Clean and green

Another day with the vacuum cleaner and a duster, this time tidying up the fireplace in our back room.  It's a long brick thing which easily becomes a dumping ground for books and knick-knacks and dust.  Anyway, all clean now.  I even polished the leaves on the houseplants.

The Girl helped out a bit with some window-cleaning.  The Boy was not available: he went out for a sleepover last night and didn't come home until this evening.

Meanwhile, outdoors it was so warm today that in the time between me driving into work with the Man in the morning and picking him up tonight, all the lawns on our street turned magically green.

Multi-faceted day

I have blogged before about cleaning our chandelier.  OK, so it's been a while - the urge doesn't strike me often - but today I had all that glass down once again for a good old wash and polish. Spring cleaning fever really has me in its grip, apparently.

The clean chandelier looked nice enough in the daytime, but wow - look how it sparkles at night!

Also today, a family trip to the Huyck Preserve.  We'd avoided it all winter, remembering how treacherously icy it can be in that season.  Even with temperatures in the high 70sF this afternoon (seems like we're doing that two-days-of-spring-then-fast-forward-to-summer thing) there was still ice around, and the lake has a long way to go before it's swimmable.  But the waterfall was impressively rapid, and the woods were pretty, and there were signs of wildlife - we surprised a snake and I saw a couple of chipmunks.

Changed tastes, changed states

It being spring, today I felt moved to do some cleaning.  Windows, tile-work, doors, cupboards...everything needs a good going over, so this is going to be a long work in progress.

I finally threw out my collection of souvenir Marmite jars which, over the course of nearly seven years, had been gathering dust on the kitchen windowsill.  There's just one active jar left, but actually I think it's more than a year since anybody in this house ate any Marmite. Life is all about moving on, isn't it?  Speaking of which, if you are curious about how our friends the Exiles are getting on, you can now find them here - blogging from their new home in Maine. Happy unpacking, you guys!

No end of good causes

I spent much of the day at a Fair Trade conference at Siena College, which as usual was interesting and encouraging. The first presentation was by four students who had recently visited FT projects in Guatemala, and they shared their enthusiasm and excitement about all they'd experienced. Then I attended a panel discussion on ethical food sourcing, and over lunch there was a speaker from a company that's trying to produce ethical and healthy cosmetics (in the USA, cosmetics are virtually unregulated.  Whereas in Europe 1,300 substances are banned for health and environmental reasons, in the US all but 11 chemicals are permitted, and labelling rules are lax).

I came away with plenty to think about.

Meanwhile, the Girl and some of her friends spent a Day of Silence at school to draw attention to anti-LGBT bullying.  I'm proud that she cares about this issue, enough to want to take a stand.

Budding architect?

It has been a beautiful spring day here, and I managed two walks - one at Five Rivers after another meeting there, and one around the neighbourhood where I saw definite signs of leaf buds appearing on the trees. It is an exciting time of year.

And I've been busy otherwise with one thing and another, including taking the Boy to buy supplies for his latest project, a scale model of the Parthenon.

But let's face it, we've all been there: I had one of those evenings when I just wanted to make leprechauns.

All in the planning

I had a bit of a fair tradey day, starting with my friend M.  We work together on the annual Black Friday FT Market, and we were discussing some ideas we have for promoting the event. Although the market is months off, we're planning to do some legwork now in the hopes that it will pay off later with more people attending.  One thing is to do the rounds of some local churches and try to get them enthused about the FT movement in general.

Partly with that in mind, I later spent some time trawling Google, and learnt that Pope Francis carries a cross made specially out of materials fairly traded from Honduras.  He's quite the dude, isn't he, that pope?

This afternoon there was skating for the Girl in Troy.  I sat up in the bleachers planning a World Fair Trade Day (May 10) event with kids' activities, which could be fun.  I've booked a room in the library and hopefully a few people will drop in, if only for some free food.

Fundraising and fun-sizing

Friends of Five Rivers is preparing to launch a fundraising appeal - we're going to be inviting people to make donations in support of the Guided School Program.  Today we had a second morning (yesterday was the first) stuffing and addressing envelopes to be mailed out later in the week.  I was working with some of the Board members that I know best (we've worked on a few projects together) and we spent a cheerful few hours together.

The afternoon was quieter.  The Boy insisted on a trip to Price Chopper after school.  We cleaned the store out of his favourite yogurts, which are on special offer at the moment.  And somehow he managed to sneak the world's largest packet of Cape Cod Potato Chips into the trolley when I wasn't looking - as he would term it, a "fun size pack" (because what's so fun, in fact, about those one-bite-and-they're-gone tiny packs of treats that usually go by the name of fun size?).