Frustration, disappointment and all their friends.

I had two exciting updates planned today and I started mentally working on them during my bike ride home, but instead, life happened and here I am writing about slightly-unrelated things...

I just got home from teaching English and on my way, I decided to stop by the Armas Maitokauppa (click for pictures) and see if they had milk in stock. (You would think, judging by their name: the dear milk store, that they would always have milk but it comes in on Tuesday and it's usually gone by the time I check later in the week.) They did indeed have milk so I got all excited. ***

***Sidenote: They bring their milk from their farm and milk their own cow so it's pretty fresh AND it comes in a glass bottle... thus the excitement.

So I inquire about the milk, they have some: in a small glass bottle labeled 'kyyttömaito' and in a plastic thingy... round, white, tub-looking thing labeled 'ruokamaito' (food milk.) I was a little nervous to get foodmilk, considering I didn't know what that meant and it came in plastic so I sprung for the bottle.
How much?
2€

Now don't get me wrong, I'm totally willing to pay more for fresh, glass-bottle milk but this bottle is only 0,25L... hardly enough to last one meal. I didn't think too much about it but then, of course, I had to ride my bike home and thoughts do tend to fly through your head even if unintentionally. So I get home and I'm pretty upset. Juha asks if that's the bottle I mentioned on the phone and says: you paid 2€ for that?
I don't want to talk about it.

So I proceed to go sit in the bathroom with the light off and think about it some more... I feel discouraged. Yet I know that this is normal when you're trying to change your habits and when the whole world seems to be pushing you in a completely different direction. So instead of wasting too much time being discouraged, I decided it was high time to make a list of accomplishments to date, and set some goals which I can measure... instead of continuing to feel discouraged (which I do, so I'm hoping this will help) and trying to do everything at once.

My list of accomplishments so far:
+ rode my bike to work every day for the past 2 weeks (minus the days I didn't go to work and that one day after I sat at work wet and cold for 4 hours.)
+ stopped taking the elevator (minus once when I went to bring the vacuum cleaner from the basement)
+ have become hyper aware of the use of plastic in our day-to-day lives, to the point of borderline-panic attacks in the bread section at the grocery store (well that was only once, but now I'm panicking less and using awareness as a substitute.)
+ I've starting looking at various websites for ideas on how to reduce waste in many aspects of life and trying to gather ideas before embarking...

This last 'accomplishment' is probably the one that's making everything very challenging. I haven't fully defined what I'm going to do, minus the vague notion of 'reducing waste' and I've read tons of ideas which I'd love to put into action, yet I feel limited by resources, a language barrier and the fact that I live in a small city where I do not feel some things are readily accessible (which basically means resources and language barriers.)

... but alas, I have a picture post coming up from Chloe's visit and I promise it'll be completely unrelated to the environment, minus our trip out to the cottage and pretty pictures of a setting sun.

Here's a picture of some owls and apples to cheer me up:

You can click on it and go straight to the shop!