Jeni's Musings

Me: You know that new laptop I was talking about? The Dell XPS M1330? The one where you can get it with a 32Gb solid-state drive?

Him (wary): Yeeesss…

Me: Well listen to this: “a 64 GB solid-state drive can read 64 MB/S, write 45 MB/s, and consumes just half a Watt when operating (one tenth of a Watt when idle). In comparison, an 80 GB 1.8-inch hard drive reads at 15 MB/s, writes at 7 MB/s, and eats 1.5 Watts either operating or when idle.”

Him: So what you’re saying is, if you get this laptop you’ll be saving the planet.

Me: Precisely!

Preparing dinner. Our three-year-old suddenly exclaims, “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!”

Too much Bob the Builder (who, for those without three-year-olds, has decamped to “Sunflower Valley” and now lives a zero-carbon lifestyle, constructing eco-friendly sunflower-oil-extraction factories and the like).

Get ‘em young, that’s what I say.

We went to the Science Museum on Monday. In Launch Pad, there are lots of hands-on activities for children. One of them starts with a big container with lots of lentils in it. You have to fill a bucket with lentils, then hoist the bucket up and along so it meets with a device that flips it over so that the lentils spill down a funnel into a tube and along a chute into another large container. From there there are two Archimedes screws linked together that, when you turn their handles, take the lentils into another funnel and down another tube into yet another large-ish container. From there, there are two conveyor belts with scoops attached that take the lentils up to another funnel, down another pipe and back into the first big container, where they can start the entire process again.

We’re going to be moving to a new house soon, and one of the first things I intend to do is get a compost bin. We produce an inordinate amount of food waste in our house, at least partly due to two small children who can be quite fussy eaters, so I’m looking for a compost bin that takes cooked food as well as vegetable peelings and the like (ie a digester as well as a composter).

The Green Johanna looks like it’ll do the job perfectly, and actually benefits from a mix of waste so will take our cardboard too! Plus it comes with a little coat for winter. How sweet. It’s on the expensive side, but Recycle Now shows that there’s roughly a 25% discount in my area, plus a whole pound off for shopping online.