my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘environment’ Category

(color viciously enhanced by iPhoto,
so NO, this is not conjunctivitus)

Saturday night, as that wicked storm rolled into Buffalo, I was riding my bike taxi and got a big fleck of something in my eye. It was irritating my eye all night Saturday, into Sunday morning, but, sometime in the afternoon Sunday, the irritation stopped, and I thought my eye had expelled the offending mote.

Well, this morning I woke up with a log in my eye instead, and holy cow is it driving me crazy. I can barely keep my eye open. That’s okay for typing, but for anything that requires some depth perception, I’m in trouble.

UPDATE: My eye is no longer feeling irritated. When I ate the wasabi-flavored almonds my co-worker gave me today, my eyes and nose watered themselves clear. I hope this is permanent.

I haven’t worn a suit to work since… I really can’t tell you what year it was. I had a job in the early 2000′s where I wore a suit most of the time, so instead of wearing the same one every day, I purchased a few of them and rotated them throughout the week. (I usually wear a short-sleeved shirt or a dress shirt without a tie these days.) Other than weddings and funerals, I don’t have many suit occasions.

I’m really not a fan of dry cleaning. Mostly I keep my suits clean by not getting them dirty in the first place, but every now and then they just have to be cleaned, otherwise the fabric will wear out.

I have to check if all of my suits still fit me (not that I’ve gained weight or anything… ha ha), but now I know where to take them to get cleaned. There’s a place on Elmwood Avenue that doesn’t use the traditional dry-cleaning chemicals. They use water–so technically it isn’t “dry” cleaning at all, but the owner told me that he washes REAL FUR in his store, with water and the special soap-stuff they use, and the fur wasn’t harmed a bit. In fact, he says the chemicals that traditional dry cleaners use can leave a residue on your clothes that attracts oils and can damage your clothing. “Wet cleaning” leaves your clothes clean, so no oil builds up, which means they stay cleaner longer and don’t wear out as fast.

Isn’t that where you’d like to take your dry cleaning from now on? Check them out: Eco Friendly Custom Cleaners is located at 152 Elmwood Avenue. Oh, and one more thing–the chemical most dry cleaners use? It has been banned in the USA, because it is bad stuff. Think about it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the economy lately. I remember that when I was shopping for my first car, my Dad tried to talk me into buying a US car instead of a Toyota or a Honda, I said that US cars were too expensive. I hope I’ve grown up since then, but I did see a rather persuasive bumper sticker once that said “If we keep buying foreign cars, where will our children work?” Maybe I had to have kids to start getting the bigger picture.

My observation of human nature is that people don’t care about the hidden costs of what they buy or consume, they are interested only in keeping the total at the cash register as low as possible. That’s what pushes small stores out when Wal-Mart is cheaper, and that’s why there are no more automobile factories in Buffalo, and that’s why tech support, electronic product disposal (which releases toxic elements into the air, soil, and water), and just about anything else that can be done overseas is done there instead of here.

It’s human nature to be selfish and keep as much for ourselves as we can. It’s not a political statement–I don’t blame the “liberals” who founded the unions and “bloated the payroll” or the “conservatives” for letting any kind of business practice “as long as it’s profitable” go on and on without regard to the long-term effects. It takes all kinds of selfish people, always shopping for the cheapest price, to push manufacturing and services to the countries with the poorest people. Overseas, the poor are willing to do just about anything to make a living, even work with in polluted conditions that our enlightened (rich) culture doesn’t want to pay to correct.

The reason US-made products are expensive is not just because the unions had the power to pay great wages, or because greedy store owners want to make sure we spend our retirement funds on stuff we don’t need, but because here we have the “luxury” of safety rules, we have environmental protection, we have unemployment and disability insurance so that kids can eat when their dads get hurt on the job, and we try not to send toxic waste downstream so that our cows grow 5 limbs and our kids are born without eyes. The poor in Africa, India, and Asia don’t have that protection–how could they afford it on what we’re paying?

When I went to the ski shop on Saturday to return the boys’ season rentals, I discovered that ski country still had plenty of snow, and I whined to the ski shop owners that it would have been great to have one more day of skiing. Naturally their response was “come back tomorrow, you don’t have to turn in the skis today.” I called my wife to make sure nothing was planned for the next day, then packed the skis back into the car and gleefully drove home.

I also called a friend of mine who recently told me he was interested in skiing with us next season, and he agreed to meet us at our house at 8:30 a.m. the next morning.

The weather was perfect, and at first the snow was perfect, too. But then the temperature went up, and the snow started getting mushy. I think the reason my friend had a bad fall is that he hit some slow snow on a turn and couldn’t get his balance back. He did something to his knee and will be on crutches for a few weeks.

But my friend is still enthusiastic about skiing and insisted that me and boys keep skiing while he rested in the lodge–he hoped to rest a bit and join us after a while, but his knee was in bad shape.

The boys and I kept skiing and occasionally stopped into the lodge to check on my friend throughout the afternoon. It got warmer and warmer, and we started getting uncomfortably warm, so while we rode up the chairlift, we unzipped our coats a little and took our gloves off. Once, I was holding my youngest’s gloves for him, and when we got off the chairlift, I thought I had given him both gloves, but I had lost one of them.

We skied down the slope, trying to follow the chairlift so that we could find the glove on the ground, but part of that slope was closed due to poor conditions, so we didn’t find the glove on the ground.

When we got in line to get back on the chairlift, I was looking around to see if someone had turned it in for us, and there were a couple gloves, but not the one I lost. After we got on the chair, however, we discovered his glove ON THE CHAIR. So it turns out, that of the 119 chairs on that lift, we happened to ski down the hill and wait in line with just the right timing to get on the same chair. What are the chances? Is it 1 out of 119? Or do you have to decrease the odds because of the number of people in line ahead of us?

Those are our two stories of luck; one of us had good luck, one bad luck.

This might be our last day of skiing for the season, but we’re hoping to get one more day in over Easter weekend. In this picture, you see the boys riding up a chairlift without me–I was in the chair behind them with their cousin. This photo was taken with their mother in mind–she doesn’t worry about them when they’re with me at all!