Information still has to get around, and even though I like to read the New York Times on my iPhone in the bathroom, I am still partial to a real, honest-to-goodness magazine to hold onto and distract me when I am having quiet time in the morning. Also, I don’t have to worry about dropping my $300 investment in the toilet.

So naturally I am excited that Pepsi has teamed up with Plenty Magazine, for who knows how long, offering FREE SUBSCRIPTIONS to the green . Just click here, then click on the little green monster on the right side of the screen. There doesn’t appear to be any catches. They will send you an email confirmation and …poof, free magazine for a year.

Just be sure to share the mag, and recycle it when you are done.

Here’s a question for you:

There is only one way to be a good (green) neighbor in the suburbs especially in a place where I live, which seems to be frozen in time:

Keep a nice lawn.

Colin and I went away for two weeks in July this past summer, and we had hot temps while we were gone. The result was a scorched lawn in front of our house. We weren’t too bothered — it’s just dirt and some plants after all, a temporary thing. But we were suddenly the talk of the Hilltop.

“Looks like fertilizer burn to me.”

“You could use a little water, I bet.”

“Got a few bear patches huh? Guess you don’t need to mow so often now, haha.”

Time to Plant the Seed

OH-kay. We got more comments on our pathetic lawn than we did comment our LED Christmas lights. (No one sent us the Hilltop memo that we were supposed to have electric candles in the window! How was I to know???)

Well, fortunately autumn and the perfect grass growing season is here. The air is cool and the time is ripe for overseeding. By the way, we did consider planting our veggie garden in the front yard, but feared we would never be spoken to again and forever be named the weird couple down the road growing pumpkins in the gutter.

I have to be shamefaced and admit that Colin and I were lured into the using a lawn service for the last year. Maybe we wanted to fit in, but I think it was the neighbor, Todd (oh the shame of suburban peer-pressure!) He had gorgeous grass and we attriubuted it to Lawn Doctor. After we discovered our neighbor was some kind of alien turf grower, obsessed with the perfect lawn, we decided that we needed to go back to our better — less herbicidal — instincts and try to care for the lawn ourselves.

My dad, with the help of good seed and fertilizer, has always been able to keep a gorgeous lawn. Since I don’t have him in residence, I am using the guidelines I’ve found on HGTV’s Organic Gardening website. I love this site, FYI. The videos are very informative and useful.

I also can’t wait to try out skim milk on my roses to prevent black spot. Skim milk is weird.

I love to keep up with news in my hometown, so I keep the Quad-City Times on my Google Reader. That’s how I found out the great green story of Dennis Osborne Sr., an industrious and wise retiree in Rock Island, IL who’s saving some coin in retirement by greening his lifestyle.

“He choreographed a series of changes to his two-bedroom Rock Island home that allow him to live comfortably while trimming expenses. A few of the more important steps were installing a high-efficiency furnace and air conditioner and a Rinnai tankless water heater.

Osborne’s other updates include:

• using an electric car to get around town.
• planting trees on the south side of the house to block sunlight
• reinsulating to keep heat in
• installing Energy Star appliances
• running the air conditioner only in the evening, to cool the house before bed
• using ceiling fans and opening windows for cross breezes

Going Green for Coin

The thing I love about this article is that it never once mentions that Osborne is an “environmentalist.” He’s not. He’s just a guy who likes to dance, who’s sensible, handy, and, in his retirement, wants to keep more coins in his piggy bank, than dole them out to the utility companies.

Dennis Osborne Sr. is the new electric cowboy, riding into town on his sensible and quiet car, saying with action not words that “less is more.” He is using the principles of his parents generation — Waste Not, Want Not — and the best of the green materials being produced today to formulate my favorite kind of environmentalist: the non-environmentalist.

Unbeknownst, perhaps, to himself, Osborne is going green for cash, a motivation that is much more likely to keep him making changes, than young red-faced activists screaming for change.

Thanks Dennis. You are an excellent example, for my parents, and for regular people everywhere.

Tesco’s arrival into the American market is making me quiver with anticipation!

The conqueror of British retail and all-good-food-packaged-(including-four-overly-shiny-green-peppers-sitting-on-plastic-wrapped-in-plastic) is out to reenact the Revolution in Reverse,  determined to, someday, turn Wal-mart into a sniveling third-grader who got choked for its lunch money and ran away crying.

Thus, in post-superstore Apocolyptica, leaving every town in America with great hulking structures with dangling Ws (that now read “Mal-Mart”), turned, one by one, into Tesco Rollerinks.

But I digress.

Curiously, Tesco’s strategy for entering the U.S. market is a greenwashed one– I mean hey, if you can’t beat the life of out if, at least dress it up in the latest fashions. So Tesco branding automatons came up with this:

A Greener, Gentler Tesco

Interesting… They’ve decided to do everything wrong and can’t figure out why they aren’t winning over the hearts of American shoppers … hmmm.

1) Fresh. While the local food thing is sort of catching on mainstream, ain’t no way that the “Tesco” American thinks of the food they want to eat as “Fresh.” Fresh to a Tesco American = Vegetarian = beans and hairy arm pits. Yuck
2) Easy. It seems to appeal to the American Mind. We are, afterall, fat and lazy. But there’s that “fresh” word in front of it, acting as a modifier. What do Fresh AND Easy, together, equal? Sounds like carrot sticks to me.
3) Neighborhood Market. Listen. If you have to SAY it’s a neighborhood market, you probably haven’t chosen the right location. That’s like explaining milk to a cow then realizing that cow has got some big ‘nads. Our local “Shaw’s” doesn’t have the word “Grocery Store” in the name anywhere, but I reckon we figured it out when we went it a saw all the cereal organized into one aisle.
4) GREEN! What is this? British Petroleum?

Take a look at the branding for Tesco in England.

What am I? I am your Future Master!!

We’re f*cking Tesco, got it? Red, White and BLUE! So Fast, we only got five letters! And it doesn’t even mean anything! Why? because WE RULE YOU!

And, BTW, we also own you. So get in here and buy stuff! Now, before I sell your grandmother on eBay!

Hmmm. That cockiness of spirit. That brash style. Those colors. Reminds me of … something.

In the recent hype over the Hurricane Gustav, I found this fantastic photograph, courtesy of the BBC .

You know, it’s hard for me to take Mother Nature seriously when Weathermen (well, sometimes it’s weathergirls, too, like my old friend Jacqui Jeras on CNN– not a man at all) insist on playing muppet in the gale force. I hope all remember the humiliation of this Al Roker incident:

Honestly, I am not sure which part of that is more embarrassing: Al Roker having to be held down by a flunky, or the the poor humiliated intern who had to do it. Personally, I’d rather be the intern. At least I’d be less likely to get hit by a tree branch.

I know the networks are a slave to the ratings, and all TV personalities are slaves to their escape-tapes, but do we really need to see someone getting pummelled by rain and hail, nearly whipped away in 100 mph winds to be satisfied that gee, it’s a-getting purty bad out thar!

Happy News

I think, personally, that it doesn’t matter at all what we want any more. Those of us mildly amused are to busy coughing in our hands to make any noise anyway. Meanwhile the media machines grind on without us, guessing at what, I don’t know, but sure as hell having an AWESOME time!

Whatever happened to the good old days of Willard Scott? Now there’s a weather reporter who knew a) how to stay out of the inclement weather (just fly where it’s sunny!) and b) knew how to gracefully and purposefully bungle the easiest job on the planet.

God love the weather reporters– unlike our politicians, they are ready and willing to face down any storm.

Like many people, I try to be all artsy-fartsy, especially when it comes to home decorating. But I don’t have the gene.

Add to that equation an eco-bent that sometimes requires a double-dose of creativity, and lately, well, I’ve pretty much given up on making any alternations to the interior of my home.Those little helicopter seeds from the maple trees outside are pretty much the extent of my decor at the moment. Talk about organic.

Instead I browse the net and just imagine how homemade hemp curtains, or a handmade desk forged from reclaimed metals could better my life.

So I was thrilled to discover Decor It Yourself, a green-friendly, stylish-it-yourself blog that seems to be connected with Threadbanger, a totally awesome multi-media, make-your-own-clothes website.

Green style babes like Decor It Yourself’s Meg are my hero. Why? Because they can imagine it, they can do it, and they can explain it too. Sticks for curtain rods? Brilliant! Remove the smoke-stained paper lampshade and repurpose the frame for a gorgeous new lace one??? Why the hell didn’t I think of that?

There are many reasons to love my Mother… she’s handed down many talents to me: like the ability to, with one syllable, get a pack of rowdy kids so frightened they immediately disperse. However, Madame Domesticity she was not. Neither am I.

Oh well… I think the manual for the sewing machine is around here somewhere.

The water is green from glacial rock flour

Not everything is made green on principal. Some things are only green, by a trick of the eye.

Take the lake, for example. It’s Peyto Lake, in Banff National Park. It LOOKS a unearthly bluey-green, but if you look at the center-left of the photo, you can see the truth… a dirty glacier feeding the lake with a mix of melted runoff and ground rock.

What’s green here isn’t green at all, but light reflected off the powdery rock flour floating in the water. Green and blue are the shortest light waves.

How Green is Your Rock Flour?

What’s got me thinking about reflected green is my garden. I spotted a lovely, grungy-looking lady the other day wearing a t-shirt that said “Grow Your Own!” with an abundant garden scene. Our first organic veggie garden is taking over the backyard with cucumbers, pumpkins, radishes, and beans, with tomatoes and carrots on the way. I adore my garden, such as it is.

Too bad I don’t eat any of it. Green beans, ok. But I can’t stand cukes and the taste of carrots– blech. Maybe the t-shirt should have read “Grow your own! (and eat it too, you picky little snot!”). The question is “how” but why does my garden grow?

Meeting the Melting Icecaps, in person.

The glaciers around the Columbia Icefields are receding. The guides tell you it’s cyclical (which it is), but we are helping things along. They don’t say flat out “Look at the SIZE of that outer moraine! HUGE! You idiots! YOU and your SUVs did that!”

No… they are more coy than that. After all people are on vacation, here. Give them a break!

Meanwhile, back at the scenic outlook, the pushy glaciers, the alien lakes, and mountain after mountain are doing their best to appear impenetrable. It seems to work. My mind wasn’t on ecocity on my trip through Alberta and B.C…. It was on nature and my own experience with it. The rushing water and the haste of the beautiful warm season took my mind away.

Warm and lovely… another trick of the eye.

I’d like to extend a special word of thanks to PNY Technologies, Inc. and National Geographic for the awesome plastic packaging that accompanied my Compact (note the definition of COMPACT sometime… FUN WITH IRONY!) Flash Drive.

Note that I bought the drive because I have mostly given up using beloved real film cameras in order to be greener. Apparently all those chemicals, paper, and film are bad for the melting ice caps, and so I too have converted to a digital technology that should be simpler and save consumables.

I’m not sure, but I am pretty certain that the INSIDE packaging (see right) that the drive came in was big enough to keep me shoplifting the flash drive in my pocket. But I guess it’s the OUTSIDE packaging that was really necessary for National Geographic to help save the polar bears.

Someone call The Doctor

Do you know what I wish I had? I wish I had a giant KARM-ECO SCALE. What’s that, you ask? A Karm-Eco scale would be a REALLY big scale like Lady Justice has… used for comparison.

However, in this case I could pile up all the nostalgia and beauty created from film cameras, along with all the dusty equipment that exists already but is going to get trashed, and the film, paper and chemicals on one side of the scale.

And on the other side, we’d represent with PNY’s use of this STUPID PACKAGING. Among other blatant karmic offenders. Sure the plastic isn’t that heavy, but I wonder if what the weight of its future implications and thoughtlessness is?

There isn’t any scale like that … not in the 21st century. But I am hopeful. There is one man who might be able to save us!

Meanwhile, I am considering a twist on the “starving children in Ethiopia” routine that my mom pulled on me when I was a kid. There are, after all, dying Polar Bears in the Arctic. Surely they could use a new chew toy?

Before the invention of spinning classes, and before stationery bicycles even existed at all, people used to ride actual mobile bicycles in order to move from one place to another.

Case in point, the utterly fantastic FRED MATHES of Madera Ranchos, California, who at 92, is still riding the Schwinn cruiser he’s had since his days working on the Marshall Islands. His bicycle is older than me, by 18 years.

What is Fred’s take on why riding bicycles is so great?

“(It’s about) the breeze in your face, the exercise, and the constant change of scenery. It’s the frosting on the cake. Plus, it doesn’t wear out your knees and hips.”

At 92, Fred’s seen every state in the Union– except Michigan. He wrote to Schwinn to even tell them about his dedication to their brand for 56 years. They sent him socks.

I say Schwinn owes him a trip to next week’s Michigander Bicycle Tour, so he can complete his collection of the Coffee Mugs of the 50 United States in the best way– in the saddle!

Note: Thanks to CT Post, Diane Marcum at the McClatchy-Tribune and the Fresno Bee for source material.

Hey I know it isn’t cool to brag about the old crap I’ve bought, and hey I know I’m supposed to be doing the “Less is more” thing.

But I’ve got family. Colin’s got family. And we’ve kinda like to get a family of our own soon. So this week I wrangled up two beds (bunkbeds, natch), full bedding and mattresses, for a total of $325. We used Craigslist to buy the used beds and mattresses (a purchase I consider LOCAL, since it didn’t come from China, but Branford, CT), and BJs wholesale for the bedding.

After a nearby bedbug incident in London, I am slightly nervous about bringing strange beds into the house, but let’s face it– you can’t worry all day, everyday. Life is too damn short for that.

By the by, the beds are not perfect (a bit banged up for sure), but they do have a few things going for them: they are MAPLE– not pressed wood. And they came with a dresser, mirror, and ladder. Check out the retail cost of something similar, new. That’s without the mattresses!

Green bedding note: BJs Wholesale had ORGANIC COTTON SHEETS for sale, which I would have bought had they not been only Queen sized. Score one for the box stores!