Connecticut Green Living

This year sucked. The only redeeming portion of 2023 was the chunk dedicated to helping New Haven schoolchildren and teens turn on their Chromebooks and access the lessons their real teachers had provided them. I also lost 10 pounds. And in February I was offered an environmental reporting job in North Dakota that I, temporarily insane, passed up. Other than that, I did not find a permanent job, boyfriend or cat, nor undiscovered millions. Oh yes, I did fall in love with someone ELSE's cat, Laird, a sturdy white dazzler at a Hamden Airbnb. I also joined the club and caught C , after a mask was brought to a kid in class and an aide pushed her name and number my way. Paxlovid was gross, but it worked. I have spent the 10 months since carefully avoiding sniffling vectors unless you count yesterday when Amtrak diverted us to a bus and the guy behind me coughed his way from New Haven to Hartford . I spent a lot of time alone this year, at McDonald's in West Haven or Branford. Sp...

When I lived with my mother in Texas, she worried about the way I would reuse my straws. "I'm not sure it's sanitary," she said. I told her there was a big movement to curtail plastic use and reuse straws. I had been sent a metal straw a couple years earlier. Mom didn't use straws, but she immediately understood. I was happy to see that there is a nationwide university movement toward this end. Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia has announced that students there recently became "champions" in the nationwide Pledge Against Plastic Straws Campus Challenge 2019. The contest was organized by California-based Simply Straws, which sells reusable straws and encourages college campuses to shutter plastic straw use. Longwood collected 878 pledges from students, staff and the community to “Kick the Straw” habit, putting the university ahead of 71 other institutions. Indiana State came in second place. All one has to do to understand the ills of plasti...