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In Michigan, your license stickers are up for renewal on your birthday (Hint: mine is 7/3 and there’s a PayPal button in the Tip Jar page :->). My possible jury duty stint — 6 weeks — begins Monday. I wanted to get this over in case my panel was called.

The Barry County Michigan DMV office has never been crowded. Until Friday. They were out the door and lining the hallway. All I can say is I’m glad I brought a book.

I grabbed my ticket from its dispenser. I was behind 25 people.

Let me interrupt the narrative with this — there are no public bathrooms in the building. I know this because just about every door has that message. If you know me, you know that makes me flinch a bit. Diabetics like me do two things all day long: drink a lot and piss even more.

I settle in and read and people gaze. A lot of teenagers. Really, a lot of teenage girls. Happy teenage girls with their families. I can’t imagine why. They are stuck in a Russian style bread line on a lovely day in a building with no public restroom access.

I return to my book.

The teenagers are every where. I mean aren’t they old enough to just hang at home, get tans, update their MySpace page, and play with their Wii? There are whole families here on a Friday afternoon. Bizarre.

I’m behind 15 more people when I leave the building in search of a public restroom. Found a grocery store down the road.

Ok, back in line. 10 more to go.

One of the DMV guys is walking around with a form pad. I overhear him have a conversation with a dad. He mentions that four high schools had finished their driving programs that day.

Doah!!!! Happy teenagers with their parents at the DMV are there for only one reason — getting their license to drive away from their parents and siblings.

Do you remember your first bottle of bottled water? I do. I was in Chicago, circa 1988 when my high school boyfriend insisted that I must try some Evian (if you remember him you are probably chuckling over that). He said that it was so good, it was ‘like drinking air.’ He was right. It was the tastiest water I had ever… not tasted. Barb! sent me this NPR link which led me to the article Message in a Bottle which is what got me thinking about that first taste of bottled water.

Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. We’re moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That’s a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 8-1/3 pounds a gallon. It’s so heavy you can’t fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water–you have to leave empty space.)

The author questioned John Mackey, CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods Market about the ethics of bottled water and got this response:

As for the energy used to transport water from overseas, Mackey says it is no more or less wasteful than the energy used to bring merlot from France or coffee from Ethiopia, raspberries from Chile or iPods from China. “Have we now decided that the use of any fossil fuel is somehow unethical?” Mackey asks. “I don’t think water should be picked on. Why is the iPod okay and the water is not?

Well, for one thing, the iPod is a durable good and really, that question seems like a diversion tactic. As for the other food issues mentioned, I would have to say that local is better on all counts, however, I’m not going to drink 8 bottles of French merlot a day in the same way that I might drink 8 bottles of water. And coffee is also not generally not consumed in the same quantities as water and doesn’t weigh as much since we add our own water once it gets to us (although it does have its own unwieldy set of environmental issues). I think its clearly a matter of efficiency but with all of the global warming and “getting off foreign oil” talk, bottle water seems like an issue we ignore too easily.

So, if I am to minimize my “footprint,” clearly bottled water has to be taken off the list of conveniences I consider available to me. I’ve been working on eating more locally. I guess its time to start drinking more locally too.

I knew there was something I didn’t like about this guy…

Romney placed his family dog, an Irish setter named Seamus, into a kennel lashed to the top of his station wagon for a 12-hour family trip from Boston to Ontario in 1983. Despite being shielded by a wind screen the former Massachusetts governor erected, Seamus expressed his discomfort with a diarrhea attack.

Washington Post link.

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I watched SiCKO via a stream the other day. Very effective film. On my iGoogle page, there was a headline about the film saying it is Moore’s attempt to shame us. Probably true.

Scoble wrote about a blog his wife, Maryam, follows. Derek Miller just found out he has stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer. His post about getting the news is not surprising. He’s upset and angry. By the way, he’s not even 40.

Please read his post and note what’s missing. Where’s the part about him worried he’ll sink his wife with hospital bills, causing her to file bankruptcy. Where’s the part about him worried that his children won’t have a college fund after his surgery.

You won’t find it. He’s a Canadian.