after Christmas is over! Hopefully, Jonathan and I will be able to take advantage of this next year….

I found out recently that a co-worker of mine has a business called Smart Business Recycling (http://www.sbrecycling.com or http://www.smartbusinessrecycling.com).

If you’re a non-profit or a business in LA and have a hard time getting the city to collect your recyclables, Smart Business Recycling will come to your business for free and collect them for you!   Sounds like a good deal to me…  They even do a preliminary consultation to determine your exact needs.  Cool!

Okay.  So Jonathan and I are finally ready for a new car.  Our 11 year old Saab is dying.  I’m sure I’ll cry a few tears when it comes time to actually part with the green monster, but for now, I’m caught up in the hype and promises of new car smells.

After much online research, I’ve learned some very interesting things.  I was super set on getting a Prius, until I worked out the monthly payment calculations…wowza.  And then I found an interesting article on  Actual Costs at Edmunds.com.  Can’t find the direct link now…sorry!  Anyway, it used current gas prices and then gas prices at $5/gallon to calculate which cars are actually cheaper for the consumer.  Turns out the Prius is really low on the list, once you calculate actual price of car, maintenance, etc.  The Chevy Aveo is number 1, and the car that we’re considering - the Honda Fit is number 3.

Fuel efficiency is very, very important, and it seems that this car does the trick, at 35mpg highway.  And I hear that over 40 can be reached with hypermiling .  The price is about right too, at just under $18K for the top-o-the-line Sport trim.  Apparently, it’s a very popular car and sells quickly, so it may be a trick to get just the one we want…if indeed, it’s what we want after the test drive.

One thing that’s become so clear to me throughout the research process is that Americans are clamoring for more fuel efficiency, and the automakers can’t give it to us fast enough - nor at the efficiency rate that we’re wanting!  Laws put into place tie the hands of automakers to take off the lid of fuel efficiency and really have it go to work for us.  So, while 35mpg seems pretty cool (especially compared to what we’re getting now!), I yearn for a day when we’re no longer using gas at all to fuel our rides.  Hopefully, the demand of the public creates that day sooner rather than later.

A cool thing I recently learned…

You can compost in the green bins!  For those of us who live in Los Angeles on streets that have at least some houses (as opposed to streets where there are only mainly apartment buildings), we have those big green bins out front.  I know ours mostly gets used by the gardeners and their trimmings.

But I recently learned that one can throw their vegetable matter away in the green bins!  It makes sense, but I had never thought of it.

Now - to be clear - it’s not exactly like a traditional compost, in that you can’t throw egg shells into it.  But if it can be grown in a garden, then it can go in the green bin.

We’ve been taking our coffee grounds, carrot peelings, and cucumber ends and have been storing them in a large tupperware in the freezer (where it won’t smell!).  When the tupperware is full, we just take it down to the green bin and toss it.

It really saves on garbage space, and I love knowing that it’s going to rot much faster in the bin than it would in a plastic garbage bag.

Yay for the green bin!