Green Day

Yummy rooms from the latest dwr catalog

There's nothing like 10 days away from home to make you realize how much junk mail you actually get... after digging through the sacks of stuff our friends kindly retrieved from our mailbox each day while we were lazily basking in the sun, I ended up with a tiny stack of relevant bills, magazines and decent catalogs and a mountain of needless crap that I swiftly schlepped (in three trips) to the recycle bin. It was insane.

The "keepers" pile included the latest Design Within Reach catalog (which normally would have ended up in the recycle bin with all the rest of the unwanteds, as while I love their stuff and would happily populate my home with egg chairs and nelson lamps all the live long day, I find every single catalog exactly the same and their styling pretty darn dull...) But I was intrigued by their "green" catalog (I'm not totally sick of "green" as a marketing ploy yet) so I gave it gander and loved this line from the intro:

"Whether we're speaking to a chair or a serving utensil, an object that lasts won't have to be replaced, and that, in my opinion, is the best definition of green."

I'm pretty smitten with the idea of buying things you love and keeping them for a looong time as the ultimate green move, and this time I loved the styling and the real rooms and the clutter and the mix of groovy, "have-forever" stuff with newish egg chairs and nelson lamps and whatnot. Pretty...

But despite my DWR bliss, I was still in a tizzy over the whole junk mail avalanche. And today being Earth Day and all, I decided to finally do something about it. I took about 30 minutes while plowing through my third cup of coffee and visited all the opt-out sites to get my name off almost every mailing list out there...there's a good round up of these sites on Ideal Bite.

I was on a roll, caught up in Earth Day fever, so when I was done with my opt-out fest, I decided to finally address that resolution that's been languishing on my list since January and bought four of those Baggu reusable shopping bags in a nice chic (gender neutral) navy blue (I wanted the fuchsia, but was thinking of hubby...he's pretty progressive, but I thought it just cruel to force him to take a slew of hot pink reusable shopping bags to a Texas grocery store.) I'm figuring between those beauties and a couple of canvas numbers I have at home, I'll be able to do a weekly shop and maybe go completely bag free. That's the goal at least...

I'm feeling awfully darn virtuous today.