Alright, so enough of the global warming/climate change arguments. Let’s get down to the really important stuff. Why is it twenty-nine degrees outside with snow on the ground, and I can’t get a snow shovel for love or money? My snow shovel broke after the first big snow storm (remember that one?) and when it looked like that wasn’t going to be the last of winter, I went looking for a replacement. I went to Walmart first where the assistant told me that they had sold out a long time ago.

A very good question, and one that many people in the North East have been asking recently. We have been slammed by huge amounts of snowfall recently accompanied by freezing temperatures with no end in sight. As I look out of my window I see four feet long icicles hanging from my roofline and nothing but glistening snow piled three feet high in my garden. I wonder if instead of being concerned about global warming I should be concerned about a global ice age!

Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and remembered to set your live tree out to be picked up and recycled! So after a long break for the holidays, here are some more suggestions for how to be greener instantly.

1. Use unbleached coffee filter papers. The only difference is that they are brown instead of white. You can compost both the papers and the used grounds.

2. Sign up for paperless billing. You can receive all of your bills online and be notified by email when they arrive. To be even greener, pay them online as well.

Here are a few easy ways to be greener immediately, without spending ANY money or really using any extra effort!

1. Turn lights off every time you leave a room (yes, even if you're coming back!)

2. Turn your car engine off when you're waiting at Wawa, or at the bank drive through

3. Shred your junk mail and compost it

4. Recycle plastic bags of ALL types

5. Check the base of those Wawa and Starbucks food bowls and yogurt cups; if it's a 1 or 2 inside the recycling sign you can recycle it. Most of them are recyclable.

So now that you know how to make a compost bin cheaply and quickly, (see last week’s post) you’re going to want to start putting stuff in it! It’s very easy to compost food scraps which keeps them out of the landfill. You might wonder why food should be kept out of the landfill in the first place. In a landfill everything is buried and compressed, so it doesn’t have access to oxygen. This causes a build up of methane gas, that has to vented. Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon monoxide, very flammable, and HORRIBLY smelly.

Here’s a quick, cheap, and easy way to be greener. Make your own composting bin. I did this a couple of weeks ago and it really is easy. I already have a double-chamber composting bin that I use continuously year round. I put kitchen scraps in one chamber until it is full, then I put kitchen and yard scraps in the second chamber until that one is full too. The idea is that as one chamber is “cooking” you are filling the other chamber. Trouble is, as the weather cools down, so does my compost, and sometimes I am left with a lot of semi-finished compost.

So now that people are becoming more aware of the need to save our precious resources, whether it be oil, coal, or water, you might have noticed that number one on everyone's "advice" list on how to save money and resources is to switch your incandescent (regular) light bulbs to CFL (compact florescent light) bulbs. Those are the twisty ones that take a while to warm up to full light capacity.

I know airing your dirty laundry in public is not a good idea, but I didn't know airing your CLEAN laundry could have negative consequences. Apparently some homeowners associations have rules against line-drying your clothes on your own property. One woman in Vermont is battling for the right to save electricity, money, and the planet by hanging her laundry out to dry. Her neighbors feel so strongly that they should not have to view her "smalls", that they have resorted to guerilla tactics and cut her clothes lines in the dead of night -- three times!

So I discovered there is an alternative to chlorine and salt-to-chlorine converting systems. After scouting around online I found CL Free Water Systems. www.chlorinefreeusa.com I read through everything on their website, how their system works, customer recommendations, how they installed the pool on Extreme Makeover, Home Edition, even all the scary information about kids that swim in chlorine pools having much higher rates of asthma. I was VERY impressed. This is exactly what I’m looking for, it’s an electrolysis system that uses copper to clean the water.