My goals for this coming winter

First of all I will volunteer for Ohio Responds https://www.ohioresponds.odh.ohio.gov/Volunteermobilizer/ to be ready for the Pandemic Flu or any other emergency.
You can make a difference in case of an emergency in your community. Anyone interested in volunteering can go at http://www.serveohio.org/OhioCitizenCorps_MRC.aspx.

To be well informed about the Pandemic Flu and how to prepare your family, business or school you can go at http://www.flu.gov/ or http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/.

Then I will try to introduce in the school where my daughters will start to go this year different available programs:
Kids walk to school (as this is what I did in Italy when I was in school from elementary to University, walking or biking) , http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/kidswalk/.
Ohio EPA Clean Diesel School Bus Fund Retrofit Grants Program and Anti-Idling campaign http://www.hcdoes.org/airquality/Anti-Idling/idle.htm
Bring gardening to school following the model of Granny's Garden School http://www.grannysgardenschool.com/
And many more...

Will be a busy school year, no time to be bored !

Visiting the gas pump less often

This spring I finally convinced my husband to trade his demanding SUV for a hybrid compact car.

There were a lot of obstacles I needed to overcome: "Every family with kids in USA has at least a SUV or a Minivan, we need it" (we don't need it in Italy and we do perfectly fine). Then "How will I transport big stuff" (to transport big items one or twice a year you can make the store deliver them to you or you can rent a truck for one day). "We need space to make a long travel" (yes we do, but for 1-2 long travels a year we can rent a car).

Finally I won. When we went to the car dealer his last doubt was "Are you sure you have enough space with the kids and their car seats?" I got the car seats out of my car and fit them perfectly in the small hybrid. "And what about the grocery, the trunk is smaller", "Where will you put the bikes?". I took the bikes to the park one or 2 times in 5 years and there are bikes holders you can attach to the car. I never buy more than 10 days of grocery as we eat mainly fresh food anyways.

We will do just fine and the kids will be very proud of us because we are trying to give them a chance to enjoy nature like we did growing up.



I cannot tell you how good you feel when you do not need to fill up the gas tank for 2 weeks, and you bypass the gas pump many more times without stopping. My new hybrid car was suppose to make 42 mpg combining city and highway (40 city, 45 highway) and to my surprise I'm doing 50 mpg. Probably also because I learned a better way to drive on this website http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/drive.shtml.

Not to mention the reduction in air pollution. Every time you stop, the engine turns off automatically, as soon as you lift your foot from the breaks, the engine start again. With other cars whenever you are idling you are consuming gasoline and making 0 mpg while polluting the air.

With my trade our family will consume almost 12 barrels less of petroleum each year with a saving of about 1281$/yr in our budget (plus a possible tax reduction). And finally we will emit about 6.5 less tons of Co2 a year with an additional score of air pollution of 9 (where 10 is the least polluting car).

A car is one of the biggest purchase of a family after a house and also one of the biggest cause of pollution. At http://www.fueleconomy.gov/ there are many information on mpg and CO2 emissions of all brands and models. It is just a matter of choosing the right car for the right main usage that fits your family.

Spring/Summer 2009 local nature encounter

This Spring/Summer we meet a lot of friends around our house.
A Grassnake came to say "Hi!" to us in the yard. They are harmless if you do not step on their head, they are not venomous and they keep the yard clean from mice and other little mammals.



This is one of our 2 hummingbird visiting the sugar feeder placed on a tree in front of the study of my house. They are little perfect amazing fliers.

The deers come every evening at dusk in a cul-de-sac with empty lots in my neighborhood. No one is cutting the "weeds" so the animals have actually something to eat. There is the entire herd with 5 males 3 females and 3 fawns. We nominated this part of the neighborhood "Deer Park" and it is at a nice walk or bike ride from our house.

Here is a "stick" insect. Very strange to see one in my yard instead than in a picture book or a zoo. He climbed all the way to the face of my daughter very fast and then stopped as in a pose for a picture I could not take the last picture as my daughter was laughing and at the same time telling me "take it away!".

Just relaxing and enjoying the environment: a rainbow in a dry day, a sunset, , trees on the onset of a storm

Hope you enjoyed you vacation as we did.

July 22nd 2009: my plants think it is fall!

In almost 9 years I have been living in Cincinnati I never saw a summer weather like this. Temperature below the average for the all month of July with a lot or rain and just one or two tornado alarms from Spring to August.

Some of my plants decided it is fall already on July 22nd when I took those pictures. Today they look even more reddish. Some trees are even loosing yellow leafs. No one hot, sticky humid day with a lot of mosquitoes and a lot of showers to cool off, when you wish only one thing: winter! I don't know how I feel about this version of summer. Too much rain for my taste and not many hot days to go to the pool.

Climate change impact in USA.

Here is a report you may want to look at to decide where you would like to live in the next 50 or so years from now. It also gives you a glimpse of what is coming if all of us does not start to change our lifestyle and start reduce our CO2 footprint.

This report may also be useful for businesses to decide how to invest money in the near and not so far future to continue to be competitive.

Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts

My compost is producing tomatoes.

Back in the spring of 2008 I decided to buy a compost bin. I was able to take advantage of the great compost bins sale Hamilton County does two times a year http://www.hcdoes.org/SWMD/Residents/Yardwaste/ywcompost.html. After waiting a long winter I was finally able to put my wonderful compost rich soil at use.

My idea was, "...what if I could use my food scraps to grow tasty tomatoes, not like the ones that are sold in the stores now. They do not have any taste or smell, full of pesticide, artificially ripened with chemicals and that may be coming from far far away on a airplane.....What a waste of gasoline...".

If you think about it. Your trash needs to be transported to the local garbage landfill and will be there unmodified for 100s of years. In fact in the landfill the garbage is so compressed that there is not enough oxygen to decompose what could naturally decompose in your back yard.

And the garbage hill will keep growing until there will be no more space. At that point they will need to open a new landfill far from the city and they will spend even more gasoline to transport the garbage in the new site. I'm very sensitive to this as in Italy we keep having events where the landfills we imagined for granted were so full that they did not have anywhere to put the trash and they just left the trash in the streets for months (in Naples 2 times and in Palermo 1 time, just google "spazzatura Napoli" or "Emergenza rifiuti Palermo", select images at the top of the page and you will see what I mean). According to a recent study the garbage problem will soon be national in Italy because in 2 years the space of the current landfills on the all territory will be exhausted.

So going back to my compost and tomatoes. I thought it was a great idea to compost. You give more time life to the landfills, you save gasoline to transport garbage and tomatoes and you produce rich compost for your plants and garden.

Since I started to compost and recycling I produce only 1 tall bag of regular garbage a week instead of 3-4 when I arrived in USA, and my family in the meantime is also doubled.

My daughters helped me the all time to collect the scraps, damp them in the bin, turn the material. We also attended a free composting lesson at Park+Vine to learn more about composting.

Spring comes and with it our excitement to finally use the compost. I planted 7 big vases with 7 plants of tomatoes, all different varieties using only my old mulch, my rich compost and some soil of my wooded backyard. Two of those plants came from the seeds of a tomatoe I bought in the store.

My girls are so amazed of the results. What before was food scraps now is rich soil. What was something that mommy use to grab on the shelves of a store, now is growing on a plant in our deck. They go and look at the plants every morning and they tell me how tall the plants are growing and how may tomatoes are on each plant. And they are also all excited that the tomatoes have different shapes and sizes even if all the plants look the same. What an experience for them.

One inconvenient is that so far I was able to taste only a few of the cherry tomatoes, the first to be ripened, in fact as soon as my daughters see a red one they grab and eat it on the spot. I will post you more pictures when the big ones will be ready. The few tomatoes I ate were super delicious and full of flavor, not comparable to the ones you buy at the store.

Earth Hour 2009 March 28th from 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm.

This rapid change in the world economy has by now affected all of us directly or indirectly.

But the other day I realized that the only way out is to keep taking positive action in what we firmly believe. And for me it is to try to make this world a better world for future generations.
So today I'm back with my postings, with more energy than ever.

It's spring! Recharge your inner energy by making something good for the Earth.
Join the rest of the world and switch off the lights on March 28th for 1 hour from 8:30 pm till 9:30 pm. Make this a family event or a work event or a school event.
For more information go to http://www.earthhour.org/.