So, the weather yesterday said a 30% chance of snow starting at 3 AM. It picked up to a 50% by noon. But the day's high was supposed to be almost 40.

Today, I wake up, 10:00AM (long day of music yesterday, followed by a few movies), and there is already about 4 inches of snow on the ground. New daytime high? 32. 100% chance of snow until 2:00PM. Beautiful.

I love the weather man.

Now, for a subject change, something that has been bothering me quite a bit.

I'm not an eco-maniac, but I am an avid environmentalist. All the time I see people in my neighborhood, other neighborhoods, just about everywhere not recycling. There is a recycle service, they get the recycle buckets for free, recycling bins are picked up twice a week, it's extremely easy to recycle. Yet people don't.

An aluminium soda can, when recycled, saves enough power to run a 25" TV for 3 full hours. The average American drinks 6 cans of soda a week. If every average American recycled all 6 cans of soda, thats 18 hours of TV being run a week. That makes 936 hours of TV a year. If multiplied by 300 million, that means 2,808,000,000 hours of TV that could be watched without denting fossil fuels.

Yet people don't take the two minutes a day it might take to recycle. WHY? It's beyond laziness, in a society driven by leisure, where two of the most profitable industries are sports and film, where people buy Hummers and Landrovers which get 8 and 12 mpg respectively just to show off, it's just plain disgusting.

It takes so little effort to be environmentally friendly.


Water the yard in the early morning or evening during the summer instead of the daytime. That cuts down the water use by almost half, with equal benefits for the grass.

If you urinate in the evening, dont flush the toilet; close the lid, flush after you've gone twice, that can save thousands of gallons of water a year.

Maximize trips out of the house; if you are going to a mall, don't go twice in two days, go one time when you really need to and cut down on gas consumption.

Keep your house at 68 degrees instead of 70 in the winter and wear a coat. Keep it at 72 instead of 70 in the summer and walk around in shorts and a t-shirt. The amount of energy that saves is enormous.

Turn off the lights when you walk out of a room. As long as you are gone for more than .01 seconds, you save power by shutting off the light. Something tells me when you leave a room, it is usually for more than .01 seconds... (side note - mythbusters did a huge test to prove that it is energy efficient to shut off the lights rather than leave them on)

Look for products packaged in recycleable or recycled materials; I buy eggs in cardboard packaging rather than in foam packaging; the price difference is around 10 cents for the carton of 12 eggs, yet the foam takes over 1000 years to biodegrade, while it takes about 2 weeks for the cardboard to biodegrade.

Having a party? Use Paper plates and bowls instead of plastic or foam ones. They're a little bit cheaper, they might not have the divided sections, but again, it takes days rather than centuries for it to biodegrate.


You don't have to be a super focused environmentalist to make a difference. The argument that "there are more important matters at hand, and a single person is too small to have an impact" is bullshit. If every person took the small steps, the big steps would take care of themselves. And the environmentally friendly steps are very small ones indeed.

You don't have to purchase Double-pane windows, dual-flush toilets, bamboo flooring, solar panel roofing, recycled material insulation, recycled glass terrazo countertops (which look really cool), or any other expensive (but in the long run more economical)environmentally friendly special features. You just have to take the itty bitty step.

Heck, it even saves money by reducing toilet flushes and monitoring heat use and reducing trips in the car and turning off the lights and watering at the right times.