Take an image of 3 items of importance to you. How did you obtain each item? How long have you had each of them? Why are they important to you (currently)? What made these items important to you? Are there any memories associated with them? Stuffed animal The cheetah cub isn’t even the oldest stuffed animal in the house. It was bought before me, and not as a baby shower gift. To be honest, I don’t know who, why, or what it was bought for, but I remember it because I didn’t even notice it existed until after we moved to Atlanta. Some of the stuffed animals didn’t make the first cut and were donated away. Some, like this cub, were left to sit on the top shelf of my closet because the one in my parents’ room had too much actual stuff in it. Originally, the cub was attached to a mother (father?) cheetah. I think to my parents it was symbolic and very endearing, but to 8 year old me, it was very large and clunky. In my eyes, the baby cub was much cuter and I wanted to be able to play wi...
This post was inspired by https://recycling-better.blogspot.com/ and https://ijd267.wixsite.com/trashblog, both excellent blogs about recycling. (Also the origami blog, but I couldn't actually open it) I felt these OSTs were tangentially related to mine, so I might as well give them a shot. While drinking tea is pretty straightforward, recycling better takes some more thought because we generate trash basically all the time. I decided to focus on paper and plastic waste, since those were the most relevant ones to school and being at home. In particular, I realized that I never tried to recycle the paper packaging of each individual tea bag that I use, and that I tend to throw away a lot of plastic things without checking whether they can be recycled. I realized that the paper on the tea bag is around the dimensions of a dollar bill. To make use of the bags, I folded some into nice origami shapes, like a six-pointed star. Now my whole tea-making process is more envir...