Day 1 of "Living Green" - Bicycles, blue bins and David Suzuki

The first thing I did before I started typing this was turn off the lights in the room. “Ha ha!” I thought to myself rather smugly. How hard can this “living green" thing be?

The second thing I did was try to generate more ways than just “turning off the lights” of becoming environmentally friendly in day to day life. Hmmm. What do environmentally conscious people do? I try to conjure up an image in my head. I see bike riding. I see blue bins. I see David Suzuki. The vision ends there.

All right. Never mind. This is going to be hard.

Truth be told, I must shamefully admit that I’m one of those walking hypocrites when it comes to preserving our Mother Earth. I could preach for days about the need for society to stop ruining our planet, start finding sustainable energy sources, and learn to live in harmony with the natural world…and the next minute you’ll find me walking out of my house with every light, appliance and plug-in-able thing still powered on. I have never truly thought about how to actually reduce my own impact on the environment in practical day-to-day terms – despite believing in the cause, I’ve never actually taken action to do anything about it.

But they say there’s no time like the present for a reason…so for the next 13 weeks, I’ll be looking into learning about and trying out a variety of green-friendly initiatives.

Now, I have learned something from my last rather flat 3-month project. Working 2 jobs and doing this blog requires a good, realistic plan… more structured than I had for the “Living Healthy” project, where I had the luxury of copious amounts of free time to dedicate to grocery shopping, cooking, exercising, and blogging about it all. The “Living Spiritually” segment demonstrated that without a plan, things get away from me pretty quickly. So this time, I’m going to approach it a little differently – one blog every week, each with a slightly different theme or spin on the green living thing. If there’s a reason in particular to do an extra blog or two I most certainly will, but at the minimum there will be a weekly post.

Hang onto your hats, kids (before my windmill of green enthusiasm blows you away! Ha...ha...)...oh, this should get interesting.

xo Janine