Month: April 2013

So, I am mostly improved from my injury and basically walking again.  I am still having a little problem with negotiating grade changes; yesterday I was unable to make it up a very small hill to get into the woods to go caching, and J told me I was pushing myself too hard and needed to slow down and wait until I was ready.  I have a small limp but some people have told me that they wouldn’t have noticed it if I didn’t tell them about it.  I can go up and down stairs, but not with my feet working individually – I have to hold on to the hand rail and go one step at a time.  Also, my foot is still having some issues with swelling and I have a suture abscess on one area that I am still fighting.  I was finally able to put on some dress shoes (have only been able to wear one set of tennis shoes), but I couldn’t actually wear them to church because when I walked in them, they were putting a lot of pressure on the side of my ankle where I had the metal plate put in.

I’ve been spending a little bit more time outside – we participated in another CITO event yesterday, been doing a little geocaching on the weekends, some chores around the house, but I haven’t been hiking or even made it for a walk around the block yet.  I have been dreaming about what I want to do when I am fully recovered.  These dreams have helped me deal with my time in recovery, and are the impetus to working hard in physical therapy to get to 100%.  These are goals I have set for my future – I don’t know when, but somehow over the next ten years I want to work my way through the list.

1. Weekend backpacking trip on the Lone Star Trail

2. Thru hike the Lone Star Trail

3. Day or weekend hike in Glacier National Park

4.  Journey to Alaska

5. Journey to Hawaii

6.  Ride that horse again

7.  Hike the Appalachian Trail – maybe in pieces, maybe all the way thru if I could figure out how to make it work without giving up my day job

8.  Get my passport and save for a foreign trip:  New Zealand, Australia, and/or Scotland

9.  Run a 5K again, with my son preferrably

10.  Pass up cookcachers and my brother with number of caching finds (they are both about 400 ahead of me)

 

This weekend, our family participated in a CITO event, which is basically a “clean up the Earth” party, or a “trash bash”.  We also plan to attend a few more of these in the upcoming weeks, and also are planning one for the Cub Scout Den we are working with.  This was my ninth time to participate in a CITO event (short for “Cache In-Trash Out), but this is the first time I really got to thinking about how “earth friendly” it really is.

To get the “smiley” for the event, we show up and get our trash bag.  We put on some gloves and carry around a trash bag and put trash in it, and then throw it away in the dumpster and feel all good about ourselves afterwards.  At the last CITO we were at, and probably quite a few of the ones previous, people were walking around with mostly empty trash bags and then disposing of them within a short time period without filling them up.  It seems a little ironic.

What happens after that?  The trash gets taken to a landfill, and then it takes the plastic bag the trash is in about 400 to 1000 years to break down into the environment, if it ever actually does at all. We also need to think about what we are adding to our landfills.  Even though more is being recycled than ever before, our waste has been tripling due to packaging used for the goods we buy.

I propose that at future CITOs, we use paper bags or biodegradable bags.  This will better serve our intentions of being good to the Earth by removing some of the junk on it, without adding to the problem.