I am really excited today about two different products I just happened upon in the past 48 hours. One product saves the environment at a great price and the other product helped me find photos I had lost in the vast space of my own hard drive.My girlfriend, Penne brought a ton of things over to celebrate my birthday on Saturday in re-usable grocery bags from Kroger. I asked her how much they were and she said they were $1 at Kroger!
So, today, on my way to do my bi-weekly shopping, I stopped in and bought six bags to try them out. I have been using canvas bags that I bought from Hobby Lobby and Ingles. I have already ripped the handles right off some of the Ingles canvas bags and, because of the color, the other bags are beginning to look, well, yucky. My Ingles bags cost me $4.99 a piece. I bought them over several weeks of shopping when I decided to cut my own grocery bag dependency.
When I sat down to write about them, I went to the website advertised on the side of the bag called Bring Your Own Bag (BYOB). I was ecstatic about the website, the great information they give and the idea in general.
These BYOB bags are the greatest! They have a true rectangular bottom, a little zipper pocket on the inside and sturdy handles. I took my six BYOB bags and didn't use any of my other canvas bags at all - now that is my bi-weekly shopping trip there. Further they fit into the cart so nicely. They are just the right size! I know I sound like an infomercial. I don't care. I love the environment and I love the fact that this is now available and for such a great price! Let me give you some statistics that I have learned from BYOB.
Did you know? (these facts are from BYOB)
P It takes plastic bags 15 to 1000 years break down in the environment
P Plastic bags photodegrade ~ breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways, polluting our soil, rivers, lakes and oceans.
P Production of plastic bags requires vast amounts of oil.
P North America goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually.
P Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals dies every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food.
P Each year an estimated 500 billion - 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That translates to over one million per minute.
P If 1 person uses BYOB bags, they will save the use of 250 bags per year.
P If a family of 3 uses BYOB bags, they will save the use of 750 bags per year.
P If a family of 4 uses BYOB bags, they will save the use of 1000 bags per year.
P If a family of 6 uses BYOB bags, they will save the use of 1500 bags per year.
Another great thing BYOB does, is a form they have on their website that you can print out, fill out and give to your local grocers. My only complaint is that the form is done in color with lots of graphics. BYOB obviously isn't remembering how much color ink costs the average consumer and forgetting the impact empty cartridges have on the environment. Still, you can print it in black and white or simply copy the letter itself into Word, or whatever you use, and print it plain. This is such a simple thing that we can all do. You guys get to Kroger and buy those bags! For $10 you can physically contribute to saving the environment. The environment is worth $10 to you, isn't it?
The second product I am excited about is FREE! That's right, complete free! Picasa is a program I downloaded after following some links on Blogger। I downloaded the file initially to make it easier to put pictures up on Blogger. Unfortunately that feature is no longer available because of incompatibility between Picasa and the new Blogger programs.
HOWEVER! The program completely rocks! It will scan your hard drive and download any jpg you have. It places these pictures in a library that shows thumbnails of the pictures and allows you complete management. You can delete files completely from your computer or simply tell Picasa to ignore a file you know you won't need to reference.
The greatest things is this: it puts your pictures into the Picasa library BY DATE! That means my Birthday pictures are the first ones I see and then the other pictures are available by year and folder. With the Manage Folder tool you can manage the folders your pictures are in and manage the way they are saved. You can edit pictures in Picasa, too! Easily set your favorite picture as your desktop background or order prints right from the program! Using a program called Hello! you can share your pictures with friends via the Internet. All in all, I have been really pleased, even though I can't use the program the way I wanted to.
Mother's Day was today and my family went grocery shopping with me, helped me make my favorite meal, cleaned the kitchen, water my plants and let me take a nap, all in all, a very nice day indeed. A friend of mine found out she was loosing her mother to her fight with brain cancer today. I can't get the frantic sound of her voice out of my head. I could feel her panic at the thought of not having a mommy anymore. I have been sending her lots of energy and experiencing the feelings of overwhelming sadness I felt in her soul.
My birthday celebrations are officially over. Yesterday my girlfriend, Penne, threw me a wild party. We had a beautiful piñata that was shaped like a star. We had bubbles at the party along with balloons and a helium tank which is just fun anyway. Tony, Connla, Penne and I all took a whack at the piñata. Since we were outside, we attracted a crowd of kids so we invited them to whack it to. It took Tony taking his cedar staff to the thing to bust it open. It was a sight! I got glow-in-the-dark bracelets from the piñata. I can't wait to share them with my friends at gathering we are all going to at the end of May!
