Bottled Water

I just finished reading Scott's April 30th blog where he is continuing a discussion about glass bottles and bottled water. Last week the news media made a big stink about one of the chemicals used to make plastic bottles and how it can cause cancer. Apparently there is enough proof of the cancer link that Canada has banned bottles made with it. That chemical is a real problem for plastic bottles. Scott started the topic because since the snow is going fast he has been able to use the trails by his house to walk with his dog Sweet Pea. He mentioned all the broken glass that is a danger to Sweet Pea's bare feet which is a valid point and would be solved by people using unbreakable plastic bottles. The real problem though is people littering. Glass or plastic, it doesn't belong on the trail. It has always amazed me to hear all these people talk about the environment and saving the animals yet somebody must be throwing those bottles, cans, cigarettes, mattresses, plastic bags, car bodies , etc etc . I get so mad when I see people flipping cigarettes out their car windows not only for how dumb it is because it could cause a fire but also because those things mount up. Our property runs for about a quarter mile along the Parks Highway and each spring I go out and pick up trash along it. Bottles, plastic and glass, and cans are mostly what I get but there are piles of cigarette butts all along the bike path and highway. We are smothering ourselves in garbage and killing our planet at the same time. Even properly disposed of plastic causes problems because the chemicals used to make them leach out into the land and then into the water. At least when glass is properly disposed of it breaks up in the landfill and just keeps breaking into smaller and smaller pieces to the point where it just becomes sand-like. The solution? One: get rid of people. No people equals no unnatural pollution. Okay, that will never fly so the only real solution is to educate people on the harm they are doing to their environment and that THEIR garbage does count. When I visit Finland I see how educating the people really works. They recycle and compost everything and they seem to try to avoid plastic as much as possible. When they go grocery shopping they take their own bags made of either cloth or heavy reusable plastic. If you need more bags you buy reusable bags at the checkout. Most soft drinks and beer come in cans or glass bottles that get recycled. I don't think there is a refund involved, they just do it. There is still litter along the road but nothing like here. You never see a grocery cart in the ditch because to use one you have to pay the equivalent of a quarter to unlock it but you get that back when you return it. I've seen them change from using things that were made out of wood or wood by products because it supported their forest industries, to people who use glass and metal for everything now. They still have wooden stuff but not for everyday things. We aren't very good about no plastic and recycling up here. There is very little recycling in Alaska at all and what is available is only in Anchorage and Wasilla/Palmer area. Willow landfill transfer point tried collecting recyclables for a while but now they only pick up aluminum cans. Mary stopped buying bottled water since we got a water filter and we do save our good plastic bags for Scott to use as doggy poop bags but that's about it. Each summer Mary has tried starting compost piles but they don't seem to get going very good up here.
Since Mary just got back from her monthly supply trip with about 36 plastic bags I better stop talking about recycling since it makes me feel like a hypocrite.

Internet

Love it! Hate it!
We've had a lot of phone problems over the last few months and it really points out some of the weak spots in our new technology. We depend more and more on being connected to the internet for everything from staying up to date on the news to shopping. When the internet is down it is more annoying to me then if the television is broken. This last weekend we lost phone service because of the snow storm. So using my cell phone I called in the trouble reporting that our line was dead. They confirmed it was dead and said someone would get on it. Late Saturday afternoon I noticed we had a dial tone but still no internet. I figured they were working on it so I didn't call again. Sunday morning we still didn't have internet so I tried to call but the line was so bad I couldn't get through. Then it mysteriously cleared up so I report that our DSL had been out since the phone went out on Saturday. They hadn't been told of an outage but would look into it. First she tells me to reboot the modem so she can see it connect but when I do she says she can't see the modem. Finally she says she is updating something and boom, we have internet again. While we were without internet it was easy to see how dependent we have become on it. We don't even get a newspaper anymore because I can read most of it online plus I can read out of town newspapers too. I use the online TV listings provided by Zap2it.com to plan our evening TV viewing and to schedule my homemade DVR for HDTV. This blog can only be updated when I am on the network and both Mary and I have started using GoogleDoc for some things. She does a lot of volunteer work for LibraVox.org which is a nonprofit outfit that is putting public domain books into mp3 files for people who want to listen to books, for one reason or another, instead of reading them themselves. Once again though you have to have the internet to up and down load the files and since she coordinates who is reading what she needs her email to communicate with people from around the world. In this country internet providers boast about their 4 and 8mbps (megabit per second) premium connections. In countries like Japan and many European countries they have 100mbps connections and they cost a fraction of what the best connections in this country cost. On one of my Linux forums a guy was telling how he pays $79.00 a month for a 4mbps connection in New York and when he goes to Europe, which he does quite often, he gets a 70mbps connection for about $10.00 per month. I pay almost $70.00 a month for a measly 768kbps connection that has a 10 gigabyte per month limit. Up here there is only one broadband solution through MTA telephone company. I could use satellite but that is very unreliable up here due to weather and how low on the horizon the satellites are and pretty expensive too.
I was reading an article by John Dvorac who is kind of a guru of the PC world and he was commenting on it doesn't matter if you have a 10 gigabit connection, the way the internet is designed if you are trying to pull something off a server that only has a 512kbps connection that is a fast as it is going to come down. Also the more popular the site the more connections it has to handle and the slower it can handle them. That's why when watching YouTube sometimes it stops every few seconds. So I just hope that before all the news papers stop publishing paper copy and TV stations stop broadcasting over the air signals that someone upgrades the internet backbone so we all aren't sitting watching those little spinning timers that show up on YouTube all the time waiting for the clip to get buffered.
Time to go to the post office and drop off our last Netflix. Later....

I think this will work

GoogleDocs is pretty cool. It allows me to create blog entries a couple different ways. First I had to create a new blog at blogger.com but then I can either use it's interface or GoogleDocs to create entries.
Boy! what a mess all that snow made around here. Temperatures today are in the mid 40s and that snow is melting really fast. There is mud all over so now the dogs are not very happy. None of them like getting their feet wet and they like mud even less, but since they have to go out to poop they have to get their feet wet. They do try and keep to the snow but that get pretty hard. They goats stay on a board that is in front of their door so they don't get their feet wet. Speaking of the goats. Friday while working on the web page I checked the webcam and noticed they had figured out how to open the door to the barn. By the time I got over there Ellu had got up on the straw bail and was eating straight out of the grain bag. Everything had been investigated and there was trash all over. I got them back in their pen and saw one of them had actually figured out how to undo the lock on the door. I quickly came up with a remedy by attaching a rope to one of the doors so that even if they get the lock open again the door wont open. In the few minutes it took me to clean up the mess they had made, Kapu figured out the knot I had made and had untied the door. Back to the drawing board and finally I have it so they can't get out. I think. I'm sure they will be happy when spring finally arrives and they can use the rest of their outside pen and also get out and browse a little.
Lunch time so off I go. Now that it is a little easier to post I will probably add things more often.

Now using Google Doc

Well today I signed up with Google doc to see if this would be a quicker way of making entries in my blog. This way if it works the way I think it does Mary will be able to make entries if she wants although before when she could make entries she only made very few. I guess I spoke too early about spring coming the other day. Friday, April 25, we got 7 inches of snow with another 2 inches on Saturday. Anchorage got even more. Poor Scott was snowed in and all he had left to eat in his house was Romin Noodles. This is getting ridiculous. Mary's sister in Finland is talking about all the stuff that is starting to grow in her garden and we still cant even see the garden. This year instead of us wasting time on a vegetable garden we are going to plant berry bushes down where we used to try and grow vegetables and Mary will grow her herbs up by the front door. The one nice thing about the late spring snow is that the forest around our house will be much safer from fires for a while.