Local Living

With the holiday season in full swing, there’s all sorts of internet ordering happening. Free shipping is our friend, but you can quickly end up with a plethora of packing materials taking over your living room. Instead of tossing them to the trash or the compost bin, try helping out local businesses instead.Remember the Zum Laundry Soap we reviewed last week? (Our clothes still smell like oranges by the way!) Their website shares a great tip when it comes to excess packing materials.

I know it’s a grim proposition—getting robbed as a reason to downsize—but last week my home was broken into. I’m honestly over being angry, bitter, and scared when I come home at night, but I do have the need to find a silver lining. After reflecting for a week, there are a few lessons and advice that I can draw from the experience.

It’s happened to the best of us, we get excited over a new craft and wind up with too much fabric or bits and buttons. Instead of squirreling away your resources only to donate them 10 years later, why not give them a good home now? Here are 5 places to do just that.1. Before & After School Programs: Although most art programs have a built in budget, many before and after school day care programs run on a slightly tighter ship.

For us, weekends at home turn into mini-staycations when we do something very simple—and very green. Instead of hopping in the car, we jump on our bikes and set off for a day full of easy errands, local sight-seeing, and plenty of exercise. Here are a few ideas for a pedaling tour of your hometown.We can’t recommend this kind of staycation enough; whenever we have a free weekend day, we plot it out just like this.

If you’re staying close to home this summer, love eating, and care about where your food comes from, then we have the perfect summer plan for you – a locavore staycation! Here are five fun ideas with plenty of resources for finding activities in your own area.• Visit a local farm – Get outside and see where your food is grown. This is a great activity with kids, too. For help finding a farm, check Farm Visit and Pick Your Own.

A few years ago, Apartment Therapy ran a post on the development of the Bronx River Greenway, the continuous bike/pedestrian path that will snake 23 miles along the Bronx River up to Westchester County. When complete, the BRG will be one small part of the East Coast Greenway, a 3,000-mile-long network of healthy green conduits running from Maine to Florida. This summer, major advancements are planned for its sister greenway. More after the jump.

We recently heard about a new online neighborhood sharing website: Share Some Sugar helps you find someone in your neighborhood who is willing to lend you something that you need.Founder Keara Schwartz says: The concept behind Share Some Sugar came out of a personal experience. When I moved from an apartment to my first home, I ended up needing a lot of house-hold items, like tools and gardening equipment.

We’ve written our share about plastic bags and what to do with them. If you’re University of Oregon student Ruby Sprengle, you turn them into tarps for the homeless in Haiti.Sprengle was moved to action upon hearing how the American Red Cross had given out thousands of tarps in Haiti, but how many more were needed due to the coming rainy season in May.

There’s a day to celebrate everything, we’ve learned, and tomorrow we’ll join folks across the nation in celebrating yoga. Ah, yoga. Deep breaths, mindfulness of body and soul, and relaxation from the inside out come to mind. That and some really beautiful eco-friendly yoga mats. Here are a few reasons to celebrate with the yogis tomorrow.We bet you’ve had a personal experience with yoga.

You can find apartments to rent on Craigslist, but what if you wanted to rent a cheap snowboard for a trip to Tahoe next weekend? Where would you go? A brand new site focused on community sharing and renting is trying to answer that question.On Rentalic (which just recently launched in beta), you can list things you want to rent out to others (an easy way to earn some cash) and you can put in requests for things you need.

Water cooler talk at the office yesterday fell upon an interesting topic: meat eating. I work in an office with many open-minded folks, some of whom, like me, have outspoken qualms with today’s food system. Here’s how that conversation went:One colleague mentioned that she watched Food, Inc. the night before and was greatly disturbed by what she saw. Another mentioned he’d seen Michael Pollan on The Daily Show. Yet another asked about my decision to go vegetarian.