Lately I have been trying very hard to "Go Green!" But it is sooooo hard when there are all these ideas and you don't know where to start. Our slow but sure greening is coming along and I'm actually proud of myself and my little family but it's hard to completely erase our footprint on this old earth with out a few toe marks being left...
We already recycle (we were forced to through town bylaws, although it's all good) almost everything. Our community only allows 1 garbage can every 2 weeks. We recycle our food compost and can put that out every week as well as recycling every 2nd week. You know how hard is it to only have 1 garbage can of garbage every 2 weeks? I have a houseful of 6 people, so it took a while to get everyone on the ball to recycle as much as we could. After a crack down by me, we have now brought our garbage down to 1 bag every second week or so. That's fantastic considering we used to take out a bag every second day! Most times we only put the garbage can out once a month!
We had a nice little garden last year and are going even bigger this year. We rent our house and I know the owners wouldn't mind us using the yard to grow a garden but I hate digging up the grass when we aren't the home owners. So we are going to try pallet gardening this year. My cousin owns a greenery business and they have a ton of pallets that they don't end up using so I can get them from her for free. Although I have talked to a lot of people and it seems pallets are not that hard to come by, most really cheap, if not free. While you are checking out the pallet gardening, sift through the awesome tips from Backyard Diva on facebook. She is a supreme gardener and lives just a couple of towns away from me. She has such great ideas and a lot of them can be made quite cheap...which serves me fine because I happen to be very cheap :)
I am thinking about planting some salad greens in planters as well. I was at the Farmers Market today and saw a small planter with Arugula, Radicchio, Baby beet greens, loose leaf lettuce and a couple more salad goodies. It seems like a great idea and if I do a few of them up I can harvest more then once a week for fresh salads.
I love to hear of others "Greening" ideas. I am willing to try to do as much as I can to make my family more conscious of how we are treating the earth. I am also trying to show the kids how important it is to be as self sustainable as possible because it's so important!
On another note, I am apparently the computer fixer for all my friends and although I don't mind it some times I can go a little overboard. Which thankfully my husband pointed out - what a guy!
My friends gave me a laptop the other day to check out. Someone wants to sell it to them and they turned it on and saw a few minor blips and were worried it was a waste of their money. So anyhow, I came home, fired it up and went to work. First thing that hits me is that it's WinXP. I should have known when it was a square, heavy as a Mo-Fo case...this puppy is an OLDY! But hey that's ok, I can still salvage it, if the hard drive is ok and everything works, right?
So while I am working away, checking it out, the screen goes dim. I think "Oh it's unplugged, that may be the trouble" so I plug it in, the screen goes dimmer, slowly, until I can hardly make out anything on the screen. Hmmm...this ain't good. So I search on the internet for an hour. It sounds like the backlight. This computer is ancient, I don't think they'd want to replace the backlight on it, so strike two. Anyhow, I work around that and get it all set up for the internet but can't get it to go online through the wireless. I plug in my little handy dandy aerial and update, download, update again and download some more. Nothing. It just won't do it. Ugghh Strike three because if you can't go wireless with your laptop, then it becomes a desktop. And soon a paperweight on the desktop :)
By now I have spent almost 3 hours playing with it and figuring things out. (Thankfully it was a Saturday afternoon and the kids were out and busy) So I am frustrated, cursing it, slamming stuff around and sighing heavily. My hubby comes in t he kitchen and laughs at me. I say "WHAT?" in my favorite 'I will eat your young' voice. He says, "It's not even your laptop, I don't know why you are getting so frustrated about it..." OMG he's right! Here I am swearing and sweating away working on a laptop that isn't even mine! A choir sang in my head and fireworks exploded around me! (No, not really, but that would be so cool!)
Needless to say, I put the old bird back in it's bag and shipped it back off to the friends with the sad report of no, don't buy it. I know I could have said, buy it if it's cheap, it would be a good secondary computer for the kids to bang around on. But I didn't and you know why? Because I would just be the one they came to when it needed fixing and I don't want to be frustrated over it because it's not mine :)
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