Patrick Pinlac

My family and I have been in the process of making a garden in our backyards for I believe 1-2 years. We initially had just grass/lawn back there but we decided to change this for sustainable water purposes. Now over the past 2 years we have slowly added to the garden that originated which just a lime tree. We currently have a variety of plants there now including an avocado tree, cherry tomatoes, green onions, dragonfruit, oregano, rosemary, tangerine, calamansi (a filipino citrus lime), variety of hot peppers, citronella, and we used to have squash as well but that unfortunately died during this mini heat wave we had not that long ago during this past year. Throughout our time building this garden we try to maintain sustainable practices, such as using removing our sprinklers and instead watering everything by hand to reduce the waste of water, we reuse clay pots, however our biggest sustainable decision was the choice to get rid of the lawn and instead just have a mini garden on the side which I'll display below.
Honestly, taking care of a garden requires much attention especially in the beginning. However I found it extremely enjoyable and peaceful. While watering the plants I feel so much at ease, I find it extremely important to not feel like taking care of these plants as a hassle but more as hobby because its then that you'll start to enjoy maintaining a garden. My biggest enjoyment of maintaining a garden with my family is the excitement you see when that first fruit/seed begins to sprout, it makes you want to continue taking care of it to finally see the end result. It's definitely a long process but I really enjoy it. My family and I are going to continue to find different ways to maintain a sustainable garden as we continue on with this process.

I've been this doing this for about a week and a half now, and I'm not gonna lie it was definitely hard for me to get in the habit of doing this. Especially since technology is all around me and having a hand size screen just makes it that much more convenient to use while eating. It's hard to say so far if this habit has been beneficial to me, as I'm a person who tends to overthink so much if I don't keep my mind busy or distracted. So during my first few days of mindful eating it was honestly stressing me out, I obviously had nothing but my food in front of me so my mind would just think about everything, majority of this being school. So I would start to stress about all the school work I had to do, all the writing, every assignment coming up and it honestly made me lose my appetite. Since I've been doing this for a week now I've definitely learn to tone down these thoughts but it's still definitely bothering me, as before I would obviously watch a show or youtube and this would distract me from all my worries. Now who's knows which one is actually better for me, as overthinking too much is definitely unhealthy and being too distracted on technology is also unhealthy. I think there definitely needs to be a certain balance between the two. I think going forward I'm going to continue not using technology for a few more days or 1 week and see how it goes and update this, but I think what's personally best for me is a balance of both. As with my mind I definitely need a distraction to get my mind of stressful thoughts, so most likely I'll tend to use my phone maybe for less time or some meals I don't use while eating and some meals I don't, but for now I'm going to continue to try and not use any technology, maybe I should consider another distraction that doesn't involve technology while eating. I took no photos of me doing this because I turned off all my devices every single time I ate to make sure I didn't even get the temptation to grab it. 

After learning about my own household carbon footprint, I decided to talk to my girlfriend, Fabi, about her own household footprint, especially since I knew she would actually implement changes to reduce this number. We decided to talk over zoom instead of me just simply sending her the link because I felt like this would have a much greater impact as I could explain what exactly this means.
We begin by calculating her household footprint using the calculator given, and we had similar carbon footprints especially since we live around the same area. We figured out that her carbon footprint was 4.24 tons of CO2 per month. At first, she didn't understand what exactly this meant so I used the same analogy I learned from my recent post and explained it to her in that way. She was extremely shocked by this number, however similar to what Alexa said she wondered why this calculator didn't take into account other actions her family implements to reduce her carbon footprint. Despite this, she said that she would explain to her family different ways to help reduce this number such as eating less meat and trying to drive less. Fabi, herself actually utilizes public transport a lot to go to work or even takes walks to local stores instead of driving so that helped reduce her carbon footprint. In fact, her dad is a college professor who used to drive to different schools but due to COVID their entire family hasn't driven much this past year so that definitely reduced their carbon footprint but this calculator didn't take that into account. However, Fabi promise to continue to do her part in trying to reduce her household's carbon footprint. 

While I begin filling out my carbon footprint on my household, I came to realization that I don't truly understand what I'm doing right now. I understood that 4.00 tons of carbon is the average monthly footprint for U.S households and since mine is 4.15 tons I'm doing even more damage which is bad but I couldn't fully conceptualize exactly how much this was. In order to get a mental image of how much carbon this actually was I read this article "What is a 'ton' of carbon dioxide anyway?" by Sherry Listgarten. In this article she basically carbons 1 ton of carbon to Volkswagon bug car, now I was beginning to get more of an understanding of how much carbon this truly was. So if my carbon footprint was 4.15 tons of CO2 monthly that would would mean in 1 year of doing the same habits would result in 49.8 Volkswagon bug cars or 99,600 lbs of carbon in our atmosphere from just my household alone. Hearing it in this way, makes me truly realize the damage we are doing just from my household. If we were to take driving a car out of our daily lives that would lower our carbon footprint from 4.15 to 3.47 tons, that alone would make significant changes. Luckily, we don't take flights because we don't travel at all so that's out of the picture. Now if my family were to eat meat less often it would lower our carbon footprint from 2.69 to 2.59 tons, although this isn't as significant as not driving a car, imagine simply just eating meat less lowering carbon by .10. Therefore my family will definitely implement trying to eat less meat and although we can't fully let go of driving we will definitely try to drive alot less to offset our carbon foot print.