So, on my 45th birthday, it was my last day of career naivety. The next day I am called to a last minute 5:00 meeting with the bosses. Hmmm this can't be good. Maybe they've caught me playing solitaire one too many times, or I've been late too many days or I know - my messy desk is a problem.

Entertaining other people is always a great excuse to show off my dietary choices.  In the past, it's been vegan diet, and then raw diet and now I'm focusing on local food.

So, Mom came to visit last week, so the menu included:

What kind of city do we want to live in during the garbage strike? What are you going to do? Just ignore the growing smelly pile of bags around your dumpster or refuge bin, as the crows spread junk over your alley?

After starting my change for eating local, the July 3 Vancouver Sun Business section had an article on "Shoppers think global, then buy local". This is a business related article about the increasing sales at farmers markets and retailers such as Capers. But what I liked was the reasons that research shows why this local conscienceness is happening.

I had my second outing of collecting native berries this year and I was pleasantly surprised. 

Well, I finally am ready to share my photo of three months worth of garbage (Jan 1 - Mar 31) I'm not going to show the contents because ... well it's kinda nasty. I emptied a few ancient items from my cupboard, plus I went through many tissues during 2 week flu. The "clean" items were the plastic/cellophane packaging. But I am proud to report that for April, I'm almost at literally zero in my garbage. Much better than before ... avoiding those bags of junk food really helps the cause ... in more ways than one.

I've recently been to two presentations about zero waste where some of our elected officials, NGOs and local government employees were present. Some interesting things to that I learned :

While I haven't been doing exceptionally well on keeping my waste down as much as I hoped, it has been on my mind lately. Sometimes I feel so inadequate compared to EnviroWoman's journey against plastic :( :)

Some recent events to report ...

My Braun hand mixture just died ... it's tough making my banana, frozen berry and protein shake without it, but it still tastes the same lumpy. So, the next step is to contact Braun to see if they have a method of recycling it. I don't have much hope, but at least my question will let them know that disposal of their products (and short lifetime) is an issue for people.

Will I reach my goal to be garbage free?  enough to be on national tv?  Well, one couple in Toronto is doing it by being in G&M, CBC Gill Deacon Show and CBC The Hour ... that I've seen.  Their blog discusses many of the same issues I'm going through.  Although I haven't resolved many of them for myself YET, at least I know I'm on the right track.  I'm not going to extreme of avoiding recyclable items like her, but I am shopping around, buying bulk, avoiding [some] items with non-recyclable packaging, doing without some things, preparing my work lunches instead of eating out, and of course reusing bags.

Well, after the first few days I thought that I had failed at zero waste.  But then I realized that all those foil, plastic bags that are normally the only contents of my garbage bag, can actually be burned.  Because of this idea, my garbage remains empty!   Well maybe not completely empty.  There's the jar and bottle lids (I'm sure they're not recyclable.  Even www.terracycle.net that reuses old beverage bottles, is looking for ways to reuse the lids) and some old gloves that have served their time volunteering in local parks (holes in almost every finger).

I just saw a story about this property on Shaw Cable 4 last night.  The property looks beautiful, with a big pond (beaver home included), bog, douglas fir forest, clean stream and many endangered species.  It is a rare remaining wetland in Fraser Valley; it must be saved.  It seems that the deadline to raise the money has been extended to Dec 31, so I'm now contributing to the cause.  I  may never visit the area, but I do know the importance of saving wetlands for our wildlife, children's future, ecosystem.