B'ham State of Mind

So most people who read this blog will probably already have seen this, and maybe a good portion of the rest of you don't really care, but I had to share this music video my college buddy Nathan Cox made - a loving homage to my beloved Bellingham.

"City of Subdued Excitement..."


Rep. Re. Sent.

10 on 10 :: September

Ten on Ten Photojournal Project - a photo taken every hour for ten hours on the tenth of each month.

Join in the fun next month here!

Impact

Chad and I seem to love torturing ourselves with environmentally themed documentaries that drastically affect how we view the world and our place in it (i.e. Food, Inc). I think we've always considered ourselves pretty 'earth-friendly', and have consistently tried to be earth-friendlier every year (we started using cotton shopping bags forever ago, but only recently have we started remembering them almost every time.)

However, the most recent documentary we watched - No Impact Man - has REALLY got us thinking. Not that anything they talk about in the movie is really big news: I think we all know that our landfills are piling up with plastic bottles and disposable diapers, and that trucking in piles of bananas from Ecuador is bad for the environment.  But for some reason watching this family try to live without those things (in NYC no less!) made us notice how shockingly prevalent they are in our own lives. And THAT is what got us thinking.

It's an interesting idea, to take away a lot of things that you regard as 'necessities' as a sort of trial-by-fire to see what you really need in life, and what you can get by without (or even enrich your life by getting rid of). Not that we plan on living with no electricity or without a car, but I've been thinking about the things that I can easily change that maybe I hadn't thought of before, and I thought I'd make a top-ten list here, for accountability's sake:

1. Greatly reduce our pre-packaged grocery items (particularly anything wrapped in plastic.)
2. Use fewer paper towels (I am especially bad about this one, and it will be a real challenge. They are just so convenient!)
3. Use homemade, earth-friendly cleaning products
4. Line-dry our laundry more often
5. Buy from bulk bins (& use cloth bags)
6. Continue our love affair with our Farmers Market (and bring back egg cartons/strawberry baskets)
7. Bake our own bread (or buy from local bakeries) and store in a reusable fabric bread bag
8. Make our own ____ (fill in the blank - we've talked about making our own salsa, etc... could we make our own yogurt? Pasta? Peanut/almond butter?)
9. Compost bin/box for food scraps (our landlord is going to LOVE that one...)
10. Travel mugs for Starbucks treats (even though that paper cup feels so darn good in your hand...)

I get really excited talking about this. We were at our friends' house this past weekend and laughed about how we always end up on this line of conversation when we get together with them. It's quickly becoming a shared passion of ours! I actually have much bigger dreams for the future, and leading a more responsible, sustainable life (something a lot like this), but I know there is a great deal we can do for the time being and it feels kind of thrilling to start that journey. It feels like I just woke up.