The semester is almost over and I screwed up my student loans.  Ooops.  Cross your fingers and say a prayer I can keep going to school summer semester.

I have half my garden planted, mostly spinach, herbs, lettuce, radish, carrots and peas.  I tried planting some tomatoes and peppers but it was too early and they died.  I bought new ones to plant in a few days.  I also planted a few more strawberries and a pumpkin patch behind our swing set.  All I have left to plant is zucchini, watermelon, cucumbers, cantalope, corn, butternut squash and peas.

My apple tree, plum tree and crab apple tree are all blooming fantastically.  My raspberry bushes are growing back wonderfully, but things don’t look good for our grapes and blueberries.  We might have to buy more.

Tonight I’m going to a hunters safety class.  Step one towards obtaining my own sustainable meat!

In a couple weeks, my mom and I are starting bee keeping classes.  My boyfriend is going to help me build a hive.  Soon, we’ll be bee keepers!

I hurt my foot running, but I think its mostly better and I will be able to start running again.  It was a strained tendon.  I’ve never had a running injury before, ever.

I promise I’ll post some pictures of the garden real soon.

Obviously, I don't make cheese on this scale. I really need to start taking my own pictures. It's not that I don't take pictures, it's just that I don't download them because it's a pain in the ass on my computer. My caption might be longer than my blog now. Ooops.

Much like gardening, I enjoy making cheese just because I enjoy it.  I’m not sure if it’s any cheaper, if I had to guess, I’d say probably not.  But the good news is that when you make your own cheese, you also get whey in addition to cheese, which is a great liquid to make soup with or to use in baked goods (instead of water).  It adds lots of vitamins and minerals to your food that water doesn’t add, and it also increases the protein level.  It tastes super yummy, but it’s not too different from water.  I think most people won’t even notice the difference, actually.

The thing that’s so cool about cheese making is how impressed people are when you go to a pot luck or something with a home-made cheese.  Even if you never share your home-made cheese with someone else, the accomplishment of having made cheese is still so impressive even to your self that it makes it worth while.

I’m just starting to learn how to make cheese, and have only made the simplest soft cheeses so far.  Fromage Blanc is my favorite of all of them that I’ve made, but I’ve also made yogurt cheese, as well as sour cream, kefir, whipped cream, butter and yogurt.  I’m hoping to buy myself a hard cheese making kit and a mozzarella making kit here soon.  Mozzarella only takes about 30 minutes to make.  Wow!

In my cheese making adventures I’ve used mostly conventional milk that’s on manager’s special in the grocery store.  Since cheese is made by forcing milk to go bad in a particular way, its okay to use milk that expired yesterday to make it.  The expiration date doesn’t mean it went bad the minute the clock struck 12:01 on that date.  It’s just a sell by date.  Manager’s special milk has been my way of keeping my cheese making hobby reasonably priced.  But in my heart of hearts, I wish I was making cheese from organic milk from grass-fed, local cows.  A lot of my friends have raw milk shares, and raw milk is the best of the best to make cheese with, but it also costs about $7 a gallon, and I just don’t have that kind of cash.

The alternative I’m searching for is non homogenized milk, or cream top milk.  This milk is minimally pasteurized and less processed than the kind of milk you get from the store.  It’s a little more expensive than store organic (which will run you about 4.50 a gallon) at $5 a gallon, but it just might be worth it to me.  That way I don’t have to buy separate cream when I want to make sour cream or butter, I don’t have to buy separate low-fat milk when I want to make yogurt or kefir, and separate whole when I want to make cheese.  I just buy whole milk and skim the cream off as needed.  Excellent.

If you’d be interested in learning more about cheese making visit Cheesemaking.com, where you can learn all about cheese and buy kits to make your own.

This is not my garden. My garden is much bigger than this (40 feet long by 8 feet wide). But this will give you an idea of what a square foot garden looks like.

Its been a while.  Its always a while between posts, I know.  But its been so nice here, I’m finally getting to garden.  I mean, really garden.  My son and I have planted about 40 square feet of our garden so far, using the square foot garden method, and it feels so good to get my hands into the dirt I can’t even say.  I am eager to start harvesting, but right now the only sprouts we have are some random radishes that are haphazardly planted all over because I let my radishes from last year go to seed.  Soon, my pretties will be sprouting though.

Also, looks like my crab apple tree is about to bloom, and I think I might be getting my first ever blossoms on my plum tree.  The apple and pear tree have put out leaves but no blossoms yet.  The apple is old and has been blossoming regularly, so I expect to see blossoms on it for sure.  The pear we just planted last year, and I wasn’t expecting blooms on it or the plum, which we planted at the same time, until next spring.  But who knows?  Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised, just like I am with the plum.

I love to garden.  I couldn’t tell you why, I just really like it.  Even if it didn’t save me money on food, I would still do it.  Even if the food it produced wasn’t of higher nutritional quality than the food at the grocery store, I would still do it.  Even if it wasn’t better for the environment, I would still do it.  Even if it wasn’t good exercise, I would still do it.  Even if it didn’t help me teach my son about the natural world, I would still do it.  Even if it didn’t encourage my son to eat healthy and get him to eat vegetables, I would still do it.

But gardening does do all these things, and collectively, they are so great, that even if I didn’t love to garden, I would still do it just for those benefits.

I’m just lucky that I love doing something that has so many benefits.

I can’t wait to start my bee hive!

We will be dying eggs this year, but since Elijah is allergic, we're going to fill his basket with something else.

There are three holidays that I accept as consumer holidays and, though I try not to go all out, give in to the consumerism a little bit.  Christmas, Halloween and Easter, the latter probably being the one I spend the least on.  Before I had Elijah, the only thing I cared about on Easter was Easter Sunday services at church (and before that all the Lenten services and Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and what not), and Easter brunch.  I loves me a good brunch.

Now that I’m a mom, I feel like I probably should provide Elijah with an Easter Basket.  His first Easter, when he was about five months old, I only bought a little something as a formality.  A tiny basket, a few plastic eggs, and a little Easter grass.  The basket now holds all his crayons.

Last year, when he was one, I set about creating a basket with healthy-ish treats.  Fruit leather, honey sticks, organic lolly pops, organic fruit snacks and fair trade chocolate.  There were, I must admit, a few Peeps and some Jelly Belly beans as well.

This year I had intended to do something similar, but was dependent on getting my tax return before Easter to do it.  I have not gotten my tax return.  So now I’m trying to get creative and see what I can do to put together a home made Easter basket.

In theory, this should be cheaper, and it probably is.  I mean, I probably spent close to $50 filling his Easter basket last year, maybe more.  I don’t even know.  But as my shopping is shaping up, we’ll have to see.

So, here was my plan for his basket.

• Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Home made crayons (made by melting old broken crayons down in muffin tins, then letting them harden.  They’re shaped like discs, but they color just as good as store bought)
• Home made chalk (made out of plaster of paris, here’s the recipe)
• Home made play dough (I have a recipe in my Holistic Moms Network cookbook)
• A few items of store bought candy
• Toy Story fruit snacks donated by my boyfriend, who bought them for Elijah when we go over to his house
• A few packets of seeds
• Dried fruit and honey sticks (maybe?)
• Jelly beans purchased months ago, when they were on sale at Costco

Most of the items required to make these things I have already at my house.  This morning, I formulated a shopping list for the things I would need to buy.

• Chocolate chips
• Tempura Paint Powder
• Candy
• Dried fruit
• Honey sticks
• Plastic eggs (for the Easter egg hunt)

Pretty short list, right?  So how did I leave the store with $24 worth of purchases?

I bought him

• a little plastic egg full of Skittles, which cost a buck fifty?!  What the hell?  I’m taking that back.
• some sidewalk chalk (it was cheaper than the tempura paint powder would have been) for 2.79
• chocolate chips, two packs at 1.75 each (these were the cheapest generic brand)
• two packs of plastic eggs for 1.25 each
• three seed packets, about two bucks each (oh, thats the biggest purchase, there.  At least we’ll get food from them)
• two chocolate bunnies at a buck fifty each – one is for me, alright?
• a thing of Reeces Pieces shaped like a carrot for a dollar
• a pinwheel for 79 cents

I also bought a sack of flour, which is not really Easter basket related, but we were out of whole wheat flour so I thought I’d pick one up while I was there.

So, that was about 21 dollars on his basket, before tax.  How does that compare to everyone else, what do you all spend?  I still want to buy some honey sticks and some dried fruit, if I can, that will up my spending hopefully no more than ten dollars, and the dried fruit will last for snacks for a very, very long time, so I think its worth the cost up front.

In addition to what I’ve purchased, I’ve managed to find a stash of old broken crayons to make new crayons on Freecycle, so I won’t have to pay anything for that.  My mom’s friend at work also gave us a Thomas the Train wooden train set, which we will give to Elijah instead of a kite (which he would be too little to fly anyhow).

Compare that to what my sister said she spent on her daughter’s Easter basket last year ($30).  This included a basket and grass, neither of which I am purchasing this year because we already have a basket (it was actually my basket all through childhood) and I’m reusing some paper grass that was in the bottom of a fruit basket my mom got last year.  When I told her what I was putting in Elijah’s basket, she was aghast.  ”No Peeps?  No Cadbury Eggs?”  Where the hell is she shopping?  I buy all this generic stuff and intend to make my own, and I’m already spending as much as she did when she had to buy a basket and Easter grass too?  I mean, I don’t think my shopping list looks that extravagant.  Is there anything I super splurged on?  The seeds, fine.  But we are going to get food out of them for the entire summer (hopefully) so really, two dollars a pack is a steal.

I think the fact that she can buy all that name brand processed stuff for a fraction of my generic home made stuff shows that there’s some economic injustice going on here.  Isn’t home made supposed to be cheaper? Shouldn’t you pay more for the luxury of having someone else premake something for you?  But, I guess when you take into account how much of our tax money goes to subsidize corn and soy, the two main ingredients in candy, you can understand how its clearly being sold for less than the cost of production.  My tax money is paying for my sister’s cheap basket.  I see now.

I’m not sure how environmentally friendly my basket is.  The chocolate in it is not fair trade or organic, it was probably grown and harvested by near slaves in horrible environmental conditions.  But really, there is much less of it in the basket I’m giving my son than there were in my baskets growing up.  The crayons will be an entirely free and recycled product, which is good, but the chalks are brand new.  The cookies will have very little organic ingredients, but they are almost certainly healthier than store bought cookies, because they don’t have all those crazy preservatives and ingredients no one can pronounce.  They will taste better also.  The eggs are plastic, and probably not a safe kind.  I know of no other alternative that I can open up and hide things in.  But the basket and the grass are both reused (the basket has been in use well over twenty years now, in fact), and the grass is recyclable and compostable.

I think he’s getting a pretty loaded basket for the price.  I think it could have been better environmentally, but this was the best I could afford.

This is not my yard, but it is last night's actual snow storm. I'm too lazy to post pictures of my real yard right now. My camera is in a whole other room, and I'm sore from shoveling.

Last night we had a bit of a snow storm roll through Colorado.  In Littleton, where I live, we got a little under a foot, not as bad as the weather men were calling for.

It is my understanding, based on a number of environmental and urban homesteading books that I read, that snow and rain that lands and melts on the pavement is not very likely to end up back in our ever shallowing water table.  For that reason, many of the environmental books I’ve read recommend tearing up your pavement and replacing it with something that allows more water to absorb back into the earth, such as brick work or gravel.  I don’t think my HOA would allow this, and honestly, I don’t know if that’s a project I’m willing to take on any time soon, so what I try to do is make sure I shovel all my paved areas and get that snow into my yard, rather than into the street.

Shoveling snow is hard work, and today’s snow was no exception.  It was heavy and wet when it fell from the sky, and in true Colorado fashion, by the time I got outside today to shovel, around 9:30 am, it was already so warm and sunny that the snow was starting to melt.  If I wanted to get that snow onto my lawn, I had to work quick.

And work quick I did.  Forgetting the bit where I accidently hit my son in the back of the head with my snow shovel and had to take a break to comfort him, I managed to shovel all my patio, driveway and corner lot sidewalk in just about an hour an a half.  I also got all the snow off my car, and shoveled my neighbor’s side-walk, just for good measure.  I was going to do my other neighbor’s too, but I was too sore.

I tried getting some slush out of my gutter, but that proved nearly impossible.  Slush is so heavy.

I’m very sore now.  I think this was a better work out than my usual Wednesday workout, climbing the stairs at Red Rocks Amphitheatre while holding my two-year old son.  I really hope this is the last snow of the year, but knowing Colorado, we’ll get some freak, late April storm.

I really want to start gardening.

This book might be good. Maybe he can explain how to use baking soda shampoo.

Normally, I buy organic, pthaylate and paraben (for information on why you want to avoid these chemicals, visit my other blog) free shampoo from a coop my friends and I from Holistic Moms Network are all a part of.  Its nice, because I can get the kinds of products sold at my local health food store for wholesale prices, and without paying for shipping.  This saves me quite a bit of money.

Unfortunately, even that amount of money I save has not been enough to make ends meet recently, so I have been experimenting with household products that I can use for shampoo.  I remember reading, a few years ago, that No Impact Man Colin Beaven uses baking soda for shampoo.  Lots of women in Holistic Moms do this as well, and swear by it, saying it leaves hair shinier and softer than regular shampoos and conditioners, and cures everything from itchiness to dandruff as well.  I thought it would be worth giving a try.

Well, my dear readers, I tried washing my hair with nothing but baking soda for a little over two weeks.  The first time I did it, the results were amazing.  My hair was soft and shiny, and it stayed clean for a whole week!

The next time I used it, my hair felt greasy and dull, and like there was dirt in it.  It was more than just unwashed hair feeling, it reminded me of the first time I rode on an ATV, and all the dirt clouded up behind me, and when I got off, my entire backside was covered in a fine, dirt dust.  The feeling that my hair retained the rest of the camping trip was just like it felt when I finished washing it the second time with baking soda.  Ewww.

This time, I felt it needed another washing right away, and so, the next day in the shower, I repeated my baking soda shampoo process.  I made a paste out of baking soda and water, rubbed it onto my scalp as best as I could, and rinsed vigilantly.

The results were the same.

I felt I had to keep trying.  It was my intention to try for a month.  But after a few more washes, I knew I couldn’t let my boyfriend see me with my hair in this state, so I broke down and used my shampoo.  I told myself that maybe, just maybe, shampoo was an area where it was best to spring for a professionally manufactured, organic, safe product.

But my bottles of shampoo kept getting emptier and emptier, and its going to be another month before I can afford to place an order for shampoo.

So now I’m experimenting with dry shampoos.

I had come across this concept once in high school.  I think I may have read it in a Seventeen magazine or something, that putting baby powder in your hair will absorb grease and make your hair look and feel clean and soft.  However, when I tried it with baby powder, it just made my hair look white and caked with baby powder.

Recently I was going through a book about making your own grooming products, and I came across some instructions for making and using dry shampoos.  The author recommended a number of common household products, such as corn meal and corn starch.  The idea is that you sprinkle this stuff in your hair, comb vigorously until it is all out, and as it leaves your hair, it will take grease with it.

The other day as I was doing my hair, I realized I got some of the coconut oil I use for lotion in my bangs, and they looked greasy and gross.  I did not have time to shampoo my hair again.  What would I do?  I thought about this dry shampoo concept and decided to give it a go with some corn starch.

It worked great!  I had to do a bit of brushing to get it out of my hair, but once it was gone, my hair was shiny, soft and clean.  It got me to thinking.  Could this method be used to lengthen the amount of time between hair washes?  I don’t think this stands a chance of replacing shampoo permanently, of course, but if I can draw out the amount of time between needed shampoos, then my shampoo would last longer and the cost of it will be lessened over time.

So, today I washed my hair with shampoo, and the next time it feels greasy, I’m going to use my corn starch trick, rather than shampooing it.  I will continue to shower every day, of course, I just won’t shampoo every time I shower (I don’t do that anyway, its more like every other time).  I’m going to see how long I can go between shampoos.  I will make sure to keep you all posted.

As for baking soda, you all can give it a try if you want to.  Lots of people love it.  Maybe its just not good for people with long, thick hair, such as myself.  Maybe I needed to be rinsing with vinegar (as some of the Holistic Moms said they do).  I don’t know.  I just know that I won’t be trying it again any time soon.

Anyway, when I was pregnant, I wondered, could one make cheese out of breast milk, and would vegans be okay with eating said breast milk cheese?  It was a silly question that I asked purely out of silliness, but a friend sent me an article saying that you could not make cheese out of breast milk because the proteins are wrong.

Well, apparently that article was wrong, because some dude in New York is making cheese out of his wife’s extra breast milk.

Breast milk cheese!

Let me tell you, I am so totally going to try this next time I have a baby and have enough milk to pump extra.  I’m going to do it just because its weird and I want to say I did.  But, also, it doesn’t get anymore local than your own breast milk, breast milk has a very low carbon footprint, and breast milk cheese would be significantly cheaper to make than cow’s milk cheese.

I’ll make sure to let you all know how it turns out.

Another reason to pick cloth over disposable: They're so much cuter!

Sorry I’ve been gone so long.  I’ve been busy as usual, and last week I got super sick.  Everyone in the house did, actually.  No fun.  I’m still getting over it, with a cough and a runny nose.  Yuck.  Complicating matters further is the fact that I’m trying to keep up with my other blog, All Natural, Single Mothering 101, because its going to be featured on SinglePregnancy.com, a site where I’m also going to be answering pregnancy and birth questions for single moms everywhere.

Today I want to talk about my progress cloth diapering.  I haven’t been as gung ho about cloth diapering as I said I would be when I started this project.  Mainly because I hate doing laundry.  Those disposable diapers are so tempting when you’re down to two clean cloth diapers and you don’t want to descend into the cavern that is your basement to do laundry.

But last weekend I ran out of disposables and have been too cheap and lazy to go buy more.  Mostly too cheap.  So I’ve been cloth diapering exclusively for the past week.  I even cloth diapered when Elijah and I went to go spend the night at my boyfriend’s house (he did not seem to mind, or even much notice, the difference, but then, Elijah only had wet diapers the entire time we were at my boyfriend’s house).

The problem I’m running into is that I seem to have less cloth diapers than I used to.  When I got my tax return after my son was born I bought 18 Bum Genius 3.0 diapers.  I had a few cloth diapers I had bought individually before then.  I used them for a while, then reverted back to Seventh Generation Disposables.  Now, I can’t seem to find all the cloth diapers I once had.  I know that I lost one when I left it at a Holistic Moms Network meeting (I’m sure the school where we have the meetings found the diaper and simply threw it away), but where did all the others go?  I’d say I’m missing at least six.

If you are thinking about cloth diapering a baby, I would recommend getting at least 20 diapers to start with.  You might want double that, for a baby under six months.  They go through a lot of diapers.  You have to change cloth diapers more frequently too.  It all depends on how much laundry you want to do, I suppose.  Next baby, I’m going to try to have 50 diapers on hand, so I only have to wash them once or twice a week.

More likely, I’ll go with a diaper service, which picks up your dirty diapers once a week and leaves you with fresh clean ones.  I’ll pay someone else to do the laundry for me, that would be awesome.  But I wonder what the environmental impact is of a diaper service over washing diapers yourself?  You have to factor in all the fuel the truck that delivers and picks up the diapers uses.  Hmmmmm …

But buying your own All-in-One cloth diapers is really expensive.  My stash of 18 cost over $300.  Sure, I can reuse them on the next baby, most likely, but that still leaves me with probably close to $800 worth of cloth diapers left to buy, if I want to get my ideal number.  I could go with prefolds (which are only about $2 a piece, compared with AIOs, which are closer to $15 a piece), but prefolds are a little more difficult to use than AIOs.  You have to learn to fold them, secure them (most people use plastic snappies now, instead of pins) and then put a waterproof cover on them.  What a pain.  With an AIO, all you have to do is velcro it.  It goes on just like a disposable diaper, all in one piece.  And you throw it in the washer, all in one piece (unless you have a pocket with inserts, like I do, then you have to pull the inserts out).  Easy peasy.

With a diaper service, you pretty much only get the option of prefolds, but at least then you’re not doing laundry.

You can buy diapers used, and buying used is the most environmentally friendly thing to do, because it means that you’re saving items from the landfill and stopping material from being used to produce that item.  But I’ve found that people tend to cling on to their AIOs and not sell them.  If they are, they’re selling them for so much I might as well purchase new.  Very frustrating.

For now, I’m not buying any more cloth diapers.  Elijah only goes through about five or six a day now, and I find myself washing a small load of them every day to keep up.  I’m hoping that what they say about cloth diapers is true, and he potty trains sooner for wearing them.

Check out this site to learn about buying used cloth diapers.

Diaper Swappers

Coturnix quail, an animal I would consider raising for meat and eggs.

Just as I’ve been thinking about whether or not quail would be a reasonable animal to raise for meat and eggs in my back yard, the opportunity to get some quail, for free no less, falls into my lap.

I posted something on the message boards of one of my Meetup.com groups, The Greater Denver Urban Homesteaders, asking if anyone in the group raised quail or rabbit, and if I might pick their brains on the subject.  I am a planner.  I’ve been thinking about a bee hive for almost a year now.  I figured meat animals might be a good project to start planning for, but I had no intention of getting started until perhaps 2011.

But low and behold, someone from the group contacted me to tell me that they raise quail, but they are moving and cannot take them with, and they would be willing to give the quail to a good home.  She was wondering if I would be interested.

Well, yes, I very much would be, but there’s the obstacle of my mother.

My mom knows of my desire for chickens, but is strongly opposed to them.  I don’t know if it would be possible to talk her into quail, but I think if it were, it would take some time (part of why I hadn’t anticipated starting this project until next year).  I just don’t know if I could talk her into it within a month.

Lets run down what appeals to me about raising my own animals for food:

Organic/ethical/sustainable meat is expensive.  I cannot afford to buy it, and don’t see myself affording it any time soon.  I would love a way to obtain it for cheaper, which is why I plan to learn how to hunt.  Growing my own on my own property would be another way to obtain organic meat for cheap.

I do not care for how animals live in conventional meat producing facilities.  I find it sickening.  I do not think there is something wrong with eating meat, but I do think its wrong to torture our food before we eat it.  Not only is it terribly inhumane, but animals raised in this fashion have been shown to produce meat and dairy products that are lower in nutritional value (particularly lower in Omega 3 Fatty Acids), and carry a greater risk of food borne illness.

If I were to raise and slaughter my own meat animals, I would know they lived a humane and happy life.  I would know they lived healthily, and therefore would produce the healthiest meat.  I would know they were killed quickly and with respect.  I would know their meat was handled in a way that ensured a level of cleanliness that meets with my own approval.

Lets run down what appeals to me about raising coturnix quail, specifically:

• They are smaller than chickens, and take up far less space.
• They are quieter than chickens
• They will likely be less noticeable and offensive to mainstream neighbors than chickens would be
• They are prettier than chickens are to look at
• They give you eggs.  While these eggs are tiny, not the kinds you want to make an omlet out of, they are still tastey and they can be sold to gourmet and Asian restaurants
• They taste good
• They reproduce quickly, so quick, in fact, they say that you almost have to eat them

I’m going to see if I can find a book on them at the library and find more ways to talk my mom into them.  What do you guys think?

The idea intrigued me.  What could I rescue from landfill hell to enhance my own life.  This dude was talking about getting food, good food, that’s been discarded from grocery stores.  He was talking about furniture, clothes, toys, etc.  I thought it might be worth looking into.  I’m not above going in a few dumpsters.  My friends and I once rescued a whole papasan chair from a dumpster behind a Pier One Imports, and to this day, we haven’t figured out what was wrong with it to make the store throw it away.

However, once I started reading this book, I was so annoyed by the author that it really turned me off to the idea of dumpster diving.  If you can get past his rants about how dumpster diving makes him better than everyone from rich people to the rural poor to the Amish, there are some interesting bits of info in this book.  Seventy five percent of it was just drivel, though.  I can’t believe this kind of stuff gets published.  I hope I can write a better book than that.

The worst part of this book was the truly offensive manner in which he talks about police officers.  He actually refers to them as “the swine patrol” on several occasions.  Yuck.  Hey, I’m not always a big fan of police officers, but I don’t have any beef with them either.  I think mostly they protect us, and mostly, they are good people.

This guy calls himself a Libertarian, but judging by his views, I’d say he’s closer to an anarchist.  But I digress.

I tried to stay really neutral to this guy so that I could take in the useful info, but here’s my problem with dumpster diving.  I don’t like the idea of invading people’s privacy (Hoffman reveled in all kinds of personal info he acquired on people he didn’t even know, and bragged about the possibilities for identity theft, and selling college papers to other college students to help them plagiarise), and I’m not the type of person who loves the idea of standing up to authority by breaking laws and telling police officers to shove it if they question me.

This is a topic I’d be willing to look further into, because the more we save from the landfill, the better, but I’d be eager to hear some less opinionated and more civil information on it.  Have any of you ever dumpster dived?  Tell me your stories!