Yes, I did indeed!
Details on the craft blog!
-
Friday, November 18, 2011
| Labels: crafty | 0 comments | | |
-
Monday, November 14, 2011
A week or two ago I took Peter out on a date. By 'date' I mean, I bought tickets to an event and made him go with me. Fortunately, he's a good sport for blindly going to events he knows nothing about (me, not so much). The event was Raincity Chronicles. I went because one of my new favorite musicians was going to be there: Jill Barber, and because it is described as a night of storytelling - which sounded great to me.It was a sold out show (they always are, apparently). And it was lovely. There was a lineup of storytellers who each got on stage and told a tale - the theme this time was Duty Calls (venue was the Legion Hall). There was something very simple and fantastic about it - regular people getting up and telling very entertaining and/or touching stories from their lives, interspersed with lovely songs from Jill Barber. Oh, and beer. And home-baked cookies. And, we ran into two friends of mine, which doesn't surprise me at all - this is totally the kind of event my friends would love just as much as I do. Bumping into friends is awesome.I kind of wish Raincity Chronicles offered an annual pass, since I plan to go to all their shows from now on. Peter enjoyed it too, though it turns out he was quite skeptical when I told him it would be 'a night of storytelling'. So it pays to go to events that sound weird, you never know what you might discover! (Raincity Chronicles is working to get podcasts of their shows up - you can find the first one here!)
| 0 comments | | |
-
Saturday, November 12, 2011
I wonder what it's like to live in a place with medieval, windy streets and historic architecture everywhere. I wonder if you get used to it and stop finding it charming and just find it annoying (you probably dream of straight streets).
And where do they put all the modern infrastructure of today? Phone lines? Cable lines? Separated storm water and sewer pipes. Our engineers like roads to be at least, oh, 20m wide so they can fit in all the under-street utilities in separate areas... then I arrive in Europe to these narrow streets and life seems to carry on.
| 0 comments | | |
-
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Edited a few more Latvia photos... am missing Riga, which seems weird. Maybe I miss being a lady of leisure.
| Labels: travel | 0 comments | | |
-
Friday, November 04, 2011
On Tuesday, I got to go do another photoshoot with cats.... except this time it was mostly KITTENS!
It's been a long time since I've been around kittens, and having seven 5-week old ones running around was seriously cute overload. It was awesome.
And, Ben took more fabulous photos! Don't these photos make you want to adopt them all? I think Ben and I both want to quit our jobs and photograph cats full time.
All these cats are available for adoption from HomeFinders Animal Rescue!| Labels: cats | 1 comments | | |
-
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Today at work I got to go tour a recycling sorting facility! No, really, this is cool.
Since I've been doing stuff on waste diversion at work, I jumped at the chance to go on the tour and see how this stuff gets done in the real world. The guys in the Solid Waste department seemed somewhat surprised that I wanted to go, but it was neat, I'm glad I did. It's a new, state of the art automated sorting system. So all your recyclable containers that go in your blue bin go to a facility like this (or maybe one less fancy and less automated), and somehow the stuff all gets separated. It's quite the operation. It involves magnets, air density separators, optical scanners, and a whole lot of conveyor belts.
And it forces me to tell you three things:
1. Do not. ever. put plastic bags in your recycling bin. ever. I know it's convenient to put your containers in a bag and then toss them in the bin with the bag, but don't do it. really. seriously. They muck up ALL the machinery. There aren't words to convey what an immense headache they cause. There's no easy way to separate them out and they just get everywhere. Aside from actually gumming up the machinery, they contaminate the separated materials which makes it hard to market the recyclables. And if no one wants the recyclables, then it didn't do much good for you to recycle it, the city to pick it up, and the facility to try to separate it. All that effort wasted because of some stupid plastic bag. (you should be using reusable shopping bags anyhow, then you won't have this issue at all!)
So really, seriously: no plastic bags. Please.
2. Make a point of buying products with post-consumer recycled content. Please. It doesn't do a lot of good to recycle your used stuff if you don't help create a market for the material! Do you buy paper towels with post-consumer recycled content? Did you know you can buy paper towels made of 100% post-consumer recycled content and it's just as good as stuff made from virgin forests that were cut down to make your disposable wipes? Why do we allow forests to be cut down when we could be reusing our own materials?! This drives me bonkers. There shouldn't even be any paper towel on the shelf made from anything other than post-consumer materials. Ditto for toilet paper and aluminum foil and many many other products. Please take the time to seek out these products. I understand the markets for recyclable materials tanked a few years ago, meaning it's hard to find anyone who wants to buy the material (and the ones that do pay very little). Some (most?) of the materials get shipped overseas - which has a ridiculous carbon footprint and is silly because clearly we use enough material our own selves to eat up all the recyclables.
3. Please rinse out your containers. Have some pity on the facilities that store, sort, and process your materials.
Sorry for the PSA - but it's so easy for people to avoid thinking about this stuff, and it's rather important! In any case, yay for recycling! Let's do more and do better!| Labels: environment | 1 comments | | |
Posts
