Here I am in the kitchen, working on battery power, making yogurt after lugging the milk and fruit I bought up seven flights of stairs. So far, so good!

I feel amazing right now, actually. It's surprisingly empowering to reuse plastic vegetable bags and to buy only produce grown in Italy (today there is no market -- on Thursday I can re-stock with 0 km food). It seems silly. But I am beginning to see that once you have built your personal infrastructure it is easier and easier to subsist on what you already have.
I'd still like to find a solution to the problem of non 0-km ingredients for the food you make at home. As well, ingredients still come packaged, though you can buy them in larger quantities (huge bags of flour for example, versus a small bag of bread. I still haven't found milk in anything bigger than 1 L plastic bottle; maybe there is a way to get your milk containers refilled but not in the city, that's for sure. I' using old plastic bottles for water.)

Today is the day we "green" our commute. That means, for me, cutting out any automated mobility devices -- no escalators, moving sidewalks, or escalators except where stairs do not exist. It also means going home on the last subway, always, to avoid having to use cabs, and carpooling when it is socially awkward to refuse a ride somewhere. Since I don't drive here, it's relatively easy to rpomise myself to walk or take the bus; it also means that today I'm considering the possibility of never owning a car, just to think about it and what it would mean for me.

Did you take the bus today? Sometimes life is hard when you can't just drive to where you need to be. Cities are so big, and here they have the added obstacle of many spread-out villages with a city as their common centre for commercialism and industry, with many mountain roads and no train or bus infrastructure. At home, things are just so far away that sometimes it isn't practical. It's definitely something that needs to change here in Italy, though; I'm glad to see many smaller cars and hybrids, but there are still too many. There is also something called Eco-Pass, which is basically a zone of the city encompassing the downtown area where you cannot take your car unless you pass an emissions test. Milanesi say it hasn't changed much, though. In Florence you can't even drive downtown! But Milan is much bigger.

Stay tuned for more flights of stairs and how the yogurt turns out... right now it's busy multiplying on the hot-water heater...