I found the chair below at the thrift store and refinished it. I built the seat and did an ink jet transfer to get the image of teddy that my brother Austin drew on to the chair. It turned out really nice. I put the chair in Kootenai Environmental Alliance auction. It went for 250 bucks. Not too bad. I hope to build more pieces like this and rather than give them away have the proceeds go to funding, and sending out Teddy packages. 250 dollars would be like 20 big teddy packages built and mailed or probably 80 small teddy packages. It was for a good cause and hopefully I can build a few more chairs or pieces of furniture. I feel people might buy them if they know there money is going to be the spark to initiate clean-ups around the world.

My parents just went on a trip and did a small clean-up in Canada so officially I have 3 states, and 3 countries with documented Teddy Clean-ups. I had a few people send me messages from other countries and so as soon as I can get the Teddy packages out, I should document a few more. I have one package ready to go to Washington, DC to an old roommate and one to a person in Spain who just stumbled on to the project and wanted to be part of it. I really like the idea of putting Teddy’s Image as free and open source so when people contact me they can print a piece of paper and go do a clean-up. That would be a great way for people to do Teddy Clean-ups with out putting out a bunch of resources. Then the flags I am making I can try and sell for 10 bucks or something.

I also went to Tubbs Hill to do my own Teddy clean-up. I went there last week as well. It is the local hiking trail that leaves from downtown and something that every tourist who comes to town strolls around. If you are up on the trail it looks clean and you are close to nature. If you actually go walk down by the beach and in the coves there is so much trash. In two weeks I have not been able to haul it out. I found a large tire, old ice chest and filled a large trash bag. That was all that I could carry and I hiked it all out about 1.5 miles. My arms were pretty dead afterwards because it was very heavy. I hauled the tire up from the beach and set it by the trail to rest. I watched to see if any passerbys would try and take it out. No takers in the 20 or 30 minutes that I was resting. Really that is one of the main goals of the The Theodores . . .if you see something and you can do something about it, DO IT. It really is unacceptable that so much trash finds it way to wild places and eventually the ocean. I am sure most trash could avoid this fate if 1. the person who produced the trash makes sure it finds it’s way into recycling or trash and 2. more importantly if you did not produce the trash and see some do not walk by it but rather bend over and pick it up.

I finished about 50 new teddy flags and patches. Excited to get them in the hands of people who want to support the project.

Been pretty productive with The Theodores over the last few days. Even finding time for blog posts. Yesterday I was able to present my project in front of Post Falls Middle School Students. The are doing a project where they have to build a robot and provide an innovative solution for picking up garbage. Their teacher I had met while organizing stuff for my Eat Smart Idaho Job. At the end of the meeting I started telling her about The Theodores, and she asked if I could come present my project.

It was neat. The kids were really receptive and engaged. I explained to them how people in the United States consume way more resources than other people around the world. I stressed that if all 6 billion people around the world were to consume the resources that the United States does the world probably could not function. I told them I would get them Teddy Flags for their inventions. Hopefully come December there will be 30 robots picking up trash with Teddy Flags!

I also showed them examples of other young people doing and providing innovative solutions for the trash problem. I told them how 8 million tons of trash is making its way to the ocean every year. One little girl responded “oh you are talking about the island of garbage in the ocean.”

Yep the Pacific Garbage Patch. I showed them the The Ocean Clean-up webpage. I talked about how 21 year old Boyan Slat has raised millions of dollars in start up capital to start cleaning the oceans. They were very impressed. So was the teacher. She stated, “kids he is 21 and will be very wealthy.”

Overall I was pleased with how it went. The teacher was excited and so were the kids. However, I left thinking the teacher kind of missed the point of the whole presentation. Hopefully the younger generation got a little more out of it.