Lazy Gun

Co-worker rummages through the drawer in our office kitchen, reaching for a plastic spoon. I open the cabinet and gesture to the stainless steel cutlery, saying: "These are available to use also."

He replies: "Yeah, but I'm lazy and this way I don't have to get up and wash them afterwards and can just throw them away"

I reply: "To go in a landfill..."

Him: "Yep."


sheesh.

Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft

Toyota just scored some more brownie points with me.

I just found out today that Toyota has an eco-friendly, pre-fab home division that merges car and home. Super-smart ideas include:

-same key for home and car
-car charges when at home
-homeowners can rely on the car battery as an electricity backup in case of emergency
-earthquake resistant
-plans for an electricity-monitoring system that charges car on off-peak hours
-more than a dozen designs
-houses can be built in 45 days

Lounge (Closing Time)

Once again, I turned the lights off in the lounge today at work on my way to the restroom. I have no idea how many times a week I turn those lounge lights off but I should start keeping track. Two halogen floor lamps and the ceiling can lights, none of which are energy efficient (of course). The plasma TV was also on (plasmas are the MOST energy consuming of the flat screen options.) None of the lighting in my office is energy efficient, save my desk lamp because I bought a CFL for it.

What is it about being at work that makes people lazy about energy consumption? Do they do this at home and just pay massive amounts of money in energy bills? Or am I the only one who turns lights off when I leave a room?

Green Arrow

Oh man, Dallas barely squeaked in this list. Looks like I need to move to Washington state or Oregon....

2008 City Rankings
Best Green Cities 1 - 100 1. Corvallis, OR 2. Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR 3. Bellingham, WA 4. Santa Rosa-Petaluma, CA 5. Boulder, CO 6. Eugene-Springfield, OR 7. Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA 8. Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN 9. Bend, OR 10. Santa Barbara-Santa Maria, CA 11. San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, CA 12. La Crosse, WI 13. Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA 14. Fort Collins-Loveland, CO 15. St. Cloud, MN 16. Salem, OR 17. Madison, WI 18. Iowa City, IA 19. Ames, IA 20. San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles, CA 21. Salinas, CA 22. Bremerton-Silverdale, WA 23. Duluth, MN 24. Pittsfield, MA 25. Medford, OR 26. Wenatchee, WA 27. Oakland-Fremont-Hayward, CA 28. Olympia, WA 29. Denver-Aurora, CO 30. Missoula, MT 31. Sacramento--Arden-Arcade--Roseville, CA 32. San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 33. Austin-Round Rock, TX 34. Rochester, MN 35. Lafayette, IN 36. Burlington-South Burlington, VT 37. Spokane, WA 38. Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, MA 39. Santa Fe, NM 40. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, CA 41. Colorado Springs, CO 42. Napa, CA 43. Durham, NC 44. Springfield, MA 45. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 46. Fargo, ND 47. Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine, CA 48. Mount Vernon-Anacortes, WA 49. Boston-Quincy, MA 50. Wausau, WI 51. Ann Arbor, MI 52. Grand Forks, ND 53. Dubuque, IA 54. Chico, CA 55. Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA 56. Champaign-Urbana, IL 57. Pueblo, CO 58. Gainesville, FL 59. Eau Claire, WI 60. Barnstable Town, MA 61. Tacoma, WA 62. Oshkosh-Neenah, WI 63. Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI 64. Glens Falls, NY 65. El Centro, CA 66. Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY 67. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC 68. Ithaca, NY 69. State College, PA 70. Lancaster, PA 71. Syracuse, NY 72. Appleton, WI 73. Hanford-Corcoran, CA 74. Cedar Rapids, IA 75. Des Moines-West Des Moines, IA 76. Tucson, AZ 77. Bethesda-Gaithersburg-Frederick, MD 78. Honolulu, HI 79. Bloomington-Normal, IL 80. Holland-Grand Haven, MI 81. South Bend-Mishawaka, IN 82. Baltimore-Towson, MD 83. Grand Junction, CO 84. Harrisburg-Carlisle, PA 85. Racine, WI 86. Lansing-East Lansing, MI 87. Philadelphia, PA 88. Kingston, NY 89. Waterloo-Cedar Falls, IA 90. Lewiston, ID 91. Greeley, CO 82. Charlottesville, VA 93. Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL 94. Dallas-Plano-Irving, TX 85. Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI 96. Fond du Lac, WI 97. Elkhart-Goshen, IN 98. Boise City-Nampa, ID 99. Sheboygan, WI 100. Columbia, MO

The Reel Deal

reasons why reel push lawnmowers rock:

--The 2-cycle engines found on most power mowers, blowers, and weed-eaters contribute 5%-10% of the air pollution in Southern cities.

--Cutting a lawn with a manual reel mower is easier on the grass and provides a healthier lawn.

--Manual reel mowers are much easier to use than most people think and require about 1/20th the maintenance of a power mower.

--Mowing with a reel mower is smooth, quiet, and puts you more in touch with the environment around your home. Burn calories, not gasoline!

--Personally speaking, the reel lawn mower is much lighter and easier for me to handle on my own. I never have to buy gas for it, and it only cost $99. The only maintenance is keeping the blades sharp, and the grass clippings automatically drop back into the lawn and serve as mulch. What could be better?

This is the reel mower I bought, but as with any other product there are many brands and pricepoints. Like these, or these...

who needs a yard?

So, now even us loft dwellers can compost! How cool is that?

Everybody's Plastic

Many of you know that over the past year or so I have tried to do everything I can to eliminate the use of plastics in my life, specifically in my cooking/eating. When the docs thought I had endometriosis, I quickly learned about the "feminization of the planet" caused by the dioxin leaching from plastics that mimic estrogen, and that this can affect fertility rates, cancer rates, etc. Plastic is not inert, hence the leaching. But glass IS inert, and is entirely safe.

If the creatures in the sea, and the landfills filling up are not enough for you to give your use of plastics a good hard look, then maybe I can appeal to your narcissistic side:

"On land, things are equally gruesome. “Fertility rates have been declining for quite some time now, and exposure to synthetic estrogen—especially from the chemicals found in plastic products—can have an adverse effect,” says Marc Goldstein, M.D., director of the Cornell Institute for Repro-ductive Medicine. Dr. Goldstein also notes that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable: “Prenatal exposure, even in very low doses, can cause irreversible damage in an unborn baby’s reproductive organs.” And after the baby is born, he or she is hardly out of the woods. Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia who specifically studies estrogenic chemicals in plastics, warns parents to “steer clear of polycarbonate baby bottles. They’re particularly dangerous for newborns, whose brains, immune systems, and gonads are still developing.” Dr. vom Saal’s research spurred him to throw out every polycarbonate plastic item in his house, and to stop buying plastic-wrapped food and canned goods (cans are plastic-lined) at the grocery store. “We now know that BPA causes prostate cancer in mice and rats, and abnormalities in the prostate’s stem cell, which is the cell implicated in human prostate cancer,” he says. “That’s enough to scare the hell out of me.” At Tufts University, Ana M. Soto, M.D., a professor of anatomy and cellular biology, has also found connections between these chemicals and breast cancer.

As if the potential for cancer and mutation weren’t enough, Dr. vom Saal states in one of his studies that “prenatal exposure to very low doses of BPA increases the rate of postnatal growth in mice and rats.” In other words, BPA made rodents fat. Their insulin output surged wildly and then crashed into a state of resistance—the virtual definition of diabetes. They produced bigger fat cells, and more of them. A recent scientific paper Dr. vom Saal coauthored contains this chilling sentence: “These findings suggest that developmental exposure to BPA is contributing to the obesity epidemic that has occurred during the last two decades in the developed world, associated with the dramatic increase in the amount of plastic being produced each year.” Given this, it is perhaps not entirely coincidental that America’s staggering rise in diabetes—a 735 percent increase since 1935—follows the same arc."

enough said. CLICK HERE for the full article.

I want to wear tires for shoes

eco sneaks

because I can't afford therapy

Do you ever have one of those bad dreams in which someone you know, or knew, very well treats you very very badly? I have them often...for about eight months now. It is usually the same person (last night it was actually two different people in two separate dreams). I wake up knowing that in real life they would never do whatever it is they just did in my dream, but the dreams are so vivid and real that I wake up feeling really hurt, and then for the next day or two I remain anxious and upset at them.

Even as a kid I usually had very violent and negative dreams. In general you hear that flying dreams are good and represent freedom. But my flying dreams were almost always about me flying away from someone who was trying to kill me. This person usually had a knife. Sometimes the "bad guy" (as it was always a man) could also fly. I also recall a dream from my childhood where a masked bad guy broke into my house and I was home alone. My sleeping self knew he was trying to kill me (again, he had a knife) but my dream self thought the whole thing was a game, laughing and racing around the house and furniture in a catch-me-if-you-can manner. So my sleeping self was freaking out trying to make my dream self see that he was serious and it wasn't a game.

I even had one dream in which I actually died, but this has only happened once. I still remember it very well. I was living in a country that, in my young mind, seemed like somewhere in the mid-east, desert-y and hot. The women were all being persecuted and living in these sort of stacked hammocks in this huge multi story building that just looked like a building looks before the sheet rock is put up, all open and unprotected. Anyway, I was posing as a man trying to fight for the rights of the women, and I was eventually caught and executed. The thing I don't remember is whether I was killed with a knife or a gun. But I do remember my sleeping self worrying very much about if it would hurt when I was killed since I was asleep.

________________________________________________________

On a lighter note, the weeks have been flying by since I got back. I woke up this morning, took the dog out, came back up to make breakfast, turned on the TV to see cartoons, and couldn't believe that it was Saturday again. I mean it was just Saturday. Seriously, like two days ago it was Saturday and i was making a feta and mushroom three-egg omelette watching this same animal show on Fox and getting ready for work, right? Wrong. It was SIX DAYS AGO. Geez. I blinked and August was gone. I blinked twice and summer was gone.

And I am fed up with restaurants continuing to use styrofoam and plastic to-go/take-home containers when there are affordable paper alternatives. So in a week when I get paid I am going to buy some Biopak 100% recycled take-out boxes to keep on hand and in my car. And when I run out of the staples I have on hand I am going to buy a staple-less stapler. Plastic freaks me out and I have banned it, as much as humanly possible, from my life (as far as eating is concerned). I heard that Whole Foods carries corn-based biodegradable straws and was very excited. So the next time I was there I looked but no luck. I asked one of the very helpful employees and they went off to find out about the mystery straws, but reported back that their location does not carry them but I could call around and see if maybe the other larger location have them.