Today is blog action day. It is a call to bloggers to post about the environment. In the last few months I have been doing what I can to lessen my carbon footprint everyday. I have stopped buying plastic water bottles almost completely and if I do buy them, I reuse them before I recycle them. I have started recycling every piece of paper or cardboard that comes into the house that goes out. I have been looking into small dwelling for our upstate property which use solar power and water catchment systems to relieve at least some of the load. M&I were just yesterday discussing a more vegetarian diet (we plan to eat more vegetarian meals at home). We are doing it for health reasons, but that doesn’t mean it won’t help. We are also looking at reusing the trash on the property instead of tossing it away. A few less things in the landfill. What are you doing to lessen your carbon footprint?

Inhabitat is a wealth of inspiration when it comes to high design meets recycling. With a background in architecture, design and environmental graphics you can imagine that I would like to do something really creative with all the junk on our property. Matt Ganon is an architect doing a whole lot of creative design of objects reusing materials and has been featured on the Inhabitat blog a number of times for his innovative use of materials and terrific objects. One of my favorites is this paper coffee table. Yes, you read right, a paper coffee table. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to turn all of those books into tables, maybe a chair or two. This particular table is made from homasote, which is recycled paper in sheet form. Think plywood made of paper. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be recycled books! Also check out his nomad grass chair. It is fantastic!

Our property upstate has a lot of stuff on it. For the most part I would classify this stuff as junk. So far we have tried a number of ways to get rid of all the the junk. We donated two cars, we have had two dumpsters full carted away, we recycle what we can, we have even tried burning some of it. There is still a lot of stuff. We are going to have to get more creative! One of the biggest categories of junk is books. You are probably thinking, hey books are good, can you donate them? I would love to donate them. They are in such bad shape that no one will take them! I mean they are moldy and mouse pooped… would you want them? I didn’t think so. I have been reading how some places can recycle hard covers and some places take soft covers. Lucky for us we aren’t in a place that doesn’t take them at all. I have also been trying to think of ways we can recycle them that would be a more personal undertaking such as turning them into handmade paper, well the ones that aren’t too moldy anyway.

Today I am 1/3 of a century old. Where does the time go?

This past weekend my father, my grandfather & M with a little help from me took one of the old dilapidated buildings on the property and secured it and raised the roof. We went into the weekend unsure of how much we would be able to get done. It turns out we were able to get new posts on the corners and get the roof jacked up from 5′ to 7′. Quite a difference! Although we aren’t positive what the final building will look like, we are deciding if we want it to be an open gazebo or an enclosed structure. We are definitely going to re-shingle the roof and put a floor in. With the hard part done we can take our time and do it right. It is the first step in making this a place we can relax.

We all have an old cell phone or two laying around which we just don’t have the heart to pitch in the landfill and we can never remember to bring it with us to those recycling bins. While clicking around today I found this site via Apartment Therapy. Not only do you not have to feel bad about clearing out some of your old electronics, you can get a few bucks for them. I tried it out with a super old Sony Ericsson I ran across the other day with no manual or power adapter and they were willing to give me $10 for it! Sweet. Now what else do I have that I can sell…

In 38 days, 3 hours and 6 minutes (give or take a minute or two) M & I will be on a plane making our way to New Zealand and Australia. Whooooo hoooooo is all I can say to that. I am really starting to get excited.

This weekend we have three generations of my family coming together to finally build something on the property upstate. The building with the green roof is going to get new walls and a floor. We want it to be a sleeping structure so we can clear some of the junk away. This picture was taken after a whole lotta work has already been done, believe it or not. All the buildings on the property are pretty much filled to capacity with anything and everything you can imagine. Since we really don’t have a place to stay while we are working, we have not been moving forward. We hope that we can finally start making progress and clear some space for our PowerPod!

I like taking photos. In college I took a few photo classes and just loved it. It was fairly close to instant gratification… at least I thought it was at the time. Now I realize what instant gratification actually is. Then I would take my 36 photos, rolling the negatives onto a spool in complete darkness praying I did it right, then developing said negatives, all the while praying I got at least one or two good shots, then developing print after print until finally I got an image that I was happy with. Now with an almost identical camera (a Nikon D70s instead of an N90s) I can shoot… a lot. At 350 pictures (both a jpeg and raw image) per 2GB compact flash card let’s just say I could shot more photos that even I would probably want to. I get to see them immediately and decide of I want to take another shot and if I really am feeling crazy I can use burst mode to my hearts content. The problem up to this point has been what comes next. Generally if there are other people interested in seeing these photos I will put them up on the web. If they were just for my shooting pleasure then they tend to sit on my computer while I curse iPhoto for being a woefully inadequate program. Now however I am using Lightroom. I just started getting my immense library into the program, but already I love how it organizes my files. I can’t wait to test out the other features and maybe, just maybe I will print one or two. I make no promises.