By Michelle Yogis

I moved to Ottawa in 1993 to live with my cousin and her family and take care of her two boys (aged three and almost one). It was a new city where I didn’t know anyone (other than family) but being a ‘born and bred Maritime’ (and an extrovert) that wasn’t going to stop me from meeting new people. I took and art class and met a good friend…we ended up taking voice lessons from the same teacher as well. On our days off we’d take the bus from Kanata into Ottawa with no plans…our motto for those days was *whatever*. We’d get off the bus and decide what to do…I still like the ‘no plans, go with the flow’ days…my current vacation is pretty much all about that.

Photo credit: Intiaz Rahim from Flickr

My cousin, though not anti-social, was not the type to make friends. She just didn’t really want them. We are quite different in that respect. She knew some of her neighbours’ names…I got to know the neighbours. I’d have coffee with the woman 2 doors down (she had a young daughter) when she wasn’t working and even went golfing with her and my cousin (who had started to join for coffee/tea/drinks…she was coming around). The day of the golf outing, we came back to see that a neighbour across the street was working, alone, filling his wheelbarrow full of earth that was piled in the driveway and moving it to the backyard. I mentioned to my cousin that he had knocked on the door the day before asking to borrow a second wheelbarrow and I couldn’t find one in the shed. Turns out it was behind the shed. So, tired and sticky from golfing in the Ottawa heat I went to the backyard and brought the wheelbarrow over to him. While he appreciated the gesture…his helpers (teenage sons) were in school so he wouldn’t need it. I started to shovel. Turns out we were filling in the hole from the above ground pool they had removed. We went trough the pile in the driveway fairly quickly (an hour and a half or so?) considering I was tired from golfing (oh, to be that young again) and when finished sat on the back deck with a beer that his wife brought out. She was shy but we started talking and another great friendship was started. I spent a lot of free time visiting/helping across the street….even built the front porch on their house (he is not ashamed to admit that he was MY helper for that endeavour). (Don’t worry that I didn’t do things fro my cousin’s house…I painted/decorated every room while I was there, did most of the laundry, cooked almost every meal and provided a weekly menu from which to make the grocery list…thus saving money at the grocery store.)

I went to a Home Exhibition show in Ottawa one day (with the friend from art class) and filled out ballots to win free trips, blah, blah, blah. BIG MISTAKE. I kept getting phone calls from insurance people. ‘No thank you, I’m not interested.’ But one caught me at a weak moment. Packing for a weekend trip to Montreal, I answered a call from someone asking to talk about life insurance…tired of saying NO to all of these calls, I agreed to meet with this woman and arranged a time for her to visit me. Turns out she went to Saint Mary’s University and though I went to Dalhousie, we were about the same age and knew some of the same people. Another great friendship ensued.

Hard to believe that I was able to make friends in a new city without Facebook and/or Twitter. I have been back in Halifax for almost 9 years but I still have contact with my Ottawa friends (contact may not be as often as it should be but they are still my friends and I feel lucky to count them as such). Wish I could have moved them back here with me! People have asked me if I’d ever move back to Ottawa…it’s not out of the question (never say never) but I am home…the only pull that Ottawa did have was the friendships that I had made. The friends I have in Halifax would win a tug of war now though so Ottawa, for me, remains memories of …UNBEARABLE HEAT/HUMIDITY in the summer, FREAKING COLD in the winter, a better transit system (though it still takes forever to get from Kanata to Gloucester) and GREAT FRIENDS.

Michelle Yogis is an inventory manager, a native Haligonian, an aunt to three, @myogis on Twitter, a #twushi aficionado, a very recent newcomer to the blog-o-sphere and proud to be a #halifaxchick!!

[This next Earth Week post comes from @myogis on Twitter who's running the Halifax Geophotwography contest with me until the end of the month. If you're interested in winning great eco-books from Random House of Canada, check out the details on the Halifax Tweetup wiki.]

By Michelle Yogis

OK…I knew I was going to write this guest post for about a month now and though I did think about it in earnest and had great intentions to write it early…this past month was extremely busy with work, turning 40 and various tweet-ups. In a way I feel that it is fitting that I procrastinated in writing this post for “EARTH WEEK” since the whole idea behind “EARTH WEEK” seems to be one that 99.9999% of us in the ‘civilized’ world are late to the party for. We can recycle our cans/bottles, separate our garbage and buy hybrid vehicles all we want but it’s kind of like giving someone with a debilitating migraine an aspirin as we hammer away at our next project.

Mother Earth has been very upset with us (see natural disasters becoming more prevalent)….and well she should be! The human race has walked this planet for thousands of years and in the last three generations we have brought it to the brink. We are a society of convenience. I don’t think about where/how the electricity that I use to run my computer or turn on my lights comes from…just that it is there when I want it. We buy coffee at local coffee shops (you may have gone through the drive-thru), get take-out food in Styrofoam containers and buy things that are over packaged. And, yet, just one week each year we are asked to think about it. We don’t want to think about it, however, because at this stage of the game it is a freakin’ mess and it is sad to think that the ones who must do the bulk of the clean-up are still in diapers and/or not yet conceived.

Photographed at the 2009 Washington DC Auto Show

I read a quotation on Twitter the other day (and I should have saved it in my “fav quotes’ folder”, ‘cause now I’ll get it wrong and not give proper credit where credit is due) which said that “taking a step forward is not progress when you are standing at the edge of a cliff.” It’s time to save the future by stepping back and ask…”where can I start?” In a way…we have started but there is a mountain to be moved and sometimes I think it would be easier to build a time machine so we can go back 50-70 years or so and start people thinking about what has become our reality. If necessity is the mother of invention then we should see ‘greener’ products available for all aspects of life. Oh, wait, they are available now…they’re just cost prohibitive! Perhaps a place to start is for business to offer less choice of environmentally unfriendly products in order to boost the sales and bring the costs down on the products that are friendlier! Get rid of the Hummer and mass produce the Volt! (maybe that will save GM)

In the meantime….think about “EARTH WEEK” as being every week. Traditional media doesn’t offer the gloom and doom stories much in any other week. Let’s face it, stories about the environment are scary these days. Though we shouldn’t become ‘doomsday’ believers, we should keep an eye on what’s going on. You can do this by reading articles posted on the web (like this study) or by following sites like @greenbizdaily on Twitter.

FYI…tomorrow I’m using my travel mug again when I get my coffee.

Michelle Yogis is an inventory manager, starting up a skin-care line with a friend (still working on it), a just-for-fun singer/songwriter who wishes to improve guitar skills!