Christmas season is upon us....Kinda

So after long weeks at work I think all of us are appreciative of the weekends...even if they are a little bit chilly these days! I think I can speak for all of us when I say that there are definitely good days and bad days at work. There are always challenges when working at non-profits and I have really been struggling lately to stay swimming above water. There are days I have worked overtime until 11pm trying to get residents the social services they need and deserve, but then there are days where I am literally out of work by 10am and I feel that I am being totally under utilized. By Friday, I am always thankful to get out of the office and forget about everything for 2 days. With that being said...it has been a very exciting weekend at the Imani house! There had been rumors that there could be snow this weekend...but I think we were all in a bit of denial about it but low and behold on Saturday morning we woke up to a fresh layer of snow everywhere. Unfortunately...my car doors were also frozen shut. In the spirit of simplicity and sustainability Mary Eileen and I rode our bikes to the post office this morning. It was a little bit cold...but it was sort of a refreshing way to start the day. People at the post office were pretty impressed with our tenacity!
This weekend was also the first annual Lowry Harvest Festival. For those of you that don't know...we live on Lowry Avenue, and it used to be a pretty rough street to live on. In the past couple of years they have done a ton of renovation to make it way safer AND more appealing to the eye. We now have better lit streets, bike paths, and these strange little statues on each street corner (I wish I could explain them better...) It was a good way for us to get out of the house...luckily this celebration was not ended with gunshots (apparently the last time North Minneapolis had a festival like this...someone got shot. yikes). It was a very nice and calm little street get together. We met a few neighbors and got alot of freebies, which are always great!


Because we are on such a tight budget we are having to get creative with our entertainment. This weekend we made ourselves a mailbox...exciting right!?! Almost everything (everything but the pretty paper) was recycled from stuff we already, and now we won't lose our mail!

We also make a green goal every week. Since we haven't been blogging since the beginning we are already:

1. the mellow yellow rule (don't flush your pee unless it is super yellow to save water)
2. use gray water (what we wash our dishes with) to water our house plants
3. using a compost for our food scraps
4. using eco-friendly dish soap (so it doesn't hurt our plants)
   
5. using eco-friendly laundry detergent (no phosphorus)
   

We have been getting a lot of pesky junk mail lately so this week we are going to try and get off some of those lists so we aren't wasting so much paper and ink!

We are always open to new "green goals"...so if you have any ideas...please feel free to comment!

Because we don't have access to a gym (there are no gyms in north minneapolis...and we probably couldn't afford it anyways) Mary Eileen managed to get us an old school work out bike and treadmill for the basement. Now we just have to create a spot down there where it can all actually fit so us girls can start working out again!!! so....time to get back to work!!

Love,
Maggie