“Where’d you get a name like that?”

“Oh, so you married into the name, where’s your husband from?”

The bill . . . is bringing thundering bad publicity that will echo for years to come. It will lead to lost economic-development opportunities, lost tourism and lost opportunities to expand our trade and commercial ties with Mexico.

I guess I’m “lucky” because I “pass”. You won’t know I’m actually Hispanic and Indian to look at me. There’s some German and Irish in me, too – that’s the “pass” part. Because it’s not as if there ever were any white people coming over here a few hundred years ago.

Maybe I should say “usually pass” – I’ve been pulled over driving a vehicle that dared to be 10+ years old in Beemer/Lexus land. Vehicle was borrowed, plates out of date, so the pull over wasn’t specious by any means. But it was kind of weird to pass a cop car going south while I was going north, and have it change lanes, pull a u-turn and follow me until a reason to pull me over was found. And of course he had to know where I was going, why I was there, and who I was going to see. I didn’t know any better and just answered his questions. Weird to be experiencing things my parents and grandparents experienced a lot first hand that I’d only heard stories about.

Aaarrrrrgh. Maybe this will fare better than Hilibel and ruled unconstitutional.

I’ve got tea bag wrappers. No reason to save them, but they smell so nice. And I came up with a use for them. But not the time to use them in.

I’ve got old mailing envelopes. Some can be reused, some can’t. The “can’ts” can be reused in other ways, but I want to do more research on Tyvek before I get into it. I had hoped to have a nice long piece about Tyvek tonight, but I was thwarted by bad javascript. :( I understand DuPont wants to capture information about their users, but should I really have to fill out tons of personal information to read a PDF about the Tyvek life cycle? And I still don’t have the PDF. I’ll have to wait for a sales professional to call me.

Not sure why I’m still stuck in “Depression” mode, as in The Great. The news says the economy is picking up, but the news also failed to anticipate the crash. Maybe it’s less GD-save-twist-ties-and-bread-wrappers mode and more awareness of the general wastefullness of our lives and how to reduce it.

Part of it, I think, is that a local city is having a contest for ideas to generate revenue. Great, I’m full of good ideas, I submitted one for taxing plastic shopping bags. Then I did a search on all the words in the rules of the contest – they want to raise revenue without raising taxes. Um, duh. What are they thinking? Should I suggest we draw a circle on the ground, throw all the money up in the air, and whatever the city wants, it keeps?

My friends who are voting (and not eligible but talking about) on the Seattle “bag tax” pointed out that they use those bags for every day garbage. Most of them cloth diapered, or have kids out of diapers, and don’t really create a lot of garbage. For them, it would be the loss of garbage bags, free garbage bags … but on the other hand, we’ve been paying for them all along – we’re just noticing it more.

I guess I’m just all over the place tonight. I’ll try for coherent in the morning. Anyone got any creative reuses for “trash” to share?

Then I met the hub, and we started our little family; I’d have time while on maternity leave! Nope.

I’d have time on the next maternity leave! (Insert laughter here.)

Maybe when they were all in school! (Well …)

Even launching this blog a few years later than even my most optimistic projections was part of the plan. But life and my own schooling have slowed my time table a bit.

And now I’m hearing that legislation to provide safer toys, clothes, and child care materials is coming on line. Great! I’ve been looking at joining various trade groups to make sure anything I produce is safe. They are voluntarily or self-regulated; we can see by the results of importing some voluntarily regulated toys.

However, as I and others read, this pretty much puts small toy makers, home craft industries out of business. I’d love to sell you a cute little doll I designed, or a lunch bag, or a diaper, but I have to test each item for lead and certify it because I’m not allowed to rely on third party certifications or allow you to sign a waiver.

And no matter how cute and fancy it is, I don’t think you’ll want to pay $4,013.95 for it. Plus shipping. And you know what’s gone on with shipping prices these days. Yeesh.

Various people have claimed that nothing specifically states diapers, clothes, toys, either hand made or resold new goods (so much for reselling overstock toys for profit later in the year after you clean out the local Target Dec 26th). Others claim this does cover diapers, clothes, toys, both hand-made in small-scale production and re-sale of other’s manufactured goods. Half the problem is the ambiguity and lack of plain-text language and decoding. But I’ve seen more that points toward shutting down a huge cottage industry than away from it.

Fire up your favorite search engine, find out more about CPSIA and how as thrown together it may to kill your favorite etsy store or eBay seller. Then DO something. Pick out a couple of the things that matter – this retroactive legislation is meant to protect, but it also effectively over-burdens small businesses. Pick out some solutions – third party manufacture certifications okay, help in the costs of testing for small businesses. Put them in a short letter to your representative and get your voice heard.