Hope everyone continues to live thos challenge even with the holidays approaching.

Another recycle moment! A year ago, we wound up taking out a damaged walkway that contained bricks, which were bound for the landfill. Then, realized that the culvert at the bottom of our road often fills up with plants, debris and dirt. Hubby wanted to get large gravel to put in there to stabilize the stream bed (with weedstop to discourage plants). Ahah! Bricks 'laid' in the bottom of that culvert will help water channel thru more easily (less likely to catch dirt and debris), discourages plants, and makes use of the old brick!

My apologies that I haven't been checking in. As of the week of Thanksgiving, I had surgery, so I've been trying to recover, but it's been a slow recovery.

Sunny, sunny days. I'm generating electricity like mad, which is unusual in December. So my cars, my house battery and the grid are happy, but my plants are thinking, "Uh oh, where's the rain?" Tradeoffs.

Going after the gophers again. Darn it! They've poked a bunch of holes in my grass/goose fodder.

Today, shared on Next Door, the news of California's SB 54, a bill that will require product sellers to 1. reduce plastic packaging by 25%, 2. make all single-use plastic packaging recyclable, and 3. recycle 65% of that plastic packaging, by 2032. This is going to spread beyond California (what widget maker really wants to set up two different streams of packaging?) so once again, an action of California that benefits other states. Our Next Door is very down on government, so I post occasionally with these good news stories. We don't need a barrage of bad news to be constantly beating the drum.

Long Next-Door thread about the California Air Resources Board actions over the last 50 years. The actions in California were models for Germany and France, spread thru Europe, as well as helping (through the power of the California Marketplace to force change on Detroit) all of the U.S. to cleaner air. We aren't done yet, but man, there were some forward thinking political folks back then. Everybody complains about politics and government, but there are plenty of examples where enormous gains have been made.

We bought an EV yesterday. "Ruby". We already had a Volt, so now we have to figure out the small differences between a gas car (the truck we use for very occasional heavy jobs. Old, no power steering, 4 on the floor), the Volt, which is a platypus, and the new EV which reminds you about lines in the road, and cars passing you. Hard to drive "automatically" with many different platforms, but we'll get there. All as we are driving less and less.