The air out there

As of this hour Logan, Provo, Ogden, and Salt Lake City Utah make up 4 of the top 5 highest AQI (Air quality Index which includes particulate matter 2.5 and ozone), in the nation. In other words our air is nasty as hell. This is not a new thing, last week we spend many a days on the top of this list as well... Not necessarily a list you want to be ranking the highest on.

On a normal day we can easily see the Wasatch mountains from our apartment but today you can barely make out the peaks of this normally clear range. It really does scare me, this air that we are breathing. And tomorrow will be worse. Tuesday should get still worse until we get a predicted snow storm to 'clear' out the air in the valley.

 It is amazing to me that people believe that this 'dirty' air is only here during the time of an inversion, that all other times of the year the pollution just disappears and gets taken care of. This inversion, this pollution we are seeing and breathing is that of our waste. Our driving. Our burning fossil fuels. Our wasting of finite resources to make our lives as comfortable as technologically possible (note that I don't say 'humanly possible because we are beyond that point). And yet we find ourselves in this ironic position of being advised not to drive on 'red days', but who really wants to be walking or biking to work when we are being recommended not to breath in this nasty air?

So still we are car-less, and heartily attempt to drive less (including getting less rides, renting less car hours and driving less distances). We are on the brink of ringing in 2010 and we still find ourselves being thought of as strange, weird, immature, idealistic, and many more adjectives because of our lack of car ownership. But we still breathe the same dirty, harmful air that our hummer driving neighbors do....but more likely we are breathing more of it since we have to walk much further distances than to our garage and back.

Maybe we should move out of Salt Lake City.

The glory of winter without a car

There are many, many reasons why it would be nice to own a car in the winter...most of them so obvious that I won't even list them...but, there are also many reasons why it is nice to not own a car in the winter:

• No scraping frozen windows or brushing the snow off your car
• You don't have to worry about getting stuck in the snow
• Although the bus or trax may run a bit late, I don't have to worry about 'snow day' traffic with horrendous commute times
• You don't have to sit in a freezing car and wait for the heater to kick in
• It's fun to walk in slush and snow, it's like ice skating for free! ;)

So anyways, we are coming upon our fourth month without owning a car. Ucarshare has been very nice for running errands that require more "stuff" than we can carry with our hands but UTA has really been our godsend.

We are trying to decide where we will be when spring comes and our lease is up...Jake is pretty determined to remain car-free but we'll see where we end up.