Welcome to Living Sanny

When my sister and I were 7 & 10, respectively, our family sold our house, bought an old 38 ft sailboat named Feather, and we went sailing for a year. During that year I learned a lot about being self-reliant, and about not believing the general public's ideas as to what is or is not possible. We also brought our 2 kittens Momo & Didrre, the former of whom has a language named after him (Momo Talk) which we spoke INCESSANTLY during that year (my poor parents dealt with it very well, with the occasional 'off to the discipline dinghy' for us young 'uns).



We even made a Momo Talk opera. "Sanny" is one of the most frequent words in Momo Talk. It derives from the word "funny", but is expanded to mean 'nice, wonderful, happy, good, funny; everything/anything positive'. I thought that was a good euphemism for environmentalism/good living...sort of a catch-all for what I plan this blog to be about (and for you grammar police, the word 'sanny' is so broad that it works not only as an adjective, but also here as an adverb (o: ) .
Today I was reading through Matthew and Waveney's Rubbish Free Year blog (just stumbled on it today), and was inspired to start this blog. I have been environmentally aware and motivated most of my life, but because my job isn't directly related to something environmental (like I intended it to be...and am still working on) I sometimes feel like I'm failing in my life. By keeping a journal (blog) of some of the things I DO do in my life, I hope to put some of my guilt to rest (especially b/c I know that I will only improve my environmental consciousness through this endeavor), and maybe even inspire others to do more, or to share what they do, themselves.

On Feather, we had a small water tank that was only refillable in ports when we were docked up. We had two foot-operated pumps for water. Instead of hot and cold, we had one fresh, the other salt water (or whatever nastiness our boat was floating in). My sister and I made it a game to see who could wash all the dishes each night with the fewest fresh water pumps (pumping 1/2 way down and holding it there until we were ready for another splash of fresh rinse-water was a good way to do it). Similarly, we had no shower on the boat, so any shower we took was in a marina, usually a 2-5 minute timed contraption that kept us water-thrifty. I loved being this conscious of our resource usage. It has motivated me since.