The older I get, the more green I am getting.

Seriously.

Now, I haven't always been a crunchy-granola kind of girl. Once upon a time I owned a shotgun and a few home alarms and supported the NRA. No it's true. I really did. Then a little thing called Columbine came and happened and I switched lanes faster than Paris Hilton switches fiancees, and I have never looked back. The older I get, the more hippy liberalism I embrace-abolish guns? Check. Vegetarian? Check. Buying mostly organic foods? Check. Gay marriages? Check (although I never was against that one.)

But it's not just me-Angus has taken to being pretty green himself. We are investigating solar and wind power for when we build on our extension in about a year's time. We are signing up for electricity from a renewable resource, which costs more but means we are trying to do our part. A composter the size of Milwaukee is now placed in our back garden and we dutifully trot out our compost once a day. Recycling bins are used more than the garbage in our house and all in all we work really hard to try to be even greener all the time.

So there's a show on TV every Tuesday now called It's Not Easy Being Green (those people should bow down and kiss Kermit the Frog's ass for stealing that line. Bow down, I say!) A number of ideas from that show are going into our home-a solar shower will be going into the garden for showers outside on warm summer days. Our back yard is huge and almost completely secluded. Angus and I have similar attitudes about this kind of thing, much like why we both hate curtains and don't have them-if you happen to be walking close to our house (which is set far back from the road) and look in the window and see us bumping uglies, well, that's your problem. Don't walk so close to houses you know don't have curtains (that said our guest rooms will have curtains as we figure that maybe not everyone who comes to visit us likes to do a floor show a few times a week.)

But the main thing that gets me about this show is the characters. The guy is a hard-core engineer who is devoted to making his home self-sufficient. So self-sufficient that he's even raising his own piggies, who will become Christmas dinner (that's right. Babe is going to be slaughtered after a life of enjoying life as a family pet. Sooo-ee!) His Mrs., who is clearly younger than him and not the mother of his children, is a bit of a hardcore "I miss the 60's" kind of nutter. She's into fairies and spiritual energy and palying a folk guitar at impromptu parties and whatnot. At one point she was at a Kiss Your Ass Fairy Convention or something like that, and they all held each other's heads to try to share positive energy. I am pretty sure she has the lyrics to Kumbaya tattooed across her ass, albeit in a henna sanskrit format. Her name is Bridget and she's become the basis against which I measure myself.

Yesterday shopping in Camden Market I bought an Indian-inspired skirt to run around the garden in during the summer (if summer ever actually happens here) while working on all the flowers I am buying up and will potentially watch fail in my green-growing process. It got the Bridget measure-"Angus, I like this skirt, but is it too Bridget?"

It passed (only just) and the skirt has come home with me.

We paint our rooms in colors that the Dulux guides recommend (because we are both seriously color-impaired and can't choose colors that should go together to save our lives. No really. If nuclear bombs were about to go off all over the world and the only thing that would stop it were if we could choose a complimentary color to "Moonlight Blue" you'd all be fucked.) These colors are generally soft and soothing, relaxing colors since we tend to be two stressy people. They have a range that I love which smacks a little too close to being Bridget, in that some have names like "Snuggle Up" and shit like that, but I figure it's far enough away from Bridget to be acceptable (besides, Bridget would likely have some kind of funky "swallow your tongue" orange walls or something like that.)

Angus now rages against 4x4 cars (unless you run a farm, in which case, you would need one. Like our old neighbors who had a Land Rover to help run their stables. Said Land Rover had moss growing out of it, so hey-giving a bit of oxygen back is ok, yes?) We don't use a clothes dryer (in fact, we don't even have one). We try to go for environmentally economical yet esoteric lighting. We are getting pinker with age and I wonder where we'll get to next (please note-such extent does not include making bathtub gin, recycling our own feces, and using Gorby as dog-fueled irrigation power. If I get to that point I hope someone will come here and take away my incense and explain that greed is the new black, so why not boil up some water and pour it on an iceberg, I'll feel so much better?).

But I'm never, ever getting a folk guitar.

And the first person who touches my head to try to share positive energy is going to get his ass kicked.

Green can only go so far.

-H.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 11:13 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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