Simone

Too busy to blog

Bunch of quick notes:

Outdoor birds indoors: I’m in favor. Sparrows in Costco, sparrows in National Airport. “Wild hawk in loading dock!” at my car dealership. More power to them.
Blue candy: Generally, I’m against. Blue m&ms, blue sour skittles, wrong wrong all wrong. Exception: Blue Cadbury’s mini eggs. Perfectly fine. Probably because they are a blue that occurs in nature, as opposed to “blue raspberry slush puppy” blue.
Pralines: I’m in favor. Especially when there’s a nice cup of cafe au lait to go with.
The Vieux Carre: In favor, except I think I’d like it best when there wasn’t much going on. I couldn’t live there, because I would hate the tourists.
Virtual water: um, neither pro nor con. It’s just another thing to figure into the eco-guilt equation.
Voice mail: You know how when you call your cellphone voicemail, there’s 15 seconds of “instructions” you don’t need? That costs us $100 million dollars a year. $100M we’re paying to the cellphone companies for “You have eight new messages. To listen to your messages, press one… to listen to new messages, press one…”
Cellphone 411: Never again. Send your questions as txt to 46645 .
50% of U.S. households don’t have high speed Internet. That. Sucks.

This bit of oddness came across my tribe’s listserv today: lab-grown meat.
I’m really not sure what to make of it.
Especially the bit about having to exercise the tissue to make it meaty.
It gives me an uncomfortableness.

Shame on you, USPS!

Posted by Johanna

As Simone mentioned, I recently ordered stamps through USPS’ Postal Store. Yes, I was lazy. I didn’t want to waste a whole lunch hour standing in line just to buy the stamps for my wedding invites that I have yet to send. And, since I do almost all of my other shopping online, I figured I should branch out and do my postage stamp shopping online, too.

Never again–or at least not until USPS changes their shameful, wasteful ways.

I purchased 21 booklets of stamps (14 booklets of 26¢ stamps and 7 booklets of 41¢ stamps) and each individual booklet came wrapped in cellophane with a cardboard insert three times the size of the stamp booklet. Note: on neither the cellophane nor the cardboard are there recycling instructions. Additionally, the excessive packaging–which I originally thought was for the benefit of stamp collectors–actually is printed with the notice, “PKG NOT SUITABLE FOR PHILATELIC ARCHIVING.” Seriously?!?

To further demonstrate the wastefulness, I actually used a kitchen food scale to measure the weight of the actual products (the stamps) versus the weight of the waste (cellophane and cardboard). The 21 booklets of stamps weighed 1.5 ounces while the waste weighted 12 ounces! The waste weighed EIGHT times as much as the product! And, as you can see, the volume of the waste was also many times more than the volume of the product.

Boo, USPS. Boooooooo.

USPS packaging shocker!

Johanna ordered some stamps online, because she didn’t feel like waiting at the post office. Good so far. When her dozen-or-so panes of stamps arrived, each pane was backed with a piece of cardboard about 6 times bigger than the pane, and then individually wrapped in plastic. We can see how this would be good practice when mailing stamps to collectors, but we feel it is outrageously wasteful otherwise. There should be a “minimal packaging” box we can check. This knowledge makes me very unlikely to ever order stamps online.

(I’ve invited Johanna and Shital to blog here too, what with Ehren scoring an “opportunity for improvement” on his blogging since May.)

More with the breathtaking.

Another bit for the “More things in heaven and earth” file: lenticular clouds.
Jawdropping.

Ooh, and here’s a cute animation explaining how lenticular clouds happen.
(Which leads to the question “South Georgia Island?”, but that’s for another inclement lunch hour.)

Breathtaking

You know that whole “fly to Europe and take a break in Iceland” concept I’m so fond of?
Here’s a good incentive.

Things to Do

Do too.

(In response to Ehren’s comment just now that “we don’t have a science museum in DC.”) This sure sounds like a science museum to me.

Sweet (like a wren, not like “Dude, Sweet!”)

I was poking around on Panoramio in my very limited lunchtime today.

Making my way up the Welsh coast. Disappointed to find no pictures of Llangrannog, where Michelle and I recovered from our character-building Pembrokeshire Coast Path adventure.

So I went looking, and found the very sweet Llangrannog website. Don’t you just want to pinch its cheek? I do.

That’s a little more than I wanted.

So, you know how the packaging on the (admittedly very delicious) Saphara Tea makes me crazy with the wastefulness? I was just going to give them a piece of my mind when I discovered this:

They have music for each kind of tea.
Music.
Downloadable music.
From the “Saphara World Music Player.”
In case you need a more multi-media tea experience.

It’s gone too far.

Oh, and apparently “Saphara offers an exclusive combination of premium teas and social responsibility. The packaging is composed of 100 percent recycled paperboard, which includes 35 percent post-consumer material. All printing is done with 100 percent vegetable-based inks for full biodegradability, and the pyramid bags, strings, tags, overwrap and carton are all made from biodegradable materials to minimize impact on the environment.”

The fact that “some trash” has higher environmental impact than “no trash” does not seem to have sunk in. I’m going to do that piece-of-mind thing now.

A retraction, and a recommendation.

Retraction: I’d like to take back the mean thing I said about tilapia the other day. Not the “bamboo of fish” part; the “I’d rather eat tofu” part. On Monday I made a dredge out of ground flax seeds and coriander (seed) and orange peel, and dipped the fish in egg white and then in the dredge, and baked it, and put it in the fridge. Yesterday I heated/crisped it up in a frying pan and ate it over a spinach and grapefruit salad, and it was very very delicious. Also, a tilapia filet is a very nice convenient 4-oz portion.

Recommendation: Need any really cool animals made out of junk?

Author: Simone