Friday, July 27, 2012

Small Successes: Slow and Steady

My attempts to reduce my waste while living at home have been met with a variety of reactions, from understanding to misunderstanding, from helpfulness to laughter and scorn.  When I tried to institute cloth napkins back in May, that last pair of reactions was the most prominent.  T thought it was gross to reuse them but wasteful to wash them if they'd only been used once (to clarify, at that point we had 8 napkins total, for 4 people).  Mom thought having to wash them was a pain in the rear.  Dad, after a while, confessed to me that he actually liked using them.  And more and more recently, everybody has used the cloth napkins.  As I've acquired more, I think their continued presence has helped my family feel like they're commonplace and ok to get dirty.  And sometimes everybody used paper ones and I would just silently exchange mine for cloth. 

But this. I came home Tuesday with a set of napkin rings and a some more new(ish) napkins from the thrift shop, and I looked at the middle of the kitchen table.  I realized that something was missing.  Can you tell what it is?


The paper napkin holder is empty.  I don't know when it was emptied, I think it may have actually been last week.  But it definitely stayed empty for at least three days.  Not much, but it's a start.

(This happened with reusable grocery bags as well, near the end of my high school days.  I bothered my parents to buy a few, and then kept bringing them along as often as possible, and now we have a fleet of them.  By the time the bag tax rolled around a year or so ago, we didn't even have to change our routine.)

Related to this, I've finally gotten around to getting napkin rings for the family.  I found a set of 5 wooden rings for 25 cents at the thrift shop, and have now decorated them with sharpies to distinguish each person's ring.

1 comment:

  1. My step-daughter came home from college and said she'd noticed that two kinds of people use cloth napkins: the very frugal, and the very wealthy. Thanks for sharing the peek at your own family! -MM

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