Back from the Wild Blue Yonder

Thank you all so much for the lovely comments on my anniversary post! Very kind words both here and on Facebook. Michele and I had a wonderful weekend together. We went to "The Grand Canyon of the East" (aka Letchworth Park). It was so beautiful and the weather was perfect: very sunny, but still cool enough that hiking was manageable. We've actually wanted to go since before we moved to the area, but it's taken five or so years for us to actually make it. It was well worth the wait!

After our whirlwind anniversary weekend, both Michele and I needed to head out of town for work: she to Wisconsin and I to North Carolina. I spent Monday through Wednesday visiting a co-development partner with several others from my company. We worked long and hard and were very productive! The coolest thing was that we stayed at the Proximity Hotel, which is "The Greenest Hotel in North America!" The space was amazing:

• 60% of the water for the hotel and restaurant is heated by the sun (see the solar panels!)
• The elevators GENERATE electricity going down that is used going up - too cool!
• The wood for the bars was salvaged from trees downed during storms

And if I didn't watch a video and read several articles (and thoroughly explore their website), I wouldn't have noticed any of the cool "green" things about the hotel. It looks and feels just like a fancy, upscale hotel - it's just made übercool because of how lightly it "walks" on the earth!

Giving Junk Mail a Swift Kick in the Pants

OK, one of my missions in life is to do less work. Another is to live lightly on the earth. Well, I'm not sure what happened, but it seems like within the last year, Michele and I have been getting massive amounts of junk mail. And it's my job to sort through it and shred what needs shredding and recycle everything that I can. My recycling bin is about 95% junk mail and I'm really sick of it. So, I decided to find that buttom I can push to sock junk mail right in the jaw. Yeah, right! It's not an easy job to stop getting junk mail at all, but I think I've taken all the steps needed and I thought I'd share them with you.

1. Go to donotmail.org and fill in their form. They will auto-populate the letters that you need to send to the mailing lists to get your name off them.
2. Go to DMAchoice.org and register with them. They will (1) help you stop being added to new lists and (2) direct you to contact information for getting off lists you are on because you have purchased products from the company or because you once requested a catalog or something.
3. Look through your junk mail and catalogs and contact the individual companies you are receiving stuff from who are not registered with DMA.

It doesn't work immediately, and it takes a lot of time to do it all, but I'm hopeful that it will (1) save me time in sorting through it all and (2) save some trees!