Sorry, if you’ve seen this one before, but if you haven’t, I think you’ll enjoy it… A reader named Chrissy wrote to me and asked how we entertain Isabella without TV or video games: We build towers from a set of wooden blocks and laugh our heads off when the towers fall down. Towards bedtime, we sit […]
Relationships, Family and Friendship
Too bad about the fireflies
One of my most avid readers is, well, my mom. Since I’ve never quite been the best at staying in touch, she tells me that, because of the blog, she feels closer to me than she has in years (love you, mom). Needless to say, the post she liked the most was the one about entertaining my […]
Entertaining Isabella—Update
Since we have no mains electricity as part of the No Impact experiment, we also have no TV. Last week, someone asked me how we entertain Isabella without one. In the comments to that post, someone said that they like to take their kids hunting for fireflies. Coincidentally, that day, my friend Mayer, whose community garden plot I help […]
Entertaining Isabella without TV
A reader named Chrissy wrote to me and asked how we entertain Isabella without TV or video games: We build towers from a set of wooden blocks and laugh our heads off when the towers fall down. Towards bedtime, we sit on the couch and listen to classical music on the crank-up radio and try to hum along. […]
Living in the gray
We have this great picture of Isabella that Michelle had blown up on poster board some time back. Strictly speaking, of course, the poster is not in the No Impact project’s non-consumption rules. I bit my tongue. Then, we had to mount the poster. Michelle came home with some of that sticky putty, which was, again, new and not […]
How to negotiate a marital eco-fight
Back when we were in the trash phase of the project, Michelle and I went to the farmers’ market at Union Square and walked up to the booth of the Lower East Side Ecology Center. I said, “Let’s look at the worms.” “Worms,” Michelle said. “What worms?” “They sell worms which you keep in a bin and they make […]
Boys, girls, and whose job is it to take out the compost?
So I got this email today from a woman named Nellie Wieland. I Googled her and she appears to be a professor of philosophy or something like that who has reviewed books by Noam Chomsky. Now, I love Noam Chomsky but only when someone else explains to me what he’s talking about. This is by […]
The beat of a quieter drummer
A couple of months ago, it started to pour with rain while Isabella rode my shoulders in a backpack-like contraption. There were, surprisingly, plenty of available taxis that day on 6th Avenue, but No Impact means no taxis, so I did my best in a wind-torn wrestling match with our umbrella and I started the […]