Recycling On My Bicycle - how coolly green is that!

Today - another beautiful semi-sunny, slightly breezy day - I loaded some of my recycling onto my cheery bike and did a tour about town. First off, I zoomed out of the parking lot, down the hill and around the rock, and stopped at the recycling depot. It's right by the Old Town community garden, mere minutes away. Almost Dutch, what the bike can transport!

I must say that recycling in Yellowknife is a bit confusing - newspaper, tin, glass, sure; boxboard, white paper - what counts as boxboard (versus corrugated cardboard), what is not white paper? Plastics - yes, but only #s 2, 3, 5, and 7, and not if they're ketchup or syrup bottles. And I understand that envelopes - "mixed paper"? - can't be recycled. There's a more detailed guide on the web, but that's not entirely helpful if you're standing with your stuff in front of minimally signed blue bins. However - and this is a plus - there is a "Compost Only" bin at the landfill (more on the famous "Yellowknife Dump" in another posting). So things are on the right track, even if there's some room for improvement in the system.

Next I dropped in on Down to Earth Gallery - right next to the larger and more touristy Gallery of the Midnight Sun - to see if I could locate some copies of Triumph of the Chill, a wonderful short DVD on the making of the famous Snow Castle on Yellowknife Bay every March. Unfortunately they were out, but "Tony" (the Snowking himself) will be contacted to see if there are still copies available. You can watch a trailer of the video on the Snowking site - http://snowking.ca/ - and better yet, come up for this marvellous winter celebration!

Then I thought I'd go to TJ's Nut House for a latte - using the preferred Yellowknife way of giving directions by places rather than streets, I'll just say he's located "on the government dock in Old Town" -

but alas, for good reasons the place was closed:

Of course, now having connections in Yellowknife, I knew that Janet, owner of Tangletree Gallery and my new fibre arts heroine, was away this weekend, so that was no surprise.
 

Speaking of being away - it's one of the many things I like about Yellowknife, namely that if someone is away, or sick, it's not business as usual. People are not replaceable - if they're available to do what they normally do, that's fine; if not, you just have to wait until they are. So the other day Frankie's illness had an impact on the offerings at the Gourmet Cup Beverage Station in the basement of the YK Centre: