The inaugural post

This year, when I wrote my resolutions for the year, one of the things I resolved to do was to think carefully about the items that I use, and to try to reuse things at least once rather than throwing them away or recycling them. In the days after I made this pledge, as I thought about the potential uses for things I would normally have thrown away or recycled, I quickly realized what an enormous task keeping this pledge would be. I was faced with a choice: give myself a break and water down the pledge, or really go for it. I've chosen, with some trepidation, to not only try to keep the pledge, but to push it to its limit (or, at least, to my limit).

I will be posting daily on my other fr(ECO)logy blog, fr(ECO)logue, giving the mundane details of my daily acquisitions, discards, reuses, and piles of potential reusables. This log is for transparency for those who want to see it. It is what I would otherwise be doing in my notebook. I'll be more likely to keep doing it if there is some chance of someone checking up on me.

I intend to use this blog for my thoughts and discussion of issues that come up along the way. So if you are interested in the project but don't care to know what I got in the mail or threw away today, this is the place. This blog will be personal; I'll continue to post about general news commentary, including stuff pertaining to ecology and environmentalism, along with essays about compacting, feminism, language, and anything else I feel like writing about at my main blog, the lucky achiever. I am also working on a website of some sort to centralize information about my project and all the things I learn this year about garbage, recycling, resources and resourcefulness, and creative reuse throughout the year.

I am posting this process in blogs because I hope doing so will keep me motivated, because I tend to think things through best by writing my thoughts down, and because I have a feeling at least a few people may find reading about this project as it happens interesting, thought-provoking, informative, or even inspirational. Feedback, support, and information from readers, along with comments from anyone who would like to call me a freak is welcome.