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

Take it back!

Today we went out for supper to Kelly O's. As usual we got our drinks without straws and our dipping sauce in a ceramic bowl instead of a throw-away plastic cup. Also par for the course, I managed to order more than I could eat in a sitting and therefore had leftovers. After running out to the car and finding we had not, in fact, packed reusable containers, we asked the waitress if they had a little tinfoil we could wrap my leftover baked potato in. They did, which worked out for us. I would rather not have used tinfoil because it's the same level of disposable one-use behaviour we are trying to avoid with this project, but at least metal is more easily reused than plastic is.

When we returned to the car after supper, we found a lovely glossy-paper (plasticized) ad slipped neatly under my wiper-blade. Reading it, we discovered that the generous garbage donor was a business just down the street from where we parked, so we brought it back to them. This caught them off guard and the young folk working there seemed a little weirded out, but at least now they know that not everyone wants their garbage. We explained to them why we don't want it, and they put it in their stack to go out in the next ad-littering spree, but at least they're now a little more aware. Even if it weren't plasticized, it would still be quite a nuisance. I really wish our society would pull its collective head out of its rump and stop being so selfishly wasteful and quit with the junk ads all the time. It's super inefficient and annoying as well.

-Sheri

Restaurants

Restaurants. These places are a minefield for plastic. Waitresses are always trying to give you plastic. Want a drink of refreshing water? Why not suck it through a tube of molded toxic plant fossils? Want a sammich? How about we decorate that for you with some garbage. Time for your bill? We'll give you some candies - each individually wrapped in a carcinogenic package laden with gender bending chemicals that will happily gum up the eco-system for the next 500-1000 years so that you can rest assured that your treat is sterile.

Since all these things are given so routinely even a waitress who is aware of our project will sometimes give us something without even realizing it. Because of food-safety issues, once it's placed on our table it's consumed. We need to get our waitress (we haven't had a single waiter since the project started) watching out for us and then be sure to make sure none of our orders come with consumable plastic. It's really easy for a waitress to forget about the container the dipping sauce comes in or something like that. So far everyone has been really good.

We picked up a straw for our Box o' Shame at Milestone's the other day due to some excessively good service - our waitress brought us water before we had hardly sat down never mind had a chance to warn her. Other than that and a trip to Harold's where our own lack of vigilance was to blame we've done pretty well. Sometimes our friends even join in in eschewing unnecessary waste. This makes me feel a bit less like an weirdo and a little more hopeful that our 'no plastic' culture could become mainstream.

-Miles