October.

For a few weeks now I end up sitting in the same Light rail car as a big man in large headphones, humming and talking to himself. His humming is so loud, long  and deep-in-the chest, it keeps all the passengers who have not heard it before confused by  the sound ' s origin, and when I first heard it myself I thought the train car was going off the rails.


Today's the coldest day of this semester, with drizzling rain and gusty winds developing as I am already waiting for my train at the stop. sitting in the car I catch myself thinking my shoes are two light and thin for such weather. This thought flows into trying to remember the last time I was wearing weather-incompatible shoes. Must be when working at La Reserve - I did have to take train and walk to and from train stations. Good times!.. Where did I keep my work shoes then? Must be my locker - yes, I did have a locker in the staff changing room. Was it also where I would keep my German study book for the times I arrived to work too early in the morning? Must be.


It's amazing how such details escape conscious mind for so many years - not that I needed to refer to them daily, and because I needed to constantly keep my mind clean for other... thoughts. But they've been somewhere deep down my memory all along. As I pass downtown, I take a different route to the building my class is at, and when glancing in the window of a hotel I walk by I see a team of waiters circled around a Maitre-d'  and realize they're going through their instructions, and their shift is about to begin, and it's going to be a pretty busy evening with such nasty weather outside.

Dear Chemists, Chemical Engineers, Environomental Scientists et al!

On behalf of that luckiest part of the present day human kind who live in permanent accommodation  - and therefore, have to run a household,  and who also have children - and therefore, deal with a number of items and objects meant to ease up the process of raising up children, I seek your help in inventing, creating and making available:

1. A THING working on neutralizing the chemical part in gels, powders, creams, liquids used either for house cleaning or for personal hygiene. When a toddler squeezes out shampoo on the carpet, scatters dishwasher detergent all over the kitchen floor - it would be great to... pick whatever you can and put it into a THING  to make the end product less harmless for the environment. If you need to dispose off of a 1/4 bottle of hair conditioner  that by no means work for you anymore - instead of flushing it all down the toilet, it would be much better to run it through the THING and minimize the overall amount of the chemicals run in the sewage waters because of waste. 
2. STUFF for turning the contents of the baby and (especially) toddler diapers into all-natural organic fertilizer. All you need to do is to throw  in a filled up  compostable diaper. Just imagine - a Diaper Genie size STUFF that stands near your changing table or in the bathroom and keeps those extra... few pounds a day from going into a landfill,  but rather to actually benefit land. Priceless for those who have an excess of used diapers at home, and their green thumb spouses' little garden in the backyard. 
3. A SOMETHING that composts kitchen waste of organic origin in matter of days. I believe works on the prototype that used bacteria were already carried out, but please - come up with a SOMETHING affordable and available to the middle class, kitchen-size and  fully baby proof.

To any Chemists and Environmentalists that are in fact genius scientists: is there any way to design an exothermic THING, STUFF and SOMETHING? On the household scale, we could all use some additional energy...

I'm sure for many this will be an easy and logical step to contribute a small improvement to the world by "starting with themselves". On my end, I am willing to volunteer for the projects as idea contributor and the final product tester ;)

Sincerely,

Rita.

Second postpartum recovery is complete:



Ran my first 5K postpartum - which technically indicates I'm back to pre-prenatal shape - without killing my ankles and lungs. And judging by the photo it only took me .02 mile to get my phone ready and document the achievement.