• made my own glass cleaner and used it to clean mirrors
• spent a few hours planning the great declutter project of 2011
• clean my bathrooms
• make soup from leftover beef bones
• make bread (mmmm warm bread)
• vacuum up cobwebs and dust elephants

Little House in the Suburbs has lovely simple recipes for cleaning products in her third post in her Home Management Notebook series. I can vouch that the glass cleaner works great, even when you scent it with a few drops of lavender essential oil. I’m going to try all the other Homemade Cleaning Solutions on her list as well. I can’t make my husband stop buying expensive brand name cleaners, but since I’m normally the only one doing any cleaning, I can just keep saying “nope honey, we haven’t run out of it yet, no need to buy more.” I’ve reached the end of 2010 more committed than ever to dropping out of the market for as many products as possible.

My latest bout of anti-consumerism was brought on by the great o.b. tampon debacle, which you can search on your own or wait for the full-blown post I will eventually write about it. You can also choose not to hear about it at all, filing it under the TMI category.

Anyway, that’s my sharing for the day. I find when I’m doing other productive things, sharing feels productive too.

All this local, organically grown produce was $24 at Downtown Phoenix Public Market. I joined Maya’s Farm CSA tonight, too. That means next week I’ll get a dozen fresh eggs and a share of whatever vegetables have just been picked. So I better get cooking! Usually this many veggies last Gary and I a couple of weeks.

I chose Maya’s Farm because Maya herself was selling me the vegetables, and her farm is just ten miles from my house. My CSA membership is for three months – actually a little less, just whatever is left in the season. Maya offered to prorate the amount or just let me beef up my share with some additional selections from her market tables. I took the beef-up option. I also gave her all my saved up egg cartons to fill up with more eggs! Reuse, better than recycling.

Maya’s stand looked so beautiful – everything there was top notch. I’m pretty excited! I think her produce will keep me motivated until I get my own garden in the ground.

Almost every mayonnaise on the market is encased in plastic, and I’m sick of it. My husband is the type of person who keeps a spare of everything. We always have one jar of mayo in the fridge, and one in the pantry. Over the last year we have watched our choices of brand diminish as more and more of them switch to plastic jars.

We bought some mayonnaise in a plastic jar exactly once, when we had no other choice in the grocery store. By the time it went from our pantry to the fridge, three weeks tops, it had gone bad. It smelled, well, wrong, and we dared not eat it. Now, the only place I can get mayonnaise in glass jars is the local organic or health foods stores, where it is approximately twice the cost of regular grocery stores, at least here in my neighborhood.

Glass is better for two huge reasons. First, it isn’t permeable like plastic, and your mayo won’t go bad, at least not in the next several years. Second, you can reuse the glass jar for a long time, and then you can readily recycle it. (Phoenix only recycles #1 and #2 plastics, and not all plastic food containers are accepted.)

So one of my resolutions this year is to drop out of the mayo market. I am no longer a mayonnaise consumer. I am a mayonnaise creator.

Oh, and in keeping with another new year’s resolution, this video is compressed using the h.264 codec using the multi-pass setting, as per Freevlog‘s latest screencast. It’s still iPod compatible, and I can do it from my MacBook Pro.

Happy New Year, everyone!