Sunday, February 3, 2008

Thinking about not being wasteful...

Had another weird pondering today. Been full of weird ponderings lately. Must be mercury retrograde. The event that spawned it was Ron pouring a bunch of extra syrup on Orion's pancakes accidentally this morning. For some reason, I had a flashback to age eight. I had this friend I adored, but she did one thing that drove me crazy. When she would spend the night, we usually had pancakes or French Toast in the morning, and she would DROWN her whole plate in syrup. Invariably, there would still be a giant pool of the sticky stuff when she was done, and it just bugged the heck out of me she would be so wasteful! Um, yeah, I was like eight. What the heck?

Now, my parents were the king and queen of thrifty, and it wasn't until I got much older I found out this is a Scottish stereotype LOL! I don't think I share many of their other worldviews, but I guess this one really stuck. Now I am proud of it as I feel it has morphed into more of an environmental stance. Granted, sometimes I am a bit rigid about it, but at least I feel good about what is behind it. For my parents, I think it was more about being children of the depression, although I did get the sense from them it was just the right thing to do as well. My dad became a very successful engineer, so it was never about the money when I was growing up, yet he still carefully put each and every rubber band around the kitchen door knob - hey, I always knew were to find them!

The thing I couldn't help wondering about was if this was some innate part of my personality or if it totally came from my parents. I know I was turning shampoo bottles upside down and saving rubber bands from asparagus bundles long before I really thought about it being connected to the environment. Anyway, it was a trip to have this flashback as I have been thinking about my antiwastefulness alot these days. Can you say Michael Apted?

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