Tag Archives: it’s not easy being green

>Inch by inch, Green is a cinch.

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>BlogHer asked members to comment on ways they’ve been “greening” their lifestyles. The post has a sponsor, of course. Doesn’t everybody? I started to comment, realized I’d forgotten my password, and vowed to come back. As time passed and life went on, I couldn’t help but think that my recent Green Growth couldn’t possibly fit in a comment box.

You can tell from my blogs’ names that I’m an environmentalist at heart. Compost Happens, A Mother’s Garden of Verses… no doubt about this blogger’s philosophies. Not at all. Then look through the archives: start with Mom’s Playing in the Dirt Again! and then check out others under the labeles of garden and It’s not easy being green. Green isn’t just a color; it’s a way of life.

I’m not “crunchy” green in the hippy sense, though. I gave in to Husband’s desire to hire a lawn service. We use a clothes dryer, not a clothesline. Our home is air conditioned, although in our part of Wisconsin we are fortunate not to need it often. I drive a minivan, too. Hey, I’m a mom of a teen and college student. We’re always filling the back of the minivan with someone or something.

The pale olive comparison (see above) is here so readers will know that green, like any lifestyle, has limits and levels. Seriously, it’s easier than many people think. Teacher friends like to say “Inch by inch, learning’s a cinch. Yard by yard, learning’s hard.” Incorporating environmental actions step by step, inch by inch, can be easy.

I garden. This section of lawn doesn’t grow grass, doesn’t need mowing, doesn’t need any chemicals. It provides delicious and fresh vegetables for much of the summer.
We compost. Composting is easy, it cuts down on our family garbage, and it produces a nice soil additive each spring for the garden.
We conserve energy by using a programmable thermostat, minimizing the use of the clothes dryer, washing clothes in warm or cold water, and more.
There are more, many more, environmentally friendly practices in my home and family. Really, it’s quite easy to bring green living practices into everyday use.

Back to the top. It would be cheating to simply list the above practices in the comment box on BlogHer’s question. These are not new; they’re habits we’ve built into our lives for years. New and recent additions in my family’s eco-conscious behaviors do exist. For example:

We stopped buying paper napkins last fall. I keep them on hand (well, we haven’t used up the package that was in the pantry when I set this goal!), but we have switched almost 100% to cloth napkins. This was a frugal choice: I bought the first set from a store’s going out of business sale, and picked up a set of holiday napkins in new condition from a thrift store before Christmas. I wash them with the rest of the dirty clothes and towels each weekend – no extra laundry, no additional water/ heat energy used. This decision was so easy I wonder why I didn’t start years ago!

I set a goal last fall of buying No New Wrapping Paper. My family resisted a little, so I didn’t push it on them, but I predict they’ll come around. I reuse gift bags, make tags from last year’s cards, and collect rather than recycle packing material. It worked; I bought no new wrapping paper, and (don’t tell them I noticed), my family didn’t come home with any new paper, either.

My husband and I make a conscious effort to pay attention to buying local, especially in foods. That’s tough in a cold climate like ours, and we’re hoping to freeze more of our garden produce in order to avoid buying produce imported from out of the country. This is a nutrition decision as well as a commitment to minimizing our carbon footprint, as well as noting that local and fresh simply tastes better.

So, BlogHers, are you satisfied with my contribution? I almost hope not. I’m committed to living lightly on the earth, and there are many easy ways to lighten my footprint. In my future I predict a second compost bin, a rain barrel or two for the garden, and possibly a food dehydrater to make the most of my garden yield. Spinning the rabbits’ shedded fur into yarn might not be possible, but I know that inch by inch, my family and I will weave the green consciousness into action.

And action, after all, is what environmentalism is about.

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>It’s not easy being clean and green

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>Simple weekend pleasures.
A long shower, warm water, not needing to rush to get ready for school.
In winter, showers are usually short so as not to over dry my skin. Today I took my time, breathed in the humid air (good for my recently healed sinuses), washed and moisturized. Don’t worry, this is not a TMI (Too Much Information) type of post. I’m just reveling in the simple pleasure of being able to take my time.
I like to buy decent shampoos, salon products, but they cost more than the drugstore variety. This often balances out, however, with the quality. The EcoStore shampoo and conditioner in my shower are good quality, and therefore I only need to use a little. There are no fillers (their company goal is No Nasty Chemicals) so the small amount of shampoo I used was plenty to clean my hair.
Conditioner is a little harder. I have dry hair, and it’s winter. That’s not just any winter, but a harsh Wisconsin winter which equals dry, static-filled air and drier, static-filled hair. I ordered EcoStore’s vanilla shampoo and conditioner because they’re designated as being good for dry hair like mine.
I’ve been using Ecostore’s vanilla shampoo and conditioner for a week, and the results so far are good. The conditioner is light and rinses out easily, yet detangles and smooths my thin fly-away locks. Poetic enough for you? It’s all true.
Back to simple pleasures. A somewhat longer than usual shower, steaming up the mirrors, wasting water – I don’t do this often. A little body butter afterwards, and I felt like a whole new person. I’m not the grungy mama in her sweats doing laundry any more; I’m the clean, green mama ready to plan the garden.
If only the garden weren’t still covered by two feet of snow!

Ecostore sent me the small bottles of shampoo and conditioner to sample and review. The products are good quality and they shipped quickly; I’ll definitely buy more from their company. Good variety, reasonable prices, effective products, and environmentally sensitive? Works for me.

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>Over the ground lies a mantle of white…

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>…but I’m thinking and reading green.

Mother Nature Network has updated news stories and blog entries.

President Obama (I still love saying that phrase!) and Canadian Prime Minister Harper discuss clean energy options.

In NYC, vehicles can only idle for 60 seconds or less in a school zone. I wonder if this would fly in my smaller city? Is there a need for this type of law in a smaller area with much less traffic?

Peanut butter or spinach, food poisoning is serious. Can locavores be more certain of safe food supplies, or not?

Leah Ingram’s suddenly Frugal is not just a blog, but will be a book in the fall! I like her idea for DIY laundry detergent: I already have Borax in the house.

And finally, believe it or not, I spotted these items side by side on my way back to the pharmacy: snow shovels and seeds. (Poor quality either from cell phone camera or from my laughter as I attempted taking a picture in the middle of the store) The shovels were on clearance; buy now, folks, it’s your last chance!

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>How can I be Green when the ground is White?

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>The compost bin is snowed in, the garden is covered with a mantle of white, and my rosemary plant didn’t survive the move indoors for the winter. What’s an environmentally conscious mom to do?

The thyme plant is flourishing. We add thyme to almost every soup and stew and casserole. If only I could grow time as well….
The basil plant is alive, but not doing as well. If I can nurture it through the winter it might thrive on the deck in spring.
I still make bread in my breadmaker, incorporating local honey from the farm market.
The rhubarb in the freezer is good with the apples from the music department fruit sale.
Speaking of the fruit sale, the oranges are good in my daily lunches and the grapefruits on weekends. The rinds, though. What to do with the orange peels? In spring/summer, I would compost these.
I have a lot of oranges. Even eating one a day isn’t enough to finish the entire case some years. Should I buy a juicer? Is it worth the money? In my tiny kitchen, would it be worth the space?
The tomatoes – oh, the tomatoes! I still have tomato soup and tomato sauce in the freezer. The last batch picked before the killer frost ripened oh-so-slowly on the kitchen counter. Honestly, we ate “fresh” tomatoes until Christmas.
The reduce, re-use, recycle philosophy lasts year round. Thrift stores are great places to donate and to shop. This is both frugal and green.
Then there’s the BYOB (Bring Your Own Bag, what did you think I meant?!) philosophy. As the trend spreads, some of the reusable bags get cuter and stronger.
Cloth napkins are working well for the family. I wash them with the regular laundry each weekend. We still have the package of paper napkins we bought in November.
Amigo continues to get audio books from Paperbackswap.com. He loves searching the titles and choosing for himself. I love the price tag (free; I just pay postage when I send one out).
Time magazines go to La Petite when we’re done. Working Mother and any others around the house go to the drawer at school destined for cutouts.

Maybe I’m doing alright on this green philosophy. I do enjoy winter, but I’m looking forward to spring, too.

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>Happy birthday, turn off your alarm clock, school is closed!

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>It was a pantry raid that could have made even the host of Suddenly Frugal proud. Weather had something to do with it, too. It was bitter cold; the kind of day when the thermometer appears broken because it can’t handle double digit degrees below zero. Schools were closed, and we were housebound for the second day in a row.

Amigo thought this was great because it was his birthday and he got a bonus opportunity to sleep in due to the unexpected day off from school. I really, really didn’t want to go out of the house, though, with the weather so cold even icicles weren’t forming. Unfortunately, the vaporizer wasn’t working and we needed a birthday cake, so an errand run was in the works. Our favorite bakery is half a block from Walgreen’s, so it would have been a quick one if I had to go.

Instead, I utilized the fourth R: repair. I cleaned the vaporizer, added a pinch of baking soda, and it worked again. Yippee! One errand eliminated.

Next, I dug through the pantry and found a yellow cake mix. Yes! I could bake his birthday cake without ever leaving the house. Wait a minute…frosting…I had a full can of white frosting and a chocolate package only about a third full. Yellow cake really works better with chocolate, not white, so (you guessed it) I mixed a little white with the chocolate to make a light chocolate frosting to top the yellow cake. I made a small amount of powdered sugar frosting with a few dark chocolate kisses melted in it, and asked La Petite to drizzle it artistically on top. We add a few candles and basic cake decorations (from the cupboard), and Amigo’s birthday cake looked good enough to serve to the Grandmas and Grandpas.

We still left the house to take the family out for a birthday dinner combined with a bye-bye back to school dinner for La Petite. Somehow, leaving by choice wasn’t quite as freezing as the errands might have been.

Seventeen: wow. Where did the years go?

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>To-Do list fights with Ta-Dah!! list

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>Who needs an inbox and an outbox? I have to-do and ta-dah. Sing that last one: Ta-Dah! Here’s the set from mid-day Sunday: let’s see which side wins.

Accomplishments for the day so far

  • made coffee
  • cleaned kitchen
  • ran dishwasher
  • washed two loads of laundry
  • dried four loads of laundry (including two that were washed last night, hung on drying racks overnight. Jeans and sweats work great that way)
  • folded five loads of laundry (the socks and underwear were already out of the dryer last night. they don’t wrinkle, so I left them overnight)
  • Read the Sunday newspaper (yes, even a working mama deserves a simple pleasure)
  • Ate a grapefruit (it’s an investment in my health. Of course that goes on the list!)
  • Are you ready for this? The major accomplishment for the morning:
  • I took the ornaments off the tree and put them in storage.
    Diced veggies and thawed other ingredients to put a turkey soup in the crockpot.
  • Made lunch for Husband and me and Amigo while La Petite slept in
  • Cleared Christmas decor from the mantel and around the house, sorted it into “keep” and “donate” and “throw away,” stored the “keep” boxes.
  • Replaced Christmas decorations with snowmen for January!
  • Helped Amigo with his homework
  • voted for the Packer in the Click for Cans contest

I think I need to sit down and take a break with some playoff football, a Diet Coke, and laptop time.

Yet To-do

  • correct spelling tests (abbreviations)
  • correct math tests (mid-chapter, multiplication and division)
  • check penmanship papers
  • add barley to soup, determine side dishes, prepare to serve supper

I must add this: Husband, noticing my progress in getting the ornaments down, took off the lights, stored them, and then dragged the tree outside. He put the tree stand in the basement and even (yes, honestly, he did) vacuumed all the pine needles and put the furniture back in its regular place. Isn’t he a gem?

Hmmm. I’m a pro at rationalization. But even without rationalizing my excuses for doing housework before schoolwork, this looks pretty darn good. No guilt: I’ve accomplished plenty, and the rest will get done, too.

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>Wisdom in the laundry room

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>Green washing of Jeans: wash first, dry last. Hang to air dry in between.
This saves time and energy by air drying the wettest of the jeans. They’ll shrink less, too, as they can now dry for a minimal time on the delicate cycle.

20 Mule Team Borax is a great invention.
It smells better than bleach, doesn’t spill (well, I don’t spill it as easily), and takes out stains well. It doesn’t cost as much as commercial detergent boosters, and the paper box is recyclable.

Detergent makers usually recommend at least double the amount that’s really needed to wash a load well.
Of course! They want me to buy twice as much of their product. Ha, ha, ha. I’m wise to this trick!

Dryers eat socks. Sometimes they spit them out later. I keep an Orphan Sock Box in the closet for socks waiting reconciliation.
This also works if one sock in a pair spouts a hole. When another pair from the same package suffers the same loss, there’s a new mate waiting. If a sock really, really doesn’t have a mate, it will eventually end up in my classroom as a white-board eraser.

Just because I do this chore efficiently doesn’t mean I like it.
I’ve learned enough tricks to get the family laundry done quickly and efficiently, get the stains out (mostly), and get all the clothes back in the closets and drawers by the time school and workweeks start Monday morning. It’s a necessity, family, not a pleasure.

Clothes must be washed, no matter what the other plans are. Fit it in.
See above. If we’re going away for part of the weekend, I’ll start sorting and washing ahead of time. If report cards are due, I’ll start a wash load, work on math grade, throw the wash in the dryer, work on reading grades, etc., etc., etc. Laundry is a good Sunday chore, too; I can fold sheets in front of the TV while the Packers are playing!

Each and every family member needs to own at least two weeks worth of underwear.
See above. If no one runs out of underwear, laundry can wait a week in a pinch. Maybe. So there’s the wisdom; make sure everyone has drawers in their drawers, and the livin’ is easy.

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>Fireplace brick style wrapping paper

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>La Petite showed me this technique a few years ago. I wanted to make a poster, and the brick wall motif worked well for the project. Since I’m avoiding buying wrapping paper this season, I thought I’d try it again.
The tools: iron, ironing board, spray bottle for water, marker (black or brown work well), and plain brown paper bag(s).

Step one: Crinkle the paper. Crunch it up. Crumple it.

Step two: Spritz it with water, smooth it out, press it. The water softens the paper and keeps it from scorching. Caution: it also weakens the paper, making it likely to tear.

After the pressing, draw brick shapes on the paper with the marker. I’m not an artist; mine are rough, very rough. It’s okay; wrapping paper gets torn apart and thrown out right away anyway. This batch will go in the recycling bin.

But until then, I have two pieces of “fireplace brick” with which to wrap a present or two. One bag survived the process; one didn’t. Both will look fine under the tree.

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>Green, green, green…the sequel

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>Here’s the latest in my quest for eco-friendly wrapping this holiday season. These are picture frames for my grad school friends. Don’t worry; they’re all with me today on a major shopping and social outing. They won’t read this until they get home, if they read Compost Happens at all.

I didn’t want to give the frames empty or with the usual tacky fake filler fotograf. I mean, photograph. To fill the frames, I went to Wordle. At the wordle site, I copied and pasted a blog post about the five of us and our friendship, turned it into a word cloud, and then printed. I had a hard time getting the size right, making sure it had all the names, and looking for key words, so there were a few extra copies printed. Those extras became the wrapping.

The result: a unique and personalized gift and recyclable wrapping to (almost) match.

I hope they like them. Aw, heck, they’ll love ’em.

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>Paper-wise and Paper-foolish

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>We’re under pressure at school to save paper. It’s a major expense, one we can’t avoid, but one we can adjust and minimize. Maybe.

  • I save extra copies or “oops” papers: the kind where the answer shows through on the page or I have two too many because kids moved yesterday. Those papers get re-used as scratch paper.
  • I copy back to back.
  • My colleagues and I use overhead projectors, small white boards and chalkboards, and other devices for keeping kids involved without requiring paper.
  • I copy straight from the blackline master book without making a new master copy.

But we’re stuck on other paper uses. Penmanship practice needs paper. Attendance is still on paper in our school, as is lunch count. Bathroom sign-out sheets are an unfortunate necessity.

Our district-mandated reading comprehension tests have bubble sheets to run off. My class’ bubble sheets took (are you sitting down?) 150 page. That’s 150 sheets of copy paper, more than one fifth of a ream. Multiply that by the five intermediate classes of similar sizes, and imagine the amount of paper and toner we’re forced to use. It’s like an unfunded mandate with the orders coming from downtown, but all the supplies coming from the existing site budget.

Running scores for the district-ordered Measure of Academic Progress test uses one page per child, three times a year. Multiply that times the number of kiddos in grades two through six and you get — a lot of paper.

If I run grade reports for conferences, there’s one page per student for Reading, for Math, for Science, for Social Studies…you get the picture. Multiply that number by five intermediate classes…we’re starting to look at red ink in the budget line for copy paper.

I haven’t even mentioned IEPs and other special education documentation, much less the daily behavior sheets for kids who need them.

So what do we do? I keep on looking for ways to be pennywise. My colleagues do, too. But there’s only so much we can do when the major paper usage comes not from us, but from record keeping and mandated testing that’s all ordered downtown at the district offices.

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