Walk Score from Madame X

Madame X over at My Open Wallet wrote a post on the "walkability" of where you live. In keeping with my green mindset recently, I went straight to the website to see what my condo's walkability score is, and it gave me a high score of 98 out of 100! I use a lot of the places that were found in the map search, including my grocery store, gym, coffee shop, drug store, and movie theater. Other places are a little sketchy, and while they helped the score, I probably wouldn't go to them for safety reasons.

My S.O. and I own one car for the two of us, and my job requires me to drive occassionally. I am a little more dependent on my car than I would like to be, but I try to not drive when I really don't have to.

41 Pounds

Every Christmas season I get inundated with catalogues and promotional offers. For this year, I came across a website that offers to keep my mailbox free of solicitations and catalogues (the ones that I request) for 5 years. The purpose of the website is to create less waste in the landfills and to help preserve natural resources. They claim that the average adult receives 41 pounds of junk mail each year!

Fantastic! I immediately went to sign up for this service and discovered that it costs $41. So I gave myself a couple of days to think about it, and decided to do it anyway. Definitely an example of a purchase that is more environmentally-friendly than frugal. But maybe it will come back around? If catalogues are produced and more people shop online, could prices reflect that? I hope so. Either way, I'm doing my part and that still feels pretty darn good!

This is a good time of year to test the service to see if the solicitations/catalogues slow down or stop. Any improvement will be noticed!

Vacations are great...until they're over

I'm back from a fabulous vacation, and reluctantly easing back into the real world. I was on a bike tour of Thailand, and I was really amazed at how eco-friendly the small villages were. They are able to produce their own food (rice, fruit), and sell it too. And they used every piece of everything they had. The trash cans they have at the curbs are TINY. At one point I had a gum wrapper that I needed to throw away, so I asked a vendor if I could put it in their trashcan. The look I received could be best described as deer-in-the-headlights. Me handing her trash was actually going to be a huge burden on her. I quickly rescinded that request, and bowed and thanked her in Thai.

And riding 60-80 miles a day for 10 days was not so bad for my fitness level either! I'm definitely a better cyclist as a result.

Back to the grind, but I hope that everything I learned about Buddhism can filter into my life going forward.