Waste food? Me? Never!

This week's Change the World Wednesday challenge is to waste no food during the week. Whenever I see people talking about food waste I feel a bit smug. I don't waste food - I'm the queen of leftovers, me! But then I had to admit to myself that there were two clementines in the fruit bowl that had to be thrown out because they were going rotten. And come to think of it, there was that time last week when I made cheese straws with leftover pastry and forgot about them so they burned. That captures two areas where I could improve - buying too much fruit/not eating it quickly enough (it tends to be citrus fruit) and letting things burn in the oven.

At the weekend I begged some cooking apples from a friend to make mincemeat (and consulted her on the recipe. I'd volunteered to make mince pies for a village event without really thinking about the fact that I've never made them before). I only wanted one or two, but she'd given me nine before I could stop her. Two went in the mincemeat (which after a couple of days is looking and smelling very much as it should, which is a relief), leaving seven sitting in a bag.

They were windfalls but even so, it would be a shame to let them go off. As the were windfalls, some of them were bruised and starting to go bad already, so I'd have to use them quickly. Ian doesn't like stewed apple, so it's a bit of a challenge thinking of ways to use cooking apples. I decided that the best thing to do would be to stew the lot and freeze it, so that's what I did.

When I'm freezing sauces that are essentially ingredients rather than a main part of a meal, I prefer to freeze it in the ice cube tray so I can take out just as many cubes as I need. They also thaw more quickly than a bigger block. Seven apples-worth of sauce were going to take several goes of the ice cube tray, though. Then I opened a cupboard and spotted my new chocolate moulds (inspired by Susie) - they'd do nicely. When I opened the freezer I saw another silicone tray that I'd forgotten about, this one with heart-shaped moulds. So now I have seven stewed apples freezing in a variety of decorative shapes.

Stewed apple in several trays, ready for freezing. It tastes better than it looks.

I still don't know what I'm going to use it for, but at least now it's preserved and as an added bonus, not in a bag on the kitchen floor.

Oh, and those bits of beef fat that I forgot to put in the fridge last night? Pebble didn't think they were wasted!

Choosing light bulbs

As part of my ongoing mission to reduce our electricity consumption, I've been using low-energy light bulbs for years. We still have a few of the old-style incandescent bulbs in rooms where we switch the light on only briefly (i.e. the loo and bathroom) because the low-energy ones take a while to get going (actually, the newer ones probably aren't too bad. Ours are mostly quite old). This chimed nicely with last week's Change the World Wednesday challenge, which was to replace at least one incandescent bulb in the house with a low-energy bulb.

Having said that we only have old fashioned bulbs in rooms where they're switched on briefly, I have to confess I wasn't telling the whole truth there: We still had halogen bulbs in the kitchen. We'd been meaning to replace them with LED bulbs, but had had trouble finding any in local shops. By coincidence, in the same week as the challenge, one of the halogens blew and Ian ordered a set of four LED bulbs online (they're nowhere near as expensive as they used to be, by the way).

LED bulbs replacing halogens in our kitchen

So, challenge met with zero effort on my part! I have to say, we don't like the new bulbs very much. They're a very cold light and, being so directional, make the kitchen seem much darker than with the same amount of light more evenly spread around. I'm sure we'll get used to them in time.

This isn't the end of the story, though. The challenge prompted some very interesting discussions of the pros and cons of different types of light bulb, both in comments on the original blog post, and in linked blogs. In particular, Argentum Vulgaris had quite a lot to say about the cons of CFLs (compact fluorescent lights - like the old fluorescent tubes, but smaller), following up his earlier post on the same subject. I was quite shocked to learn that there are lots of reasons not to like these increasingly ubiquitous bulbs, and set about doing some research. Here are the various objections and what I've learned about each one.

1. They contain mercury. Do they? Well I never knew that. Not only do they contain mercury, but the way they produce light it by vapourising mercury. This poisonous chemical is their very essence! While the mercury is safely contained within the bulb, this may not be a very great concern, but what if one breaks? Mercury vapour is not something you want to be inhaling. Luckily, it turns out that the concentrations of mercury vapour in the air that might result from breakage are nowhere near high enough to do you any harm (though I probably still wouldn't bend over to clear one up straight after it had broken, just to be on the safe side).
   
   That's not the only concern, though. It seems that the main worry about mercury is that, once released into the environment, it gets into the food chain and particularly builds up in fish (presumably not good for the fish, though no-one seems terribly worried about this), which we then eat (not good for us - a major concern). So if all these CFLs that we're now fitting in our houses end up in landfill, will they release a lot of mercury pollution into the environment? One answer that I came across in various places is that the amount of mercury they'll release is outweighed by the savings in emissions of mercury from coal-fired power stations. That claim has to be worth a bit of investigation.
   
   First fact: Coal burning is the biggest human-generated source of mercury in the atmosphere. There are non-trivial amounts of mercury involved here. Estimating how much is tricky, though, because coal is not a pure substance - it's a mixture of all sorts of stuff, varying from place to place. The amount of mercury in coal varies enormously. I did manage to find some estimates, though: The amount of mercury in coal varies from 0.012 mg/g to 33 mg/g, of which 90% is released into the atmosphere. The next question is: How much coal is burned to generate one kWh of electricity? That answer is fairly easy to find: It's 0.36 kg, or 360 g of coal. Using the very lowest figure for amount of mercury in coal, we can calculate that generating 1 kWh of electricity by burning coal releases 3.9 mg of mercury into the atmosphere. Coincidentally, that's almost exactly the same as the amount of mercury in a CFL bulb.
   
   That means that if you can save just one kWh of electricity with your CFL bulb, and if your electricity comes from a coal-burning power station burning the very cleanest coal, then the CFL is releasing less mercury than the incandescent bulb. I feel a graph coming on...
   
   
   
   Electricity used by incandescent and CFL bulbs
   
   If you replaced a 100W incandescent light bulb with a 30W CFL (and that's a fairly high powered CFL on the usual equivalents), by the time you'd used the light for 15 hours you would have saved the same amount of mercury in power station emissions as the mercury you might release when you eventually throw the bulb away. Remember, that's with the very cleanest coal; the dirtiest coal contains several thousand times as much mercury as that. Of course, this only applies if your electricity is produced by a coal-fired power station. I'm not sure whether mine is or not, but this analysis persuades me that mercury is a non-issue.
2. CFLs emit electromagnetic radiation. Well if they didn't, they wouldn't be much use. Light is electromagnetic radiation!
3. CFLs emit UV radiation. OK, this is a bit more specific, and yes, they do. So does the sun. It's possible to get sunburn from CFLs if they're within about 30 cm of your skin, so you may want to consider how close you put your desk lamp.
4. In a cradle to grave analysis, CFLs use more energy than incandescent bulbs. I have to quote this one: An International Association for Energy-Efficient Lighting (IAEEL) study conducted in Denmark, explored some carbon footprint factors, but not all, showing it took 1.8 Kwh of electricity to assemble a CFL compared to 0.11 Kwh to assemble an incandescent bulb. That means it took 16 times more energy to produce a CFL. Yes, but we've already seen how quickly a kWh or two can be saved when using these bulbs. The study did not include the fact that a CFL is much heavier and is more dangerous to handle, and will thus cost more to package, to ship, and to sell. Um, much heavier and more dangerous? I don't think so. Maybe a little bit heavier, but it's not going to make that much difference. This research also did not calculate the energy required to safely dispose of a CFL and reclaim the mercury. The cost of removing mercury from the landfills was also not considered. As already discussed, the quantities of mercury involved are trivially small compared with that released by burning coal. There will be no cost of removing it from landfill. If such a study could be done, and considered all the negative contributing factors, it would show a CFL has a massive carbon footprint, one that would dwarf a regular incandescent light bulb. I doubt it.
5. The waste heat produced by incandescent bulbs makes a valuable contribution to heating our homes. Heat rises. Do you really want to heat your ceilings?
6. CFLs emit ultrasound. This is interesting. (Actually, most of the article is really annoying, but the bit at the end is interesting). Yes, it seems that CFLs have something known as electronic ballast, which turns the power on and off very rapidly to stop a runaway reaction in the bulbs, which would destroy them very quickly. This operates at a very high frequency, too high for humans to hear but within hearing of just about every other animal. Well, all I can say to this is that my cat doesn't seem overly bothered by it. On the other hand, older fluorescent tubes, which operate at a lower frequency, can be unpleasant to work under, and Mrs Green reports that they give her insomnia and dizzy spells. In my opinion, this is the only good reason for not using CFLs.

After all this research, I've found only one good reason (and there were others that I can't be bothered to go into here) for not using CFLs, and I'm lucky enough not to be affected by this. Don't fall for the scare stories!

Reducing car use

This week's Change the World Wednesday challenge is to replace at least one car trip with a bicycle or walking trip. Living out in the sticks, that's pretty tricky. I generally only use the car to go to places that are too far away to walk. The car journeys I'm making this week are:-

Visit Sarah in Capel Seion: 8 miles
Meeting in London - drive to Aberystwyth station: 12 miles
Club AGM in Warwickshire: 130 miles

The last is obviously out of the question, but the first two are the kind of distances that people cycle. Could I...? Have you seen the hills around here? My car struggles with some of them! This begs the question: Why am I hanging on to my bike?

My bike.

I bought it when we moved to the flatlands, determined to get fit and cycle to work (8 miles). Apart from the fact that my route to work was nowhere near as flat as much of the surrounding countryside, I discovered that it was very busy and the roads weren't wide enough for two cars and one bike. This is not good if you happen to be on the bike and there are two unbroken streams of cars. Frankly, it was all too scary, and I never did cycle to work.

Now I'm a lot fitter and the roads are less busy, but they're still pretty scary, with many twists making for poor visibility. They're also much steeper. When the shortest journey I make regularly is as much as eight miles (sixteen, counting coming back), that feels like a big mountain to climb. Do I admit that I'm never going to use my lovely bike, or do I man up and get in the saddle? I don't know.

I do reduce car use in other ways, though. I loathe going to the supermarket, so I go as rarely as possible. I've managed to reduce the frequency to one every five or six weeks - just ten times a year - which I'm pleased with. For perishable food we either go to the village shop (300 yards) or try to combine shopping with another trip. Ian volunteers as a community bus driver, which takes him into town once or twice a week. I give him instructions to go to the butcher or the greengrocer while he's there. This means that shopping very rarely means an extra car journey.

This is all very well, but none of this is helping with this week's challenge. There was one thing I could do with this week's car journeys. I picked up the phone:

Hi, it's Rachel. Do you want a lift to Sarah's tonight?

By offering a friend a lift, I cut out one car journey. I haven't always been in the position where car sharing is practical - I certainly knew nobody who did the same journeys as me where we last lived - but here it is, at least some of the time.

Save energy: Clean the fridge

I'm not talking about the cleaning the inside of the fridge, here, but the back. A fridge is a heat exchanger; it takes transfers heat from the inside of the fridge out into the room. The part that sends the heat out into the room is a radiator type attachment on the back. If this is coated with an insulating layer of dust, it's going to have to work harder to get the heat out there, so the fridge is less efficient, overall.

Cleaning it is such a no-brainer that I shouldn't need any prompting to do it, but... well, I'm rubbish at housework at the best of times, and out of sight is out of mind, so this job tends to get neglected. I am therefore very grateful to Small Footprints for this week's nice, easy Change the World Wednesday challenge: Check your fridge. This gave me the nudge I needed to go and do that small job.

It really is a very small job; move fridge away from the wall, dust back of fridge, move it back. Of course it wasn't quite that easy. I used a cloth duster first, and though that removed some of the dust, there was obviously still quite a lot left. I then tried a fluffy kind of duster, which wasn't much better. I decided that what I really needed was a paintbrush to get into all the little gaps, and wondered where I'd left the brushes after the last time I used them. A bit of poking about revealed one brush on the kitchen windowsill (not sure what happened to the others). That worked much better than the dusters, so then it was a matter of a few minutes to clean the back of the fridge.

Before and after photos of the back of my fridge. As you can see, years of neglect left it seriously dusty. I don't know why the grill in the right hand photo appears lower. I didn't move it, honest.

It's not completely clean now, but there's a lot less dust trapping the heat in the grill, so hopefully my fridge is now breathing a sigh of relief that it doesn't have to struggle against this blanket as it tries to do its job.

Zero waste week update

In fulfilment of my pledge for Zero Waste Week, I had planned to hem the offcuts of my new dress to make hankies and find or make a couple of pouches for keeping clean and dirty ones in my handbag. But I didn't get round to it. There was much foraging to be done (which I'll tell you about shortly), and though that's a fairly lame excuse, it's all I've got.

I did make some progress, though. Commenting on my post, Eco Cat Lady advised that old T-shirts are easier because they don't need hemming. This was very useful information! I have a big heap of old T-shirts reserved for gardening, as they're not fit for wearing in public (actually, some of them probably are these days, as my standards have slipped somewhat). I fished one out from the bottom of the pile, set to with the scissors, and made myself a heap of washable tissues.

Next, I found a plastic box that used to have fruit in it, and a little plastic pouch in which underwear were sold. These became my new tissue box and dedicated bin/laundry bag for the used hankies.

Replacement for box of tissues and bin

The theme of this year's Zero Waste Week was Reducing waste away from home. Hmm. Replacing the tissue box is very much at home. Well, I did go out a few times, and I stuffed one of my new tissues into my pocket, so that when I needed to blow my nose, that was what I used. I didn't quite do what I intended, but I succeed in reducing waste and I can say that I have used no disposable tissues since making the pledge.

Pledge for Zero Waste Week

Next week is National Zero Waste Week, and Change the World Wednesday has adopted it for this week's challenge, making it a truly international event! The idea is not, in spite of the name, to avoid producing any waste at all for one week, but to take steps towards producing zero waste in the long term. In other words, don't do something just for the week, make a change in your habits that you can keep up all the time. Even if that change is quite small, the cumulative impact will be greater than making a big effort for a short period of time.

I do try to make changes like this on an ongoing basis, the most recent example being the way I store cold meat. When we've had a roast dinner, I cut the remaining meat off the bones, boil down the bones for stock, and put the meat in the fridge. I've always put the meat on a plate and covered it with foil, but I realised that I could avoid using that piece of foil each time if I just use one of my extensive stock of plastic boxes instead of the plate.

Making use of a box saved from a chinese takeaway had with friends about a year ago.

However, the theme of this year's challenge is Reducing waste away from home. This really is a challenge for me, because I spend most of my time at home these days. These means that when I'm out it's not part of my daily routine. Making changes to my habits that apply in non-habitual situations takes a bit more effort. Then the other day, I was looking at my dressing table and thought, I must put that back in my handbag, shortly followed by, That's a wasteful thing I could tackle. What was the offending item?

Wasteful packet of tissues

It was a small packet of tissues. These are particularly wasteful as not only is each tissue thrown away after use, but for every ten tissues there's a plastic packet that is also thrown away. I confess I have a weak spot for disposable tissues, both at home and away, and I really need to address that. Now is the time! I pledge that for National Zero Waste Week, I will replace the packet of tissues in my handbag with washable hankies (and some suitable containers to keep both fresh and used hankies).

Treadle powered sewing machine

I'm on a constant mission to reduce the amount of electricity we use and as part of that, I look at my various appliances and wonder whether there's an alternative to using electricity for that job. By happy coincidence, this week's challenge at Change the World Wednesday is about reducing electricity usage, so I can write about this project and link it to that challenge.

I have a 1970s electric sewing machine that I inherited from my mother. It's very, very heavy, but that's it's only downside. It's a robust bit of kit and has survived a good twenty years of neglect in my ownership without the slightest complaint. Examining the back of the machine, I found that the motor is attached to the back with a bolt-on bracket, and drives the mechanism by a simple belt. This might have been sold as an electric machine, but appears to be based on an older, probably treadle-powered, design.

I also have a treadle. My dad gave this to me some years ago, nicely powder coated (that's a way of applying paint, by the way, not a powdery finish) with a glass top to make a decorative table. It's certainly decorative, but it's also functional, and working the treadle makes the wheel spin smoothly in a most satisfying way.

Could I put these two together? Wandering around the internets, I came across treadleon.net, a website for people who want to actually use (rather than make museum exhibits of) old, human-powered sewing machines (isn't it amazing what you can find on the internet?!) Somewhere on this site* I found instructions for converting an electric machine to treadle-power. Bingo!

What I needed next was a sturdy table top to go between the treadle base and the machine. Since I needed to cut a hole in it, this needed to be solid, rather than strips that would separate when cut. I decided that I wanted something fairly big. Although the treadle would have originally had a fairly small top, not much bigger than the machine itself, I'm used to having the whole dining table to spread out on when I sew. I'm not going that big, or I'll never find house space for it (to be honest, that's going to be a problem as it is), but I'd like a reasonable amount of table to support the fabric as I sew.

Whilst visiting a wood-working friend of ours, a general offer of wood was made, so I mentioned that I was on the look-out for a table top, and he said he had just the thing cluttering up his workshop. It was a hefty lump of pine (strips glued together, but very strongly), 4' x 2'2" and an inch and a quarter thick. He was even kind enough to plane the edges for me, to remove the rather unattractive varnish (we agreed that it would be much nicer used upside down, removing just a little varnish to take it back to the natural pine colour. I did have to remove a couple of lumps of chewing gum, too.)

Where are we now, then? I have the machine, the treadle, and the table top to go between them. There's just one more thing I need, and that's the drive belt. A bit more internet research found Alan's Alterations. As well as altering things, Alan sells industrial sewing machines and traditional leather machine belts, as well as who knows what other unlikely things. He has a shop in Machynlleth which, would you believe it, is just down the road! Well OK, it's thirty miles down the road, but that's really not very far away and happens to be the same town as the Centre for Alternative Technology, which is an interesting place to visit.

My dad came to stay for a week and before he came, he said I should line up a project for him to help me with. I considered the home-made solar panels, but decided that the sewing machine had a better chance of being completed within a week, considering 1) I had all the bits lined up, and 2) we'd probably want to do other things in that week, too.

It turned out that I didn't quite have everything I needed. Dad said we'd need a wide, flat drill bit for the corners, so we went out and bought one of those. After all that preamble (most DIY jobs seem to take more work in the preparation than the actual doing), here's what we did.

First, assemble all the bits.

Sewing machine, table top, and various tools. There are other tools too, that didn't make it into this picture.

At this point I'd already removed the drive wheel from the machine so we could use it to gauge the length of the belt needed.

Next came lots of measuring, head scratching, and marking out of where the hole should be cut in the table top.

A pencil is the most important tool in many jobs

You may notice that the Cut out arrow doesn't go to the edge of the marked area. This is because the front edge of the sewing machine is set into the table, but supported. The instructions told us to cut the hole right through then screw another piece of wood underneath, but I thought it would be stronger, and neater, to leave the original wood in place and just cut a rebate (lowered bit) to take the machine.

While Dad started drilling holes...

Let the drilling commence!

... I removed the electrical gubbins from the machine.

No more electric light in my sewing machine! I wonder if I can fit a little candle into the space where this used to be?

Then came a lot of sawing and chiselling (for the rebate) that I don't have photos for, so you'll have to use your imagination for those bits. Eventually we removed enough wood that we could fit the machine into its new home.

Sewing machine in place, with string belt for lining up with the treadle

At this point we discovered that the slot for the belt needed to go quite a bit further back than the hole for the machine. Here, the rasp came in very useful. We just filed away until the dummy belt (bit of string) went round both wheels without rubbing against the table on the way.

All the measuring and cutting took about a day, and the next day we went up to Machynlleth to visit both CAT (being tourists) and Alan the sewing machine merchant. He sold us six feet of leather machine belt and a staple to hold it together. When asked, he even told me how to combine the two. He also said that after a few weeks' use (um, I don't think I'll be using the machine that frequently, but still) the belt will have stretched, so I'll need to take the staple out, shorten the belt, and join it again.

The next job then, was to cut the belt to size (easy) and join it together with the staple (very difficult). Punching the holes in the belt with a nail was hard enough, but when we'd got the staple posted through both ends we had to close it up with pliers. This was extremely difficult to do as the pliers tended to skid off. I'm really hoping I can get away without adjusting the belt when it's stretched with use, but I guess if it needs it, then I'll just have to do this job again.

Staple in leather belt. Much harder to do than it looks.

Finally, there was a bit of jiggling to make sure the machine was lined up with the treadle wheel** (never mind getting the table top square to the base, it's the machinery that's important) before screwing the table top to the base (or vice versa, as this was done from underneath).

So here it is, all put together, and whadda ya know, it works!

Sewing machine with treadle, all assembled and functional

I still have to sand down the table top to get rid of the old varnish and the pencil marks, then finish it with teak oil (making sure there are no traces of this left when I start using it for sewing). I should really take it all apart to do this, but because it's difficult to take the machine off its hinges, I probably won't.

I haven't yet tried sitting at the machine and actually using it, but I have pushed the treadle with my foot and got it all going round, with the needle going up and down and everything. No doubt it will take a bit of practice to learn to sew with this, but I'm looking forward to it!


---

* I can't actually find it again, but it must have been there somewhere. Although I couldn't find the instructions again, I remembered important bits, such as using the hinges of the machine to support the back. I didn't even know it had hinges before that!

** I found that the belt was in a different place when going round than it was when stationary, so it now rests against the edge of the hole, but hopefully will be clear of it when in use. I may yet need to make that hole a bit bigger.

Challenging times

I have mixed feelings about the challenges that people post on their blogs. I quite like occasional ones, like Mumma Troll's eat for £1 a day challenge. These are a nice way of starting conversation and links between blogs, building little communities in blogland. On the other hand, I'm not so sure about the regular ones like documenting your plastic waste every week.

I'm not quite sure why I feel uncomfortable about these regular challenges. Louisa touched on one aspect in her post on extreme frugal challenges, which was the competitive, one downmanship. There's also the regular commitment required. Of course, this can be a good thing, if it encourages the development of good habits. In the context of writing a blog, though, this is not something I want. Some people use weekly features to structure their blogs, and I often enjoy reading these, but for myself, I'd rather write about things as they occur to me; I don't want the blog to become a chore because I've set myself the task of writing about a particular thing each week.

There's also the nagging feeling that by signing up to someone else's programme of challenges, I'm letting them do my thinking for me. In general, I don't think it's a bad thing to find someone whose principles you agree with and follow their guidance on the day to day decisions in life. I'm aware that humans, as a species, do most things on auto-pilot and if we think we're making conscious, deliberate decisions about every aspect of our lives, we're kidding ourselves. On the other hand, I'm as vlunerable to the illusion of conscious control as the next person, and so I choose not to delegate my decisions to someone else.

All that said, I've been following Change the World Wednesday for a little while now. The idea of this blog is to have a little challenge each week that lots of people can sign up to, and spread the word about, with the aim of encouraging widespread behaviour change for greener living - a most laudible aim. Notwithstanding my reservations about signing up to things, I've tried the last couple of challenges.

The first challenge I tried was reducing shower times to five minutes. Ironically, since I stopped using shampoo, I tend to spend longer in the shower. Without the routine of shampoo - rinse - conditioner - rinse, I just stand under the water and my mind wanders, for 15 to 20 minutes sometimes. I've been thinking I need to do something about this, and the challenge was the nudge I needed. I found the timer function on my mobile phone, set it to five minutes and put it on a shelf in the bathroom as I stepped into the shower. When the timer pinged, I finished rinsing off the shower gel or whatever, and got out. Easy! I'll be sticking with that new habit.

The second challenge was to avoid using paper towels for a week, which confused me until I realised that this are what I call kitchen roll. I thought this one would be easy, as I hardly ever use them anyway, but then I remembered one thing that has me reaching for the big tissues without hesitation:

Cat sick, hiding on the hideous carpet. I'm so glad this wasn't a few inches further over, or I'd have stepped in it with bare feet.

I use washable cloths for cleaning up other things, but couldn't face the thought of cleaning out a cloth after using it for cat sick. I had a bit of a think - might there be an alternative to kitchen roll that I could use once and dump straight on the compost heap? How about big, soft leaves? I have comfrey...

As comfrey plants go, this one's quite small.

When the inevitable happened, I headed out into the garden and picked a few leaves. The first thing I discovered was that comfrey leaves don't hold together so well as paper towels - it's quite easy to put a finger through one. However, with two leaves together and a bit of care, that wasn't a problem. Once the bulk of the mess was gone, it was a bit more difficult to clean the remnants off the carpet, as the leaves started to disintegrate with scrubbing. If the puke in question had been wetter, I think I'd have had to give up and use... well, I could probably have coped with a cloth for that bit - it's a bit less icky by that stage.

So, could I give up kitchen roll for cleaning up cat sick? I'm not sure. The leaves are only available in summer, and this time it happened to be a nice, sunny morning and I wasn't in a hurry to do anything else. The leaves also weren't very good. I did manage to clean up the mess, but kitchen roll would have done it better. Still, the important part of that is that the leaves did work - the job was completed successfully. It's more faff and not as effective. Maybe I'll do it this way sometimes, but mostly I suspect I'll be back on the disposable paper, just for this.

How could she be guilty when she's so cute?