Emily Bloss

One of the joys of living in Florida’s rural areas is the gopher tortoise. They dig burrows in the sand and munch grass, living a pretty sedate existence (except when their territory gets invaded by another turtle). I was happy to learn that Florida recently reclassified the gopher tortoise as threatened, which means increased protection. Yay!! One of the best results of the reclassification is repeal of a law which said it was OK to bury the tortoises during construction, as long as you paid a fee. Now that’s no longer allowed, thank goodness!!! Defenders of Wildlife has an article – No Tortoise Left Behind – which gives a lot of good info about the plight of and hopes for the recovery of the tortoise population.

Guess where the world’s largest landfill is…? If you said the Pacific Ocean, you would be right. Apparently there’s an area twice the size of Texas that’s filled with trash – mostly plastic. It’s a terrible, huge problem, killing more than 1 million birds and other sea creatures every year, because they eat it, get stuck in it, or feed it to their babies. And because of the way plastic degrades, it’s pretty much impossible to clean it up.

Most of it comes from land, either washed in via storm drains or blown in by the wind. Once the trash enters the water, it’s carried by currents and wind into the patch, where it can drift for many, many years before being eaten, sinking or washing up on the beach.

Here are a couple of places with more information, from HowStuffWorks and a personal account by Charles Moore. It’s rather frightening, and I keep wondering what I can do to help clean up this mess. Maybe that will be my next job?

I found this really neat article on how to make a furoshiki wine carrier… basically you take a square piece of cloth and wind it up around the two wine bottles and you have a nice, safe way to transport the wine. Very cool! Plus, here’s a page to show you how to fold various items into a furoshiki. I’ve printed this and will keep it on hand to wrap presents and such. Another simple and interesting way to help save our planet!

Today, with my nifty new grabby thing, we got to pick up a whole grocery bag’s worth of trash from our walking route in the park! I was thrilled. What a great way to directly help the environment. Thanks, Bleys, for the gift! And thanks, eagle-eye Trav, for spotting the trash, helping to pick up and showing me how to use it better. I’ve never been so happy picking up trash!!

I truly believe we are making ourselves sick by producing unnatural products… we’re poisoning our environment. I wonder how many kids have autism or something like that because of the amount of lead in our lives? It seems every day there’s a new story about lead or some other terrible thing in this or that product. How many of us have Christmas lights from who knows when that are full of it? I read the other day that you should wash your hands after handling strings of lights because lead will get on them from touching the lights. Aieeee!!!

Anyways, this rambling was due to seeing an article about Soapberry – I want to try this on my clothes:

Laundry soap grows on trees

I’ll let you know how it is if I try it. I hope I get a seed!

The cost of food is a frequent topic in our house. It’s our biggest single expense – we spend even more on it than our house payment. Geesh! But we try to eat well, preparing almost all of our meals from scratch, with very little processed food. Today I found an article which cites a recent study that found it’s a lot more expensive to eat a healthy diet:

New York Times: The High Price of Healthy Food

We often wonder how it is that processed, crappy food can be so much cheaper. They had to do a lot to the ingredients to make it, so how can it cost so little? It doesn’t make sense. Is it government subsidies at work? If so, why aren’t we subsidizing the small farmers who bring us fresh produce? Our food system is terribly backwards… I wonder how we can fix it. I suppose it’s up to consumers, but can people afford to vote with their wallets, without going hungry?

Bleys found a great site – freerice.com – where they donate grains of rice for every vocabulary word where you can choose the correct meaning. It’s great fun! Hard, too. The most recent word I tried was ameliorate – I’ve seen the word but got it wrong…. ameliorate = improve. I’ve made it (briefly) to level 44 so far.

This made me think of being a kid and calling myself Emilia Bloka, when I was learning Spanish. Which makes me remember getting a Spanish dictionary for Christmas! I believe my parents have a film of me showing off my spiffy new dictionary. I love those films!!