My #ZeroWaste 2019 (so far)

I think I've more or less cracked this zero waste thing, you know.  I've had a few of false starts, and bright but fleeting bursts of enthusiasm but all in all, I believe I've settled in to ways of routine living that waste as little as possible.  Item: it's nearly one month into the year and so far, I haven't thrown a single thing away.  I even save litter I create while away from home.  Nothing goes in the bin.  That's the rule.

All plastic I've consumed, unwrapped or otherwise accumulated has been stuffed into ecobricks or put aside to be chopped up into ecobrick-able pieces once I've some more suitable tools (a really sharp and sturdy pair of heavy duty scissors ought to do it).  All food scraps go into the compost.  I've been very happy to see that the Co-op's compostable carrier bags are living up to their name and actually breaking down into something organic.

Yes, I just shared a picture of my kitchen compost bin.
Please insert coffee grounds.

I now have nearly seven ecobricks, although I've discovered they need to be much heavier than they currently are.  A 2 litre bottle should weigh at least 666 grams, or so I've been told.  My heaviest so far is only 401 grams, and I thought I'd already crammed as much as I could in there.  Not so.  With the end of a wooden spoon or a long stick, you've got to cram, cram, cram.  Cram until it's really worthy of being called a brick.

Occasionally I still cram suitably soft plastic into the sofa.  Glass beer bottles continue to contribute to my allotment's "bottle beds".

As for water, I either save it use for flushing the toilet, or for water plants.  That only really leaves tins.  My box of tins is nearly full.  I could put them in the "recycling" but who really knows whether they ever get recycled?  Perhaps I could make something out of them, I'm not really sure.  But I am sure they won't be wasted.

I recommend going zero waste as soon as possible.  No messing about.

Related posts

Ecobriking It
Ecobrick News
#Microgreens #Ecobricks and other little projects for 2019
Sitting on a Landfill (Waiting for the End to Come)
How to Own Only One Pair of Shoes (and Get Away With It)

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Two Hundred and Sixty Milligrams

I began a very cautious experiment this month.  Once a week, I will take 20mg of Fluoxetine (Prozac) instead of the prescribed 40mg.  Yesterday was the second week I did this.  I am observing carefully for the re-emergence of any obsessive symptoms.  If I notice any, the experiment ends.  If not, I may, with appropriate medical advice, continue.  So far, so good.

I tried about a year ago to jump down from 40mg daily to 20mg.  This didn't work.  Symptoms re-emerged.  My brain got up to its old tricks, and my anxiety increased.  So it was back up to 40mg again.

The thing is, if I go to my GP with this information, I'm almost certain what the advice will be.  Medications are usually prescribed in daily doses of fixed multiples - in the case of Fluoxetine, 20, 40, 60 and up to 80mg for severe depression (which I don't suffer from - I take the medication for OCD, for which it also happens to work).  The advice would be either, stick to the prescribed dose (40mg a day) or switch to 20mg a day for x-number of weeks and take it from there.  More "experimental" variations in dosages aren't recommended.

I don't know exactly why this is, and probably there are good medical reasons for doing so.  On the other hand, I wonder if it's simply that the bureaucracy of medical care isn't equipped for it.  The software doesn't allow for the printing of "variable" prescriptions.  Something like that.  So doctors don't recommend it, even though they could, and may even want to, because they can't.  They also can't prescribe, say, 35mg a day, or 27.639mg, because the drug isn't supplied in those quantities (liquid Prozac does exist, but is rarely prescribed).  Of course, this is just speculation.  But I've learned never to under-estimate the reach and power of inflexible bureaucracy.

Aside: I wonder in the future as medical care becomes more personalised, that such things might come to be.  Designer drugs, and all that.  3D-print your own medication, prescribed specifically for your precise physiological needs. 

So, to a very limited extent, I'm taking my mental health care into my own hands.  The key, as I said, is careful observation.  I'll continue to order my monthly prescriptions as prescribed, but every Monday, omit one of the two daily tablets.  This may turn out to have no effect at all (it's far too soon to tell, as Prozac stays in your system for months) in which case I may make further adjustments.  At the very least, I'll have accumulated an emergency "no deal Brexit" Prozac stockpile (whoopee).  Incidentally, if you happen to be stockpiling medication yourself, you probably don't need to bother - assuming the government's advice can be believed, and...well, um...

I'd like to think it's possible to find my absolute minimum dose.  I've experienced few side effects on Prozac that I'm really conscious of, and the relief it's given me has been quite literally life-saving, but I still wonder about what I may have lost from being on it for so long.  It would be nice to claim even a little of that back again.

Related posts

Twenty Milligrams
Brain


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Allotment Scraps

I've decided to keep a regular video diary this year of how things are going on my allotment, which you can follow at my YouTube channel - see the links at the bottom of this post (for my Twitter and Pinterest and Facebook page also).  I won't always post them directly here so you may want to choose your preferred way of subscribing below.  

Here is the first (from Thursday):

Here is the second (from today):

And here is a link to the playlist

I took quite a few clips over the course of last year, with the thought that I would eventually edit them into something more substantial, but this never transpired.  So instead I'll just be posting "Allotment Scraps" every now and again where I show you what's going on and ponder my progress, with only the very minimum of editing if I feel the need for it.  Comments, shares, likes and subscribes and all that sort of thing most welcome.  If you'd like to know anything in particular about my allotment, please ask.

Related posts

YouTubing It
The Mushroom Invasion
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#Microgreens #Ecobricks and other little projects for 2019

I didn't get many microgreens grown last year, for one reason or another.  I will correct that oversight this year.  My kitchen shelves are fast becoming a place where various little projects find their home.

Shelf life.

Up top there you can see two trays on which I sowed some dried peas right around new year.  It being the time of year it is, they're taking longer to germinate, but germinate they nevertheless have:

Peas are one the most commonly grown microgreens, but in my very limited experience haven't been the most productive.  The seeds are easy to acquire (I've always just used standard bags of dried peas from the supermarkets) and cheap, so that's probably why, but there's all kinds of others you can grow.  Something to explore more this year.

Meanwhile, you may also have spotted these:

I've got a steady supply of plastic bottles now, attained with the original intention of making ecobricks, another thing I will continue this year, but they're so abundantly available I thought I'd branch out (ha ha) into making some plant pots from them too.  Here's some bottles four four or five holes cut in each, stuffed with soil and compost, and holding some devil's ivy cuttings.  I look forward to seeing them develop into something even more beautiful.

Down on the allotment, I've taken some cuttings from the sage, thyme, rosemary and lavender to root and maybe pass on to friends and others, about which I am feeling double plus good:

Here's another little thing you can do around the house to make the world ever so slightly more planty and slightly less wasteful.  Whenever you're cooking vegetables, save the water and as it cools leave it near a plant that likes humidity.  Here is some just boiled potato water steaming away next to my cheese plant:

When the water is cool, assuming you didn't salt it, you can use this for watering plants around your home, or in the garden.  The nutrients will feed and nourish the soil, and anything growing therein.  If you just tip it down the sink, that won't happen.  So give that a go, too.  Make the mundane amazing.

Related posts

2018: Year of the Shed
My first week as a microgreen gardener
Garlic and Other Surprises
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Sausage Roll Politics

Passing through Manchester city centre yesterday, what seemed to be the tail end, but which turned out to be the heart, of a particularly embarrassing British parody of the "yellow vest" protests that have sprung up on the continent some like to pretend we're about to sever all ties with forever, made its way across Piccadilly Gardens, extolling the virtues of a "no deal Brexit" and expressing a totally incoherent demand to be given "our country" "back".  I grabbed a few seconds of footage as the tram took me away, thankfully, in the opposite direction.

Although things do seem to have kicked ever so slightly more off down in London, the whole affair was as pathetic as could be predicted.  Various attempts have been made to mobilise the anti-establishment sentiment of the giltes jaunes protestors since November by the usual motely bunch of hard Brexiters, hooligans, conspiracy fans and racists, and none of them have gained any real momentum.  This may have something to do with the fact that such people shares very little common ground politically with the altogether more impressive French "giltes jaunes" movement, whose demands align with a broadly leftist agenda - workers' rights, economic equality, social and environmental justice, and anti-fascism/capitalism and so on.  But try telling them that.

The wait is over… 3.1.19 #vegansausageroll 🌱😍 pic.twitter.com/UWcXFCtxdE

— Greggs (@GreggsOfficial) January 2, 2019

Anyway, around the same time, the rumour began to circulate that the mob had turned its anger onto the nation's favourite pasty provider, Greggs, who have enjoyed a week of mostly free, positive publicity since releasing a "sausage roll" suitable for those loony left soyboys like me who prefer not to eat food that was made only at the expense of the pointless suffering and murder of defenceless animals.

Anti-Vegan Sausage Roll Protest in Manchester pic.twitter.com/RTJsC4Sb47

— Paul Brierley (@therealbriman) January 5, 2019

Such is the nature of the reality we now find ourselves in, at no point was it ever possible to tell whether this was, as a matter of you know, traditional "fact", true.  Were the protesters actually targeting Greggs for making one more option available to its customers, or had they just stopped for a fag?  By tea time, the Manchester Evening News had it all worked out.  "The protest appeared to be organised by a YouTube account called Tommy Robinson news", they explained.  Imagine my shock.  And then, there's this:

This, it turned out, wasn't real either.  (Nothing is real anymore, is it?).  But it worked because it looked like could be real, and that's what really interests me: a world in which something so preposterous can seem so plausible.  That's the world we actually live in, my friends.  I think this is worth thinking about.

There's a connecting line you can draw between fascism, Brexit, gender politics, and food.  It goes something like this.  Brexit, while its origins are essentially centre-right, succeed by pandering, intentionally or not, to the far right.  Fears about immigration and multiculturalism and of a loss of national pride and identity can be gateways to full blown violent nationalism, as seen in the EDL and its various splinter groups, the rise and fall of UKIP, For Britain, and the like, and their intersection with some elements of more mainstream conservatism.  Fear is something that the reactionaries are particularly good at weaponising; and to that fear the somewhat nebulous, but certainly real "toxic male" is drawn like a magnet.  With this cartoonish picture of "manliness", all muscle and hair and sweat and...meat comes a fetishisation of the ideal man, sometimes personified in an actual political figure but sometimes not, existing more abstractly as "the alpha".  The alpha male is animal - the bear, the lion, the wolf - and these animals eat meat.  Big, bloody, red, meaty meat.  They conquer, they kill and they devour.  The slightest hint of "weakness" is preyed upon, and when it cannot be destroyed altogether (it never can) it is belittled and mocked as feminine, homosexual, "beta" and "cucked".

And so it came to pass was that regular contender for most unpleasant male human imaginable, one Piers Morgan, threw his hat into the ring of shit that was the week's social media media circus of reaction to Greggs' (apparently quite nice) vegan sausage roll.

Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns. https://t.co/QEiqG9qx2G

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) January 2, 2019

Although it quickly transpired that Mr Morgan and Greggs share the same PR firm (imagine my shock, a second time) which raised the question as to whether the whole insane affair might have been well-executed viral marketing campaign for a tasty new snack (the answer is yes) the cultural conditions under which such a bizarre state of affairs could have manifested itself are worth serious attention.  Can real men be vegans?  Why are fascists so insecure?  What if we run out of meat and potato pies in a no-deal Brexit?  How can we blame this all on cultural Marxists?  Should Jeremy Corbyn resign over this?  Welcome to 2019.

Related posts

Vegan Reading and Research
A Brief Rant on the Nature of Things
The Animal Abuse Industry is Shitting Its Pants


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