May 14, 2007
Here it is Monday again. How did that happen so quickly? I had so many things to do this weekend, and so many things I wanted to do…and didn't. Sigh.
My kindergartener gave me the coolest Mothers Day gift. They took white, green, and blue clay and rolled them around into a ball about an inch in diameter, and then her teacher poked a hole in it and "baked it in the microwave" to make it hard, then strung it on a ribbon for a cool necklace.
The accompanying card said, "To the greatest mom on earth." And, so of course, she showed me that the bead was the earth. The white=clouds, green=land, blue=water. Love it.
So…speaking of the earth…what are you doing for her?
Here are the things we've got going on here; share what you're doing too! Some of them are easy peasy. Others…well, not so easy, but worthwhile.
1. We're replacing all of our incandescent light bulbs with the low-energy, curly flourescent ones.
2. I don't let the car run anymore. When I'm stopped and waiting for someone, I turn it off. Really bad for the environment to let it run.
3. We recycle everything. I've paid for an annual membership at our local recycle center, so I can make a run about once a month. We take all of our cardboard–from pizza boxes to computer boxes to furniture boxes–plus glass, plastic, and old electronics. I just need to find a place to take styrofoam packing peanuts….
4. We also have a place to dump paper: anything from cereal boxes to computer paper to junk mail. I have bins in three places in the house to catch these papers (also inclues magazines and catalogs!). Love it.
5. My Music Man bought one of those old-fashioned reel lawn mowers. We have an acre of yard, and it takes him less time to mow it with the reel mower than it did with the gasoline push mower. He has to mow it more often, but it's a great workout he says, and he loves it. And the grass still smells great when it's cut!
So…what about you? What are you doing to help Mother Earth?
May 14th, 2007 at 7:39 am
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! What a sweet gift.
We recycle. I turn off the car when I am waiting and waiting for the kids. We should be doing a lot more.
May 14th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Most of yours I do too, however, I’m not a big fan of the curly bulbs. Too dim so anywhere I want to write or read I have regular bulbs but I’ve placed them in all the other locations. I also re-use all my grocery bags, bringing them back to the store to be re-filled and using paper instead, if available.
May 14th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Oops. I meant to tell you in the previous comment that I moved my blog: new name and place.
May 14th, 2007 at 7:56 am
We have a recycle trash can and a regular one. I need to call the city and have them bring us another recycle can, because I fill it up every week. It’s unreal, but I have more recyclable trash than not every week.
I try to do all my chores at once when possible, and I only run the car in the really hot months when picking up the kids from school. But I live in Texas. I never had to leave the car running in when I lived in Mass. I do try to time my arrival for the least amount of car running time.
I would love to try those bulbs. Especially if they put out less heat in the bathroom. Thanks for the tip. (I’d also like to try that lawnmower.)
May 14th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Lovely photo, and such a sweet gift.
We’ve been using the low-energy bulbs for ages, since I was a teenager. Now we recycle a lot, and that includes food waste - we have composters and bokashi bins and a wormery. We have water butts so we can use the rainwater for the garden. We’re planting a wildflower bank in the garden.
We hardly use any chemical cleaning products - just vinegar and bicarbonate of soda and some neem-based products and soapnut powder. We use either Ecover washing powder/liquid for washing clothes or we use soapnut. That’s all good for the environment and our own health. I don’t use shampoos or cosmetics/perfumes that are full of chemicals either - I use the most natural products I can find.
Next year we will hopefully be growing a lot more of our own vegetables and salad stuff.
We’re also trying to be better about turning stuff off rather than forgetting and leaving it on standby. We’ll get there in the end…!
May 14th, 2007 at 9:25 am
We do about everything you do except for the lawnmower. I have started buying more organic items this year as well. The tatste of organic milk is incredible!
Yesterday I certified my yard as an official Wildlife Habitat with the National Wildlife Federation. Which is pretty cool, I think!
My husband just shakes his head, but I come from a long line of tree huggers so it’s just second nature.
May 14th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Let’s see… I do #1-4 regularly when I can (some of my light fixtures won’t take compact flourescents), and I’m trying to talk The Tour Manager into a reel mower. It’s not working.
Like Sandy, we certified our entire yard as a Backyard Habitat, and the little ones and I are going to start our spring planting soon. I love plants, love taking care of them, love that they help keep our air clean. I cry when trees come down for yet another house or business.
This is what being asthmatic has taught me — I’d breathe better if the world were cleaner.
May 14th, 2007 at 11:52 am
I, too, have a push-mower, and as I was mowing the lawn last Friday, a woman jogged by and said, “I didn’t think they made those anymore.”
We grow a garden, can our own fruit and jam, buy local (as much as we can), have fluorescent bulbs (well, we’re working on that. When one dies, we replace with a long-life one). Our downfall is recycling. We do as much as we can, but Wichita is not a haven for green people. No paper, no glass, no cardboard. All in the trash. (I tend to save the glass bottles; I can’t bear to throw them away, but what else am I to do with them?) Sigh.
May 14th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
that was a very sweet mother’s day gift. I remember doing things like that for my mom.
I do some of the things listed above and others I’m trying very hard to do. We don’t recycle paper at work anymore; I guess the people said we didn’t generate enough paper for it to be cost effective to recycle.
So I have box in my office and I collect paper from everyone. Once my box is full I take it to the recycling bin in front of the elementary school in my neighborhood. The school gets money for the recycling. It’s a great way to do it.
May 14th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Love the necklace! My best Mother’s Day gift was a piece of paper with dandelions pasted on a heart. Each child was asked to fill in the blank: “I love my mother because–.” My son’s said, “I love my mother because she reads to me.” I thought mine was by far the best.
It’s very, very difficult to recycle here! That was one thing I just loved about Ann Arbor - it was so easy! We’ve replaced many of our light bulbs, as you have, and I’m really the only parent who sits in a car with the engine off. It gets so hot that I’ve gone home absolutely soaked to the skin from sitting in the heat; sometimes I can feel the sweat dripping down my arms and back - yuck! But I just can’t leave the car running. It’s far too wasteful. I also drive smaller, fuel-efficient cars. My Toyota is a stick-shift for the sake of fuel efficiency.
May 14th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
We do most of the above and have been for the last seven years….since I was pregnant with my oldest and realized how toxic so many of my every day habits can be. If they are not good for a pregnant mother then they just plain arent good for anyone. So, organic has been the mainstay as well as biodegradable cleaners, shampoos, soaps etc. I too make the weekly run to the kids school to recycle all of our paper products including the stuff from work that accumulates on my desk. (I often raid the garbage there too). This has given me a whole new outlet for my obsessive compulsive disorder.
I try to minimize my plastic purchases…..and donate containers of all sorts to our local nature preserve for crafts with the kids. I too forgo bags whenever possible and have had to insist even in the face of some pretty persistent cashiers. ( I often have to make up excuses because they can make you feel pretty crazy). Krogers is the worst.
We avoid chemical fertilizers and pesticides…….which I wish were the norm in our all too new and appearance conscious neighborhood. I wish I could do more gardening….my long term goal.
I do my best to buy used everything from furniture to kids clothes and love to garage sale shop.
My car is not the most fuel efficient…..but live close to town so minimize my driving whenever possible. With gas prices these days I cant help but rethink every venture.
I try the best I can but sometimes feel at quite a loss. I am motiveated by my kids health as well as our families…..and only hope they can live to see a cleaner earth.
Arent we the generation that was raised in the seventies with those advertisements of the crying Indian? Now that we are the decision makers, I often wonder why some of the environmental issues have not been our priority. Why has the dire threat of global warming had to be the catalyst for politicians to even approach the subject?
It all makes me a little crazy……but then again, it is almost midnight….and I am probably not thinking straight anyways.
Suffice it to say, I am working on it….but am open to further changes.
Anyways, I could go on and on……
May 14th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
My husband and I have decided to car pool and sell one car since we both live close to work and only really need one car. It saves the earth and our bank account too.
May 15th, 2007 at 12:59 am
Hi Colleen! Great post, your kidlet is a doll.
I do most of the above, except our recycling is to give our bag o recyclables to a homeless person.
Most importantly I gave up driving, quit cold turkey. I added 15 min onto my commute time when I started taking LA’s metro system. I now walk everywhere, for everything. Luckily I am close to stuff and hollywood has a weekly farmers market for food.
I’ve even been one of those annoying green peace people standing on the street asking you not to use Kleenex (Kleenex is evil, it takes 90 years to grow the tree’s used in a single box. NO ONE’S nose is so sensative that it is worth killing 90 years of tree)
May 16th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Do Not Mail Opt-Out Law would be fair to everyone.
The proposed recent “Do not mail” is an Opt-Out law. Only those not desiring advertising mail need opt-out. Anyone desiring advertising mail can do nothing - and continue to receive it. Why deny those wishing to avoid advertising mail the power to do so?
I do not consider handling unwanted advertising placed against my will on my personal property to be a civic obligation!
The US Supreme Court said in the Rowan case in 1970, ““In today’s [1970] complex society we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes, but a sufficient measure of individual autonomy must survive to permit every householder to exercise control over unwanted mail. To make the householder the exclusive and final judge of what will cross his threshold undoubtedly has the effect of impeding the flow of ideas, information, and arguments that, ideally, he should receive and consider. Today’s merchandising methods, the plethora of mass mailings subsidized by low postal rates, and the growth of the sale of large mailing lists as an industry in itself have changed the mailman from a carrier of primarily private communications, as he was in a more leisurely day, and have made him an adjunct of the mass mailer who sends unsolicited and often unwanted mail into every home. It places no strain on the doctrine of judicial notice to observe that whether measured by pieces or pounds, Everyman’s mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive.”
Furthermore, the Supreme Court said, “the mailer’s right to communicate is circumscribed only by an affirmative act of the addressee giving notice that he wishes no further mailings from that mailer.
To hold less would tend to license a form of trespass and would make hardly more sense than to say that a radio or television viewer may not twist the dial to cut off an offensive or boring communication and thus bar its entering his home. Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit; we see no basis for according the printed word or pictures a different or more preferred status because they are sent by mail.”
We need a nationwide “Do Not Mail” law to create a one-stop, convenient place for homeowners to give senders the aforementioned affirmative notice that we do not want certain kinds of mail sent to our homes.
http://www.newdream.org/emails/ta19.html
Signed,
Ramsey A Fahel