Two “portraits” by Grace. Top is Chloe and bottom is Sydney (in her bikini!).

I have a couple of habits that I am realizing are terribly un-green. One is my amazon habit … a friend turned me on to Amazon Prime and now that shipping is always free I just click and order books as I read about them … I never think to bundle my purchases and regularly receive multiple boxes in a single day. Terrible! The other is my Starbucks habit … I just love that tall (venti) cup with its very own adult sippy cup lid.
I was at Starbucks today with Whit and was waiting forever, so I studied the menu (which I rarely do). I noticed in tiny print at the bottom of one of the panels a mention that if you bring your own cup you will receive 10 cents off the price of your drink. I started thinking about this. Clearly 10 cents is not incentive enough, nor are they advertising this program at all. If they raised the price of all drinks by 40 cents and then gave people 50 cents off for bringing their own cups … now we’re talking. I realize this would have big implications for the barista process (now look at that – a TOM-style observation, from HBS first year!) – how to keep track of whose cup is whose, how to price for the three sizes when cups vary in size, etc. Seems to me it would be worth making these adjustments to save all of those paper cups.
Just a thought.

I found this today in my internet perambulations, and it is so right on with how I feel I just wanted to share it:

“…just please, please, please leave gaps in your shiny optimised parenting to get wrong and messy.
Teaching kids how to surf on the crest of chaos and anarchy, is one of the most useful life skills we can impart. Though we need to be free (and admittedly organised) enough to play; we cannot let the processes rather than their personhood become the goal.”

Have just started listening to In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto in the car. Despite Pollan not reading his own book (it’s one of my fundamental tenets, I’m realizing, that an author should read their own audio book!) it’s very very interesting. And I confess that I found The Omnivore’s Dilemma a heavy slog (and didn’t finish it).

I am charmed by the basic assertion of the first part of the book. Pollan derides the practice of “nutritionism,” which is privileging the individual nutritional components of a food above the whole food. The science is compelling, yes, but even more than that I love this, another confirmation that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This is how I feel about so much in life; for example, people, who are so much more than their individual attributes and skills. There is so much more to a person – so much that is both strong and weak, ineffable and fleeting, that contributes to who we each are. That this is apparently true of food as well is not at all surprising, and makes me smile.

Random Monday morning musings.

This latest Clinstone behavior really pisses me off. As FSJ says, hoo boy. I did love Jon Stewart’s comment last night about how having a black or female president has historically meant (in the movies) that we’re in the future. We’re there now, and wow it’s amazing.

Diablo Cody DID win the Oscar for best original screenplay. I’m thrilled, there is poetic justice in the world, and I don’t think it will be long until we see HER story all over the place – Vanity Fair, People, and probably in its own screenplay before long.

Am drinking green tea instead of Diet Coke today. Thank you, Hadley, for finally pushing me over the edge. Pigs may be flying, people.