My personal results from the carbon quiz here (damn and blast the stupid javascripts that prevent direct linking to pages! gnaaah!) are approximately 20,558 lb of carbon emissions per year. To put that in perspective, that’s apparently equivalent to 2.02 passenger cars’ annual output. Yikes. Lots o’ room for improvement!
To put it in context, though, the standard American carbon load is 44,312 lb per year per person.
To put that in context, your standard French carbon load is 13,668 lb annually per person. Holy fuck. Somehow it’s not quite fair that they get better veg, better wine, better weather, better access to other European countries, and a better carbon load, even if they don’t really wear berets and stripey shirts all the time. (And I say that as someone who’s inordinantly fond of berets and stripey shirts, having several of each.)
Perhaps my charming employer will set up a branch office in Paris — or Stockholm, or London, or Berlin — and allow me to relocate there. Purely for sustainability reasons, of course. It’s not like I’m a Eurogroupie or anything. (Perish the thought! Erm. Well, it’s not like it’s a fetish or anything. I just feel more like myself when I’m there, that’s all: like I’ve finally come home after a long exile.) It would only be so we as an association could, as it were, “walk the talk” on an international leadership level about promoting sustainability and a healthy approach to consumption and so on. Really! No personal benefit would be involved at all, obviously.
(Did anyone at all buy that last bit? Anyone?)
Autumn is my favorite time of year — not that we get much of one around Atlanta, but it’s the thought that counts, I suppose. I love the fact that the weather actually becomes tolerable, and even borders on crisp, at least in the mornings and evenings. I like the shortening days: as dusk begins earlier and earlier, I start to feel as if I’m a social gadabout, or at least someone with something others would recognize as a life, because I’m actually getting home after sunset. You can finally wear light jackets or long sleeves (though usually not both at the same time, not until November or December) without feeling as if you’re being roasted alive. It’s time to go shopping for school supplies, or at least look at them longingly and wish that you had a reason to buy notebook paper and pens and mechanical pencils and those organizer-calendar-address book things that always look so geekily cool but always turn out to be way more trouble to keep updated than they’re ever worth. The squirrels start chittering angrily at you as you walk your dog, and try to drive you away by pelting you with acorns. In some parts of the country, you even get the pleasure of watching the leaves turn, and then spending the next couple of weeks shuffling through knee-deep piles of them once they fall off the trees. I really miss that.
We don’t get much of a leaf change here, or so it seems. Not in the city, at least. We have trees, but it feels as if the leaves are green one day, then suddenly all brown, and then they’re gone — not even in piles, just blown away somewhere. No leaf shuffling for me.
I did find out where some of the leaves go, or at least part of one of them. I got home this evening to discover that, for what might possibly have been a good portion of the entire day, I’d been walking around with a chunk of reddish-brown leaf stuck in the tangles of my hair. Why did no one tell me?
Hazelnut Cupcake with Mochanut Mousse
Originally uploaded by moria.
Mmmmm! From Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero’s Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, with a couple of lazy modifications — mainly, I used the filling as a topping and didn’t make the ganache.
Still extremely good, I think. If you don’t have your copy yet, go get one — regardless of whether you’re vegan, omni, or photosynthesize your own energy from pure sunlight. Cupcakes are cupcakes, and these are good little buggers. In my experience, Isa’s recipes are generally worth your blind trust anyway, but particularly when it comes to baked goods.
If you’re local and extremely lucky, you might get to taste one if I decide to bring the leftovers into the office on Monday. If.
(Oh, yeah — I think I solved the collapsing cupcake mystery: it’s the conductivity, stupid! I lined the pans for the hazelnut cupcakes with tinfoil before I inserted the liners, and everything rose and was all three-dimensional and proud and generally happy with its cupcakey little self. Apparently it’s not the rigidity that silicone pans lack, it’s the conductivity — which seems obvious, given how baking powder is so dependent on heat for its leavening. Duh.)
As I believe I’ve mentioned before, it’s rare enough that groups I like actually tour, and that I find out about the tour in time to get tickets. However, it’s particularly annoying when their concerts are scheduled mid-week.
I would love to go see The Pet Shop Boys, for instance, but there’s absolutely no way I’m going to make it to a Thursday show. Just not going to happen, especially given that no one else I know around here would probably want to go — social obligations make it a lot less likely that I’ll wimp out. Once I’m home after work, I’m usually home for good (especially midweek), and in the absence of a convenient dogsitter to take care of the Nigel, there’s just no avoiding a trip back to the flat. I also feel horribly guilty when I do the “walk, feed, and slip out the door while he’s still eating” thing after he’s been alone all day.
On the other hand, The Decemberists (!!!) will be playing on a Friday. It’s not quite so bad doing the feed-and-run thing to Nigel on Fridays, because I know I’ll be spending the bulk of the next two days hanging out with him constantly; it’s so much easier to make it up to him. It’s also just possible that I might be able to find some other people to go, thus increasing my chances of actually making it to the show; the tickets are much more affordable, too ($20, rather than roughly $50, even before TicketBastard’s fee-o-rama).
Hmm. This might have possibilities. . . .
