A New Source for Bulk Tea (and Coffee)

I've bought bulk tea in several places before: my local coffee shop, 4th St CoOp, and Teavana.  The first two have a limited selection, and the latter is very expensive.

So I've been wanting to check out McNulty's Tea & Coffee Co. for a while now, and I finally got down there before I left for Christmas.

(from the McNulty's website)

I was impressed when I walked in.  The store is small, but packed with teas.  The walls are lined with boxes of tea, but there are also dozens of glass jars filled with loose leaf teas.  It was like heaven. 

(from the McNulty's website)

Oh, and there's a ton of coffee behind the counter.

I bought a quarter of a pound of their China Keemun tea. It cost $4.  Teavana's "Capital of Heaven Keemun", which is hands-down my favorite tea, costs $18 for 2 oz.  McNulty's admittedly wasn't as good as Teavana's (it was missing the smooth sweetness that Teavana's has), but it was still alright.  For the 9x price reduction, I'm ok with it. 

While I can't personally comment on their coffee's quality, the gentleman behind the counter was very helpful in picking out some coffee to give my Mom for Christmas. I got her the El Salvador Las Colinas (fair trade) coffee, and she tells me that it's delicious.

Celebrating a Side Effect

I know I'm supposed to have made a New Year's Resolution two days ago, but I didn't.  I mostly stopped making them because like most of this country I don't actually keep them.  Nevertheless.  I'm celebrating, because I've made progress on something I'd almost stopped thinking that I could.

I've lost 20 pounds since I moved to NYC.  I've never been able to get to this weight, in all the time I've been trying - I haven't weighed this since middle school.  Early middle school. 

I'm celebrating this because it mostly happened by accident.  I haven't been to the gym since I graduated.  I didn't pick a fancy diet.  I haven't counted calories or anything. It happened because I changed my lifestyle. 

I started focusing on where my food was coming from.  Less packaged food means less snacking and less nasty things going into my body.  More Greenmarket food means more fruits and veggies and things that taste good all on their own.  Conscience-easing meat means less meat.  Seeking different proteins means more variety in my diet.

Plus, I moved to the city.  I walk everywhere (or take the subway, but still I walk a lot).  I walk at least a mile as part of my round-trip commute every day.  I try to walk beyond that whenever I can, although since it got cold and life got crazy that hasn't happened (and most of this weight loss was early in the semester, when I was making an effort to take extra walks).

Also, city food is expensive, so I don't eat out very often.  That means I haven't been eating restaurant portions every day, and I haven't eaten the meaty, often-fatty foods I have trouble resisting when I eat out.  Plus - no access to all-you-can-eat at the dining hall, and no late-night restaurant that accepts dining dollars.  Bonus. 

I've stayed steady at this weight for about a month now (I think).  Probably a combination of plateauing, eating poorly in December, and it being Winter (our bodies naturally try to store up food for the winter), so the fact that it didn't go up was a pleasant surprise.  I'm going to start going back to the gym this semester because I need some aerobics in my life again, and I'll probably start to lose again.

And my favorite part is still that this was effectively a side effect.  This happened because I wanted to go to this graduate school, because I wanted to live a more sustainable life, and because I wanted to be more careful with my finances.  When I focused on those goals, weight loss happened on its own.  Now a healthy BMI is in sight.  I'm celebrating :)

Alternative Wrapping Paper

I came home Saturday with a suitcase full of presents and the knowledge that I didn't want to use any traditional wrapping paper this year.  My plan was just to use the comics section of the newspaper.

Instead I wound up getting a little bit crafty.  Last week, Dogs or Dollars mentioned a tutorial about making your own bows.  So I dragged out a bunch of old magazine pages I had saved from grade school (I'm a sort-of-recovering pack rat...) and got to work.

I slightly changed the tutorial because of the size of my magazine pages.  I used 3 10.75" strips, 3 9.75" strips, and 2 8.5" strips, all 0.75" wide, plus one 3.5"x1" strip.  And I put the bows together with a glue stick, instead of double-stick tape.  I think if I do this again, I either need to use more glue or a different kind of glue, since a lot of them fell apart later...

I was only able to wrap a few presents in comics pages - it might have worked better if I had told anyone at home about this a few weeks ago.  Instead I just had two Sunday funnies and one weekday comics page.  So I also wrapped presents in brown paper bags and put one in a box.

Looking through those old magazine pages, I found a bunch of animal pictures,  so I decided my young male cousins didn't need bows.  The Star Wars-obsessed 10-year-old got everyone's favorite 'droids :)

All in all, I'm pleased. Tape is still involved in the wrapping, so it's not totally plastic free, but basically everything else involved was destined for the recycling bin.  The gift tags were made from a piece of pastel paper I've also had laying around since high school.  I've already given some of the comics+magazine bow presents, and they didn't get many comments, so I guess that means no one thought they were weird?

Reusing Yogurt Containers

Thus far, buying yogurt has proved to be one of the big sticking points in reducing waste.  I haven't yet found yogurt in a reusable container, and NYC doesn't recycle any plastic besides bottles.* 

I started eating yogurt a lot last year - who knew I could really love it when you get rid of all that fake sugar and flavoring? Anyway.  Nothing beats yogurt and granola for a quick, simple breakfast. 

I buy a big container from a dairy at the Greenmarket every week or two.  They started to stack up on my shelf because I figured I would find a place that would take them, i.e. the Gimme 5 program.  That hasn't happened, although I will take some home at Christmas (my parents' county recycles all numbers).

In the meantime, though, I've been using them as bulk-buy containers.  They're lightweight and stack together, which means they're easy to carry, and when I get home I just wash them. I've even used them to store some foods that don't spoil fast and that I eat fairly quickly, like oats, brown rice, and pasta.  I sharpie the food, cost, and tare onto the lid to make life easier on the volunteers at 4th Street Food CoOp. 


*http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/resources/plastics_collection.shtml