Day 129: Money We Can’t Spend

I’m tooting my own horn a bit here, but Grant and I have recently become winners.

Contest winners.  We placed second in a national, outdoor video contest through Mountain Equipment Co-op.  For you American readers, MEC is like REI for Canada.  For the rest of the world, MEC is a huge outdoor gear co-op store.  For us, MEC is like paradise -one that we used to shop in probably every other week or so.  That is until we started the Clean Bin Project and became non-consumers.

So the irony of this is that we now have a $1000 gift card to one of our favorite stores, and we can’t spend it!  The further irony is that the ridiculous amount of outdoor gear that we both have was one of the reasons we started this project in the first place.  Seriously, we have 4 tents between 2 people.

In any case, we have another 8 months before we can officially buy “stuff”, so that should give us time to mull over what we think we “need” and what we are merely temporarily drooling over.  One of the items on our radar is a portable solar panel – that’s green right?  They also have a lovely selection of fair trade chocolate.

Anyway, enough horn tooting.  If you want to see the video click here.  It’s a 10 min movie about a ski traverse we did a few years ago.  And in my defence, I am much better on the split board now than I was then.  And also, to give credit where credit is due, Grant is the actual winner because he did most of the filming and all of the editing, but heck, I’m in it. (And yes that’s him up above, back in the shaggy-hair days, actually doing the filming on that very trip)