Cradle-to-Cradle..

My house is full of stuff because i'm a bit of a hoarder.
Throwing things out is hard for me, & the sight of things
building up in land-fills is not something i can ignore.
A little spare money means a trip to the recovery store at the local landfill site.

Our primate ancestors had no problem with throwing stuff away - it was biodegradable & living mostly in trees meant not having to live with their own rubbish.
We haven't quite adjusted yet - if our ancestors had been feline, would we insist on burying our effluent, i wonder?

Industry & farming have the same problem, on a larger & more destructive scale. Planned obsolescence took no account of what to do with the newly obsolete because it didn't directly cost manufacturers anything, & anyway that's what second-hand dealers of all sorts were there for..
At the end of the chain was the tip (aka dump, landfill, whatever).

Cradle-to-grave..

Now we have to start thinking about ways out of this problem.

So Cradle-to-Cradle makes interesting reading. And it's actually a commercially viable concept according to the two people who formed this company.

And there are others..
"let's start designing things with the idea that they will never become waste but will always be reused in some form or another"

As a kid i lived next door to an old bloke who had a work-shop with a big 3-phase electric motor mounted under the rafters - it drove his grinder & wire-brush buffer & his 4-speed drill-press; all done with belt-drives! In one corner was a big German lathe salvaged from World War 1 or 2, i never worked out which, & he had the usual oxy-acetylene & arc-welding gear (& - quite rightly! - he went really went crook at us kids if we ever looked at the welding process, even for a second!).

And he never seemed to throw anything away!
Someone would come in looking for an odd-sized bolt or something, & he'd have it! Somewhere. In one of a whole lot of tins full of kerosene to stop them rusting..

Composting is a form of recycling that i became most familiar with. I hated digging the garden, it was exhausting, & i hated weeding even more. But the thing i loathed most was "mowing the lawn". Yes, it's supposed to be good stuff for kids to play on, & we did, but the baulky, stiff little push-mower was definitely not my friend. At all. Composting was the only thing i was any good at, & i enjoyed experimenting with heaps & bins of various sizes, collecting stuff to feed them, & keeping an eye on them.

We weren't made of money, so we couldn't afford waste. The habit's stuck.

When all else fails, follow the instructions..

My Minor Project might've gone a little better if i'd stuck to Lewis Loflin's original instructions.

It wouldn't be the first time. Back in the day, when i had (by chance) the use of my (at the time) boss's workshop, i decided to give my sister's car a bit of a clean-up.

I duly borrowed, from the Dunedin Pulic Library, the manual for the Standard Vanguard Phase III (this WAS a very long time ago, you understand) - back in the day, you could actually do that; but so many people were nicking the manuals, or not bringing them back, that the DPL said "No more" & marked them all as 'Read-Only'.

And (back in the workshop) i'd decided to take the head off the old Massey-Fergusson tractor donkey that formed the power-plant of this vehicle, & clean up the valves. So..
..i undid all the head-nuts & tried to lift the head off; it was stuck - one end came free & the other stayed stubbornly put! The 'stuck' end did have this irrelevant-looking little bolt that the manual said should be removed, but i'd thought "WTF's that got to do with anything??" & ignored it. Eventually (when all else failed!) i removed the harmless little bolt &..
..lo-&-behold the head came off just like that! I still don't know how the stupid little bolt stopped the head coming off, because it didn't go into the block (which is why i ignored it in the first place!), but it did..
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Schlepping around, Soccer World Cup, Bye-bye Carisbrook..

I think "schlepping" is Yiddish - a linguistic cross between Hebrew & German.
At a guess, i'd say the name is a 'corruption' of 'Judisch' or something similar (I know a few words of German, just..).
Anyway, i think it's a wonderfully expressive word - i like it, so i use it; means (AFAIK) what we might call 'traipsing around', poking into this & that (i Hope that's what it means!)..

So, i've been poking into other blogs using Google blogs, just picking up on anything i think looks interesting: class-mates' blogs, links from there, you can go to some surprising & interesting places..

..& of course i suffer from 'Insatiable Curtiosity' as Rudyard Kipling (poems here) said in one of his "Just So" stories (or here) entitled "The Elephant's Child". We read these when we were kids, & i still like them a lot, but i can't find all of them in the Dunedin Public Library; i suspect some have fallen victim to PC, like "The Butterfly That Stamped" or "How the Alphabet Was Made". Nonetheless, there are still delightful stories available like "The Cat Who Walked By Himself", "The Beginning of the Armadillos", & "The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo"..
..& they're all online, even if the DPL hasn't the original dead-tree version.

AND - i Have To Rave On about the soccer World Cup: the All Whites holding World Champions Italy to a 1-all draw; Absolutely Fabulous!!
Are we going to get to Round 2? Who knows..

Poor old Carisbrook. Rolled, bowled & ****-holed out of existence. If i say any more i'll prob'ly get sued (Great-Big-Long-Siiiiiiiiighh!)..
I suspect Lack of Imagination, Vested Interest, & possibly even a certain amount of good old-fashioned Snobbery. The new stadium itself may be ok (tho Global Warming - & Yes! There IS such a thing, despite the ostrich stance of people worrying about How Much It's All Going To Cost - arrrgghh! - may yet have the last laugh); may be, may be, but the long-term cost? I dunno, & i don't think anyone else does either..

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