Last Friday was the third time that our recycling bin has vanished (as well as our trash can lid and, three months later, our trash can, too). The disappearances have always mysteriously coincided with new neighbors moving in next door.

We’re trying to be philosophical about it. More recycling bins in our neighborhood are good. And if our new neighbors don’t know how to get one themselves, we’re providing everyone a service, right?

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It’s actually really easy to get a free recycling bin in Cambridge. You can either send an email to bluebins@cambridgema.gov asking that one be dropped off at your house or pick one up at the Department of Public Works front office at 147 Hampshire Street. We usually pick them up ourselves; it’s faster and easier.

Maybe our neighbors will read this and get their own? Despite all our talk of “providing a service to our neighborhood,” we’re definitely going to write our address on this bin. This is frustrating!

We checked on the old worm bin—the one we haven’t been feeding—and were amazed to see that it’s full of worms. Huge ones, too! If you remember, we had separated the worms from this compost and started a new bin with them. We were quite thorough—more so than I think I would be in the future—so these worms must have come from the few cocoons or baby worms that slipped through. We haven’t even fed them for over two months; they’ve just been finishing the old compost. (Which is looking pretty good, by the way, but I think I’ll let it go for another month or so in order to make it usable for our houseplants.)

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Not feeding that bin for a couple months has completely eradicated the fly population living in the compost. Unfortunately, it looks like they’ve all moved to the new bin.

This is so embarrassing! I swear I’ve never had a fly problem before. We’ve been keeping the flies out of the rest of the house by storing the fruit in the fridge and the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, and putting out cups of apple cider vinegar.

To get rid of them completely, we’re going to stop feeding the new bin for a few weeks. It takes fruit flies 10 days at the most to mature from larvae, and as we’ve seen with the old bin, the worms can survive (even thrive) far longer than that without new food.

We’re also going to add a fly trap to the bin. We’ll make one by putting an apple core in a jar, snipping off a corner of a Ziploc bag, and attaching it to the mouth of the jar with an elastic. If we kill as many adult flies as we can and withhold food so they don’t multiply, we could solve this problem.

To prevent it in the future, from now on we’re going to freeze all of our scraps before adding them to the compost. That’ll kill any eggs that might stow away on fruit peels. Wish us luck!

We went to Maine this weekend for a holiday of our own devising: Carrot Cake and Poker Day. It’s less filling than Thanksgiving and far more fun. As the name suggests, we make and eat carrot cake and play poker all day with my sister’s family. My niece has especially gotten into it and puts up homemade decorations.

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As a vegetarian, Thanksgiving has never been my favorite holiday. And now that Jason’s a pescatarian, there’s not much to attract us to it. In fact, there are so many drawbacks:

1. The traffic – Whose bright idea was it to have everyone in the country travel on the same day?
2. The food – Like I said, we’re not interested in the main event. And although our families always have veggie options, they’re really the red-headed stepchildren of Thanksgiving.
3. The stress – It’s just so hectic. People are cooking and hunting and visiting a thousand people. No one’s at their best, especially me and Jason.

So instead we went up for a more relaxed long weekend where we can actually spend some time with people, and Thanksgiving itself we’ll just spend at home. We’ve done this for two years now, and I’m really enjoying it. So what do you think of Thanksgiving? Are there any holidays that you’ve opted out of?

Our heat cut out last weekend, which prompted some overdue maintenance on our boiler. It turns out that the transparent tube that shows the water level (called the sight glass or water gauge) had gotten plugged with sediment, and we accidentally added too much water. In addition to the lack of heat, this led to horrible clanging in the pipes and radiators as the steam hit water that shouldn’t have been there.

Our landlord cleaned out the tube and Jason flushed 8 buckets (!) of water from the system before it got back to normal. And the water was disgusting! It ran red with rust and sediment and stank up the basement.

Here’s how he fixed it:

1) He turned down the thermostat, flipped the main shutoff switch on the boiler, and let it cool down. (Very important to prevent burns, as well as damage to the boiler.)

2) He closed the valves at the top and bottom of the sight glass, removed it, and cleaned it with a pipe cleaner. Then he replaced the sight glass and opened both valves.

3) He used the valve at the bottom of the boiler (below and slightly to the left of the sight glass) to empty water into a bucket until it ran clear and the sight glass was below 3/4 full.

4) Then he opened the valve at the top of the boiler and added water slowly until the sight glass was 3/4 full.

(House in Progress has some good photos of the process.)

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Ideally this sort of maintenance should be done once a year by a trained professional, but since we’re just renters, we don’t have much say about that. Now that we know an easy way to keep the system running efficiently, we can do it ourselves, without having to rely on our landlord.

A well-running system shouldn’t make any noise. When we moved in, the radiators were so loud that they terrified the cats and woke us up in the middle of the night. Since then we’ve checked the water level every other week (it should always be 1/2 to 3/4 full), made sure that the radiators tip slightly towards the in-flow pipes, and cleaned or replaced any hissing or spitting pressure release valves. (Check out this This Old House video or doityourself.com for how.) It’s made a huge difference in the noise level, and I hope we’ll see a difference in our gas bill this year because of it.

Last Tuesday was the one-year anniversary of our pre–move-in election-night painting marathon, and we still hadn’t painted all the trim. So this weekend we finally buckled down and finished the dining room.

We used a no-VOC paint, because according to the EPA, volatile organic compounds have been linked to cancer and have lots of other health effects. These include eye, nose, and throat irritation; headaches; dizziness; nausea; and damage to the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system.

Jason studied The Karate Kid for years to get this technique.

This may seem like a hippy-dippy this-will-never-affect-me issue, but when my office was moved to a different building, I had headaches for a couple months afterwards. (Rainbow aura migraines, too, which I’d never had before, or since.) At the time, I blamed lots of things—the fluorescent lights, sharing an office with two other people, the stress of moving—but now I’m thinking it may have been the VOCs. The new office had freshly painted walls, new carpet, and new furniture, all of which off-gas toxic chemicals.

While paint can emit VOCs for years, the worst occurs as it’s drying, leading to levels in your freshly painted house of up to a thousand times higher than outdoors. That’s why it’s recommended that you paint in a well-ventilated area. A major benefit of no-VOC paint is that it doesn’t require as much ventilation—a real boon when you’re painting in the middle of the winter. I couldn’t smell a thing.

We chose Harmony from Sherwin Williams mostly because of our proximity to a store, but also because it’s one of only a few no-VOC options out there. To be clear, no-VOC paints actually do contain some VOCs—less than 5 grams per liter. By comparison, low-VOC paints generally contain less than 150 g/l. Adding tint to the base adds another couple grams per liter, but that’s minimal.

VOCs help to bind colors to the paint, so their presence actually does improve the paint’s performance. This is why our no-VOC paint doesn’t come in truly saturated colors. (And why we had to chose a lighter shade of yellow than my niece wanted for her bedroom—sorry Kelly!)

Unfortunately, it also dries as slow as regular paint*, which really sucks when one of your cats decides to ambush the other in a wet corner. Ollie ended up with patches of white on the tips of his ears and the back of his head—cute, but still toxic if he’d swallowed it.

* Changed from “slower than,” because a commenter pointed out that there’s no difference in drying time.