Archive for the 'Recycling' Category

Page 2 of 3

My Sony eBook Reader

Published on September 5, 2008 by Corinna Carlson | 11 Comments

Seeing as there is a 50/50 chance right now depending on a couple things and people that I might be in Bali for Christmas I didn’t think I was getting a Christmas present from my parents this year.  We were all out getting Adam luggage for his Christmas gift which he got already because Christmas gifts in my family are given sometime between August and December every year since I left home and my mom mentioned that I did get a present and I hadn’t even thought about it so I said I wanted a tripod but I got a Sony eBook Reader.

They actually bought three, my showing it to my mother off a friend’s photo stream turned out to be great for them because they can’t easily get books in Bali and can now hold up to 160 books each on their own readers.  We also have a family book club we are going to keep going over webcam so it all just fell into place.  I know that they are considered expensive but when you think about how many books it holds, the fact you can still get free books from the library for it and that it comes with 100 free classic novels (if you buy it before September 20) for an avid reader it is dirt cheap.

OH YAY!

I have my third fifty dollar Chapters gift card coming in the mail this year which I will be spending on paper books.  I think it will be a long long long long time before any electronic reader could or will take over paper books but for anyone who reads as much as I do and more I highly recommend it.

No more packing four to eight books every time I hop a plane.  No more trying to decide what I am going to feel like reading before I leave.  I have only added four books to the eBook so far, Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy, Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte and The Turn of the Screw Henry James.  With the 100 free classics I can’t see buying any books for it for a while; I have a feeling I’m going to be on a classics kick for some time.  My only complaint, even though I completely understand why is that the free classics list does not contain any book that has been banned for even one minute, yet you can get the book of Mormon which I just don’t consider a classic in ANY sense of a the word.  No Orwell no Salinger, etc. and etc.  I also wish the USB port had a cover but it doesn’t.  I generally have my current book in a bag within my bag which will hopefully protect it from getting a dirty port.  It comes with a really cool magnetic brown cover.

my brand new Sony eBook.

I have kissed my eBook and petted it like a pet and hugged it because I love it. A lot.  The reader is not only pretty much the raddest thing I own now but it opens up the door for me to continue collecting my favourite novels in first printing first edition hard covers!! I’ve mentioned before I spent over a hundred dollars on my covered in plastic copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Michael Chabon and I bought the cheapest one I could find and hoped it would show up in the condition promised and thankfully it did.

EARTH DAY NERD ALERT!!

Published on April 22, 2008 by Corinna Carlson | 13 Comments

smithersstory.jpg

Blast from the past!

Grade Seven, 1990 I was already down with the environment. This story got chosen to go in the paper as a special insert paper, only one kid got picked from each class. Small town paper and all, but it was still cool.

Click on it if you can’t read it, although it is pretty bad, only grade seven and I already cared about the Earth though WOOT!

Happy Earth Day!! And may we all learn how to treat everyday like Earth Day.

smithersstorypage2.jpg

Dude Hasn’t Blogged in a While…..

Published on April 17, 2008 by Corinna Carlson | 0 Comments

So I will go BULLETS on you.

  • Every single time one of us sits at the computer Gus jumps straight onto a lap she has her head buried in my arm right now. She is the most adorably cute annoying cat in the world.
  • Adam hurt himself at work and has been off here and there and so I’ve had to carry some heavy shit and;
  1. it made me wonder how the hell I was ever as independent as I was
  2. someone held the back door to the apartment building open for me, I made it all the way up the stairs to my floor and swung the door open so I could let it hit me in the back to go through but I didn’t move far enough over and the door knob NAILED me so hard that it happened on Monday and I still have pain shooting in a couple of directions and a massive LUMP.
  • COMING SOON!!! HUGE and I mean HUGE MOOOOO-VIE post. While we make monkeys we watch movies, mostly movies we’ve seen or I watch them twice or vise versa, some will be old and some will be new movies. I feel that my one liner-ish reviews are generally better than if I go all out anyway.
  • Speaking of movies, and forgive me as I’ll probably repeat some of this somewhere down the road but I FINALLY got my hands on a copy of Into the Wild BUT now I’m afraid to watch it, WHY? Because see, I read the book in April 2005 [NERD ALERT/reminder: I date all of my books when I finish them] I have also read most of Jon Krakauer’s other books. The book Into the Wild is a 199 pages, with epilogue 203. I had this funny feeling having just watched two movies of perfect length so I looked at Into the Wild and saw that it is 143 minutes. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I’m now convinced that Krakauer and Penn are conspiring against all of man kind, how the HECK does a 199 page book become a 143 minute movie? Krakauer wrote Into the Wild before he became known for being an arrogant thinks he knows it all, extremely repetitive journalist [NOT SAYING HE HASN'T BEEN THROUGH A LOT re: Everest] but seriously is half this fucking movie going to be Penn and Krakauer masturbating their egos and Krakauer getting us back for writing such a short book in comparison? I guess I’ll see once I watch it.
  • Also coming soon a very personal review of Dry, Augusten Burroughs, [who has a new book out on April 29 YAY!] and I wasn’t planning on reviewing it at all but I have a few things to say about The Last Days of Socrates, Plato. Once I start talking about the damn Socrates I can’t shut up now, I feel similar to how I felt after I read 1984.
  • OUR CAMERA IS BROKEN!!!!!! On one hand I feel really lame getting so upset over a materialistic possession but our camera is not just a play toy for us anymore we NEED it for our business so we are pretty stressed about it or rather I am, Adam doesn’t really stress much about anything in life. I have a couple tricks up my sleeve to hopefully get some photos of two monkeys that will be done this weekend and HOPEFULLY by the time the Jedi one is done THAT IS RIGHT A JEDI ONE, the camera will be fixed. I don’t pray but if you do please say a prayer for our new business. All start ups have glitches. We’ve officially hit a glitch.
  • I finally had the pleasure of meeting Raul over the last weekend at Tanya’s housewarming party. I am like the last blogger in Vancouver to meet him I think. He was everything he has been talked up to be and more! I was the one at the party with the sippy cup. I had every intention of joining y’all at Every Third Tuesday this month because the Hamburgler [Monica Hamburg] was the speaker, I call her a friend, she doesn’t read my blog, that is cool man, but she is rad, I heard she did a great job, sorry I missed it, been taking care of my dear husband yo.

KITTY!! DARGON!! ABC & CAC!

  • We now have our FOURTH coffee pot in less than two years. The first one I broke in a tantrum of mass destruction, although I was not TRYING to break the coffee pot I just forcefully put it under the tap and knocked it into something. THEN Sarah and Jack bought us a rad coffee pot for a wedding gift [can't find the post re: FUCKED archives] but even though we know at least four other couples/people who have that coffee pot and they ALL still have it ours broke!! WOOOOOOOOOOO! RIGHT after the warranty was done, probably the day after. I then bought a $24.99 twelve cup coffee pot, cheapest one I could find. Last week the heating plate went on it. Adam likes burnt coffee I blame him. SO I bought YET another coffee pot, and this one makes loud noises and I want to throw it out the window and I don’t have the box to take it back because I am a recycling freak and actually get excited about the amount of things I have to recycle and FUCK now I have to wait out this shit coffee pot, watch it last ten years, seriously.

Ps. Dr. Vegas is always a mentor to the Sock Monkeys, he always gives em’ some advice before they leave our infantry but this particular monkey the Dr. really took to. They had a pretty awesome jam session before he departed, Vegas has already shown off his guitar though so he took it off for the photo.

hermanos

Vancouver Earth Hour 2008

Published on March 25, 2008 by Corinna Carlson | 10 Comments

eh_ad_300x250.gif

Last July I wrote on some of the new measures that Adam and I are taking to make the world that we live in a better place and also trying to do our part for the environment.

Since then we’ve added things such as a reusable coffee filter [we both drink a lot of coffee and it is Adam's fault I never drank as much till I met him] we’ve almost cleared the apartment of *almost* all plastic bags, which is not even close to as easy as it sounds and we’ve added reusable bags. There are people in the West End that recognize and point and give us a smile when we forget our bags and can be seen booting it home with our arms filled. It has happened to us both more than once.

One of my very favourite places to give my money to has always been to the WWF – World Wildlife Fund – I used to adopt animals for people as gifts on a very regular basis, you can also adopt forests, oceans and the arctic now. They have even more animals to adopt than they did when I used to do it, I may get back on that. I want a ‘Hotter than I should be’ organic t-shirt.

This will be the first year of hopefully many, that Adam I will participate in Earth Hour. Between 8 and 9pm this Saturday night, March 29, we will be in the dark with hopefully a massive load of people in the city and around the world. As per their website:

On March 29, 2008, cities across Canada, and around the world will turn off their lights for Earth Hour, a WWF event to raise awareness about climate change and symbolize that, working together the people of the world can make a difference in the fight against climate change.

Earth Hour has grown from a single event in Sydney, Australia in 2007 to a global phenomenon that will occur across six continents and in as many as 20 cities in 2008.

Toronto was the flagship Canadian city to commemorate Earth Hour 2008 but dozens of others including Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal have already joined!

Our goal is to get thousands of businesses and individuals to participate in this historic event, so we can show the nation and the world that Canadians are leaders in addressing climate change, one of the most critical issues facing our world today.

I’ve been pretty excited about this since hearing about it. I have NO idea what we’ll do in the dark for an hour [I sense there will be some Earth Hour babies being made] but I am sure we will find something or maybe we will invite some people over for some good in the dark conversation.

If you’d like to participate you can either just DO IT or sign up on the WWF website.

If you’d like to do more, ‘The Good Life‘ is a new kick ass campaign/challenge you can also sign up for right on the WWF site and it will guide you through more and more ways to help save the planet basically handing you simple actions to not only help the Earth but to help you feel like you ARE making a difference and to make “Every Hour Earth Hour”.

I encourage you to click on the provided links and participate in this great cause. There is also a jam packed group on Facebook of participants you can also join in there.

If last year ONE CITY was able to accomplish what the quote provided below describes, I can’t wait to see what the rest of us can add:

Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming.

About Earth Hour On March 31 2007, for one hour, Sydney made a powerful statement about the greatest contributor to global warming – coal-fired electricity – by turning off its lights. Over 2.2 million Sydney residents and over 2,100 businesses switched off, leading to a 10.2% energy reduction across the city. What began as one city taking a stand against global warming caught the attention of the world.

In 2008, 24 global cities will participate in Earth Hour at 8pm on March 29. Earth Hour is the highlight of a major campaign to encourage businesses, communities and individuals to take the simple steps needed to cut their emissions on an ongoing basis. It is about simple changes that will collectively make a difference – from businesses turning off their lights when their offices are empty, to households turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby.