A Carbon-Neutral Christmas?

This past weekend I completed my holiday shopping with a two hour adventure ride through the streets of Providence. I was searching for a specific gift for my mother. Online sources couldn't get it here in time. As it turns out, only one store in Providence had it. I had a blast riding all over the place searching, but it was only later that I realized the significance of what I had done. All of my Christmas shopping was done either by bicycle or on foot. Zero driving! On top of that, (I'm pretty sure nobody in my family actually reads this...) I bought carbon dioxide offsets from Carbonfund.org for each of my family members.

Now to be fair, I should think about this further before I claim carbon neutrality. I will be driving my car 40 miles each way to go be with my family for the actual holiday. My family members will be driving quite a bit as well. The gifts themselves involve carbon emissions in their production and transportation to market. Making my bicycle created carbon emissions. There's no such thing as a free lunch and there's no such thing as truly carbon neutrality, at least yet. I think it can be done, though, with more use of offsets.

I have also been lucky in terms of the weather this month. It's easy to ride a bike all over town when it's 50 degrees out. Had it been a snowy, rainy, cold, nasty month, would I have had the dedication to shop this way? Who knows, but I'm proud that I did complete all my shopping without using my car. Sure was a lot of fun...

Snow!

Just a quick one today...

After a 65 degree day on December 1st, we've got snow today, December 4th. Hooray for climate change and destabilized weather patterns! Anyway, being the toughguy I am I rode in to work today. I dressed poorly, however. I thought that snow would simply bounce off of me and I would stay relatively dry. This was not the case. The snow, in fact, stuck to me, particularly my pant legs. I wasn't as wet as the time I rode home in a downpour, but I was pretty damp. But who cares, right? Commuting to work by bike on a snowy Monday morning is a pretty good adventure... although I'm not sure what that says about the rest of my life right now. Hmmm, riding my bike in the snow is an adventure? Sheesh, I need to get a life.