Settling In

We are adjusting to life in Fort St John, where we have had to learn all over again where we can get various products. We can get a wide variety of bulk items at PriceSmart, including powdered milks and cheeses and even, if we were so inclined, cookie dough mix. We can get spices and candies and pastas and probably over a hundred other things from this fantastic bulk section.

Thank goodness also for Safeway. We've been buying our meat from behind the meat counter, and they fill our own containers with the things we want. Sensitive to our project stipulations and goals, they let us know when something comes prepackaged only, versus when they cut the meat themselves.  We also get buns (and sometimes donuts!) from their bakery, where we can pick out any number of buns and put them in the paper bags provided. These paper bags serve double for us in that they later become our garbage bags.

Speaking of garbage, most of our garbage currently is kitchen scraps and kitty litter. We usually have 2 small paper bags full of garbage per week, and if we had a compost, we'd have far less garbage than that even. This is great progress, because the whole point of this exercise has been to learn to live as less wasteful people.

-Sheri

Interview

Just before we moved to Fort Saint John we were interviewed about our project by Jenifer Norwell. Immediately after that we spent some time without proper internet. It took a while to post it but here we are!

Fort Saint John

Hello! It's been too long.

Although our blogging has faltered, the project has been going strong. We moved to Fort saint John, spent some time without proper internet, and got out of the blogging habit. We've faced a few challenges finding what we want in a small town with limited selection. Over all things have gone well.

We've had a lot of adventures since or last post. Right before we left we were interviewed by Jenifer Norwell (We'll post the video in the next few days). We've adjusted to sharing a home with non-plastic-abstainers (and they've cut back). I've been avoiding plastic in a work camp setting as well. It's been interesting.

-Miles

Bean Bags

Small observation today:

Today we stopped by one of our favorite veggie stores, and we noticed at the till that they were taking green beans from a cardboard box and putting them into plastic bags for 'convenient' sale. What would be so bad about selling them loose, like they do for bean sprouts? They lost at least one sale for doing that (I would have gone for some green beans). Hopefully in the future, more people will stand up and say 'no thank you' to items packaged wastefully, and then vendors will start to think twice before suffocating everything in plastic doom.

-Sheri

Bring it Back

Recently we've made a few plastic purchases in error, and some of them we've avoided putting into our box of shame (which is actually itself a plastic bag from that bridal fair) by bringing them back to the merchants we bought them from. For instance, my Valentine's Day rose from Miles came with a little water-holder-on-the-stem thingy, so we took that back to the florist because there's no reason it cannot be reused. We also bought a jar of mustard that had a plastic seal around the lid. The seal was practically invisible and most of the other jars of the same product did not have the seal. We returned that to the grocery store and exchanged it for one of its plastic-free brothers.

This isn't much different from a scenario at restaurants where a waitress may bring us something plasticky without thinking, such as crackers for our soup or candies with the bill. We will remind her in a friendly way about the plastic plan and they are always good sports about taking them away from us and reusing them for other restaurant patrons. Of course, this doesn't always work - if there's a straw, we have to take it. If there are dip cups or sandwich toothpicks with decorative foof on the ends, they can't be taken back because the restaurants will not reuse them.

We recently made a big slip-up in a restaurant and walked away with two foofed toothpicks and two straws, which we didn't even notice until partway through the meal, so engrossed were we in our conversation. It was weird to discover ourselves mindlessly sipping water with straws like that. We did manage to send the cracker packs back, though, and the candies that came with the bill. On the other hand, we went back to a restaurant that had previously accosted us with plastic and had a delightfully plastic-free meal - we had to be pretty diligent but we managed. Hopefully one day, our awareness will spread to the populace in general, and we won't need to be as hyper-diligent because our society's habits will have changed.

-Sheri

Been a while...

It's been a while since we last posted on here. It's not that we're losing interest in the project - o contraire mon frere - it's just that it's going so smoothly. Really this isn't as hard as I expected. We buy some items at different places than we used to, we do without a couple things that we like but overall it's not a big deal to do without plastic.

We do have some challenges on the horizon though. We're moving to Fort Saint John in a couple of weeks and not only will we need to find plastic free options in our new location but we will have fewer options in this smaller and more convenience oriented community. We're going to be pretty busy but we'll try to keep the posts coming.

-Miles

Valentine's Day

Due to conflicting schedules, I didn't get to see much of Sheri on Valentine's day. I spent my day busing around town running errands and buying groceries. I haven't been on a bus in a while and I really enjoyed it. Busing is better than driving for the following reasons:

• You don't need to worry about somebody hit-and-running your bus while it's parked
• You don't need to worry about your bus getting stolen or broken into
• You don't need to worry about getting in an accident (at least not the liability and insurance woes)
• You can read or do other stuff while traveling
• You can people watch and eavesdrop

 I won't be getting a bus pass though because they are plastic. We're being fairly dogmatic about our rules.

The downside of buses is that you need to carry everything you have with you. This can be tricky for multi-stop shopping. Fortunately none of the shops minded me walking past the til with already full bags. Unfortunately light bags get heavy the longer you carry them. Good exercise though.

My last stop was at Awesome Blossom to pick up a rose for Sheri. I was getting pretty tired and didn't even realize that the flower was wrapped in plastic and had a little plastic test tube looking thing on the stem. I felt dirty all the way home.

Sheri arrived home shortly after me and we had just enough time to walk over to Tumbleweeds pub and have a romantic Valentines Lupper (Sunch?). As usual we warned our server that we didn't want any plastic and that if we got any we'd need to put it in our box of shame. While she didn't give us any straws, she gave Sheri 2 disposable plastic dippy bowls made out of... plastic!

OK, I need to update our box of shame.

On the plus side, a teller at The Great Canadian Super Store was commending us on our use of mushroom bags for our bulk good when I mentioned our project and was given a high five. I estimate we get about nine enthusiastic reaction for every slightly weirded out reaction from people we tell about this project. Folks seem to like the idea, hopefully more people join in and we can start to make some market pull towards a more sustainable future.

-Miles