Category Archives: Green Ideas

Change in the air?

I use the Yahoo home page to sign into my email account, and every so often one of their “news” headlines catches my attention, as this one did today: Generation Y Giving Cars a Pass.  Chalk this one up in the good news category 🙂

It’s small, but it’s a start, and I hope it continues to catch.  Policy makers and transportation planners take note: we don’t want more roads or bigger roads.  We want accommodations that make us LESS car dependent, that expand transportation options and make walking, biking, and public transit easy and convenient.

Chattanooga, you had me at hello

Market St. bridge across the Tennessee River, taken from the Walnut St. bike/ped bridge

Hello from Pro Walk Pro Bike 2010 in lovely Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Ya’ll (I can say that because I’m in the south now), Chattanooga is a lovely city that has made huge pedestrian and bicycle enhancements in recent years and I’m surrounded by fabulous and inspiring people from across the country (and the globe, in some cases) who are working hard to create safe, viable transportation alternatives.

Art Museum at Bluff View Art District

I packed for the conference after looking at the weather forecast and seeing temps in the high 80s (i.e., almost 90 — ugh, hot) all week instead of the reality that I would spend 8am to 5:30pm in a refrigerator an excessively (and wastefully) over-air-conditioned building.

After hours, I’ve been exploring Chattanooga by bike.  Given the conference hours, this means that I’ve been exploring Chattanooga by bike IN THE DARK, both a.m. and p.m., which wouldn’t be a big deal if I had Baby Jake and my usual riding gear, but it’s a little iffy on the rental with no lights or reflective vest.  Note to self: always travel with reflective vest, you never know when you might want it.

I’m only scratching the surface here, but so far I’ve enjoyed the Walnut Street Bridge, the Tennessee Riverpark (an 8-mile long multi-use greenway), and biking around downtown in general.

Spinach walnut ravioli at 212 Market Restaurant

The food scene (normally, I would consider this the most important part, but I’m so enjoying the biking and the beautiful riverfront):

However, eating out is not nearly as fun without Matthew.  I can try many more things when he’s there to share in the fun and food.  I’ve already informed him that we’re coming back to Chattanooga together 🙂

Driving on car-free Friday

Big Bertha interrupted my usual car-free Friday with a trip to the MO Extension Services office in Clayton for some testing.  (You’ll meet Big Bertha later,when she returns to the apartment and is ready for her photo shoot.)

Our destination was totally bikeable, and also conveniently located near a MetroLink stop.  However, there’s a reason for the “Big” in Big Bertha’s name, and the bike’s cargo carrying capacity, as well as my lack of willingness to put in the necessary walking for public transit with Big Bertha, limited our options.

I arrived in Clayton, and SURPRISE!  The Saint Louis Art Fair is this weekend (yeah, they call it the SAINT LOUIS Art Fair, although it’s in Clayton, but I digress), meaning I was immediately mired in horribly congested traffic, what with the blocked off streets and the vendors’ cargo vans and trucks clogging all of the non-closed streets.  Ugh!

If you go to the Saint Louis Art Fair (in Clayton) this weekend, please take my advice and get there by any means other than driving.  Ride your bike or take p-trans — MetroLink stops right in Clayton, and you’ll end up walking less than you would if you drove and parked really far away.

Anyway, after much ridiculousness and navigating the craziness, I found a parking spot, one with money already in the meter.  Score!  Things were looking up for us.

After Big Bertha’s test (which she failed, but all is not lost), I set out to make the most of the car trip with a Whole Foods run.  I hit the bulk bins hard and fast — and succeeded in my goal to use no new plastic bags in the bulk bin aisle.  Heck, I managed to avoid using any new twist ties 🙂

Errand completed, and too much money spent, I drove to the CWE to drop off the car for Matthew.  He should be walking to the car to drive to his doctor’s appointment right about now, and I’m anticipating his call telling me that it’s not in one piece anymore.  Or maybe that it’s in one severely dented piece.

See, I realized too late (i.e., after paying the meter) that my sweet parking spot on Kingshighway was in a highly dangerous position with high potential to get rear-ended by merging traffic.  Yep, I picked the spot where what was previously a lane of moving traffic turned into a lane of street parking.

After parking and paying the meter, I resisted the strong temptation to just stand there with the car, staring down any potential rear-enders, ready to jump out and protect the car if necessary.  Quite ridiculous, but as much as I don’t even particularly like owning a car, repairing or replacing an accident-damaged vehicle would be less fun.

As it was, I managed to make myself walk away so I could make the next #95 bus and get home for some lunch.  The bus ride was soooo relaxing and pleasant after a morning navigating traffic — what a refined way to travel!

Greening the Festival of Nations

Thanks to our BYO everything (water bottles, utensils, plates) strategy, we produced just one piece of trash on day 1 of the Festival of Nations last weekend.  I spent way too much time debating weather to trash that cardboard serving dish or recycle.  The sign on the recycling said they accepted cardboard, but this was dirty cardboard, despite our best scraping efforts (we don’t lick our plates clean in public), so I reluctantly deposited it in the trashcan.

Props to St. Louis Earth Day’s “Recycling on the Go” program for providing recycling at the event.  And by “providing recycling,” I don’t just mean setting out the bins.  They actually had people (volunteers?) walking around and removing recyclable items from the the trashcans to place in the recycling bins (don’t worry, they were wearing gloves for this activity) — really taking it to the next level!

Although I didn’t attend, the LouFest Music Festival (also last weekend) really pushed the greening theme, and I would love to see Festival of Nations implement a few other key programs, a water station for refilling water bottles being the main one.

Bike parking also makes the wish list, although this item is for Tower Grove Park in general, not specifically the Festival of Nations.  I heard through the grapevine that Tower Grove’s excuse for the lack of bicycle parking is that bike racks “don’t fit the Victorian theme of the park.”  Wha???  Of course, all of their accommodations for motor vehicles are perfectly in keeping with that time period, because there were lots of cars around in the Victorian era. Yeah.

Diva with a party in my pants

For 10+ years, I never really questioned the standard of disposable menstrual products, other than some vague curiosity when reading historical fiction.  My lack of questioning was due, at least in part, to the fact that for most of those years, I never bought any tampons or pads because my bargain-hunting mother stockpiled a lifetime supply (or so it seemed).  Between coupons, sales, and rebates, she never paid anything near full price for said items, and our bathroom cabinets were overflowing with feminine products.  (Hi Mom, I love you!)  I’m not complaining, because my mom’s savvy shopping and generosity no doubt saved me a lot of money, but it may have delayed my exploration of alternatives.

But four females can go through A LOT of tampons, pads, and liners, and the supplies eventually dwindled.  Plus, oh hey, I haven’t been living at home for more than 8 years now.  I’m an adult, maybe it’s time I bought my own tampons.  So I’m buying my own, halfheartedly looking for coupons and sales, experimenting with the cheaper generic options, all while trying to reduce my environmental impact, and I start to wonder, “What did women do before we had disposable menstrual products?  There have to be some alternatives out there.  What are my options now?”

Forty or so years of tampons and pads adds up to quite a bit of trash, but this, as with most “disposable” products of various types that cram store shelves today, represents a relatively new phenomenon.  Today we have non-disposable options that are just as convenient as disposables and more technologically advanced than just using a rag.Continue reading “Diva with a party in my pants”