Trying to Life a Green Life

Sometimes I do pretty well, sometimes not so well. I'd like to be more consistent, but I'll just have to keep working at it.

Thumbs down:

Today, I disassembled one of two Ikea bookcases I'm throwing away, one four years old, the other perhaps eight or ten, both in perfectly fine shape. The first was bought to store food and dishes in a kitchen with almost no storage space, and at 16" deep, that worked well; the second was bought to match, for use with books, but that 16" turns out to be too deep for books. So when I move in the coming months, I'm not going to take them with me.

I'd like to be able to say I found a buyer on Craigslist or a taker on Freecycle. But instead I followed the path of least resistance and just took them out to the trash.

Thumbs up:

On the other hand, I'm running again, and feeling rather Rip Van Winklish in my odd collection of gear. I bought the sneakers last week; otherwise, no item is less than five years old (I haven't bought exercise gear since before the arrival of The Offspring), and some are at least 20 years old.

I know I bought the cotton gloves while I was living in China in 1987 or 1988, and the fleece vest and the bandanna aren't much newer. The polypropylene shirt is old enough to stink when I sweat. (I've heard about new, anti-microbial gear that doesn't do that; frankly, the idea makes me a little nervous.) The tights are from about ten years ago, when I was trying to bike in the winter, and I think the shorts are older than that. Oh, the socks. Plain old cotton ones, but probably only two or three years old.