CSA boxes!

hey guys, so it seems like as of now, we're not sure that we are going to make San Diego High a CSA pick-up point. It would be great if we could, but it is nearing the end of the year, and we still have Earth Fair and loads of other things to focus on right now.

I did some poking around the website to see where some other pick-up points are. As it turns out, there's loads of options. At least one in almost every neighborhood around the city. There's a neat little map with dozens of dropped pins—you should take a look yourself.


I think that, even if we don't do this as a club, anyone who's interested should consider signing up for one elsewhere. It's still all the same environmental benefits, and I'd be glad to throw up some recipes and whatnot for the potentially strange and exciting produce!

Thrift stores!

Hi everyone! As Jimmy mentioned a couple posts earlier, we're organizing an environmental week. There's a document on the FB group for STWF (let me know if you need to be added!) for song suggestions so be sure to take a look at that if you haven't already.

For environmental week's Thursday the theme is "Thrifty Thursday" where we'll be encouraging everyone to wear their finds from thrift stores in order for a) people to see what cool things you can find at thrift stores and b) to also remove the stigma of owning previously used items. So, hopefully a) environmental week gets approved and b) you participate! However, even if those things don't happen, you should still check out a thrift store soon because you can always find fun (and CHEAP) things there.

Some locations:

Thrift Trader
3939 Iowa St
(between Lincoln Ave & University Ave)
San Diego, CA 92104

Goodwill
939 16th St
(between Broadway & E St)
San Diego, CA 92101

Buffalo Exchange
3862 5th Ave
(between Robinson Ave & University Ave)
San Diego, CA 92103


Flashbacks
3847 5th Ave
(between Robinson Ave & University Ave)
San Diego, CA 92103

Frock You Vintage Clothing
4121 Park Blvd
(between Howard Ave & Polk Ave)
San Diego, CA 92103

Thrift stores don't only have clothes--they often have DVDs, CDs (I found a copy of Disintegration by the Cure once), books, games (found a complete set of Harry Potter clue!) etc. You really never know what you'll find there.

Post in the comments about the best and/or most outlandish thing you've found at a thrift store!

recycling?

hey dudes! Your friendly neighborhood blogger is here to post about one of our favorite ways to save the world: recycling!

After a club member mentioned a new recycling rule at a recent meeting, I tried to look it up for confirmation and further information so I could make it more public. It was mentioned that waxed containers, like most milk cartons, could now be recycled. This, of course, was excellent news, as these paper-based containers surely contribute to a large amount of waste. Also, any increase in "recyclability" is almost bound to be a good thing, right?

Well, I can't seem to find any information to back this up. I don't want to doubt its verity because it sounds awesome, but I'm also hesitant to tout a statement that I cannot back up. As of now, the city of San Diego accepts the following items:

 

Cool, right? I didn't know about aerosol cans! Anyway, this includes the summer 2011 allowance of the last two sections pictured. (By the way, this all comes straight from the city's website).

However, this is what it has for "no's":

As you can see, our waxed buddies are at the top of the list. The point of this post is this: if you can find any information on/proof of this new rule, please post it here or bring it up at a meeting. We'd love to hear about, and we'd be super thankful.

Happy recycling!

MARCH 9 MEETING

Hello there fellow environmentalists. We're planning an Environmental Week at our school, but we are waiting on approval! I, Jimmy, will check on that next week. When I get approval, I'll post about it here. And I'll tell everyone at the meeting.

In the meanwhile, we're working on some other stuff. We're trying to make our school a drop-off spot for one those local produce basket things (CSA, Community Supported Agriculture), and for that we need ten people to commit to ordering them. They're pretty good, delicious foods and whatnot. We'll have more information on that in the future.

In a similar vein, we want to start growing vegetables and plants inside the school. Lauren will be bringing tomatoes, and everyone else is encouraged to bring other plants to grow (good stuff includes succulents, basil, rosemary, peas maybe, etc.).

Next week we are meeting at the IS Garden to do some cleanin' up. See you there!

How Do I Love Thee? (List 1)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 

1. I love thee on my sandwiches. You are much better than mayonnaise. (Seriously!)
2. I love thee with pita chips. 
3. I love thee with tortilla chips. 
4. I love thee with pita bread. 
5. I love thee with crackers.
6. I love thee cold. 
7. I love thee, with everything. 

As you can tell, my love for hummus is quite uncontrollable. My favorites are pesto and lemon cilantro, which you can purchase at your local farmer's markets and Fresh & Easy respectively. 

Feel free to share your favorite flavor and/or how you eat hummus with in a comment! 

valentine's day is tomorrow,

the day of chocolate. I just wanted to take another second of your time to mention the global impact of products that we consume. However! This is not all gloom and doom. I try not to be. I have a wonderful sunny disposition, I think.

Kidding aside, there's a reason you can purchase pounds and pounds of chocolate for a few dollars. It's because the cost of making this bargain chocolate is externalised, often in the form of child labour and other awful things.

Luckily, there's a wonderful little label that says "fair trade" that helps you discern whether or not bad things are involved in the production of your chocolate. Yeah, it's more expensive, but I like to think of it as a more "honest" price. Chocolate, like coffee and other foreign commodities, is expensive. That's why it's a decadent treat. Also luckily, the whole "green" thing is quite trendy. That means that you can find tasty fair trade/organic chocolate in a bunch of different varieties at a bunch of different places.

So yeah, be responsible chocolate purchasers this holiday!

environmental week!

hey guys, so just giving an update on last week's meeting!


We're pretty certain that ASB will grant us a full week dedicated to environmental awareness, and we'll be putting in a formal request for the use of the quad for lunchtime activities shortly. They won't be until April, but we wanted to figure it all out as soon as possible. By this Friday, we were hoping that everyone who took responsibility for one of the days of the week will give the entire club a brief presentation on their ideas for the activity (related to their theme, of course). The themes are as follows:


Meatless Monday — encouraging the incorporation of less meats and more sustainably farmed produce into our diets as a way of being conscious consumers (Lauren)
Trashy Tuesday — all about recycling and reducing waste (Jiem and Aliyah, I believe)
Water Conservation Wednesday — pretty much like it sounds, conserving that water, wooo (Katra)
Thrifty Thursday — encouraging reusing as well as the consumption of already used clothing as an alternative to new (Lorelay)
Save the World On Fridays — about the club, our mission, and helping out in small ways! (Nicola)

Of course, each person who took responsibility for the activities is likely to interpret these in slightly different ways. I just wanted to give the basic idea. Feel free to seek out club members that you saw volunteer for the theme days and offer to help and/or bounce ideas off of them. No one wants to or would be able to do it alone!

As an added note, we will also be selling water bottles at lunch all week and I'm sure a sign-up will circulate as we get closer to April.

Thanks everyone, and don't forget about your pitches on Friday!

Conserve energy!

This showed up on my Facebook ticket thing and it caught my eye. This could be a fun art project--do you think we could get away with putting this up?

thank you Katra!

All right, so I just wanted to take a second and thank our wonderful and fabulous member Katra for a couple recent contributions to the club.

Firstly, a friend mentioned today that she used to bring her lunch items in disposable packaging, but after the urging of our good friend Katra converted to tupperware. Three cheers for reducing waste! And I'm assuming that it was done very politely and pleasantly.

Secondly, Katra was responsible for ordering our new stainless steel water bottles, and we thank her for that contribution as well. They're still in Mr. Steussy's room as far as I know, so get them while they're hot! I know we'll be setting up and organising lunch sales soon.

Thirdly, we now have a new little poster that mentions the water bottles and the STWF t-shirts that Katra designed. Jimmy got clearance with ASB to post them wherever, so you should be seeing them multiply in the next few days.

I just thought it'd be nice to give a blog-five to a member that helped out a lot recently. Keep up the good work, everyone, and we'll see you on Friday!

Andy Rooney on Water Bottles

"What people will remember about Andy Rooney are things like this: He’d open a can of mixed nuts on 60 Minutes and separate the various nuts by type, and then he’d count how many of each nut were in the can. What made this so interesting (at least to me) was not the metaphor this act represented; what was interesting was that there was no metaphor at all. It wasn’t a veiled sociological commentary or a criticism of advertising or a meditation on consumerism. It wasn’t about anything, except the contents of the can. This, I suspect, is why Rooney’s seemingly banal essays were so infuriating to a certain kind of person: We have come to assume that whenever a media personality talks about something basic, he or she is actually trying to explain something complex. The idea that someone on television would just sit at his desk and complain about mixed nuts and have it only be about the ostensive subject — without a larger meaning and without a defined purpose — seemed facile and ridiculous. But isn’t it equally ridiculous to assume trivial thoughts are only worth considering when we pretend they represent something else? As a self-defined atheist, Rooney would have never pretended that filtering peanuts could help us understand the nature of existence; he was wholly resigned to the fact that we couldn’t even understand the nature of peanuts."


-Chuck Klosterman


Andy Rooney 1919-2011

Cool video!

Hi everyone,

I hope the end of the semester hasn't been too brutal for anyone, and as you are all cramming for finals and putting finishing touches on papers/projects/what-have-you, here's a short video to take a break with:

CLICK

NASA apparently had some time on its hands and they produced the video to show modern global warming and how the temperatures have changed/risen from 1880 to 2010. It's a neat little thing. It'd be interesting to analyze the causes of the fluctuations between 1880 and 2010. If you have any ideas, feel free to toss them down in a comment. (I'm assuming there are a couple of Industrial Revolutions in there...)

Hope all is going well! Best of luck finishing up this fall semester.

JANUARY 13 MEETING

Hey guys!

Sorry I haven't posted lately. My computer had to go for repairs and Senior year's been keeping me real busy. Just wanted to record and remind you of a couple things:

• The bottles! They have come in, and we'll be selling them soon. We need to fill out a form first, but now we have the bottles to sell, it's super cool.
• Speaking of bottles: the flyers you made. Remember them? You can post them up wherever. We don't need permission. So go for it.
• T-Shirts! We still have a bunch! Buy one, they look (and feel) really neat. They're organic cotton! And, um, yeah. Oh: if you have one, make sure to wear it! I like the idea of wearing it on Fridays, as it creates more of a presence in the school.
• Environmental week! We still need to figure it all out. I'll keep you updated on that.

So yeah. There's the stuff. Just part of my ongoing mission to provide transparency for student governments. Yeeeeeeeahppo.

composting!

I am almost absolutely sure that somewhere on this blog is a post about composting. We're all tree-hugging hippies, right? It comes with the territory.

But I figure that sometimes redundancy doesn't hurt, especially when we've just been handed this new, shiny 2012 that's just begging for new projects and resolutions. If you've already thought about giving composting a go, here's some information that could help you along the way. If you haven't, then maybe this will cause you to consider it? Who knows.

Anyway, I got this information off of the conveniently-named howtocompost.org. I'm sure the website (and the internet in general, really) is full of helpful tips, but I thought their "top ten tips" would be a neat way to get us off the ground.

1. Gather all grass clippings and green yard waste but be sure to mix with the "brown" materials like leaves and shredded paper to add carbon. You will need both, but if you only add grass clippings your pile will compact and start to stink.


2. Do not compost meats or pet droppings. Stick with food scraps and yard waste only.


3. Avoid all pesticides and/or herbicide treated material.


4. If you add weeds to your pile make sure your pile is good and hot. It should be steaming hot, not just warm otherwise it may not kill the seeds.


5. Turn your pile as often as you can. Each time you turn it will speed up the process.


6. Keep your compost damp but not wet. As you add material to your pile make sure that each layer is moist as it is added. During the summer your pile will dry out and the composting process will slow down.


7. Got too much material to compost? Make a second or third pile. Stop adding material to a pile that is under way and start a new pile. This will ensure you get a chance to use the compost this season.


8. Add compost to your garden a few weeks before you plant. Let the compost have a chance to work into the soil. Try to mix it in and let it sit before you plant.


9. Worms and most bugs are okay. No need to go crazy trying to keep bugs out of your compost.


10. Since the compost process works best at temperature between 120 and 150 degrees composting in the warmer months is easier to do, if this is your first attempt at composting best to try in the summer. 

And there we have it! Good luck to you if you're trying out this new endeavour!