Hey, come over to the Green Phone Booth–I posted there today about some chemical-free pet care ideas!

Pet Care without Toxic Chemicals (and rescue organizations!)

Happy Friday!

Okay, up front I admit that we all like reading stuff that tells us what we want to hear.  I don’t want to be a vegetarian.  I tried it for six months a few years ago, and I wasn’t happy or healthy on it. And that was plain old veggie-ness; I still did dairy and cheese.  So anything that says “Yes! You can eat meat and not be an environmentally irresponsible person!” is something I’ll read and enjoy rationalizing.

But these are two interesting articles: Nicolette Hahn Niman’s op-ed piece in the Times entitled “The Carnivore’s Dilemma,” and David Friedlander’s “Vegetarian’s Rebuttal to ‘The Carnivore’s Dilemma,” on Tree Hugger.

In the former, Hahn proposes a moderate approach to meat-eating–eat a little, eat it occasionally, and when you do, make sure you select meat that’s ethically and responsibly produced. (Er…okay, as much as I love my free range chicken or occasional burger, one has to question the whole “raising living things to eat them” thing when talking about being “ethical,” but that’s an old argument I don’t want to go into.  There will be no winners.) (Though when looking for local grass-fed meat, I was a little creeped out by one farm which proclaimed “we treat our animals like our own children!”–eeg. Think about that. Shades of a bad John Carpenter flick.)  Hahn is a rancher who raises cattle, goats, and turkeys the right way–grass-fed and pastured.   And she points out–rightly–that given the problems with plant products transported all over the world (emissions) and the soy industry’s propensity for deforesting croplands, and it’s becoming harder and harder to guarantee onesself “ethically grown” soy (But not impossible.) , it’s not a given that eschewing meat will necessarily make one more environmentally responsible. 

Friedlander’s rebuttal is exactly on target, although it doesn’t seem to me to be much of  a rebuttal: he says the problem with Hahn’s article is that she compares industrial vegetarianism to small-farm omnivorism, saying that the latter has less impact on the planet than the former.  I personally don’t see why that’s a problem at all–people who give up meat to save the planet, assuming that giving up meat will help the environment, need to know that’s not necessarily true.  On the other hand, he has a point when he says that conscious veganism will always and forever have less of a carbon footprint than the most conscious meat-eating could ever hope for.  True enough.

I know I say it again and again and again–it’s not about adopting some sweeping lifestyle change. It’s about paying attention.  It’s about knowing what you’re eating, where it comes from, and what it costs–not just your wallet, but the planet and the community of humanity as a whole.  Read the labels.  Read the green blogs.  Eat locally. 

Oh, and don’t forget to see Food, Inc.

It’s sort of funny; you don’t always think about how much what you did and learned as a kid impacts who you grow up to be–the very template from which you operate on every level.

I started thinking about this “green journeys” question, and I thought about when our kids’ school went to waste-free lunches and I had to suddenly make that happen, and I thought about when I learned that I could make blankets and hats and mittens out of old felted sweaters without exercising the industry to actually knit them, and I thought about how Goodwill never wants my used shoes because by the time I’m done with them they are so battered as to be nearly useless…I thought about how I realized how much money we could save diapering my son in cloth for the last year or so of diaper use, how easy baby slings were to make, how the lotion I made myself made my skin behave better than the expensive store-bought stuff, and how proud I felt the first time I successfully grew my own tomatoes. But none of that is really the beginning.

I think if we’re going to talk beginning, we have to talk about the garden.  The front yard suburban garden at the house where I grew up.

It was pretty typical suburbia, all things considered.  Three different home designs in the whole big subdivision designed (unsuccessfully) to make it look like they weren’t cookie cutter houses. (It just looked like the baker had three different cookie cutters.)  Pretty trees, most fairly good-sized, since the area was pretty well established. Green manicured lawns. Except for our house.

My parents had torn up the whole front yard and turned it into a fairly large vegetable garden.  Not an elegant classy-looking one, either–this was rows and chicken wire fencing and big leggy plants all over the place, zucchini and yellow squash and tomatoes and raspberries (which the squirrels always seemed to eat) and God knows what-all else, since I didn’t eat vegetables much at all.  To my parents’ credit, we didn’t have enough of a backyard to have a garden there, so the front was the only place. 

All summer my mom tried to get us to eat zucchini and tomatoes.  (I remember this one particularly ubiquitous casserole; I think she basically just cut up a bunch of zucchini and tomatoes and threw them into a baking dish with some garlic and oregano, sprinkled grated cheese on it, and baked it.  It was really good the first, second, and third times she served it…but it got a little old after a while…)  My folks took care of that garden, with very little help from the kids, all year round.  My dad rented the rototiller every spring to turn the soil, hanging onto the thing for dear life, with his Mother Earth News baseball cap on his head.  They weeded.  They picked out seeds and planted and harvested and made us eat the vegetables, which we didn’t like at all.

There was always a compost jar in the corner of the kitchen. Dad would periodically empty it onto the big pile in the backyard.  And somewhere he’d get a load of cow manure every spring and dump it into the garden with some compost. That Mother Earth News hat wasn’t just a nod; he actually read the thing. (Now I read it too.) 

When our clothes no longer fit, or we stopped playing with any given toy, if there was still life in it, we gave it away; the idea of “throwing away” something that someone somewhere might eventually use was not in our vocabulary.  We never had the biggest coolest noisiest toys, but we had books.  Our family drove cars till they literally died: As of the mid-1980’s when I graduated from high school, we had three cars: a 1964 Volkswagen Beetle my mom had rescued from a trip to the junkyard and rebuilt herself, a 1982 Chevy Suburban, and a 1972 Dodge Polara–when people talk about a “land yacht,” they are talking about that old green Dodge.  ( The Dodge became mine; I christened her “Olivia Neutron Bomb.”)  My dad still has that Suburban, though the others have long since bitten the dust.

When we vacationed, we drove, we packed our own lunches to eat at picnic areas along the way (however longingly we kids might have looked at every McDonalds or Burger King sign we passed), and we camped and visited national and state parks.  I always assumed it was to save money (in which case the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree), but I now realize that our whole way of traveling was as low-impact, low-consumption, and low-garbage as we could possibly manage.  My brother used to comb the campground looking for discarded returnable bottles; he made an amazing amount of money one summer…

In a thousand little ways, my parents’ way of living–and thus teaching us how to live–set me firmly on the path to being someone who tries to pay attention to how my life and my family’s lives interact with and impact the world around us. 

And sometimes I wonder…what are my children learning from me?

This is a beautiful article…I highly recommend it. (Found at http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-13-no-time-for-tears-in-copenhagen/)

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NO TIME FOR TEARS IN COPENHAGEN

by Bill McKibben

COPENHAGEN—I’ve spent the last few years working more than fulltime to organize the first big global grassroots climate change campaign. That’s meant shutting off my emotions most of the time—this crisis is so terrifying that when you let yourself feel too deeply it can be paralyzing. Hence, much gallows humor, irony, and sheer work.

This afternoon I sobbed for an hour, and I’m still choking a little. I got to Copenhagen’s main Lutheran Cathedral just before the start of a special service designed to mark the conference underway for the next week. It was jammed, but I squeezed into a chair near the corner. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, gave the sermon; Desmond Tutu read the Psalm. Both were wonderful.

But my tears started before anyone said a word. As the service started dozens of choristers from around the world carried three things down the aisle and to the altar: pieces of dead coral bleached by hot ocean temperatures; stones uncovered by retreating glaciers; and small, shriveled ears of corn from drought-stricken parts of Africa.

As I watched them go by, all I could think of was the people I’ve met in the last couple of years traveling the world: the people living in the valleys where those glaciers are disappearing, and the people downstream who have no backup plan for where their water is going to come from. The people who live on the islands surrounded by that coral, who depend on the reefs for the fish they eat, and to protect their homes from the waves. And the people, on every corner of the world, dealing with drought and flood, already unable to earn their daily bread in the places where their ancestors farmed for generations.

Those damned shriveled ears of corn. I’ve done everything I can think of, and millions of people around the world have joined us at 350.org in the most international campaign there ever was. But I just sat there thinking: it’s not enough. We didn’t do enough. I should have started earlier.

People are dying already. People are sitting tonight in their small homes trying to figure out how they’re going to make the maize meal they have stretch far enough to fill the tummies of the kids sitting there waiting for dinner. And that’s with 390 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. The latest numbers from the computer jockeys at Climate Interactive – A collaboration of Sustainability Institute, Sloan School of Management at MIT, and Ventana Systems, indicate that if all the national plans now on the table were adopted the planet in 2100 would have an atmosphere with 770 parts per million CO2. What then for coral, for glaciers, for corn? I didn’t do enough.

I cried all the harder a few minutes later when the great cathedral bell began slowly tolling 350 times. At the same moment, thousands of churches across Europe began ringing their bells the same 350 times. And in other parts of the world—from the bottom of New Zealand to the top of Greenland, Christendom sounded the alarm. And not just Christendom. In New York rabbis were blowing the shofar 350 times. We had pictures rolling in from the weekend’s vigil, from places like Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, where girls in burkas were forming human 350s, and from Bahrain, and from Amman.

And these tears were now sweet as well as bitter—at the thought that all over the world (not metaphorically all over the world, but literally all over the world) people had proven themselves this year. Proven their ability to understand the science and the stakes. Proven their ability to come together on their own—in October, when we organized what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history,” there wasn’t a movie star or rock idol in sight—just people rallying around a scientific data point. Now the world’s religious leaders were adding their voice.

On one side: scientists. And archbishops, Nobelists, and most of all ordinary people in ordinary places. Reason and faith. On the other side, power—the kind of power that will be assembling in the Bella Center all week to hammer out some kind of agreement. The kind of power, exemplified by the American delegation, that so far has decided it’s not worth making the kind of leap that the science demands. The kind of power that’s willing to do what’s politically pretty easy, but not what’s necessary. The kind that would condemn the planet to 770 ppm rather than take the hard steps we need.

So no more tears. Not now, not while there’s work to be done. Pass the Diet Coke, fire up the laptop, grab the cellphone. To work. We may not have done enough, but we’re going to do all we can.

Spread the news on what the føck is going on in Copenhagen with friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, or smoke signals.

My “day job,” though it’s as much about evenings as days, is as a full time church musician.  (I work in a church big enough to pay me a living wage at it. (However, if you check out this article on CNNmoney.com, at number 4, that should tell you something…)  This time of year is incredibly intense, and everyone is overworked and a little crabby, and there’s generally very little time for pleasant little holiday family rituals. For that matter, there’s very little time for family, period.  Every year somewhere in the first week of December,  my husband and I give each other a kiss and say, only semi-jokingly,  ”good night, honey, see you on the 26th or so.”

Today is sort of the last hurrah.  It’s a Saturday, I have no morning meetings, I have no weddings to play, I just have to show up at about 4pm and I have nothing on the calendar prior to that.  So even though it is nearly 11:00am, the kids and I are still in our jammies.  We are watching “The Nutcracker” while the second batch of melt-and-pour soap is melting over the double boiler.  This morning is the last shot at regaining any sense of serenity and holiday peace before the insanity hits full force on Monday, when the final shove of choir rehearsals and booklet printing and making sure the cast of thousands knows what it’s supposed to be up to…

I discovered melt-and-pour soaps a couple Christmases ago at teacher gift time; there was a bit of a learning curve, but we’re much better at it now.  And both kids have different teachers from last year,  so I feel okay about doing it again. Since the early experiments I’ve bought soap molds and experienced a lot of trial and error, and I have something like six pounds of unmelted soap block sitting in the closet.  It’s a great project for kids, as long as the adult does the melting, because they can pour and stir and color and blend themselves.

So…off we go.  
 
This is a really good site for basic instructions, and here’s my own experiences:

Melt and pour soap base is available in a lot of places, but if you get it from, say, Michaels, it is a lot more expensive. (I’m still glad I did that for my first pound–it was a good way to ease into the process.) I think I paid about $10 for a pound-size soap block, which makes maybe 4 bars of soap depending on the size you use, which isn’t that much less than buying nice glycerin soap somewhere else. 

I honestly can’t remember where I bought the 6 lbs I have in my closet, but any internet search for “melt and pour soap” will give more hits than anyone can possibly need. www.goplanetearth.com/index.html has some good-looking prices and products; I’ll probably try them next. 

Just a few hints, after one has read the basic falling-off-a-log instructions:

Color: I bought three little bottles of soap coloring from Michaels, in the three primary colors, and I’ve managed to work within that palette so far.  One would think there’s a whole lot of variety to be found from mixing red, blue, and yellow, but somehow in practice…not so much. Probably with better colors I could get better results, but our first few bars of soap looked a bit like radioactive waste…

This batch, for 12 ounces of soap, we used 3 drops of red and 4 drops of yellow, which gave a fairly nice coral-pink.  The next batch Bear wants to be green, which unfortunately was the hue we never managed last time and wound up with the radioactive waste look, but we’ll give it a try…

Fragrance: Some websites have suggested about 1.5 tsp of essential oil per pound of soap, but in reality that’s going to depend a lot on what oils you use.  Peppermint overpowers almost anything, as does Tea tree…Lavender blends too quickly into the background, as does Clary, but Geranium Rose leaps to the forefront. They seem, to me, to be behaving differently in soaps than they do in ordinary aromatherapy blends, but that could be just my own impression.   Also, as nice as the spices and citruses may smell, it’s not a good idea to use them in skin care products, because they are sensitizing. (Sweet Orange in small amounts I admit i do use…but I also want to be clear when I say that that I know I’m going against other advice, and no way would I advise anyone else in that direction.)

For this batch, I went the easy route and am trying to use up some of a much too old bottle of “Peace and Calming” from Young Living Oils. (Note: the Young Living company has been at the center of a lot of controversy in the aromatherapy community, regarding questionable business practices and irresponsible medical advice that flies in the face of the research of the aromatherapy community at large–advice which, incidentally, involves the use of way larger amounts of the oils than is widely deemed safe. Every shopper must make his or her own choice, but I have chosen not to continue purchasing their oils and once what I have is gone I won’t be buying any more.)  I don’t know about its theraputic value, but this blend does smell very nice and ought to make a lovely soap.

Molds: Pretty much anywhere you can get soap base, you can probably also get molds.  but molds aren’t absolutely necessary, especially if you want to really go for the “natural handmade” look.  A loaf pan or square baking dish can work just as well, although you’ll want to test out quantity to make sure you have the right container for whatever amount of soap you’re using. (If you melt your soap in a Pyrex measuring container, you can then use a different cup to measure that same amount of water into the container you want to use and find out exactly how high your soap will come and thus how thick your bars will be.)

I swear by silicone baking dishes, and using silicone for soap molds is just as easy and wonderful.  Sometimes in hard containers the soap gets stuck and is hard to unmold (though usually a quick immersion of the mold part into hot water loosens it enough to get it out), but silicone is really easy.

Additives: One word; beware.  I had this lovely idea of bars of soap with lavender blossoms scattered through it, or oatmeal, or whatever…but unless one gets the soap base that’s designed to suspend things in it, it all falls to the bottom of the mold.  Which, actually, gives a very nice exfoliating thing on one side, but not the effect I was looking for. 

Final product:

My oval mold holds 3 4oz bars, so we made 4 different batches:
1. coral-colored shea butter soap base with “Peace and Calming”
2. green goats-milk soap base (sort of a nice green this time!) with lavender and roman chamomile
3. lavender goats-milk soap base with lavender and just a touch of sweet orange
4. yellow clear glycerin with lemongrass and a teeny bit of lemon and orange (I know, the citrus thing, but I couldn’t resist)
5. orange clear glycerin with bergamot mint and sweet orange

Our final experiment, made in a loaf pan, is single layers of the 6 (okay, yes, I know there are seven, but whatever) colors of the rainbow each with a different scent; you put in one layer, let it harden, then go to the second layer, and so forth.  Takes a while, but it should be very cool…

This makes for a really fun kid project–I love giving teachers things that the kids can actually participate in.  Plus we always make a couple extra bars for us, and the kids like washing with the soap they helped make.  So it’s a win-win all around.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furoshiki

Last week I posted an entry about creative gift wrap ideas; sometime a couple of days later I happened upon the actual name of the Japanese tradition whereby one wraps gifts in big fabric squares: Furoshiki. Armed with a new Google search word, I went after more information…

My highly educated and researched conclusion: this is WAY COOL!

I’ve found several sites with basic info and easy to follow video tutorials for using a fabric square to wrap a box, or two bottles, or two books, or to make a simple purse or grocery-type bag–this site has all of the above on one page. And here you can find a simple diagram (saveable as a pdf file) with the largest number of different wraps I’ve seen anywhere…(That diagram is below, but the source site is the one I’ve linked to above.) Sites that sell furoshiki also often have instructions on the sites–not as sexy as the videos, but perfectly good as far as I can tell. (The one I’ve linked to above has a whole lot of different options…)

I mean, think about it…how much money have I spent on those ridiculous overpriced gift bags over the years?  Buying a yard of sale fabric and taking the time to hem it (and, though this hardly fits the Japanese model, finding a nice knit or something that won’t even need hemming would save even more time) would save a good bit of money over time and also mean the recipient would gain a nice piece of fabric; especially for children gifts; it’s amazing to me what my kids can do with a piece of cloth and how much mileage they get out of it.

So: gift wrap and gift bags out: Furoshiki fabric squares in.  Easy trade, in my opinion.

from favecrafts.com

Hey, these look cool!

Every other CD recycling craft I’ve seen always looks sort of cheesy, like “Okay, what the hell can we do with all these used CD’s”, ya know? But I like this!

Directions can be found at http://www.favecrafts.com/Ornaments/Beaded-CD-Ornaments.

Anyone else have any cool things to do with used CD’s?

Food Inc., for those who don’t know about it, is a documentary about the American food system, how it works, who runs it, and how that impacts almost everything about our lives–not to mention the lives of people all over the globe.

Like many green blogs, the bulk of my readership is other greenies, which is sort of too bad since I’m still sort of at Greenness 102 level and most of them are way better at it than I am.  And I suspect most of them have already seen this movie. (If you haven’t, GO SEE IT.  NOW.) (Although if you read Grist.com and/or La Vida Locavore, and have read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation, there won’t be a whole lot of brand new stuff you didn’t know.  But somehow seeing it all at once over a couple of hours hits hard and makes you mad all over again…)

But if you haven’t, if you’re someone who honestly, like me not very many months ago, never really thought to ask where our food comes from and how it gets to the supermarket, who grows it, how they live and what they have to do to keep their families fed, you need to see this.  Not as a guilt trip–to be very blunt, I expected that watching this movie would make me feel guilty.  It didn’t make me feel guilty, it made me feel screwed with.  It made me feel deceived and lied to and treated like a commodity, and if there’s a feeling of guilt, it’s side by side with a feeling of anger that Certain People have made me into part of the problem without asking my permission. What this movie shows is unbelievable. And yet completely believable.

See this movie.  Put it on your Neflix queue, find it at the video store, whatever. But see it.

My daughter’s knuckles are beginning to be a perpetual shade of dark pink, and they are sort of scaly and are itching and hurting her.  My own elbows are beginning to look like a reptiles abandoned old skin. My husband’s hands make the rest of us look like a Palmolive commercial.  We’re a mess.  Chicago winters somehow manage to keep this combination of damp and dry that is awful on the skin, and I’ve just in the past week realized it’s time to suck it up and move into the winter skin care routine.

My last post at the Green Phone Booth was about making lotion–a really fun and cool project, and honestly the end product is well worth the trouble. But if one just plain doesn’t have the time and/or ingredients, honestly, you can do just as well using the ideas I posted some months ago about easy DIY facial moisturizer–I just have a little pump bottle (recycled from oil I’d purchased–any well-cleaned cosmetic or hand soap pump would work) by the sink, filled with plain old grapeseed oil from the kitchen and scented with a little lavender essential oil (maybe 10-15 drops per ounce of grapeseed–though even this is optional).  After my ridiculously hurried morning shower, which I take during the window between getting the kids dressed and when my husband comes upstairs to brush his teeth, I almost-dry off and then smooth a little oil over my legs, elbows, and hands while my skin is still just a little damp. Then before the oil has time to completely soak in, I smooth my slightly-oily hands over my face and neck. And I’m done.   Literally over the course of a week my skin is back to normal–and I swear, this entire process takes under 30 seconds. If you take longer, your skin dries, and it doesn’t work as well.  The premise here: lotions and creams are basically oils and waters mixed together through special techniques and added ingredients (because, you know, the whole “oil and water don’t mix” thing requires them).  The oil helps the water not just evaporate off the skin.  If you skip the mixing-and-emulsifing step and just apply the oil when the water is already present on your skin, the added ingredients aren’t necessary.  And oil on its own in a bottle keeps longer than oil and water together, is less prone to going bad, and needs no bizarre chemicals to not get gross.  Eventually it goes a little rancid, but that takes a long time.

I’m training my kids, when they go to the bathroom or wash their hands before meals, to automatically squirt a little oil onto their slightly damp hands and smear it around on their hands and knuckles. My daughter’s knuckles are already evening out and not bothering her.  It’s a good thing.

Seriously, this is the easiest easiest easiest avoid-buying-expensive-chemically-cosmetics-but-get-the-same-or-better-result thing I’ve ever happened on.  It’s not as clever or “wow Jenn’s such a domestic goddess” as some of the schmantzy stuff I try to think of to blog about (I happily inhabit the island of self-delusion in my little cabin of denial), but wow it works.

Okay, the blog posts will probably start getting more and more sporadic as the weeks go on, since more of my former computer time is apt to become crafting-gifting-making time between now and the 25th.

So here’s what I’ve got going (plus the things in the hopper for folks who I know stop by here every now and again!):

For my daughter, I did finally bid for and win on ebay several yards of 100% wool flannel at a really good price.  It’s in the washer fulling as we speak.  (Fulling or felting is when you intentionally wash wool in hot water and shrink it down so it’s tighter and softer…in this case, also less itchy.)  I actually got enough flannel for two nighties, so I’m making one for me too.  This will be seriously warm–maybe too warm, but what the hey.  So that’s two nightgowns.

(The only drawback is that the wool flannel felted a little better than I expected it to–I’d done a swatch as well, but that didn’t do as well–and it’s almost too heavy for a nightgown now…so I may instead learn how to make bathrobes. I’m even thinking of adapting the flannel nightgown pattern I have to make a big flowy robe that ties just at the front top; I know I’d wear it, I have to think about whether my daughter would.  This is good fabric, I love it. I know I could have left it un-fulled, but honestly with nightgowns for these two mess-prone women, I don’t want something that’s going to be high maintenance on the laundry front, and once you’ve done everything you can to a piece of wool, it’s fairly indestructible.  Look at Braveheart.) (By the way, historical costumers laugh in derision at that movie…but the whole kilt thing is fairly ingenious, when you think about it…)

I’m also working on a little patchwork blanket for each of the kids–one made out of cut up jeans for my son and one made out of felted sweater squares for my daughter.  I’m currently experiencing a little two-birds-with-one-stone goodness; I was looking for wool sweaters in the thrift stores in different shades of red and pink, but mostly what I found was white and cream ones.  Only one pink sweater, in a very pale shade. (And I had a few  red ones from last year, three different shades.) So just for the hell of it, I washed one of the white sweaters in the machine with the bright red brand new wool flannel, and now I have a lovely bright pink sweater.  (Since I was “dying” to experiment. ) Very cool.  So now I have some really nice contrasting colors to make squares out of, hopefully enough for a small throw blanket for her.  Jeans will be no problem–I’ve been saving the jeans my son busted the knees out of for a few years now, plus the ones my husband has trashed.

Both blankets will be backed with colorful flannel–my son’s in rockets and planets and stuff, and my daughter in butterflies.

I’m also planning on making cloth napkins for the family, as a gesture of hope that we can start to eliminate some of our daily paper use–if I can make each of us several napkins in a person-specific print–butterflies for my daughter, sunflowers for my son, and who-knows-what for each of the grownups–we can at least use them for meals and toss them in the wash at the end of the week.

I have some jeans bags in the works too–way better than the ones I attempted last year; these should be very cute.  But as I said, no photos, since some recipients might read this blog…

Other than that, there are the melt and pour soaps, and some folks will doubtless get jars of applesauce and apple butter, though I haven’t had the chance to make any more since the first batch.  I also have more nuts and dried fruit than I know what to do with, so I may make a few batches of granola as well.  Nice consumable gift the kids can help with.  And mulling spices.

I got to listen to a friend tell of his Macy’s nightmare today, of long lines and incompetent and/or rude sales people, and I felt only slightly smug but deeply relieved that I just don’t. go. to. the. mall.

At. all.

Sigh…