Four wheels bad, two wheels good

With this great spring weather we’ve been having here in the frozen north, it was time to get the bikes back out and try to get back to leaving the car at home for short trips.
Yesterday was sunny, warm and all the streets were clear for a quick six-minute trip to one kids’ preschool. It was [...]

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Lights out

 
Earth Hour is tonight from 8 to 9 p.m. wherever you live.
Think you’ll be bored in an hour without electricity? Here are some suggestions to keep you busy:

Read

Play board games

Knit

Talk to your significant other. Who know what that could lead to…

Play with your kids

Sing

Play an instrument

Draw

Sleep

Go for a walk

Montreal Canadiens’ fans: listen to the game [...]

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Na na na na na

As I was breastfeeding my toddler for what felt like the umpteenth time yesterday, I started to try to think about the postive aspects of nursing forever and ever amen. This is what I am going to try to focus on instead of trying to figure out why this baby just does not want to be weaned. [...]

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Greening the WC

 
Last year, we began to try to buy toilet paper and paper towels that were made only from recycled paper. (I know, I know, we shouldn’t use paper towels. I’m working on it!!)
According to Greenpeace Canada, if each household in Canada replaced 1 roll of virgin toilet paper with just one roll of recycled toilet paper, [...]

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Get out the candles

 
People around the world are making plans to shut off their electricity for an hour on March 29 (that’s two weeks from tonight) in a global statement against global warming. More than 32,000 Canadians – including our family – have already pledged to turn off their lights between 8 and 9 p.m., local time.
Last year, [...]

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Just popping in a for a snack

This would be one of the many squirrels that has discovered the buffet at our backyard compost bin. Hard to see the bins, buried under the 26cm of snow that fell here on Saturday night.

But what hungry squirrel would let 26cm of snow keep them from a tasty snack? Not this one, who dug a [...]

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Litterless lunch

Ever since our family did a one-week garbage-free experiment last summer, I’ve been trying to keep our kids’ packed lunches and snacks as litterless as possible. The average Canadian kid’s lunch (like the one pictured above) is estimated to create about 30 kg of waste each year. I’d been at the kids’ schools at lunch and [...]

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The worms came crawling, one by one, hurrah

For the first time since we got our outdoor compost bins, we are adding green waste like fruit and vegetable peels to it all winter long. It has kept the family of squirrels living in the maple tree in our back yard very happy as they have everything from canteloupe rinds to avocado skins to munch on in the cold dead of [...]

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No idling

 
There’s an interesting story in today’s Montreal Gazette about the impact of idling your car. Besides polluting and wasting fuel, it also damages the car engine because newer cars are designed in order not to have to be idled before you start driving, even in the winter.
Idle Threat
Bylaw rarely enforced. Only 106 out of 1.3 [...]

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Oil, that is, black gold

I’ve been reading a couple of interesting things recently about the oil sands projects in Alberta.
The first is this series, published earlier this year in the Globe and Mail. The eight-day series looks at the development of the oil sands, and the environmental and social cost of the projects, which are estimated to have a [...]

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