Update on No Impact land

Union Square Cabbage season has ended! We spent the winter eating it boiled, steamed, fried and baked. No more. Spring has finally brought kale, chard, sweet peas, broccoli rabe and all sorts of other yummies to the farmers’ market. Yippee! We’re still waiting for in-season tomatoes and a lot of other goodies, but who’d have thought six months ago that our palettes would do a dance for arugula?

The heat with no air conditioner has not troubled us yet. With our windows open, the noise of other people’s air conditioners has. So have the mosquitoes. I pull down the top windows, which lets the hot air out and the nasty bugs in (even way up on the 9th floor). But my best friend Tanner showed up the other day with a pair of those collapsible screens as a gift. Hurray for community.

No fridge is hard so far. The milk goes bad in a day. The aforementioned arugula turns yellow in two. The pot in the pot is a bust. My dad has found a vintage Coleman cooler on eBay, where he plans to use some top-secret bidding tool. He feels sure to win. I’m going to get some of those ice packs and throw them in a neighbor’s freezer to keep the cooler cold. It’s the best I can do, especially since vegetables are going to be coming in bulk next week, when deliveries from the CSA (community supported agriculture) start.

As for other aspects non-electric, Michelle loves doing everything by candle light; I hate it. We’re waiting for a couple of solar-powered lamps to come in the mail, which ought to make things a bit easier. Meanwhile, the hard thing about stomping the laundry in the bathtub is getting our acts together often enough so it doesn’t mount up into a mammoth job.

But the great news is that we met a lady at the farmers’ market on Saturday who rode her kid and her groceries around on a specially-built tricycle. It turned out she had a second one—who’d have thunk?—and guess where that second one now is? Parked right outside my building. She loaned it to us and we love, love, love it! Life is so much easier when you can plop your two-year-old in a rickshaw along with the groceries.