Green Tales


The Community Cool Campaign at First Pres is about people of all ages and their attempts to become "green" in their everyday lives. Sharing stories is a great way to connect to others struggling over the very same issues, lend support, have a good laugh, perhaps reveal a clever new approach to an old problem. Consider some sample topics:

What trick has your family learned to limit their showers to 5 minutes or less?
What changes did you make that really made an immediate difference to your heating bill?
Who is emerging as the family enforcer of good energy habits and what carrot and stick do they use?
Did you figure out a clever way to reduce driving each week?

It’s indisputable that we influence one another in countless ways. So if you have anything to share about your experiences with the monthly challenges, write it up and email it to the Cool Team to post here.

First Pres Green Tales

I have been collecting rain water to use later for watering my plants.  I put small garbage containers (or buckets or pots) at places where the water from the roof runs off.  I empty these into smaller closed containers such as gallon jugs. If you leave the water in open containers you need to be concerned about mosquitoes breeding and about keeping pets and small children from falling in.    Natalie

This last fall I found that I would be making regular trips from Fremont to the Berkeley area. My normal pattern would be to drive up 880 or 680 and hope that the traffic was not going to make me late…But when gasoline was over $4.00 a gallon and traffic was wildly frustrating I decided to use BART. (This was just at the time when the Cool Planet group was asking folks to commit to ways to reducing their carbon footprint .) Over the years I have on occasion  used BART, but never quite got the knack of scheduling.  Now I go to http://www.bart.gov/index.aspx and use their "Quick Planner" to choose my travel times.  If I’m not quite sure if I can get where I want to go on BART, I use this site to find a map to the closest station for my destination:  http://www.bart.gov/stations/closest.aspx  It feels a lot like travel in Europe where using the "Metro" is just a normal fact of life in many cities. Not only do I get to engage in "people watching" some fascinating folk that I might not normally encounter, but I often walk a few blocks from my BART station to my destination  and see parts of our Bay Area that I have never seen before.  John
(editor’s note: also try http://www.511.org for other transit agencies)

I have a clothesline that I love! I tumble dry for 5-7 min. then I hang things out on the line. Sheets, towels, clothes – everything smells so good when I bring things in the house. If it is raining I wait ’til another day if at all possible. I did 2 loads yesterday & 1 load today using my clothesline!  This saves on the use of electricity.  Mary Alice

I have a slight variation on the above.  I’ve found that I can hang out 2 loads on one retractable line and one foldable rack.  When a load finishes in the washer I put at least half in a laundry basket to hang out immediately (napkins, socks, sweat clothes…) and the rest in the dryer to shake out the wrinkles (shirts, slacks).  It takes about 5 minutes to set up the lines and hang up the first half; then I grab a bunch of hangers and take the stuff out of the dryer.  I put it on hangers immediately and hang them on my line to save space.  Pat