Tales From a “GREEN” Minivan

Apple hasn’t been very nice to Canadians as of late. First it started with iTunes, show downloads were priced much higher here and didn’t offer multi-episode discounts that our southern friends. It took a while but they listened. One other aggravation is finding something you like only to discover “Unfortunately that’s not available on he Canadian iTunes Store!”      Well why not?

I’ve been very happy with Apples products, we’ve been a multiple Mac happy family, from Nanos to iTouch things had been going smoothly. My little Mac has been great, barely crashes and I’ve been REALLY happy with my newest Apple gadget my beloved iPhone. It has enriched my life, I know that sounds corny but having the world wide web at my finger tips is an amazing benefit. It’s come in handy too many times to count. Right now I’m actually using it to write this post!

One of the things that sets iPhone’s apart from other smartphones is the Applications that are available to interact with it. Applications can be downloaded from iTunes App Store. This is where my Beef starts!

Let me first back up a little bit, I got my iPhone 3G back in September. Since then I’ve been downloading mainly free Apps I bought a couple to try as well but one of the things I really disliked was that when you make purchases on iTunes you have to charge them to your credit card there’s no options to use Paypal, but you can use iTunes gift cards… or so I thought!

I thought that iTunes cards would be the solution to these petty little credit card charges that add up, so they went on my Christmas Wishlist. Let’s just say I have a sizable amount to use. So finally last week I decided to redeem one if my $50 cards to buy a few Apps I was excited to try out some must have Apps that were not free. I input the cards code and up popped my $50 balance! I went into the App store to buy a Twitter App that I was excited to try, I selected it and up popped my credit info aski g me to confirm. I thought to myself, “That’s strange? There’s $50 credit there!” I closed iTunes and reopened it thinking there must be a glitch with the iTunes card not going in properly, so I then tried the App again and again up pops the credit card info again. I then remembered a friend from highschool Cayman Grant just had her short film “His Good Will” added to iTunes. I started the download process with no problems at all and instantly my iTunes balance Shrunk to $48.01 after my $1.99 purchase. So back to the App store to try again and again no luck!

For some reason Canadian iTunes cards will not work in the Apps Store! So now I’m stuck with all of these iTunes cards, but I can’t use them in the App store!

I’m not the only one that’s upset with this I’ve read many blogs and forums where Canadians are really peeved!

So Apple if you’re reading this please let us loyal Canadian Apple fanatics use our Canadian iTunes cards in the App Store? Pretty please ?! Oh and one more request… Please hurry up and get OS 3.0 launched I really want Copy/Paste, it will truly make my iPhone experience complete.

PS- I just wrote this entire post in bed on my iPhone, landscape mode of course! That reminds me one other request-  landscape mode for Gmail!

Thanks,

Your Macbook shopping friend,

Cara

Last weekend we took advantage of the beautiful weather here in Southern New Brunswick to get outside and do some much needed yardwork.  One of the tasks was removing some playsand from our planter that I had put in a few years ago for the boys to use as a sandbox.  The original project failed miserably as the neighbourhood cats decided it was their own supersized litterbox, so it has remained abandoned.  Luckily I had put the black fabricky stuff (not sure of it’s real name) above the soil to block any weeds from coming through so it was relatively easy to remove the sand.

We also decided to remove the giant rhubarb plant as well, as it was taking over the planter and no one we know really likes it! Here’s me trying to remove it.  The roots were so thick at the bottom they were casuing the planter to expand and come apart in one corner!

We completely filled our compost cart with it, I felt bad just hacking away at it, but I know that it really couldn’t have been removed and transplanted anywhere else.

So know we’re left with our awesome raised planter! Just waiting for planting!

I picked up some spanish onion bulbs, and seeds for pumpkin, squash, carrots and some herbs.  I’d like to do tomatoes , but I’m not sure how hard they are to do.  As well, should I be adding anything to the soil to enrich it?  The rhubarb grew beautifully every year, and it was HUGE, but anyone that tried it said it didn’t taste that great most likely due to it’s size.  Here’s a pic from 4 years ago.

I thought I’d provide a disclaimer right up front for my male followers as I’m going to be talking about periods also know as the monthly visitor Aunt Flo–or AF in boardspeak!

Last night was garbage night in our city.  We’re part of a pilot project  for the inner-city to have trash out after 6pm up until 9pm.  I’m guessing so people don’t have to see this eyesore! My neighbourhood mainly consists of multi-dwelling buildings with the occaisional single family home mixed in.  It’s a very diverse neighbourhood, that also has it’s challenges- parking, snow removal, and recycling & garbage removal are some of them. About 5-6 years ago our city adopted an every other week trash removal and compost on the off week.  It was soon noticed that the Southend could not handle this, as many had no way to compost or a place for the compost bins or a place to store the trash for 2 weeks.  It was decided that trash removal would remain weekly with compost every other week.  Since then the city has now changed to a weekly compost pick-up with trash every other week, with the exception of the Southend we have trash and compost weekly.

The problem I have with this is that people are abusing this!  In front of one single family dwelling I counted 12 large black trash bags…TWELVE!  It’s obvious that no one in that household is recycling or composting anything!   We are a family the same size as that one and we throw out 1 (ONE)trash bag a week!  So it got me thinking about some of the things I have done personally to cut back on unnecessary waste.

One thing I have started doing is using reusable feminine products.  If you would have asked me 4 years ago, I would have laughed in your face. Actually I remember sitting down with some of my friends and us joking about it, “Why on earth, would anyone want to?”.  You see that’s just it, it’s about the earth!  Until we can start thinking about all of these little things that we can personally cut back on, our landfills and oceans will continue to fill.

So you’re probably thinking, “Well, what the heck is she doing for Aunt Flo?”  Having 3 boys in 6 years along with breastfeeding into toddlerhood kept AF from making her monthly visit for a long time.  So when she returned I decided to look into alternatives. I’ve never been a fan of maxi-pads and even whilst typing the word I’m getting a little redfaced and giggly, so cloth mama-pads were out of the question (although many moms love them).  I decided to look into menstrual cups and found many CPO members raving about the Diva-Cup! You can read about this Canadian mother-daughter team at their website www.divacup.ca

image compliments of Squawkfox-Where Frugal Living is Sexy

Read more about the DivaCup here

Or discuss it with other CPO’ers here

I will never go back to disposable feminine products ever again!  I just wish I had found this sooner!  So there you have it just one way you can make a small impact and save money and embarrassment as a bonus!

Happy Earth Day!

Testing this out to see how it works! Looks like I need to go into the code area rather than from the visual text box! I tried to see if I could post a photo, but it does not look like photo browsing is functioning. I can add a photo

that has already been uploaded and hopefully when Apple launches it’s new OS 3.0 it will have copy/paste functionality and I can add photos that way! Well I’m off to publish this and see if it works!

edited to add: YAY!  It works!