Emissions Offsetting and Moratorium on Lamination

Here is a good thing: Offsetting one’s personal emissions of carbon dioxide at the TerraPass website. Based on my monthly PG&E bill for gas and electricity of $13 or less, and my one annual flight from San Francisco to Detroit and back, it looks like I could emit with a cleaner conscience for a mere $40 a year. I am going to do this, plus add it to my annual task list.

My non-flight transportation-related emissions should be pretty low, but home-related emissions are unavoidable, and of course air travel emits.

Besides TerraPass, there is GoCarbonZero, where the estimate is that I could offset my emissions for $58.20 a year, also quite reasonable.

Next, on to greener cleaning products. I already use only Ecover and Seventh Generation products, plus Bon Ami for the tub and bathroom sink, which is a fine start, but according to Eartheasy, every single preparation I use (for the tub and sink, for the toilet, for the mirror) could be replaced by something simpler and no doubt cheaper, that I can probably obtain in bulk at Rainbow (think baking soda, white vinegar and borax). For ten percent off! (With Bike Coalition discount, assuming I remember to bring my Bike Coalition membership card and picture ID. That will be the hard part.)

The McRoskey mattress is still on the floor and I still think it’s too soft. Oddly, since I started sleeping on it, I am having one very vivid dream after the other, including a dream about a man riddled with tumors, including two or three bulging whitely on his chin, plus he had only one eye, large and in the middle of his forehead. I blame this on being in the middle of Kenzaburo Oë’s novel A Personal Matter, which my mother recommended.

Maybe all this dreaming indicates that I’m getting more deep sleep than I think, but the half-hour of stretching I have to do in the morning before I can leave the house is a contraindication.

The advice (of McRoskey) is to sleep on your new bed for two weeks before deciding to make a change, but since I sometimes have the mattress on the floor and sometimes on the box spring, I haven’t slept for two weeks straight on any one configuration.

I do have a nice new pen pal: a woman who has put a down payment on a McRoskey mattress but is not sure about having them deliver it after reading my posting on Craigslist seeking feedback from McRoskey owners. I haven’t gotten any, positive or negative, but did hear from three people who want to know what I think before they buy McRoskeys themselves.

When I most recently omitted the box spring, I stood it up against the wall and put the big chair against it to keep it from falling down. I covered it with a thickish blanket, but saw that evening that Hammett had clawed the blanket, the first time he’s substantially clawed anything other than his scratching post—something I very much wish to discourage—and had managed to make a mark or two on the box spring itself, though you’d hardly notice it if you didn’t know where to look.

While I was watching, he leapt on top of the box spring and reached up to seize the picture molding. Gosh, he’s a long cat. He decided not to hang from the picture molding, but looked speculatively at the metal fixture that once concealed the top of a set of drapes. He was clearly thinking about leaping on top of it.

I pictured him falling onto the lamp that lacks the lampshade and ending up in a pool of blood, and then I called Tom and asked if he’d help me stuff the box spring into the walk-in closet. With the little screw-on legs removed, it actually fit in there, but entering/exiting the closet is now kind of a production and I can forget about accessing my Alfred Hitchcock-edited collections of horror stories, or anything else on the west side of the closet, including the lamination materials.

About a month ago, someone destroyed the lock on the front door of our apartment building, but left without stealing anything, exiting through a different door. The other day, someone else came in and stole a bike that was, I believe, fastened to a railing in the third-floor hallway.

(Not to blame the victim, but I do kind of think people’s personal property doesn’t belong in shared space such as hallways. If your stuff doesn’t fit in your apartment, you might have too much stuff. This is the third time, at least, that the building has been broken into in about a year. The first time, the person was obviously after a bike visible in the lobby, and probably ditto a month ago, so such objects also serve as bait.)

There was no property damage this time. Ironically, the new extra-security plate on the front door prevents it from closing securely on its own every time, so the person probably just pushed the door open and walked in.