October 24, 2007

Green Intentions

In my defense, let me say that I have good intentions about going green. Every morning I wake up intending to stop eating meat, wasting paper, and taking unnecessary car trips. Then I catch a whiff of barbeque in the air, forget to set the printer to duplex, and discover that I cannot possibly make dinner without a quick trip to Foodville for some fresh parsley.

Still, I try. Just this week, I called Keeper and asked him to pick up something on his way home instead of driving to the store myself. Big deal, you say. Hey, for a control freak like me who has trouble delegating anything at all, it was a stretch for me to send my better half, knowing that he would pick up the wrong brands and that I would have to praise him nonetheless for a job well done. By the way, I continue to be perplexed about why men deserve kudos for "helping" do everyday things like picking up the dog toys, putting in a load of laundry, or running the vacuum. I do these things constantly and no one even notices, let alone THANKS me for it.

As I was saying, I look for small ways to conserve resources, mostly because I'm not willing (yet) to give up my Subaru Forester for a hybrid. I follow Keeper around turning out lights, wear a wool hat around the house rather than turn on the heater, and never run the washer unless I have a full load.

Sometimes, though, I pull a doozy that undoes all the good things I do. Recently, I went online to spend my credit card bonus points before I cancelled the card. I browsed through the merchandise and found almost nothing that appealed to me. I didn't need an espresso machine, a jacket with a University of Pennsylvania logo on it, or a ballistic nylon carry-on bag. I did need a dog crate, so I ordered one, grateful to find something I could actually use among the catalog items.

Three weeks later, a notice arrived in my mailbox. The post office was holding a box for me because it was too large to deliver. Mystified, I drove to the post office. The guy at the desk told me to drive my car around back to the loading dock. He met me in the back, bringing out a box the size of a loveseat. I checked the label. It was the dog crate, but the box looked ridiculously large for a French Bulldog carrier. Maybe I had ordered the Great Dane size by mistake? I folded down the back seat, opened the hatch and stood back as three men lifted the box and shoved it into my car.

There was no way I could unload it myself, so I waited for Keeper to get home from work. We went outside with a box cutter and opened the end of the box. Out poured an ocean of packing material: bubble wrap, Styrofoam pellets, air-filled pillows, crushed newspaper, wadded up plastic bags, and chunks of solid plastic foam. It was a recycler's nightmare. It took us a good hour to unpack the box, sort the packing material into what could be recycled and what couldn't, and chase down the pellets that blew all over the neighborhood.

When the dog crate was finally revealed, it proved to be the extra large size instead of the medium I had ordered. There was no way to send it back, so I sold it through Craigslist and bought the right size at a local pet store.

Now I have another item on my good intentions list: shop locally.