The most obvious answer is the reduction in power use.  I've been working to shut off my laptop entirely after hours, which means i'm not wasting energy or charging up a laptop while offline.  And keeping my day to just 8 hours means I'm not commuting anywhere. 

it was really startling to read about the immediate issues with obesity and poor health in relation to how much access a community has to healthy food.  I've always been lucky to live in fairly close relationship to multiple grocery stores, even growing up in rural Maryland, but even just slightly outside of my current house (we're talking a handful of miles! Areas I could jog to!) fall into the definition of a food desert.  And it was even more eye-opening to me that the definition just wasn't access to grocery stores, but also access to healthy food sources. 

I think what has me most worried is the planet my kids will have to live in. I’m also concerned with how I will be able to deal with it when I’m old. I’d say the amount of fossil fuels our family uses in an average week isn’t great. I’m  not concerned with waste, because that can be very manageable up to a point. But getting places, I’m trying to change how we go about that with biking, which is easy when the weather and time abides. Time and lack of infrastructure are the main reasons we don’t bike everywhere. If there was a safer way and we as a society weren’t running around like chickens with our heads cut off we could live very sustainably, and I think we’d be happier for it. We’d be healthier, sleep better, breathe better. Would you bike places? What keeps you from biking?

The kids are already excited for the tree to grow so they can hang a swing from it. How can that not bring anyone happiness?

In our area, its kind of easy to get focused on the city part of Alexandria and lose sight of the fact that we really are surrounded by a number of trails that not only connect parts of the city (for biking, running, walking) but also that it allows us to get away from the cars/noise/concrete.  I've had the luxury of finding a bunch of the trails through running and now biking, but I made an effort with this challenge to at least walk a few connecting paths that I had never used before.  That also helped to realize how even these places get affected by pollution and climate change, especially after some of the unusually heavy rains we've had this season

Probably the biggest for us is the Potomac, which feeds directly into the bay and the Atlantic.  All of my life I've lived in the Chesapeake watershed, and even in school we were very conscientious about what we put into the water...i can remember that being a big talking point in art class with oil painting and the discarding of any turpentine we used in the process.  Pretty much anything we put down our drain, in our yard or in our gutters will eventually make its way into those bodies of water.

Any and all fruit! That is my goal for next summer. Also tomatoes. I’m very excited about all of these new methods, and how they bring me closer to less waste.

I’ve always tried to end my day on a good note, and I think it’s a great thing because in the end I’m happy. Even when days can be really shitty, I know it’s not as bad as it could be because it can always be worse. While I always reflect on my day of how I could’ve  done better, it’s nice to find things I’m grateful for. The smallest things can really bring you immense joy.