I have been, as you might know by reading my layouts, quite political in my life.  I spent many years as an activist and a community organizer. Then in my early forties I was fortunate to meet and marry my wonderful husband Jon. I don't know what happened; I think perhaps he was waiting to become an activist. Anyway two years after we were married he read a book by John Robbins of the ice-cream family and he became a vegetarian. Boom…just like that. He hasn’t touched a piece of meat, fish or fowl since. And the main reason was the harm to the environment. The result of which has been a concerted effort over the years to decrease our footprint on this earth.

We bought a condo less than five miles from where Jon works and the bus line runs right in front of the condo entry. I could go to work and come back with less than a block of walking and Jon can do the same. We can walk to our local mall only about two blocks away and find there a Michael’s, Jo-Ann’s, Barnes & Noble, theaters, library, ethnic restaurants (about twenty), NY Cupcake Co., French bakery, etc. Also within six miles of us we have Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Puget Consumers Coop. We are happy in being able to travel less and vote with our dollars as well as our ballot.

So what does a respectable ex-sixties activist and her younger husband and friend do on a gorgeous Saturday morning in late September? We go to a Green Jobs action!! We find that in downtown Bellevue, our hometown, they are building two huge condo towers and to our delight and surprise, they are going to be LEED Gold certified. Now what the heck is that you might ask? Well, Jon and I are early risers and on early morning HGTV is a program called HGTV-Pro. It is all about remodeling and building and lately green building. LEED certification means that you are building to the latest environmental standards. So gold certification is the second best there is and the highest one, platinum, is seldom accomplished in residential building.

So here I am along with Jon having great fun on a Saturday afternoon. Each time we here of the great things that are being done and could be done to save our planet, we are inspired. Please vote-both with your ballot and your dollars. We are recording history with our pages. We do it for our families, ourselves and for future generations to know who we are. I hope that they will know that we did our small part to make things better when we realized that we were causing harm to our home, the planet earth.             

We each got to keep our green hard hats. This is me and my camera. Jon is on the far right of the picture of the group and my friend Sue is holding up the bright green sign.