Day 130 - July 16, 2010

life guard tower 26 - Ocean Park, Santa Monica CA

trash collected for 20 min.

5.7 pounds

515.7 pounds total

COMMUNITY COUNT COLLECTION - Danielle, Aaron, Chase, Claire, and Henri

DAY 36

5.4 pounds

312.9 pounds total
Arrowhead water... There's a saying I learned growing up - "IF CAN'T SAY ANYTHING NICE, DON'T SAY ANYTHING AT ALL." This phrase would apply to my feelings about bottled water. However, keeping silent about the damaging environmental impacts of bottled water is not an option.

- if you filled a plastic water bottle about 1/4th of the way up with petroleum, that is approximately how much it takes to make the plastic bottle.

- why do we continue to buy products that are used for minutes and their packaging sticks around forever ? (plastic is fairly new - 1970's - some estimates are 1,000 yrs. for breakdown, mostly we are learning as we go)......

- oh yeah - and it is 10,000% percent mark up to buy bottled water then fill up at the tap in your own house. buy lunch for 10$ or 1,000$

see TAPPED - the movie for more details.
Danielle - from Wilmongton NC - is a fellow blogger who I met online. Her blog - It Starts With Me - is great! She is visiting her college roomate for the week in Corona Del Mar so she braught her family up for the evening to have dinner, and come on a cleanup with me.

Thank you to her, her husband Aaron, oldest son Chase, Claire (pictured above), and Henri for joining me on the beach last night.

As Claire picked these glasses up her father said, "Not everything you find out here is trash, huh?" to his daughter who then turned and very nicely modeled her new find for me.
As we were collecting, the topic of finding "loaded" dirty diapers at the beach came up. I mentioned how I had written finding a dirty diaper into the story I am working on well before I found my first diaper on the beach in real life.

The one pictured above is diaper number 3 or 4.

3 or 4 too many.

From R to L - Henri, Claire and Chase with another find. A perfectly good umbrella. They also found many sandtoys that they are hopefully putting to good use today, and a beach towel.

Garen and I tried to go to the beach today.

First - we tried to go to the local cafe, "Rose Cafe" on the boarder of Venice and Santa Monica. The parking lot was full.

Excuse me - first we tried to go to the beach pictured above - parking lot full, then the cafe and then to "Lily's" on Abbot Kinney because there is cheap validated parking behind it.

Well save yourself the favor of following our lead and DO NOT GO TO LILY"S RESTAURANT. 50$, a horrible soggy snadwich, and a ridiculously long wait while we watched everyone else eat later, we got back in the car to go to the beach in Venice.

FULL

The beach back in our hood

FULL.

I love our neighborhood, but Southern California in the summer is SO crowded that Garen and I are dreaming of the day when we can move to a more remote part of our beloved state coast. We finally gave up, and came home....but it sure feels good to be back on The Daily Ocean. Going out again tonight to collect some more trash from our local beach.