I'm timing myself for this blog post so that I can give you as precise an answer as possible. Right now it's 10:14am (that's early!). My estimate is I will be finished by 10:46am.
The pressure is on. Good thing I already thought about what I'm going to write about, which is green-ness. Not the colour but the environmental movement.
This blog is spurred for two reasons, 1. My family recently purchases (and installed) a low-flow toilet (that's 6 litres per flush, people*) and 2. I'm reading a book called Sleeping Naked is Green about a girl who decides to take on one green change per day for a year, and the most awesome part: she blogs about it. Every day. For a year.**
This book has got me thinking about a lot of the things I do/don't do that I could do to help the trees and such.
For example, I've started to feel guilty whenever I have a shower that last longer than 7 minutes. Even with my low-flow shower head, that's a lot of water.
But we do a lot. My family doesn't own a car; we recycle AND compost; we turn the temperature down to use a minimum power supply; we flick off the lights, and turn off whatever doesn't need to be on; we use the smallest amount of paper products possible; we have reusable shopping bags; we use compact fluorescent light bulbs; basically, any simple change you can make in your house, we've done it.
It gets you thinking though, is anything enough? What is the scale of the changes we're making when there's factories out there submitting more greenhouse gases in a day than we can save with our little changes in a year?
I'm not expecting anyone to read this blog and go live in a grass-hut, fore go showers, and use no electricity; that's ridiculous. But if you can make a few changes, I would much appreciate it. I'm not going to devote a year to writing a blog about being green, but I figure if five people (a reasonable number, I think) read this and change their light bulbs to CFLs or start a compost or cuts down on paper towel and plastic grocery bags, then at least I've done something, right? Maybe the polar bears will die, and maybe the melted ice caps will make Florida disappear, but at least I did something.
If you could only wear one colour for a month, what would it be?
This reminded me of something I said the other day:
Person: What's your favourite colour?
Alex: I don't have a favourite colour. Except for yellow.
This is lame, but I think I'd have to choose blue. Otherwise I'd have no pants to wear. (not strictly true, but if I choose yellow I'd have nothing to wear. Maybe a headband. But those hurt my head.)
Well, It's 10:39am, so... 25 minutes. How long does it take you, Vita?
Q: I can't remember if this question has been asked before (if it has, go to question 2): if you were a vegetable, what would you be.
Q2: Do you have a cell phone? (why or why not?)
footnotes
*Feel free to estimate for yourselves what that is for Americans and their "special" system. Seriously guys, catch up with us metric-ers.
**This puts things for us BEDAers into perspective. I guess if you had an actual subject to write about every day it wouldn't be as hard.
3 comments:
We live at the bottom of a slight hill (the street slopes downward), so my family has a rain garden, which helps stop all the water from flooding our basement and continuing into our neighbor's yard next door. It may not be purely for ecological reasons, although I suppose it a) provides more plants and b) stops us from having to use tons of electricity and such to clean out our lower level. We also do little things, like turning off lights and recycling our batteries (apparently there's some place you can take them that saves them from going into the dump).
My neighborhood is also reworking our pond to make it a "stormwater management" pond, which apparently helps stop all the soil and water and everything from rushing into the Chesapeake Bay (which needs saving, if you haven't heard... you may not have, actually, but living in Maryland, I hear it quite a bit).
It's really cool that your family doesn't have a car, actually. Unfortunately it's not possible for us to -not- have a car; my dad bikes to the Metro and we walk everywhere we can, though. You're right about us needing to do more about saving the environment; I'll try to make more changes around our house and hopefully we'll start remembering to take all our reusable Giant bags with us when we go grocery shopping :)
We do a lot of the minor things, turning off lights and and such, and my parents are HUGE recyclers anyway. My mom thinks of herself as the crafty type, so there's a bit of trash-type-stuff-turned-art.
Have you guys heard of Half Price Books? Well, I don't think there's any in Canada, there should be for the following reasons:
--They are AWESOME, they sell used books AND new books/CDs/records/casettes/movies/basically antything at HALF the publishers price. This means new hardcovers for like 7 bucks or less.
-- They're California based, super-eco stores, I think they made the chain carbon-neutral a while ago... and yes it's a chain, I'd be happier if I was supporting a small local business but still...
--I just like the Reusable Giant Bags that say "b(eco)me" It's kind of cryptic, but kind of not. Plus tis pretty.
It is really important to save the environment, we all should try to do just a little bit more, even if it means sleeping in the nude. :) (I agree with you on the blog thing. I think it's easier to BLOG if you have some specific thing to do every day, but harder to actually DO something blog worthy every day. Speaking of, are you guys going to see that movie about the Julia Child blogger person? I have a feeling I might want to just read the blog more, though.
I did go see Julie and Julia. It was fantastic. Very funny. Meryl Streep and Amy Adams are two of my favourite actresses and it was a delightful movie.
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