Oh, these orchids!

Red2 has a green thumb. Grandma gave us these orchids 2 years ago. Red2 kept them alive and they even bloomed again. How awesome is that? 

She has a little spritzy water bottle and everything. 

{Clue from yesterday's post: The flowers were not in the box.}

Lemur Tell you Something

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What's your favorite animal?

Cincinnati Zoo - check.
Ft. Worth, TX Zoo - check.
Zoo Atlanta - check.

Busch Gardens, Tampa - check.
Disney's Animal Kingdom - check.

Zoos are really keeping up with the times. The Cincinnati Zoo has installed a series of solar panel roofs for the the parking lot. They look like the structures found at gas stations that protect you from the raid when you are filling your tank.

Wouldn't it be cool if "they" installed the same panels at the gas stations?

Geonosian Solarsailer. From StarWars.com

Here's your sci-fi: Have you seen Count Dooku's ship? Solar sails. 

Games God Google and Green

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"She prays?"

These are the G Labels for the posts from my blog. Games, God, Google and Green. Good Grief!

I started looking back at the posts and this one which was tagged "green" is more about our yard and the things we did in it.



http://sfdaddy.blogspot.com/2010/08/flower-power.html

The post labeled, God, is funny. It contains the psuedo transcript of my daughter's first viewing of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. It really encapsulates one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place and I want to share it with you again:

J is six and today we watched Star Wars Episode I. Here are J's comments.

Never tell a Jedi, "You're under arrest."

Who was that white lady? (Watching the pod race.)

What kind of fabric are their clothes made of? (Anakin and his mother's on Tatooine.) Information about the costumes. And another article.

I'd bet the fabric would be something synthetic since it's a desert planet, but here you could go for a linen or bamboo fabric.

Yoda: " I sense much fear in you." to Anakin.
J: "Yoda's a good senser."

Queen Amidala: "I pray you'll bring sanity back to the Senate."
J: "She prays? She believes in God."

Yoda: "May the Force be with you."
J: "And also with you. (giggle) Church." (That's Daddy's joke, now she knows the reference first hand.)

Queen Amidala: "Jar Jar, I need your help."
J: "Oh! Gungans have fine armies!!!" (J puts it all together and remembers what Jar Jar said earlier in the film.)

Blog Action Day 2010 Prep

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Blog Action Day 2010  October 15th

I'm preparing an entry for Blog Action day. Have you heard about it? My kids try so hard to conserve water they rarely flush and have to be sent to the shower. Do we take our access to water for granted? In the US, we absolutely do. This year the Blog Action day theme is water. I bet we'll learn a lot.

This week I learned that there are people in the United States that don't have access to other basic services we take for granted.


A fire rescue team let a man's house burn to the ground because he failed to pay his fire service fee. They had abundant water to available to wet down the perimeter to protect his neighbors from the flames. The neighbors were all paid up.



Blog Action Day 2010: Water from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

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Flower Power

Every year we watch the cardinals and their babies at our bird feeders in the backyard. They have a nest somewhere close.

This spring we started a row of amazing flowers along the front edge of our yard. These are much more interesting than that strip of grass was.  We've seen more birds, caterpillars and butterflies than we've ever seen in our yard. Little yellow finches nibbling at the flower seeds. Blue birds swoop through.

We use the worms from our yard to turn our kitchen scraps into compost and then turn that into the dirt in the flower beds and around the bushes.

We planted 2 peach trees, 2 apple trees, a fig tree, blueberries and even a pomegranate! Yum. So our awesome new shrubs and trees will feed us people too.

This summer we certified our yard with the National Wildlife Federation. When we read the qualifications, they seemed to be describing our place! A friend of ours nearby certified their yard a while ago and I always thought it would be cool to have our own certification number! We ordered the yard sign too.

nwf.org Garden-for-Wildlife - Create-a-Habitat
"creating a certified wildlife habitat to discovering wildlife in your neighborhood and sharing the findings, there are many ways you can make a difference."

Listen to this interview! All the great things to do in your yard! We've been doing it and it's so rewarding.  http://ow.ly/2w3Tq

under the sea - wonders and astonishments

David Gallo shows underwater astonishment | Video on TED.com




One amazing clip from TED. The most mysterious and cool things under that water. We had seen a lot about cuddle fish from the visit to the IMAX theater at MOSY in Tampa a few months ago.

Oh, dear. This next one was not a happy video. TED is full of great ideas. Not all of them will make you smile, but even these I'm glad to have shared and seen. The girls were most impressed with the size of the fish that we used to be able to catch. These pictures really hit home what's happening under the sea.

Wormy update

On Earth Day,  2010, I went to St. Anne’s Day School All Stars class and we went out for a nature walk. The intent was to collect objects from nature to build letter sculptures from found materials.

I suggested that we take out a few trash bags to pick up litter too. Even though the grounds are very well kept, my lovely teachers were skeptical about being able to find anything.

We won't find very much trash...

We found more trash than we expected. Unpopped balloons, church bulletins, even a very nice metal reusable coffee mug that must have been accidentally knocked off of the ledge overlooking the bushes.



We brought it all inside and sorted out the items we wanted to keep for the art project, what was recycleable, compostable, and just landfill bound.

We had been talking about my worms and our composting habits, so my little one volunteered to bring home the items that were compostable. Just the great kind of stuff our worms would eat.




I shredded it all up and added my family’s kitchen scraps. Placed the new mixture in the worm bin.


"Yummy," the worms will say. Then we’ll add some more Georgia clay and dirt to the mix and put into the garden.

Keep a box of spent batteries

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Battery Recycling! Now here's a bit of info for you on what to do with these batteries that you know you shouldn't be tossing into the trash.

Lookup a recycling center near you!

Earth911.org has given itself a really nice sprucing up and looks gorgeous.

Our batteries died in our cordless phone and I went out to buy new ones. Well I brought home the wrong kind. They're expensive little suckers. Mrs. SF Daddy went out and just bought a new set of phones! (Not as great for the environment.) So now my errand of returning the wrong batteries is expanded to also collecting up the old phones and either recycling them, or finding a person who can REUSE them. Finding people is easy for us, but a great way to get rid of the 'still usefull' stuff you don't need anymore is FreeCycle. People in your area will come to your house and take it from you. No money exchanges and it's beautiful.

FreeCycle "Our mission is to build a worldwide gifting movement that reduces waste, saves precious resources & eases the burden on our landfills while enabling our members to benefit from the strength of a larger community."

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Don't just chuck that Recyclababble Container

We've been trying to master composting. We have the leaf piles, a rotating barrel, AND a worm farm. The back yard isn't messy because of these things, it's still the kids' toys and a real need for a good mow to blame for that.

We're sending all the trash out to the recycling center, but it's those #1's that are getting refused. No.1: PETE (polyethylene terephthalate).

The discussion started at Tree Hugger is a good one: Talking about it.

There's more on #1: National Geographic Green Guide on plastics

It's off to Google for solutions...

Flying Green

We can all say we're going green, but there are a lot of folks that still need to catch up. We're using cloth shopping bags, driving a hybrid and replacing light bulbs.

These girls are also getting more modern chores: Feed the worms (the kitchen scraps), and take out the Recycling. We recycle so much stuff it's almost a shame that we have to pay extra in our county for trash collection at all. We only have 2 bags a week for a family of 4.

J the gardner arborist

A TV program in 10 minutes just made it click for a 3-year-old. A plant gets water from the ground through its roots; air from under its leaves; and with sun from the tops of its leaves it turns it all into food!
After watering the flowers on the porch we pulled weeds and found some baby pine trees growing at the mailbox. Maybe we'll watch them grow up into big trees. We'll have to ask mommy if that would be okay. She doesn't really love pine trees very much... but they do grow fast!