Thursday, January 3, 2008

Saving the Environment

So are you still drowning in catalogs, now with post-holiday sales? We got so many Christmas catalogs I made a video about them sometime around the start of December. (It would have been even more impressive if I'd waited until the end of the month!) We still get several catalogs every day. Companies like Lands End and JMS (Just My Size--for fat ladies) are particular bad and I seem to get two or three catalogs from each of those companies a week.

Approximately 19 billion catalogs are mailed to US consumers every year. Printing those 19 billion catalogs uses 53 million trees and requires about 38 billion BTUs to turn those trees into 3.6 million tons of paper. And let's not forget the 5.2 million tons of carbon dioxide produced by all of this. And then there are all those nasty colored inks.

Finally, there is a way to opt-out. Catalog Choice is a free service that lets you decline paper catalogs you no longer wish to receive. This effort is a sponsored project of the Ecology Center and it is endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

So far, members have declined almost four million catalogs.

I'm making a list of the catalogs I no longer wish to receive and will continue to add to it as I get them. I hope that by next year I will have reduced the deluge to a manageable number.


We're down to just one puppy. After I put out the call that one or the other puppy had to go, the woman who has Half Pint's siblings volunteered to take Half Pint too. I was very sad to see the little cutie leave. Ever since we were at my mother's she seemed to have an infusion of friskiness and she just galloped all over the house, finding things to play with. But we just could not let Chunk near her. Chunk would literally sit on my lap (she still wasn't sure about jumping off the recliner, fortunately), trembling and then barking.

When it was Chunk's time to play, Half Pint would go into the playpen or cage and Chunk would spend most of her time growling and barking and trying to get to her. It was hard to remember days like this.

Chunk seemed thrilled to be an "only puppy" last night. She actually jumped off the recliner three times (once by accident, twice, using Sheila's back as a kind of step!), raced around the house, and was just so funny I giggled at her all evening.

By 9 p.m., she was totally worn out and collapsed in Walt's lap, where she slept until he went to bed, and transferred her to me, where she slept until I turned in for the night, when I put her in the playpen and she was not heard of until 7 a.m. this morning.

Ashley says she has two great applications for Chunk and "about half a million" for Half Pint so, with luck both puppies will be in forever homes very soon.

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