I have been superbad about posting. Ross has been lessbad about it. Look, I got a new job, got married, had five children, and circumnavigated the globe in the past couple of months, and I am here to tell you that, though I could not/would not post, I have some new bytes of info that you may or may not already know about.

Item 1: Stainless Steel Water Bottles

The People! Why do you hate Mother Nature? Don’t you know about WATER BOTTLES?

I think I’m pretty slick when I use only Diamond Springs water from the giant cooler thing at work…that is until the Dasani bottle I’ve been drinking from starts getting kinda aquariumesque and I have to buy another from the machine. Oh yes, I throw the old, gross one into the recycling, but think about this:

I use one water bottle every five days. That’s 73 bottles a year! If I have nine friends (DO I?) and they all are as stupidly unconcerned about the leechy chemicals in plastic water bottles as I am, together we use and discard 730 bottles! If they DO care about leechy chemicals and they get a new bottle every time, they’re piling up about 568,326 bottles a year.*

Nalgene makes water taste gross and is for hippie college students.

I just bought myself a Klean Kanteen!

It’s efficient (thing gets cold and stays cold), it drastically reduces waste, no chemicals get into my water, and it looks fantastic. Everybody wins! Except Dasani!

Item 2: CatalogChoice.org

I shop online a whole lot. I love shoes, I love clothes, I love books, I love pet grooming things (?), I love cookware. I love stuff that comes for me in the mail. I get like four catalogs a day. I don’t shop via catalog because it’s not 1953, so I toss them immediately into recycling.

Have you noticed that NPR is always talking about CatalogChoice.org? It’s a free service created for people like me who get so many catalogs that the idea of calling them all and telling them to quit seems both daunting and fruitless. You enter your address, type in the catalogs you get, and finally have a polite way to refuse delivery of the Newport News catalog. I figure it saves the company money, the postal service some extra weight, and Mother Nature her children the trees. Everybody wins! Except Newport News! Wait, even they win!

I’ve been making a ton of stuff lately that I am all too happy to share. Stay tuned.

*Made up number.