Earth Day

We're doomed. One way or another the end is near. Of course, near is a relative term. Sometime in the next billion years we are going to get fried, broiled, baked or blasted. Even if we avoid all of those calamities, the damn sun will go out and we will freeze or something. Just saying.

But hey, today was Earth Day, so maybe there's some hope. Everywhere I go, people are going green. Not Shamrock green mind you, but a pastel green. But a light green is a place to start, I suppose.

My personal Earth Day efforts pretty much amounted to doing nothing different than usual. I live a pretty simple life. I drove to work in my little clown car, one mile each way. At thirty miles per gallon in the city, I used about eight ounces of gas. I supposed that I could have walked or biked, but after a standing on my feet all day, the last thing I wanted to do was walk home. Plus I drove one of the high school kids home, right on my way. This kept his father from making a two mile round trip.

We recycle all of our household waste. Nothing goes into the trash but garbage. I do use more water than need be, but having a lot of plants requires water. Not a colossal amount of water, but more than I could get by with. I changed every bulb in the house to compact fluorescent, to save electricity.

Anyway, I think I do a pretty good job of not being wasteful and that's all I have to offer. Maybe when solar panels get affordable, I will look into that, but for now I'm doing what I can.

There were a couple of Earth Day items that caught my attention today.

First of all, I noticed that someone at the store put up a large sign that says, "Choose to Reuse" on a display of reusable bags. The kind that can be used in lieu of those awful plastic bags.

I have to question our store's commitment to reuse, though. Every Tuesday and Friday, we empty dozens of cardboard boxes, flatten them and then toss them into the trash, where the are hauled to the landfill.

I asked the powers that be about recycling them and was told that they thought of that but hadn't really done anything with the idea. Cynical Merle might conclude that choose to reuse might really be choose to buy our bag.

Secondly, a woman came in today asking for a particular gardening item that we don't carry. I told her as much and she asked if I knew where she might get it. When I told her that I was pretty sure she could get it at the nursery a block down our street, she responded that she wasn't going to drive all over town on Earth Day looking for something. She said she would go home and call.

It occurred to me, but not to her apparently that if she went home and called, she would have to drive back to get it. Or drive somewhere else to get it. I offered her our phone to make some calls, but she said she preferred to do it from home. Seems odd to me.

Anyway, Happy Earth Day.







Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky