Stop whiskering
me!-Carly, while getting her face rubbed by Scott's scruffy cheeks.
The following is a repost of a blog posting at the Active Minds blog by Kathy entitled Ditch the gym membership... grow a garden!
It’s a shame our leaders can only tell us to “buy, buy, buy” during an economic downturn (slump, recession, whatever you want to call this). As the price of fuel and food climbs upward, they should be urging us to grow Victory Gardens, pitching in to
sustain ourselves and reduce our dependence on industrial methods and foreign fuels.
When economic recession coincides with a global climate crisis, it makes even more sense.
When you grow even a small portion of your own food, you reap manifold benefits. You get the satisfaction of reducing your dependence on others for your most basic needs. Vegetables are absolutely the best thing you can eat, and when you grow your own they are cheaper, fresher and tastier. You get to control what fertilizer is used (or not) to grow them, and no petroleum is required to truck them to your kitchen. You get to slow down a bit and maybe connect with your neighbor to swap surplus tomatoes or borrow a shovel. Best of all, you get to be out in the fresh air, using your muscles with a real purpose and not just completing sets of reps. It’s the perfect solution: get in shape while improving your diet.
Michael Pollan makes the point more completely in his essay, Why Bother?:
It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape [i.e., driving ourselves to the gym].
I say we take his advice. Let's skip the health club this summer and work out in our back yards instead.
(Photo: Flickr - Dr. Hemmert)
Our "green" ways have gained attention — we've been featured as part of a story in this month's MetroParent magazine
entitled Going, Going, Green!
We were one of four families feature in the article about families in the Milwaukee area
who have been making strides towards living a "green" lifestyle.
Yanoff Family "Green" Tip: We've found a number of ways to save energy around the Yanoff household:
- Compact Fluorescents — these can be had for $1 to $2 if you look for specials. They last forever and we've found that while some of the older versions are not the best for reading lamps, they do just fine outside for the porch light or for those lamps we have on timers to light up dark rooms after sundown.
- Use a reel mower instead of a gas-powered mower &mdash granted, we have only a quarter of an acre lot here in Shorewood. But, if Scott's going to push a mower either way up and down that lot, why does it need to be gas-powered? Sure, the old mower didn't use much gas over the course of a summer, but it's one less machine spewing CO2 into the air.
- Use stairs instead of the elevator &mdash whenever we get the chance, we opt for the stairs. Kathy has one flight up to her office and Scott has about three, so both try to set an example for others by forgoing the electric-powered elevator in favor of the stairs. Figuring that each staircase burns about 13-14 calories, a few flights up a couple of times a day can account for any naughty snacking we do that day. Scott's even begun leading his teammates to the stairwells instead of the elevators in hopes of getting his team on the right path.
For Valentine's Day this year, Carly found some leftover valentines from last year that she was able to re-use. She choose the valentine and the person it was going to if the sentiment on the card matched the recipient. What was funny was that in a couple of cases, Carly edited "Be Mine" to read "Be You" and "Not just another pretty face" to "Not just another boy" for some of her male classmates. Meanwhile, Gillie bought some seeds and made her own valentines out of homemade paper with the seeds embedded in them. These earth-friendly valentines are then ready for planting in the ground come spring.
Yanoff Family "Green" Tip: We purchased a rain barrel for $30 from the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. Rain barrels help slow down rain runoff so it can drain naturally into the ground. That helps us keep excess water out of sewer systems and keeps rain runoff from collecting pollutants on its trip to nearby waterways. Collected rainwater is better for plants because it's not chlorinated although it is mildly acidic, which helps plants take up important minerals from the soil. They can provide water during dry weather, or you can set them to slowly release the water over a 1- 2 day period when the rains have subsided. The slower release of rain will allow the water to seep into the soil and be used by plants, such as we are planning to start doing this summer as a way to water our vegetable and flower gardens.
It's a snow day! Nearly everything has been canceled or closed in Milwaukee today as we've received several inches of snow with the potential for the storm to bring over a foot of snow. Luckily, we can work from home via VPN connections.
Meanwhile, Gillie lost two lower teeth in the past week which definitely creates an interesting look. We've been having great fun playing Dance Dance Revolution nearly every night. We have it on loan from Kathy's sister and we've been finding that even though it's a video game, it's a really fun way to get exercise. We'll have to get a video of the girls dancing on the dance pads if we can ever take one where they are not in a half-state of undress (we get hot playing it).
Carly's Girl Scout cookie sales have ended and she's moved on to other things, such as eBay. Yes, we had an interesting experience where Scott taught Carly how to use Google. She's often looking for fun new games to play online (speaking of which, check out Snowball 2008) and so Scott watched her search for "Littlest Pet Shop" on Google and saw that she had found the game site she was looking for and walked away. We supervise the girls' activity online but apparently the short time we left Carly to play her game left her enough time to get bored with it and examine the other search results from Google. Since Google searches eBay, she clicked on some Littlest Pet Shop toy she wanted and since the web browser was set to autmatically remain logged into eBay, she placed a bid on a toy.
Now, keep in mind that although we use eBay and may talk about bidding and buying on it from time to time, we've never actually showed the girls how to use it nor have we fully explained the concepts to them. Not only were we surprised that she attempted to make an online purchase, but that she figured out the concepts of eBay on her own. The toy she wanted was currently at $5.75 and so she put in a bid of $8.50 (at least, we hope that is what she typed when she told us she bid eight-fifty). When we asked her how she knew to do this, she said that she knew that she had to put in a dollar amount higher than what it was currently at if she wanted to get the toy. She ended up winning the auction for $6 but acted unfazed when we told her that with shipping, she'd owe $12. Lessons learned: we've since logged out of our eBay account so that bids can't easily be placed on it and decided to monitor computer usage even more closely than we had been before. And, we had "the talk" with Carly, although who knew that "the talk" we'd have to have was about eBay!
Yanoff Family "Green" Tip: Compost those food scraps! We bought a simple compost bin a couple of years ago and we keep it behind the garage. We accumulate our food scraps (why do people feel the need to put these down the garbage disposal, anyway?) as well as lawn clippings and add them into the compost bin. The compost that comes out is like black gold, as it can really help any plantings thrive. How is this "green"? Food in the landfill is the United States' second largest source of anthropogenic methane, a strong greenhouse gas. So, composting is important!
We've shut off the text messaging capabilities of our phones. We did this because we were getting spam messages at 3 a.m. Sure, we filed a complaint with the FCC, but that doesn't really help stop these untraceable messages. We called our phone service provider and this was the only option they could offer, so we took it since we don't really use the text messaging anyway.
Scott's been keeping track of some nifty online opt-outs that allow you to receive fewer credit card offers and less junk mail.
Yanoff Family "Green" Tip: Whenever we receive unsolicited email, Scott heads over to that company's website and requests to receive no more postal mailings. Opting out not only keeps you from getting less junk mail, it's saving on paper and postage. Yeah, I know everyone likes looking at those Victoria's Secret catalogs but hey, the same stuff is online when you want it.Anyway, here is Scott's list of online opt-outs:
Happy new year, everyone! We all passed our last Taekwondo test which means that Gillie and Scott are now high brown belts and have begun testing for their red belts, the final color before black. Meanwhile, Carly became a high green belt but has decided to take a break from the Taekwondo. A friend from class took a short video of Gillie's first-place board-breaking technique from the Taekwondo tournament we participated in last October.
Scott enjoyed making his "best of 2007" music list so much that he made a playlist on his iPod of his favorite songs from 2007. He then proceeded to create a list of his picks of the best music of 2006. Also new on the site:
