I’m putting together a list of charities I like so I can narrow down the ones I’d donate to for the end of the year and/or my birthday.

And I’ve noticed that I don’t have any environmental organizations.

These days, most of the work I’ve been supporting that worries about sustainability and the environment is food-oriented.

So who is helping the trees?

I’m not looking for the Sierra Club. I’m looking for organizations that are smaller and more agile, where more than 50% of their income goes toward the work they are doing, rather than organizational expenses. I want a watchdog for industry. Someone working locally. Doing something specific that makes a difference.

Oh! Just typing this up has reminded me of one! Philadelphia’a Pedal Co-op. I should totally support them.

Any other suggestions?

ETA:

ational but good -

Environmental Working Group - lobbyists and nonprofit activists working to change policy - ewg.org

Trust for Public Land - lobbying and holders of large and small scale sizes of land for conservation tpl.org

10,000 friends - http://10000friends.org/ have national and local (PA specific) plans to promote smart growth in urban development (meaning conservation is part of the larger picture instead of piecemeal)

Center for Health Environment and Justice- started by Lois Gibbs (love canal lady) around keeping communities healthy and safe and advocating for their wellbeing
http://www.chej.org/

(those are the biggies, here are the grassrootsy ones with a greater need for your money)
http://www.ciw-online.org/ Coalition for Imokolee Workers - migrant farmers organizing for rights

Native peoples organizing around environment and climate change (maybe sara has an opinion on them) http://www.ienearth.org/

Rhizome Collective - http://www.rhizomecollective.org/ doing great work anarchist style

Growing power - www.growingpower.org. will allen (macarthur fellow) saves the day by making compost, giving people green jobs, and growing produce in rust belt cities.

Local (PA)-

Any conservation easement organization (means they put farmland or other productive land into sustainably managed forestry, foraging, etc)-
Natural Lands Trust www.naturallandstrust.org
Pennypack Ecological Trust http://www.pennypacktrust.org/

PASA - PA sustainable agriculture www.pasafarming.org

Even more local (Philly)-

Clean Air Council - doing good work around air emissions and pollution http://www.cleanair.org/

Bicycle Coalition - http://www.bicyclecoalition.org/

Community Environmental Defense Fund - http://www.celdf.org/ Really awesome legal services around environmental movements for communities that can’t afford it

UNI - urban nutrition initiative http://www.urbannutrition.org/

Chester County Environmental Justice group - http://energyjustice.ning.com/ or http://www.ejnet.org/chester/ but I don’t know how organized they are

Fair Food Philly - http://fairfoodphilly.org/

Pennsylvania Horticultural Society - http://www.pennsylvaniahorticulturalsociety.org/home/index.html

If you’re looking for super specific things, a fun website is www.kickstarter.com (like Kiva.org but for whatever and whomever wants to sign up)

Okay, so I love my food blog, and it’s coming up on its one year anniversary.

But I’ve been reluctant to post in it lately (partly from not wanting to write up the terrible University City Dining Days restaurant and partly because I just don’t like the template anymore - it’s all dark and oppressive, but it was the best of the templates I saw). (ETA: have since ported the missing months from my private journal over to this one - still looking for a site redesign as of 11/25/09)

I crave to have my own identity - my own, individually designed, style which is mine all mine.

And just as I was thinking that, one of the bloggers I read announced that she had just gotten her site professionally redesigned by nifty people. And I pined… so I shot them an email talking about what I wanted, and they sent me back their price list. And OMG - I am not paying $1200 to make my site look better. Because I am so much less professional than she.

Especially not when I have friends. Friends who are good at design and (in some cases) under employed.

So I propose to pay $300 for a quick, pretty WordPress template. I promise I’m easy to please.

So here’s the deal. You say you want to do the job. I give you specifics and 2 weeks to produce a rough draft. If there is a rough draft (whether I like it or not - done is good), I will pay you $50. If there is no rough draft, then I’ll give two weeks to the next person who responded. And then you have a month for a final draft - at which point I will give you $250.

Fair?

If you are interested, let me know.

ETA: Is that a fair offer? Let me know, if I am way out of line.

comments screened

Weight Watchers is coming to campus. They are having meetings every Tuesday - at a time (11:30am - 12:30pm) I can actually attend, even with my crazy work schedule. Starting November 13th. The initial sign up is less than half price, if you start either of the first two meetings, and then each week is $14 after that.

• Can I afford it? Yes, but I could be putting that money toward credit card debt
• I’ve done Weight Watchers before… and I thought it was one of the more sensible diets out there but
  • I wasn’t invested in being thin (beyond a certain weight, I started feeling cold and getting sick a little more frequently)
  • I got tired of obsessing over food quite that much
• My household isn’t set up for it
  • I often pick up leftovers from my mother that aren’t going to be measured or made in a particular way
  • I guess I could still make large meals and save portions, but it’d call for a lot of tracking and calculating
  • there are, less with Weight Watchers than other programs, a lot of cheats to coming to the right amounts that require buying pre-packaged stuff (especially WW’s mysteriously light bread product), and I’ve been moving farther and farther away from artificial food products. It used to be that I couldn’t tell much difference between regular sour cream and diet sour cream - but now I can spot the carageenan and other texturizing agents right away, so I’d be doing more cutting things out than substituting :(

Even though I have food frozen for lunch, it is an act of will almost every single day not to go out to eat.

The tasty Mexican place across the street is half price from 2-4pm.

I have 18 minutes in which to cave to temptation.

The original Battlestar Galactica, you know - the one with Lorne Greene, is so much better than the new one.

Driving on highways during the daytime is always worse than driving at night. Driving at dusk, dawn, and 3am joyous.

Dairy products are interchangeable.

The key to running an economic kitchen is just the right amount of storage space - too much, and those exotic sauces and fancy jams start looking sexy; too little, and you can’t stock up on sales. It’s the freedom to be able to buy the six boxes of pasta for $3 that saves you from running out of pasta and getting stuck with a box for $2.50. It’s knowing that you have enough meat in your freezer that you can wait for good sales and never pay more than $2/lb for any kind of meat (and can stubbornly wait for some to get even cheaper - like chicken thighs below $.50/lb, whole chicken and pork shoulders or picnic ham roasts for $.80 - and if you live somewhere these are cheaper, that alone will be enough for me to spend at least 5 good minutes considering moving there). Produce is pure luck, though - luckily, I have people selling lots of good produce cheaply off the back of a truck.

Sewing your own clothes from scratch doesn’t save a dime.

People think I can garden even though most of the pots on my porch are empty. The pots are empty because I have been systematically killing the plants that were passed to me when my neighbor moved out of state. They think I can garden because I have pots.

I have a small apartment, and in some ways it has been a good idea to limit my available storage space. I will fill anything… and that will just make it harder to move in the future. But I love my apartment, and I’m likely to stay here for a while.

So I am trying to figure out what to do with my available floorspace.

Option 1: Nothing.
Bonus: It keeps me from accumulating a whole lot of extra crap.

Option 2: Shelves
Can hold my cookbooks and extra pantry stuff… and, if the shelves end up sturdy enough, I could finally bring my mixer from my parents’ home.
Minus - omg, I already have enough food staples stored to hold out against a seige for a fortnight… but they could be in more visible locations so that I’d use them up… *cough* yeah, right, like I wouldn’t just fill the space because it was there… but I would move it all to a level where I didn’t need a stepstool to get to the ketchup.

Option 3: Chest freezer
I can steal all the 8 year old beef that is filling the bottom of my mother’s chest freezer and I can have more room to store my own stuff without having to keep 40 lunches at work.
Minus - I will hoarde food and possibly not get around to eating it, either. And what’s the point of having room to get free meat, if I’m going to spend $150 to get it? Also, it doesn’t solve the book storage problem. Do they make hutches to go over chest freezers, like an etagere?

I made macaroni and cheese for the first time tonight.

Yes, I do have weird holes in my cooking experience.

So I need to talk about money -
What would you do right after realising your financial management is way out of line? Right - go shopping.

I spent today in the Italian Market.

I bought $27.92 worth of meat for [redacted] (which is excellent because I got almost everything she wanted despite having instructions to stay below $40 - I am a great food shopper)

For myself, I bought miscellaneous chicken bits (backs and necks and stuff) for stock - a 5lb bag for $1.85. I also bought 3 chicken leg quarters ($1.38) and butter ($2.49).

Then I made a strategic error, I think, in going to Fante’s. I bought some paper tea infusers because my teaball was too small to make my tea strong enough ($5.99) — but it cost the same as the teaball I use at work, but they were out of that one. I made tea when I got home - at least the bags work well. I also bought a magnetic hook ($6.49) so I can hang my measuring cups from the range hood instead of having them just hang out on the back of the stove because they don’t fit in any of my drawers.

Trip back and forth took two tokens ($3.30?).

And then I went to the produce truck and bought a bag of potatoes and some celery ($2).

Feeling bizarrely virtuous (aside from the Fante’s part) I went to the thrift shop to see if they had a bigger stock pot so I wouldn’t have to make stock in small batches. No pot, but I ended up with a $2 sweater.

That’s all the money I spent today.
Food: $7.72
Travel: $3.30?
Miscellany: $14.48

I mean, that’s not much and kind of awesome… but on the other hand I am so not good at keeping track at all.

Possible meals for tonight -

Meal #1 - Quesadillas
Ingredients I’d need to purchase
cheese $2-5
tortillas $3ish (I don’t buy them often, so I’m not sure)
Avocado <$1
salsa $3
mushrooms $1

Meal #2 - Eggplant curry
Ingredients needed -
Eggplant $1
onions $1
yogurt (optional) $2
nan (optional) $2

Meal #3 - Mushroom Risotto flavored with truffle juice
Ingredients needed -
mushrooms $1
heavy cream $4
(Can you make risotto without finishing cream? Cause then it'd be the cheapest by far)
(ETA: yes, I know you can - but it's a question of whether it is morally right.)