wash away your iniquity...

The weather puzzles me. One moment there's snow and then overnight it disappears. I'm absolutely estatic about the change. It has been a long and dreary winter and I have been anxious to throw off the shackles of sock season.

Today is officially the day. My decision to go sockless was in part prompted by my inability to find any matching pair this morning, but also because yesterday it was warm enough that I could walk across the parkade to the Property Management Office in a pair of pants my mom brought me from Trinidad and a tank top. Unfortunately open-toe season at work has not started yet (there's a strict dress code, summer dress starts sometime in May I think), so all of my sandal type shoes have to wait a couple weeks. I hope this is the last major weather change I will have to endure for a while. I want it to start getting hotter and hotter, with perhaps some rainy days in between.

I really feel like my general mood is improving. Aryn and I will start to move in a couple weeks, just in time for the reopen of the downtown Farmer's Market (The City Market) on May 19th. Realizing how little time I get to spend in the fresh air during the week, I'm trying to spend as much time as I can out of doors this summer. So that will mean sitting outside in the park during my lunch break, going for evening walks and going to the market every weekend. I live downtown, I might as well take advantage of all the amenities I have close by.

Maybe it's spring, but green things have been popping up a lot recently. I am continually reading blog posts or magazine articles about the new 'green' fad. Yesterday I came across Colin Beavan's blog called No Impact Man chroniciling his family's year long experiment to have no net impact environmental impact while living in the New York City.

No Impact Man is my experiment with researching, developing and adopting a way of life for me and my little family—one wife, one toddler, one dog—to live in the heart of New York City while causing no net environmental impact. To do this, we will decrease the things we do that hurt the earth—make trash, cause carbon dioxide emissions, for example—and increase the things we do that help the earth—clean up the banks of the Hudson River, give money to charity, rescue sea birds, say.

The blog has been running since February 2007 and will eventually be made into a documentary (to be released in 2009 I think). I was looking through the blog yesterday and it was interesting to read some of the comments, especially the negative ones. There are lot of people out there who like to condemn others for attempting to do something different. This guy is trying to reduce his environmental impact, which I think is admirable. However, there are a number of people who feel the need to call this guy a hypocrite and try to prove that his experiment is only a publicity stunt or an effort to seek fame and fortune. It's really ridiculous how some individuals are able to find something negative in what should be viewed as an admirable effort by Beavan and his family. There are so many ways that we each can try to minimize our environmental impact - and I think it's inspiring that this fellow is trying some extreme measures in order to see what would be feasible for his lifestyle in the longterm.

After watching Manufactured Landscapes over the Easter long weekend, I'm still in shock of some of the images I saw in the film. After seeing the piles of recycling shipped to some of these cities in China (where from I'm unsure), I am interested to find out more specific details about how the Edmonton Recycling (& Waste Management) Programs work. Lucky for me I'm dating a Civil Engineer who has not only visited some of these facilities but is also employed by the City (albeit in a totally different department).

I think Aryn and I need to think more closely about how much waste we are producing. If the Beavan family can try to live with a net environmental impact for a year, we can at least try to lessen ours.