What Is And What Should Never Be

Last weekend I went to Paris to meet up with family and actually meet my cousins. One of the best parts of living here is that this can be a normal sentence! Hopefully we can take advantage of how close we are to the rest of Europe and see all sorts of places. Friday I explored alone... starting on one side of the Seine, then walking across and up to the Musee L'Orangerie to see Monet's Water Lillies... then down through the Jardin des Tuileries ... down and over to Musee Picasso... then back across the Seine to Notre Dame... and into Jardin du Luxembourg. Saturday I explored with the fam. We started at Notre Dame and wandered our way down to the Lourve and up into the Eiffel Tower. There was so much along the path for kids to play on and explore. My cousins are awesome by the way, and it was fun to see my aunt and uncle too, and my grandma who is such a good traveller/travel buddy. In sunny and cloudy weather, the white buildings lined with iron and ivy were very charmin

In the summer as we purged all our belongings I had high hopes of starting over in Scotland 100% zero waste. We would show up to a furnished but basically empty apartment and we could start from scratch making good choices about the food, toiletries, and cleaning supplies we brought in. Everything would be wooden or glass and both beautiful and useful. We would patiently wait until the right item was available, instead of buying the first cheaply made option we ran across. None of this happened. (I did thrift and reuse jars for grocery items purchased in bulk; I also ate Snickers and bought crap on Amazon.) For the past two or so years we have been slowly but surely reducing the amount of landfill waste we produce and plastic we use. But starting fresh actually set us back a little in our efforts. First of all, our apartment is more than furnished and came stocked with a large supply of plastic packaged cleaning products and some food items (that I'm thankful for!) pl