being not doing

On the Tuesday after Labor Day we drove up to Maine from Rhode Island. It was a beautiful day for a drive, and we weren’t expected at the house until the evening, so we stopped at several places along the way. At the Kittery Visitors’ Center, we picked up a number of leaflets [...]

One of the many ways in which last week did not go exactly as planned involved the robot giving up the ghost and refusing to drive forward when I set it up to clean the living room. The robot was a gift from my parents, on which we’ve become quite dependent over the past [...]

Dear Whole Foods,
You bust your unions. You stock Coca-Cola products. You refuse to submit your coffee suppliers for third-party fair-trade certification. Your CEO conceals his identity online in order to pimp his own stores.
Do not presume to tell me which ingredients are acceptable in my bath products.
Thank you,
Me

Today is international Buy Nothing Day. I encourage you to celebrate it this year in remembrance of Jimmy Damour, if for no other reason.
On a separate note, over the past few weeks I’ve fallen into a blogging black hole, for which I sincerely apologize to my loyal reader(s). No excuse, really, just a [...]

For the first time, this week, I made active changes in what I was buying at the store as a concession to inflation. I had been conserving and trimming luxuries for a while, but yesterday marked the first time I downgraded in the selections I was making. It’s not that we haven’t been [...]