Am I going mad?

I am beginning to wonder about my own sanity! 3 months ago I considered us to be a reasonably average family living a reasonably normal life, but after being sucked into the greener living issues I am beginning to have doubts. Once you start reading more articles, watching more films and generally become more aware of environmental issues, it gets harder and harder to ignore the problems with our lifestyles. I am beginning to fear that in my enthusiasm I am turning into some kind of eccentric.

I started off this project just wanting to have a conscience that wasn't pitch black all the time and now I am finding myself doing stuff I would never have imagined 3 months ago. E.g. yesterday I said to my husband I would quite like a sewing machine (Christmas is coming, so time to throw a few hints), and he in his usual pragmatic manner replied 'I take it you want one that doesn't use electricity then'. I hadn't actually thought about that, but after his little 'funny' remark I couldn't help doing a google search on non-electric sewing machines. Needless to say there are no modern versions of people powered sewing machines and you need to do a bit of digging (in your wallet as well) to get one of the old ones, especially the ones with a footpedal rather than a handle... The point here though is not the fact that non-electrical sewing machines are hard to come by, but the fact that I actually did a google search on the subject!

This morning I walked my daughter to school despite the fact that it was pouring rain. She didn't mind, she got a chance to show off her green teddy umbrella, but when I returned to the house completely soaked I did wonder what had happened to me. Last winter I would not have left the car at home on a day like this.

Last year I had no idea about growing vegetables and I had no interest for example in learning how to make jam - what's the point when you can buy it in the shops; but now I am thinking it would be great to make lots of stuff from all this amazing fruit that is going to grow in my garden. (Hopefully I will get the hang of this gardening thing at some point...)

A few days ago I was making breadcrumbs out of left over crusts - something I would never ever have considered previously. OK we still throw out some of the crusts, otherwise we would drown in breadcrumbs, but the fact that I did make a portion of the crumbly stuff tells me that things are actually changing.

I hope the changes are for the better, I certainly feel happy about them, but I do occasionally wonder if I am in fact loosing the plot.

Last week I was talking to one of the other mums at the school gate and briefly explaining about my green project. She was very polite, but basically told me that she thought all this green business was rather silly, it was just the government trying to scare us and especially global warming was nothing to get so hung up about, as it was just part of a natural cycle for the planet. I was slightly lost for words! Her reply made me remember that what I thought was generally accepted as the right thing to do, (even though most of us rarely get round to doing the right things) is in fact to some people complete nonsense. She considered me a fanatic with some kind of strange belief system and for a moment I felt like some kind of missionary facing a group of heathens. It was a strange feeling -I never really thought of being green as a religion! Am I in fact part of a new cult?

The ultimate strike to my sanity then came when I later opened my e-mail and there was a message saying I had been banned from the ad programme on this blog because I posed a risk to the advertisers. For a moment I thought I had become all powerful. Was my blog really so influential that advertisers like the utility companies considered me a risk? Unfortunately I doubt that, but it turns out that these ad programmes are more secret than MI5 and MI6 put together, so I am unable to obtain any information on this risk - maybe the risk was just the fact that they were due to pay me? I shall never know, so maybe I could just stick with the illusion that my green project has become a threat to some of society's big companies... ;-)

Anyway, ads or no ads, religion or not, I am still going strong. This project might be taking me in directions I didn't imagine to begin with, but I still feel I am doing the right thing. I might be slightly more cautious of who I speak to about the project until I gain the ability to remember some hard hitting facts to use in a discussion (not much hope there then, I am useless at memorising facts), but I have learned a lot and that in itself is reason enough to continue. At the end of the day we are still a pretty normal family I think, our lives haven't actually changed that much, we have just changed the focus a little.