Success?

Last week I spent a few days in a small holiday apartment south of the city of Bamberg while my son was at basketball camp. Originally we had planned to go on a three-day-bike trip right afterwards, I had the bikes in the car and while the time away stitching, spinning, reading, sleeping. When preparing everything and packing, we realized that my pretty urgent desire to reduce our consumption of throw-away plastic items that I have been following has been rather successful. I keep being reminded of the necessity to further follow that intention with determination when I see pictures like this on Instagram, on the internet, or just see plastic trash lying around when people did not dispose of their waste properly.

Screenshot from Instagram -
frightening.

Not only have I noticed that the number of bags containing plastic waste that we put out for collection has gone down quite a bit (it used to be up to 5 or 6, now it is only 2, at the most, sometimes less), but we also could not find a single plastic bag in the house in which to wrap our belongings that we would have wanted to take on the trip, to protect them from possible rain.
Bike trip experience has taught me that it is useful to do that. We left without having pre-wrapped anything, and I thought I could perhaps get (i.e. BUY) some sturdy trash bags should weather be looking grim with the danger of rain interfering with our trip. As it turns out, it has been so hot here in Germany, that we canceled the bike trip. If I had been on my own, I probably still would have gone, but my son is 13, I had hoped to introduce him to a more-than-one-day bike trip to show him how much fun it is, but with temperatures in the range of mid-30Centigrades it would have not worked. He would have hated it and me forever, so we came back home. I never needed to think about plastic bags again.

It is still very hot, with feeble attempts to stay 'cool' inside (we, this being Germany, of course don't have air conditioning). The water in the swimming pool is too warm for my taste by now, exercising outside is almost unbearable, and working on a longarm commission makes me break out in sweat.

But I finished it in record time as this is meant to be a wedding present for a wedding in ten days, and I am going to Birmingham on Wednesday.
So we are using less plastic. But we are suffering from climate change dramatically here - at least this summer. Of course, the American President has decreed that there is no such thing...